What Is The Democratic Party? (and WILDING et al. v. DNC SERVICES CORPORATION et al. Gets a New Lease on Life)
Posted on January 15, 2018 by Lambert Strether
By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
An alert reader who is a representative of the class that’s suing the DNC Services Corporation for fraud in the 2016 Democratic primary — WILDING et al. v. DNC SERVICES CORPORATION et al., a.k.a. the “DNC lawsuit” — threw some interesting mail over the transom; it’s from Elizabeth Beck of Beck & Lee, the firm that brought the case on behalf of the (putatively) defrauded class (and hence their lawyer). Beck’s letter reads in relevant part:
[Y]ou may have heard on some early independent news reports (the earliest reports were via tweets from the attorneys on the case), the appellate court [the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals] has issued a preliminary order in our favor dispensing with one jurisdictional issue that the lower court had raised….
In dispensing with this issue, the Court is allowing the appeal to continue to proceed. The appellate court could have thrown out the appeal, but chose to allow Plaintiffs to amend the Complaint, and agreed with us that with the changes, the jurisdictional issue raised by the lower court is resolved.
I would like to take this opportunity to caution against any premature exultation, as the ultimate odds are not in our favor (only about 5% or so of civil appeals are overturned, on average).
(Beck & Lee have stored documents relating to the case here. This is the amended filing; this is the appellate court’s decision.) It’s very good news that the DNC lawsuit is back from the dead, if only because it’s A Good Thing that the Democratic Party continues to be put on the record about what it thinks it is, and how thinks it is entitled to act. Truthdig summarizes the theory of the case:
All this is context for a lawsuit against the Democratic National Committee that has been slowly wending its way through a federal district court in Florida. The suit contends that the DNC engaged in fraud by reneging on a key commitment in its charter.
The DNC charter is fairly explicit. Article V, Section 4 says: “In the conduct and management of the affairs and procedures of the Democratic National Committee, particularly as they apply to the preparation and conduct of the Presidential nomination process, the Chairperson shall exercise impartiality and evenhandedness as between the Presidential candidates and campaigns.”
The charter goes on to state: “The Chairperson shall be responsible for ensuring that the national officers and staff of the Democratic National Committee maintain impartiality and evenhandedness during the Democratic Party Presidential nominating process.”
DNC emails that reached the public a year ago show direct and purposeful violations of those DNC rules. As The New York Times reported with understatement days before the national convention, “The emails appear to bolster Mr. Sanders’s claims that the committee, and in particular [DNC Chair Debbie] Wasserman Schultz, did not treat him fairly.”
The theory of the case is, in other words, consumer fraud (!); small DNC donors were sold a bill of goods. From my own summary:
One prong of the plaintiff’s case is based on consumer fraud law: The DNC represented itself as being neutral and people donated money to it on that basis, when in fact (as shown by the Gufficer 2.0 documents) the DNC had its thumb on the scale for Clinton the whole time. I’m not sure I’m comfortable thinking of citizens as consumers.
That said, the revivification of the DNC lawsuit serves as a story hook for me to try to advance the story on the nature of political parties as such, the Democratic Party as an institution, and the function that the Democratic Party serves. I will meander through those three topics, then, and conclude.
What Sort of Legal Entity is a Political Party?
I present the following exchange between myself and a subject matter expert. I asked:
What sort of legal entity is the Democratic Party, anyhow? It’s not a profit-making corporation. It’s not a 501(c)(3) or whatever. It’s not a membership organization like the DSA or British Labour. But if you believe the DNC’s lawyer in the Beck case, the party can choose whatever candidates it wants in a smoke-filled room. So apparently it’s not an association of voters. They also get (yes?) public money for running elections.
And the expert concluded:
This question is fantastically complicated.
So yet again, I didn’t find the bird![1] However, the expert did recommend that I read this article: Benjamin D. Black, “Developments in the State Regulation of Major and Minor Political Parties,” Cornell Law Review, Volume 82, Issue 1, November 1996 (PDF). There, I found the following passage:
Political parties were purely private organizations from the 1790s until the Civil War. Thus, “it was no more illegal to commit fraud in the party caucus or primary than it would be to do so in the election of officers of a drinking club.” However, due to the efforts of Robert La Follette and the Progressives, states began to treat political parties as “public agencies” during the early 1890s and 1900s; by the 1920s “most states had adopted a succession of mandatory statutes regulating every major aspect of the parties’ structures and operations.” Because the parties were “public” under conventional constitutional doctrine, the courts “deprive[d] the parties of the protections of the Bill of Rights.” By the 1970s, federal courts considered “virtually every aspect of the party’s presidential nomination process .. .state action,” and thus, subject to state regulation. At the same time, however, the Court issued a number of decisions that treated political parties as private organizations that held First Amendment rights. By recognizing that political parties are holders of First Amendment rights in some circumstances, the Court created a dilemma—parties could be both public and private entities depending on the particular activity in question.
Oh good[2]. At this point, the reader will recall Zephyr Teachout’s work on corruption:
While 1787 delegates disagreed on when corruption might occur, they brought a general shared understanding of what political corruption meant. To the delegates, political corruption referred to self-serving use of public power for private ends, including, without limitation, bribery, public decisions to serve private wealth made because of dependent relationships, public decisions to serve executive power made because of dependent relationships, and use by public officials of their positions of power to become wealthy. Two features of the definitional framework of corruption at the time deserve special attention, because they are not frequently articulated by all modern academics or judges. The first feature is that corruption was defined in terms of an attitude toward public service, not in relation to a set of criminal laws. The second feature is that citizenship was understood to be a public office. The delegates believed that non-elected citizens wielding or attempting to influence public power can be corrupt and that elite corruption is a serious threat to a polity.
You can see how a political party — a strange, amphibious creature, public one moment, private the next — is virtually optimized to create a phishing equilibrium for corruption. However, I didn’t really answer my question, did I? I still don’t know what sort of legal entity the Democratic Party is. However, I can say what the Democratic Party is not.
Institutionally, the Democratic Party Is Not Democratic
Here I want to consolidate some earlier NC material. First, on why superdelegates have a voice in choosing candidates, this video from a Democratic superdelegate. From October 25, 2017:
The purpose of superdelegates, explained. Listen to the whole thing:
So the purpose of superdelegates is to veto a popular choice, if they decide the popular choice “can’t govern.” But this is circular. Do you think for a moment that the Clintonites would have tried to make sure President Sanders couldn’t have governed? You bet they would have, and from Day One.
And since when do Democrats want to govern, anyhow? Obama had the chance to be a second FDR, and under the most charitable interpretation possible, he went into the Rube Goldberg Device-building racket (“… (M), allowing donations to a Presidential Library, thereby cashing in [ka-ching].” And no, I don’t care that the DNC Unity Commission has recommended reducing the number of superdelegates. First, the Rules and Bylaws Committee, having been purged of Sanders supporters[3], has yet to vote on the recomendation. More importantly, you can bet that the number of superdelegates retained is enough for the superdelegates, as a class, to maintain their death grip on the party.)
Second, on how candidates could be chosen if the Democratic Party decided to do it that way. From the DNC’s lawyer in the DNC fraud case:
The Democrat Party Has No Obligation to be Democratic
Page 36 of the transcript:
MR. SPIVA: [W}here you have a party that’s saying, We’re gonna, you know, choose our standard bearer, and we’re gonna follow these general rules of the road, which we are voluntarily deciding, we could have — and we could have voluntarily decided that, Look, we’re gonna go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way. That’s not the way it was done. But they could have. And that would have also been their right, and it would drag the Court well into party politics, internal party politics to answer those questions.
That’s exactly “the way it was done”, as the Podesta mails and the Guccifer 2.0 documents show.
Of course, if indeed the Democratic party is an amphibian, both public and private, there may very well be public questions that go beyond private “internal party politics” (though I’m not sure Beck’s consumer law-oriented theory of the case can take that line). And from the conflation of public and private we turn to corruption.
Functionally, the Democratic Party Is a Money Trough for Self-Dealing Consultants
Here once again is Nomiki Konst’s amazing video, before the DNC:
Those millions! That’s real money! In an earlier article in Medium, Konst wrote:
Today, it is openly acknowledged by many members that the DNC and the Clinton campaign were running an operation together. In fact, it doesn’t take much research beyond FEC filings to see that six of the top major consulting firms had simultaneous contracts with the DNC and HRC — collectively earning over $335 million since 2015 [this figure balloons in Konst’s video because she got a look at the actual budget]. (This does not include SuperPACs.)
One firm, GMMB earned $236.3 million from HFA and $5.3 from the DNC in 2016. Joel Benenson, a pollster and strategist who frequents cable news, collected $4.1m from HFA while simultaneously earning $3.3 million from the DNC. Perkins Coie law firm collected $3.8 million from the DNC, $481,979 from the Convention fund and $1.8 million from HFA in 2016.
It gets worse. Not only do the DNC’s favored consultants pick sides in the primaries, they serve on the DNC boards so they can give themselves donor money. Andrew Dobbs, an activist and organizer from Austin, TX writes:
Primary among these structural choices is the fact that the DNC—the party’s governing body—actually allows political consultants to be elected as members and then even allows those members to be vendors to the party and to campaigns they are supporting.
And:
This self-dealing means that the interests of the consultant class will always have a privileged place in campaign decision-making.
As we saw in 2016, where the DNC consultants picked sides (and if that’s not “rigging” the primaries, tell me what is). Having self-dealt themselves contracts, the consultants[4] then maximize their fees:
These campaign consultants make a lot more money off of TV and mail than they do off of field efforts. Field efforts are long-term, labor-intensive, high overhead expenditures that do not have big margins from which the consultants can draw their payouts. They also don’t allow the consultants to make money off of multiple campaigns all in the same cycle, while media and mail campaigns can be done from their DC office for dozens of clients all at the same time. They get paid whether campaigns win or lose, so effectiveness is irrelevant to them.
Now, I think it would be a little strong to say that the Democratic Party is nothing more than a layer of indirection between the donor class and the Democratic consultants and the campaigns they run; after all, the Democratic Party — in its current incarnation — has important roles to play in not expanding its “own” electorate through voter registration, in the care and feeding of the intelligence community, in warmongering, in the continual buffing and polishing of neoliberal ideology, and in general keeping the Overton Window firmly nailed in place against policies that would convey universal concrete material benefits, especially to the working class. Those are all very important!
Conclusion
Seth Ackerman gives this definition of an “inside/outside” strategy; the bottom line is that if Democratic Party controls ballot access for the forseeable future, they have to be gone through as well as around. But if the nature of the Democratic Party as an institution and/or legal entity cannot be specified — and I’m not sure that either Ackermann in 2017 or Black in 1996 do this — it’s like going to war without knowing the enemy’s order of battle. Not a recipe for victory. More work needed. And it’s “fantastically complicated.” So, again, I haven’t found the bird!
* * *
Readers will note that in the headline I wrote “Democratic Party” out of deference to those who recall the Republicans of forty years ago deploying “Democrat Party” as a smear. However, I’ve come to prefer “Democrat Party” regardless of past party wars, on the grounds that Democrats have to earn to moniker “Democratic,” and not merely claim it.
NOTES
[1] “Every so often, I feel that I have cause to recall the famous New Yorker story about the writer who heard about a bird in the woods, said to be extinct. So he went to report on the story, found the local who thought they’d heard the bird’s song, bought some yellow waders, hired guides and a boat, and set out through the swamps and the Spanish moss and the dripping and the stinging insects in search of the bird. Long-form story short, they never found the bird. So what’s the point of a story where you don’t find the bird?”
[2] Black also writes:
Any interpretation of the Elections Clause should also recognize a simple historical fact: when this provision was drafted, political parties were generally unknown and positively feared. To the Founders, the entire structure of our government-the separation of powers-was predicated on a fear that factions, operating through parties, would impose their will on the country. John Taylor, a Founding Father and libertarian from Virginia, lamented: “The situation of the public good, in the hands of the two parties nearly poised as to numbers, must be extremely perilous. ‘ John Adams feared the specter of the “division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to one another.” Regardless of whether the Founders’ fears were politically naive, unreasonable, or unfounded, it is fair to conclude that the Founders evinced no particular theory of party politics, let alone one desiring continuous two-party domination of American politics.
(I’d speculate that the two parties feared by Taylor and Adams would be pro- and anti-slavery; whenever you see the word “property” in the Federalist Paper, remember that slaves were property.) Surely, then, a strict constructionist would conclude that there’s no Constitutional justification for parties. Parties don’t seem to be working very well. Perhaps, rather than tinkering round the edges with consumer law, a suit should be brought to abolish political parties altogether? (The DSA, a membership organization with no ballot line, would in my view not be a party in the same way that the Democrats and Republicans are.)
[3] In retrospect, despite Sanders evident appeal and the power of his list, I think it would have been best if their faction’s pushback had been much stronger; expressions of outrage were insufficient. Physical occupation of DNC premises would have been fully warranted.
[4] Oddy, or not, these consultants go unmentioned in the press, at least collectively. Individually, they’re all over the airwaves like cheap suits. Here’s a list:
They win even when Democrats lose:
GMMB Consultants - AJ Lenar
Precision Strategies - Jennifer O'Malley Dillon
The Podesta Group - Tony & John
SKDK NickerBocker - Anita Dunn, Hillary Rosen
Benenson Strategy Group - Joel Benenson
Perkins Coie Law International - Marc Elias
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/01 ... -life.html
Sympathy for the Devils...
Re: Sympathy for the Devils...
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Sympathy for the Devils...
Joe Biden Gets a big Fat F For His Foreign Policy
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - January 1, 2025 0
[Source: shorenewsnetwork.com]
Complicit in the Israeli Genocide in Gaza, Biden Sowed Misery and Death in Russia and Ukraine, Expanded an Already Ridiculously High Military Budget and Put the World at Risk of Nuclear War
In the June issue of The Nation magazine, editor D.D. Guttenplan claimed that Joe Biden was the most progressive U.S. president since Lyndon B. Johnson.[1]
This claim is obscene as neither of these two leaders was progressive in any way.
Lyndon Johnson may have ushered in the Great Society and civil rights legislation, but he also orchestrated the calamitous war in Vietnam, invaded the Dominican Republic, backed the Indonesian genocide of 1965, armed Israel to the hilt during the Six-Day War, triggered the USS Liberty incident and put the world close to the brink of nuclear war.
Joe Biden for his part has done very little to arrest the widening economic inequality patterns gripping the United States in this era of a second Gilded Age and has adopted a foreign policy that is horrifyingly comparable to LBJ in certain respects.
Like Johnson, Biden triggered wide-scale campus revolts, in his case because of his administration’s complicity in Israeli military operations in Gaza involving Vietnam-style atrocities.
[Source: radiohc.cu]
According to Brown University’s Cost of War Project, U.S. spending on Israel’s military operations and related U.S operations in the Middle East totaled at least $22.76 billion as of September 30. In just the first six weeks of the war, the Biden administration sent more than 15,000 bombs and 50,000 artillery shells.[2]
[Source: mintpressnews.com]
Since that time, the weapons the U.S. has provided include thousands of precision-guided munitions, Hellfire missiles, artillery ammunition, shoulder-fired rockets, glide bombs armed with cluster munitions, and bunker-buster, and 2,000-pound bombs.
Speaking to The Washington Post, former Biden administration official Jeremy Konyndyk said that the “extraordinary number of sales over the course of a pretty short amount of time” suggests that Israel would not be able to maintain its operation against Hamas in Gaza “without this level of U.S. support.”
[Source: masspeaceaction.org]
As Israel escalated its killing spree into Lebanon, the Biden administration deployed 100 U.S. troops to Israel directly to operate a sophisticated missile system it financed and escalated bombing of Houthi targets in Yemen who retaliated against Israel–in violation of the U.S. War Powers Act of 1973, which requires Congressional approval for carrying out military strikes.[3]
Ukraine
Biden’s complicity in Israel’s war crimes is matched by his complicity with war crimes committed by his administration’s other key ally: Ukraine.
Since war with Russia broke out in February 2022, the Biden administration has provided more than $175 billion in aid to Ukraine, most of which has been military-related.
U.S. Special Forces time were directly assisted the Ukrainian military, with the CIA having set up a dozen bases in Ukraine after the February 2014 Maidan coup that provoked the war, which Biden championed.
Among the weapons systems the Biden administration provided to Ukraine were Javelin anti-tank missiles, high-mobility rocket systems, howitzers, weaponized drones, cluster bombs, and others that were used by the Ukrainian military to attack and kill civilians in eastern Ukraine and over the border in Russia.[4]
[Source: kidsrnews.com]
Biden promoted his Ukraine policy as being advantageous to the U.S. economy, though it really enriched military contractors and the Wall Street hedge funds that owned them and donated generously to Biden’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
At the Rage Against the War Machine rally in February 2023, comedian Jimmy Dore gave a top ten list of how the $100+ billion spent on arming Ukraine could have been better spent, including:
Ending homelessness in the U.S., reinstating it, and then ending it again
Funding a new police force to police against the current ones
Facilitating two FTX collapses
Paying Hunter Biden’s monthly salary for the rest of his life; and giving Joe Biden a dog who knows where to lead him when his press conferences are over
Funding 90 Alex Jones lawsuits
Funding balloons to spy on China
Curing cancer
Comedian Jimmy Dore at the Rage Against the War Machine rally in Washington, D.C., in February 2023. [Source: Photo courtesy of Jeremy Kuzmarov]
One of the great lies advanced by Biden and his media and academic stenographers is that the U.S. was supporting Ukrainian democracy against Russian autocracy.
In fact, under Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine banned 12 opposition parties and deployed U.S.-trained commando units to hunt down dissidents, including inside Russia, where some were assassinated mafia-style.
Another great lie was that the U.S. was standing up to Russian aggression.
The Biden administration, in reality, had provoked a Russian invasion of Ukraine with the goal of bogging down Russia in a quagmire and ratcheting up sanctions to destroy its economy and fuel civil unrest that could lead to regime change.
[Source: yahoo.com]
Most dangerously, Biden authorized Ukraine to conduct strikes inside Russia while providing Ukraine and Germany with long-range missiles capable of striking there, directly threatening World War III.
The New York Times reported that “Mr. Biden’s decision appears to mark the first time that an American president has allowed…military responses on artillery, missile bases and command centers inside the borders of a nuclear-armed adversary.”
[Source: theguardian.com]
Biden further antagonized that adversary by, according to journalist Seymour Hersh, blowing up the Nord Stream II pipeline running from Russia through Germany.[5]
The goal of this act of environmental terrorism was to sever Russia’s ties with Germany and the rest of Europe and undercut its oil and gas industry.
Russia found new markets in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, however, while Europeans had to pay much higher rates, having to purchase natural gas from U.S. energy suppliers, thereby causing an economic crisis that has led many Europeans to turn against the war and some against the U.S.
Signs from February 2023 Rage Against the War Machine rally in Washington, D.C. [Source: Photo courtesy of Jeremy Kuzmarov]
China and the Far East
The Biden administration has threatened war not only with Russia but also China by a) expanding the number of military drills carried out in or near the South China Sea; b) launching a new regional economic initiative building off the precedent of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) whose purpose was to isolate China; and c) sending naval vessels and spy planes on provocative missions into the Taiwan Strait, over which China claims jurisdiction under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.[6]
[Source: chappatte.com]
Eli Friedman, Kevin Lin, Rose Liu and Ashley Smith wrote in China in Global Capitalism that the Biden administration “poured money into developing new high-tech weaponry, missiles, and new bases in Australia, the Philippines and elsewhere in the Pacific, all to assert U.S. hegemony in the region and against China. He increased deployment of the U.S. military in the Asia Pacific to press home the point that Washington intends to remain the dominant player in the region. He expanded the Quad alliance with Australia, India and Japan, and forged a trilateral security pact, AUKUS, with Britain and Australia against China.”
The authors continued: “Biden promised to expand Washington’s Five Eyes intelligence network, established after World War II, by the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, to include Germany, India, Japan and South Korea. He even has managed to get the latter two to put aside their historic antagonism, rooted in Tokyo’s occupation of Korea during World War II, to establish cordial relations and collaborate with the U.S. against China.”[7]
A key facet of the Biden administration’s aggressive anti-China strategy was the attempt to transform Taiwan into a heavily armed porcupine bristling with armaments and other forms of U.S.-led support that makes it “appear too painful to attack.”
In April 2023, the Biden administration announced a $345 million military aid package to Taiwan that included provision of portable air defense systems, intelligence and surveillance equipment, firearms and missiles. In late September, Biden approved a $567 million package, and in December, yet another package worth $573.1 million.
[Source: civilsdaily.com]
After the announcement of a characteristic $440 million arms sale agreement, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said that Taiwan had evolved into a “powder keg” by the infusion of U.S. weaponry, pushing the Taiwanese people into the “abyss of disaster.”
Taiwan’s leader Tsai Ing-wen sold her people down the river in acquiescing to the U.S. strategy of transforming the country into a U.S. dependency. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) decoupled from China, and Taiwan was negotiating a free trade agreement with the U.S. that would benefit U.S. interests and further cut off Taiwan from China, its largest trading partner.
Besides Tsai Ing-wen, Biden was particularly close with South Korea President Yoon Suk Yeol, a neo-conservative branded by the RAND Corporation as “the perfect partner of Joe Biden” who declared martial law for the first time since the country was ruled by a military dictatorship.
During Yoon’s visit to Washington in May 2023, Biden announced a new U.S. commitment to deploy a nuclear-armed submarine in South Korea for the first time since the early 1980s.
This was part of a new set of steps designed to boost U.S.-South Korea cooperation on military training, information sharing and other forms of strategic collaboration, whose net effect was to further antagonize North Korea and destroy any prospects for resolution of the Korean conflict.[8]
President Joe Biden toasts his “perfect partner,” Yoon Suk Yeol, at State Dinner in Washington attended by celebrities. [Source: twitter.com]
Preparing for a New Pacific War
The Biden administration was planning for a new Pacific War by establishing new military command centers in Hawaii, with piers, runways and barracks, while sending more planes over beaches and warships in and out of Pearl Harbor.
Biden’s 2024 defense budget provided $9 billion to the Pentagon for the Pacific Deterrence Initiative (PDI), which aimed to enhance American war-making capabilities in the Asia-Pacific. The budget earmarked a whopping $15.3 billion for the Indo-Pacific Command, higher than the other theater commands and a $4 billion increase from the previous year.
Some $464 million was being used for Pacific Pathways exercises conducted by U.S. Army Pacific to support military exercises with partner militaries, including Thailand and the Philippines.
U.S. and Thai soldiers in military exercise. [Source: army.mil]
A March 2024 issue of Air & Space Forces Magazine reported that the U.S. Air Force planned to spend $400 million to expand an airfield on the tiny island of Yap in Micronesia between Guam and Palau, some 1,000 miles southeast of China.
Red marker shows the location of Yap (Google Maps). [Source: news.antiwar.com]
In May 2023, the Biden administration signed a deal with Micronesia to extend 20-year-old political and security ties, enabling the U.S. to locate military facilities there.
Similar deals were signed with Palau and the Marshall Islands, a collection of 29 coral atolls lying halfway between Hawaii and Australia, where Washington has promised to provide $2.3 billion in economic assistance over 20 years in exchange for access to 2.1 million square kilometers of land.
According to Air & Space Forces Magazine, the U.S. Air Force in 2024 sought $1.24 billion in appropriations in foreign infrastructure investment, a 93% increase over the prior year, and $872.5 million, a 44% jump, in new authorizations for military construction outside the U.S.
A key focus was to restore multiple airfields in the Pacific that were previously used by the U.S. during World War II to bomb Japan, including the infamous Tokyo firebombing that killed approximately 100,000 people in one night, and the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic attacks.
Among these is Andersen Air Force Base on Guam, for which the U.S. Air Force requested $411 million to fund a North Aircraft Parking Ramp, large enough to park up to 14 bombers.
Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro participates in a wreath-laying on March 1, 2024, at the 81st Infantry Division Memorial in Peleliu, Palau, that honors division members who assisted the 1st Marine Division in the Battle of Peleliu during World War II. [Source: stripes.com]
Some $78 million was budgeted for upgrades to a U.S. airfield on Tinian Island in the Marianas near Guam, which was used as a launch point for the atomic attack over Hiroshima by the Enola Gay bomber, and which the Air Force reclaimed in 2012 under Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” policy.
General Kenneth Wilsbach, Commander of the Pacific Air Forces, told Nikkei Asia in December 2023 that the Tinian base “will become an extensive” facility once work has been completed to reclaim it from the jungle that has grown over the base since the last U.S. Army Air Force units abandoned it in 1946.”
Enola Gay bomber at Tinian Air Field before taking off on its fateful mission. [Source: taskandpurpose.com]
A USMC F/A-18D lands on Tinian for the first time in 2012, snagging a temporary arresting gear set up on West Field. [Source: twz.com]
Ruins of World War II-era buildings at North Airfield, Tinian. [Source: cnn.com]
Expanding the Bloated Pentagon Budget
Biden’s Pentagon budget for 2023 was $838 billion and his Pentagon budget for 2024 was $886 billion, about 40 percent of global military spending.[9]
The 2023 budget included $24.5 billion for the new U.S. Space Force and Space Development Agency, which is contributing to the dangerous militarization of Outer Space.[10]
The Space Force is here to stay. [Source: nymag.com]
Biden’s 2022 Pentagon budget provisioned $100 million for training Ukrainian pilots; increased irregular warfare activities; extended the 31-year U.S. military attack on Iraq; and extended the disastrous Plan Colombia through 2024—a militarized drug war program promoted by Senator Biden in the 1990s—even though Colombia’s newly elected president, Gustavo Petro, has rejected the U.S. War on Drugs.
For 2025, Biden asked for $898 billion for the military. Of that total, $167.5 billion is to be devoted to buying new weapons and equipment and $49.2 billion to support the “nuclear enterprise,” including supporting production of the new B-21 Raider bomber, refurbishing Trident II D-5 submarine-launched missiles, developing the new Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile, and funding construction of the new Columbia-class missile submarines.
The Biden administration was also investing in a new variant of the B61-13 nuclear gravity bomb, which is far more powerful than the two bombs used to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Pacific War.
B-21 stealth radar funded by the Biden administration. [Source: popularmechanics.com]
B61-13 nuclear gravity bomb. [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
Real Life Dr. Strangelove
In March, President Biden issued a secret nuclear engagement order expanding an already underway program to add a so-called “super-fuse” which “drastically increases the `killing power’” of Trident II Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBMs) produced by Lockheed Martin carrying W-76 100 kt warheads, making it possible—on paper—to knock out all Russian and Chinese land-based nuclear silos simultaneously.
MIT scientist Theodore Postol, former science adviser to the Chief of Naval Operations, specified that the “super-fuse” achieves the warheads’ “fantastic increase in killing efficiency.” According to Postol, this is not some “slight modernization” of weapons components, “but a dramatic step towards the capability to fight and win nuclear wars with both China and Russia.” These are “preemptive strike technologies.” Russia and China both know that, and “will have no choice but to implement countermeasures,” he warns.
[Source: gagadget.com]
Extending the Failed War on Terror
Analysis by the Costs of War Project at Brown University reveals that, between 2021 and 2023, the U.S. government conducted “counterterrorism” operations in at least 78 countries, including ground combat in at least nine countries and air strikes in at least four countries during the first three years of the Biden administration.
The report notes: “Though the total number of countries with U.S. counterterrorism operations has decreased slightly from 2018-2020—from 85 countries—the counterterrorism footprint remains remarkably similar to what it was under the Trump administration.”
[Source: watson.brown.edu]
In August 2022, Biden claimed to have scored a great victory by assassinating Ayman al-Zawahiri, formerly Osama bin Laden’s top deputy, in Kabul, though there was never any confirmation of al-Zawahiri’s body.
President Joe Biden being briefed on July 1 about the plan to assassinate Ayman al-Zawahiri. [Source: wsws.org]
In Syria, the Biden administration maintained two thousand troops to fight ISIS (lying to the public about the totals), though their real purpose was to help unseat the secular nationalist, anti-Israel government of Bashar al-Assad.[11]
The extension of Donald Trump’s draconian sanctions and theft by U.S. troops of Syria’s oil created a biblical-scale tragedy for the Syrian people caused largely by the U.S. The regime change operation that had began when Biden was Vice-President culminated in December with the triumph of Al Qaeda in Syria.[12]
Somalia was one of the new frontiers of the War on Terror, where the Biden administration signed a deal for the construction of five new military bases to help in the fight against Al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda affiliate.
The bases were intended to bolster the Danab Brigade of the Somali army, a U.S.-sponsored Special Operations force that had been linked to repeated incidents of brutality.
In May 2022, Biden sent 500 U.S. troops into Somalia. His administration also announced an increase in aid to the Somalian army and greenlighted new drone strikes.
[Source: newsweek.com]
In 2024, the U.S. Africa Command conducted at least seven air strikes in Somalia targeting Al-Shabaab, which had become resurgent in correlation with the U.S. military escalation.
A Pentagon think tank concluded that America’s war in the Horn of Africa under Biden was plagued by a “failure to define the parameters of the conflict” and “an overemphasis on military measures without a clear definition of the optimal military strategy.”
Similar failings were evident in West Africa, which also saw a spike in terrorist attacks as a result of the growing U.S. military presence.
Journalist Nick Turse pointed out that, in 2002 and 2003, before the creation of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM, which was established in 2007), the State Department counted nine terrorist attacks in all of Africa compared with 2,737 in 2022 in Burkina Faso, Mali and western Niger, and a total of 6,756 on the African continent, a 75,000% increase.[13]
Terrorism has proliferated as a result of the expansion of U.S. military operations in the Sahel. [Source: worldview.stratfor.com]
Widening Network of U.S. Military Bases
One purpose of the Somalian bases was to provide a launching point for U.S. military operations in the Middle East, including against the Houthis in Yemen who were disrupting commercial ships in protest of the Israeli assault on Gaza.
In August 2024, two months before the Tribe of Nova music festival massacre, the Pentagon awarded a $35.8 million contract to build U.S. troop facilities for a secret base it maintains deep within Israel’s Negev Desert, just 20 miles from Gaza, code-named “Site-512.”
The Biden administration sustained around 40,000 troops in at least 60 military bases across the Middle East[14] and made efforts to establish new drone bases in Ghana, Ivory Coast and Benin after a coup in Niger jeopardized a $110 million drone base.
[Source: youtube.com]
AFRICOM was expanding its footprint throughout Africa, including in Zambia whose right-wing government enabled corporate exploitation of the country’s copper mines and carried out a campaign of repression against socialists who wanted to nationalize the mines.
A major investor in Zambia’s copper mines was the Wall Street firm, BlackRock, whose deep ties to the Biden administration were evident in Biden’s appointment of former BlackRock executives to important positions in his administration.
AFRICOM chief, General Michael Langley, and Major General Oscar Nyoni, Deputy Commander of the Zambia Air Force with Zambian Air Force pilots. [Source: military.africa]
The U.S. military expanded its footprint also throughout Southeast Asia under Biden.
In February 2023, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced on a visit to the Philippines that the U.S. would provide $100 million to refurbish at least nine Philippines military bases to which the U.S. now has access.
Four new naval bases were set to be established close to contested waters in the South China Sea—three of them north of Luzon Island directly facing Taiwan.
Demonstrators burn a U.S. flag during a rally in front of Camp Aguinaldo military headquarters in Quezon City, Philippines, on April 11, 2023. [Source: defensenews.com]
Growing Political Weakness
Growing military might cannot make up for political weakness and a loss of “hearts and minds” around the world.”
Between October 7, 2023 and June 2024, U.S. and allied forces were attacked more than 170 times, including over 70 times in Syria and 100 times in Iraq as well as once in Jordan.[15]
Biden’s attempt to create a rail, ship, pipeline and digital cable corridor connecting Europe, the Middle East and India to counter China’s Belt and Road, meanwhile, failed, in part because Saudi Arabia would not normalize relations with Israel unless it stopped its genocide and recognized a Palestinian state.
Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment & India-Middle East-Europe Economics Corridor event during G20 Summit, in New Delhi on September 9, 2023. The plan has not gone forward because Biden administration policies alienated potential participants. [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
The Biden administration faced setbacks in Africa when Niger’s government removed a major U.S. drone base, and where other West African countries followed suit by removing U.S. military bases or threatening to do so.[16]
Even more significantly, Biden’s sanctions policy and war on Russia was prompting Russian alliance with China and Iran, in an anti-American axis that is moving the world towards multi-polarity.
Delegates to the 2024 BRICS summit in Kazan, where BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, CHina, South Africa) added twelve new members, endorsed the use of local currencies in financial transactions between BRICS countries and their trading partners as a means of reducing dependence on the U.S. dollar and undercutting American global hegemony, which appeared to be on the wane.
Unleashing the CIA
As CovertAction Magazine has previously detailed, Biden has a long record of supporting the CIA, including by helping to cover up its crimes while serving on the Senate Intelligence Committee and supporting legislation that would criminalize disclosures of it.
President Biden continued to champion the CIA’s interests by withholding 5,000 critical documents on the JFK assassination.
He further helped to unleash the CIA in Ukraine, where it has played a central role in the proxy war with Russia, including by training specialized commando units that compiled blacklists of opponents of the Zelensky government and hunted them down.[17]
Under the direction of William F. Burns, the CIA expanded its operations in mainland China in an effort to destabilize the People’s Republic of China. The CIA created a new mission center focused on spying on China, including by flying spy planes off its coast. [18]
[Source: dailymail.co.uk]
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a CIA offshoot specializing in regime-change propaganda and the sponsorship of color revolutions that are designed to bring down anti-U.S. governments. It has been very active in the Biden years advancing propaganda against U.S. adversaries like Russia, China and Venezuela, supporting dissidents in those countries even if they are terrorists, and plotting subversive operations in countries like Belarus, Nicaragua, Iran and North Korea among others that the U.S. wants to bring into its orbit.
Support for Dictators
While purporting to be leading a worldwide crusade against authoritarianism, a report in The Intercept revealed that the Biden administration sold weapons in 2022 to 57% of the world’s authoritarian regimes.
The foreign dictators that Biden cozied up to included Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to whom Biden gave a fist bump when he visited Saudi Arabia in July 2022.
Biden had earlier vowed to treat Saudi Arabia as a “pariah,” due to a long string of human rights abuses, including the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi—a killing in a Saudi operation that U.S. intelligence assessed had been approved by Crown Prince bin Salman.
However, realpolitik dictates led Biden to cozy up to bin Salman who agreed to continue to sell Saudi Arabian oil in U.S. petro dollars and boost oil production to lower prices in exchange for billion-dollar arms supplies, including a $5 billion missile defense system, along with provision of spare parts and maintenance for coalition warplanes that bombed the Yemeni population.[19]
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and President Biden bump fists as they begin meetings in Jeddah in July 2022. [Source: npr.org]
In his first year alone, Biden approved more than $1 billion in assistance—including $170 million in military aid—to Egypt, ruled by Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, a man Donald Trump lovingly referred to as his “favorite dictator.”
Human Rights Watch documented a pattern of extrajudicial killings by El-Sisi’s security forces covered up as “shootouts,” and extensive unlawful home demolitions in northern Sinai that led to the eviction of over a quarter of its population.
Joe Biden and Fattah el-Sisi [Source: egyptindependent.com]
When Biden hosted an Africa Leaders Summit in December 2022—where deals were cut to enable U.S. exploitation of Africa’s natural resources—Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame was one of the invitees given the red-carpet treatment.
Kagame had been in power since 1994 and admitted that his opponents tend to “die.” He won August elections with 99% of the vote after his main opponents were excluded.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken meets with Rwandan President Paul Kagame at the President’s Office in Urugwiro Village in Kigali, Rwanda, on August 11, 2022. [Source: time.com]
In 2023, the Biden administration provided Rwanda with more than $175 million in foreign aid, which helped sustain Kagame’s rule.
Kagame was being rewarded for helping to safeguard control over the rich mineral resources of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Uganda was also rewarded for helping to open up the DRC. In 2023, the Biden administration provided it with more than $530 million in foreign aid, and in 2022, $790,252,008.
Since 1986, Uganda has been ruled by Yoweri Museveni with an iron fist. Abandoning a youthful Marxism, Museveni has favored U.S. corporations and allowed the U.S. to establish military bases directly in Uganda while invading the DRC repeatedly with Rwanda.[20]
Yoweri Museveni at the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit. [Source: nrm.ug]
In late July, Museveni cracked down brutally on anti-government protests, turning the opposition National Unity Platform (NUP) party into a “military barracks,” according to the BBC, and violently arresting party officials.[21]
The response was reminiscent of neighboring Kenya, where another close U.S. ally, William Ruto, ordered a police crackdown on youth protesting an IMF dictated finance bill that was poised to raise costs on basic goods and impose more austerity measures. At least 60 people were reportedly killed in the crackdown, 600+ were injured, and police were accused of engaging in abductions and torture.[22]
Secretary of State Antony Blinken commended Ruto afterwards “for his commitment to direct police to refrain from using violence of any kind against protesters,” which was patently false.
Mere weeks before the protests Ruto had been granted a formal state dinner in Washington, the first by an African leader in 16 years.
Biden named Kenya as a major non-NATO ally of the U.S., because it had had a) kept a force of 3,500 troops in Somalia which worked with the Somali army to hunt down Al-Shabab, b) signed a deal allowing for U.S. military advisors into Kenya, and c) provided troops for a Western-backed African peacekeeping force in Eastern Congo whose purpose was to stabilize the region so Western corporations could plunder its mineral wealth.
The Biden administration wanted to make Kenya into a manufacturing hub for U.S. companies looking to relocate out of China and to sustain control over Kenya’s ports, which could be used to strangle Chinese trade.[23]
Kenya was valued furthermore for hosting Camp Simba base in Manda Bay, a hub for U.S. drones and surveillance to project its control across the Indian Ocean, the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea, particularly over the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a chokepoint critical to securing global energy.
Kenyan President William Ruto at a state dinner at the White House hosted by the Biden’s in May 2024. A few weeks later, huge protests broke out in Kenya, which Ruto violently suppressed. [Source: upi.com]
The above strategic considerations trumped any commitment to upholding democracy or human rights, which was used by the Biden administration, like its predecessors, as a rhetorical device that was devoid of real meaning or substance.
More Hypocrisy
The Biden administration hypocrisy with regards to human rights was evident in his advancing “defense ties” with India, China’s traditional rival, designed to make India one of the largest recipients of U.S. military aid behind only Israel and Egypt.
India was ruled by Hindu nationalist, Narendra Modi, who has long supported the brutal oppression of Muslims in Indian-occupied Kashmir and ruled autocratically.
President Biden, left, and Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, toast during a State Dinner at the White House on June 22, 2023. [Source: foxnews.com]
Imran Khan, a target of U.S. regime change. [Source: infostar.com]
In neighboring Pakistan, Donald Lu, the Assistant U.S. Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs[24], told the Pakistani ambassador to the U.S., Asad Majeed Khan, that Imran Khan—considered too independent and close to China—had to be removed as Prime Minister in a parliamentary vote of no confidence, otherwise there would be consequences for Pakistan.
Khan’s replacement, former Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, was a right-wing businessman from a corrupt, oligarchic family who promised a “paradise for investors” and reversed Khan’s opposition to the war in Ukraine.
With Khan gone, the Biden administration was also able to broker a bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) after Pakistan came to an agreement to purchase arms for use by the Ukrainian military in its war with Russia.
In August 2024, Indian journalist M.K. Bhadrakumar accused Lu of being “the hatchet man” of “Bangladesh’s color revolution,” which ousted the independent-minded Sheikh Hasina. She was replaced by Muhammed Yunus, a neoliberal darling of the global financial elite whose Grameen Bank had promoted microfinance schemes that plunged poor peasants into debt.[25]
Donald Lu upon arrival in Dhaka in May. [Source: bdnews24.com]
M.K. Bhadrakumar wrote in The Deccan Herald that “Hasina’s stubborn refusal to join [the] Quad [anti-China alliance including India, Japan, U.S. and Australia] was probably the clincher [in her removal]. With the failure of the color revolution in Thailand, the stalemate in the insurrection in Myanmar, and Chinese consolidation in Sri Lanka and the Maldives—Bangladesh’s importance to the Western strategy in the region is second to none.”[26]
Sheikh Hasina was ousted after she refused to join an anti-China alliance. [Source: businesstoday.in]
The Quad. [Source: freepressjournal.in]
A Sleeper Monroe Doctrine
Historian Greg Grandin wrote after the Biden administration’s first year that it was pursuing “something like a sleeper Monroe Doctrine in Latin America, carrying forward many of Trump’s worst policies.”
Characteristically, Biden increased funding for the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), which maintained dozens of bases across the continent, and targeted leftist regimes for regime change.
The sanctions that Biden imposed on socialist Venezuela were much harsher than what Trump imposed (the latter resulting in a 72% decline in living standard and 31% increase in mortality rates).[27]
[Source: israelnoticias.com]
Along with Venezuela, the Biden administration extended sanctions on Nicaragua in an attempt to weaken the left-leaning regime of Daniel Ortega, whom the U.S. could never forgive for leading Nicaragua’s 1979 revolution against U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza.
The sanctions targeted Nicaragua’s gold industry, Nicaragua’s top export, and made it more difficult for Nicaragua to obtain international loans.
[Source: wsj.com]
In another relic from the past, Biden extended the six-decade long U.S. blockade on Cuba, whose aim is to weaken Cuba’s economy by restricting trading opportunities and barring imports onto the island.
Biden had long courted the vote of the Cuban-American lobby and, as a U.S. senator in 1996, supported tightening the embargo through the Helms-Burton Act, which Fidel Castro called a “shameful” bill paving the way for “economic genocide.”
When anti-government protests broke out against the Cuban government in July 2021, they received support from the Biden administration. That year, the NED provided $5,538,193 in grants to opposition media and political groups in Cuba seeking regime change and in support of efforts to privatize Cuba’s largely state-run economy.
[Source: cubaenmiami.com]
Biden’s double standard when it comes to human rights was apparent in his embrace of Honduras’s narco-dictator Juan Orlando Hernández, who has now been sentenced to 45 years in a U.S. prison on narcotics trafficking charges.
When Senators Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) sponsored a bill in February 2021 imposing sanctions on Hernández for corruption and human rights abuses and advocating the suspension of U.S. security assistance to Honduras and export licenses for coveted defense articles and munitions items sold to the Honduran police and military, Biden administration officials failed to support the bill—which lacked the numbers to pass—and refused to condemn the human rights violations carried out by U.S.-subsidized security forces in Honduras.[28]
Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández (left) speaks with then-Vice President Biden during a news conference in Guatemala City on March 2, 2015. [Source: npr.org]
In Peru, the Biden administration generated rare dissent from within his own party by extending military assistance to the right-wing coup regime of Dina Boularte, which is facing a genocide inquiry for ordering the suppression of anti-government protests, leaving over 70 people dead.
Rep Susan Wild (D-PA) wrote in a letter to Biden signed by 19 other House Democrats that Peruvian security forces had indiscriminately responded to the outbreak of protests with “almost no regard for protestors’ human rights, classifying the protesters as ‘terrorists’ and limiting citizens’ right of movement.”[29]
In October, The Intercept ran an article on Boularte that referred to her as the “world’s least popular president,” noting that she had a mere 5 percent approval rating. Joe Burt, an associate professor at George Mason’s Schar School of Public Policy was quoted in the article stating that “the political system [in Peru] has been captured by a bunch of thieves and they’re running the country into the ground.”[30] With the backing of the Biden administration.
Joe Biden shaking hands with Lina Boularte [Source: latinus.us]
In El Salvador, the Biden administration expanded foreign assistance and provided police aid and military equipment to the government headed by Nayib Bukele, a right-wing authoritarian whom human-rights groups accused of carrying out arbitrary detentions, forced disappearances, and torture. Bukele locked up thousands of innocent people in an overzealous war on gangs reminiscent of that of Rodrigo Duterte in the Phillipines.[31]
More skulduggery was deployed in Bolivia, where the socialist government led by Luis Arce accused the Biden administration of waging a “hybrid war” against it that was designed to restore the power of Bolivia’s far-right.
At stake was the world’s largest reserves of lithium a critical mineral considered one of the strategic priorities of the Pentagon, serving the interests of the main global investment funds pouring heavy support to the Biden administration: BlackRock, Vanguard, Fidelity and State Street in its geopolitical and geo-economic war for markets and natural resources against China.[32]
In Haiti, the Biden administration ousted the Prime Minister it had helped impose on the Haitian people, and provided armored vehicles driven by Kenyan soldiers who were subcontracted to help uphold the new U.S. backed regime of Gary Conille.
[Source: mwakilishi.com].
The pretext for military intervention was the menace posed by “armed gangs,” some of which were led by revolutionary figures[33] seeking to transform the corrupt ruling order and liberate Haiti from the scourge of neo-colonialism.
The U.S. had helped precipitate the growth of the gangs by enforcing years of neo-liberal austerity on Haiti, and by allowing for the pillage of the country’s resources by multinational corporations.
An Iconic Figure of America’s Second Gilded Age
Following Biden’s defeat of Donald Trump in November 2020, I wrote an article entitled “Beware of the Hawk,” warning about what a new Biden administration would portend.
In that article I reminded readers that, for the past half-century, Biden had been at the forefront of the U.S. warfare state supporting wars of aggression, often under the guise of humanitarian intervention.
After Biden announced his withdrawal from the 2024 election cycle, The New York Times, predictably, ran columns suggesting that Biden was some kind of hero. Even on the left, many displayed a soft spot for Biden by praising his domestic record.
However, Biden’s atrocious foreign policy cannot be separated from his domestic policy record.
For one thing, the nearly trillion-dollar military budget prevented his administration from enacting adequate social programs to address the major ills gripping the U.S., including skyrocketing health care and education costs, anemic public transportation, rampant homelessness and drug addiction, and massive public debt. [34]
Additionally, the authoritarian methods used to advance imperial power abroad have increasingly come home as the U.S. evolves ever more into an authoritarian police state.
Journalist Caitlin Johnson wrote that “propaganda, censorship, the war on the press, banning TikTok, consolidating the collaboration of Silicon Valley with U.S. government agencies, police crackdowns on campus demonstrators, and quashing political dissent are all outward manifestations of the [Biden administration’s] agenda to manipulate the way the public thinks about what’s happening in the world.”
Some of the new measures to bolster police powers and crackdown on civil liberties were adopted in the name of fighting Domestic Violence Extremism (DVE).[35]
While right-wing extremism is a genuine problem in the U.S., there is evidence that the Biden administration has deliberately inflated this threat using deceitful tactics reminiscent of the ways U.S. leaders have deliberately inflated the threat of international terrorism to justify the expansion of the military-police industrial complex.
Biden ultimately will go down in history as an iconic political figure who embodies the deep-rooted corruption of America’s second Gilded Age with people like Dick Cheney, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Donald J. Trump.
Supported from the beginning of his career by large corporations like DuPont and the MBNA bank and credit card company, Biden will be remembered as an unprincipled war hawk who perpetrated destructive foreign policies that portend an end of the American Century.
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2025/0 ... gn-policy/
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - January 1, 2025 0
[Source: shorenewsnetwork.com]
Complicit in the Israeli Genocide in Gaza, Biden Sowed Misery and Death in Russia and Ukraine, Expanded an Already Ridiculously High Military Budget and Put the World at Risk of Nuclear War
In the June issue of The Nation magazine, editor D.D. Guttenplan claimed that Joe Biden was the most progressive U.S. president since Lyndon B. Johnson.[1]
This claim is obscene as neither of these two leaders was progressive in any way.
Lyndon Johnson may have ushered in the Great Society and civil rights legislation, but he also orchestrated the calamitous war in Vietnam, invaded the Dominican Republic, backed the Indonesian genocide of 1965, armed Israel to the hilt during the Six-Day War, triggered the USS Liberty incident and put the world close to the brink of nuclear war.
Joe Biden for his part has done very little to arrest the widening economic inequality patterns gripping the United States in this era of a second Gilded Age and has adopted a foreign policy that is horrifyingly comparable to LBJ in certain respects.
Like Johnson, Biden triggered wide-scale campus revolts, in his case because of his administration’s complicity in Israeli military operations in Gaza involving Vietnam-style atrocities.
[Source: radiohc.cu]
According to Brown University’s Cost of War Project, U.S. spending on Israel’s military operations and related U.S operations in the Middle East totaled at least $22.76 billion as of September 30. In just the first six weeks of the war, the Biden administration sent more than 15,000 bombs and 50,000 artillery shells.[2]
[Source: mintpressnews.com]
Since that time, the weapons the U.S. has provided include thousands of precision-guided munitions, Hellfire missiles, artillery ammunition, shoulder-fired rockets, glide bombs armed with cluster munitions, and bunker-buster, and 2,000-pound bombs.
Speaking to The Washington Post, former Biden administration official Jeremy Konyndyk said that the “extraordinary number of sales over the course of a pretty short amount of time” suggests that Israel would not be able to maintain its operation against Hamas in Gaza “without this level of U.S. support.”
[Source: masspeaceaction.org]
As Israel escalated its killing spree into Lebanon, the Biden administration deployed 100 U.S. troops to Israel directly to operate a sophisticated missile system it financed and escalated bombing of Houthi targets in Yemen who retaliated against Israel–in violation of the U.S. War Powers Act of 1973, which requires Congressional approval for carrying out military strikes.[3]
Ukraine
Biden’s complicity in Israel’s war crimes is matched by his complicity with war crimes committed by his administration’s other key ally: Ukraine.
Since war with Russia broke out in February 2022, the Biden administration has provided more than $175 billion in aid to Ukraine, most of which has been military-related.
U.S. Special Forces time were directly assisted the Ukrainian military, with the CIA having set up a dozen bases in Ukraine after the February 2014 Maidan coup that provoked the war, which Biden championed.
Among the weapons systems the Biden administration provided to Ukraine were Javelin anti-tank missiles, high-mobility rocket systems, howitzers, weaponized drones, cluster bombs, and others that were used by the Ukrainian military to attack and kill civilians in eastern Ukraine and over the border in Russia.[4]
[Source: kidsrnews.com]
Biden promoted his Ukraine policy as being advantageous to the U.S. economy, though it really enriched military contractors and the Wall Street hedge funds that owned them and donated generously to Biden’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
At the Rage Against the War Machine rally in February 2023, comedian Jimmy Dore gave a top ten list of how the $100+ billion spent on arming Ukraine could have been better spent, including:
Ending homelessness in the U.S., reinstating it, and then ending it again
Funding a new police force to police against the current ones
Facilitating two FTX collapses
Paying Hunter Biden’s monthly salary for the rest of his life; and giving Joe Biden a dog who knows where to lead him when his press conferences are over
Funding 90 Alex Jones lawsuits
Funding balloons to spy on China
Curing cancer
Comedian Jimmy Dore at the Rage Against the War Machine rally in Washington, D.C., in February 2023. [Source: Photo courtesy of Jeremy Kuzmarov]
One of the great lies advanced by Biden and his media and academic stenographers is that the U.S. was supporting Ukrainian democracy against Russian autocracy.
In fact, under Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine banned 12 opposition parties and deployed U.S.-trained commando units to hunt down dissidents, including inside Russia, where some were assassinated mafia-style.
Another great lie was that the U.S. was standing up to Russian aggression.
The Biden administration, in reality, had provoked a Russian invasion of Ukraine with the goal of bogging down Russia in a quagmire and ratcheting up sanctions to destroy its economy and fuel civil unrest that could lead to regime change.
[Source: yahoo.com]
Most dangerously, Biden authorized Ukraine to conduct strikes inside Russia while providing Ukraine and Germany with long-range missiles capable of striking there, directly threatening World War III.
The New York Times reported that “Mr. Biden’s decision appears to mark the first time that an American president has allowed…military responses on artillery, missile bases and command centers inside the borders of a nuclear-armed adversary.”
[Source: theguardian.com]
Biden further antagonized that adversary by, according to journalist Seymour Hersh, blowing up the Nord Stream II pipeline running from Russia through Germany.[5]
The goal of this act of environmental terrorism was to sever Russia’s ties with Germany and the rest of Europe and undercut its oil and gas industry.
Russia found new markets in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, however, while Europeans had to pay much higher rates, having to purchase natural gas from U.S. energy suppliers, thereby causing an economic crisis that has led many Europeans to turn against the war and some against the U.S.
Signs from February 2023 Rage Against the War Machine rally in Washington, D.C. [Source: Photo courtesy of Jeremy Kuzmarov]
China and the Far East
The Biden administration has threatened war not only with Russia but also China by a) expanding the number of military drills carried out in or near the South China Sea; b) launching a new regional economic initiative building off the precedent of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) whose purpose was to isolate China; and c) sending naval vessels and spy planes on provocative missions into the Taiwan Strait, over which China claims jurisdiction under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.[6]
[Source: chappatte.com]
Eli Friedman, Kevin Lin, Rose Liu and Ashley Smith wrote in China in Global Capitalism that the Biden administration “poured money into developing new high-tech weaponry, missiles, and new bases in Australia, the Philippines and elsewhere in the Pacific, all to assert U.S. hegemony in the region and against China. He increased deployment of the U.S. military in the Asia Pacific to press home the point that Washington intends to remain the dominant player in the region. He expanded the Quad alliance with Australia, India and Japan, and forged a trilateral security pact, AUKUS, with Britain and Australia against China.”
The authors continued: “Biden promised to expand Washington’s Five Eyes intelligence network, established after World War II, by the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, to include Germany, India, Japan and South Korea. He even has managed to get the latter two to put aside their historic antagonism, rooted in Tokyo’s occupation of Korea during World War II, to establish cordial relations and collaborate with the U.S. against China.”[7]
A key facet of the Biden administration’s aggressive anti-China strategy was the attempt to transform Taiwan into a heavily armed porcupine bristling with armaments and other forms of U.S.-led support that makes it “appear too painful to attack.”
In April 2023, the Biden administration announced a $345 million military aid package to Taiwan that included provision of portable air defense systems, intelligence and surveillance equipment, firearms and missiles. In late September, Biden approved a $567 million package, and in December, yet another package worth $573.1 million.
[Source: civilsdaily.com]
After the announcement of a characteristic $440 million arms sale agreement, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said that Taiwan had evolved into a “powder keg” by the infusion of U.S. weaponry, pushing the Taiwanese people into the “abyss of disaster.”
Taiwan’s leader Tsai Ing-wen sold her people down the river in acquiescing to the U.S. strategy of transforming the country into a U.S. dependency. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) decoupled from China, and Taiwan was negotiating a free trade agreement with the U.S. that would benefit U.S. interests and further cut off Taiwan from China, its largest trading partner.
Besides Tsai Ing-wen, Biden was particularly close with South Korea President Yoon Suk Yeol, a neo-conservative branded by the RAND Corporation as “the perfect partner of Joe Biden” who declared martial law for the first time since the country was ruled by a military dictatorship.
During Yoon’s visit to Washington in May 2023, Biden announced a new U.S. commitment to deploy a nuclear-armed submarine in South Korea for the first time since the early 1980s.
This was part of a new set of steps designed to boost U.S.-South Korea cooperation on military training, information sharing and other forms of strategic collaboration, whose net effect was to further antagonize North Korea and destroy any prospects for resolution of the Korean conflict.[8]
President Joe Biden toasts his “perfect partner,” Yoon Suk Yeol, at State Dinner in Washington attended by celebrities. [Source: twitter.com]
Preparing for a New Pacific War
The Biden administration was planning for a new Pacific War by establishing new military command centers in Hawaii, with piers, runways and barracks, while sending more planes over beaches and warships in and out of Pearl Harbor.
Biden’s 2024 defense budget provided $9 billion to the Pentagon for the Pacific Deterrence Initiative (PDI), which aimed to enhance American war-making capabilities in the Asia-Pacific. The budget earmarked a whopping $15.3 billion for the Indo-Pacific Command, higher than the other theater commands and a $4 billion increase from the previous year.
Some $464 million was being used for Pacific Pathways exercises conducted by U.S. Army Pacific to support military exercises with partner militaries, including Thailand and the Philippines.
U.S. and Thai soldiers in military exercise. [Source: army.mil]
A March 2024 issue of Air & Space Forces Magazine reported that the U.S. Air Force planned to spend $400 million to expand an airfield on the tiny island of Yap in Micronesia between Guam and Palau, some 1,000 miles southeast of China.
Red marker shows the location of Yap (Google Maps). [Source: news.antiwar.com]
In May 2023, the Biden administration signed a deal with Micronesia to extend 20-year-old political and security ties, enabling the U.S. to locate military facilities there.
Similar deals were signed with Palau and the Marshall Islands, a collection of 29 coral atolls lying halfway between Hawaii and Australia, where Washington has promised to provide $2.3 billion in economic assistance over 20 years in exchange for access to 2.1 million square kilometers of land.
According to Air & Space Forces Magazine, the U.S. Air Force in 2024 sought $1.24 billion in appropriations in foreign infrastructure investment, a 93% increase over the prior year, and $872.5 million, a 44% jump, in new authorizations for military construction outside the U.S.
A key focus was to restore multiple airfields in the Pacific that were previously used by the U.S. during World War II to bomb Japan, including the infamous Tokyo firebombing that killed approximately 100,000 people in one night, and the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic attacks.
Among these is Andersen Air Force Base on Guam, for which the U.S. Air Force requested $411 million to fund a North Aircraft Parking Ramp, large enough to park up to 14 bombers.
Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro participates in a wreath-laying on March 1, 2024, at the 81st Infantry Division Memorial in Peleliu, Palau, that honors division members who assisted the 1st Marine Division in the Battle of Peleliu during World War II. [Source: stripes.com]
Some $78 million was budgeted for upgrades to a U.S. airfield on Tinian Island in the Marianas near Guam, which was used as a launch point for the atomic attack over Hiroshima by the Enola Gay bomber, and which the Air Force reclaimed in 2012 under Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” policy.
General Kenneth Wilsbach, Commander of the Pacific Air Forces, told Nikkei Asia in December 2023 that the Tinian base “will become an extensive” facility once work has been completed to reclaim it from the jungle that has grown over the base since the last U.S. Army Air Force units abandoned it in 1946.”
Enola Gay bomber at Tinian Air Field before taking off on its fateful mission. [Source: taskandpurpose.com]
A USMC F/A-18D lands on Tinian for the first time in 2012, snagging a temporary arresting gear set up on West Field. [Source: twz.com]
Ruins of World War II-era buildings at North Airfield, Tinian. [Source: cnn.com]
Expanding the Bloated Pentagon Budget
Biden’s Pentagon budget for 2023 was $838 billion and his Pentagon budget for 2024 was $886 billion, about 40 percent of global military spending.[9]
The 2023 budget included $24.5 billion for the new U.S. Space Force and Space Development Agency, which is contributing to the dangerous militarization of Outer Space.[10]
The Space Force is here to stay. [Source: nymag.com]
Biden’s 2022 Pentagon budget provisioned $100 million for training Ukrainian pilots; increased irregular warfare activities; extended the 31-year U.S. military attack on Iraq; and extended the disastrous Plan Colombia through 2024—a militarized drug war program promoted by Senator Biden in the 1990s—even though Colombia’s newly elected president, Gustavo Petro, has rejected the U.S. War on Drugs.
For 2025, Biden asked for $898 billion for the military. Of that total, $167.5 billion is to be devoted to buying new weapons and equipment and $49.2 billion to support the “nuclear enterprise,” including supporting production of the new B-21 Raider bomber, refurbishing Trident II D-5 submarine-launched missiles, developing the new Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile, and funding construction of the new Columbia-class missile submarines.
The Biden administration was also investing in a new variant of the B61-13 nuclear gravity bomb, which is far more powerful than the two bombs used to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Pacific War.
B-21 stealth radar funded by the Biden administration. [Source: popularmechanics.com]
B61-13 nuclear gravity bomb. [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
Real Life Dr. Strangelove
In March, President Biden issued a secret nuclear engagement order expanding an already underway program to add a so-called “super-fuse” which “drastically increases the `killing power’” of Trident II Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBMs) produced by Lockheed Martin carrying W-76 100 kt warheads, making it possible—on paper—to knock out all Russian and Chinese land-based nuclear silos simultaneously.
MIT scientist Theodore Postol, former science adviser to the Chief of Naval Operations, specified that the “super-fuse” achieves the warheads’ “fantastic increase in killing efficiency.” According to Postol, this is not some “slight modernization” of weapons components, “but a dramatic step towards the capability to fight and win nuclear wars with both China and Russia.” These are “preemptive strike technologies.” Russia and China both know that, and “will have no choice but to implement countermeasures,” he warns.
[Source: gagadget.com]
Extending the Failed War on Terror
Analysis by the Costs of War Project at Brown University reveals that, between 2021 and 2023, the U.S. government conducted “counterterrorism” operations in at least 78 countries, including ground combat in at least nine countries and air strikes in at least four countries during the first three years of the Biden administration.
The report notes: “Though the total number of countries with U.S. counterterrorism operations has decreased slightly from 2018-2020—from 85 countries—the counterterrorism footprint remains remarkably similar to what it was under the Trump administration.”
[Source: watson.brown.edu]
In August 2022, Biden claimed to have scored a great victory by assassinating Ayman al-Zawahiri, formerly Osama bin Laden’s top deputy, in Kabul, though there was never any confirmation of al-Zawahiri’s body.
President Joe Biden being briefed on July 1 about the plan to assassinate Ayman al-Zawahiri. [Source: wsws.org]
In Syria, the Biden administration maintained two thousand troops to fight ISIS (lying to the public about the totals), though their real purpose was to help unseat the secular nationalist, anti-Israel government of Bashar al-Assad.[11]
The extension of Donald Trump’s draconian sanctions and theft by U.S. troops of Syria’s oil created a biblical-scale tragedy for the Syrian people caused largely by the U.S. The regime change operation that had began when Biden was Vice-President culminated in December with the triumph of Al Qaeda in Syria.[12]
Somalia was one of the new frontiers of the War on Terror, where the Biden administration signed a deal for the construction of five new military bases to help in the fight against Al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda affiliate.
The bases were intended to bolster the Danab Brigade of the Somali army, a U.S.-sponsored Special Operations force that had been linked to repeated incidents of brutality.
In May 2022, Biden sent 500 U.S. troops into Somalia. His administration also announced an increase in aid to the Somalian army and greenlighted new drone strikes.
[Source: newsweek.com]
In 2024, the U.S. Africa Command conducted at least seven air strikes in Somalia targeting Al-Shabaab, which had become resurgent in correlation with the U.S. military escalation.
A Pentagon think tank concluded that America’s war in the Horn of Africa under Biden was plagued by a “failure to define the parameters of the conflict” and “an overemphasis on military measures without a clear definition of the optimal military strategy.”
Similar failings were evident in West Africa, which also saw a spike in terrorist attacks as a result of the growing U.S. military presence.
Journalist Nick Turse pointed out that, in 2002 and 2003, before the creation of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM, which was established in 2007), the State Department counted nine terrorist attacks in all of Africa compared with 2,737 in 2022 in Burkina Faso, Mali and western Niger, and a total of 6,756 on the African continent, a 75,000% increase.[13]
Terrorism has proliferated as a result of the expansion of U.S. military operations in the Sahel. [Source: worldview.stratfor.com]
Widening Network of U.S. Military Bases
One purpose of the Somalian bases was to provide a launching point for U.S. military operations in the Middle East, including against the Houthis in Yemen who were disrupting commercial ships in protest of the Israeli assault on Gaza.
In August 2024, two months before the Tribe of Nova music festival massacre, the Pentagon awarded a $35.8 million contract to build U.S. troop facilities for a secret base it maintains deep within Israel’s Negev Desert, just 20 miles from Gaza, code-named “Site-512.”
The Biden administration sustained around 40,000 troops in at least 60 military bases across the Middle East[14] and made efforts to establish new drone bases in Ghana, Ivory Coast and Benin after a coup in Niger jeopardized a $110 million drone base.
[Source: youtube.com]
AFRICOM was expanding its footprint throughout Africa, including in Zambia whose right-wing government enabled corporate exploitation of the country’s copper mines and carried out a campaign of repression against socialists who wanted to nationalize the mines.
A major investor in Zambia’s copper mines was the Wall Street firm, BlackRock, whose deep ties to the Biden administration were evident in Biden’s appointment of former BlackRock executives to important positions in his administration.
AFRICOM chief, General Michael Langley, and Major General Oscar Nyoni, Deputy Commander of the Zambia Air Force with Zambian Air Force pilots. [Source: military.africa]
The U.S. military expanded its footprint also throughout Southeast Asia under Biden.
In February 2023, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced on a visit to the Philippines that the U.S. would provide $100 million to refurbish at least nine Philippines military bases to which the U.S. now has access.
Four new naval bases were set to be established close to contested waters in the South China Sea—three of them north of Luzon Island directly facing Taiwan.
Demonstrators burn a U.S. flag during a rally in front of Camp Aguinaldo military headquarters in Quezon City, Philippines, on April 11, 2023. [Source: defensenews.com]
Growing Political Weakness
Growing military might cannot make up for political weakness and a loss of “hearts and minds” around the world.”
Between October 7, 2023 and June 2024, U.S. and allied forces were attacked more than 170 times, including over 70 times in Syria and 100 times in Iraq as well as once in Jordan.[15]
Biden’s attempt to create a rail, ship, pipeline and digital cable corridor connecting Europe, the Middle East and India to counter China’s Belt and Road, meanwhile, failed, in part because Saudi Arabia would not normalize relations with Israel unless it stopped its genocide and recognized a Palestinian state.
Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment & India-Middle East-Europe Economics Corridor event during G20 Summit, in New Delhi on September 9, 2023. The plan has not gone forward because Biden administration policies alienated potential participants. [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
The Biden administration faced setbacks in Africa when Niger’s government removed a major U.S. drone base, and where other West African countries followed suit by removing U.S. military bases or threatening to do so.[16]
Even more significantly, Biden’s sanctions policy and war on Russia was prompting Russian alliance with China and Iran, in an anti-American axis that is moving the world towards multi-polarity.
Delegates to the 2024 BRICS summit in Kazan, where BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, CHina, South Africa) added twelve new members, endorsed the use of local currencies in financial transactions between BRICS countries and their trading partners as a means of reducing dependence on the U.S. dollar and undercutting American global hegemony, which appeared to be on the wane.
Unleashing the CIA
As CovertAction Magazine has previously detailed, Biden has a long record of supporting the CIA, including by helping to cover up its crimes while serving on the Senate Intelligence Committee and supporting legislation that would criminalize disclosures of it.
President Biden continued to champion the CIA’s interests by withholding 5,000 critical documents on the JFK assassination.
He further helped to unleash the CIA in Ukraine, where it has played a central role in the proxy war with Russia, including by training specialized commando units that compiled blacklists of opponents of the Zelensky government and hunted them down.[17]
Under the direction of William F. Burns, the CIA expanded its operations in mainland China in an effort to destabilize the People’s Republic of China. The CIA created a new mission center focused on spying on China, including by flying spy planes off its coast. [18]
[Source: dailymail.co.uk]
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a CIA offshoot specializing in regime-change propaganda and the sponsorship of color revolutions that are designed to bring down anti-U.S. governments. It has been very active in the Biden years advancing propaganda against U.S. adversaries like Russia, China and Venezuela, supporting dissidents in those countries even if they are terrorists, and plotting subversive operations in countries like Belarus, Nicaragua, Iran and North Korea among others that the U.S. wants to bring into its orbit.
Support for Dictators
While purporting to be leading a worldwide crusade against authoritarianism, a report in The Intercept revealed that the Biden administration sold weapons in 2022 to 57% of the world’s authoritarian regimes.
The foreign dictators that Biden cozied up to included Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to whom Biden gave a fist bump when he visited Saudi Arabia in July 2022.
Biden had earlier vowed to treat Saudi Arabia as a “pariah,” due to a long string of human rights abuses, including the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi—a killing in a Saudi operation that U.S. intelligence assessed had been approved by Crown Prince bin Salman.
However, realpolitik dictates led Biden to cozy up to bin Salman who agreed to continue to sell Saudi Arabian oil in U.S. petro dollars and boost oil production to lower prices in exchange for billion-dollar arms supplies, including a $5 billion missile defense system, along with provision of spare parts and maintenance for coalition warplanes that bombed the Yemeni population.[19]
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and President Biden bump fists as they begin meetings in Jeddah in July 2022. [Source: npr.org]
In his first year alone, Biden approved more than $1 billion in assistance—including $170 million in military aid—to Egypt, ruled by Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, a man Donald Trump lovingly referred to as his “favorite dictator.”
Human Rights Watch documented a pattern of extrajudicial killings by El-Sisi’s security forces covered up as “shootouts,” and extensive unlawful home demolitions in northern Sinai that led to the eviction of over a quarter of its population.
Joe Biden and Fattah el-Sisi [Source: egyptindependent.com]
When Biden hosted an Africa Leaders Summit in December 2022—where deals were cut to enable U.S. exploitation of Africa’s natural resources—Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame was one of the invitees given the red-carpet treatment.
Kagame had been in power since 1994 and admitted that his opponents tend to “die.” He won August elections with 99% of the vote after his main opponents were excluded.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken meets with Rwandan President Paul Kagame at the President’s Office in Urugwiro Village in Kigali, Rwanda, on August 11, 2022. [Source: time.com]
In 2023, the Biden administration provided Rwanda with more than $175 million in foreign aid, which helped sustain Kagame’s rule.
Kagame was being rewarded for helping to safeguard control over the rich mineral resources of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Uganda was also rewarded for helping to open up the DRC. In 2023, the Biden administration provided it with more than $530 million in foreign aid, and in 2022, $790,252,008.
Since 1986, Uganda has been ruled by Yoweri Museveni with an iron fist. Abandoning a youthful Marxism, Museveni has favored U.S. corporations and allowed the U.S. to establish military bases directly in Uganda while invading the DRC repeatedly with Rwanda.[20]
Yoweri Museveni at the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit. [Source: nrm.ug]
In late July, Museveni cracked down brutally on anti-government protests, turning the opposition National Unity Platform (NUP) party into a “military barracks,” according to the BBC, and violently arresting party officials.[21]
The response was reminiscent of neighboring Kenya, where another close U.S. ally, William Ruto, ordered a police crackdown on youth protesting an IMF dictated finance bill that was poised to raise costs on basic goods and impose more austerity measures. At least 60 people were reportedly killed in the crackdown, 600+ were injured, and police were accused of engaging in abductions and torture.[22]
Secretary of State Antony Blinken commended Ruto afterwards “for his commitment to direct police to refrain from using violence of any kind against protesters,” which was patently false.
Mere weeks before the protests Ruto had been granted a formal state dinner in Washington, the first by an African leader in 16 years.
Biden named Kenya as a major non-NATO ally of the U.S., because it had had a) kept a force of 3,500 troops in Somalia which worked with the Somali army to hunt down Al-Shabab, b) signed a deal allowing for U.S. military advisors into Kenya, and c) provided troops for a Western-backed African peacekeeping force in Eastern Congo whose purpose was to stabilize the region so Western corporations could plunder its mineral wealth.
The Biden administration wanted to make Kenya into a manufacturing hub for U.S. companies looking to relocate out of China and to sustain control over Kenya’s ports, which could be used to strangle Chinese trade.[23]
Kenya was valued furthermore for hosting Camp Simba base in Manda Bay, a hub for U.S. drones and surveillance to project its control across the Indian Ocean, the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea, particularly over the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a chokepoint critical to securing global energy.
Kenyan President William Ruto at a state dinner at the White House hosted by the Biden’s in May 2024. A few weeks later, huge protests broke out in Kenya, which Ruto violently suppressed. [Source: upi.com]
The above strategic considerations trumped any commitment to upholding democracy or human rights, which was used by the Biden administration, like its predecessors, as a rhetorical device that was devoid of real meaning or substance.
More Hypocrisy
The Biden administration hypocrisy with regards to human rights was evident in his advancing “defense ties” with India, China’s traditional rival, designed to make India one of the largest recipients of U.S. military aid behind only Israel and Egypt.
India was ruled by Hindu nationalist, Narendra Modi, who has long supported the brutal oppression of Muslims in Indian-occupied Kashmir and ruled autocratically.
President Biden, left, and Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, toast during a State Dinner at the White House on June 22, 2023. [Source: foxnews.com]
Imran Khan, a target of U.S. regime change. [Source: infostar.com]
In neighboring Pakistan, Donald Lu, the Assistant U.S. Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs[24], told the Pakistani ambassador to the U.S., Asad Majeed Khan, that Imran Khan—considered too independent and close to China—had to be removed as Prime Minister in a parliamentary vote of no confidence, otherwise there would be consequences for Pakistan.
Khan’s replacement, former Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, was a right-wing businessman from a corrupt, oligarchic family who promised a “paradise for investors” and reversed Khan’s opposition to the war in Ukraine.
With Khan gone, the Biden administration was also able to broker a bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) after Pakistan came to an agreement to purchase arms for use by the Ukrainian military in its war with Russia.
In August 2024, Indian journalist M.K. Bhadrakumar accused Lu of being “the hatchet man” of “Bangladesh’s color revolution,” which ousted the independent-minded Sheikh Hasina. She was replaced by Muhammed Yunus, a neoliberal darling of the global financial elite whose Grameen Bank had promoted microfinance schemes that plunged poor peasants into debt.[25]
Donald Lu upon arrival in Dhaka in May. [Source: bdnews24.com]
M.K. Bhadrakumar wrote in The Deccan Herald that “Hasina’s stubborn refusal to join [the] Quad [anti-China alliance including India, Japan, U.S. and Australia] was probably the clincher [in her removal]. With the failure of the color revolution in Thailand, the stalemate in the insurrection in Myanmar, and Chinese consolidation in Sri Lanka and the Maldives—Bangladesh’s importance to the Western strategy in the region is second to none.”[26]
Sheikh Hasina was ousted after she refused to join an anti-China alliance. [Source: businesstoday.in]
The Quad. [Source: freepressjournal.in]
A Sleeper Monroe Doctrine
Historian Greg Grandin wrote after the Biden administration’s first year that it was pursuing “something like a sleeper Monroe Doctrine in Latin America, carrying forward many of Trump’s worst policies.”
Characteristically, Biden increased funding for the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), which maintained dozens of bases across the continent, and targeted leftist regimes for regime change.
The sanctions that Biden imposed on socialist Venezuela were much harsher than what Trump imposed (the latter resulting in a 72% decline in living standard and 31% increase in mortality rates).[27]
[Source: israelnoticias.com]
Along with Venezuela, the Biden administration extended sanctions on Nicaragua in an attempt to weaken the left-leaning regime of Daniel Ortega, whom the U.S. could never forgive for leading Nicaragua’s 1979 revolution against U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza.
The sanctions targeted Nicaragua’s gold industry, Nicaragua’s top export, and made it more difficult for Nicaragua to obtain international loans.
[Source: wsj.com]
In another relic from the past, Biden extended the six-decade long U.S. blockade on Cuba, whose aim is to weaken Cuba’s economy by restricting trading opportunities and barring imports onto the island.
Biden had long courted the vote of the Cuban-American lobby and, as a U.S. senator in 1996, supported tightening the embargo through the Helms-Burton Act, which Fidel Castro called a “shameful” bill paving the way for “economic genocide.”
When anti-government protests broke out against the Cuban government in July 2021, they received support from the Biden administration. That year, the NED provided $5,538,193 in grants to opposition media and political groups in Cuba seeking regime change and in support of efforts to privatize Cuba’s largely state-run economy.
[Source: cubaenmiami.com]
Biden’s double standard when it comes to human rights was apparent in his embrace of Honduras’s narco-dictator Juan Orlando Hernández, who has now been sentenced to 45 years in a U.S. prison on narcotics trafficking charges.
When Senators Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) sponsored a bill in February 2021 imposing sanctions on Hernández for corruption and human rights abuses and advocating the suspension of U.S. security assistance to Honduras and export licenses for coveted defense articles and munitions items sold to the Honduran police and military, Biden administration officials failed to support the bill—which lacked the numbers to pass—and refused to condemn the human rights violations carried out by U.S.-subsidized security forces in Honduras.[28]
Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández (left) speaks with then-Vice President Biden during a news conference in Guatemala City on March 2, 2015. [Source: npr.org]
In Peru, the Biden administration generated rare dissent from within his own party by extending military assistance to the right-wing coup regime of Dina Boularte, which is facing a genocide inquiry for ordering the suppression of anti-government protests, leaving over 70 people dead.
Rep Susan Wild (D-PA) wrote in a letter to Biden signed by 19 other House Democrats that Peruvian security forces had indiscriminately responded to the outbreak of protests with “almost no regard for protestors’ human rights, classifying the protesters as ‘terrorists’ and limiting citizens’ right of movement.”[29]
In October, The Intercept ran an article on Boularte that referred to her as the “world’s least popular president,” noting that she had a mere 5 percent approval rating. Joe Burt, an associate professor at George Mason’s Schar School of Public Policy was quoted in the article stating that “the political system [in Peru] has been captured by a bunch of thieves and they’re running the country into the ground.”[30] With the backing of the Biden administration.
Joe Biden shaking hands with Lina Boularte [Source: latinus.us]
In El Salvador, the Biden administration expanded foreign assistance and provided police aid and military equipment to the government headed by Nayib Bukele, a right-wing authoritarian whom human-rights groups accused of carrying out arbitrary detentions, forced disappearances, and torture. Bukele locked up thousands of innocent people in an overzealous war on gangs reminiscent of that of Rodrigo Duterte in the Phillipines.[31]
More skulduggery was deployed in Bolivia, where the socialist government led by Luis Arce accused the Biden administration of waging a “hybrid war” against it that was designed to restore the power of Bolivia’s far-right.
At stake was the world’s largest reserves of lithium a critical mineral considered one of the strategic priorities of the Pentagon, serving the interests of the main global investment funds pouring heavy support to the Biden administration: BlackRock, Vanguard, Fidelity and State Street in its geopolitical and geo-economic war for markets and natural resources against China.[32]
In Haiti, the Biden administration ousted the Prime Minister it had helped impose on the Haitian people, and provided armored vehicles driven by Kenyan soldiers who were subcontracted to help uphold the new U.S. backed regime of Gary Conille.
[Source: mwakilishi.com].
The pretext for military intervention was the menace posed by “armed gangs,” some of which were led by revolutionary figures[33] seeking to transform the corrupt ruling order and liberate Haiti from the scourge of neo-colonialism.
The U.S. had helped precipitate the growth of the gangs by enforcing years of neo-liberal austerity on Haiti, and by allowing for the pillage of the country’s resources by multinational corporations.
An Iconic Figure of America’s Second Gilded Age
Following Biden’s defeat of Donald Trump in November 2020, I wrote an article entitled “Beware of the Hawk,” warning about what a new Biden administration would portend.
In that article I reminded readers that, for the past half-century, Biden had been at the forefront of the U.S. warfare state supporting wars of aggression, often under the guise of humanitarian intervention.
After Biden announced his withdrawal from the 2024 election cycle, The New York Times, predictably, ran columns suggesting that Biden was some kind of hero. Even on the left, many displayed a soft spot for Biden by praising his domestic record.
However, Biden’s atrocious foreign policy cannot be separated from his domestic policy record.
For one thing, the nearly trillion-dollar military budget prevented his administration from enacting adequate social programs to address the major ills gripping the U.S., including skyrocketing health care and education costs, anemic public transportation, rampant homelessness and drug addiction, and massive public debt. [34]
Additionally, the authoritarian methods used to advance imperial power abroad have increasingly come home as the U.S. evolves ever more into an authoritarian police state.
Journalist Caitlin Johnson wrote that “propaganda, censorship, the war on the press, banning TikTok, consolidating the collaboration of Silicon Valley with U.S. government agencies, police crackdowns on campus demonstrators, and quashing political dissent are all outward manifestations of the [Biden administration’s] agenda to manipulate the way the public thinks about what’s happening in the world.”
Some of the new measures to bolster police powers and crackdown on civil liberties were adopted in the name of fighting Domestic Violence Extremism (DVE).[35]
While right-wing extremism is a genuine problem in the U.S., there is evidence that the Biden administration has deliberately inflated this threat using deceitful tactics reminiscent of the ways U.S. leaders have deliberately inflated the threat of international terrorism to justify the expansion of the military-police industrial complex.
Biden ultimately will go down in history as an iconic political figure who embodies the deep-rooted corruption of America’s second Gilded Age with people like Dick Cheney, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Donald J. Trump.
Supported from the beginning of his career by large corporations like DuPont and the MBNA bank and credit card company, Biden will be remembered as an unprincipled war hawk who perpetrated destructive foreign policies that portend an end of the American Century.
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2025/0 ... gn-policy/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Sympathy for the Devils...
Don’t Deify Jimmy Carter
January 2, 2025
A black-and-white illustration of Jimmy Carter, split into light and dark halves, titled “This, That or the Other Carter” by Mr. Fish. Photo: PopularResistance.org
By Chris Hedges – December 31, 2024
Jimmy Carter, out of office, had the courage to call out the “abominable oppression and persecution” and “strict segregation” of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in his 2006 book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” He dedicated himself to monitoring elections, including his controversial defense of the 2006 election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and championed human rights around the globe. He lambasted the American political process as an “oligarchy” in which “unlimited political bribery” created “a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.”
But Carter’s years as an ex-president should not mask his dogged service to the empire, penchant for fomenting disastrous proxy wars, betrayal of the Palestinians, embrace of punishing neoliberal policies and his subservience to big business when he was in office.
Carter played a significant role in dismantling New Deal legislation with the deregulation of major industries including airlines, banking, trucking, telecommunications, natural gas and railways. He appointed Paul Volcker to the Federal Reserve, who, in an effort to combat inflation, drove up interest rates and pushed the U.S. into the deepest recession since the Great Depression, a move that saw the start of punishing austerity cuts. Carter is the godfather of the pillage known as neoliberalism, a pillage fellow Democrat Bill Clinton would turbocharge.
Carter fell under the disastrous influence of his Svengali-like national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Polish exile, who rejected the Nixon-Kissinger reliance on détente with the Soviet Union. Brzezinski’s life’s mission, one that meant he saw the world in black and white, was to confront and destroy the Soviet Union along with any government or movement he deemed to be under communist influence or sympathetic to it.
Carter, under Brzezinski’s influence, walked away from the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks treaty (SALT II) with the Soviet Union, which sought to curb nuclear weapons deployment. He increased military spending. He sent military aid to the Indonesian New Order government during the Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor, which many have characterized as a genocide. He supported, along with the apartheid state of South Africa, the murderous counter revolutionary group, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), led by Jonas Savimbi. He provided aid to the brutal Zairian dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. He supported the Khmer Rouge.
He instructed the Central Intelligence Agency to back opposition groups and political parties to bring down the Sandinista government in Nicaragua once it took power in 1979, leading under the Reagan administration to the formation of the Contras and a bloody and senseless U.S.-backed insurgency. He provided military aid to the dictatorship in El Salvador, ignoring an appeal from Archbishop Oscar Romero — later assassinated — to cease U.S. arms shipments.
He poisoned U.S. relations with Iran by backing the repressive regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi until the last minute and then allowing the deposed Shah to seek medical treatment in New York, triggering the occupation of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and a 444-day hostage crisis. Carter’s belligerence — he froze Iranian assets, stopped importing oil from Iran and expelled 183 Iranian diplomats from the U.S. — played into Ayatollah Khomeini’s demonization of the U.S. and calls for Islamic rule. He obliterated the credibility of Iran’s secular opposition.
Carter gave Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, although he ruled under martial law, billions in military aid. He armed the Mujahideen in Afghanistan after the Soviet intervention in 1979, a decision that cost the U.S. $3 billion, saw the deaths of 1.5 million Afghans and led to the creation of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. The blowback from this Carter policy alone is catastrophic.
He backed the South Korean military in 1980 when it laid siege to the city of Gwangju, where protestors had formed a militia, which led to the massacre of some 2,000 people.
Finally, he sold out the Palestinians when he negotiated a separate peace deal, known as the Camp David Accords, in 1979 between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and “Israeli” Prime Minister Menachem Begin. The agreement excluded the Palestine Liberation Organization from the talks. “Israel” never, as promised to Carter, attempted to resolve the Palestine question with Jordan and Egypt’s involvement. It never permitted Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and Gaza within five years. It did not end “Israeli” settlements — a refusal that led Carter to later claim Begin had lied to him. But since there was no mechanism in the agreement for enforcement, and since Carter was unwilling to defy the Israel lobby to impose sanctions on “Israel”, the Palestinians found themselves, once again, powerless and abandoned.
Carter, to his credit, did appoint the civil rights activist Patricia Derian as his Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, leading to the blocking of loans and reduction in military aid to the military junta in Argentina during the Dirty War, restrictions the Reagan administration removed. Derian’s commitment to human rights was genuine. She supported Philippines leader Benigno S. Aquino Jr. and the South Korean dissident and former president Kim Dae-jung. Carter allowed her to anger a few of our most repressive allies. But his human rights policy was primarily designed to back democratic dissidents and worker movements in Central and Eastern Europe, especially Poland, in an effort to weaken the Soviet Union.
Carter had a decency most politicians lack, but his moral crusades, which came once he was out of power, seem like a form of penance. His record as president is bloody and dismal, although not as bloody and dismal as the presidents who followed. That’s the best we can say of him.
https://orinocotribune.com/dont-deify-jimmy-carter/
January 2, 2025
A black-and-white illustration of Jimmy Carter, split into light and dark halves, titled “This, That or the Other Carter” by Mr. Fish. Photo: PopularResistance.org
By Chris Hedges – December 31, 2024
Jimmy Carter, out of office, had the courage to call out the “abominable oppression and persecution” and “strict segregation” of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in his 2006 book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” He dedicated himself to monitoring elections, including his controversial defense of the 2006 election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and championed human rights around the globe. He lambasted the American political process as an “oligarchy” in which “unlimited political bribery” created “a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.”
But Carter’s years as an ex-president should not mask his dogged service to the empire, penchant for fomenting disastrous proxy wars, betrayal of the Palestinians, embrace of punishing neoliberal policies and his subservience to big business when he was in office.
Carter played a significant role in dismantling New Deal legislation with the deregulation of major industries including airlines, banking, trucking, telecommunications, natural gas and railways. He appointed Paul Volcker to the Federal Reserve, who, in an effort to combat inflation, drove up interest rates and pushed the U.S. into the deepest recession since the Great Depression, a move that saw the start of punishing austerity cuts. Carter is the godfather of the pillage known as neoliberalism, a pillage fellow Democrat Bill Clinton would turbocharge.
Carter fell under the disastrous influence of his Svengali-like national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Polish exile, who rejected the Nixon-Kissinger reliance on détente with the Soviet Union. Brzezinski’s life’s mission, one that meant he saw the world in black and white, was to confront and destroy the Soviet Union along with any government or movement he deemed to be under communist influence or sympathetic to it.
Carter, under Brzezinski’s influence, walked away from the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks treaty (SALT II) with the Soviet Union, which sought to curb nuclear weapons deployment. He increased military spending. He sent military aid to the Indonesian New Order government during the Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor, which many have characterized as a genocide. He supported, along with the apartheid state of South Africa, the murderous counter revolutionary group, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), led by Jonas Savimbi. He provided aid to the brutal Zairian dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. He supported the Khmer Rouge.
He instructed the Central Intelligence Agency to back opposition groups and political parties to bring down the Sandinista government in Nicaragua once it took power in 1979, leading under the Reagan administration to the formation of the Contras and a bloody and senseless U.S.-backed insurgency. He provided military aid to the dictatorship in El Salvador, ignoring an appeal from Archbishop Oscar Romero — later assassinated — to cease U.S. arms shipments.
He poisoned U.S. relations with Iran by backing the repressive regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi until the last minute and then allowing the deposed Shah to seek medical treatment in New York, triggering the occupation of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and a 444-day hostage crisis. Carter’s belligerence — he froze Iranian assets, stopped importing oil from Iran and expelled 183 Iranian diplomats from the U.S. — played into Ayatollah Khomeini’s demonization of the U.S. and calls for Islamic rule. He obliterated the credibility of Iran’s secular opposition.
Carter gave Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, although he ruled under martial law, billions in military aid. He armed the Mujahideen in Afghanistan after the Soviet intervention in 1979, a decision that cost the U.S. $3 billion, saw the deaths of 1.5 million Afghans and led to the creation of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. The blowback from this Carter policy alone is catastrophic.
He backed the South Korean military in 1980 when it laid siege to the city of Gwangju, where protestors had formed a militia, which led to the massacre of some 2,000 people.
Finally, he sold out the Palestinians when he negotiated a separate peace deal, known as the Camp David Accords, in 1979 between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and “Israeli” Prime Minister Menachem Begin. The agreement excluded the Palestine Liberation Organization from the talks. “Israel” never, as promised to Carter, attempted to resolve the Palestine question with Jordan and Egypt’s involvement. It never permitted Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and Gaza within five years. It did not end “Israeli” settlements — a refusal that led Carter to later claim Begin had lied to him. But since there was no mechanism in the agreement for enforcement, and since Carter was unwilling to defy the Israel lobby to impose sanctions on “Israel”, the Palestinians found themselves, once again, powerless and abandoned.
Carter, to his credit, did appoint the civil rights activist Patricia Derian as his Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, leading to the blocking of loans and reduction in military aid to the military junta in Argentina during the Dirty War, restrictions the Reagan administration removed. Derian’s commitment to human rights was genuine. She supported Philippines leader Benigno S. Aquino Jr. and the South Korean dissident and former president Kim Dae-jung. Carter allowed her to anger a few of our most repressive allies. But his human rights policy was primarily designed to back democratic dissidents and worker movements in Central and Eastern Europe, especially Poland, in an effort to weaken the Soviet Union.
Carter had a decency most politicians lack, but his moral crusades, which came once he was out of power, seem like a form of penance. His record as president is bloody and dismal, although not as bloody and dismal as the presidents who followed. That’s the best we can say of him.
https://orinocotribune.com/dont-deify-jimmy-carter/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Sympathy for the Devils...
Biden & Make-Believe Democracy
January 3, 2025
If a large chunk of the public can be persuaded that a man who is incapable of finding the door is “sharp as a tack,” they can be made to believe a lot of other things too, writes Jonathan Cook.
President Joe Biden in August 2022. (White House, Erin Scott)
By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net
Only in the world of political make-believe we inhabit in the West would The Wall Street Journal’s account of Biden’s years-long cognitive decline, and its concealment by his officials, count as a scoop.
And only in a world in which the billionaire-owned media alone constructs and polices what counts as reality would the WSJ be able to run this story without also being expected to consider what it signifies about America’s professed democracy.
The emperor, we are now told, was naked all along. How did it take more than four years for the fearless, tenacious billionaire-owned media to notice?
The WSJ reports that even back in 2021 Biden had what his officials described as “bad days” when his mind worked so poorly he had to be kept away from senior Congresspeople and his own cabinet colleagues.
So insulated was he that he rarely met even with key figures directing White House policy, such as the secretaries of State, Defence and the Treasury.
He was able to hold only two or three cabinet meetings a year during his four-year term — a total of nine, compared to 19 by Barack Obama and 25 by Donald Trump.
His aides barely strayed from his side because they needed to whisper instructions for him to carry out the simplest of public tasks, such as where to enter and exit a room.
Concern only went mainstream when he performed catastrophically in an unscripted TV debate against Donald Trump in June, eventually having to pull out of his re-election bid and let his vice-president, Kamala Harris, take over.
Shortly afterwards, it emerged that he had been receiving regular visits to the White House from a leading neurologist and Parkinson’s expert.
Many observers — myself included — pointed out Biden’s mental infirmity from the get-go. Matt Orfalea has been compiling video clips of the president’s stunning gaffes and verbal confusions for years. None of us were geniuses. We didn’t need access to the 50 White House insiders interviewed by the WSJ. It was blindingly obvious.
Biden wanders offstage or walks like a geriatric robot. Yet we are meant to believe he’s carefully navigating us through the nuclear tripwires of the West’s serial wars.
My latest article can be read here: https://t.co/V3J2zCxmRb pic.twitter.com/4EaGcKon0x
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) June 15, 2024
You had to be lying, or hypnotised, to deny what was so visible.
And yet every time we pointed out Biden’s clear cognitive impairment, we were accused of promoting conspiracy theories, engaging in elder abuse, or supporting Trump.
The emperor, so we were told, was fully clothed.
The truth about Biden hasn’t suddenly leaked out from his officials. Senior politicians on both sides of the aisle knew. White House correspondents knew. Editors knew. And they all lied to protect the system of power to which they belong, the system that keeps them gainfully employed, the system that maintains their status. No one was going to rock the boat.
[See: Stop Calling It A ‘Stutter:’ Dozens of Examples Show Biden’s Dementia Symptoms and Caitlin Johnstone: Biden Not Running the Show]
The WSJ hasn’t suddenly found out things it didn’t know before. The reason it is coming clean now – as are White House staffers – is that President Biden is almost out the door. The truth is no longer a serious threat to the Washington power system.
There will be more revelations about Biden’s incapacity – maybe contained in a future book by Bob Woodward – after his presidency has become a distant memory. When it is safe for the full story to be told. When the lies are no longer important.
But more significant than the media deceptions are the fact that much of the public fell for them, not once but over and over again: day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.
Why? Because far too many of us are in the grip of the West’s propaganda system. We believe that the billionaire-owned media is to be trusted, that it serves the public good, not private wealth.
If a large chunk of the public can be persuaded that a man who is incapable of finding the door through which he’s supposed to leave is “sharp as a tack”, then why would they not also believe that the United States is promoting democracy as it has laid waste to the Middle East over the past two decades to control the region’s oil?
Or that Washington is seeking peace for the world and Ukraine by arming it with ever-more offensive weapons against a nuclear-armed Russia so that the U.S. can place ballistic missiles on Moscow’s doorstep?
Or that the U.S. wants a ceasefire in Gaza even as it supplies the munitions, intelligence and diplomatic cover for Israel to carry out a genocide there?
The problem is that, subjected to a lifetime of elite propaganda, many are readier to believe that very propaganda than the evidence of their own own eyes. They are truly hypnotised.
Even now, many are listening to the “revelations” of Biden’s long decline and, just like the WSJ, not wondering how the U.S. has been functioning for the past four years with a president barely able to read a teleprompter, one whose mind is so vacant he can wander off in the middle of a conversation.
Does the U.S. run by itself? Does it need a president? Or is the president nothing more than a figurehead for a permanent bureaucracy that expects to wield power from the shadows, unobserved by voters and unaccountable to them? Is the U.S. a democracy, or is the democracy just a facade behind which a wealth elite maintains its power?
Biden has given us the answer. Were you listening?
https://consortiumnews.com/2025/01/03/b ... democracy/
*******
Biden blames increase on homeless on migration—sidelining cost of living and unaffordability crisis
A report from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development revealed that there was a an 18% increase in homelessness in 2023
January 02, 2025 by Natalia Marques
Photo: Dan Parlante.
An annual report released by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) last week revealed that homelessness increased by unprecedented levels last year. According to HUD’s 2024 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report, over 770,000 people were homeless on a single night in January of 2024, an 18% increase from January of 2023.
As a comparison, last year’s Annual Homelessness Assessment Report revealed that homelessness had increased by 12%, and the year prior showed an increase of 0.3% from 2020 to 2022.
Homelessness shot up by a third under Biden and is now at a record high, according to new data.
The White House’s response? Blame immigrantshttps://t.co/AjnrdMD7E4 pic.twitter.com/Kjvvrc4caJ
— Stephen Semler (@stephensemler) January 1, 2025
It is possible that even this sharp increase could be an undercount. The agency itself states that not included in the report are those who are “temporarily staying with family or friends—sometimes referred to as being ‘doubled-up’ or ‘couch surfing’—even if their stay may be unstable” as well as those who are staying is housing that is “not dedicated for people experiencing homelessness.”
The Biden administration has tried to downplay this sharp increase in homelessness, around 33% since 2020. “No American should face homelessness, and the Biden-Harris Administration is committed to ensuring every family has access to the affordable, safe, and quality housing they deserve,” said Adrianne Todman, who currently leads HUD. “While this data is nearly a year old, and no longer reflects the situation we are seeing, it is critical that we focus on evidence-based efforts to prevent and end homelessness. We know what works and our success in reducing veteran homelessness by 55.2% since 2010 shows that.”
What has led to this sharp increase? The Biden administration has attempted to place much of the blame on the increase in migration. “Some communities reported data to HUD that indicated that the rise in overall homelessness was a result of their work to shelter a rising number of asylum seekers coming into their communities,” reports HUD. Indeed, cities that took in a large number of migrants experienced an increase in sheltered homelessness, including New York City and Chicago.
However, migration does not tell the full story of the massive increase in homelessness in the United States. A fuller picture includes the major factors of cost of living and the rollback of COVID-19 era social services during Biden’s presidency.
For the state of Illinois, for example, the HUD report states that “new arrivals accounted for most of Chicago’s increase in estimated homelessness,” in other areas in Illinois, the rise in homelessness was attributed to “increased shelter capacity, extreme cold that brought people into shelter, a higher cost of living combined with a rollback of pandemic-related financial supports, and a lack of affordable housing.”
According to an analysis by researcher Stephen Semler, “the combination of ending pandemic welfare assistance (which included an eviction moratorium, specific homeless prevention funding, and broader cash assistance and tax credit programs) and the lack of affordable housing was particularly devastating.” The HUD report itself contains a quote by a Continuum of Care (CoC) in the northeast, one of many regional bodies throughout the country that are part of a larger HUD initiative to assist homeless people.
“In response to COVID-19, our CoC saw an influx of rapid rehousing and prevention resources, as well as an effective statewide eviction moratorium,” reported a suburban CoC in the northeastern part of the US. “These efforts were effective in keeping households from entering into homelessness and moving households out of homelessness quickly. Since the sunsetting of these resources and the ending of the eviction moratorium, our COC has seen a large influx of new families and individuals seeking emergency shelter assistance.”
Indeed, Biden’s administration oversaw the rollback of COVID-19 social services and protections, including unemployment, additional public healthcare, and eviction moratoriums throughout the country. The administration also oversaw one of the largest increases in cost of living in recent history, which still plagues the people of the US.
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/01/02/ ... ty-crisis/
January 3, 2025
If a large chunk of the public can be persuaded that a man who is incapable of finding the door is “sharp as a tack,” they can be made to believe a lot of other things too, writes Jonathan Cook.
President Joe Biden in August 2022. (White House, Erin Scott)
By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net
Only in the world of political make-believe we inhabit in the West would The Wall Street Journal’s account of Biden’s years-long cognitive decline, and its concealment by his officials, count as a scoop.
And only in a world in which the billionaire-owned media alone constructs and polices what counts as reality would the WSJ be able to run this story without also being expected to consider what it signifies about America’s professed democracy.
The emperor, we are now told, was naked all along. How did it take more than four years for the fearless, tenacious billionaire-owned media to notice?
The WSJ reports that even back in 2021 Biden had what his officials described as “bad days” when his mind worked so poorly he had to be kept away from senior Congresspeople and his own cabinet colleagues.
So insulated was he that he rarely met even with key figures directing White House policy, such as the secretaries of State, Defence and the Treasury.
He was able to hold only two or three cabinet meetings a year during his four-year term — a total of nine, compared to 19 by Barack Obama and 25 by Donald Trump.
His aides barely strayed from his side because they needed to whisper instructions for him to carry out the simplest of public tasks, such as where to enter and exit a room.
Concern only went mainstream when he performed catastrophically in an unscripted TV debate against Donald Trump in June, eventually having to pull out of his re-election bid and let his vice-president, Kamala Harris, take over.
Shortly afterwards, it emerged that he had been receiving regular visits to the White House from a leading neurologist and Parkinson’s expert.
Many observers — myself included — pointed out Biden’s mental infirmity from the get-go. Matt Orfalea has been compiling video clips of the president’s stunning gaffes and verbal confusions for years. None of us were geniuses. We didn’t need access to the 50 White House insiders interviewed by the WSJ. It was blindingly obvious.
Biden wanders offstage or walks like a geriatric robot. Yet we are meant to believe he’s carefully navigating us through the nuclear tripwires of the West’s serial wars.
My latest article can be read here: https://t.co/V3J2zCxmRb pic.twitter.com/4EaGcKon0x
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) June 15, 2024
You had to be lying, or hypnotised, to deny what was so visible.
And yet every time we pointed out Biden’s clear cognitive impairment, we were accused of promoting conspiracy theories, engaging in elder abuse, or supporting Trump.
The emperor, so we were told, was fully clothed.
The truth about Biden hasn’t suddenly leaked out from his officials. Senior politicians on both sides of the aisle knew. White House correspondents knew. Editors knew. And they all lied to protect the system of power to which they belong, the system that keeps them gainfully employed, the system that maintains their status. No one was going to rock the boat.
[See: Stop Calling It A ‘Stutter:’ Dozens of Examples Show Biden’s Dementia Symptoms and Caitlin Johnstone: Biden Not Running the Show]
The WSJ hasn’t suddenly found out things it didn’t know before. The reason it is coming clean now – as are White House staffers – is that President Biden is almost out the door. The truth is no longer a serious threat to the Washington power system.
There will be more revelations about Biden’s incapacity – maybe contained in a future book by Bob Woodward – after his presidency has become a distant memory. When it is safe for the full story to be told. When the lies are no longer important.
But more significant than the media deceptions are the fact that much of the public fell for them, not once but over and over again: day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.
Why? Because far too many of us are in the grip of the West’s propaganda system. We believe that the billionaire-owned media is to be trusted, that it serves the public good, not private wealth.
If a large chunk of the public can be persuaded that a man who is incapable of finding the door through which he’s supposed to leave is “sharp as a tack”, then why would they not also believe that the United States is promoting democracy as it has laid waste to the Middle East over the past two decades to control the region’s oil?
Or that Washington is seeking peace for the world and Ukraine by arming it with ever-more offensive weapons against a nuclear-armed Russia so that the U.S. can place ballistic missiles on Moscow’s doorstep?
Or that the U.S. wants a ceasefire in Gaza even as it supplies the munitions, intelligence and diplomatic cover for Israel to carry out a genocide there?
The problem is that, subjected to a lifetime of elite propaganda, many are readier to believe that very propaganda than the evidence of their own own eyes. They are truly hypnotised.
Even now, many are listening to the “revelations” of Biden’s long decline and, just like the WSJ, not wondering how the U.S. has been functioning for the past four years with a president barely able to read a teleprompter, one whose mind is so vacant he can wander off in the middle of a conversation.
Does the U.S. run by itself? Does it need a president? Or is the president nothing more than a figurehead for a permanent bureaucracy that expects to wield power from the shadows, unobserved by voters and unaccountable to them? Is the U.S. a democracy, or is the democracy just a facade behind which a wealth elite maintains its power?
Biden has given us the answer. Were you listening?
https://consortiumnews.com/2025/01/03/b ... democracy/
*******
Biden blames increase on homeless on migration—sidelining cost of living and unaffordability crisis
A report from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development revealed that there was a an 18% increase in homelessness in 2023
January 02, 2025 by Natalia Marques
Photo: Dan Parlante.
An annual report released by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) last week revealed that homelessness increased by unprecedented levels last year. According to HUD’s 2024 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report, over 770,000 people were homeless on a single night in January of 2024, an 18% increase from January of 2023.
As a comparison, last year’s Annual Homelessness Assessment Report revealed that homelessness had increased by 12%, and the year prior showed an increase of 0.3% from 2020 to 2022.
Homelessness shot up by a third under Biden and is now at a record high, according to new data.
The White House’s response? Blame immigrantshttps://t.co/AjnrdMD7E4 pic.twitter.com/Kjvvrc4caJ
— Stephen Semler (@stephensemler) January 1, 2025
It is possible that even this sharp increase could be an undercount. The agency itself states that not included in the report are those who are “temporarily staying with family or friends—sometimes referred to as being ‘doubled-up’ or ‘couch surfing’—even if their stay may be unstable” as well as those who are staying is housing that is “not dedicated for people experiencing homelessness.”
The Biden administration has tried to downplay this sharp increase in homelessness, around 33% since 2020. “No American should face homelessness, and the Biden-Harris Administration is committed to ensuring every family has access to the affordable, safe, and quality housing they deserve,” said Adrianne Todman, who currently leads HUD. “While this data is nearly a year old, and no longer reflects the situation we are seeing, it is critical that we focus on evidence-based efforts to prevent and end homelessness. We know what works and our success in reducing veteran homelessness by 55.2% since 2010 shows that.”
What has led to this sharp increase? The Biden administration has attempted to place much of the blame on the increase in migration. “Some communities reported data to HUD that indicated that the rise in overall homelessness was a result of their work to shelter a rising number of asylum seekers coming into their communities,” reports HUD. Indeed, cities that took in a large number of migrants experienced an increase in sheltered homelessness, including New York City and Chicago.
However, migration does not tell the full story of the massive increase in homelessness in the United States. A fuller picture includes the major factors of cost of living and the rollback of COVID-19 era social services during Biden’s presidency.
For the state of Illinois, for example, the HUD report states that “new arrivals accounted for most of Chicago’s increase in estimated homelessness,” in other areas in Illinois, the rise in homelessness was attributed to “increased shelter capacity, extreme cold that brought people into shelter, a higher cost of living combined with a rollback of pandemic-related financial supports, and a lack of affordable housing.”
According to an analysis by researcher Stephen Semler, “the combination of ending pandemic welfare assistance (which included an eviction moratorium, specific homeless prevention funding, and broader cash assistance and tax credit programs) and the lack of affordable housing was particularly devastating.” The HUD report itself contains a quote by a Continuum of Care (CoC) in the northeast, one of many regional bodies throughout the country that are part of a larger HUD initiative to assist homeless people.
“In response to COVID-19, our CoC saw an influx of rapid rehousing and prevention resources, as well as an effective statewide eviction moratorium,” reported a suburban CoC in the northeastern part of the US. “These efforts were effective in keeping households from entering into homelessness and moving households out of homelessness quickly. Since the sunsetting of these resources and the ending of the eviction moratorium, our COC has seen a large influx of new families and individuals seeking emergency shelter assistance.”
Indeed, Biden’s administration oversaw the rollback of COVID-19 social services and protections, including unemployment, additional public healthcare, and eviction moratoriums throughout the country. The administration also oversaw one of the largest increases in cost of living in recent history, which still plagues the people of the US.
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/01/02/ ... ty-crisis/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Sympathy for the Devils...
What Is a Democrat?
Posted on January 8, 2025 by Yves Smith
Yves here. This Tom Neuburger post finesses the question of “What is the Democratic Party?” and for good reason. Lambert gave the matter a fair bit of study and could not come up with much of an answer. We asked political scientist Tom Ferguson the same question and he agreed it was not obvious. So the fallback is to consider what being a Democrat amount to, and it appears to be “cannon fodder”.
By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies
Image: Caroline Brehman/CQ Roll Call file photo
Why do national Democrats seem so feckless when it comes to elections? Look no further than the consultant-ridden DNC, the Democratic National Committee, nominally the governing institution of the Democratic Party.
James Zogby is a long-time member of the DNC, and has long railed against its practices. Consider what he has to say in the following interview with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti on a recent Breaking Points show.
The whole interview is good, but here are a few juicy quotes for those with less than a little listening time.
On Democratic Party “membership” (lightly edited; all emphasis mine):
I grew up, my mom was a precinct captain and I used to go door to door with her, and go to Ward meetings, and on Election Day we’d get poll cards and we’d go to the polls and pass them out. You belonged to something, and you felt like this was part of who you were.
That’s no longer the case. Being a member of the Democratic Party means nothing more than: I’m on a email list, I’m on a text message list, I’m on a hard mail list, I’m on a phone list, and I get asked for money. Nobody asks my opinion. There is no way to record your feeling about an issue.
On whether the DNC controls the Party:
In all the years I’ve been on the DNC, first time we had an actual election was when Keith Ellison and Tom Perez faced off after the Bernie-Hillary race.
First time we had a floor vote and a debate on an issue was at that same meeting when we debated whether we should accept money from PACs that emanated from businesses that violated the DNC positions on oil, fracking, whatever.
The fact is that DNC members even were like props who go to meetings and fill chairs and, I can say it because I’m a Catholic, you know we know when to stand up, when to sit down, when to clap, when to leave. Votes are a done deal. Staff decide what we vote on.
On who controls the money:
[E]very year, every cycle, the DNC spends hundreds of millions of dollars — this year well over a billion — and guess what? I have no idea where it’s going to go.
The Harris campaign raised a billion dollars. It’s in the red. We will never know where that money got spent. We will never evaluate was it effective or not.
People give $3 donations monthly [and] we have no idea where that money goes. And as opposed to being a governing body, like I said, we [the DNC] are props at meetings.
The fact is, Democratic voters aren’t members of the Party in any sense of membership. You can’t be a card-carrying Democrat. There are no cards, and the national party itself is just a tiny group of people with enormous power. Democratic voters are just supporters, sideline cheering fans at a game they can only watch. Or more accurately, Democratic voters the Party’s target market, one source of its funds.
Is the same true on the Republican side? Of course it is. But unlike Democrats, Republican fear their base…
…while Democrats ridicule theirs…
By “socialist” Biden means these people like these, marginal, easily ignored:
Bernie Sanders, New York City, 2019 (Getty Images)
Victories are nice when they come, but it’s really all about the Benjamins. The Party raises money from everywhere it can and gives it to their consultants, many of whom sit on the DNC itself and have ties to the campaigns they advise. And while the candidate may win or lose, no consultant comes out of a contest unenriched. The Harris campaign is currently in the red, but I don’t think consultants are sitting on IOUs. The game’s as corrupt as it looks.
We all want the U.S. to march into a better future. The Democratic Party is having trouble convincing voters it should lead that mission. This is why.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/01 ... ocrat.html
And we must note that Bernie's 'socialism' ain't real socialism, there is no great expropriations, no returning the means of production to the workers, it barely makes it to 'feel good'. The vehemence with which the bosses confront this lightweight reformism speaks of their existential fear and assures that socialism will never come to the US by purely electoral means.
But blaming party consultants is bullshit because they are just fixers for the Serious Money, little better than well paid clerks.
*******
Genocidal president, genocidal politics
Originally published: Antiwar.com on January 7, 2025 by Norman Solomon (more by Antiwar.com) (Posted Jan 08, 2025)
When news broke over the weekend that President Biden just approved an $8 billion deal for shipping weapons to Israel, a nameless official vowed that “we will continue to provide the capabilities necessary for Israel’s defense.” Following the reports last month from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch concluding that Israeli actions in Gaza are genocide, Biden’s decision was a new low for his presidency.
It’s logical to focus on Biden as an individual. His choices to keep sending huge quantities of weaponry to Israel have been pivotal and calamitous. But the presidential genocide and the active acquiescence of the vast majority of Congress are matched by the dominant media and overall politics of the United States.
Forty days after the Gaza war began, Anne Boyer announced her resignation as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine. More than a year later, her statement illuminates why the moral credibility of so many liberal institutions has collapsed in the wake of Gaza’s destruction.
While Boyer denounced “the Israeli state’s U.S.-backed war against the people of Gaza,” she emphatically chose to disassociate herself from the nation’s leading liberal news organization:
I can’t write about poetry amidst the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.
The acclimatizing process soon became routine. It was most crucially abetted by President Biden and his loyalists, who were especially motivated to pretend that he wasn’t really doing what he was really doing.
For mainline journalists, the process required the willing suspension of belief in a consistent standard of language and humanity. When Boyer acutely grasped the dire significance of its Gaza coverage, she withdrew from “the newspaper of record.”
Content analysis of the war’s first six weeks found that coverage by the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times had a steeply dehumanizing slant toward Palestinians. The three papers “disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict” and “used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians,” a study by The Intercept showed.
The term ‘slaughter’ was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and ‘massacre’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. ‘Horrific’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.
After a year of the Gaza war, Arab-American historian Rashid Khalidi said:
My objection to organs of opinion like the New York Times is that they see absolutely everything from an Israeli perspective. ‘How does it affect Israel, how do the Israelis see it?’ Israel is at the center of their worldview, and that’s true of our elites generally, all over the West. The Israelis have very shrewdly, by preventing direct reportage from Gaza, further enabled that Israelocentric perspective.
Khalidi summed up:
The mainstream media is as blind as it ever was, as willing to shill for any monstrous Israeli lie, to act as stenographers for power, repeating what is said in Washington.
The conformist media climate smoothed the way for Biden and his prominent rationalizers to slide off the hook and shape the narrative, disguising complicity as evenhanded policy. Meanwhile, mighty boosts of Israel’s weapons and ammunition were coming from the United States. Nearly half of the Palestinians they killed were children.
For those children and their families, the road to hell was paved with good doublethink. So, for instance, while the Gaza horrors went on, no journalist would confront Biden with what he’d said at the time of the widely decried school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, when the president had quickly gone on live television. “There are parents who will never see their child again,” he said, adding: “To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away… It’s a feeling shared by the siblings, and the grandparents, and their family members, and the community that’s left behind.” And he asked plaintively,
Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen?
The massacre in Uvalde killed 19 children. The daily massacre in Gaza has taken the lives of that many Palestinian kids in a matter of hours.
While Biden refused to acknowledge the ethnic cleansing and mass murder that he kept making possible, Democrats in his orbit cooperated with silence or other types of evasion. A longstanding maneuver amounts to checking the box for a requisite platitude by affirming support for a “two-state solution.”
Dominating Capitol Hill, an unspoken precept has held that Palestinian people are expendable as a practical political matter. Party leaders like Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries did virtually nothing to indicate otherwise. Nor did they exert themselves to defend incumbent House Democrats Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, defeated in summer primaries with an unprecedented deluge of multimillion-dollar ad campaigns funded by AIPAC and Republican donors.
The overall media environment was a bit more varied but no less lethal for Palestinian civilians. During its first several months, the Gaza war received huge quantities of mainstream media coverage, which thinned over time; the effects were largely to normalize the continual slaughter. Some exceptional reporting existed about the suffering, but the journalism gradually took on a media ambience akin to background noise, while credulously hyping Biden’s weak ceasefire efforts as determined quests.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came in for increasing amounts of criticism. But the prevalent U.S. media coverage and political rhetoric—unwilling to expose the Israeli mission to destroy Palestinians en masse—rarely went beyond portraying Israel’s leaders as insufficiently concerned with protecting Palestinian civilians.
Instead of candor about horrific truths, the usual tales of U.S. media and politics have offered euphemisms and evasions.
When she resigned as the New York Times Magazine poetry editor in mid-November 2023, Anne Boyer condemned what she called “an ongoing war against the people of Palestine, people who have resisted through decades of occupation, forced dislocation, deprivation, surveillance, siege, imprisonment, and torture.” Another poet, William Stafford, wrote decades ago:
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
https://mronline.org/2025/01/08/genocid ... -politics/
*******
The Biden Administration Declares That A Genocide Is Happening… In Sudan
The Biden administration, which has been intimately complicit in the genocidal atrocities being perpetrated in Gaza for the last 15 months, has just determined that a genocide is being committed in Sudan.
Caitlin Johnstone
January 8, 2025
The Biden administration, which has been intimately complicit in the genocidal atrocities being perpetrated in Gaza for the last 15 months, has just determined that a genocide is being committed in Sudan.
On Tuesday the Biden administration formally accused the Sudanese paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of committing genocide in the civil war that has been ravaging the country since April 2023, announcing sanctions on the group’s leader Mohammad Hamdan Daglo Mousa along with seven RSF-affiliated companies.
“The RSF and RSF-aligned militias have continued to direct attacks against civilians,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken moralized in a statement regarding the decision, adding, “The RSF and allied militias have systematically murdered men and boys — even infants — on an ethnic basis, and deliberately targeted women and girls from certain ethnic groups for rape and other forms of brutal sexual violence. Those same militias have targeted fleeing civilians, murdering innocent people escaping conflict, and prevented remaining civilians from accessing lifesaving supplies.”
Sometimes all you can do is stare wordlessly at the absolute gall of these freaks.
This is after all the same Antony Blinken who just flatly denied that a genocide is taking place in Gaza in his final interviews with the press a few days ago, even as mainstream western human rights institutions like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch unambiguously accuse Israel of committing genocidal crimes of extermination against Palestinians in the enclave.
This is the same Biden administration which has adamantly insisted on continuing to supply Israel with the weapons it depends on to continue its genocidal onslaught in Gaza, despite mountains of undeniable evidence that it is deliberately targeting civilians with deadly force and deliberately cutting off civilians from food, clean water and medical supplies.
And this is also the same Biden administration that has been sending weapons to the United Arab Emirates while conveniently ignoring the fact that the UAE is sending money and weapons to the RSF to use for its atrocities in Sudan.
“The UAE has been covertly shipping weapons to the RSF, but that hasn’t stopped the Biden administration from pushing forward major arms sales to Abu Dhabi,” notes Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp regarding the announcement.
So the US is indirectly backing the genocidal atrocities it now denounces in Sudan, while aggressively defending the genocidal atrocities it is directly backing in Gaza.
This announcement comes as Biden and his handlers push through one last $8 billion weapons shipment to Israel in the last days of his term, a final blood-soaked punctuation mark on an ugly legacy of mass murder throughout Biden’s far-too-long political career.
And we can’t realistically expect it to get any better when the next soulless empire manager takes office. In a radio interview on Monday, president-elect Trump boasted of being “the best friend that Israel ever had,” pointing to the numerous concessions he made to the Zionist state during his first time in office.
“Well, I’m the best friend that Israel ever had,” Trump said. “You look at what happened with all of the things that I’ve gotten, including Jerusalem being the capital, the embassy getting built.”
Trump then reiterated his threat to Hamas that there will be “hell to pay” if the Israeli hostages are not released by the time he takes office, following earlier statements which suggested the US could become directly involved in the bombing of Gaza during Trump’s term.
The US government does not care about genocide, regardless of what bloodthirsty ghoul takes office or what political party they happen to belong to. Anytime genocide rears its ugly head in a way that is convenient for the interests of the empire, the empire at best will look the other way and at worst join right in with the slaughter.
The empire itself is the problem. When the empire remains murderous even after you get rid of the official elected leaders currently overseeing the murderousness, this tells you that it is the empire itself that’s the problem. The empire is what needs to go.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2025/01 ... -in-sudan/
******
The Ghost of Jimmy Carter
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 08 Jan 2025
Jimmy Carter greets Haitian presidential candidate Jean-Bertrand Aristide on the eve of the Haitian presidential elections in December 1990. Photo: Thony Belizaire/AFP via Getty Images
Hagiography is inevitable when presidents and other prominent people die. The unwillingness to ‘speak ill of the dead’ and the propaganda that would have us believe in American exceptionalism must be rejected. Jimmy Carter was always devoted to protecting the interests of the U.S. state.
Carter’s hapless ending was largely forgotten because of his good works with Habitat for Humanity and his eschewing of the typical post-presidential cashing in with corporate speeches and other forms of money grubbing among the elite. He wrote books and spoke out against Israeli apartheid . Unlike other U.S. officials he referred to it as such, naming the crime and doing a service to humanity in the process.
But the warm feelings engendered by Carter’s life after he left the white house should not be a license for amnesia. While in office, he acted as other presidents did and that means his actions must be closely examined.
In December 2024, the U.S. succeeded in deposing Syrian president Bashar al-Assad after years of backing foreign jihadist fighters against that government. The coup was not without historical precedent. This dynamic began with Jimmy Carter in Afghanistan, where the U.S. waged a proxy war with the help of Osama Bin Laden and others against a government that asked the Soviet Union for support. Carter’s National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski , was the architect of this policy. He spoke quite proudly of his role.
“According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahidin began in 1980, that is to say after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was on July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that, in my opinion, this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.”
The U.S. public was never informed that president Najibullah requested Soviet assistance. Instead, the narrative of an evil invasion was created and is still disseminated and widely accepted to this very day. U.S. culpability in arming al-Qaeda is also a topic that has been declared off limits by the corporate media.
The attacks of September 11, 2001, would have been a perfect opportunity to discuss U.S. culpability in empowering al-Qaeda. Twenty years late,r the vow of silence continues, as does the U.S. proxy relationship with al-Qaeda, ISIS, and now Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), the al-Qaeda off-shoot now in control of Syria.
Carter may have failed to be re-elected, but like every other white house occupant, he created a new paradigm for his successors to follow. Islamist proxies were U.S. foot soldiers in Bosnia, Chechnya, Libya, and later Syria. U.S. backing was a marriage of convenience with these groups. In a 1993 interview bin Laden bragged about sending “not hundreds, but thousands” to Afghanistan. He could not have done so without U.S. support.
Jimmy Carter did more than build homes for the needy. He established the Carter Center . “It seeks to prevent and resolve conflicts, enhance freedom and democracy, and improve health.” Yet even cursory scrutiny reveals that the Carter Center did not act as an independent entity but instead worked hand in hand with the U.S. Interference in Haiti is but one example.
Elections were scheduled to be held in Haiti on December 16, 1990, and Jean-Bertrand Aristide was favored to win. Carter was on hand as an election observer, but he also held meetings at the U.S. embassy, after which he asked Aristide to stand down and to concede before all votes were counted, but he refused and won 67% of the vote. Carter certainly didn’t resolve any conflicts in Haiti. His goal was to get the U.S. backed candidate, Marc Bazin, elected.
Carter interfered in Haitian affairs again in 1994 in coordination with Bill Clinton’s administration. Aristide’s administration was short-lived, and he was overthrown by a CIA-backed coup d’etat in 1991. In 1994 ,Clinton acted in part at the request of the Congressional Black Caucus, who wanted Aristide restored to power. Carter’s negotiation ended military rule but sent U.S. troops to Haiti. Occupation was the price for so-called democracy. Aristide was forced to accept World Bank and IMF “structural adjustments,” which forced austerity on the country and reversed his plans to bring economic justice to his people. Ten years later, in 2004, the George W. Bush administration kidnapped Haiti’s democratically elected president and sent him to the Central African Republic, despite protest from the Congressional Black Caucus and others.
The Carter Center showed its true colors again in 2024 after Venezuela’s presidential election , declaring, “Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election did not meet international standards of electoral integrity and cannot be considered democratic.” The Carter Center is funded by the U.S. State Department, Agency for International Development (USAID), and foreign governments of the UK, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar in addition to the George Soros funded Open Society and the Gates Foundation. While the Carter Center cast aspersions even before all votes in Venezuela were counted and audited, other international observers pointed out that the process was, in fact, one that is accepted as being democratic and fair.
Jimmy Carter proves that there really aren’t any former presidents of the United States. They continue to uphold U.S. self-declared prerogatives. Even when faced with evidence that his presidency was undone by Ronald Reagan, Carter demurred and feigned confusion about what to believe. He never gave up that stance of serving U.S. interests. That is, after all, how one becomes president. And after having served in that office, upholding U.S. interests is a position that is unlikely to change. It is all to the good that Carter built homes for poor people, but no one should forget his service to the maintenance of U.S. hegemony.
https://blackagendareport.com/index.php ... mmy-carter
Posted on January 8, 2025 by Yves Smith
Yves here. This Tom Neuburger post finesses the question of “What is the Democratic Party?” and for good reason. Lambert gave the matter a fair bit of study and could not come up with much of an answer. We asked political scientist Tom Ferguson the same question and he agreed it was not obvious. So the fallback is to consider what being a Democrat amount to, and it appears to be “cannon fodder”.
By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies
Image: Caroline Brehman/CQ Roll Call file photo
Why do national Democrats seem so feckless when it comes to elections? Look no further than the consultant-ridden DNC, the Democratic National Committee, nominally the governing institution of the Democratic Party.
James Zogby is a long-time member of the DNC, and has long railed against its practices. Consider what he has to say in the following interview with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti on a recent Breaking Points show.
The whole interview is good, but here are a few juicy quotes for those with less than a little listening time.
On Democratic Party “membership” (lightly edited; all emphasis mine):
I grew up, my mom was a precinct captain and I used to go door to door with her, and go to Ward meetings, and on Election Day we’d get poll cards and we’d go to the polls and pass them out. You belonged to something, and you felt like this was part of who you were.
That’s no longer the case. Being a member of the Democratic Party means nothing more than: I’m on a email list, I’m on a text message list, I’m on a hard mail list, I’m on a phone list, and I get asked for money. Nobody asks my opinion. There is no way to record your feeling about an issue.
On whether the DNC controls the Party:
In all the years I’ve been on the DNC, first time we had an actual election was when Keith Ellison and Tom Perez faced off after the Bernie-Hillary race.
First time we had a floor vote and a debate on an issue was at that same meeting when we debated whether we should accept money from PACs that emanated from businesses that violated the DNC positions on oil, fracking, whatever.
The fact is that DNC members even were like props who go to meetings and fill chairs and, I can say it because I’m a Catholic, you know we know when to stand up, when to sit down, when to clap, when to leave. Votes are a done deal. Staff decide what we vote on.
On who controls the money:
[E]very year, every cycle, the DNC spends hundreds of millions of dollars — this year well over a billion — and guess what? I have no idea where it’s going to go.
The Harris campaign raised a billion dollars. It’s in the red. We will never know where that money got spent. We will never evaluate was it effective or not.
People give $3 donations monthly [and] we have no idea where that money goes. And as opposed to being a governing body, like I said, we [the DNC] are props at meetings.
The fact is, Democratic voters aren’t members of the Party in any sense of membership. You can’t be a card-carrying Democrat. There are no cards, and the national party itself is just a tiny group of people with enormous power. Democratic voters are just supporters, sideline cheering fans at a game they can only watch. Or more accurately, Democratic voters the Party’s target market, one source of its funds.
Is the same true on the Republican side? Of course it is. But unlike Democrats, Republican fear their base…
…while Democrats ridicule theirs…
By “socialist” Biden means these people like these, marginal, easily ignored:
Bernie Sanders, New York City, 2019 (Getty Images)
Victories are nice when they come, but it’s really all about the Benjamins. The Party raises money from everywhere it can and gives it to their consultants, many of whom sit on the DNC itself and have ties to the campaigns they advise. And while the candidate may win or lose, no consultant comes out of a contest unenriched. The Harris campaign is currently in the red, but I don’t think consultants are sitting on IOUs. The game’s as corrupt as it looks.
We all want the U.S. to march into a better future. The Democratic Party is having trouble convincing voters it should lead that mission. This is why.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/01 ... ocrat.html
And we must note that Bernie's 'socialism' ain't real socialism, there is no great expropriations, no returning the means of production to the workers, it barely makes it to 'feel good'. The vehemence with which the bosses confront this lightweight reformism speaks of their existential fear and assures that socialism will never come to the US by purely electoral means.
But blaming party consultants is bullshit because they are just fixers for the Serious Money, little better than well paid clerks.
*******
Genocidal president, genocidal politics
Originally published: Antiwar.com on January 7, 2025 by Norman Solomon (more by Antiwar.com) (Posted Jan 08, 2025)
When news broke over the weekend that President Biden just approved an $8 billion deal for shipping weapons to Israel, a nameless official vowed that “we will continue to provide the capabilities necessary for Israel’s defense.” Following the reports last month from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch concluding that Israeli actions in Gaza are genocide, Biden’s decision was a new low for his presidency.
It’s logical to focus on Biden as an individual. His choices to keep sending huge quantities of weaponry to Israel have been pivotal and calamitous. But the presidential genocide and the active acquiescence of the vast majority of Congress are matched by the dominant media and overall politics of the United States.
Forty days after the Gaza war began, Anne Boyer announced her resignation as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine. More than a year later, her statement illuminates why the moral credibility of so many liberal institutions has collapsed in the wake of Gaza’s destruction.
While Boyer denounced “the Israeli state’s U.S.-backed war against the people of Gaza,” she emphatically chose to disassociate herself from the nation’s leading liberal news organization:
I can’t write about poetry amidst the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.
The acclimatizing process soon became routine. It was most crucially abetted by President Biden and his loyalists, who were especially motivated to pretend that he wasn’t really doing what he was really doing.
For mainline journalists, the process required the willing suspension of belief in a consistent standard of language and humanity. When Boyer acutely grasped the dire significance of its Gaza coverage, she withdrew from “the newspaper of record.”
Content analysis of the war’s first six weeks found that coverage by the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times had a steeply dehumanizing slant toward Palestinians. The three papers “disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict” and “used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians,” a study by The Intercept showed.
The term ‘slaughter’ was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and ‘massacre’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. ‘Horrific’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.
After a year of the Gaza war, Arab-American historian Rashid Khalidi said:
My objection to organs of opinion like the New York Times is that they see absolutely everything from an Israeli perspective. ‘How does it affect Israel, how do the Israelis see it?’ Israel is at the center of their worldview, and that’s true of our elites generally, all over the West. The Israelis have very shrewdly, by preventing direct reportage from Gaza, further enabled that Israelocentric perspective.
Khalidi summed up:
The mainstream media is as blind as it ever was, as willing to shill for any monstrous Israeli lie, to act as stenographers for power, repeating what is said in Washington.
The conformist media climate smoothed the way for Biden and his prominent rationalizers to slide off the hook and shape the narrative, disguising complicity as evenhanded policy. Meanwhile, mighty boosts of Israel’s weapons and ammunition were coming from the United States. Nearly half of the Palestinians they killed were children.
For those children and their families, the road to hell was paved with good doublethink. So, for instance, while the Gaza horrors went on, no journalist would confront Biden with what he’d said at the time of the widely decried school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, when the president had quickly gone on live television. “There are parents who will never see their child again,” he said, adding: “To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away… It’s a feeling shared by the siblings, and the grandparents, and their family members, and the community that’s left behind.” And he asked plaintively,
Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen?
The massacre in Uvalde killed 19 children. The daily massacre in Gaza has taken the lives of that many Palestinian kids in a matter of hours.
While Biden refused to acknowledge the ethnic cleansing and mass murder that he kept making possible, Democrats in his orbit cooperated with silence or other types of evasion. A longstanding maneuver amounts to checking the box for a requisite platitude by affirming support for a “two-state solution.”
Dominating Capitol Hill, an unspoken precept has held that Palestinian people are expendable as a practical political matter. Party leaders like Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries did virtually nothing to indicate otherwise. Nor did they exert themselves to defend incumbent House Democrats Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, defeated in summer primaries with an unprecedented deluge of multimillion-dollar ad campaigns funded by AIPAC and Republican donors.
The overall media environment was a bit more varied but no less lethal for Palestinian civilians. During its first several months, the Gaza war received huge quantities of mainstream media coverage, which thinned over time; the effects were largely to normalize the continual slaughter. Some exceptional reporting existed about the suffering, but the journalism gradually took on a media ambience akin to background noise, while credulously hyping Biden’s weak ceasefire efforts as determined quests.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came in for increasing amounts of criticism. But the prevalent U.S. media coverage and political rhetoric—unwilling to expose the Israeli mission to destroy Palestinians en masse—rarely went beyond portraying Israel’s leaders as insufficiently concerned with protecting Palestinian civilians.
Instead of candor about horrific truths, the usual tales of U.S. media and politics have offered euphemisms and evasions.
When she resigned as the New York Times Magazine poetry editor in mid-November 2023, Anne Boyer condemned what she called “an ongoing war against the people of Palestine, people who have resisted through decades of occupation, forced dislocation, deprivation, surveillance, siege, imprisonment, and torture.” Another poet, William Stafford, wrote decades ago:
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
https://mronline.org/2025/01/08/genocid ... -politics/
*******
The Biden Administration Declares That A Genocide Is Happening… In Sudan
The Biden administration, which has been intimately complicit in the genocidal atrocities being perpetrated in Gaza for the last 15 months, has just determined that a genocide is being committed in Sudan.
Caitlin Johnstone
January 8, 2025
The Biden administration, which has been intimately complicit in the genocidal atrocities being perpetrated in Gaza for the last 15 months, has just determined that a genocide is being committed in Sudan.
On Tuesday the Biden administration formally accused the Sudanese paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of committing genocide in the civil war that has been ravaging the country since April 2023, announcing sanctions on the group’s leader Mohammad Hamdan Daglo Mousa along with seven RSF-affiliated companies.
“The RSF and RSF-aligned militias have continued to direct attacks against civilians,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken moralized in a statement regarding the decision, adding, “The RSF and allied militias have systematically murdered men and boys — even infants — on an ethnic basis, and deliberately targeted women and girls from certain ethnic groups for rape and other forms of brutal sexual violence. Those same militias have targeted fleeing civilians, murdering innocent people escaping conflict, and prevented remaining civilians from accessing lifesaving supplies.”
Sometimes all you can do is stare wordlessly at the absolute gall of these freaks.
This is after all the same Antony Blinken who just flatly denied that a genocide is taking place in Gaza in his final interviews with the press a few days ago, even as mainstream western human rights institutions like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch unambiguously accuse Israel of committing genocidal crimes of extermination against Palestinians in the enclave.
This is the same Biden administration which has adamantly insisted on continuing to supply Israel with the weapons it depends on to continue its genocidal onslaught in Gaza, despite mountains of undeniable evidence that it is deliberately targeting civilians with deadly force and deliberately cutting off civilians from food, clean water and medical supplies.
And this is also the same Biden administration that has been sending weapons to the United Arab Emirates while conveniently ignoring the fact that the UAE is sending money and weapons to the RSF to use for its atrocities in Sudan.
“The UAE has been covertly shipping weapons to the RSF, but that hasn’t stopped the Biden administration from pushing forward major arms sales to Abu Dhabi,” notes Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp regarding the announcement.
So the US is indirectly backing the genocidal atrocities it now denounces in Sudan, while aggressively defending the genocidal atrocities it is directly backing in Gaza.
This announcement comes as Biden and his handlers push through one last $8 billion weapons shipment to Israel in the last days of his term, a final blood-soaked punctuation mark on an ugly legacy of mass murder throughout Biden’s far-too-long political career.
And we can’t realistically expect it to get any better when the next soulless empire manager takes office. In a radio interview on Monday, president-elect Trump boasted of being “the best friend that Israel ever had,” pointing to the numerous concessions he made to the Zionist state during his first time in office.
“Well, I’m the best friend that Israel ever had,” Trump said. “You look at what happened with all of the things that I’ve gotten, including Jerusalem being the capital, the embassy getting built.”
Trump then reiterated his threat to Hamas that there will be “hell to pay” if the Israeli hostages are not released by the time he takes office, following earlier statements which suggested the US could become directly involved in the bombing of Gaza during Trump’s term.
The US government does not care about genocide, regardless of what bloodthirsty ghoul takes office or what political party they happen to belong to. Anytime genocide rears its ugly head in a way that is convenient for the interests of the empire, the empire at best will look the other way and at worst join right in with the slaughter.
The empire itself is the problem. When the empire remains murderous even after you get rid of the official elected leaders currently overseeing the murderousness, this tells you that it is the empire itself that’s the problem. The empire is what needs to go.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2025/01 ... -in-sudan/
******
The Ghost of Jimmy Carter
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 08 Jan 2025
Jimmy Carter greets Haitian presidential candidate Jean-Bertrand Aristide on the eve of the Haitian presidential elections in December 1990. Photo: Thony Belizaire/AFP via Getty Images
Hagiography is inevitable when presidents and other prominent people die. The unwillingness to ‘speak ill of the dead’ and the propaganda that would have us believe in American exceptionalism must be rejected. Jimmy Carter was always devoted to protecting the interests of the U.S. state.
The late Jimmy Carter lived longer than any other U.S. president, passing away at the age of 100 on December 30, 2024. Like all presidents who only serve one term, Carter is generally considered to have been a failure after being defeated by Ronald Reagan in 1980. What is less well known is that ample evidence indicates Reagan and his associates planned what is known as the “October Surprise ,” which kept U.S. hostages in Iran and sealed Carter’s electoral defeat.“All US Presidents, Living and Dead, Are War Criminals” https://blackagendareport.com/all-us-pr ... -criminals
Glen Ford
Carter’s hapless ending was largely forgotten because of his good works with Habitat for Humanity and his eschewing of the typical post-presidential cashing in with corporate speeches and other forms of money grubbing among the elite. He wrote books and spoke out against Israeli apartheid . Unlike other U.S. officials he referred to it as such, naming the crime and doing a service to humanity in the process.
But the warm feelings engendered by Carter’s life after he left the white house should not be a license for amnesia. While in office, he acted as other presidents did and that means his actions must be closely examined.
In December 2024, the U.S. succeeded in deposing Syrian president Bashar al-Assad after years of backing foreign jihadist fighters against that government. The coup was not without historical precedent. This dynamic began with Jimmy Carter in Afghanistan, where the U.S. waged a proxy war with the help of Osama Bin Laden and others against a government that asked the Soviet Union for support. Carter’s National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski , was the architect of this policy. He spoke quite proudly of his role.
“According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahidin began in 1980, that is to say after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was on July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that, in my opinion, this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.”
The U.S. public was never informed that president Najibullah requested Soviet assistance. Instead, the narrative of an evil invasion was created and is still disseminated and widely accepted to this very day. U.S. culpability in arming al-Qaeda is also a topic that has been declared off limits by the corporate media.
The attacks of September 11, 2001, would have been a perfect opportunity to discuss U.S. culpability in empowering al-Qaeda. Twenty years late,r the vow of silence continues, as does the U.S. proxy relationship with al-Qaeda, ISIS, and now Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), the al-Qaeda off-shoot now in control of Syria.
Carter may have failed to be re-elected, but like every other white house occupant, he created a new paradigm for his successors to follow. Islamist proxies were U.S. foot soldiers in Bosnia, Chechnya, Libya, and later Syria. U.S. backing was a marriage of convenience with these groups. In a 1993 interview bin Laden bragged about sending “not hundreds, but thousands” to Afghanistan. He could not have done so without U.S. support.
Jimmy Carter did more than build homes for the needy. He established the Carter Center . “It seeks to prevent and resolve conflicts, enhance freedom and democracy, and improve health.” Yet even cursory scrutiny reveals that the Carter Center did not act as an independent entity but instead worked hand in hand with the U.S. Interference in Haiti is but one example.
Elections were scheduled to be held in Haiti on December 16, 1990, and Jean-Bertrand Aristide was favored to win. Carter was on hand as an election observer, but he also held meetings at the U.S. embassy, after which he asked Aristide to stand down and to concede before all votes were counted, but he refused and won 67% of the vote. Carter certainly didn’t resolve any conflicts in Haiti. His goal was to get the U.S. backed candidate, Marc Bazin, elected.
Carter interfered in Haitian affairs again in 1994 in coordination with Bill Clinton’s administration. Aristide’s administration was short-lived, and he was overthrown by a CIA-backed coup d’etat in 1991. In 1994 ,Clinton acted in part at the request of the Congressional Black Caucus, who wanted Aristide restored to power. Carter’s negotiation ended military rule but sent U.S. troops to Haiti. Occupation was the price for so-called democracy. Aristide was forced to accept World Bank and IMF “structural adjustments,” which forced austerity on the country and reversed his plans to bring economic justice to his people. Ten years later, in 2004, the George W. Bush administration kidnapped Haiti’s democratically elected president and sent him to the Central African Republic, despite protest from the Congressional Black Caucus and others.
The Carter Center showed its true colors again in 2024 after Venezuela’s presidential election , declaring, “Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election did not meet international standards of electoral integrity and cannot be considered democratic.” The Carter Center is funded by the U.S. State Department, Agency for International Development (USAID), and foreign governments of the UK, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar in addition to the George Soros funded Open Society and the Gates Foundation. While the Carter Center cast aspersions even before all votes in Venezuela were counted and audited, other international observers pointed out that the process was, in fact, one that is accepted as being democratic and fair.
Jimmy Carter proves that there really aren’t any former presidents of the United States. They continue to uphold U.S. self-declared prerogatives. Even when faced with evidence that his presidency was undone by Ronald Reagan, Carter demurred and feigned confusion about what to believe. He never gave up that stance of serving U.S. interests. That is, after all, how one becomes president. And after having served in that office, upholding U.S. interests is a position that is unlikely to change. It is all to the good that Carter built homes for poor people, but no one should forget his service to the maintenance of U.S. hegemony.
https://blackagendareport.com/index.php ... mmy-carter
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Sympathy for the Devils...
Beware the Faux Populism of Corporate Democrats
Posted on January 9, 2025 by Yves Smith
Yves here. This piece sets out the plight of what next for Democrats in class warfare terms, which is a useful frame. I am not even sure, however, that many who are in positions of influence relative to the party are even able to swallow the idea that the path for the Team Blue to recover is to embrace much derided populism, which has come to be equated with anti-intellectualism and bigotry, contrary to its historical tradition.
Les Leopold also points out, as a step in restoring some semblance of cred, that elite Dems would also have to admit where they made policy errors. But this again seems impossible; I can envision key figures recoiling, as if presented with a raw roadkilled squirrel carcass on a fine china in a fancy restaurant. Most members of our soi-disant leadership have deeply internalized that their status depends on never admitting they were wrong, much the less apologizing. That is why Democrats never fail but can only be failed by their feckless voters.
Mind you, even though this is a US issue, the repudiation of PMC elite politicians may be moving a bit faster in Europe due to worsening economic conditions on top of mainstream leaders being all on board with cutting social spending to fund military spending, which voters soundly and roundly oppose.
By Les Leopold, the executive director of the Labor Institute and author of the new book, Wall Street’s War on Workers: How Mass Layoffs and Greed Are Destroying the Working Class and What to Do About It. (2024). Read more of his work on his substack here. Originally published at Common Dreams
For the Democrats to become a truly populist party, an entirely new wave of working-class candidates must come to the fore. But that won’t just happen. A movement must be built and harnessed.
Donald Trump’s victory is causing James Carville, the outspoken raging Cajun who was Bill Clinton’s campaign manager in 1992, to call for the Democratic Party to go all in on a populist agenda. He wrote recently in the New York Times,
“Go big, go populist, stick to economic progress, and force them [Republicans] to oppose what they cannot be for. In unison.”
Is Carville really agreeing with the Center for Working Class Politics, which in October published the results of their YouGov survey, “Populism Wins Pennsylvania?” That report found that:
“… working-class Pennsylvanians responded most favorably to populist messages and messages that emphasized progressive economic policies. What’s more, we found little evidence that focusing on economic populism risks decreasing voter enthusiasm among core Democratic constituencies outside the working class.”
Ezra Klein, another Democratic Party influencer, picked up on that survey just before the election in November, but then dismissed it as an outlier: “Surveys like that should be treated with some skepticism”, he wrote. “The Harris team is running plenty of its own polls and focus groups and message tests.”
But the results of elections matter, and there is now a chorus of Democratic Party nouveau populists, including Rahm Emanuel, Bill Clinton’s close advisor, who went on to earn tens of millions on Wall Street.
It’s time to take a deep breath and recall how these recently minted populists helped to create the very conditions that crushed the working class. As former Senator Sherrod Brown discovered in Ohio, to this day, workers still blame the Democrats for NAFTA, the 1994 trade deal that Clinton, Carville, and Emanuel pushed that ended up costing millions of U.S. jobs.
Emanual seems these days to have become a closet Sanders supporter, claiming that Obama was way too soft on the bankers who crashed the economy in 2008:
Not only was no one held accountable, but the same bankers who engineered the crisis were aggrieved at the suggestion of diminished bonuses and government intervention. It was a mistake not to apply Old Testament justice to the bankers during the Obama administration, as some called for at the time.
Some did, at the time, but Emanuel did not. Buy hey, people do change, don’t they? Why shouldn’t we believe that the old Democrats can become real populists?
Let’s start with an understanding of how that Harris polling could have been so wrong. Why did their results cause them to shy away from the kind of strong populism that the Center for Working Class Politics found attracted the most working-class support in Pennsylvania? A state Harris had to win.
I don’t know the Harris pollsters personally, but I do know how the Center for Working Class Politics operates. They are meticulous. They know that their polls will be ripped apart by establishment academics and party gatekeepers, so they can’t make mistakes. They can’t let their own personal beliefs tilt the survey towards what they’d like to believe is true. Their goal is to ask the questions others aren’t asking, to better reflect the opinions of people of all types about working class values and beliefs.
Not so with the pollsters who cashed in on the Harris campaign. They know what their client wants to hear (and is capable of hearing). And it’s not that a strong anti-Wall Street message sells, and therefore that she should mercilessly attack what Sanders calls “the billionaire class.” After all, Harris made a public point of holding a Wall Street fundraiser in the middle of her campaign, and her staff made clear that Wall Street helped to shape her agenda. Her brother-in-law, Tony West, was special adviser to her election campaign, and has deep ties to Wall Street through Uber and Pepsico.
It’s not that Democratic Party pollsters cooked the books. They just knew to ask questions that hovered within the corporate Democratic comfort zone. They didn’t ask the strongest populist questions because they didn’t think those results would be welcomed within the campaign.
I once saw this process in action. I was watching a focus group through a one-way mirror. The topic was healthcare in the leadup to Obamacare, but it was stunning to see how the discussion was shaped by the types of questions the facilitators asked. They limited them to various types of health insurance and avoided more radical reforms of the healthcare system.
At one point a younger Black man expressed his frustration: “Why all this talk about insurance? I’m interested in health care and getting access to it.” He was thanked for his comment and then ignored, while I yelled at the mirror, “Talk about Medicare for All!” It didn’t happen because the group paying for the focus group, as well as the pollster, didn’t think Medicare for All was feasible, and therefore refused to discuss it.
Today, the Democratic elites not only run away from Medicare for All, but they refuse to acknowledge their financial ties to Wall Street. They are more than comfortable, however, accepting large consulting and speaking fees from what should be the targets of their populism. This goes back to Bill and Hillary Clintons’ tone-deaf acceptance of $153 million in speaking fees, including 39 speeches from the very banks that crashed the economy in 2008. During Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign she collected $1.8 million for eight speeches to Wall Street banks.
It’s not hard to understand. The Wall Street barons who pay the speaking fees are the same kind of people who went to Yale with Hillary and Bill. They’re all from the same newly minted class of highly successful strivers. If there were any working-class roots in their backgrounds, they withered long ago. Nearly all Democratic Party elites are swathed within this moneyed class. During their leadership of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, author David Halberstam called them “the best and the brightest.” Now they are just the richest. In this milieu, light years away from the working class, getting $225,000 per speech seems like a trifle.
But let’s try to be fair. Can’t the party change its stripes now that Democratic influencers are talking populism in the wake of Trump’s victory?
Unfortunately, I don’t think their talk is credible. It’s doubtful that Carville, Klein, and Emanuel are capable of offering a sustained anti-Wall Street message. They are different from Bernie Sanders, and not just because of their word choices. It’s about their entire careers, the things that made them who they are, their entire way of being. Sanders has been an overt social democrat all his adult life. It’s obvious that he means what he says. He says it over and over again. He really couldn’t care less what Wall Street thinks about him.
As for the nouveau populists, I’m waiting for Carville to say, “Look I was dead wrong when I helped Bill Clinton undermine unions through NAFTA.” Or for Emanuel to confess that “I was wrong to take millions in Wall Street fees while workers were losing their jobs through mergers, leveraged buyouts, and stock buybacks.” Or for Ezra Klein to admit in print that the Center for Worker Class Politics, “were right about populism. The Harris pollsters were wrong, and I was at fault for dismissing their solid work.”
Or maybe the Democrats could finally show some outrage about Wall Street-induced mass layoffs that are destroying the livelihoods of working people. (For more information, please see Wall Street’s War on Workers.)
For the Democrats to become a populist party, an entirely new wave of working-class candidates must come to the fore. And for that to happened, we need a working-class movement that forms outside of the two parties and demands economic justice for all, as the original American populists, the Peoples Party, did in the 1880s. Today, that might look like a sustained, organized version of Occupy Wall Street, which fights against mass layoffs caused by Wall Street’s greed and for a $20 federal minimum wage.
Meanwhile, get ready for more faux populism from Democratic Party elites while Wall Street feasts on the riches Trump showers upon them.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/01 ... crats.html
******
And speak of the Devil: https://mronline.org/2025/01/10/we-can-do-better/
There he goes again, big talk, all talk, no action. He proved himself a shameless sheepdog for the Dems in 2016 and ain't quit yet. If he meant what he says he'd have fought them tooth and nail then, even gone third party. But no, what we get is billionaires, billionaires, billionaires, no questioning as to how they came to be. A classic case of distraction, of treating a symptom and not the disease, the organism or underlying cause. Bernie and the Dems are as bad as the Republicans, just sneakier.
There is no curing this diseased party, the corruption stems from capital, which they will never renounce.
Posted on January 9, 2025 by Yves Smith
Yves here. This piece sets out the plight of what next for Democrats in class warfare terms, which is a useful frame. I am not even sure, however, that many who are in positions of influence relative to the party are even able to swallow the idea that the path for the Team Blue to recover is to embrace much derided populism, which has come to be equated with anti-intellectualism and bigotry, contrary to its historical tradition.
Les Leopold also points out, as a step in restoring some semblance of cred, that elite Dems would also have to admit where they made policy errors. But this again seems impossible; I can envision key figures recoiling, as if presented with a raw roadkilled squirrel carcass on a fine china in a fancy restaurant. Most members of our soi-disant leadership have deeply internalized that their status depends on never admitting they were wrong, much the less apologizing. That is why Democrats never fail but can only be failed by their feckless voters.
Mind you, even though this is a US issue, the repudiation of PMC elite politicians may be moving a bit faster in Europe due to worsening economic conditions on top of mainstream leaders being all on board with cutting social spending to fund military spending, which voters soundly and roundly oppose.
By Les Leopold, the executive director of the Labor Institute and author of the new book, Wall Street’s War on Workers: How Mass Layoffs and Greed Are Destroying the Working Class and What to Do About It. (2024). Read more of his work on his substack here. Originally published at Common Dreams
For the Democrats to become a truly populist party, an entirely new wave of working-class candidates must come to the fore. But that won’t just happen. A movement must be built and harnessed.
Donald Trump’s victory is causing James Carville, the outspoken raging Cajun who was Bill Clinton’s campaign manager in 1992, to call for the Democratic Party to go all in on a populist agenda. He wrote recently in the New York Times,
“Go big, go populist, stick to economic progress, and force them [Republicans] to oppose what they cannot be for. In unison.”
Is Carville really agreeing with the Center for Working Class Politics, which in October published the results of their YouGov survey, “Populism Wins Pennsylvania?” That report found that:
“… working-class Pennsylvanians responded most favorably to populist messages and messages that emphasized progressive economic policies. What’s more, we found little evidence that focusing on economic populism risks decreasing voter enthusiasm among core Democratic constituencies outside the working class.”
Ezra Klein, another Democratic Party influencer, picked up on that survey just before the election in November, but then dismissed it as an outlier: “Surveys like that should be treated with some skepticism”, he wrote. “The Harris team is running plenty of its own polls and focus groups and message tests.”
But the results of elections matter, and there is now a chorus of Democratic Party nouveau populists, including Rahm Emanuel, Bill Clinton’s close advisor, who went on to earn tens of millions on Wall Street.
It’s time to take a deep breath and recall how these recently minted populists helped to create the very conditions that crushed the working class. As former Senator Sherrod Brown discovered in Ohio, to this day, workers still blame the Democrats for NAFTA, the 1994 trade deal that Clinton, Carville, and Emanuel pushed that ended up costing millions of U.S. jobs.
Emanual seems these days to have become a closet Sanders supporter, claiming that Obama was way too soft on the bankers who crashed the economy in 2008:
Not only was no one held accountable, but the same bankers who engineered the crisis were aggrieved at the suggestion of diminished bonuses and government intervention. It was a mistake not to apply Old Testament justice to the bankers during the Obama administration, as some called for at the time.
Some did, at the time, but Emanuel did not. Buy hey, people do change, don’t they? Why shouldn’t we believe that the old Democrats can become real populists?
Let’s start with an understanding of how that Harris polling could have been so wrong. Why did their results cause them to shy away from the kind of strong populism that the Center for Working Class Politics found attracted the most working-class support in Pennsylvania? A state Harris had to win.
I don’t know the Harris pollsters personally, but I do know how the Center for Working Class Politics operates. They are meticulous. They know that their polls will be ripped apart by establishment academics and party gatekeepers, so they can’t make mistakes. They can’t let their own personal beliefs tilt the survey towards what they’d like to believe is true. Their goal is to ask the questions others aren’t asking, to better reflect the opinions of people of all types about working class values and beliefs.
Not so with the pollsters who cashed in on the Harris campaign. They know what their client wants to hear (and is capable of hearing). And it’s not that a strong anti-Wall Street message sells, and therefore that she should mercilessly attack what Sanders calls “the billionaire class.” After all, Harris made a public point of holding a Wall Street fundraiser in the middle of her campaign, and her staff made clear that Wall Street helped to shape her agenda. Her brother-in-law, Tony West, was special adviser to her election campaign, and has deep ties to Wall Street through Uber and Pepsico.
It’s not that Democratic Party pollsters cooked the books. They just knew to ask questions that hovered within the corporate Democratic comfort zone. They didn’t ask the strongest populist questions because they didn’t think those results would be welcomed within the campaign.
I once saw this process in action. I was watching a focus group through a one-way mirror. The topic was healthcare in the leadup to Obamacare, but it was stunning to see how the discussion was shaped by the types of questions the facilitators asked. They limited them to various types of health insurance and avoided more radical reforms of the healthcare system.
At one point a younger Black man expressed his frustration: “Why all this talk about insurance? I’m interested in health care and getting access to it.” He was thanked for his comment and then ignored, while I yelled at the mirror, “Talk about Medicare for All!” It didn’t happen because the group paying for the focus group, as well as the pollster, didn’t think Medicare for All was feasible, and therefore refused to discuss it.
Today, the Democratic elites not only run away from Medicare for All, but they refuse to acknowledge their financial ties to Wall Street. They are more than comfortable, however, accepting large consulting and speaking fees from what should be the targets of their populism. This goes back to Bill and Hillary Clintons’ tone-deaf acceptance of $153 million in speaking fees, including 39 speeches from the very banks that crashed the economy in 2008. During Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign she collected $1.8 million for eight speeches to Wall Street banks.
It’s not hard to understand. The Wall Street barons who pay the speaking fees are the same kind of people who went to Yale with Hillary and Bill. They’re all from the same newly minted class of highly successful strivers. If there were any working-class roots in their backgrounds, they withered long ago. Nearly all Democratic Party elites are swathed within this moneyed class. During their leadership of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, author David Halberstam called them “the best and the brightest.” Now they are just the richest. In this milieu, light years away from the working class, getting $225,000 per speech seems like a trifle.
But let’s try to be fair. Can’t the party change its stripes now that Democratic influencers are talking populism in the wake of Trump’s victory?
Unfortunately, I don’t think their talk is credible. It’s doubtful that Carville, Klein, and Emanuel are capable of offering a sustained anti-Wall Street message. They are different from Bernie Sanders, and not just because of their word choices. It’s about their entire careers, the things that made them who they are, their entire way of being. Sanders has been an overt social democrat all his adult life. It’s obvious that he means what he says. He says it over and over again. He really couldn’t care less what Wall Street thinks about him.
As for the nouveau populists, I’m waiting for Carville to say, “Look I was dead wrong when I helped Bill Clinton undermine unions through NAFTA.” Or for Emanuel to confess that “I was wrong to take millions in Wall Street fees while workers were losing their jobs through mergers, leveraged buyouts, and stock buybacks.” Or for Ezra Klein to admit in print that the Center for Worker Class Politics, “were right about populism. The Harris pollsters were wrong, and I was at fault for dismissing their solid work.”
Or maybe the Democrats could finally show some outrage about Wall Street-induced mass layoffs that are destroying the livelihoods of working people. (For more information, please see Wall Street’s War on Workers.)
For the Democrats to become a populist party, an entirely new wave of working-class candidates must come to the fore. And for that to happened, we need a working-class movement that forms outside of the two parties and demands economic justice for all, as the original American populists, the Peoples Party, did in the 1880s. Today, that might look like a sustained, organized version of Occupy Wall Street, which fights against mass layoffs caused by Wall Street’s greed and for a $20 federal minimum wage.
Meanwhile, get ready for more faux populism from Democratic Party elites while Wall Street feasts on the riches Trump showers upon them.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/01 ... crats.html
******
And speak of the Devil: https://mronline.org/2025/01/10/we-can-do-better/
There he goes again, big talk, all talk, no action. He proved himself a shameless sheepdog for the Dems in 2016 and ain't quit yet. If he meant what he says he'd have fought them tooth and nail then, even gone third party. But no, what we get is billionaires, billionaires, billionaires, no questioning as to how they came to be. A classic case of distraction, of treating a symptom and not the disease, the organism or underlying cause. Bernie and the Dems are as bad as the Republicans, just sneakier.
There is no curing this diseased party, the corruption stems from capital, which they will never renounce.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Sympathy for the Devils...
Genocidal President, Genocidal Politics
January 13, 2025
Acclimatizing the U.S. to the Gaza genocide was most crucially abetted by Biden and his loyalists, who pretended he wasn’t doing what he was really doing, says Norman Solomon.
Free Gaza demonstration at The White House, Nov. 4, 2023. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC)
By Norman Solomon
Z Network
When news broke last week that President Joe Biden just approved another $8 billion for shipping weapons to Israel, a nameless official vowed that “we will continue to provide the capabilities necessary for Israel’s defense.”
Following reports last month from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch concluding that Israeli actions in Gaza are genocide, Biden’s decision was a new low for his presidency.
It’s logical to focus on Biden as an individual. His choices to keep sending huge quantities of weaponry to Israel have been pivotal and calamitous. But the presidential genocide and the active acquiescence of the vast majority of Congress are matched by the dominant media and overall politics of the United States.
Forty days after the Gaza war began, Anne Boyer announced her resignation as poetry editor of The New York Times Magazine. More than a year later, her statement illuminates why the moral credibility of so many liberal institutions has collapsed in the wake of Gaza’s destruction.
While Boyer denounced “the Israeli state’s U.S.-backed war against the people of Gaza,” she emphatically chose to disassociate herself from the nation’s leading liberal news organization:
“I can’t write about poetry amidst the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.”
Anne Boyer at a poetry festival in Buenos Aires in February 2023. (Ministerio de Cultura de la Nación, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0)
The acclimatizing process soon became routine. It was most crucially abetted by President Biden and his loyalists, who were especially motivated to pretend that he wasn’t really doing what he was really doing.
For mainline journalists, the process required the willing suspension of belief in a consistent standard of language and humanity. When Boyer acutely grasped the dire significance of its Gaza coverage, she withdrew from “the newspaper of record.”
Content analysis of the war’s first six weeks found that coverage by The New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times had a steeply dehumanizing slant toward Palestinians. The three papers “disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict” and “used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians,” a study by The Intercept showed.
“The term ‘slaughter’ was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and ‘massacre’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. ‘Horrific’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.”
After a year of the Gaza war, Arab-American historian Rashid Khalidi said:
“My objection to organs of opinion like The New York Times is that they see absolutely everything from an Israeli perspective. ‘How does it affect Israel, how do the Israelis see it?’ Israel is at the center of their worldview, and that’s true of our elites generally, all over the West. The Israelis have very shrewdly, by preventing direct reportage from Gaza, further enabled that Israelocentric perspective.”
Khalidi summed up: “The mainstream media is as blind as it ever was, as willing to shill for any monstrous Israeli lie, to act as stenographers for power, repeating what is said in Washington.”
Khalidi in 2011. (IMF, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
The conformist media climate smoothed the way for Biden and his prominent rationalizers to slide off the hook and shape the narrative, disguising complicity as even-handed policy. Meanwhile, mighty boosts of Israel’s weapons and ammunition were coming from the United States. Nearly half of the Palestinians they killed were children.
For those children and their families, the road to hell was paved with good doublethink. So, for instance, while the Gaza horrors went on, no journalist would confront Biden with what he’d said at the time of the widely decried school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, when the president had quickly gone on live television.
“There are parents who will never see their child again,” he said, adding: “To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away. . . . It’s a feeling shared by the siblings, and the grandparents, and their family members, and the community that’s left behind.”
And he asked plaintively, “Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen?”
Biden meeting on May 24, 2022, with families of the victims of the mass shooting days before at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. (White House, Adam Schultz)
The massacre in Uvalde killed 19 children. The daily massacre in Gaza has taken the lives of that many Palestinian kids in a matter of hours.
While Biden refused to acknowledge the ethnic cleansing and mass murder that he kept making possible, Democrats in his orbit cooperated with silence or other types of evasion. A longstanding maneuver amounts to checking the box for a requisite platitude by affirming support for a “two-state solution.”
Dominating Capitol Hill, an unspoken precept has held that Palestinian people are expendable as a practical political matter.
Party leaders like Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries did virtually nothing to indicate otherwise. Nor did they exert themselves to defend incumbent House Democrats Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, defeated in summer primaries with an unprecedented deluge of multimillion-dollar ad campaigns funded by AIPAC and Republican donors.
Thank you Congress/Biden, your aid was received! March for a Free Palestine, Freedom Plaza, Washington, D.C., Nov. 4, 2023. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC)
The overall media environment was a bit more varied but no less lethal for Palestinian civilians. During its first several months, the Gaza war received huge quantities of mainstream media coverage, which thinned over time; the effects were largely to normalize the continual slaughter.
Some exceptional reporting existed about the suffering, but the journalism gradually took on a media ambience akin to background noise, while credulously hyping Biden’s weak ceasefire efforts as determined quests.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came in for increasing amounts of criticism. But the prevalent U.S. media coverage and political rhetoric — unwilling to expose the Israeli mission to destroy Palestinians en masse — rarely went beyond portraying Israel’s leaders as insufficiently concerned with protecting Palestinian civilians.
Instead of candor about horrific truths, the usual tales of U.S. media and politics have offered euphemisms and evasions.
When she resigned as The New York Times Magazine poetry editor in mid-November 2023, Boyer condemned what she called “an ongoing war against the people of Palestine, people who have resisted through decades of occupation, forced dislocation, deprivation, surveillance, siege, imprisonment, and torture.”
Another poet, William Stafford, wrote decades ago:
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.]
https://consortiumnews.com/2025/01/13/g ... -politics/
January 13, 2025
Acclimatizing the U.S. to the Gaza genocide was most crucially abetted by Biden and his loyalists, who pretended he wasn’t doing what he was really doing, says Norman Solomon.
Free Gaza demonstration at The White House, Nov. 4, 2023. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC)
By Norman Solomon
Z Network
When news broke last week that President Joe Biden just approved another $8 billion for shipping weapons to Israel, a nameless official vowed that “we will continue to provide the capabilities necessary for Israel’s defense.”
Following reports last month from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch concluding that Israeli actions in Gaza are genocide, Biden’s decision was a new low for his presidency.
It’s logical to focus on Biden as an individual. His choices to keep sending huge quantities of weaponry to Israel have been pivotal and calamitous. But the presidential genocide and the active acquiescence of the vast majority of Congress are matched by the dominant media and overall politics of the United States.
Forty days after the Gaza war began, Anne Boyer announced her resignation as poetry editor of The New York Times Magazine. More than a year later, her statement illuminates why the moral credibility of so many liberal institutions has collapsed in the wake of Gaza’s destruction.
While Boyer denounced “the Israeli state’s U.S.-backed war against the people of Gaza,” she emphatically chose to disassociate herself from the nation’s leading liberal news organization:
“I can’t write about poetry amidst the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.”
Anne Boyer at a poetry festival in Buenos Aires in February 2023. (Ministerio de Cultura de la Nación, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0)
The acclimatizing process soon became routine. It was most crucially abetted by President Biden and his loyalists, who were especially motivated to pretend that he wasn’t really doing what he was really doing.
For mainline journalists, the process required the willing suspension of belief in a consistent standard of language and humanity. When Boyer acutely grasped the dire significance of its Gaza coverage, she withdrew from “the newspaper of record.”
Content analysis of the war’s first six weeks found that coverage by The New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times had a steeply dehumanizing slant toward Palestinians. The three papers “disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict” and “used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians,” a study by The Intercept showed.
“The term ‘slaughter’ was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and ‘massacre’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. ‘Horrific’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.”
After a year of the Gaza war, Arab-American historian Rashid Khalidi said:
“My objection to organs of opinion like The New York Times is that they see absolutely everything from an Israeli perspective. ‘How does it affect Israel, how do the Israelis see it?’ Israel is at the center of their worldview, and that’s true of our elites generally, all over the West. The Israelis have very shrewdly, by preventing direct reportage from Gaza, further enabled that Israelocentric perspective.”
Khalidi summed up: “The mainstream media is as blind as it ever was, as willing to shill for any monstrous Israeli lie, to act as stenographers for power, repeating what is said in Washington.”
Khalidi in 2011. (IMF, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
The conformist media climate smoothed the way for Biden and his prominent rationalizers to slide off the hook and shape the narrative, disguising complicity as even-handed policy. Meanwhile, mighty boosts of Israel’s weapons and ammunition were coming from the United States. Nearly half of the Palestinians they killed were children.
For those children and their families, the road to hell was paved with good doublethink. So, for instance, while the Gaza horrors went on, no journalist would confront Biden with what he’d said at the time of the widely decried school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, when the president had quickly gone on live television.
“There are parents who will never see their child again,” he said, adding: “To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away. . . . It’s a feeling shared by the siblings, and the grandparents, and their family members, and the community that’s left behind.”
And he asked plaintively, “Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen?”
Biden meeting on May 24, 2022, with families of the victims of the mass shooting days before at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. (White House, Adam Schultz)
The massacre in Uvalde killed 19 children. The daily massacre in Gaza has taken the lives of that many Palestinian kids in a matter of hours.
While Biden refused to acknowledge the ethnic cleansing and mass murder that he kept making possible, Democrats in his orbit cooperated with silence or other types of evasion. A longstanding maneuver amounts to checking the box for a requisite platitude by affirming support for a “two-state solution.”
Dominating Capitol Hill, an unspoken precept has held that Palestinian people are expendable as a practical political matter.
Party leaders like Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries did virtually nothing to indicate otherwise. Nor did they exert themselves to defend incumbent House Democrats Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, defeated in summer primaries with an unprecedented deluge of multimillion-dollar ad campaigns funded by AIPAC and Republican donors.
Thank you Congress/Biden, your aid was received! March for a Free Palestine, Freedom Plaza, Washington, D.C., Nov. 4, 2023. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC)
The overall media environment was a bit more varied but no less lethal for Palestinian civilians. During its first several months, the Gaza war received huge quantities of mainstream media coverage, which thinned over time; the effects were largely to normalize the continual slaughter.
Some exceptional reporting existed about the suffering, but the journalism gradually took on a media ambience akin to background noise, while credulously hyping Biden’s weak ceasefire efforts as determined quests.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came in for increasing amounts of criticism. But the prevalent U.S. media coverage and political rhetoric — unwilling to expose the Israeli mission to destroy Palestinians en masse — rarely went beyond portraying Israel’s leaders as insufficiently concerned with protecting Palestinian civilians.
Instead of candor about horrific truths, the usual tales of U.S. media and politics have offered euphemisms and evasions.
When she resigned as The New York Times Magazine poetry editor in mid-November 2023, Boyer condemned what she called “an ongoing war against the people of Palestine, people who have resisted through decades of occupation, forced dislocation, deprivation, surveillance, siege, imprisonment, and torture.”
Another poet, William Stafford, wrote decades ago:
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.]
https://consortiumnews.com/2025/01/13/g ... -politics/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Sympathy for the Devils...
Joe Biden's Terrible Legacy
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 15 Jan 2025
Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, Israel, October 18, 2023. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/File Photo
The moniker “Genocide Joe” is well deserved and one that Joe Biden can never live down, along with any other names that describe the damage he brought to the country and to the world. His legacy is that in every position he held, he was a happy servant for imperialist and neo-liberal interests, like all of his white house predecessors.
On January 20, 2025, Joseph R. Biden will no longer be president of the United States. Unlike other one term presidents he was not defeated in a re-election effort. He was undone by the same wealthy donors who rigged the process to make him the Democratic Party’s nominee in 2020. Biden was already not up to the task of running in 2020 but his obvious state of debility had noticeably worsened by 2024. He could no longer rely on claims that he only had a stutter when there were so many strange outbursts, verbal miscues, handshakes with invisible people, and wandering off as a toddler would do.
The June 2024 debate with Donald Trump sealed the deal and the forces who had previously been reluctant to say the emperor had no clothes, moved against him. He was forced to stand down. The attempt to shoehorn Kamala Harris in at the last minute failed spectacularly and Donald Trump will be president again.
At this moment it is important to remember Joe Biden’s racism, slavish devotion to neo-liberalism and imperialism, and to a genocide in partnership with Israel, which he committed to carrying out until his last days in office. Serious ceasefire negotiations, now in place were the work of the incoming Trump team, while Biden, with bipartisan congressional support, assisted in every atrocity and war crime.
Joe Biden was nothing if not consistent during his career as a senator, vice president and finally president. He was a reliably conservative Democratic Party senator, one who often expressed himself using insulting and racist language when discussing government policy. No one should have been shocked when Biden had one of his famous angry moments in a meeting with Black leaders as president elect in December 2020. The group’s modest requests for voting rights protections and the need for federal intervention to address police brutality were dismissed by the man that millions of Black people helped to win the presidency. At one point the notorious Biden temper rose up and he chastised the group. “If it doesn’t count for y’all to hell with y’all!”
He meant the words and governed accordingly, only living up to his promise to rich funders during his campaign in 2020, assuring them that in his administration, “No one's standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change.” He was true to his word, refusing to take any action that the oligarchy didn’t want to see realized.
In foreign policy he was always hawkish and always a zionist. All of the machinations that made Biden the democrats’ nominee in 2020 and eventually president brought disaster to millions of people. In 2022 he instigated a war with Russia, using Ukraine as a U.S. proxy. Three years later the war rages on but Biden failed to as he said, “reduce the ruble to rubble .” Instead, the futile effort to sanction Russia’s energy sector increased consumer prices in the United States and internationally. He then pivoted with the forgettable phrase “Putin’s price hike ” in hopes that struggling people wouldn’t blame him for worsening their lives. The foolish phrase soon disappeared but popular discontent didn’t and helped to defeat Kamala Harris.
Biden was maniacal in his commitment to using Ukraine to weaken Russia. On September 26, 2022, two of the NordStream pipelines which connected gas lines from Russia to Germany mysteriously exploded. The U.S. was the suspected perpetrator from the very beginning and in February 2023 investigative journalist Seymour Hersh provided solid evidence that Biden and his foreign policy team were responsible for the terrorist attack on an ally. Without inexpensive Russian gas, Germany was forced to buy more expensive U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) and in the process has ruined its own economy but like a good little vassal, has not dared to speak about what is obvious to anyone who is paying attention.
Bipartisan support for the war in Ukraine has cost $183 billion in public funding and thousands of Ukrainian lives. The administration is even forcing Ukraine to lower the conscription age to 18 and send very young men into battle as cannon fodder. Any stated concerns about that country’s fate are fake as the Biden administration scuttled a tentative peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia which took place shortly after the war began. The continuation of death and destruction there are all the fault of the U.S.
While money was sent to Ukraine in a hand over fist fashion, people in this country were always told that they had no needs which their government needed to address. The outpouring of spending during the covid era provided stimulus payments and increased eligibility for Medicaid and SNAP nutritional benefits. But it all ended and millions of people were asked to vote for Kamala Harris despite being made destitute. Nearly seven million who had voted for Biden in 2020 chose not to in 2024 and Harris and Biden will be spectators at Trump’s inauguration.
There were a reported 771,480 homeless people in 2024, an 18% increase over the previous year. Once again we see that the ending of pandemic programs which included eviction moratoriums, rental assistance, and tax credit programs had devastating impacts. The Biden administration responded by blaming an influx of migration and natural disasters , never mentioning its own role in perpetuating this crisis of low wages and lack of affordability.
But the one issue which seals Biden’s eternal disgrace is his support of Israel. Immediately after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood began on October 7, 2023, Biden raced to Israel to publicly declare his support for the apartheid state. Since that time more than $17.9 billion in military aid has gone to Israel, with a new $8 billion sale announced just one week ago. The term sale is a misnomer, Israel actually spends money the U.S. allocates to buy more weaponry.
As of July 2024 there were an estimated 186,000 people killed by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in Gaza and none of those deaths would have occurred without U.S. support. The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the former defense minister in November 2024 but Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan should also be threatened with arrest. Of course congressional leadership should also be on that list because they too are culpable in the crimes which included targeted assassination of journalists and public officials, destruction of hospitals, destruction of homes followed by the bombing of tent camps where people were then forced to live.
In real time the world has seen people burned alive, and watched as Israeli civilians and officials blocked food aid from coming to needy people. The IDF has committed rapes and soldiers rioted when there was a possibility of punishment of the perpetrators. All of these crimes can be laid at Joe Biden’s feet. Now it is Donald Trump who can take credit for moving a ceasefire proposal forward, a proposal whose provisions were accepted by Hamas months ago.
Of course it was Black people who first warned Biden that his policy regarding Israel might lead to defeat. Black clergy spoke up first. “Black faith leaders are extremely disappointed in the Biden administration on this issue,” said Rev. Timothy McDonald of Atlanta. “We are afraid. And we’ve talked about it — it’s going to be very hard to persuade our people to go back to the polls and vote for Biden.” The most loyal demographic for the democrats foretold the eventual outcome.
Black politics is in a weakened state with prominent misleaders and surrogates urging support for democrats. But all of the people can’t be fooled all of the time. In 2024 fewer of them could be corralled into holding their noses and voting for Kamala Harris.
Joe Biden is truly Genocide Joe. He is also Austerity Joe and Militarism Joe. All of the worst imperatives of the duopoly have been prioritized by a one-term administration to such a degree that victory became impossible.
It is strange that when Biden’s 2020 victory over Trump was announced, there was quite literally partying in the streets in cities across the country. But there is no fond memory of him now. The words “But Trump!” that were used to silence anyone questioning Biden’s actions now ring hollow. Trump may indeed live up to the worst expectations about him. He may have the “mass deportations” that he pledged, but Biden deported more people in his one term than Trump did in his first.
As always historians will whitewash a president’s actions and find ways to sing praises of some kind. The words will ring hollow however, and the homeless in the U.S. and in Gaza will have the final say. Joe Biden’s legacy is one of immiseration, war making, and death. During Jimmy Carter’s funeral he fell asleep in a perfect denouement symbolizing a presidency which ends in ignominy and disgrace.
https://blackagendareport.com/joe-biden ... ble-legacy
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 15 Jan 2025
Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, Israel, October 18, 2023. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/File Photo
The moniker “Genocide Joe” is well deserved and one that Joe Biden can never live down, along with any other names that describe the damage he brought to the country and to the world. His legacy is that in every position he held, he was a happy servant for imperialist and neo-liberal interests, like all of his white house predecessors.
On January 20, 2025, Joseph R. Biden will no longer be president of the United States. Unlike other one term presidents he was not defeated in a re-election effort. He was undone by the same wealthy donors who rigged the process to make him the Democratic Party’s nominee in 2020. Biden was already not up to the task of running in 2020 but his obvious state of debility had noticeably worsened by 2024. He could no longer rely on claims that he only had a stutter when there were so many strange outbursts, verbal miscues, handshakes with invisible people, and wandering off as a toddler would do.
The June 2024 debate with Donald Trump sealed the deal and the forces who had previously been reluctant to say the emperor had no clothes, moved against him. He was forced to stand down. The attempt to shoehorn Kamala Harris in at the last minute failed spectacularly and Donald Trump will be president again.
At this moment it is important to remember Joe Biden’s racism, slavish devotion to neo-liberalism and imperialism, and to a genocide in partnership with Israel, which he committed to carrying out until his last days in office. Serious ceasefire negotiations, now in place were the work of the incoming Trump team, while Biden, with bipartisan congressional support, assisted in every atrocity and war crime.
Joe Biden was nothing if not consistent during his career as a senator, vice president and finally president. He was a reliably conservative Democratic Party senator, one who often expressed himself using insulting and racist language when discussing government policy. No one should have been shocked when Biden had one of his famous angry moments in a meeting with Black leaders as president elect in December 2020. The group’s modest requests for voting rights protections and the need for federal intervention to address police brutality were dismissed by the man that millions of Black people helped to win the presidency. At one point the notorious Biden temper rose up and he chastised the group. “If it doesn’t count for y’all to hell with y’all!”
He meant the words and governed accordingly, only living up to his promise to rich funders during his campaign in 2020, assuring them that in his administration, “No one's standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change.” He was true to his word, refusing to take any action that the oligarchy didn’t want to see realized.
In foreign policy he was always hawkish and always a zionist. All of the machinations that made Biden the democrats’ nominee in 2020 and eventually president brought disaster to millions of people. In 2022 he instigated a war with Russia, using Ukraine as a U.S. proxy. Three years later the war rages on but Biden failed to as he said, “reduce the ruble to rubble .” Instead, the futile effort to sanction Russia’s energy sector increased consumer prices in the United States and internationally. He then pivoted with the forgettable phrase “Putin’s price hike ” in hopes that struggling people wouldn’t blame him for worsening their lives. The foolish phrase soon disappeared but popular discontent didn’t and helped to defeat Kamala Harris.
Biden was maniacal in his commitment to using Ukraine to weaken Russia. On September 26, 2022, two of the NordStream pipelines which connected gas lines from Russia to Germany mysteriously exploded. The U.S. was the suspected perpetrator from the very beginning and in February 2023 investigative journalist Seymour Hersh provided solid evidence that Biden and his foreign policy team were responsible for the terrorist attack on an ally. Without inexpensive Russian gas, Germany was forced to buy more expensive U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) and in the process has ruined its own economy but like a good little vassal, has not dared to speak about what is obvious to anyone who is paying attention.
Bipartisan support for the war in Ukraine has cost $183 billion in public funding and thousands of Ukrainian lives. The administration is even forcing Ukraine to lower the conscription age to 18 and send very young men into battle as cannon fodder. Any stated concerns about that country’s fate are fake as the Biden administration scuttled a tentative peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia which took place shortly after the war began. The continuation of death and destruction there are all the fault of the U.S.
While money was sent to Ukraine in a hand over fist fashion, people in this country were always told that they had no needs which their government needed to address. The outpouring of spending during the covid era provided stimulus payments and increased eligibility for Medicaid and SNAP nutritional benefits. But it all ended and millions of people were asked to vote for Kamala Harris despite being made destitute. Nearly seven million who had voted for Biden in 2020 chose not to in 2024 and Harris and Biden will be spectators at Trump’s inauguration.
There were a reported 771,480 homeless people in 2024, an 18% increase over the previous year. Once again we see that the ending of pandemic programs which included eviction moratoriums, rental assistance, and tax credit programs had devastating impacts. The Biden administration responded by blaming an influx of migration and natural disasters , never mentioning its own role in perpetuating this crisis of low wages and lack of affordability.
But the one issue which seals Biden’s eternal disgrace is his support of Israel. Immediately after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood began on October 7, 2023, Biden raced to Israel to publicly declare his support for the apartheid state. Since that time more than $17.9 billion in military aid has gone to Israel, with a new $8 billion sale announced just one week ago. The term sale is a misnomer, Israel actually spends money the U.S. allocates to buy more weaponry.
As of July 2024 there were an estimated 186,000 people killed by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in Gaza and none of those deaths would have occurred without U.S. support. The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the former defense minister in November 2024 but Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan should also be threatened with arrest. Of course congressional leadership should also be on that list because they too are culpable in the crimes which included targeted assassination of journalists and public officials, destruction of hospitals, destruction of homes followed by the bombing of tent camps where people were then forced to live.
In real time the world has seen people burned alive, and watched as Israeli civilians and officials blocked food aid from coming to needy people. The IDF has committed rapes and soldiers rioted when there was a possibility of punishment of the perpetrators. All of these crimes can be laid at Joe Biden’s feet. Now it is Donald Trump who can take credit for moving a ceasefire proposal forward, a proposal whose provisions were accepted by Hamas months ago.
Of course it was Black people who first warned Biden that his policy regarding Israel might lead to defeat. Black clergy spoke up first. “Black faith leaders are extremely disappointed in the Biden administration on this issue,” said Rev. Timothy McDonald of Atlanta. “We are afraid. And we’ve talked about it — it’s going to be very hard to persuade our people to go back to the polls and vote for Biden.” The most loyal demographic for the democrats foretold the eventual outcome.
Black politics is in a weakened state with prominent misleaders and surrogates urging support for democrats. But all of the people can’t be fooled all of the time. In 2024 fewer of them could be corralled into holding their noses and voting for Kamala Harris.
Joe Biden is truly Genocide Joe. He is also Austerity Joe and Militarism Joe. All of the worst imperatives of the duopoly have been prioritized by a one-term administration to such a degree that victory became impossible.
It is strange that when Biden’s 2020 victory over Trump was announced, there was quite literally partying in the streets in cities across the country. But there is no fond memory of him now. The words “But Trump!” that were used to silence anyone questioning Biden’s actions now ring hollow. Trump may indeed live up to the worst expectations about him. He may have the “mass deportations” that he pledged, but Biden deported more people in his one term than Trump did in his first.
As always historians will whitewash a president’s actions and find ways to sing praises of some kind. The words will ring hollow however, and the homeless in the U.S. and in Gaza will have the final say. Joe Biden’s legacy is one of immiseration, war making, and death. During Jimmy Carter’s funeral he fell asleep in a perfect denouement symbolizing a presidency which ends in ignominy and disgrace.
https://blackagendareport.com/joe-biden ... ble-legacy
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Sympathy for the Devils...
Was Biden Right to Warn about the Tech-Industrial Complex?
Posted on January 18, 2025 by Yves Smith
Yves here. The Biden effort to wrap himself in the mantle of Eisenhower in warning about a “tech-industrial complex” is vile. The Biden Administration, as we know from the Twitter Files, statements by Mark Zuckerberg and ample other evidence, was all on board with the “tech-industrial complex” wielding great power when the Biden team wanted to use it as a propaganda and enforcement arm. This goes well beyond suppressing threatening ideas on big social media platforms and extends to deplatforming and de-monetizing dissidents, and even freezing/canceling bank accounts.
Biden was perfectly happy to take advantage of this influence when he could obtain cooperation, either via asking it of largely PMC-orthodoxy aligned who were willing to go along, or force it by threatening anti-trust suits and/or the restriction or termination of Section 230 protections.
Telling, Biden focused only on the supposed threat of the pet liberal bogeyman of misinformation, and not about a even greater danger, that of ever-rising surveillance, which again the likes of Biden were perfectly happy to exploit. Nick Corbishley has relentless documented the danger of the rising implementation of biometric ID, and the coercive potential of eliminating cash in day-to-day commercial transactions.
Biden’s echo of Eisenhower is telling in another way. Some scholars claim that the military-industrial complex already was extremely powerful by the time Eisenhower left office, so his warning was a cover-up for his failure to try to check in when he could have done so.
By Richard Murphy, part-time Professor of Accounting Practice at Sheffield University Management School, director of the Corporate Accountability Network, member of Finance for the Future LLP, and director of Tax Research LLP. Originally published at Fund the Future
Joe Biden’s swan-song speech to the people of the USA warned about the threat to the people of the USA from what he called the tech-industrial complex, otherwise known as Musk and his tech billionaire friends. Was he right to do so? But was he also too late?
This is the audio version: https://richardmurphy7.podbean.com/e/wa ... n-the-end/
This is transcript:
President Joe Biden, in his farewell speech from the Oval Office in the White House, warned the USA about what he called the Tech-Industrial Complex.
He wasn’t the first president to issue such a warning. Sixty four years ago, and I don’t remember the speech in question, President Dwight D. Eisenhower left office as president of the USA and also issued a warning to the people of that country about the threats to it from commercial power.
Eisenhower, who was the general who led the invasion of Europe during the Second World War which ultimately led to the fall of the Nazis, said this. when he left office in January 1961.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists only and will persist.
Eisenhower was clearly right. The rise of misplaced power was a threat to the USA. In 1961, and as Joe Biden had to say in 2025, it is still a threat. All that Joe Biden did was rename the military-industrial complex and call it the tech-industrial complex.
His words were:
Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation. and disinformation enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families and our very democracy from the abuse of power.
And that power he called the tech-industrial complex. He did, of course, have some very specific people in mind. There is no doubt that these comments were aimed at the likes of Elon Musk and the other so-called ‘tech bros’ in Silicon Valley who are supporting the rise of Donald Trump.
But what he was talking about was something that was remarkably similar to what Eisenhower described in 1961. What he was suggesting was that the power of the private corporation to shift the values within American society in its favor – to enrich a few at cost to the many, by spreading fear, by spreading misinformation, by spreading abuse – that threat remains as real now as it was 64 years ago. And I believe Biden is right.
I wish he’d done it earlier in his career. I wish he had talked about this a long time before his farewell speech. I wish we’d seen the Democratic Party in the USA do something about this. Because frankly, it seems to be as in hock to corporate power in the USA as the Republican Party does. Well, perhaps slightly less, but so little less as to make almost no difference. But at least he’s used those words now.
He’s said that this tech-industrial power threatens us all. And it does.
It threatens the ordinary person who’s abused online, and there will be nothing to stop that happening.
It threatens the person who is abused in a libellous way.
It threatens the young person who’s bullied at school.
It threatens the small business who these large tech powers literally try to bring down through their own ability to force others out of the market.
All of this is an exercise in extracting profit, just as the military complex tried to do in the early 60s.
I remember the 1960s all too well. There was a US Air Force base not far from where I was brought up, so the reality of US military power was something that was quite familiar to me at the time. USAF Bentwaters it was, for those who are geeks about these things. And what happened then? There was this massive expansion of military spending, partly, of course, because of Vietnam, but partly because that was a proxy war in the whole Cold War between the USA and Russia.
A total pack of lies was said about the threat to us from Russia; that Russia was going to be marching troops across the plains of Germany and threatening the UK, when, frankly, there was not a hope that Russia could have done such a thing at the time. Any more, by the way, than it could now.
And, things were said about China which were so unrealistic at that point in time that it was absurd. And slightly more credible if they were said now. But again, really not credible.
And now we have the tech bros coupling with that military power to actually, in a sense, produce something that is very similar.
Remember that Trump is demanding that the countries of Europe increase their military spending to 5 per cent of their gross domestic product – their national income.
It’s the same force on the march. “You gotta spend on the military, or you’re gonna die.” No, you’re not. Almost certainly, you won’t. Spend money on diplomacy, solve the conflicts, understand the causes, resolve them, talk about how we can actually live peacefully together on this planet rather than threatening each other, stop spreading the lies and the misinformation, and then you might achieve an outcome. But that’s not the style of the neo-fascist. And I do happen to think, and I’m allowed to have this opinion, that Trump is one of them.
So, where are we? We are, as Joe Biden said, at threat, real threat, from the tech-industrial complex. And things have changed since 1961. The change is that these people have more power over the media, over the network of ideas, and the information that we get all the time, every day, day and night, if we want it. And that really does change the potential outcomes for the way in which the world sees itself and each other. Those tech companies literally influence our worldviews in ways that it’s very hard to understand. But they threaten us if they believe that aggression at a macro and a micro level is the way to leverage profit for themselves. And I fear they do. And I fear the consequences of that.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/01 ... mplex.html
A-hem, Eisenhower had as much to do with defeating the Nazis as Pompey had in defeating the Spartacus rebellion. To borrow from one of my old man's favorite expressions, 'Eisenhower couldn't carry Kutuzov's jockstrap.'
Well, we could always turn the damn machines off...They haven't put the wires in our brains, yet.
Posted on January 18, 2025 by Yves Smith
Yves here. The Biden effort to wrap himself in the mantle of Eisenhower in warning about a “tech-industrial complex” is vile. The Biden Administration, as we know from the Twitter Files, statements by Mark Zuckerberg and ample other evidence, was all on board with the “tech-industrial complex” wielding great power when the Biden team wanted to use it as a propaganda and enforcement arm. This goes well beyond suppressing threatening ideas on big social media platforms and extends to deplatforming and de-monetizing dissidents, and even freezing/canceling bank accounts.
Biden was perfectly happy to take advantage of this influence when he could obtain cooperation, either via asking it of largely PMC-orthodoxy aligned who were willing to go along, or force it by threatening anti-trust suits and/or the restriction or termination of Section 230 protections.
Telling, Biden focused only on the supposed threat of the pet liberal bogeyman of misinformation, and not about a even greater danger, that of ever-rising surveillance, which again the likes of Biden were perfectly happy to exploit. Nick Corbishley has relentless documented the danger of the rising implementation of biometric ID, and the coercive potential of eliminating cash in day-to-day commercial transactions.
Biden’s echo of Eisenhower is telling in another way. Some scholars claim that the military-industrial complex already was extremely powerful by the time Eisenhower left office, so his warning was a cover-up for his failure to try to check in when he could have done so.
By Richard Murphy, part-time Professor of Accounting Practice at Sheffield University Management School, director of the Corporate Accountability Network, member of Finance for the Future LLP, and director of Tax Research LLP. Originally published at Fund the Future
Joe Biden’s swan-song speech to the people of the USA warned about the threat to the people of the USA from what he called the tech-industrial complex, otherwise known as Musk and his tech billionaire friends. Was he right to do so? But was he also too late?
This is the audio version: https://richardmurphy7.podbean.com/e/wa ... n-the-end/
This is transcript:
President Joe Biden, in his farewell speech from the Oval Office in the White House, warned the USA about what he called the Tech-Industrial Complex.
He wasn’t the first president to issue such a warning. Sixty four years ago, and I don’t remember the speech in question, President Dwight D. Eisenhower left office as president of the USA and also issued a warning to the people of that country about the threats to it from commercial power.
Eisenhower, who was the general who led the invasion of Europe during the Second World War which ultimately led to the fall of the Nazis, said this. when he left office in January 1961.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists only and will persist.
Eisenhower was clearly right. The rise of misplaced power was a threat to the USA. In 1961, and as Joe Biden had to say in 2025, it is still a threat. All that Joe Biden did was rename the military-industrial complex and call it the tech-industrial complex.
His words were:
Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation. and disinformation enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families and our very democracy from the abuse of power.
And that power he called the tech-industrial complex. He did, of course, have some very specific people in mind. There is no doubt that these comments were aimed at the likes of Elon Musk and the other so-called ‘tech bros’ in Silicon Valley who are supporting the rise of Donald Trump.
But what he was talking about was something that was remarkably similar to what Eisenhower described in 1961. What he was suggesting was that the power of the private corporation to shift the values within American society in its favor – to enrich a few at cost to the many, by spreading fear, by spreading misinformation, by spreading abuse – that threat remains as real now as it was 64 years ago. And I believe Biden is right.
I wish he’d done it earlier in his career. I wish he had talked about this a long time before his farewell speech. I wish we’d seen the Democratic Party in the USA do something about this. Because frankly, it seems to be as in hock to corporate power in the USA as the Republican Party does. Well, perhaps slightly less, but so little less as to make almost no difference. But at least he’s used those words now.
He’s said that this tech-industrial power threatens us all. And it does.
It threatens the ordinary person who’s abused online, and there will be nothing to stop that happening.
It threatens the person who is abused in a libellous way.
It threatens the young person who’s bullied at school.
It threatens the small business who these large tech powers literally try to bring down through their own ability to force others out of the market.
All of this is an exercise in extracting profit, just as the military complex tried to do in the early 60s.
I remember the 1960s all too well. There was a US Air Force base not far from where I was brought up, so the reality of US military power was something that was quite familiar to me at the time. USAF Bentwaters it was, for those who are geeks about these things. And what happened then? There was this massive expansion of military spending, partly, of course, because of Vietnam, but partly because that was a proxy war in the whole Cold War between the USA and Russia.
A total pack of lies was said about the threat to us from Russia; that Russia was going to be marching troops across the plains of Germany and threatening the UK, when, frankly, there was not a hope that Russia could have done such a thing at the time. Any more, by the way, than it could now.
And, things were said about China which were so unrealistic at that point in time that it was absurd. And slightly more credible if they were said now. But again, really not credible.
And now we have the tech bros coupling with that military power to actually, in a sense, produce something that is very similar.
Remember that Trump is demanding that the countries of Europe increase their military spending to 5 per cent of their gross domestic product – their national income.
It’s the same force on the march. “You gotta spend on the military, or you’re gonna die.” No, you’re not. Almost certainly, you won’t. Spend money on diplomacy, solve the conflicts, understand the causes, resolve them, talk about how we can actually live peacefully together on this planet rather than threatening each other, stop spreading the lies and the misinformation, and then you might achieve an outcome. But that’s not the style of the neo-fascist. And I do happen to think, and I’m allowed to have this opinion, that Trump is one of them.
So, where are we? We are, as Joe Biden said, at threat, real threat, from the tech-industrial complex. And things have changed since 1961. The change is that these people have more power over the media, over the network of ideas, and the information that we get all the time, every day, day and night, if we want it. And that really does change the potential outcomes for the way in which the world sees itself and each other. Those tech companies literally influence our worldviews in ways that it’s very hard to understand. But they threaten us if they believe that aggression at a macro and a micro level is the way to leverage profit for themselves. And I fear they do. And I fear the consequences of that.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/01 ... mplex.html
A-hem, Eisenhower had as much to do with defeating the Nazis as Pompey had in defeating the Spartacus rebellion. To borrow from one of my old man's favorite expressions, 'Eisenhower couldn't carry Kutuzov's jockstrap.'
Well, we could always turn the damn machines off...They haven't put the wires in our brains, yet.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Sympathy for the Devils...
Biden’s legacy: genocide abroad, economic despair at home
From rolling back the pandemic-era social safety net, to overseeing the largest inflationary crisis in decades, Biden’s legacy was one of economic despair
January 17, 2025 by Natalia Marques
President Biden stands in front of Vice President Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken (Photo via @POTUS/X)
46th US President Joe Biden officially leaves office Monday, January 20, to be succeeded by former President Donald Trump. Trump’s promises in the name of “saving American workers” have raised alarm for people across sectors of society, including migrant workers who are gearing up for mass deportations, and unionized workers who are preparing for Trump’s attacks on labor rights. Trump’s loyalty to multi-billionaires has also given the working class of the US great cause for concern. Meanwhile, in contrast, the Democrats have attempted to position themselves as the real defenders of working people. As four years of a Democratic presidency come to an end, it is necessary to ask, what was the true impact of the Biden administration on the working class?
Rollback of pandemic-era social safety net
Biden’s presidency oversaw the massive rollback of pandemic-era social safety net programs and policies, including expanded Medicaid benefits, the Child Tax Credit, and additional unemployment insurance. Research reveals the effectiveness of these programs at reducing poverty levels, with poverty actually lowering in 2021 as compared with pre-pandemic levels.
Instead of working to keep these expanded social programs in place, the Biden administration oversaw their slow, excruciating removal. The so-called “unwinding” of Medicaid is one example. At the start of the pandemic, the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) included a requirement that states keep people continuously enrolled in Medicaid, the US’s public health insurance program for low income adults and children, until the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE). States received additional federal funding in order to keep people enrolled in these benefits.
Without any intervention by Biden, continuous enrollment ended on March 31, 2023, and states began the process of “unwinding,” or disenrolling millions of people from Medicaid benefits. As a result, over 25 million people, including almost five million children, lost their health insurance coverage, the majority over purely procedural flukes due to states redetermining eligibility for all Medicaid recipients.
A survey of low income adults across Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Texas, conducted by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, revealed that the vast majority had been disenrolled from Medicaid by late 2023. The study found that “that those who had been disenrolled had significantly worse access to health care compared to those who did not lose their Medicaid coverage,” reporting cost-related delays in care, skipped medication doses, and skipped annual checkups.
Working people struggle under high costs
As Biden oversaw this massive rollback of the pandemic-era social safety net, people in the US were experiencing the worst inflationary crisis in decades during his administration. This crisis was experienced by many other Western nations, and was exacerbated by corporate price gouging and existing economic difficulties such as a lack of affordable housing and stagnant wages.
In the final days of Biden’s term, working people in the US are still suffering under a cost of living crisis, contrary to the positive spin of the mainstream media. According to AP VoteCast, a survey of over 120,000 registered voters conducted from October 30 to November 5, 96% of these voters said “high prices for gas, groceries and other goods” factored into who they voted for in the November 2024 elections—in which the Democrats incurred a stunning loss.
This is no surprise, considering that people in the US are still paying 22% more for groceries than they did when Biden took office according to October Consumer Price Index inflation data. According to US Census data from August 20 to September 16, over 93% of those polled had some level of stress over the last two months’ price increases, with over 45% reporting they found these price increases to be “very stressful”. Additionally, approximately 69% of people polled (around 250 million) have had some difficulty affording basic household expenses each week.
Corporate greed has exacerbated the crisis. Reports indicate that grocery stores have “price gouged”, or raised the prices of goods beyond inflation. A Federal Trade Commission (FTC) report from March of 2024 found that “food and beverage retailer revenues increased to more than 6 percent over total costs in 2021, substantially higher than their recent peak of 5.6 percent in 2015. In the first three-quarters of 2023, grocery retailer profits rose even more, with revenue reaching 7 percent over total costs.”
Working people have also struggled under rising housing costs throughout Biden’s administration, with housing costs hitting an all-time high in April of 2024. Rent prices keep increasing, with asking rent prices rising 3.3% in September, only exacerbating housing unaffordability which plagues working people. Nearly half of renters across the US spend over 30% of their income on housing.
A recent report from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development revealed the true cost of the housing affordability crisis: over 770,000 people were homeless on a single night in January of 2024, an 18% increase from January of 2023. For context, last year’s Annual Homelessness Assessment Report revealed that homelessness had increased by 12%, and the year prior showed an increase of 0.3% from 2020 to 2022.
“How does it feel to have your legacy be genocide?”
Throughout Israel’s fifteen-month long genocide in Gaza, the US proven that Israel would simply be unable to carry out this genocide without the material and political support of the bigger country. Biden’s administration supplied Israel with billions in aid, while US officials threatened international institutions that sought to hold Israel accountable for its crimes against humanity.
In response, the people of the US mounted a powerful Palestine solidarity movement which put Biden’s administration in a domestic political bind. Arab and Muslim voters in key swing states such as Michigan turned away from the Biden, and then Harris campaign in droves, refusing to vote for an administration that facilitated genocide.
Biden’s administration has also been the chief obstacle to a peaceful negotiation between Russia and Ukraine, while continuing to send billions of dollars in military supplies to further escalate the war in the region. In November, Biden issued a significant provocation against Russia by authorizing Ukraine to use US-made long-range missiles, called Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS).
Biden continued the ongoing Cold War against China, with the US escalating military exercises in East Asia with an eye on both China and Chinese ally North Korea. In his final days, Biden reversed Trump’s harsh policy against Cuba by finally removing Cuba off of the State Sponsors of Terrorism list, although Trump’s pick for Secretary of State Marco Rubio has signaled that he will re-add Cuba to this list.
In the final days of his presidency, Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken delivered remarks on the long-awaited ceasefire agreement that was recently reached in Gaza. Two journalists interrupted Blinken’s remarks: Palestinian journalist Sam Husseini was dragged away by security while yelling “Why aren’t you at The Hague?” and Max Blumenthal interrupted Blinken to ask “How does it feel to have your legacy be genocide?”
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/01/17/ ... r-at-home/
******
Oligarchy already rules: Top 0.1% gained $6 trillion under Biden
January 18, 2025 Gary Wilson
On Jan. 15, President Joe Biden gave his farewell address from the Oval Office. In a speech packed with self-congratulation and lofty claims about his four years in office, Biden made one striking admission.
“I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern,” Biden said. “And that’s the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people. Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms.”
Biden cited Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address, in which he warned about the dangers of the “military-industrial complex.”
After World War II, Eisenhower was the chief architect of the military-industrial complex. However, more than a decade later, he warned, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Biden said, “Six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country.”
Biden spoke as though this oligarchy were merely “taking shape,” when in fact, it’s already a harsh reality for working people — one that has been decades in the making and upheld by both major parties. And, as Biden knows, the oligarchy is not just the tech-industrial complex.
Capitalism is not democratic. The U.S. is a capitalist republic but not a democracy. As Aristotle explained, democracy means the rule of the poor. Rule by the rich is an oligarchy. Aristotle says the real difference between oligarchy and democracy is whether the wealthy or the poor rule.
The settler war of independence from the British colonizers was led by men of wealth — merchants, bankers, and plantation owners. The Constitution set some democratic rights (limited to men only; none for women, Indigenous peoples, or enslaved people), but the Constitution did not establish a democracy. The House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Presidency are all set up to ensure control by wealth. Put simply, money rules. What’s taken place over the last decades is that it has become more and more concentrated.
The reality of an entrenched oligarchy
Biden’s remarks ignored his administration’s role in further consolidating the power of a tiny billionaire class.
The very richest are among the biggest winners from President Joe Biden’s time in office, the Seattle Times reports, despite his farewell address warning.
“The 100 wealthiest Americans got more than $1.5 trillion richer in the past four years, with tech tycoons including Elon Musk, Larry Ellison and Mark Zuckerberg leading the way, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The top 0.1% gained more than $6 trillion, Federal Reserve estimates through September show.”
Bidenomics meant the rich were getting richer. The top U.S. billionaires did far better than everyone else.
The Seattle Times adds:
“The 100 largest fortunes combined now exceed $4 trillion — more than the collective net worth of the poorest half of Americans, spread over 66.5 million households. The share of U.S. wealth owned by the top 0.1%, at nearly 14%, is now at its highest point in Fed estimates dating back to the 1980s.”
Biden leaves office talking about an oligarchy that his policies, together with those of the Democratic and Republican parties, have promoted to protect corporate profits and drive down wages, hitting the working class hardest. When adjusted for inflation, average weekly wages are now less than when Biden came into office.
A president who served corporate interests
While the warning about the threats of the oligarchy and the tech-industrial complex is true, Biden has never done anything other than promote that oligarchy. His administration and the entire political establishment support the economic system — capitalism — that feeds the Wall Street and Big Tech oligarchy.
Donald Trump, along with Biden and many others, represents a capitalist oligarchy that has been concentrating wealth for decades. We have seen how billionaires and mega-millionaires — Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and Larry Ellison, among them — use their economic power to undermine labor rights, squeeze wages, promote racism and sexism, attack trans rights, and reshape society in their interests. Their alliances and political maneuvers are not abstract threats; they have immediate consequences.
The path forward
Biden’s farewell address may seem to acknowledge a grim truth, but words alone won’t protect rights or improve wages and conditions. From Amazon to Tesla, from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, the ultra-rich have grown wealthier and more aggressive.
We, the working class majority, need to fight back against these forces. Our solidarity, ability to organize, and determination to defend and expand workers’ rights are potentially far more powerful than all the concentrated wealth of the oligarchy. We cannot rely on hollow speeches or empty promises from any politician. The only way to address this “dangerous concentration of power” is through our collective action — on the picket line and in the streets.
Stand united. Fight for what’s rightfully ours. Together, we can build a socialist future that serves the many, not just the wealthy few.
https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2025/ ... der-biden/
From rolling back the pandemic-era social safety net, to overseeing the largest inflationary crisis in decades, Biden’s legacy was one of economic despair
January 17, 2025 by Natalia Marques
President Biden stands in front of Vice President Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken (Photo via @POTUS/X)
46th US President Joe Biden officially leaves office Monday, January 20, to be succeeded by former President Donald Trump. Trump’s promises in the name of “saving American workers” have raised alarm for people across sectors of society, including migrant workers who are gearing up for mass deportations, and unionized workers who are preparing for Trump’s attacks on labor rights. Trump’s loyalty to multi-billionaires has also given the working class of the US great cause for concern. Meanwhile, in contrast, the Democrats have attempted to position themselves as the real defenders of working people. As four years of a Democratic presidency come to an end, it is necessary to ask, what was the true impact of the Biden administration on the working class?
Rollback of pandemic-era social safety net
Biden’s presidency oversaw the massive rollback of pandemic-era social safety net programs and policies, including expanded Medicaid benefits, the Child Tax Credit, and additional unemployment insurance. Research reveals the effectiveness of these programs at reducing poverty levels, with poverty actually lowering in 2021 as compared with pre-pandemic levels.
Instead of working to keep these expanded social programs in place, the Biden administration oversaw their slow, excruciating removal. The so-called “unwinding” of Medicaid is one example. At the start of the pandemic, the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) included a requirement that states keep people continuously enrolled in Medicaid, the US’s public health insurance program for low income adults and children, until the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE). States received additional federal funding in order to keep people enrolled in these benefits.
Without any intervention by Biden, continuous enrollment ended on March 31, 2023, and states began the process of “unwinding,” or disenrolling millions of people from Medicaid benefits. As a result, over 25 million people, including almost five million children, lost their health insurance coverage, the majority over purely procedural flukes due to states redetermining eligibility for all Medicaid recipients.
A survey of low income adults across Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Texas, conducted by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, revealed that the vast majority had been disenrolled from Medicaid by late 2023. The study found that “that those who had been disenrolled had significantly worse access to health care compared to those who did not lose their Medicaid coverage,” reporting cost-related delays in care, skipped medication doses, and skipped annual checkups.
Working people struggle under high costs
As Biden oversaw this massive rollback of the pandemic-era social safety net, people in the US were experiencing the worst inflationary crisis in decades during his administration. This crisis was experienced by many other Western nations, and was exacerbated by corporate price gouging and existing economic difficulties such as a lack of affordable housing and stagnant wages.
In the final days of Biden’s term, working people in the US are still suffering under a cost of living crisis, contrary to the positive spin of the mainstream media. According to AP VoteCast, a survey of over 120,000 registered voters conducted from October 30 to November 5, 96% of these voters said “high prices for gas, groceries and other goods” factored into who they voted for in the November 2024 elections—in which the Democrats incurred a stunning loss.
This is no surprise, considering that people in the US are still paying 22% more for groceries than they did when Biden took office according to October Consumer Price Index inflation data. According to US Census data from August 20 to September 16, over 93% of those polled had some level of stress over the last two months’ price increases, with over 45% reporting they found these price increases to be “very stressful”. Additionally, approximately 69% of people polled (around 250 million) have had some difficulty affording basic household expenses each week.
Corporate greed has exacerbated the crisis. Reports indicate that grocery stores have “price gouged”, or raised the prices of goods beyond inflation. A Federal Trade Commission (FTC) report from March of 2024 found that “food and beverage retailer revenues increased to more than 6 percent over total costs in 2021, substantially higher than their recent peak of 5.6 percent in 2015. In the first three-quarters of 2023, grocery retailer profits rose even more, with revenue reaching 7 percent over total costs.”
Working people have also struggled under rising housing costs throughout Biden’s administration, with housing costs hitting an all-time high in April of 2024. Rent prices keep increasing, with asking rent prices rising 3.3% in September, only exacerbating housing unaffordability which plagues working people. Nearly half of renters across the US spend over 30% of their income on housing.
A recent report from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development revealed the true cost of the housing affordability crisis: over 770,000 people were homeless on a single night in January of 2024, an 18% increase from January of 2023. For context, last year’s Annual Homelessness Assessment Report revealed that homelessness had increased by 12%, and the year prior showed an increase of 0.3% from 2020 to 2022.
“How does it feel to have your legacy be genocide?”
Throughout Israel’s fifteen-month long genocide in Gaza, the US proven that Israel would simply be unable to carry out this genocide without the material and political support of the bigger country. Biden’s administration supplied Israel with billions in aid, while US officials threatened international institutions that sought to hold Israel accountable for its crimes against humanity.
In response, the people of the US mounted a powerful Palestine solidarity movement which put Biden’s administration in a domestic political bind. Arab and Muslim voters in key swing states such as Michigan turned away from the Biden, and then Harris campaign in droves, refusing to vote for an administration that facilitated genocide.
Biden’s administration has also been the chief obstacle to a peaceful negotiation between Russia and Ukraine, while continuing to send billions of dollars in military supplies to further escalate the war in the region. In November, Biden issued a significant provocation against Russia by authorizing Ukraine to use US-made long-range missiles, called Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS).
Biden continued the ongoing Cold War against China, with the US escalating military exercises in East Asia with an eye on both China and Chinese ally North Korea. In his final days, Biden reversed Trump’s harsh policy against Cuba by finally removing Cuba off of the State Sponsors of Terrorism list, although Trump’s pick for Secretary of State Marco Rubio has signaled that he will re-add Cuba to this list.
In the final days of his presidency, Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken delivered remarks on the long-awaited ceasefire agreement that was recently reached in Gaza. Two journalists interrupted Blinken’s remarks: Palestinian journalist Sam Husseini was dragged away by security while yelling “Why aren’t you at The Hague?” and Max Blumenthal interrupted Blinken to ask “How does it feel to have your legacy be genocide?”
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/01/17/ ... r-at-home/
******
Oligarchy already rules: Top 0.1% gained $6 trillion under Biden
January 18, 2025 Gary Wilson
On Jan. 15, President Joe Biden gave his farewell address from the Oval Office. In a speech packed with self-congratulation and lofty claims about his four years in office, Biden made one striking admission.
“I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern,” Biden said. “And that’s the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people. Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms.”
Biden cited Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address, in which he warned about the dangers of the “military-industrial complex.”
After World War II, Eisenhower was the chief architect of the military-industrial complex. However, more than a decade later, he warned, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Biden said, “Six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country.”
Biden spoke as though this oligarchy were merely “taking shape,” when in fact, it’s already a harsh reality for working people — one that has been decades in the making and upheld by both major parties. And, as Biden knows, the oligarchy is not just the tech-industrial complex.
Capitalism is not democratic. The U.S. is a capitalist republic but not a democracy. As Aristotle explained, democracy means the rule of the poor. Rule by the rich is an oligarchy. Aristotle says the real difference between oligarchy and democracy is whether the wealthy or the poor rule.
The settler war of independence from the British colonizers was led by men of wealth — merchants, bankers, and plantation owners. The Constitution set some democratic rights (limited to men only; none for women, Indigenous peoples, or enslaved people), but the Constitution did not establish a democracy. The House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Presidency are all set up to ensure control by wealth. Put simply, money rules. What’s taken place over the last decades is that it has become more and more concentrated.
The reality of an entrenched oligarchy
Biden’s remarks ignored his administration’s role in further consolidating the power of a tiny billionaire class.
The very richest are among the biggest winners from President Joe Biden’s time in office, the Seattle Times reports, despite his farewell address warning.
“The 100 wealthiest Americans got more than $1.5 trillion richer in the past four years, with tech tycoons including Elon Musk, Larry Ellison and Mark Zuckerberg leading the way, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The top 0.1% gained more than $6 trillion, Federal Reserve estimates through September show.”
Bidenomics meant the rich were getting richer. The top U.S. billionaires did far better than everyone else.
The Seattle Times adds:
“The 100 largest fortunes combined now exceed $4 trillion — more than the collective net worth of the poorest half of Americans, spread over 66.5 million households. The share of U.S. wealth owned by the top 0.1%, at nearly 14%, is now at its highest point in Fed estimates dating back to the 1980s.”
Biden leaves office talking about an oligarchy that his policies, together with those of the Democratic and Republican parties, have promoted to protect corporate profits and drive down wages, hitting the working class hardest. When adjusted for inflation, average weekly wages are now less than when Biden came into office.
A president who served corporate interests
While the warning about the threats of the oligarchy and the tech-industrial complex is true, Biden has never done anything other than promote that oligarchy. His administration and the entire political establishment support the economic system — capitalism — that feeds the Wall Street and Big Tech oligarchy.
Donald Trump, along with Biden and many others, represents a capitalist oligarchy that has been concentrating wealth for decades. We have seen how billionaires and mega-millionaires — Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and Larry Ellison, among them — use their economic power to undermine labor rights, squeeze wages, promote racism and sexism, attack trans rights, and reshape society in their interests. Their alliances and political maneuvers are not abstract threats; they have immediate consequences.
The path forward
Biden’s farewell address may seem to acknowledge a grim truth, but words alone won’t protect rights or improve wages and conditions. From Amazon to Tesla, from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, the ultra-rich have grown wealthier and more aggressive.
We, the working class majority, need to fight back against these forces. Our solidarity, ability to organize, and determination to defend and expand workers’ rights are potentially far more powerful than all the concentrated wealth of the oligarchy. We cannot rely on hollow speeches or empty promises from any politician. The only way to address this “dangerous concentration of power” is through our collective action — on the picket line and in the streets.
Stand united. Fight for what’s rightfully ours. Together, we can build a socialist future that serves the many, not just the wealthy few.
https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2025/ ... der-biden/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."