It’s Not That Trump Is Good, It’s That Biden Was Just That Bad
Trump will go on to do many evil things as president, just as he did during his first term, but none of this will reverse the fact that Biden just spent four years advancing genocide, nuclear brinkmanship and authoritarianism.[/img]
Caitlin Johnstone
January 20, 2025
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TikTok is back in the US after a brief shutdown, reportedly because Trump pledged to suspend the Biden administration’s ban. A Gaza ceasefire has also finally emerged due to pressure from Trump after Biden stalled for 15 months, and NBC News is reporting that the Trump administration plans on pressuring the Israeli government throughout negotiations to establish a permanent peace beyond the 42 days scheduled for the first phase of the agreement.
Remember this: it’s not that Trump is good, it’s that Democrats are just that bad. Biden’s completely unconditional facilitation of Israeli atrocities has actually been the exception rather than the norm among US presidents, as Trita Parsi explained in Foreign Policy last April. From what we are seeing so far, Trump is just returning things to their horrible standard baseline.
Trump will go on to do many evil things as president, just as he did during his first term, but none of this will reverse the fact that Biden just spent four years advancing genocide, nuclear brinkmanship and authoritarianism. The Democratic Party plays just as crucial a role in promoting the tyranny and abuse of the US empire as the Republican Party does, and it is nonsensical to think of either of them as a lesser evil. The empire itself must end.
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Do yourself a favor and spare yourself the indignity of thinking the ceasefire and suspending the TikTok ban indicate that Trump is going to be a good president. You don’t get to become the US president unless the powers that be trust you to inflict the evils necessary for running the empire.
The system does not work. You cannot vote your way out of the tyranny of the empire, and the president is not going to save you. Trump will do many evil things as president, because that’s what US presidents do.
Don’t believe me? Then watch and pay attention. And learn the lessons you failed to learn last time.
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It’s possible that Trump’s term will constitute another swing from Bush-level depravity to Obama-level depravity.
It isn’t normal for the US empire to be as openly depraved as it has been in Gaza. Normally its evils are much more well-disguised, because it is in the empire’s interests to preserve its image in the eyes of the western public. You only see the really in-your-face acts of monstrosity when a coalition of forces within the swamp are able to seize on a rare opportunity to shove them through, as we saw in the wake of 9/11 and again in the wake of October 7.
The rest of the time, the empire likes to be a lot subtler about its abuses, like it was during the Obama administration and the first Trump administration. Starvation sanctions. Staging coups. Secretly arming proxy forces. Drone assassinations. Covert ops. It prefers these means over the Hulk Smash ground invasions like we saw during George W Bush’s first term, and the overt genocidal atrocities like we saw during Biden’s.
The Zionists, war profiteers and empire managers seized on the rare opportunity presented by October 7 combined with a senile lifelong Zionist in the White House to push through agendas in Palestine, Syria and Lebanon that they had wanted to push through for years, but they greatly damaged the empire’s propaganda interests in the process. We can expect the empire to try to move its ugliness out of the spotlight as swiftly as possible in the coming years and attempt to restore its false public image as a force of good in the world, while continuing to advance its psychopathic agendas in sneakier ways.
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Young Americans can take the same lessons from the TikTok ban that they’ve taken from Gaza: that they live in a tyrannical dystopia, and that the Democratic Party is not their friend.
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To be clear, when you hear people saying that US lawmakers voted to ban TikTok in order to shut down criticism of Israel among young people, it’s not some antisemitic conspiracy theory; they have openly admitted that this was in fact what they were doing. Legislators like Chris Murphy, Mitt Romney, Mike Gallagher and Mike Lawler are all on record saying they supported the ban because of the prevalence of pro-Palestinian content on the platform.
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One of the most politically interesting developments in recent days has been Americans flocking to the Chinese app Red Note in response to the looming TikTok ban and interacting with people in China for the first time in their lives with the help of translation technology.
If you had asked me last month what country I wish ordinary Americans would start communicating with at mass scale, I would have said China without a moment’s hesitation. If this keeps up it’s going to cause some real problems for the empire propagandists down the track.
Patrick Lawrence: Exeunt, the Man from Scranton
January 22, 2025
When a president has failed as miserably as Joe Biden, you have to change the subject. You have to distract the public.
President Joe Biden holding a cabinet meeting in June 6, 2023. (White House, Adam Schultz)
By Patrick Lawrence
ScheerPost
I honestly do not think Joe Biden ever had a chance to make sense of his four years as president.
It is not merely his native stupidity, and Joseph R. Biden, Jr.’s execrable record on the foreign side seems evidence enough that he is through and through, all-over stupid. This does not distinguish Biden among American presidents, after all.
No, the matter to hand is larger. If you assume the task of running an empire and the empire has profligately abused the world’s once-considerable reservoir of goodwill, anyone short of a philosopher king was bound to fail as America’s No. 46.
But American presidents do not fail and America altogether never fails. We all know this. The Success God has always reigned supreme in our republic, and it reigns without mercy now, even as our republic teeters.
This creates a big problem when a president who has failed so miserably as Joe Biden takes his leave. You have to change the subject. You have to distract the great broad masses with matters of no consequence. You have to make things up and keep making them up at least until No. 46 is back home playing with his Corvette.
It becomes a little ridiculous, but Americans, of course, are well used to ridiculous at this point. We are not, I strenuously insist, a ridiculous people. It’s that those purporting to lead us, ridiculous themselves, have made the nation wherein we dwell act ridiculously and, so, look ridiculous.
Ridiculous! I come upon the word I seek. I read somewhere the other day, and if my editors will excuse me, I am not going to waste time looking it up, that Nancy “Look At All My Ice-Cream” Pelosi remarked that Joe Biden now “takes his place in the pantheon of American democracy.”
See what I mean by making things up? See what I mean by ridiculous?
Joe Biden has hankered ardently after a “legacy,” the leaving of some lasting mark on America, something to get him some lines, maybe a chapter, in the history texts.
He has succeeded on many fronts, even if this is upside-down to his intent. America is now complicit in a genocide that has us invoking President Jackson’s Trail of Tears.
He bequeaths the danger of nuclear war and an economy — near to a magic trick, this — that clocks well in the statistics but has most of the citizenry in one or another way desperate.
These are the big, obvious features of Biden’s legacy. But, awful as they are, America’s plunge into unreality during Biden’s watch seems to me just as consequential for its enduring consequences. Joe Biden has led the nation so far out to sea Americans can no longer see the shore.
Americans have lost contact with the world — a thought so inconceivable even a few years ago I find it odd to type these seven words.
The myths of America’s success and supremacy and goodwill collided head-on during Biden’s years with failure, America’s malintent, and the reality of a multipolar world neither Biden nor the policy cliques he commands (or that command him) can accept.
Again, no other White House occupant could have done any better these past four years. Biden’s stupidity simply made the mess worse.
And so we witnessed Biden’s farewell amid a parade of ridiculousness.
America’s Post Democracy
David Brooks in 2022. (Jay Godwin, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist, wrote a notable piece the other day under the headline, “We deserve Pete Hegseth.” He was remarking on the confirmation hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee of President-elect Trump’s nominee for defense secretary.
Right up top Brooks lists the questions with which the next Pentagon chief will have to contend: the threat of another world war; the prospect of fighting multiple conflicts at once with China, Russia, Iran and North Korea; America’s hollowed-out industrial base; the military’s overall “insolvency,” a RAND Corporation term for the armed forces’ inability to match the tasks policy sets for it.
“Now, if you are holding a hearing for a prospective secretary of defense, you would think you might want to ask him about these urgent issues,” Brooks writes. “If you thought those kinds of questions would dominate the hearing, you must be living under the illusion that we live in a serious country.”
Wow.
Brooks continues with piercing acuity:
“We do not. We live in a soap opera country. We live in a social media/cable TV country. In our culture you don’t want to focus on boring policy questions; you want to engage in the kind of endless culture war that gets voters riled up.
You don’t want to focus on topics that would require study; you focus on images and easy-to-understand issues that generate instant visceral reactions. You don’t win this game by engaging in serious thought; you win by mere attitudinizing—by striking a pose. Your job is not to advance an argument that might help the country; your job is to go viral.”
Hegseth during his U.S. Senate confirmation hearing as secretary of defense on Jan. 14. (C-Span)
Brilliant, especially given it appears in the Times’ ordinarily wooden opinion pages. A soap-opera country is a country out of touch with reality, just as I say. It is a ridiculous country, the soaps being famously such.
Pete Hegseth, who failed to answer the most elementary questions about how the world is organized, is preposterously unqualified to serve as defense secretary. But never mind all that.
His attacks on wokery, along with his boozing and dalliances with women, whatever the nature of either, made him the perfect blackboard for all the Bidenites on the Armed Services Committee to scrawl their credentials as virtuous culture warriors.
American ridiculousness: O.K., we have lived with this for years. But I simply cannot believe it has come to this level of irresponsibility. It is another feature of the Biden legacy, let us not miss. Brooks nailed this well.
But for all the pith he put into this piece, Brooks failed to address a couple of key points.
One, if we consider the potential crises Brooks listed, we must conclude Biden is responsible either for creating them — the danger of a new world war — or for making them greatly worse, as in the potential for multiple conflicts.
Example: One of the policy pursuits Biden et al. boast of most vigorously is the strengthening and expansion of U.S. military ties in the Pacific — with South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and Australia.
They got this done, certainly. And the working assumption in this exercise is that China is fundamentally a hostile power and must be dealt with, at the horizon, militarily.
Tell me, does this count as diplomacy? Is this the wisest, most imaginative way of dealing with China? Do these revitalized military alliances, to put the point another way, make the world safer or more dangerous?
How do they fit with the Biden–Blinken commitment, professed incessantly during the 2020 campaign season, that their foreign policy would put diplomacy first and leave military response as a last resort?
Two, Brooks would have done well to consider another reason, and the more important, the Armed Services Committee spent so little time examining Hegseth for his views on policy.
To put the point simply, there is very little to discuss, as it does not matter terribly much, or not as much as it should, who runs the Pentagon.
If the Biden regime made one thing clear above all others, it is that presidents and cabinet members are not much more than ritualized figures, the Deep State’s front men, whose function is not to determine policy but to present it to the public and the rest of the world.
The imperium’s foreign policies do not change, one administration to another, if you have not noticed. Nothing to talk about, then. To me this is a feature of America’s post-democracy that manages to be ridiculous and frightening all at once.
Legacy
Biden delivering his farewell address on Jan. 15. (C-Span)
Legacy. The grandeur of epochally significant insight. The sage old man offering the republic his guiding hand as he steps gracefully aside in the late autumn of a life given honorably to public service: Biden’s minders must have whispered these thoughts into the addled man’s ear when they got him to tell us, in his farewell speech last Wednesday evening, of an imminent oligarchy overtaking America.
The long-attempted FDR comparison didn’t stick, after all: Biden to Roosevelt, if my editors will again excuse me, is chicken shit to chicken salad.
Let’s try Eisenhower, I can imagine those who invent Biden up from day to day must have said. Let’s warn of something. Ike is well remembered for his farewell speech, his now-famous military-industrial complex speech, delivered on Jan. 17, 1961. Techno-industrial complex! Yes!
And so we have Biden’s wave goodbye, delivered Jan. 15, two days short of 64 years after Eisenhower’s. There are all kinds of knick-knacks in this thing — lower drug prices, veterans’ benefits, the infrastructure spending, the (still-to-prove-out) spending on semiconductor plants.
All fine, but lacking in magnitude, I would say. And so to the grand theme:
“… In my farewell address tonight, I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern. And this is the dangerous concer- [the mind wandered here] — and that’s the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of very few ultra-wealthy people, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked.
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 and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead ….”
And a little later, in case anyone missed the reflected glory, the claim to a place in history:
“You know, his farewell address, President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. He warned us then about, and I quote, ‘the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power,’ end of quote.
Six day lec- [another lapse here] — six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the p- [another] — potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well.”
I tell you, this man cannot do anything but for self-serving political effect. If he has, I have missed it.
On one hand, Biden wants the techno-industrial bit to make him look wise, prescient. On the other, it is little more than a final brag about his regime’s small-bore achievements and, if you read the text, a cheap-shot attack on President-elect Trump.
The presidential president who cannot act presidentially even as he finishes up: This is Biden in a few words.
First of all, everyone in America knows this nation has long been beset by oligarchic parasites, even if the mainstream media do their best to keep this kind of talk out of our accepted discourse.
To take aim at an American oligarchy at this stage in the story is like shooting at the side of a barn.
Second, Biden has been intimately involved in the reigning oligarchy, not least among Silicon Valley’s princes — an appendage, a reaper of its benefits, certainly an enabler — for most of his political career, if not all of it.
And now Biden speaks of this monster’s potential rise? The ruse is too obvious: I don’t have anything to do with an oligarchy or those rich techies in Silicon Valley and Seattle. I’m for a fair shot for everyone. But my successor, a few ultra-wealthy….
We are, I had better remind you, supposed to take this stuff seriously, as in “Not a joke,” except it is.
I happened to walk past a television with an MSNBC news program broadcasting on the evening of Biden’s speech. And there were the guilty, pictured as if in a police lineup. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos: Yes, they are all in bed with the president-elect. This is it, a real, live oligarchy. Who knew, etc.?
I decided to look up a few statistics and found them on Open Secrets. Among the top contributors to the Biden campaign, as inherited by the Harris campaign, were Alphabet, Google’s holding company ($5.5 million), Microsoft ($3.2 million), Amazon ($2.9 million), Apple ($2.5 million), and a lot of “Etc.” after these.
Where does American ridiculousness end?
There was one occasion last week when the intervention of people whose great virtue is their authenticity managed to explode the pretenses of the Biden regime’s exeunt, and I will mention it but briefly.
This was Antony Blinken’s farewell press conference, held in the State Department briefing room last Thursday. It was absolutely delightful to watch as this event, its own kind of ridiculous, collapsed into chaos — which it to say evolved inexorably into reality.
By all appearances — see the above-linked video — Blinken expected this event to go off as routinely as all others during his tenure as Biden’s secretary of state. He began to speak, the government clerks posing as journalists for mainstream media sat quietly, doing their usual bit by taking the scene seriously.
Then the excellent trouble started, the trouble that is absolutely necessary if we are to find our way back to reality. This was when the irrepressible Max Blumenthal, publisher and editor of The Grayzone, erupted in utterly honest indignity even before the ritualized time allotted for questions.
Blumenthal’s remarks in part:
“Three hundred reporters in Gaza were on the receiving end of your bombs. Why did you keep the bombs flowing when we had a deal in May [a ceasefire Israel scuttled under the Biden regime’s cover]? … Why did you sacrifice ‘the rules-based order’ on the mantle of your commitment to Zionism? Why did you allow my friends to be massacred?…. Are you compromised by Israel? Why did you allow the Holocaust of our time to happen? How does it feel to have your legacy be genocide?”
Blumenthal posed these last questions as Secret Service agents escorted him out of the room. Then came the interventions of Sam Husseini, a freelance Palestinian–American journalist who writes for, among other publications, Antiwar.com.
Like Blumenthal, Husseini began peppering Blinken with questions, but then he went quiet. As Blumenthal later recounted the scene, Matt Miller, Blinken’s notoriously arrogant press secretary, then ordered the Secret Service to eject Husseini anyway — presumably to spare the secretary further embarrassment.
“Answer a damn question!” Husseini began to shout as he was forcibly pulled from his seat. “Do you know about the Hannibal Directive? Do you know about Israel’s nuclear weapons? You pontificate about a free press!”
When Blinken protested repeatedly that Husseini should “respect the process” — wait until question time — Husseini exploded:
“Respect the process? Respect the process? While everybody from Amnesty International to the ICJ says Israel’s doing genocide and extermination, and you’re telling me to respect the process? Criminal! Why aren’t you in the Hague?”
A senior official whose every syllable is an expression of the ridiculous regime of which he has been a part, government goons dragging out those who pose good, perfectly ordinary questions, mainstream reporters supinely silent throughout: This was a superb tableau. What do we see in it?
We see two people rejecting that soap opera country, that social media/cable TV country David Brooks so well described. Two people insisting on an authentic, altogether equal exchange with someone in the business of constructing such a country.
I also see what is asked of those who decline to go to sleep under America’s blanket of unreality. This requires commitment, courage in our moments of truth, a willingness to pay the price of one’s refusal to live ridiculously.
These are basic equipment for any life lived in a failing imperium that insists it never fails.
Kevin Gosztola: Biden’s Legacy: The World Is More Unsafe For Journalists
January 21, 2025
By Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter, 1/18/25
Editor’s Note: The following is the fourth and final article in The Dissenter’s series on President Joe Biden’s legacy when it comes to press freedom, whistleblowing, and government secrecy. The series began in November, and you can find previous articles here.
President Joe Biden’s administration proclaimed numerous times that “journalism is not a crime” and that the United States government supports “free and independent media around the world.” Biden said the “free press is crumbling” in his farewell address. But the reality is that Biden and his administration helped make the state of the free press more fragile.
Over 200 journalists in Gaza were killed by Israeli military forces armed by the Biden administration. Other client states, like India and Saudi Arabia, trampled on the human rights of reporters without fearing much criticism.
Through the political case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Biden became the first president to secure an Espionage Act conviction against a journalist.
Biden, along with Democrats, had plenty of time to pass a federal shield law to protect U.S. journalists from government interference. Yet when asked if he supported greater protection for the news media, the White House would not endorse the legislation.
And during the last week of Biden’s presidency, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller had guards drag a reporter out of a press briefing room.
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Reporters Without Borders (RSF) offered an assessment in their 2024 World Press Freedom Index that applies to the Biden administration:
A growing number of governments and political authorities are not fulfilling their role as guarantors of the best possible environment for journalism and for the public’s right to reliable, independent, and diverse news and information. RSF sees a worrying decline in support and respect for media autonomy and an increase in pressure from the state or other political actors.
On top of Biden officials’ failure to create the “best possible environment for journalism,” they also cynically invoked freedom of the press to further U.S. foreign policy objectives. For example, officials were outspoken when Russia attacked journalists but nonchalant and tight-lipped when Israel killed, detained, or censored journalists.
Not All Journalists Are Really Journalists
The Biden administration claimed the authority to determine who is and is not a journalist in order to deny them protection from prosecutions. Officials also applied criminal charges or other forms of lawfare to suppress journalism that they opposed.
In June 2024, the biggest press freedom case of the century ended as Assange was finally released from London’s Belmarsh high-security prison. He flew to the Northern Mariana Islands and pleaded guilty to engaging in journalism in violation of the Espionage Act.
“Exposing government secrets and revealing them in the public interest is the core function of national security journalism. Today, for the first time, that activity was described in a guilty plea as a criminal conspiracy,” declared Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.
Assange was indicted during Trump’s first term. Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Biden Justice Department had a chance to heed the concerns of civil liberties, human rights, and press freedom groups and drop the charges. But the Biden administration sided with Trump officials like Jeff Sessions, Bill Barr, and Mike Pompeo, who had vengefully pursued the WikiLeaks founder, and bristled at reporters when questioned about the case.
FBI agents raided the home newsroom of Timothy Burke in 2023, and the following year, the Biden Justice Department charged Burke as an economic cybercriminal.
Burke’s crime, according to prosecutors, was that he “scoured” the internet for “electronic items and information” that were “deemed desirable” for news reporting. In particular, he obtained access to an unsecured stream that contained an uncut version of an interview Tucker Carlson conducted with rapper Kanye West for Fox News. (His trial was scheduled for June 2025.)
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In Espionage Act prosecutions involving leaks, the Biden Justice Department continued the practice of treating the use of privacy tools, such as Tor or Tails, as evidence of criminal activity.
There were a few positive actions by the Biden administration. In 2021, the Commerce Department blacklisted the NSO Group, a Israeli spyware developer that was hired by countries like Bahrain, India, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The governments targeted journalists, human rights activists, and powerful regime opponents. Visa restrictions against individuals who “misused” commercial spyware were also imposed by the State Department in 2024.
In 2023, a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) judge stood up to Starbucks and deemed it unlawful for the corporation to pursue “extensive” and “verbose” requests for records of communications between unionized workers and news media organizations.
Garland adopted changes to “news media guidelines” in October 2022 that were lauded by press freedom groups. As the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) described, for the first time, guidelines prohibited the Justice Department “from using subpoenas or other investigative tools against journalists who possess and publish classified information obtained in newsgathering, with only narrow exceptions.”
President Joe Biden (Photo from the White House and in the public domain.)
Refusing To Advocate For A Reporter’s Shield Law
The change to guidelines came in response to news reports that the Trump administration had secretly subpoenaed the communications records of reporters at CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post as part of retaliatory leak investigations aimed at identifying sources.
However, the Biden Justice Department continued Trump’s retaliation in 2021 until the subpoenas became public. Officials even imposed a gag order against Times executives, which Times deputy general counsel David McCraw called “unprecedented.”
The Biden administration gave journalists the cold shoulder as a coalition of groups urged the administration multiple times to codify the change to news media guidelines and back the PRESS Act—a national reporter’s shield legislation.
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In June 2021, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki incuriously said, “I’d have to look into the specifics of the piece of legislation.” The legislation received no public support from the White House, and in December 2022, anti-press Republican Senator Tom Cotton successfully blocked the law.
The PRESS Act was reintroduced in 2023, and it passed in the House of Representatives in January 2024. The shield law languished in the Senate for months as Democrats did nothing to move the bill for a vote. In April 2024, when White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked if Biden supported the PRESS Act, she uttered a platitude: “[J]ournalism is not a crime. We’ve been very clear about that.” But the White House refused to back legislation that would offer protect reporters from criminalization.
After Vice President Kamala Harris lost the presidential election to Trump, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and other Democrats suddenly recognized the need to pass the PRESS Act. However, it was too late. Trump came out against the shield law, Cotton blocked the bill (again), and the Biden White House maintained its silence.
Tempering Support For Press Freedom When Client States Repress Journalists
During a debate among Democratic presidential candidates in November 2019, candidate Biden pledged to make the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia “pay the price” for murdering Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi and make them “the pariah that they are.” Yet by 2023, as the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) outlined in their “Global Impunity Index,” Biden had embraced the Saudi kingdom and “stymied” justice for Khashoggi.
“The failure to pursue justice for Khashoggi, a U.S. permanent resident, signals to repressive regimes that even the most powerful Western democracies will temper their fervor for the protection of journalists if they perceive political and economic interests are at stake,” CPJ Director Robert Mahoney wrote.
“In November [2022], his administration went as far as to declare that the crown prince was shielded by sovereign immunity. That effectively killed a civil lawsuit filed in U.S. district court by Khashoggi’s fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, that sought to hold Mohammed bin Salman and two of his senior aides liable for the death.”
“Secure in the knowledge that Western governments would take no action against him,” Mahoney added, “Prince Mohammed set about rebranding himself as a tech-friendly millennial and political reformer.”
BBC India produced a documentary, “The Modi Question,” about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s role in the 2002 Gujarat riots, which resulted in the death of over 1,000 people. In response, the Modi regime censored the film, and in February 2022, officials raided the BBC’s offices in New Delhi and Mumbai. “Documents and phones of several journalists were taken and the offices sealed.”
After the raid, Agence France-Presse journalist Shaun Tandon asked State Department spokesperson Ned Price for comment. Rather than unequivocally condemn what happened, Price suggested that Tandon direct his question to Indian authorities. Price then spoke about the “importance of freedom of expression, which led Tandon to followup. “[D]o you think that this action went against that spirit or the banning of the documentary?”
“I couldn’t say. I couldn’t say. We’re aware that these – we are aware of the fact of the searches, but I’m just not in a position to offer a judgement,” Price stammered.
On the same day that Indian authorities engaged in this act against BBC India, Biden had a phone call with Modi. Biden and Modi discussed a “historic agreement for Air India to purchase over 200 American-made aircraft from Boeing.”
President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken (Photo from the State Department and in the public domain.)
Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, a correspondent for Al Jazeera, was killed by an Israeli sniper on May 11, 2022, when military forces opened fire on reporters who were covering a raid on a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.
Akleh’s family demanded that the Biden administration support their efforts for justice, however, officials resisted calls for an independent investigation. In fact, the Biden administration sided with Israel and contended that Akleh was not “intentionally” killed.
After Israel launched an intense bombing campaign against Gaza in October 2023, Biden officials continued to whitewash or ignore attacks on freedom of the press by the Israeli government.
The Biden administration planned and authorized around $26 billion in arms shipments to Israel, which included weapons that were used to kill journalists. By January 18, 2024, at least 217 journalists had been killed, and many of them were specifically targeted by military forces.
According to the CPJ, in 2023, the Israeli government became one of the world’s worst jailers of journalists. That distinction continued in 2024 as the U.S.-backed government detained or imprisoned 43 journalists.
Journalists in Gaza were detained under a law that allowed for long periods of detention without charge and “limited access to legal counsel.” Several detained journalists were held in confinement because they “had contacted or interviewed people Israel wanted information about.” They were kept in “inhuman conditions” that included “frequent acts of severe, arbitrary violence; sexual assault; humiliation and degradation; [and] deliberate starvation,” according to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.
The jailing of Palestinian journalists was symptomatic of a censorship regime that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials enforced. Thousands of international correspondents were prohibited from entering Gaza, and Al Jazeera was shut down in Israel and the occupied West Bank.
In October 2024, the Israeli government attempted to prosecute Grayzone reporter Jeremy Loffredo for “aiding the enemy during wartime and providing information to the enemy.” All he had done is travel to the impact sites where Iranian missiles had landed and report on the damage that was done. He was eventually allowed to leave the country, but the Biden administration was extremely quiet as a U.S. journalist faced detention and potential prison time.
One year after the Israeli military launched its assault, according to the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (PJS), Israeli forces had “destroyed all media institutions” in Gaza.” Airstrikes had “demolished 73 media facilities, including 21 local radio stations, 15 local and international news agencies, 15 TV stations, 6 local newspapers, 3 broadcasting towers, 8 printing presses, and 13 journalistic service institutions.”
“In the early days of the genocidal war on Gaza, the Israeli military targeted most of the high-rise buildings in Gaza that housed both local and international media offices. For example, the Al-Shawa and Al-Haseeri towers in Gaza City, which contained 15 floors of media offices, were completely destroyed by an Israeli airstrike on December 18, 2023, causing extensive damage to the surrounding area,” PJS additionally recalled.
Student journalists in the U.S. faced violence from police and so-called counter-protesters as they attempted to cover a groundswell of protests against Biden’s support for Israel’s assault on Gaza.
At Cal Poly Humboldt in California, a reporter named Adelmi Ruiz livestreamed the moment when police detained her for “interfering with a crime scene.” She told police that she was press, and it was her job to cover the police response to protesters. “Find a different job if this causes you to break the law,” an officer replied.
Such repression was representative of a rising crackdown in the U.S. against routine journalism, especially against reporters that attempted to cover protests or homeless encampments. Freedom of the Press Foundation U.S. Press Freedom Tracker documented in 2023 and 2024 how U.S. journalists were punished for “asking questions of public officials, publishing leaked information, and documenting breaking news in the field.”
The U.S. Congress, with the support of Biden, also banned TikTok in April 2024. Subsequently, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law that banned the social media app.
As the Freedom of the Press Foundation warned, the law could be applied to “online news outlets based abroad, as long as they offer some kind of interactivity (for example, user comments).” The ACLU described the Supreme Court’s decision as a “disturbing precedent” and one that “increase[s] the risk that sweeping invocations of ‘national security’ will trump our constitutional rights.”
Despite staggering examples of the Biden administration’s role in making the U.S. and the world more unsafe for journalists, officials clung to their press freedom platitudes.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken in his farewell remarks to the press corps said he had a great appreciation for journalists who ask “tough questions” and hold officials like him to account. “Being on the receiving end, sometimes that’s not always the most comfortable thing; not always the most enjoyable thing. But it is the most necessary thing in our democracy.”
Yet as laudable as that may have sounded, Blinken had steered clear of the briefing room for a number of months. When he appeared, two credentialed reporters—Max Blumenthal and Sam Husseini—were tired of hearing speeches. They were fed up with spokespeople like Matthew Miller, who had smirked and berated reporters who confronted officials with important questions about Israel, which the State Department typically evaded or refused to answer.
Husseini claimed that Miller had “blackballed” him. He interrupted Blinken with two different questions before Miller had guards at the State Department drag Husseini out of the briefing room. Blumenthal was escorted out of the briefing room after he interrupted Blinken.
“Days before the inauguration of an anti-press President, the Biden administration handed Trump a gift by normalizing punishing journalists for asking questions officials don’t like,” declared Freedom of the Press Foundation advocacy director Seth Stern.
The moment was emblematic of Biden’s presidency when it came to press freedom. Biden officials supported journalists—except when it was politically inconvenient or they made officials look bad.
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Where Have All the Liberals Gone?
January 29, 2025
The new liberal consensus, born of a shared “exhaustion,” is that it is time to “tune out,” or “take a break,” or simply close one’s eyes and ears.
Capital slurry. (Michael Galkovsky, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
I simply cannot figure American liberals and “progressives”—’pwogwessives,’” as the late Alexander Cockburn used to call them.
They do nothing when faced with calamitous events and call it hard work. Then, when the political process (such as it is) takes a radical turn for the worse and there is serious work to do, they announce that they are exhausted and must “take a break” from it all.
And then they go off to Mexico City or Barbados or the Cotswolds.
Can’t figure it. When the going gets tough, liberals get… tickets to Santorini or Sicily.
I propose a brief investigation of the conduct of liberals during the Biden years and now, as Donald Trump takes office, not as a matter of ridicule, although at this point there is much in the culture of American liberalism that is ridiculous. No, my concern lies in the larger implications of what amounts to mass frivolity.
Liberals have never struck me as a very reliable lot. Their stated positions and “values”— a ridiculous word in its own right — are by tradition always of the highest order. But they so frequently and predictably cave to reaction.
Cold War liberals proved the worst in this regard: Ever prepared were they, whenever authentic political principles were challenged, to line up behind conservative Cold Warriors.
O.K., there is a long, unfortunate history here. But since the Clinton years in the 1990s, matters have taken another turn. Capitulation itself has become the position, the value.
This became perfectly obvious once Hillary Clinton — warmonger, interventionist, cultivator of coups, all-around authoritarian — assumed a prominent voice among liberal elites. Since the 2016 political season, and one can scarcely fail to notice, liberals have vigorously favored … wars, interventions, coups, censorship, a certain apple-pie authoritarianism.
They count the military and “the intelligence community”— a term that reflects the liberal embrace — their allies and friends. They are, in a phrase, the direct descendants of the Cold War liberals of decades past.
I have this acute urge to write the following sentence. American liberals trust the Central Intelligence Agency.
Clean, simple, bald and bold, irrefutable. Just seven words give a useful idea of how far things have gone. And you will know now what I mean by ridiculous.
The Biden regime’s four years in power and Trump’s election last November cause us to mix an alloy of ridiculous with critical, maybe even grave, as we characterize the culture of liberals.
Official inaugural portrait of President Donald, Jan. 15. (Daniel Torok, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
We have witnessed in this period the collapse even of the weak, drowsy liberalism of the past. I see a qualitative difference I mean to say, between the liberalism of yore and what has become of liberalism these past years.
Liberalism as we find it out our windows seems now to consist of little more than performance and signifiers. You have posturing and authorized speech, and you have consumption patterns certified as a sort of semiology by way of liberal media.
Look at any day’s edition of The New York Times: What are effectively latter-day Good Housekeeping seals of approval—“T–shirts we love,” the right olive oil, “our favorite banana bread” — are considerably privileged above anything resembling serious news as measured in column inches.
And you have above all, the rest being subsets, a shockingly submissive worship of authority. And this, in turn, induces among liberals something between a refusal to act and an inability to act, a paralysis.
You could read liberalism’s slide in the direction of the supercilious in all those supposedly panicked cries as Trump’s momentum gathered during the 2024 political season. Fascist, tyrant, totalitarian, dictatorship, and above all, an existential threat to democracy: It was all very grave, historic in magnitude.
But I had to wonder what all the people saying these things were doing about so menacing a prospect as a second Trump term. I couldn’t find much; it was all signification. Saying was somehow sufficient, all that needed doing by way of political action.
Turning the matter another way, while there were great reservoirs of alarm about the prospect of a Trump presidency, and setting aside the principled minority who demonstrated on university campuses and elsewhere, liberals seemed to have little to say as Joe Biden dragged the United States into a genocide.
Where were these people? I still want to know.
It was good enough by way of action, it turned out, to pull the lever for Kamala Harris last Nov. 5 — this even as she endorsed Israeli terror as openly as the president.
Routines of Entitlement
Luxury sports car solidarity fist, Washington, D.C., November 2020. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC)
I had to laugh after the election when a conservative commentator whose name I cannot recall wondered in print why all the liberals flinging around “fascist,” “dictator,” “tyrant,” and so on hadn’t taken to the hills in the manner of the old French maquisards — you know, the wartime guerrillas who gave up work and family to wage armed actions and sabotage ops against the Nazi Wehrmacht from mountain hideouts where they subsisted on leaves and weeds.
Such a vacuum of silence and what amounts to indolence.
Ridiculous is as ridiculous does not, I say. How can you take seriously people who tell you that they now live under a fascist dictatorship while going about their business entirely per usual?
Maybe the word I seek is infantilization — the infantilization of liberalism. Is there a better term for what has become of liberals since Trump’s ascendancy?
At the very moment, according to the liberal narrative, political action of a great variety is urgent in the cause of saving our republic, the new liberal consensus, born of a shared “exhaustion,” is that it is time to “tune out,” or “take a break,” or simply close one’s eyes and ears.
How many news reports have I read to this effect? Politico: “The resistance is not coming to save you. It’s tuning out.” The Associated Press: “Americans are exhausted by political news. TV ratings and a new poll show they’re tuning out.”
And from The New York Times: “Certain kinds of left-leaning, reflective New Yorkers declare… they were drained, exhausted, resigned, ready to choose a plaintive ignorance.”
I just love the Times some mornings. Reflective New Yorkers — left-wing, of course — retreating honorably into ignorance. You just can’t beat this kind of thing.
Bingeing on chocolate, watching British crime dramas morn ’til night, people wearing themselves out on treadmills: Move over to social media and you discover all sorts of close-to-the-ground modes of escape. And then, of course, you have the virtuous travelers.
You have to have clearance to indulge in this kind of thing, let us be clear. You have to have the sanction of a new liberal consensus, and these come thick and fast nowadays, a new consensus every time you look. Worry not, liberals: the Times is once again here for you.
This is Charles Blow, the arch-liberal Times columnist, in a piece that appeared in the Dec. 18 editions under the headline, “Temporarily Disconnected from Politics?”:
“Should anyone feel guilt for choosing not to constantly ruminate or pre-emptively panic? For choosing to take a breath and a beat before re-engaging in the fight… that is almost surely in the offing once Donald Trump returns to power?
Absolutely not.”
Re-engaging with the fight? What fight was that? He must mean voting the “Joy and Vibes” ticket in the polling booth last November. I gather from all this it was exhausting.
The now evident consensus — see what I mean? Another one — is that so long as the liberal American feels the right feelings, the approved feelings, it is sufficient: There is no need actually to do anything. Nothing can be permitted to break the liberal’s routines of entitlement.
And we find, too, a flat refusal to address or even acknowledge the half of America that, having put Donald Trump in office, does not conform to the liberal version of reality.
This is what I read in the sudden impulse to travel: It is a flinch, a turning away, nothing more. Anything to avoid recognizing the grievances of the non-liberal majority, anything to avoid facing the true composition of the American polity, anything to protect the liberal bubble from a puncture.
How did it come to this? Again, I cannot figure it. Scholars now debate the future of American liberalism and whether it can be salvaged or salvage itself to serve some useful purpose in the polity. I cannot figure this, either.
I do not like to think of liberals as representative of anyone other than themselves, but to the extent they may reflect anything close to prevailing sentiment in America their conduct of late saddens me. Are we a nation so pathetic as they?
Are we lost, as they seem to be, in memes and narrative dreams that seal us protectively from reality and relieve us of all responsibility to act?
While Trump Waves a Flag of white “Supremacy,” Democrats are Waving a White Flag of Surrender
Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright 12 Feb 2025
Donald Trump began his presidency with an onslaught of executive actions meant to dismantle all institutions and agencies that offer any lifeline for poor, working class, and non-white people. However, this also highlights the Democratic Party's refusal to operate as an opposition party in any sense of the word.
Donald Trump wasted no time implementing his initiatives following his inauguration as the 47th president of the United States. As of February 10th, the president has signed 86 executive actions - 61 Executive Orders and 25 Presidential Memos/Proclamations - covering a range of sectors from foreign policy, to energy production, to reshaping a large swath of the federal government in his image and that of his acolytes including, but not limited to, his Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Millier, and billionaire oligarch, Elon Musk.
It’s clear that the driving paradigm of Trump’s political, legislative, and social agenda is (informed ?) by white “supremacy” ideology, which we at the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) define as “The combined ideological and structural expression of ‘white power.’ In its ideological expression, it posits that the descendants of people of the territory/idea referred to as Europe represent the highest examples of human development. That their culture, social institutions, religions and way of life are inherently and naturally superior.”
A quick analysis of some of Trump’s executive actions reveals an irrefutable assault on governmental systems, institutions and programs that were specifically designed to assist Black and other non white poor and working class people and ameliorate myriad instances of systemic injustices they are subjected to on a quotidian basis. To be clear, I am not attempting to make the argument that these governmental systems and institutions have all been successful or even that they are adequate as much as highlight the Trump administration’s concentrated blitzkrieg against them.
Trump’s executive action on January 21, 2025, Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity , takes pages from the Lee Atwater playbook of incognito, plausibly deniable racial discrimination. It was Atwater who is known ignominiously for a 1981 quote he offered while defending the so-called Southern Strategy as an operative in Reagan’s White House:
"You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger'-that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff, and you're getting so abstract. Now, you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'Nigger, nigger.'"
And while there’s plenty of examples of Trump’s rhetoric to suggest that he may have missed or ignored Atwater’s recommendations, the language of his executive action establishing interdiction for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in the federal government is carefully crafted, even citing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as the impetus. For instance, the January 21, 2025 executive action proclaims that DEI itself potentially violates the civil rights laws of the United States, and goes on to stipulate, “It is the policy of the United States to protect the civil rights of all Americans and to promote individual initiative, excellence, and hard work.”
The executive action then lists a slew of previous executive orders that are, in effect, now revoked including, Executive Order 13583 of August 18, 2011 (Establishing a Coordinated Government-wide Initiative to Promote Diversity and Inclusion in the Federal Workforce), Executive Order 13672 of July 21, 2014 (Further Amendments to Executive Order 11478, Equal Employment Opportunity in the Federal Government, and Executive Order 11246, Equal Employment Opportunity), and Executive Order 11246 of September 24, 1965 (Equal Employment Opportunity).
While revoking these executive orders in itself vindicates Trump’s methodology of white “supremacy” ideology, revoking Executive Order 12898 of February 11, 1994 (Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations), in particular, presents a clear and incontrovertible threat to Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor white communities.
Executive Order (EO) 12898 previously provided the primary mechanism that required federal actions to include an assessment of potential impacts to environmental justice communities as part of larger environmental reviews required by the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 (NEPA). In fact, many of the lawsuits challenging the placement of pollutive infrastructure Including, but not limited to, fossil fuel pipelines and coal and gas fired power plants invoked EO 12898 as part of their arguments. Given that Black and Indigenous communities tend to be the most polluted and rendered into energy and economic sacrifice zones due to federal actions, by repealing a bedrock executive action to address this trend, the Trump administration has effectively signaled that environmental justice communities are sitting ducks for extractive industries such as petrochemicals, industrial agriculture, and fossil fuels writ large.
As it pertains to international policy, Trump’s recent suggestion that the people of Gaza should be permanently relocated and the U.S. assume ownership of the Gaza Strip is another example of policy recommendations rooted in the racialized narcissistic cognitive disorder of white “supremacy” that centers so-called white peoples and European civilization and renders the afflicted with an inability to perceive objective reality in the same way as others. And the fact that Trump is now threatening to withhold aid to nations like the Kingdom of Jordan and the Arab Republic of Egypt, who both rejected his Gaza Grab and ethnic cleaning proposal, further vindicates the toxic pathology associated with white “supremacy” ideology.
You would think that these actions in themselves would represent a casus belli moment for any opposition political party and political formations. But if you’re looking for the Democrats to be this opposition party, you are likely embarking on a Faustian and myopic exercise. And no one seems to know this better than actors within the Democrat Party themselves. In fact, a recent piece by The New York Times entitled, ‘ We Have no Coherent Message’: Democrats Struggle to Oppose Trump , indicated, “In private meetings and at public events, elected Democrats appear leaderless, rudderless and divided. They disagree over how often and how stridently to oppose Mr. Trump. They have no shared understanding of why they lost the election, never mind how they can win in the future.” Worse yet, just yesterday, House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries, in what can only be described as an act of political cowardice, all but admitted the Democrats have no leverage against Trump or the GOP.
In his book, It;s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics, author David Faris suggests, “Democrats must avoid their natural instinct to govern and make incremental progress on a host of issues.” He continues, “They must avoid the temptation to work with President Trump….,because doing so would give an enormous advantage to their ideologically minded anti-system opponents.” It seems unlikely that the Democrats will heed this advice, largely due to the fact that they are aligned with Trump on issues like Palestine and how best to end the era of fossil fuel proliferation.
Hakeem Jeffries himself has remained largely silent on Trump’s proposal to carry out an ethnic cleansing pogrom in Gaza - and this may be due to the fact that he himself is one of the biggest recipients of money from the pro-Israel/pro-genocide American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in the entire U.S. Congress. In fact, according to OpenSecrets.org, Democrat Party candidates for Congress received more AIPAC mone y than Republicans during the 2024 election cycle.
Source: OpenSecrets.org
As it pertains to fossil fuels and protecting environmental justice communities, it’s well documented that former president, Joe Biden, approved more oil and gas drilling on federal lands and in federal waters than during Trump’s first term, which is to say that the current administration's ethos of “drill baby drill” is less a new policy and more a continuation of Biden and the Democrats’ legislative agenda. And by calling for and, in some cases, implementing elements of deregulation of bedrock environmental policies like NEPA, as part of their Inflation Reduction Act, ostensibly referred to as “permitting reform,” the Democrats have also signaled their willingness to sacrifice environmental justice communities they purport to fight for and who the depend on for electoral success.
For BAP, white “supremacy” cannot be reduced to individualized attitudes and values just among people identified as white. Instead, it should be seen as a structure of domination that is also ideologically embedded into every aspect of U.S. and European society to the extent that it has become normalized and invisibilized as general common sense. To this end, It’s not just that the Democrats are waving a white flag of surrender, in far too many cases they are saluting the same flag of white “supremacy” as Trump, they just don’t like that they are not the ones who are actually waving it.
Standing up to and vanquishing Trump will require a true and operational opposition party. The Democrats are not it, and this reveals a truth many of us have known for a long time. Therefore, instead of relying on an opposition party that does not exist, or waiting for one to emerge, it’s incumbent upon the people to institute and effectuate principled opposition movements to survive Trump, the Democrats, and white “supremacy” ideology in all of its manifestations.
Liberals Hate Socialists Because Socialists Are The Real Thing
Most liberals secretly hate socialists more than they hate rightists, because while rightists attack their political agendas, socialists attack their egos.
Caitlin Johnstone
February 20, 2025
❖
Liberals hate socialists for the same reason socialists hate liberals: because socialists are the thing liberals pretend to be. Socialists stand for truth, justice, peace and equality while liberals only pretend to stand for these things, and they both know it. Liberals know their favorite political party supports war, militarism, oligarchy and inequality and is rife with power-serving corruption, and socialists know it too, so they can critique these dynamics in ways that have the unpleasant sting of truth.
Liberals don’t mind it when some dopey right winger criticizes their ideological faction, because the rightist has no idea what they’re looking at and offers up the dumbest and least relevant criticisms imaginable. When a socialist critiques that same faction they do it in ways the liberal knows are true, and it causes the liberal to experience cognitive dissonance. If you love AOC it’s not going to bother you when a rightist calls her a woke commie terrorist lover, but someone to the left of you pointing out the various ways she serves the ugliest aspects of the US empire will grate against some of your most deeply treasured belief systems.
Most liberals secretly hate socialists more than they hate rightists, because while rightists attack their political agendas, socialists attack their egos. They expose core identity structures for the sham that they are. Cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable, and nobody enjoys feeling like they’ve been exposed as a phony.
That’s what liberal left-punching is really about. It’s not about “political pragmatism” or any of that nonsense. It’s petty, vindictive egotistic meltdowns dressed up in reasonable-sounding words. It’s never anything nobler than that.
The Frog or the Scorpion: Do Democrats Really Need to Ask Who Caused the Mess We’re In?
Posted on February 26, 2025 by Yves Smith
Yves here. Tom Neuburger below takes a very hard look at the Democrats and concludes they are not redeemable.
By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, President Donald Trump (Getty Images)
One of my favorite Nation writers, Dave Zirin, has a piece worthy of attention: “Why Democrats Won’t Throw a Real Punch.” I’m sure you can guess the reason(s). I’ll tell you why it matters in a second. Zirin starts with this:
Masses of enraged, terrified people are looking at the analog, slow-motion leadership of Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer and the zero-calorie rhetoric of House leader Hakeem Jeffries and want them replaced by people who know how to fight. As The Nation has reported, when Democratic politicians have shown up to protests, people aren’t cheering their presence. They are howling at them to do more.
The Problematic Hakeem Jeffries
Let’s look at Jeffries for a moment. It will teach us a lot.
First, on a related issue, the corruption of pro-Trump Democratic Mayor Eric Adams, Jeffries had this to say when asked to take a stand against him (h/t Ken Klippenstein):
Jake Tapper: You are one of the two leaders of the democratic party. Is it not important for Democrats, while criticizing Donald Trump for various allegations of corruption, to be able to call it out in their own party?
Hakeem Jeffries: … It would be premature for me to say anything about the charges that may or may not go away until then.
Zirin’s right; Jeffries won’t throw a punch. Why?
Jeffries is as corrupt as they come, in the Zephyr Teachout meaning of the word: “Placing private interests over the public good in public office.”
What’s Jeffries private interest? Staying in power, staying on top in the Democratic Party.
What public good that’s being ignored? Proving to voters that Democrats are the anti-corruption alternative to Trumpist rule.
How are Democrats ever to hold themselves up as the alternative to Trump if they travel the same dirty road, but in different cars? Answer: They can’t, and voters are responding accordingly.
November, 2023. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Sen. Joni Ernst, join hands at the March for Israel on Nov. 14, 2023, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Mark Schiefelbein/AP
A second problem with Jeffries: He’s rabidly pro-Israel (“Israel today, Israel tomorrow, Israel forever”), pro-Israeli genocide, and works with AIPAC to defeat progressives like Jamaal Bowman and Nina Turner (if you click just one link in this article, click on “Nina Turner”). Jeffries is also the all-time top recipient of AIPAC money at $1.6 million and counting. Genocide: not a reason to like a man.
Why would progressives ever support a ‘party of reform’ so-led? Answer: They don’t; they’re starting to stop.
The Mess We’re In
Thus the mess we’re in. In simple terms:
The rebellion against the rich and their misrule has been treated by national Democrats as a threat to the status quo, from which they get rich. Thus they force the rebellion to be led by Trump, where it’s badly misused.
In fact, Trump and Musk are about to complete the billionaire coup against the FDR State they began with the failed Wall Street Putsch of 1933, a literal attempt to create their own fascist state. Unlike then, today’s “party of the people,” also billionaire-led, choose not to interfere.
Zirin’s Reasons We’re Here
You can see my reasons above why we’re in this mess. Let’s look at Zirin’s; you’ll find an overlap (emphasis mine below).
The question then is why, amid this tornado of anger, are Democratic institutions so soft? …
1. They’d rather have peace with the billionaire tech bros—see Jeffries’s recent Silicon Valley visit to “mend fences”—than wage a struggle to get their money out of politics, have campaign finance reform, and, for the love of God, tax their obscene and unearned wealth. …
2. A wing of the Democratic Party actually supports the substance if not style of what Musk is doing, accepting the argument of bureaucratic excess and the need to stop “waste.” Several put themselves forward to join the entirely made up, extra-constitutional operation known as DOGE. …
3. The legacy of Clintonian triangulation and the corporate-centered rightward pull of the New Democrats means their top campaign consultants for a generation have been insulated, isolated, and utterly incapable of being left populists or the “brawlers for the working class” that AOC says they need to be. …
4. The legacy of Obama was that a coalition based upon “demographic destiny” would win elections in perpetuity as long as they were not Republicans. …
5. Israel. Israel. Israel. In 2025, marching lockstep behind Israel means defending ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and billions in weapon sales so they continue unhampered. It’s also taking the opposite position of what their potential voters, particularly young voters, want to see. …
6. Democrats are allergic to raising people’s expectations, and as a result, they cannot solve problems. Instead of codifying Roe legislatively after the Supreme Court killed it, they raised money off its death. …
Cash-addled, complacent, complicit. If voters continue to see Democrats in this way, the Party may be lucky to win one time in three, and in office they’ll change nothing of substance. This can’t go on.
‘It’s my nature. It’s what I do.’
Democrats blame Republicans for this mess. But a snake is always a snake, and a scorpion stings. In the famous fable of the scorpion and the frog, when the frog asks the scorpion why he delivered the blow that ultimately killed them both, the scorpion said, “Why be surprised? It’s my nature. It’s what I do.”
It’s the nature of the Koch-ruled party to corrupt the country; the pro-wealth Powell Memo has a Republican source. The rich, like parasites, can always be counted on to murder their hosts. Why be surprised by their short-sighted dangerous greed?
But the frog, the Democrats, had choices, or some thought they did. If so, they chose wrong. Poor frog. Poor those who depend on them.
Why This Matters
As I said, this can’t go on. The best the country can hope for is what Democrats offer: a return to the status quo ante, the world of Barack and Bill, when the rich drank everyone’s milkshake but some things seemed better. (In the scene below, by the way, Daniel is “capitalists.”)
Does America today want that? Do they want to go back? Or are they more hungry for hope, even from Trump?
All other outcomes are worse. Consider the poles the nation is poised between: a rigid and well-policed Republican state with FDR dead and Democratic “messaging” that replaces reform; or a rocking from failure to failure, from party to party, also policed, until climate makes government moot and we’re all on our own.
None of these outcomes are good. That’s why this matters. Zirin, at the end, talks about people he knows being “ready to throw [themselves] on the gears of this system.” That’s chaos, of course, something most people won’t choose. But the world goes to hell if they don’t.
Of course that's about as 'radical' as The Nation gonna get. If the Dems are not redeemable it's because there was nothing there to redeem in the first place. If it seems they have gotten worse it is because capitalism has gotten more intense, more practiced and refined in it's extraction of wealth and the control of society necessary to do so. They dance to the tune of capital or they don't dance at all.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Corporate Media Offer Excuses for ‘Powerless’ Democrats
Julie Hollar
As oligarchs Donald Trump and Elon Musk continue their pursuit of power unfettered by the Constitution, many citizens wonder why their elected representatives in Washington are doing so little to stop the administrative coup. They also might well wonder why the media so rarely ask the same question.
GOP congressmembers have mostly remained silent, when not celebrating, as their party leader shreds democratic institutions. Democratic leaders, meanwhile, have largely advised their own members to not make too much of a fuss—precisely the opposite of what leading scholars of authoritarianism are urgently calling for.
House Minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, for instance, told fellow Democrats not to “swing at every pitch,” while longtime Democratic adviser James Carville suggested Democrats should “play possum,” complaining that progressives voicing outrage were “detrimental” to the opposition and “never, ever learn to shut up.” Many Senate Democrats voted to confirm multiple Trump cabinet picks, who have done nothing to provide checks on unelected billionaire Musk.
Most reporting follows the tired, risk-averse corporate news script that simply quotes Democrats and Republicans in leadership positions, offering that same lens of Democratic (or even Republican!) congressmembers having no power to stop or even slow anything down. That neatly takes pressure off of those official sources to bother to do anything to protect their constituents—or, say, democracy—that might take some political capital.
‘Setting expectations too high’
Anonymous House Democrat to Axios (2/5/25): “I think there is this sense that we have legislative power, and we don’t.”
Just over two weeks into the Trump/Musk dismantling of democracy, Axios (2/5/25) reported:
Congressional Democrats’ offices are being inundated by phone calls from angry constituents who feel the party should be doing more to combat President Trump and his administration.
The volume of calls appears to be at record levels, according to Axios‘ Andrew Solender, who quoted 28-year Rep. Jim McGovern (D–Mass.): “I can’t recall ever receiving this many calls. People disgusted with what’s going on, and they want us to fight back.”
Solender included a one-line summary characteristic of his outlet’s reporting style:
Why it matters: Some lawmakers feel their grassroots base is setting expectations too high for what Democrats can actually accomplish as the minority party in both chambers of Congress.
Of course, others argue that “it matters” because Democrats actually have the ability to do much more—but that perspective apparently doesn’t matter at Axios.
Democrats have done things like send a “flurry of letters” to protest unconstitutional moves, Solender reported. “Yes, but,” he continued, again buttressing the do-nothing Democrat position, “Democrats lack many of the crucial legislative and investigative tools afforded to the congressional majority that would give them the kind of power needed to thwart Trump.”
Many tools at Democrats’ disposal
Common Dreams (2/7/25): “Democrats don’t have the votes to tank Trump nominees in the Senate, but they do have myriad tools at their disposal to grind the chamber to a halt.”
No one would dispute that the minority party can’t pass bills or issue subpoenas without Republican support, as Axios pointed out. But as progressive groups like Indivisible have countered, there are still many tools at Democrats’ disposal.
In the Senate, any member can request “unanimous consent” to help uncontroversial measures move through more quickly. It only takes one member to block unanimous consent, and Republicans used it all the time under President Joe Biden. After consistent pressure from constituents, Democrats finally used this tool to slow down the confirmation of OMB director (and Project 2025 architect) Russell Vought—only to then grant unanimous consent to adjourn for a long weekend, as if this were all business as usual (Common Dreams, 2/7/25).
Or take another Senate rule concerning quorum, the number of members required to be present for a legislative body to be officially in session. Remember when Democratic state legislators in Texas fled their state in 2021 to deny Republicans quorum, temporarily blocking passage of voting restrictions, and drawing attention to the power grab? Well, the US Senate also requires quorum—the presence of a majority of its members, or 51 senators—in order to do anything.
Democrats don’t have enough members to deny quorum on their own, but there’s still a lot they can do with this tool. As Indivisible points out, simply demanding a quorum check takes time, and if fewer than 51 of the 53 GOP senators are present (which happens frequently), Democrats can simply walk out, stopping all Senate work until enough Republicans return to the chamber.
Meanwhile, the federal government will shut down on March 14 if Congress doesn’t pass a bill to keep it funded. Since Republicans hold a whisker-thin majority in the House, and the far right Freedom Caucus in recent years has generally refused to vote to fund the government, the vote on the matter is one place Democrats actually do hold tremendous power to force concessions from the party in power.
Finally, there’s the power of the bully pulpit. Playing possum, as Carville advises, implies to the public that the things that are currently happening are not unacceptably dangerous. Speaking out forcefully—as only a few Democrats, mostly at the state level, are currently doing—would drive more constituent alarm and activism, and give even cowardly media cover to frame the story as at least plausibly the five-alarm fire that it most certainly is.
‘It’s their government’
All Things Considered (2/14/25) highlighted “the tension that congressional Democrats face with a base pushing them to be more aggressive in combating the Trump administration—but with very limited power as the party in the minority.”
In its article, Axios did quote both Indivisible and fellow progressive grassroots organization MoveOn, but only to say things like, “Our member energy is high”—not to reveal to readers what, exactly, they say Democrats could be doing but aren’t. That leaves the obvious impression that progressive groups are doing precisely the counterproductive thing that Democrats say they are doing—shouting at the wrong people, who have no power—and therefore they should stop setting their “expectations too high” for elected Democrats.
Other outlets didn’t even make the minimal effort of quoting those groups, or any other critics, in their reporting on supposed Democratic helplessness. At NPR‘s All Things Considered (2/14/25), for instance, you could find this headline: “Democrats Face Pressure to Fight Trump Agenda, But Have Limited Power in the Minority.” The piece quoted House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D–N.Y.), who said in a press briefing: “What leverage do we have? Republicans have repeatedly lectured America—they control the House, the Senate and the presidency. It’s their government.”
Rather than question that premise, NPR‘s Barbara Sprunt called it “a reality that has driven a disconnect between Democratic lawmakers and many of their constituents.” The only sources interviewed were Democratic House members who shared that position.
In the most recent round of Sunday shows, some hosts noted the increasing demands on Democrats. CNN‘s State of the Union host Jake Tapper (2/23/25) interviewed Jeffries, with the opportunity to press him on Democrats’ options for standing up to Trump and Musk’s lawlessness. Instead, he prodded him to give up the single biggest tool House Democrats currently have: “Are House Democrats going to vote to keep the government open? Or are you just going to let the Republicans be in charge of all of it?”
Similarly, on NBC‘s Meet the Press (2/23/25), host Kristen Welker pointed out to her Democratic guest, Sen. Cory Booker (D–N.J.), that “some of your fellow Democrats are saying they will support shutting down the government to protest President Trump’s policies.” She demanded to know: “You won’t help keep it open?”
‘Congress can’t do anything’
“Despite growing Republican discomfort that Musk’s actions are getting the green light from President Donald Trump,” Politico (2/18/25) reported, “there is little the GOP might be able, or willing, to do”—eliding the vast difference between “willing” and “able.”
Obviously Republican elected officials do have vastly more power to stop the Trump/Musk coup, and yet it’s not hard to find reporters letting them completely off the hook, too. Despite reports of many GOP town halls filling up with angry constituents, Republican congressmembers who admit qualms with some Trump or Musk’s actions have even more absurdly than Democrats feigned helplessness.
Politico‘s Hailey Fuchs (2/18/25) reported that Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the longest-serving member of his party in the chamber, claimed that his hands were tied in response to Trump and Musk slashing federal agencies and jobs, since those were part of the executive branch: “Congress can’t do anything except complain.”
Politico added some words of analysis that basically restated and therefore supported Grassley’s laughable contention that Congress is powerless in the face of flagrantly unconstitutional actions from the executive branch:
Grassley’s comments serve as a stark admission that, despite growing Republican discomfort that Musk’s actions are getting the green light from President Donald Trump, there is little the GOP might be able, or willing, to do.
Steve Benen of Maddow Blog (2/19/25), on the other hand, showed how simple it is to do what journalists are actually supposed to do, pointing out that Grassley’s claim was “plainly untrue,” and listing a sampling of the things Grassley could do with his power:
call a hearing and demand Musk’s testimony;
issue subpoenas to the quasi-governmental Department of Government Efficiency;
introduce legislation limiting DOGE’s authority;
file lawsuits;
sign onto amicus briefs filed in courts;
impose Senate holds until his concerns are addressed;
vote against nominees and bills until his concerns are addressed.
Dependence on corporate donors
Sludge (2/24/25): “There are a lot of factors for why the elected Democrats can’t seem to muster a powerful opposition to the administration, one of which is that they have financially tied their political futures to the companies and industries that benefit from it.”
It’s no surprise that Republican congressmembers would cravenly refuse to protect their constituents’ interests in favor of following the marching orders of their party leader.
But it also shouldn’t be so surprising that top Dems would shy away from doing anything to seriously interfere with Musk’s wrecking ball, given that the Democratic party depends upon major corporate donors that include those directly connected to Musk’s rogue pseudo-agency, “DOGE.”
As Sludge (2/24/25) reported, the House Democrats’ campaign arm accepted over $2.5 million in January from the top lobbyist for Musk’s SpaceX and for Peter Thiel’s Palantir, which has been helping to staff DOGE, and whose “artificial intelligence-powered software is well positioned to win contracts to replace functions eliminated by DOGE’s slashing.” $2.5 million represents over a quarter of the DCCC’s entire haul last month.
Meanwhile, corporate media, who have a long history of scorning and marginalizing progressive voices, continue to do so even in the face of an authoritarian administrative coup, giving cover to the elected representatives from both parties whose duty it is to uphold the Constitution.
In the last twenty four hours European and American liberals have raced to express their solidarity with poor old Zelensky after his dressing down in the White House by Trump and Vance.
These are the same European and American liberals who not only couldn't bring themselves to express an ounce of solidarity with defenceless Palestinians as America's colony state went on an 18 month genocidal slaughter spree but who, in many cases, enthusiastically armed and funded this slaughter spree.
Liberal politicians who truly believe they’re striking a morally courageous pose over Ukraine provided the weapons, funding and political cover for the murder, rape, torture, dismemberment, beheading, and starvation of an entire population.
We’ve seen children without heads, the fleshy remains of babies scooped into plastic bags. We’ve seen pictures of boys with Down's Syndrome ripped apart by dogs, of quadriplegics sniped dead in their wheelchairs. We’ve seen hospitals invaded and cancer wards turned into forward operating bases. We’ve seen babies in incubators left to rot and die. We’ve seen soldiers with American, English, Scottish, Australian accents joke breezily about war crimes on Instagram stories, joint citizens of our countries who faced no punishment and seamlessly melted back into our societies, the blood of children dripping from their hands ignored by the good guy liberals. We’ve seen terror act after terror act gleefully perpetrated by a west-backed colony, a land devastated, made apocalyptic, reduced almost fully to rubble with missiles and bombs paid for by us. BY US.
But now, in headline after headline, statement after statement, these fucking liberals, who’ve displayed biblical levels of satanic death-eating depravity, who said the square route of fuck all about the gravest act that a state can ever inflict on a people, they’re desperate for us to feel sorry for a rich man sitting in the White House because Trump said some hurty words?
FUCK OFF.
Feel sorry for Zelensky? That’s great man of history bollocks, the idea of valour encapsulated in the man at the top of a power structure hierarchy. We should feel sorry, heartbroken and enraged by the fact half a million young men or more have died in this war. For families forever broken by the oldest and most gruesome of human follies. But the youthful dead and their families aren’t the ones to whom liberals are directing their solidarity.
Honest to god, they have a completely fucked up value system.
And let me tell you what you won’t hear from the media obsessing and whining over bullied little Zelensky. You won’t hear that at almost the exact moment Zelensky was walking out of the White House the Trump administration signed off on an emergency package of ‘military aid’ for Israel.
$3.01 billion in arms & equipment. On top of the $7 something billion from a few weeks ago. More than $10 billion in a few weeks.
They’ll say nothing about this. Nothing about this at all. Because they are murderous, racist, irredeemable scum who apply a selective morality to advance political and geopolitical agendas.
They’ll condemn Trump when he doesn’t play along with their imperial games but lose their tongues and their keyboards when he does.
Trump is an obscene and hideous character, but I blame liberals for all of it. All of it. Everything that’s happening.
For forty years liberal politicians and their media mouthpieces have actively deceived people and pretended to be the good guys to win support from genuinely good, pro-social people but once in power advanced evils that helped prise open the door for even greater evils to come.
They’ve deregulated, privatised and offshored, they’ve courted billionaires, destroyed unions and made war, all in the name of progressivism.
They’ve talked of science and climate change and then let viruses run rampant and fuelled biosphere collapse.
They’ve hijacked people’s innate goodness and turned it towards evil.
And it should make us fucking sick.
We should be sick and tired of this, of the liberal elite class's disguised racism, extreme hypocrisy and total moral impoverishment. We should be furious at them for abandoning ideas of justice, equity and a good life for all. We should despise a liberal class who long ago abandoned any commitment to anti-war ideals and now schill for war. We should recognise a liberal class who drill more oil than the bad guys, who finance and commit genocide for the irredeemable, soulless husks they are.
And we should never look to them to save us from evil, from horror, from fascism.
Their performative progressive bullshit is antithetical to the fight for a better world.
To save ourselves from these approaching horrors we have to end liberalism as a political force.
The Democratic Party in the US, the British Labour Party, the Liberal Party of Canada, Macron’s centrist En Marche party, the Australian Labor Party and all the others: they must die or otherwise be consigned to irrelevance.
I am begging you: never again try to turn these parties into vehicles for liberation.
Some of us tried, we really did.
We got close with Corbyn, but the deck was stacked.
And we should never EVER waste our energy trying again.
We need to let the uneasy left-ish voter coalition that fractured over Gaza lie dead forever.
We’ve got to turn the page and build something new.
How? What? I have no fucking idea.
Anarchism isn’t good enough.
Individualism isn’t good enough.
We need new pro-social options, new political figureheads, new movements, new political parties of the left. Anti-war, anti-elite, anti-oligarch, anti-billionaire, anti-capitalist.
Right now there is a kind of vacuum, a space waiting to be filled.
It feels hopeless to have nowhere to go.
But if we turn back to the traditional liberal parties out of fear at rising fascism or the lack of alternative options, we’ll snuff out the possibility of something new emerging in these vacuums.
One reason for hope is the explosion of alternative left and anti-imperial media. Where there is an audience, there will always be a viable something that can cater to it able to be created.
We have to hold our nerve.
If revolutionary conditions have to materialise before something new can be formed, if true vehicles for liberation can only be forged in the crucible of social decay, so be it.
But we should never again sell our souls for a dribble of liberal silver.
[bChecking In on the Democrats’ Search for the “Good Billionaires”[/b]
Posted on March 5, 2025 by Conor Gallagher
While there’s clearly been a lot of infighting among the US ruling elite in recent years, there are at least a few unifying forces currently helping them to hold hands and sing “Kumbayah”:
(1)
(2) The looting of the US by Silicon Valley and Wall Street that is going into overdrive under the Trump administration.
We can see this elite reconciliation in the Democrats’ learned “powerlessness” to do anything — not even their patented “fighting” — in the face of cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, Head Start, the Department of Education, affordable housing, accommodations for the disabled, environmental protections, public health, etc. Indeed, some Democrats even voiced support for DOGE’s mission of taking a wrecking ball to the government so that private corporations can pick up — and profit off — the pieces.
In a political masterstroke that betrays how rotten the American system is, Trump has united the Wall Street private equity crowd, Silicon Valley, Big Oil, the military-industrial complex, and Zionists behind him.
Where do the Democrats turn? The People, No. Don’t be silly. They’re not going to take on any of these billionaires by taking seriously the concerns of the unwashed masses. In fact, they don’t even want their money anymore. A group of moderate Democratic consultants, campaign staffers, elected officials and party leaders recently gathered for a retreat where they plotted their party’s comeback. One eyebrow raising suggestion that came out of the meeting was the following:
Move away from the dominance of small-dollar donors whose preferences may not align with the broader electorate.
You know the party is in desperate billionaire-ass-kissing mode when its turning down free money from the plebs. More from Politico on the party’s ongoing discussions on how to tinker with the messaging. While their takeaways do include a welcome move away from identity politics, it will of course not be replaced by any sort of working class politics, but instead “a focus on shared American values.” What exactly are those shared values? It’s difficult to tell from the document but the rebranded messaging will pursue them:
Embrace patriotism, community, and traditional American imagery (e.g., farms, main streets).
Get out of elite circles and into real communities (e.g., tailgates, gun shows, local restaurants, churches).
Develop a stronger, more relatable Democratic media presence (podcasts, social media, sports broadcasting).
Encourage candidates to be bold, engaging, and authentic in their messaging rather than overly polished.
Engage with small businesses, business podcasts, podcasts like “Earn Your Leisure” that reach the aspiring class, and entrepreneurs to discuss economic policies.
Be Pro-Aspiration & Pro-Capitalism in a Smart Way
Recognize that working-class voters value upward mobility and economic success.
Have a prosperity gospel aimed at the working class.
Essentially, the party is going to lose the identity politics and remain a more couth version of Trump without accepting MAGA-style small dollar donations.
In the meantime their message largely revolves around attempts to outflank Trump on genocide:
And cheerleading more war with nuclear-armed Russia through childish taunts:
(See link)
Are Democrats really this feckless, as is widely accepted? Maybe. If you view America’s two-party system as a contest over who can better serve the money, they are now failing at that as well.
Maybe I’m too cynical, but from my vantage point American politics consists entirely of the two parties attempting to appeal to voters on the empire and its oligarchs’ terms. Which is why we see repackaging nearly identical policies from Biden’s “Foreign Policy for the Middle Class” to Trump’s “America First.” Their primary purpose is to sell the empire to the American people by demonizing the plutocrats’ “enemies” abroad, i.e., those that resist their control, and justify the transfer of public wealth to weapons companies and Silicon Valley firms tasked with winning the AI Cold War.
If you read political reporting closely you can see the real election is taking place behind the scenes with candidates and parties making their pitches to the plutocrats, and the fight over big money depends on whose narrative will better serve the plutocratic system.
With the gutting of campaign finance laws, this is more true than ever. We see this with Kamala being feted in the Hamptons. We saw it with Silicon Valley ripping off the faux woke masks and revealing the true hierarchical, eugenicist nature of the country’s tech capital as soon as the decision was made to back Trump.
We see it now with Democrats, without any real strong plutocrat backing, sitting on their hands meekly trying to renew their pitch to Silicon Valley. We get horse race coverage and most political reporting maintains the illusion that Americans live in the greatest democracy the world has ever known. Here’s a run-of-the-mill Politico piece that unintentionally revealed the stench from the stinking carcass of American democracy:
…the moneyed tech world that Musk hails from is critical to Democrats’ fortunes in 2026.
“There is a significant fear that these tech folks, who have been with us for a long time, will say, ‘fuck it, we’re going with the other guys,’” said Alex Hoffman, a Democratic donor adviser who works with donors across the country but did not attend the event. “These donors are also pissed, watching former and current colleagues have unlimited, unchecked power, and getting richer off of this and they’re not.”
Democrats are “trying to mend fences and they’re also trying to keep them in the tent,” Hoffman added.
Politico cites the Biden administration’s antitrust enforcement — the one good thing team Biden did — as a primary reason Silicon Valley billionaires went so heavily for Trump. Democratic leadership have no doubt learned their lesson already.
That’s because their donors are sitting on the sidelines. Is that just because the Democrat leadership is composed of feckless morons? Or are the donors currently satisfied with what Trump is doing? The evidence points to the latter, considering Democrats paved the way for Trump-DOGE by largely pursuing the same policies over the years — just at a slower pace.
Dems will have to wait for Trump to stumble (i.e., alienate a sector of oligarchs) so the good billionaires currently with the bad guy can come back to good side. Got it?
Meanwhile, the Dems will have to come up with better ways to enrich the “good” billionaires (peel away the weapons oligarchs by being more hawkish than Trump?), which is what a bigtime donor at Jefferies Los Altos Hills gathering was saying:
“When will we move off this posture of complaining and moaning about Trump,” the person said. “What positive ideas will Democrats offer to people to bring people back in?”
By people, they mean the billionaire donor crowd, not people. After all, The group included several top tech executives, including DocuSign CEO Allan Thygesen, Box CEO Aaron Levie, Bloom Energy CEO K.R. Sridhar and Cooper Teboe, a major Democratic donor adviser in Silicon Valley. Robert Klein and Danielle Guttman Klein, major Democratic donors, hosted it at their home in Los Altos Hills.
And so Democrat-controlled states are now doing their best to prove their worth to Silicon Valley. Let’s take the Democrat supermajority state of California. What is it doing to help people that are going to have their lives destroyed by the Trump goons’ neoliberal shock therapy?
Aside from more cruel crackdowns on the homeless (about half of which are working and still unable to afford shelter by the way), the state is shoveling evermore money to Silicon Valley. Led by golden boy Gavin Newsom, commonly mentioned as 2028 presidential candidate, Sacramento is ready to start buying generative AI tools to “help solve statewide issues” like housing, unemployment and budgeting. Hey, it’s working so well at the national level, and with Musk’s ketamine indulgences he could probably find time to do the same to California.
As Dan Schnur, a political analyst and professor at UC Berkeley puts it, “[Calif. Governor Gavin] Newsom’s incentive for strengthening his relationship with Silicon Valley is probably stronger than his need for yet one more issue to fight over with Donald Trump.”
Newsom’s desire to out-Trump Trump on public destruction for Silicon Valley gain could get a lot easier, too. That’s because the California Democrat supermajority just made it easier for Silicon Valley oligarchs to bribe state politicians.
Of course this was always going to be the Democrats’ response to the election. They possess no reverse gear on the neoliberal train to fascism because they exist to lay the track by erasing class-based politics.
Adolph Reed Jr., who has a long history of always being right about this stuff, maintains that as hopeless as it seems now, rediscovering those class-based politics is the only way to stop that train from continuing to barrel down the tracks:
To the extent that the totality of politics, including among those who see themselves as the “left” or even advocates of a working-class agenda, has reduced to winning this election or preparing to win the next one, there’s no impetus to break with what passes for “sophisticated” political understanding that people like Kornacki, Ezra Klein, et al. peddle and the others who seek to join and follow them in that breathless, oh-so-serious Conversation swallow and regurgitate. And this isn’t to suggest that we need to disengage from electoral politics. We must engage; the everyday world and its concrete challenges don’t go away just because we want to transcend them. And we have to relate to that domain through the Dems, not consider it a platform for “Here I stand; I can do no other” performances of individual righteousness. We have to face up to the fact—finally—that all we can expect from Dem success is kicking the can of confrontation with fascism down the road for four years. But for that approach to make sense someone, and only the labor-left can lead it or maybe even do it, has to spend another four years between elections organizing a real constituency for a different way of talking and thinking about and doing politics. To put it bluntly, we won’t be able to face up to the fascist juggernaut without working to build an actual popular constituency for a different, openly working-class-based politics.
I’m not alone in noting that Trump/ism is not an anomaly; it’s now the point of the lance of what’s clearly a fascist international. As nonsite readers know, I’ve been contending for a while now that neoliberalism is, from one important perspective, only capitalism that has eliminated effective working-class opposition. And for the right that fact has always held out the same promise: thirty years ago, after the GOP took over Congress, I happened upon a press conference of seven of the most reprehensible reactionaries in the House, led by Gingrich, gloating about their plans to take the country back to the 1920s. More recently, I’ve asked what if neoliberalism is no longer capable—if only because significant sections of the bourgeoisie and its political reactionaries no longer see a need or are so drunk with their own power that, like their bolsonarista allies in Brazil or Gilded Age progenitors here, they’re utterly mortified by having to share public space with the rabble or pay taxes—of delivering enough to enough of the population to retain legitimacy as a nominally democratic order? And I’ve suggested that, if that’s the case, we may be facing the equivalent of a T-intersection at which there are only two possible, totally opposite directions to take.
Problem is, which groups are out there showing any promise of taking the wheel and steering it to the left — or at least putting up a fight?
(With his 'T-intersection' metaphor our writer reveals his 'progressive' affiliation. It's always been one of two directions and like they say in Texas the only thing on the middle of the road is dead armadillos.
And if so-called neo-liberalism has eliminated effective working-class opposition then why do they need fascism?
Perhaps they anticipate an eruption of that opposition as their latest gluttony becomes apparent to even the blinkered.)
******
Why Class Matters
After the last election, Democratic Party functionaries were puzzled that voters-- usually attuned closely to the economy-- failed to show proper appreciation for the Biden economic miracle. They cited the billions in federal money flowing toward economic growth; they repeated aggregate growth figures more robust than other advanced economies; they showed that consumer spending continued to show surprising vigor; they noted that aggregate incomes grew faster than inflation; and they reminded us of the often-mentioned markers of rising stock market and housing values.
Baffled by the voters who shunned Bidenomics and complained about the economy, Democratic Party pundits are convinced that voters are simply ignorant of the facts.
Today, perhaps more than ever, the failure to recognize social-class divisions produces ill-informed, arrogant judgments like those prominent within Democratic Party circles. While aggregate numbers may tell one story, they fail to tell the story of the economic well-being of the classes and strata that make up the aggregate, even the by-far-largest segment of that aggregate. Could it be that Biden’s economic victory was a victory for the wealthiest, the most generously compensated among the US population, while leaving the majority of US citizens (and voters) in the rear-view mirror?
The answer is an unequivocal ‘yes.’
And the answer comes, not from a left-leaning think tank, but from Federal Reserve data by way of Moody’s Analytics and summarized in The Wall Street Journal.
As reported in the WSJ, the top 10% of “earners” -- those households reporting $250,000 in income or more-- are responsible for 49.7% of consumer spending. In other words, nearly half of all consumer spending is accounted for by those in the top 10% of all those reporting their incomes. This is the largest share for this elite segment since the Federal Reserve began tracking in 1989. In just three decades, the top 10%'s portion has increased from over a third to nearly half of all consumer spending.
According to the WSJ:
Taken together, well-off people have increased their spending far beyond inflation, while everyone else hasn’t. The bottom 80% of earners spent 25% more than they did four years earlier, barely outpacing price increases of 21% over that period. The top 10% spent 58% more…
Between September 2023 and September 2024, the high earners increased their spending by 12%. Spending by working-class and middle-class households, meanwhile, dropped over the same period.
Democratic Party consultant James Carville likes to say “it's the economy, stupid!” that decides US elections. If he is right, the celebration of Bidenomics was widely off the mark. During the Biden years, for 80% of US voters, their economy was stagnant, at best. In that light, the election results are far more understandable as reflective of pocketbook issues.
US economic growth is often portrayed by the major media as driven by household consumption (around two-thirds of gross US economic activity comes from household consumption). However, these reports are deceptive if they fail to acknowledge that nearly all of the consumption growth impacting GDP growth comes from the wealthiest 10% of the population. Arguably, so-called luxury spending is the driving force behind economic growth in the US in our time.
Thus, the widely heralded mantra of capitalist apologists that “a rising tide lifts all boats” has it backwards. In fact, the privileged 10% of all boats that rise constitute the tide.
Economy 101 preaches that working people spend nearly all that they make (or need to borrow more to make ends meet). That same conventional wisdom tells us that the rich reinvest or save most of their earnings. Both may be and are true, though inequality of income has grown so much that the richest 10% can save and reinvest while spending lavishly and conspicuously.
Since late 2021, the excess savings of the bottom 90% has dropped from about $1.1 trillion dollars to $300 billion at the end of 2024. In roughly the same period, the uppermost 10% has maintained an excess savings of about $1.3-1.4 trillion, according to Moody’s Analytics. Clearly, the bottom 90% was forced to draw down savings over the last four years in order to get by. It is important to notice that the concept of the “bottom 90%” masks the reality that each successive lower decile of household income below the top 10% has fewer means and lesser savings to meet a reasonably adequate standard of living. In short, the pain induced by a system maintaining such vast income inequality grows more acute as the level of income declines.
While not a proper class analysis of US society (not to be expected from official government statistics), the Federal Reserve data, as interpreted by Moody’s Analytics, provides a material basis for understanding the most recent US election. As opposed to dire conclusions of a fascist mentality sweeping the country or wild celebrations of the revival of a mythical conservative past, the economic unraveling of the last period fed the electorate's profound thirst for change, any change.
In the wake of a deep economic collapse in the first decade of a new century-- a crisis unlike any seen for generations-- US voters turned, at that time, to a fresh-faced Democrat promising change. He won voters with his earnest, unbounded hope. He produced little change, but more of the same blindness to inequality.
Now, in the wake of the economic stagnation and hardship for the majority 90% struggling through the Biden years, another snake oil salesman returns, capturing one of the two decadent parties with another message of change-- Make America Great Again.
And again, voters act out of desperation.
Don’t blame the voters, blame the bankrupt two-party system and the economic system dominated by and for the rich and powerful.
[1] A proper economic class analysis will not evoke income or wealth-- simply contingent, quantified signifiers of inequality-- but qualitative indicators of socio-economic position or status. For Marxists, class is defined by an agent's function within a particular mode of production with regard to the economic relation of exploitation. Thus, under capitalism, class is a division between exploiters-- capitalists-- and the exploited-- workers. One class commands the means of production, the other class sells the former its labor power.
Of course, there are strata within and outside of the two classes: the haute and petit bourgeoisie, the ‘labor aristocracy,’ industrial workers, lumpen-proletariat, etc.
In general, income and wealth inequality are a result of class division and exploitation under capitalism and not its cause.
Trump’s Address to Congress, Lame Democrat Proposals, Highlights the Absence of Opposition
Posted on March 12, 2025 by Yves Smith
Yves here. John Ruehl’s post below gives a detailed roundup of how the soi-disant Trump opposition of his first term has been missing from action under Trump 2.0. Ruehl glosses over the fact that the Democrat crushing of Sanders and his agenda helped pave the way for Trump. It was a repudiation of the idea of giving concrete material benefits to working and middle class citizens.A nd with the old “unifying figures’ having been Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, the bench was bad even in supposedly better times.
His post also serves as an excuse for me to discuss only briefly a new book that is making the rounds, Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, which purports to blaze a new path for Team Dem to win back working class families. Otherwise I might have had to undertake a full bore shellacking of it, as recapped in a review in The New Republic. But it’s such an insult to intelligence that even your humble blogger might have lost some brain cells as a result of too much engagement with its prescription.
The disconnect starts with the title: Abundance. Abundance is a term popular in the New Age and perhaps also in evangelical prosperity churches. Basically, it means if you believe hard enough, God (or Spirit, or Laws of Attraction) will make you rich. So the authors are signaling that they expect their solutions to be magicked into existence.
The review presents this as the core of the argument:
Promising truly effective government, they believe, will strengthen a liberalism that has accepted dangerous levels of dysfunction in day-to-day operations, which has made it difficult for fellow Americans to see why market-based solutions are not superior.
Decades of public policies that liberals enacted in the 1950s and 1960s, Klein and Thompson observe, saddled government with multiple layers of regulations, rules, mandates, and paperwork, all of which have since made it nearly impossible to accomplish key objectives. As demand has increased for many social goods, such as reasonably priced homes, clean energy, education, and medicine, the government has failed to supply. Liberals keep throwing money at the problem, but the authors believe that the money is not being well spent. As a result, we have a supply crisis that raises prices because we don’t have enough of what we need: “The problem we faced in the 1970s was that we were building too much and too heedlessly. The problem we face in the 2020s is that we are building too little, and we are too often paralyzed by process.” Personal and public debt exploded as Americans tried to keep up with higher costs for scarce goods.
Help me. I’m sure readers can pile on with what is wrong about this new scheme, but let me provide a few opening jabs.
Notice the utter absence of interest in labor bargaining rights and real wages? How hard is it, operationally, to increase the minimum wage? To strengthen union rights and lower the barriers to their formation? Or how about restoring that great American socialist Richard Nixon’s revenue sharing, giving states and localities bulk funding, subject only to anti-fraud controls? The idea behind revenue sharing was that the Feds were more efficient at revenue collection, while states and municipalities had a better grip on community needs and could often set up and run focuses programs better.
The problem here is political, not niggly rules and procedures. Or more accurately, the niggly rules and procedures are to a fair degree due to means testing for the poors. It’s not hard to see that as an effort to deny them aid, given that the less well educated who would find it hard to deal with paperwork requirements, skew low income.
And as far as “reasonably priced homes” a big obstacle is not “the government” but NIMBY-ism in the form of communities resisting the construction of multi-family units as well as mixed-income developments. With medicine, IM Doc has recounted that the reduction in the size of US med school programs started in the 1980s as a matter of policy out of concern over an expected doctor glut. The belief then was that any shortfall (and one was expected) would be filled by foreign-trained doctors recruited to work here. That largely fell apart as those non-American MDs recoiled when they encountered US practice, as in having to spend substantial amounts of time fighting with insurers to get paid.
To put this more simply, “What about neoliberalism and rentierism don’t you understand? And what are your ideas for rolling that back?” What were the radical conservatives of the 1960s set up an open-ended program of think tankery and messaging to move the values of the US to be much more business friendly. If you aren’t prepared to engage in a similarly long-term propaganda/organizing campaign, what do you propose to truncate this process?
By John P. Ruehl is an Australian-American journalist living in Washington, D.C., and a world affairs correspondent for the Independent Media Institute. He is a contributor to several foreign affairs publications, and his book, Budget Superpower: How Russia Challenges the West With an Economy Smaller Than Texas’, was published in December 2022. Produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute
During his address to Congress on March 4, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump faced brief heckling from Democratic Representative AI Green and scattered jeers from his colleagues. But the overwhelming response was silence, reflective of the reality that opposition to Trump has sharply weakened, even as his administration pushes sweeping domestic and international policy upheaval.
The opening weeks of his first term in January 2017 were met with fierce resistance, and not just from combative Democrats. People came together to protest against Trump’s immigration policies and his proposed travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries. Republican politicians openly defied him amid constant media scrutiny. Clashes with the so-called “deep state” due to intelligence leaks escalated when the FBI publicly confirmed an investigation into the Trump-Russia collusion in the 2016 election. These combined tensions defined his first term, culminating in him being temporarily banned from most major social media platforms and leading to widespread condemnation and isolation after the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack.
Now, at the start of his second term, opposition is notably subdued. The Women’s March that drew millions in 2017, becoming “the largest single-day public demonstration in U.S. history,” according to the New York Times, seems to have “lost its luster” during his second term. The February 5protest against Trump and Elon Musk’s policies drew a low turnout, mostly confined to liberal enclaves, and the 2025 Oscars—once a stage for political grandstanding—avoided directly critiquing the president. Even Green’s disruption caused dissent within his own party, with 10 Democrats censuring him the next day.
Political and institutional fatigue, shifting cultural dynamics, and strategic alignment by corporations, billionaires, politicians, and other public figureshave blunted resistance, leaving the Trump administration with fewer obstacles as it pushes forward with its agenda.
One major factor is the weakness and division within the Democratic Party, preventing grassroots progressives from working with top-level establishment Democrats. After years of Biden attempting to balance the party’s competing factions, tensions rose significantly following his response to the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas. Trump’s victory a year later—securing both the electoral college and popular vote—has only deepened these fractures, fueling a blame game that contrasts with the unity following Trump’s narrower 2016 election victory.
The party’s electoral failures are compounded by the absence of a unifying figure. Nancy Pelosi is no longer speaker, and while Chuck Schumer is the Senate minority leader, both of them are old and unpopular. Bernie Sanders, who is in his 80s, represents a sidelined progressive movement that has struggled to elevate new, dynamic leaders due to years of suppression by establishment Democrats. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has failed to offer new solutions, only deepening apathy and fatigue.
Without organizational cohesion and the ability to inspire its base, the Democratic Party has been unable to marshal its diverse coalition against Trump’s agenda. The issue that has mobilized progressives in large numbers in recent years is Palestine, which establishment Democrats are reluctant to support, including the recent arrest and threatened deportation of pro-Palestinian student Mahmoud Khalil. Losing young male voters has further weakened the party’s ability to generate active dissent.
Its association with progressive identity politics has meanwhile alienated broader segments of the electorate, with Biden having failed to address glaring economic issues and matters like crime and immigration during his presidency.
On the Republican side, dissenting voices like Mitt Romney and the late John McCain are gone, and those who still might challenge Trump within the party fear backlash and isolation. “Never Trump” conservative groups have struggled to pull voters away, while Trump’s systemic dismantling of government bureaucracy (historically staffed with left-leaning officials) and the appointment of loyalists to key positions have cemented his control over the government and prevented institutional attempts to undermine him.
With Republican control over all three branches of government, a conservative-majority Supreme Court, and Trump loyalists installed across federal agencies, his power—though often overstated—far surpasses that of his first term. Executive orders, constrained by previous presidents, are now being deployed at an unprecedented rate. His administration’s ambitious federal restructuring efforts, tied to the Project 2025 framework, go beyond the government overhauls of Ronald Reagan’s Grace Commission or Bill Clinton’s bipartisan National Performance Review. Yet, Democratic disarray has left these efforts largely unchecked.
Trump’s progress also hinges on the support of the ultrawealthy. The Democratic Party is experiencing a funding shortfall, not just from grassroots donors but from major oligarchs as well. Meanwhile, Trump has secured broader public backing from America’s corporate elite. Years of frustration with Democrats and the political left over issues like diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, taxation, and regulations have pushed many business leaders toward his camp.
This repositioning was on full display at Trump’s inauguration, where Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and many more wealthy individuals were given front-row seats. Google’s decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America,” a Trump executive order, signals the larger realignment across corporate America.
No billionaire has played a more consequential role than Elon Musk. Though his relationship with Trump was rocky just a few years ago, Musk’s endorsement of Trump in July 2024 cemented a powerful alliance between them. Musk’s control of X (formerly Twitter) not only reintroduced Trump to the media platform but also helped normalize his return to other social media networks. Meanwhile, Democrats have struggled to maintain their online presence amid declining engagement and financial strain.
This realignment has extended into the corporate media landscape. The aggressive anti-Trump narratives that dominated his first term have softened, driven by audience backlash against media institutions and wider progressive messaging. With traditional media outlets facing declining viewership, and the growing influence of oligarchic forces now backing Trump, the media’s pivot is as much about survival as it is about political recalibration.
Signs of this emerged even before the election. Jeff Bezos, who has owned the Washington Post since 2013, withdrew the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, as did billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the Los Angeles Times. CNN, under new leadership since 2023, has steadily adopted a more centrist tone, shedding high-profile anti-Trump figures like Don Lemon. MSNBC is undergoing an even more dramatic transformation, with outspoken Trump critics like Joy Reid and Alex Wagner losing their primetime slots in February 2025, while there has been scaling back of influence of others like Rachel Maddow in favor of less combative voices.
Emboldened by a changing media environment, Trump is increasingly punishing outlets. The Associated Press was banned from presidential events in February after declining to adopt the “Gulf of America” name. CBS remains embroiled in a $20 billion lawsuit filed by Trump over an edited interview with Kamala Harris, with Musk declaring that CBS reporters “deserve a long prison sentence.”
Meanwhile, Disney-ABC settled a defamation lawsuit with Trump for $15 million and recently replaced a transgender character from a new series with a Christian one. Meta, too, in January 2025, settled for $25 million for banning Trump from Facebook and Instagram after January 6. While these are small fines for corporate giants, they symbolize an increasing subservience to Trump, with both payments directed toward funding Trump’s presidential library.
It’s hardly surprising that Trump appears so powerful at this moment. Political opposition is fractured, leaving no effective barriers to Trump’s agenda. Many oligarchs have given him their quiet or public approval, as seen during his inauguration. The media’s softened stance has shaped a perception of reduced conflict. The absence of strong opposition has created new momentum as political, corporate, and media institutions adapt to this shifting power balance instead of fighting it, reducing the public’s appetite for resistance as well. For now, Trump is riding high after his election victory.
But cracks are beginning to show. Public resistance to Musk’s influence is growing, and the economic turbulence triggered by Trump’s policies is stirring unease. Without a strong and combative adversary, Trump and his most ardent supporters may find themselves without a rallying cause. International stability could further test his power, and the reality of governance may prove far more challenging than dismantling what came before.
Is this already the peak of Trump’s power, or can it be sustained? Opposition to Trump fluctuated during his first term, yet today, the political, business, and cultural landscapes have adjusted in his favor. His greatest advantage, however, may be the quiet acquiescence of elites from various backgrounds. While some may oppose him openly, many are content to let events play out due to self-interest or inertia.
Italics added, while Bernie is certainly phony baloney, the bosses fear even the suggestion, could be a slippery slope, could give the little people ideas.... Bernie would have won in 2016 and mebbe in 2024 too. Such is the bone-deep treachery of the Democratic Party which should be shunned, stomped, defenestrated, whatever it takes. Now is the time, if we let them get away with their 'good cop' scam again we are useless.
******
The Fog of Class War
Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright 12 Mar 2025
A class consciousness among the working masses, one that takes the issue of race seriously, is critical at this moment. Still, the democrats are working to disrupt this effort to organize against the capitalist elite.
“War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty. A sensitive and discriminating judgment is called for; a skilled intelligence to scent out the truth.” - Carl von Clausewitz (1873).
The primary weapon of the ruling class is capitalism, and the greatest anathema to the capitalist construct is multiracial, multiethnic, and, intergenerational/intergenderational working class solidarity and militancy. This has been known since the 1786 Shays’ Rebellion, which occurred just ten years after the colonies’ so-called Declaration of Independence from the British empire. The significance of Shays’ Rebellion is multifaceted - not only did it represent a coordinated class struggle against the newly minted ruling class of the independent states, it also exposed the fickleness and abject hypocrisy of so-called revolutionaries like Samuel Adams.
On the one hand, oppressed farmers who rejected being sacrificed by wealthy financiers to pay down the debts of the “American Revolution,” rightfully believed, as one anonymous farmer put it:
“I’ve labored hard all my days and fared hard. I have been greatly abused, have been obliged to do more than my part in the war. . . . I have been obliged to pay and nobody will pay me. . . . I think it is time for us to rise and put a stop to it, and have no more courts, nor sheriffs, nor collectors, nor lawyers, and I know that we are the biggest party, let them say what they will. . . .We’ve come to relieve the distresses of the people.”
On the other hand, famous “revolutionaries” like Samuel Adams concluded, “the man who dares rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death,” despite the fact that, the Governor of Massachusetts, ratified policies that would seize and sell the land and livestock of farmers to the wealthy for cheap rates to which they responded with nonviolent civil disobedience. Adams had no issues with the Governor, in collusion with the ruling class, utilizing the same tactics as King George to allow Massacussetts financiers who were paying themselves windfall profits as part of paying down the debts owed by the new United States to fund its “revolution,” by extracting from common people. Capitalism gets its power, in part, by seducing “revolutionaries” like Adams into the praxis of paradoxical osmosis - the process of becoming the oppressor who swore to usurp while unconsciously utilizing the same tactics that push people down, instead of holding them up.
This is a perpetual theme observed throughout the history of the U.S. republic.
Moving forward to the early 20th century, a significant epoch for both the rise and precipitous fall of multiracial class solidarity, we must analyze the significance of one of the greatest labor uprisings in U.S. history, the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain. As comrade Howard Zinn notes, “Most of the time when class solidarity is discussed, it is thought of in a way where class consciousness supersedes or wipes away other forms of consciousness such as racial or ethnic ones. However, when one digs into the history of the battle, it is obvious that class solidarity did not erase racial or ethnic issues.” He concludes, “Instead, [during the Battle of Blair Mountain] union organizers and officials worked diligently to address the civil struggles of Black miners.”
This is not to say that all the white mine workers were without anti-Black. racist views, but as Zinn confirms, Blair Mountain did cross many racial and ethnic lines as evidenced by the fact that a committee of three commanders who led many of the mineworkers included one white American man, one Black man, and one immigrant of Italian descent. As such, Blair Mountain was more than an exercise solely of class solidarity, it also demonstrated the power of class struggle when it synergizes and intersects with the interests of white, Black, immigrant and other workers.
The extensive impacts of Blair Mountain are irrefutable - it increased consciousness about poor and unsafe working conditions, it demonstrated the power workers have over the national economy, and it was integral in increasing the number of unionized workers from the United Mine Workers of America to the later formed Steel Worker, American Federation of Labor (AFL), and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). This in itself must have induced fear and even duress among the ruling class and their purchased political acolytes. That said, the rising tide of communism and socialism in the United States during the early 20th century was the last straw - the capitalist ruling class needed to respond and quickly bifurcate, create fission, and, by all means necessary, disrupt and dismantle growing and demonstrable multiracial class solidarity among the masses.
The Great Depression, which the capitalist class predicted would only last a few weeks, represented a grand elucidation of the contradictions of, and minority beneficiaries of capitalism. This epoch also saw the height of the communist party in the U.S., who were known to include and exercise more of a racial analysis than their socialist counterparts. According to the historian, Norman Markowitz, understanding that the U.S. treatment of its Black population was a key component of capitalist rule, the communists “saw the unions as the best means of organizing Black and white working people to fight together against all forms of racism, with racism among the white working class being a central focus.” This notion is vindicated by the 1931-1932 case of the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black youth in Alabama who were falsely accused of raping a white woman, but were exonerated due, in large part, to the assistance of the Communist Party who assisted with funding their legal defense and raising national awareness and solidarity.
One can only imagine how apoplectic the white supremacist, capitalist ruling class was at the idea that any white people, much less communists, would play a leading role in defending and freeing Black men subjected to the kangaroo courts of the Jim/Jane Crow south. This chagrin must have been compounded by the growing number of United Statesians who considered themselves communists/socialists , especially in large cities in most of the country. Enter Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s so-called New Deal initiative - on its surface, a grand plan to direct massive government spending to lift people out of poverty and put them to work in good, unionized jobs. But this interpretation does not provide the full story, which includes the myriad ways that the New Deal also had the effect of denying generational wealth for nonwhite populations, while also acting as a cudgel for multiracial working class solidarity by opening the doors of whiteness to some previously denied membership including, but not limited to, European immigrants, especially those of Italian and Irish descent, and white passing, European Jewish people.
Poor and working class people have been at war with capitalists and the ruling class for time immeasurable. If the fog of war can be defined as, “confusion caused by the chaos of war or battle,” FDR’s New Deal very well acted as a fog machine in its efficacious strategy to pit workers of different races and ethnicities against each other. As author, Ira Katznelson observes in his landmark book When Affirmative Action was White, “By not including the occupations in which African Americans worked, and by organizing racist patterns of administration, New Deal policies for Social Security, social welfare, and labor market programs restricted black prospects while providing positive economic reinforcement for the great majority of white citizens.”
It can be argued that one of the more iniquitous and draconian elements of the New Dea, specifically the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, was the intentional exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers - two employment sectors with high numbers of nonwhite workers and, in the case of domestic workers, specifically, high numbers of Black and Brown women. By allowing this to happen, both the Democrats and labor unions signaled they were willing to sacrifice multiracial, multiethnic, and intergenderational working class solidarity to improve economic and working conditions for white workers at the direct expense of nonwhite workers. As Katznelson states, “The great majority of southern members of Congress supported these bills, thus allowing this pivotal New Deal legislation to succeed.” He continues, “The South was willing to support their wishes provided these statutes did not threaten Jim Crow. So southern members traded their votes for the exclusion of farmworkers and maids, the most widespread Black categories of employment, from the protections offered by these statutes. “In circumstances where congressional Republicans were adamantly opposed to these laws, the Democratic Party made these racially relevant adjustments to secure a winning coalition that included southern members of the party. As a result, these new arrangements were friendly to labor but unfriendly to the majority of African Americans who lived below the Mason-Dixon line.”
By allowing a break up of multiracial class solidarity, Democrats and willing unions paved the way for a concerted attack on the very idea of unionization and collective bargaining itself, vindicated by the notorious Labor Relations Management Act of 1947, commonly known as “Taft-Hartley.” In fact, it was southern Democrats who joined with Republicans to not only pass the act, but to also overcome a veto issued by President Harry Truman who, ironically, referred to Taft-Hartley as, “a slave labor bill.” And we all know what followed - since the passage of Taft-Hartley, the share of unionized workers in the private sector has dropped from approximately 33% to just 6% today.
This trend does not include the assault on public sector unions, who have also been significantly and adversely impacted by the rise of “right-to-work” laws that have been ratified in states that were previously the epicenter of radical labor organizing, including Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana. This move had particular and disproportionate impacts on Black workers who made up approximately 15.3% of the public sector workforce in 2022 , and currently make up 18.3% of federal workers in 2025 . That said, the concerted assault on the public sector workforce did not commence in 2011 with passage of Act 10 in Wisconsin - President Ronald Regan was a major progenitor of this assault using a new weapon of the ruling class and the capitalists that continues to act as interdiction for working class solidarity and labor power - neoliberalism.
A brief synopsis of neoliberalism, adroitly characterized by George Monibot , “Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.” And as it pertains to labor unions and class solidarity Monbiot adds, “The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone.” Here we can see how, with neoliberalism, the capitalist, white supremacist, ruling class have a primary and effective instrument to exacerbate the fog of class war and, in the process, pit workers of different races, ethnicities and gender identities against each other. To this end, to characterize neoliberalism as solely a right-wing construct would be an exercise of myopia.
A simple analogy that could easily be utilized as an SAT question would read, “capitalism is to Emperor Palpatine as neoliberalism is to Darth Vader.” And like the dark side of the Force seduced and corrupted Anakin Skywalker, neoliberalism did the same with so-called progressive Democrat party presidents like William Jefferson Clinton, who injected neoliberalism with legislative steroids including, but limited to, ushering the labor job, U.S. manufacturing killing North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the repeal of Glass Steagall that ended the separation of commercial banking from investment banking thereby providing for the impetus of “too big to fail,” and signing the Faircloth amendment that prohibits the federal government from constructing public housing.
His Democrat successor, Barack Hussein Obama, not to be outdone by the previous “first Black president,” may have been more insidious with his brand of neoliberalism, but embraced the ideology nonetheless. Both his “Affordable” Care Act and bailout of the corporations who were directly responsible for the largest national financial plunge since the Great Depression in lieu of the people pushed to the margins of, and, far too many, into a circumference of penury vindicate this sentiment. Obama’s neoliberalism had an even more deleterious effect on multiracial working class solidarity due to his race - and while blaming his failed policies on solely or primarily on his blackishness are feckless, his racial identity provided the right with even more ammunition as exemplified by the advent of the Tea Party and other right wing forces who became more radicalized during his presidency.
The electoral shellacking experienced by the Democrats in the past election would have you think that the party and its progressive wing would heed the call to build racial, ethnic and gender solidarity. Instead, the Democrats have signaled they have no desire to be an opposition party, and have more of a desire to flirt with right wing ideologies, including white “supremacy,” transphobia, genocide, and war. Neoliberalism has even seduced diet socialists like Alexandria Occasio Cortez and Bernie Sanders, who continue to sheepdog bewildered residents of the U.S. into the clutches of a party that has all but announced their primary directive - win back white Trump voters at the expense of poor and working class of all races but especially Black, Brown, Indigenous people who are supposed to be the “backbone” of the Democrat Party. A recent memo by the liberal Democrat consulting group, Third Way, confirms this. Therein, the flag of white “supremacy” ideology is firmly planted via suggested strategies including, but not limited to:
Stop addressing voters as identity blocs and instead focus on shared American values;
Embrace patriotism, community, and traditional American imagery (e.g., farms, main streets);
Push back against far-left staffers and groups that exert a disproportionate influence on policy and messaging;
Many working-class voters reject policies seen as giveaways (e.g., student loan forgiveness, universal basic income);
Democrats need to stop demonizing wealth and corporations broadly;
Show up in rural communities and places where Democrats are unpopular;
The emphasis on climate change is seen as harming job opportunities and economic growth, especially in working-class communities; and
Critique corporate excess and corruption but avoid an anti-capitalist stance.
To date there has been no push back on this piece of political detritus from any of the “progressive” members of the Democrat Party, and Bernie Sanders has not mentioned it once on his recent sheepdog tour that’s attracting majority white attendees. The effect of this unprincipled positioning is giving rise to an unchecked season of class reductionism where any discussion of race is rejected and rendered into pariah status. And with President Trump’s brand of populism still being embraced by a significant portion of the U.S. population and the lack of a true opposition party to raise awareness and a proverbial alarm, we are potentially heading to a pernicious conclusion of a cross class white supremacist coalition that eschews any serious discussion about race and has the ultimate effect of unifying the white left with the white right.
