Former Biden, Obama spokespersons cash in on Gaza genocide
Jack Poulson·July 12, 2025
A mercenary firm implicated in severe abuses in Gaza has hired a PR firm led by influential former Democrat flacks, including the spokeswoman for Biden’s Pentagon.
Meanwhile, a former State Dept spokesman who defended Israel’s crimes is now VP at a Democrat PR firm representing Israel’s Foreign Ministry.
Editor’s note: After The Grayzone published a report revealing damning new footage showing mercenaries from the UG Solutions firm firing toward crowds of desperate aid seekers in the southern Gaza Strip, the company deleted its entire press page. (The previously unreported footage had been inexplicably distributed to the media by UG Solutions itself).
Two days later, thanks to the sleuthing of journalist Jack Poulson, we learned that UG Solutions’ new press page was created by Seven Letter, a PR management firm operated by former Obama and Biden communications officials. Among those hired by Seven Letter was Sabrina Singh, the former Pentagon spokeswoman who routinely spun Israel’s crimes.
Seven Letters’ Gaza profiteering follows the high-level contract Israel’s Foreign Ministry signed with a top PR firm run by Biden veterans called SKDK. Among SKDK’s top recent hires was Vedant Patel, the former spokesman for the Biden State Department who was notorious for his absurd denials of documented Israeli crimes across occupied Palestine.
In addition to Israel’s Foreign Ministry, SKDK represents the 10/7 Project, a consortium of Jewish organizations which attacks reporters who fail to toe Israel’s line on Gaza.
Below is the article originally published by Jack Poulson and at All-Source Intelligence exposing UG Solutions’ contract with Seven Letter.
A militarized U.S. and Israeli effort to replace United Nations-affiliated aid into the occupied Gaza Strip, known as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), has received international condemnation since its launch in May. Formed as an offshoot of a vehicle inspection checkpoint along Gaza’s Netzarim corridor which opened in January, the effort now employs two American firms led by former CIA officers and Green Berets to distribute meals in a manner they describe as designed to prevent looting from Hamas.
As of Friday, the United Nations human rights office reported at least 615 killings, largely by the Israeli military, near the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s aid distribution points.
The primary boots on the ground since January, the North Carolina-based private military contractor UG Solutions led by former Green Beret Jameson Govoni, has largely operated as a subcontractor to the Virginia-based security and logistics firm Safe Reach Solutions, which is led by former CIA covert activities chief Philip Francis Reilly. In May, the two security contractors shifted to the background, with former USAID official John Acree and the evangelical public relations executive Johnnie Moore becoming the public face via the GHF, following the resignation of the GHF’s original executive director over concerns of violations of core humanitarian principles.
In response to the widespread controversy, including from an Associated Press report on a UG Solutions contractor-turned-whistleblower, UG Solutions hired the crisis communications firm Seven Letter, whose partners include former Biden and Obama administration spokespersons.
The relationship between UG Solutions and Seven Letter was first revealed through the newly published press relations page hosted on the blogging website Medium, where ‘Seven Letter’ was listed as one of three editors. Seven Letter partner Andrew O’Brien, who spent roughly three years as a special representative under U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, confirmed his company’s relationship with UG Solutions in response to a request for comment submitted to UG Solutions. “Seven Letter is not just a crisis communications firm, but a full service public relations and strategic communications firm,” wrote Mr. O’Brien.
For roughly a six day period beginning on July 3, UG Solutions hosted at the website ugsolutions.press a detailed response to the leaked footage provided to the AP by a former contractor, including two videos which UG Solutions described as providing important context. A critical examination of the broader footage was published on Monday by the independent American news outlet The Grayzone.
When reached for comment regarding the takedown of the footage published by UG Solutions, Seven Letter’s O’Brien stated that, “The press link was not taken down, there was an error in how the links worked and that has been resolved. It is now working.” However, the apparently rewritten July 3 press release from UG Solutions — which is now falsely dated to June 3 — no longer includes the previously published videos, which were previously embedded from the video-sharing website Vimeo. “Hi– where can we view or download the full videos?” asked Medium user Kaitlyn at roughly noon ET on Friday.
Seven Letter announced one month ago that Sabrina Singh, who ended her term as President Biden’s deputy Pentagon spokesperson in January, would be joining the firm as a partner. Singh, who is also listed as a senior advisor to the Biden administration-affiliated consulting firm WestExec Advisors, was described in her Seven Letter biography as one of the “most outward facing voices on the Pentagon’s efforts to surge security assistance to Ukraine and support to Israel following the October 7th attack often appearing on local and national outlets.”
Seven Letter partner Adam Abrams was similarly a White House regional communications director for roughly the first three years of Barack Obama’s presidency.
In response to questions regarding a recent UG Solutions advertisement for a three-month unpaid internship, which pitched contributing to “AI-based intelligence fusion tools” under the leadership of “former Special Operations Forces and CIA contractors” before requesting the pronouns of potential applicants, Mr. O’Brien stated that “We have no comment on HR matters.”
Patrick Lawrence: Sun Valley vs. Queensbridge
July 21, 2025
In New York City, the battle has been joined between Democratic Party elites and the voters they are increasingly committed to suppressing, between money and democratic process, between power and the forces for change.
Zohran Mamdani at a DSA 101 meeting in New York City in November 2024. (Bingjiefu He /Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 4.0)
By Patrick Lawrence
ScheerPost
Maybe there was a time in the past when a candidate to become New York City’s mayor prompted as much fervor in some quarters and as much fear and loathing in others as Zohran Mamdani, but I do not recall it.
In the 100–odd days until the city votes Nov. 4, we — New Yorkers and the rest of us— are in for political warfare that could turn out to be epochal. This will be a riveting campaign season; in my read it is unlikely to be a pretty one.
Mamdani, who has served in the state legislature since 2020, wowed New York City and the rest of the country when, on July 1, he trounced the Democratic field to win the party’s nomination to run for mayor this autumn.
The Democratic establishment, which had put its money on Andrew Cuomo (literally and figuratively), was stunned. Cuomo, a machine pol who resigned as governor of New York four years ago amid accusations of sexual harassment, was considered a shoo-in and, reflecting this, ran a campaign we can kindly describe as complacent.
Then came the blow: Mamdani, with more than 50,000 volunteers campaigning for him, took 56 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary, to Cuomo’s 44 percent.
Figures don’t always lie and liars don’t always figure.
Mamdani is a true phenom, an energetic 33–year-old full of policy proposals that address the real problems of real people. A free bus system, a freeze on rents in half the city’s apartments, supermarkets run by the city, a properly redistributive tax regime to address the near to obscene inequality New Yorkers endure: These are good ideas, ideas with obvious appeal to Democratic voters, ideas expressive of his commitment to dynamic change.
Mamdani, I have to add right off, also takes a principled position against the Israelis’ shocking barbarities in Gaza and then America’s support of them.
But one’s strengths are at times also one’s vulnerabilities, as Mamdani is about to discover. On Monday, July 14, Cuomo announced in a brief video that, rather than step aside after his punishing defeat, he will stay in the race as an independent with the all-but-stated intent of preventing New York from falling “in the hands of the far left,” as The New York Times idiotically put it in a piece reviewing Cuomo’s renewed campaign.
Cuomo, whose term as governor reeked of opportunism and corruptibility if not proven corruption, is now the unseemly front end of an attack on Mamdani that is unlikely to relent until this race is decided.
Wall Street and the banks, hedge-fund billionaires, major corporations, New York real estate developers, the Israel lobby, corporate media, the Democratic mainstream: These are all lining up to make sure Zohran Mamdani does not win come Nov. 4. He’s a Marxist, a socialist, a Communist, a lunatic, of course an anti–Semite.
Zionist extremists and their sympathizers charge that Mamdani, a Muslim, will impose Shariah law on New York City. President Donald Trump has wondered aloud whether he should have Mamdani arrested, or whether he, Mamdani, should be stripped of his citizenship.
MAGA Italians vs “Italians for Zohran” in NYC; filmed by Ford Fischer for News2Share.
Financial and corporate interests spent $22 million on Cuomo’s failed primary campaign. There is every indication they will spend more this time.
Let us, then, view this in the large: The battle has been joined between Democratic Party elites and the voters they are increasingly committed to suppressing, between money and democratic process, between power and the forces for change that gather as we speak not only in New York but across the country.
We have been here before, of course. But the risk that the Democrats will destroy themselves as they attempt to destroy Zohran Mamdani is in my estimation greater than ever.
Here is Mamdani on “Meet the Press” Sunday, July 1, just after his victory:
“We can beat anyone that’s in this race because what we’ve shown is that this is a campaign that has the support of more than 400,000 New Yorkers. For too long, politicians have pretended to simply be bystanders to a cost-of-living crisis. They’ve actually exacerbated it. And our vision is one that will respond to it and make this a city affordable for every New Yorker.”
And Mamdani when asked about the Gaza crisis in an interview with Politico during his campaign in April:
“I think what is incumbent to do is to stop subsidizing a genocide. And that’s what we’ve seen over more than a year. And it’s what we’ve seen intensify right now with Donald Trump.
And it is hard for me to explain to my constituents, who live in the largest public housing development in North America, in Queensbridge, why they have to live in substandard conditions because the government refuses to fund public housing, all while we continue to find billions of dollars to drop bombs that kill tens of thousands of Palestinians over more than a year now.
And the sheer number of children that have been killed does not even capture the level of trauma for those that have survived. And that is a responsibility for us to speak up against, as the people who are financing it.”
Queensbridge, New York, housing projects, 2014. (Paul Sableman/Flickr/ CC BY 2.0)
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s … it’s a political candidate who says what he means and what he means reflects the realities facing Americans in this, the third decade of our troubled new century.
I could not help noticing a couple of things in the news as Mamdani’s victory sank in.
One, there has been a spate of worry recently as various studies have come out indicating a radical shift in public opinion about Israel, Palestinians and the former’s campaign of terror against the latter in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Gallup and the Pew Research Center each weighed in this past spring to show roughly similar results — this shift most marked among Democrats.
Peter Beinart, who, among much else, opinionates at The New York Times, put it succinctly in a July 6 commentary. A dozen years ago Democrats polled by the Gallup Organization favored Israel over the Palestinians by a margin of 36 percentage points.
“This February,” he writes, “Gallup found that Democrats sympathized with Palestinians over Israel by a margin of 36 percentage points.”
How’s that for symmetry?
The headline atop Beinart’s column was, “Democrats Need to Understand That Opinions on Israel Are Changing Fast.” I thought Beinart’s commentary was O.K. so far as it went, but his headline writer seemed to me far off the mark. Of course mainstream Democrats understand that opinions on Israel are changing fast.
It is impossible to imagine otherwise. At issue here — and I detect what concerns Beinart subliminally — is that Democrats understand very well that opinions on Israel are changing fast and are utterly indifferent to this marked change in sentiment.
New York City Hall. (MusikAnimal/Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 4.0)
Two, just as I was putting these events side-by-side in my mind — the opinion polls on Israel, Mamdani’s brilliant rise to political prominence and the instantly frenetic response among various elites, The Grayzone published a six-minute segment concerning the annual retreat of the great and good that Allen & Co., a long-influential merchant bank that keeps well out of the public eye, has run for many years.
Here is Max Blumenthal, The Grayzone’s editor, on the occasion. The segment was published Tuesday, July 15:
“Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader [in the Senate] is heading for Sun Valley, Idaho, this week to meet with Hollywood elites and Big Tech elites in a semi-secret, off-the-record retreat .… and they’re basically all conspiring to determine who will be the next Democratic … I wouldn’t say ‘conspiring,’ but they’re discussing, one of the agenda items, is who the Democrats will put forward as their next candidate…. This is how it works.”
I don’t see anything wrong with “conspiring,” myself. And in this brief clip Blumenthal has certainly captured “how it works.” They are demonstrating how it works in New York as we speak.
Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge-fund manager, promises hundreds of millions of dollars to support Eric Adams, New York’s current mayor, as the man to take down Mamdani. Adams, of course, faced federal corruption charges until President Trump ordered the case thrown out.
My question is how long this kind of anti-democratic ugliness can remain how it works.
Voters in New York, where Democrats outnumber Republicans by a margin of six to one, have just told their party they favor a candidate who promises imaginative change.
They have announced, to step back a short distance, that they want America to be something new, another kind of America. But there is no reply from the party’s upper reaches. You would think these elites would listen and learn at this point, but they show no inclination to do either.
They continue to cast Mamdani as some kind of anti–Israel radical — lots of Islamophobia going around since he won the primary — but his position on the genocide in Gaza is in line with those polling numbers and appears to have contributed to his support even among New York Jews.
What we are looking at, to stay in the context Mamdani affords us, is Sun Valley vs. Queensbridge, the working– and middle-class district Mamdani represents. This is the unholy symmetry of American politics in this, the third decade of our new century.
I do not suggest this is any kind of new opposition. Neither is the mainstream Democrats’ effort to sink Mamdani’s ship anything we haven’t seen before. They did it to Bernie Sanders — twice, indeed, in 2016 and again in 2020 — and, with the assistance of the Israeli lobbies, they did it to Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, legislators from New York and Missouri respectively, when monied interests and the lobbies destroyed them in primary contests last year.
But Mamdani is a case of another order, in my interpretation. He is too exciting to too many voters, in a word. His ideas resonate too well beyond New York’s five boroughs. He stands — in his early thirties as against his early eighties — too effectively for another idea of America. The gang-up against him is too easily legible.
This puts the party’s elites and all the interests behind them in a bind. They cannot afford to allow Mamdani to take City Hall in New York, and I conclude with the greatest reluctance they won’t. A win for Mamdani in November would change the complexion of American politics too drastically.
At the same time, given the national attention his campaign has attracted, Mamdani has more or less instantly acquired a totemic significance in American political culture. Stopping him this autumn would almost certainly be an undemocratic mess.
To the extent the Democrats succeed in destroying this man, they will also destroy themselves.
Mamdani will be 'Bernie'd' or he will prove to be compromised. If he is 'genuine' then he is dumb because the Democratic Party is the graveyard of the moderate so-called 'left'. And as we've seen with Bernie Sanders even a phony leftist must be crushed, that old 'slippery slope'...
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
High Crimes and Misdemeanors – Not by Trump but Obama and Democrats
Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist 23 Jul 2025
High Crimes and Misdemeanors – Not by Trump but Obama and Democrats
The real collusion wasn’t between Trump and Putin; it was between intelligence elites and a Democratic establishment.
“When Trump met with the arch-enemy Vladimir Putin in Helsinki and didn’t declare war on Russia some of the loudest denunciations came from Black liberals.”
Increasing evidence emerges that confirms what ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern suggests was a classic off-the-shelve intelligence operation initiated during the last year of Obama’s presidency against the Trump campaign by employees of, and others associated with, the CIA, FBI, and the NS. Yet the public is being counseled to ignore possible proof of state misconduct.
The historic and unprecedented timing of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of twelve Russia military intelligence officers on the eve of Trump’s meeting with Putin, was clearly meant to undercut Trump’s authority. This still did not pique the journalistic curiosity of an ostensibly independent press to at least pretend to question the possible motivation for these indictments at such a specific moment. Instead of critical questions, Democrats, along with the corporate liberal media, flipped the script and suggested that those questioning the allegations of Russian manipulation of the 2016 U.S. elections, which supposedly included the active or tacit support of the Trump campaign, was ipso-facto evidence of one’s disloyalty to the state -- if not also complicit with implementing the Russia inspired conspiracy.
This narrative has been set and is meant to be accepted as veracious and impermeable to challenges. Powerful elements of the ruling class, operating with and through the Democratic party in an attempt to secure maximum electoral success, decided that Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia shall be the primary narrative to be utilized by Democrats -- from the increasing phony opposition represented by the Sanders wing of the party, to the neoliberal, buck-dancing members of the Congressional Black Caucus. All are expected to fall in line and do the ruling class’s bidding.
“Democrats suggest that those questioning the allegations of Russian manipulation of the 2016 U.S. elections, are complicit with implementing the Russia inspired conspiracy.”
When Trump met with the arch-enemy Vladimir Putin in Helsinki and didn’t declare war on Russia for conspiring against Clinton, charges of treason were splashed across the headlines and editorial pages of the elite press with some of the loudest denunciations coming from Black liberals.
Not being at war with Russia, at least not in the technical sense, was just one of those inconvenient facts that didn’t need to get in the way of the main objective, which was to smear Trump
And while evidence of collusion continues to surface, it’s actually not between Trump and the Russians, rather it’s between intelligence officials in the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign. The latest revelation of this evidence was reported by John Solomon in, “The Hill, ” a Washington insider publication. According to Solomon, former FBI attorney Lisa Page gave testimony to the House Judiciary committee that seemed to confirm the partisan intentions of Peter Strzok and other high officials in the agency.
Page was one of the authors of the infamous text messages between her and Peter Strzok (the two were also in a personal relationship at the time) while they both worked together at the FBI. The texts soon became the objective of endless speculation ever since they were revealed last summer. Exchanges shared between Strzok and Page during the 2016 campaign season, appear to point to Strzok’ participation in a vast conspiracy to gather intelligence on the Trump campaign and then to undermine his presidency on the unexpected chance of his election.
“There’s no big there there.”
Two days after Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein named Mueller as special counsel, Strzok, who at that time was the lead investigator on the Russia probe texted, “There’s no big there there.”
Peter Strzok wasn’t just a minor bureaucrat with the bureau, as some outlets tried to imply in their coverage of the issue. He was the Chief of the FBI’s Counterespionage Section, and lead investigator into Clinton’s use of a personal server. He then led the FBI’s investigation of Russia interference as the Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Division until he was replaced in the summer of 2017.
Page confirmed that the no “there there” was in fact the quality of the Russia investigation. This means that a special counsel was appointed even though key FBI officials knew that there wasn’t anything there.
Page’s testimony provides strong confirmation that the decision by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to name Mueller as special counsel, who then brought in Strzok to lead the Russia-gate team, was not an objective, innocent affair. In actuality, it points to criminal use of the government’s counterintelligence capabilities to engage in a partisan manipulation of the electoral process.
Some liberals, and even some radicals, pose questions like, “Even if those officials engaged in questionable activity, why should that be of concern for progressive forces, especially since this presidency represents the forefront of a neo-fascist movement in the U.S?”
There are three interconnected reasons why progressives should be concerned:
First: The normalization of the assault on bourgeois democracy: If elements of the capitalist class, in coordination with the major intelligence agencies, can successfully conspire to undermine and/or control an individual duly elected by the processes of U.S. democracy, as flawed as it may be, what does it suggest for a strategy that sees the electoral arena as a primary space for advancing progressive candidates and oppositional movements?
The ruling class will go to great depths to maintain power: The fact that elements of the ruling class are prepared to undermine a member of their own class because that individual represents social forces that the financial and corporatist elite have determined are a threat to their interests must make us question “What would happen if a true radical was able to win high office? We are already seeing the effects as so-called progressives and radicals are aligning with and supporting these elements due to their shared hatred for Trump is still largely a reactionary approach that contains no long-term strategy for building and sustaining actual power.
Second: By aligning politically with the U.S. based transnational ruling class that sees Trump as a threat to their interests, liberals and some left forces have abandoned positions and left them to the radical right, with the objective result of providing support for the very same narrow, racist, U.S.-centric, and proto-fascist forces that liberals and the left claim to be opposed to.
The critique and rejection of NATO, supporting de-escalation of tensions with Russia, exposing hegemony of finance capital, revealing the anti-democratic nature of the European Union, opposing international “trade” agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership and trans-Atlantic Investment Partnership, demanding that U.S. forces withdraw from Syria and questioning the role of Saudi Arabia in spreading right-wing Wahhabism throughout the world, are now positions taken up by the right because the imperial left has aligned itself with the agenda of transnational capital and its imperialist objectives in lieu of presenting a people’s agenda.
Third: Consequently, the criticism of Trump’s foreign policies, including approaches on North Korea and Russia by Democrats, is coming from positions to the right of Trump! The result is a political environment in which the possibility of escalating military conflicts with Russia, Iran or even at some point with China, is becoming a more normalized and realistic possibility.
The Clinton New Network (CNN) along with MSNBC, the Washington Postand New York Timesare desperately trying to salvage the underlying theme of the assault on the Trump administration: that it’s supposed collusion with foreign sources, specifically the Russians, may have had a significant impact on why Clinton lost the election. And they also hold that any deviation from that declaration by Trump and his administration are just attempts at obstruction of justice.
“The possibility of escalating military conflicts with Russia, Iran or even at some point with China, is becoming a more normalized and realistic possibility.”
With the revelations about the role and activities of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the Comey leak to the press, with the express purpose to create pretext for the appointment of a special counsel, the placing of an FBI informant in the Trump campaign, the role of Andrew McCabe in covering up for his subordinates and leaking classified information to the press, the “primary narrative” of the Democrat party and liberals is starting to unravel.
Abuse of state power is nothing new.
This would not be the first time that powerful unelected elements in the state have moved to manipulate political outcomes based on an agenda that the public had no knowledge of or even to remove a president. People have forgotten or didn’t make the correct connection that the famous source of information that brought down Richard Nixon, Bernstein’s and Woodman’s “deep throat” was Mark Felt, the Associate Director of the FBI!
And like the question raised to Nixon and Watergate then, but will only be raised by the Black Agenda Report today is, “What did Obama know and when did he know it?”
Abundance of Accelerationism: Democrat Rebrand Promises to Keep Foot on the Breakdown Gas
Posted on July 23, 2025 by Conor Gallagher
Back in May a bipartisan(!) group of lawmakers led by Rep. Josh Harder (D-Calif.) started a roughly 30-member bloc that’s claiming inspiration from the “abundance movement.”
“Abundance” was penned by the liberal duo of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, and in this time of genocide, accelerating climate catastrophe, and Trump shock therapy, it zeroes in on zoning laws and environmental regulations as central problems to our society today. Less red tape, they argue, will mean that private capital will finally be free to deliver everything you need and want—housing, climate-friendly infrastructure, and loads of other stuff.
The book has become the guiding light for the Democrat establishment and the Build America Caucus, which is working hand in glove with the Trump wrecking ball. From E&E News:
And in a notable shift from past attempts, multiple Democrats are eyeing the nation’s so-called bedrock environmental law [the National Environmental Policy Act] as a potential target…The group has also drawn attention on Capitol Hill and among lobbyists for its association with the “abundance” movement, the pro-growth agenda championed by some high-profile liberal advocates and politicians. But caucus members on both sides of the aisle say they’re all simply focused on reducing regulatory obstacles to build more of what Americans need and to do it more efficiently….The Trump administration’s moves to upend the federal regulatory process and weaken environmental protections have created the perfect opening for a group like the Build America Caucus to flex its young muscles, said Eric Beightel, who led the federal permitting council during the Biden administration.
“This is a moment that has been building for a while,” Harder told Politico. “I think there’s been a lot of simmering interest in permitting reform and making sure that things are built faster, better, cheaper.”
The central premise behind Abundance is that what voters need isn’t a government that ensures they have a living wage, healthcare, shelter, and a liveable planet, but that the market will provide those necessities as long as enough red tape is cut. If that sounds a lot like what Democrats have long offered—and what Trump and DOGE have been selling—well, that’s because that’s what it is.
It comes with the usual shiny visions of technological utopia Democrats are so fond of, like solar panels on every roof and delivery drones buzzing into yards to keep smart fridges overflowing with organic food. And it promises that less regulation will magically make all distributional and power conflicts disappear as the Peter Thiels, Elon Musks, and Marc Andreessens will abandon their dark hierarchical visions for society and make sure that all the lowly service sector workers, disabled, and other disposables can enjoy these luxuries. How do we like those odds?
Does Abundance Economics Actually Make Any Sense?
Isabella M Weber, in her review at Foreign Policy, shows just how unserious the Abundance authors and its Democrat adherents are:
A key case study to illustrate this regulatory paradox—where environmental reviews and multilayered regulatory frameworks slow building environmentally friendly means of transportation—is the failed attempt to build high-speed rail in California. It opens the possibility for organized groups to intervene at every stage and block progress, Klein and Thompson argue. In their view, it is the thing that sets China and California apart: “This is why China can build tens of thousands of miles of high-speed rail in the time it takes California to fail to build hundreds of miles of high-speed rail. China does not spend years debating with judges over whether it needs to move a storage facility. That power leads to abuse and imperiousness. It also leads to high-speed rail.”
But here’s the reality:
…Having researched China’s market reforms for many years, I can say that it’s baffling to argue China’s success in building out critical infrastructure is simply a result of a combination of power abuses and the absence of regulations and “debating with judges.” There are many countries in the world that have authoritarian governments and loose environmental and building regulations. None of them has managed to build high-speed rail at breakneck speed.
In fact, a quick search on the internet is enough to find a detailed study by the World Bank on how China managed to build its high-speed rail so quickly and efficiently. Among the key factors are: a 15-year plan that lays out long-term goals and was followed up with five-year plans to specify construction projects and revise goals based on past progress (these have all been upward revisions); special-purpose construction and management companies that are joint ventures between central and provincial governments; coordination among rail manufacturers, research institutions, and engineering centers; managers with clear responsibility and significant performance-based compensation that incentivizes them to stay for whole projects; a high degree of standardization in design and procedures; and a steady stream of projects to enable the creation of a “capable, competitive supply industry.”
If one tried to translate the Chinese experience into the American institutional context, one arrives at something closer to the “multi-solving, whole of government approach to planning and coordination” recommended for solar development in a recent study from the Roosevelt Institute and the Climate and Community Institute. It argues that what is needed is “multi-scalar land-use and site planning”; “coordinating between federal, state, Tribal, and local governments”; and the creation of “public and nonprofit solar deployment companies.”
Backing up Weber’s argument is a recent paper from Vanderbilt Law School, “Post-Neoliberal Housing Policy,” which points out that the Abundance argument is nothing more than a recycling the same tired neoliberal ideas:
Yes, zoning in some places is a meaningful impediment to development. But the obsession with zoning is conceptually flawed, descriptively problematic in that it ignores or obscures the many other causes of the affordability crisis, and potentially perverse by promoting solutions that, in some cases, may be ineffective and even harmful. Indeed, at the extreme, those who are laser-focused on zoning are falling back into a neoliberal paradigm that makes overly simplistic assumptions about markets.
And the alternative path is obvious:
…Increasing the supply of housing and ensuring housing affordability therefore requires market-crafting and market-shaping, not abdicating responsibility for–and regulatory control over–land use decisions.
A post-neoliberal approach would therefore expand the housing policy toolkit and take an all-of-the-above, comprehensive approach. An industrial policy for the housing sector, including public investment, procurement, and regulatory standard-setting interventions, could mean cheaper and faster homebuilding. Letting go of the neoliberal obsession with privatization could unlock the public’s role in housing provision, so governments can increase housing supply directly and efficiently. Rather than embrace trickle down policies for the rich, Pigouvian-inspired taxes that target undesirable behaviors can help prevent constraints on supply. Finally, because regulations are market-shaping, policymakers can adopt antimonopoly and consumer regulations, supply-side zoning rules, and macro-level regulations to disperse economic growth.
It is as obvious for housing as it is for every life necessity and societal good, as Malcolm Harris writes:
The only way to guarantee real housing abundance is deep and concerted public support, by adding the necessary state capacity to build and maintain a home for everyone who needs one. Something analogous goes for health care and food—not to mention clean air and water, parks, schools, transportation, news reporting, universities, scientific research, museums, and worthwhile artistic production in general.
Yet a more democratic allocation of capital, which is key to any way out of our current polycrisis, is precisely what is to be prevented by the bipartisan abundance movement bankrolled by money from the crypto, oil, and tech industries.
Abundance promoters promise not just more stuff, but stuff that will help us begin to finally face the true scale of the climate crisis.
That sounds great. It’s about time, one might be tempted to say, as degrowth is going to be imposed on us one way or another. The European Central Bank just announced, it’s completely plausible that extreme climate events could cause euro area GDP to fall by up to 5% by 2030(!). That’s another global financial crisis, and this time it wouldn’t just be the EU technocrats obsession with austerity preventing a recovery.
Will it be done in chaos with the tech overlords taking advantage of the breakdown to push eugenics and slave labor or will it be met by some semblance of organized retreat and solidarity?
Abundance is an argument for the former. It is, at heart, an argument to accelerate the breakdown.
Adherents not only blame excessive government regulation for the US’ inability to meet citizens’ needs, but also labor unions for standing in the way of abundance. And the authors also argue for, and Democrats are now working on gutting environmental protections in order to unleash the builders.
The counterargument to “abundance” is that it’s not necessarily less that’s needed, but less of certain items. Think less bombs and fighter and private jets, more—or any—high speed rail, solar panels, regional self-sufficient production. With public guidance of housing policy perhaps we could begin to seriously prepare for the ravages of global warming, which are already knocking down the door, but less red tape is more likely to mean more developers building in flood and fire zones and a hollowed out state abandoning people when disaster inevitably strikes.
Cutting red tape is meaningless if power rests solely in the hands of the financial planners on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley who prefer to invest in high-return self-licking ice cream cones like the military-industrial complex rather than the most simple infrastructure that would reduce emissions and improve Americans’ quality of life.
While some communities here and there are already banding together in the face of the growing threat and a ghost government, there are limits to how much can be done at the local level.
If you’re looking for similar action on a larger scale, it’s best to look elsewhere than our two political parties who want to accelerate the breakdown and accumulation of wealth and power to those who caused it in the first place.
That’s because the dividing line is not, as Klein and Thompson tell it, between parties and those who care about the climate and those who don’t. It is between those whose goal is to make money for capitalists and hope and pray that economic forces magically lead us out of the planetary crisis (naganna happen) or more democratic control of capital in order to pay for the emergency preparations for the global warming that is here and accelerating with increasingly devastating effects. It can’t be both. And it is abundantly clear which side both political parties are on.
Political Realignment – Three Into One?
If Abundance creates the illusion of freedom, it is similar to our political terrain.
This latest attempt to keep the Democrats just as they are—a corrupt anti-working class party that’s always fighting for nothing and losing on everything but raking in money—is based on the assumption that the party can simply sit back, let Trump screw up, and wait for the “good billionaires” and the voters to come back into the big tent where nothing will fundamentally change. Well, almost nothing will change…
As Silicon Valley’s darker visions have emerged helping drive our social policy ever rightwards, the Democrats are finally having to openly move there to meet them. From The Verge:
In a few months, Klein and Thompson will headline an Abundance conference organized in part by the Foundation for American Innovation, a conservative think tank that helped co-author Project 2025. Abundance means more of everything, including more of the tired Democratic strategy of forging a coalition by making overtures to repentant conservatives — including unrepentant racists who see entire swaths of the population as inherently and biologically inferior.
Basically, the Democrats are trying to bring back into the big tent the Silicon Valley big money which wants to rely on skilled immigrant labor and is threatened by the MAGA nativist tone, if not actual deed (Trump sided with tech over MAGA in the H1-B visa debate), and so what if you’ve got to get onboard with some eugenics to do it.
The Democrats’ response to the planetary crisis is more power to the oligarchs. The Abundance agenda sounds a lot like the “freedom cities”—jusridictions under tech billionaire control where they will theoretically drive abundance to the moon (along with all their other technofascist pet projects). These cities are of course supported by the Trump administration, as are the underlying ideas buttressing them.
So while there might be differences (the GOP rejects climate science while the Dems accept it), the parties still arrive at the same place: groveling before the billionaires. It’s just the Dems pretend their benefactors are going to be “good billionaires” who care and provide for you. In the end, both embrace Silicon Valley eugenics and are eager to turn over social policy to these blood-thirsty weasels.
Despite that, we also have one of those hierarchical madmen who also happens to be the world’s richest individual, planning to start his own party because neither of the two parties goes far enough, fast enough in dismantling the state.
He certainly has the money to overcome the hurdles third parties face, but where will it land on the political spectrum? According to the New York Times, Musk recently met with “right-wing thinker” Curtis Yarvin for guidance.
Here’s Quinn Slobodian, writing at the New York Review, with a useful summary of Yarvin’s “thinking”:
Right-wing accelerationists imagine existing sovereignty shattering into what Yarvin, writing under the pen name Mencius Moldbug, calls a “patchwork” of private entities, ideally governed by what one might call technomonarchies. Existing autocratic polities like Dubai serve as rough prototypes for how nations could be dismantled into “a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions.” These would be decentralized archipelagoes: fortified nodes in a circuitry still linked by finance, trade, and communication. Think of the year 1000 in Middle Europe but with vertical take-off and landing taxis and Starlink internet. Yarvin expressed the essence of the worldview recently when he enthused over Trump’s proposal to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip and rebuild it as a US-backed colony securitized as an asset and sold to investors—as he called it, “the first charter city backed by US legitimacy: Gaza, Inc. Stock symbol: GAZA.”
Lo and behold, that sounds a lot like what the GOP and Team Blue are offering! So Musk would offer essentially a continuation of the DOGE mission, but more dedication to it than Trump’s GOP?
Meanwhile the Democrat leadership, according to Jonathan Chait, is intent on making the party into a libertarian one.
If I buy what the Dems are selling —that government is a nuisance that must be rolled back in order to unleash abundance— then what is the need of the Democrats at all?
A party led by Musk (an abundance provider, according to the Dems) can surely do the job without the presence of the Democrat middle man. It’s no surprise that Musk praised Jon Stewart’s recent interview with Klein:
So what is one potential outcome of Musk entering the ring while Democrats make the argument the government is the problem?
How fitting it would be for the Democrats to argue themselves right out of existence. Liberals do have a certain knack for elevating their supposed opponents. There is of course the Donald. And his VP:
Adam Johnson
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what's rich about this is how central NPR was to selling JD Vance's warmed over Charles Murray schtick. They helped build his media career because he told rich liberals what they wanted to hear, namely that Trump voters were lazy, irredeemable toothless hicks.
The party has long existed only to further the ends of the oligarchy and keep the left in check, and now with total victory in sight, they can be kicked to the curb. Regardless, the options provided by the “greatest democracy in the history of the world” are becoming increasingly narrow and seemingly all led by the likes of Curtis Yarvin and his right-wing accelerationism.
Newly Declassified Documents Underscore How Claims of Russian Election Interference in 2016 Were Over-Hyped–Much Like Nonexistent Iraqi WMDs
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - July 28, 2025 1
[Source: gbtribune.com]
In mid-July, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released a trove of documents that, she said, showed evidence that Obama administration intelligence officials “manufactured and politicized intelligence to lay the groundwork” for investigation into alleged Russian election meddling during the 2016 presidential campaign and Russia’s alleged support for Donald Trump.
The Russia Gate scandal helped recreate a Cold War political atmosphere that fueled support for the U.S.-led proxy war on Russia via Ukraine that has cost more than a million lives.
Rather than harming Trump, Russia Gate has helped bolster Trump’s political fortunes by giving him the ability to claim that he was a “victim” of the machinations of the “deep state” that wanted to bring him down.
Tulsi Gabbard at a Cabinet meeting in the Oval Office. [Source: nytimes.com]
Image presented in a 2018 New York Times article entitled “Putin and Trump: A Love Story” by award winning cartoonist Bill Plimpton. [Source: filmafinity.com]
The ineptitude of the Democrats makes it appear that the whole Russia Gate saga was part of a manufactured spectacle by the ruling oligarchy designed to further polarize Americans along partisan lines and create a hero out of Trump—whose regressive economic program serves the 1%—all while building up public support for the war in Ukraine.[1]
Following Gabbard’s revelations, Trump issued a fake video from a TikTok blogger depicting Trump and Obama sitting in the Oval Office and FBI officers handcuffing Obama while Trump laughs.[2]
Trump additionally shared an AI-generated image on X (formerly Twitter) attributed to “sirtemplemount” that showed fake mugshots of Obama and officials from his administration with the words “The Shady Bunch.”
[Source: time.com]
Sirtemplemount wrote that “Obama promised hope and change—delivered surveillance at home and abroad, secret drone strikes, and destabilized regions from Libya to Syria. The media cheered, but history won’t forget the scandals buried under a Nobel Peace Prize. Accountability was never on the agenda.”
While this latter assessment is well-grounded,[3] any objective analysis of U.S. politics would have to acknowledge that Trump has committed equally egregious crimes as Obama, and that Obama is not the only rotten leader in recent history whose associates deserve to be in jail.
Successor to the Mythic WMDs
Though exploited for political gain, the Gabbard documents provide evidence that the threat of Russian election interference was intentionally over-hyped—much like the threat of WMDs that led to war in Iraq.[4]
One document from then-Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper, dated August 31, 2016, rendered the conclusion that “there is no indication of a Russian threat to directly manipulate the actual vote count through cyber means.”
In another document, dated September 2, 2016, a top intelligence official asks for a “softening of rhetoric” about Russia’s intent because he/she says that the way [the intelligence briefing] currently reads, it would “indicate that we have definitive information that Russia does intend to disrupt our elections and we are uncomfortable making that assessment at this point.”
An additional email by Clapper stated that “We agree with: ‘Russia probably is not (and will not) trying to influence the election by using cyber means to manipulate computer-enabled election infrastructure.’”
James Clapper [Source: lbjlibrary.org]
These documents contradict claims by Obama administration officials in late 2016 and early 2017 about Russian election interference and Russia’s supposed support for Donald Trump.[5]
A confidential 2020 report prepared by the House Committee on Intelligence released by Gabbard on July 24 concluded that U.S. intelligence agency judgments of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intentions during the election failed to adhere to sound analytical standards.
The assessment noted that “one scant, unclear and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from [a] substandard report constitutes the only classified information cited to suggest Putin aspired to help Trump win.”
The intelligence community assessment additionally “ignored or selectively quoted reliable intelligence reports that challenged and in some cases undermined judgments that Putin sought to elect Trump.”[6]
These reports specified Putin’s feeling that neither Clinton nor Trump could correct the strained relationship” between the U.S. and Russia, or overcome “strong anti-Russian political sentiment in Washington.”
They also specified that Putin had information about Clinton’s alleged health problems and alleged psycho-emotional and anger-management issues that led to use of tranquilizers, which he chose not to publicly reveal.[7]
Right after the 2016 election, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies had stated that they had “high confidence”—but not certainty—that Putin favored Trump in the election.
A key thrust of the allegation about election interference centered on the Russians’ supposedly hacking Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails and leaking them to Wikileaks in an attempt to make Hillary Clinton look bad.
A 2017 study carried out by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) found that the DNC documents were actually leaked from within the U.S.—and not hacked from within Russia, which would have been impossible based on the speed of the modem.
The VIPS additionally determined that social media posts attributed to a Kremlin-linked company had zero impact on the election and were not likely initiated by the Kremlin. Most of these posts occurred after the election and did not exhibit preference for any particular candidate.
[Source: themilleniumreport.com]
Highly problematic was the intelligence community’s reliance on a cyber-security firm, CrowdStrike, that was hired by the Clinton campaign, and on a dossier produced by a British MI6 agent, Christopher Steele, that was based on second hand rumor and hearsay.
[Source: cnn.com]
In December 2017, CrowdStrike President Shawn Henry testified before Congress that his firm “did not have concrete evidence” that Russian hackers had exfiltrated data from DNC servers.
Crowdstrike CEO Shawn Henry [Source: realclearinvestigations.com]
Obama as Russia Gate Godfather
According to Gabbard, Obama played a pivotal role in Russia Gate by ordering the intelligence community to create a more alarmist assessment after he was given intelligence reports dismissing Russian election meddling.
Gabbard said that on December 9, 2016, Obama led a White House meeting with CIA Director Brennan, FBI Director Comey, DNI Clapper, then-National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Secretary of State John Kerry, Assistant Secretary Victoria Nuland and others, where he directed the IC (Intelligence Community) to “create a new intelligence assessment that detailed Russian election meddling, even though it would contradict multiple intelligence assessments released over the previous several months.”
After this meeting, Clapper’s office scrambled to piece together an assessment, based largely on the discredited Steele dossier, which was released on January 6, 2017.[8]
When a whistleblower came forward to question all this, the whistleblower was shunned and then pressured to support Clapper’s misleading report.
Barack Obama [Source: washingtonpost.com]
Obama’s motives appear to have been to a) try to delegitimize Trump’s election victory; and b) whip up anti-Russia hysteria that could help facilitate public support for heightened military aid to Ukraine and the new Cold War.
The latter follows an old formula used by American leaders throughout the original Cold War.[9]
After abandoning its Russian reset policy, the Obama administration initiated a coup in Ukraine in February 2014 that triggered conflict with Russia, and provided extensive military aid to Ukraine’s post-coup government, which attacked the people of eastern Ukraine who voted for their autonomy following the coup.
Mark Warner and Senate Intelligence Committee Disinformation
Following the release of the first batch of Gabbard’s documents, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) issued a statement asserting that the Senate Intelligence Committee had conducted a bipartisan investigation (in 2020) reviewing hundreds of thousands of documents and interviewing witnesses, which concluded that “Russia interfered in the 2016 election to benefit Donald Trump.”[10]
Senator Mark Warner [Source: whsv.com]
This latter conclusion resulted from the belief that Russia was behind the hack of DNC emails, which was disproven by the VIPS and by British diplomat Craig Murray who met in a wooded area in Washington, D.C., with an associate of the leaker who was identified as a disgruntled DNC employee.
Murray told The Daily Mail that none of the leaks “came from the Russians. The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.” [11]
Craig Murray [Source: 21stcenturychronicle.com]
The newly declassified House Intelligence Committee report specified that the FBI and NSA expressed only “low confidence” that Russia was behind the hack and release of Democratic Party emails, and that U.S. intelligence agencies “lack[ed] sufficient technical details” to link the stolen Democratic Party material released by WikiLeaks and other sources “to Russian state-sponsored actors.”[12]
The 2020 Senate intelligence committee report had defamed WikiLeaks by accusing it of having been given the hacked emails by the Russians.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told journalist John Pilger that “the Clinton camp has been able to project a neo-McCarthyist hysteria that Russia is responsible for everything,’ ‘Hillary Clinton has stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 US intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That’s false—we can say that the Russian government is not the source.”’[13]
Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, was defamed in a 2020 Senate intelligence committee report co-authored by Mark Warner as part of a campaign to drum up Russian hysteria and undermine WikiLeaks’ efforts to expose government corruption by suggesting that Assange was a Russian “asset.” [Source: washingtonpost.com]
Eroded Trust in Intelligence Agencies
Mark Warner tried to turn the tables by saying that Gabbard was the one trying to “weaponize her position” by “amplifying the president’s election conspiracy theories,” and that it was “appalling” to hear DNI Gabbard “accuse her own IC [intelligence community] workforce of committing a ‘treasonous conspiracy’ when she was unwilling to label Edward Snowden a traitor.”
Warner went on to claim that Gabbard’s public proclamations were “just another example of the DNI trying to cook the books, rewrite history, and erode trust in the intelligence agencies she’s supposed to be leading.”[14]
In reality, the erosion of trust in U.S. intelligence agencies has little to do with Gabbard, but is the consequence of a long-standing pattern of deceit that goes back decades.
Exposure of Billionaire Con Man Who Helped Trigger Cold War 2.0
The release of the Gabbard documents undercutting the dominant narrative of the new Cold War coincided with the publication of an article in The Realist Review by investigative reporter Lucy Komisar showing that the original U.S. sanctions policy targeting Russia was rooted in deceit.
Komisar has had a distinguished journalistic career going back to her reporting on the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the early 1960s.
In the last decade, she has written some important scoops on William F. Browder, a billionaire hedge-fund owner who profited from the privatization of Russian state-owned industry in the 1990s, and used his deep pockets to lobby for passage of the Magnitsky sanctions act on Russia that was signed by President Obama in December 2012 and helped kick-start Cold War 2.0.
Lucy Komisar [Source: Photo Courtesy of Lucy Komisar]
William F. Browder [Source: weforum.com]
The official story advanced by Browder was that Sergei Magnitsky was a lawyer who had uncovered a scam by the Russian government to defraud his company, Hermitage Capital, of $230 million and that Magnitsky was murdered by Russian authorities in Butyrka Prison in Moscow after he had become a whistleblower.
Komisar builds off a censored film produced by Andrei Nekrasov to show that Browder’s story is a complete lie.
Magnitsky was neither a lawyer nor a whistleblower. Rather, he was an accountant specializing in helping the wealthy to offshore their money and avoid paying taxes who was cooperating with the Russian authorities in their investigation of Browder’s fraudulent business practices.
Instead of being beaten to death by prison guards, as Browder alleges, Magnitsky died from health ailments that were exacerbated by medical neglect in prison—something that is all too common in U.S., as well as Russian, prisons.[15]
Sergei Magnitsky [Source: alchetron.com]
Komisar points out that, when Magnitsky was in prison, Browder never publicized his plight or tried to mobilize any public support for him. He only raised an outcry after Magnitsky’s death when it was expedient for him—as he was in the process of being investigated by the Russian government, which charged him and convicted him in absentia for tax evasion.
Robert Maxwell [Source: britannica.com]
Edmond Safra [Source: ejsny.org]
Browder’s lobbying influence was carried out through Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD), whose election campaigns Browder covertly helped fund through Ziff Brothers Investments.
The Ziff brothers [Source: thekomisarscoop.com]
Browder hired as a lobbyist Dick Cheney’s former press secretary, Juleanna Glover, who got him a meeting with John McCain (R-AZ), who agreed to sponsor the Magnitsky Act with other Washington power figures.
Juleanna Glover [Source: iop.harvard.edu]
Browder’s story is significant along with the new Russia Gate documents in pointing to the fact that much of the anti-Russia hysteria driving the new Cold War has been manufactured for political and self-serving purposes by unscrupulous individuals.
Browder is a brilliant con man who has been able to manipulate public opinion and buy political influence with his deep pockets.
The Magnitsky Act sanctions have been followed up by legions of other sanctions based on fraudulent pretexts, including the fake Skripal and Alexei Navalny poisoning stories and false allegations that Russia was behind the downing of a civilian airliner (MH-17).
T1.he American public has been susceptible to all the disinformation because of a deep-rooted Russophobia, which has born poisonous fruits.
2.Critics of U.S. foreign policy amidst this climate could now conveniently be called “Putin lovers” and Russian assets. Those seeking to investigate the real-life abuses of the “deep state” and opposed the billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine were now also branded as “MAGA cultists” or Trump defenders or “conspiracy theorists.” ↑
3.Gabbard said she referred the new documents to the Department of Justice for a potential criminal investigation. ↑
4.See Jeremy Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019) for more details. ↑
5.For good analysis of the significance of the new documents, see Aaron Mate, “US intel hid high-level doubts about “Russian interference”, docs reveal,” Substack, July 23, 2025. ↑
6.Gabbard said, “This intelligence was weaponized…. It was used as a justification for endless smears, for sanctions from Congress, and for covert investigations.” She added: “When key internal assessments found that Russia ‘did not impact recent U.S. election results,’ those findings were suppressed.”
7.A veteran CIA officer said that Intelligence agency reports supposedly proving Russian election interference contained “substandard information that was unclear, of uncertain origin. potentially biased, implausible, or in the words of senior operations officers, odd.” Putin made no positive references to Trump and a preoccupation of Russian officials and analysts was that neither Trump or Clinton would “respect Russia’s strategic interests or treat Russia as an equal on the world stage.” ↑
8.Clinton allegedly suffered from type-2 diabetes, deep-vein thrombosis and pulmonary and heart disease. She displayed uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression and cheerfulness, which resulted in her being put on tranquilizers. It was reported that the Russian intelligence services (FSB) had amassed information that Clinton secretly met with U.S. religious organizations and that State Department officials offered significant State Department increases in funding for them in exchange for them supporting Clinton. Whether the FSB and Putin actually had all this information and whether it is all true is hard to definitively discern. ↑
9.The assessment was titled “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections.” ↑
10.A key underlying motive in both contexts was to weaken Russia as a potential geopolitical rival to the U.S. In the new Cold War, Ukraine has been used as a base to attack Russia directly. ↑
The investigation was chaired by Marco Rubio (R-FL) and co-chaired by Warner. ↑
11.The DNC whistleblower is thought to be Seth Rich who was murdered under suspicious circumstances. U.S. intelligence agencies claimed that Guccifer 2.0 and another website, DCleaks.com were controlled by Russia, though newly disclosed documents show that U.S. intelligence actually only had “moderate confidence” that they were under direct Russian government control. VIPS member Bill Binney told Consortium News that Guccifer 2.0 was actually the creation of CIA Director John Brennan. ↑
12.The New York Times reported that intelligence agencies and Senate investigators who spent years reviewing the matter concluded that, while the Russians had conducted probing operations of election systems and extracted voter registration data in Illinois and Arizona during the 2016 election, there was “no evidence that Moscow’s hackers attempted to actually change votes.” VIPS founder Ray McGovern told Consortium News that if the Russians had hacked DNC emails, the NSA would have known about it. McGovern further pointed out that Shawn Henry’s testimony before Congress was suppressed by Adam Schiff (D-CA) for over two years and never reported on by the U.S. media. He also said that if the Russians had hacked DNC emails, the National Security Agency (NSA) would have known about it. For a profile of McGovern and his prescience in dissecting the Russia Gate narrative from early on, see here. ↑
13.Craig Murray told The London Daily Mail: ‘I don’t understand why the CIA would say the information came from Russian hackers when they must know that isn’t true. Regardless of whether the Russians hacked into the DNC, the documents Wikileaks published did not come from that.’” The Senate intelligence committee report presented no evidence to back up its claims about Wikileaks, and much else. Randy Credico, a comedian and radio host was accused of being Roger Stone’s “backchannel” to Wikileaks, a charge Credico strenuously denied when subpoenaed by both the House Intelligence Committee and Robert Mueller. ↑
14.Senate intelligence committee chairman Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) is trying now, in response to Gabbard’s allegations, to undercut Gabbard and the DNI’s influence and to put all power in the intelligence agencies with the CIA. ↑
15.There was no sign that Magnitsky died a violent death. An alternative theory is that Browder paid off assassins who killed Magnitsky in prison. The Russian government could not have murdered Magnitsky and had no motive to do so as he was cooperating with them in the case against Browder. Because he was a prized informant in that case, the Russian government had every reason to keep Magnitsky alive and not kill him. Oleg Lurie, a journalist who was imprisoned because a corrupt Duma member had accused him of extortion, said that Magnitsky had told him that his employers (led by Browder) were selling him out and asking him to sign documents he did not want to sign. This goes against Browder’s claim to be Magnitsky’s champion and gatekeeper of his legacy. ↑
16.Maxwell was also suspected of being an Israeli Mossad agent. Browder’s grandfather Earl Browder was ironically Chairman of the Communist Party USA from 1934-1945. ↑
Obama Colluded with the Surveillance State Against Trump
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 30 Jul 2025
Left to right, FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, Director of U.S. National Intelligence James Clapper, DIA director U.S. Army Lt. General Michael Flynn testify in Washington February 4, 2014.
“It probably helps him a lot, the immunity ruling. But it doesn’t help the people around him at all. It probably helps him a lot. He’s done criminal acts, no question about it but he has immunity and it probably helps him a lot. He owes me big. Obama owes me big.” - Donald Trump on his treason accusations against Barack Obama
Because immigrants around the country are being snatched off the streets and detained by masked ICE agents without any due process, and because the United States remains committed to aiding Israel’s genocidal grip on Gaza, it isn’t easy to write the words, “Donald Trump was right.” But in regard to the manufactured Russiagate scandal, the assertion is absolutely true. Beginning during the 2016 presidential campaign Hillary Clinton called Trump “Putin’s puppet” and claimed that his victory would bring about “Christmas in the Kremlin.” She neglected to mention that she initiated the campaign to tag Trump with the Russian collusion accusation, and that she involved the Democratic National Committee and intelligence operatives in the United States, the United Kingdom, and even Australia, in her efforts to defeat him. She lost but Russiagate lived on because Barack Obama picked up where Hillary Clinton left off after Trump was elected.
On July 18 Tulsi Gabbard , Director of National Intelligence, announced that she would ask the Department of Justice to pursue criminal charges against former Obama administration officials James Clapper, who served as Director of National Intelligence, John Brennan, CIA Director, and FBI Director James Comey. Gabbard claims that these people “manipulated and withheld” evidence as part of a “criminal conspiracy” which alleged that Trump was aided by Russian interference in his 2016 presidential campaign.
What Trump referred to as Obamagate began on January 5, 2017 , just weeks before his inauguration. On that date Obama met with Clapper, Comey, Brennan, Vice President Joe Biden, United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power, and National Security Adviser Susan Rice. They discussed Trump adviser Michael Flynn, who had served as Obama’s Director of Defense Intelligence before being pushed out of that role in 2014 for disagreeing with the Syria regime change plot.
Two weeks prior to Obama’s January 2017 meeting, in December 2016, Flynn spoke with Russia’s ambassador Sergei Kislyak. He did so at Israel’s request . The UN Security Council was set to vote on a resolution condemning Israel for its expansion of settlements. U.S. presidents always show a little courage regarding Israel when they’re on the verge of leaving office and Obama was no exception. He was ready to let the resolution pass but Israel wanted a Russian veto. Kislyak told Flynn that wouldn’t be possible but they spoke again about U.S. sanctions against Russia. Flynn advised the ambassador against escalating tensions but it didn’t matter. His calls were recorded and FBI Director Comey was ready to spring a trap.
After Trump was inaugurated Flynn was named National Security Adviser but he made the mistake of speaking to two FBI agents Director Comey sent to his office. Comey had also fooled Flynn with a leak to the Washington Post which said that Flynn was not a target of any investigation. The ploy worked, Flynn let his guard down and met with agents without having an attorney present. He was accused of lying to federal agents, was forced out of his position and his son was threatened with prosecution for not fully reporting contacts with a foreign government. That case later fell apart but the threat against the younger Flynn got the desired result. His father pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and the canard of Russian collusion with the Trump team began with a vengeance.
Trump later fired Comey and set in motion the naming of Robert Mueller as a special prosecutor. Two years later no one was even indicted for crimes connected to any possible Russian collusion but the damage was done to perfection.
When Trump said that Obama “owes me big” he was referring to a 2024 Supreme Court decision, Trump v. United States , which gave presidents immunity from prosecution for acts relating to the “core powers” of their office. Trump v. United States came about after Trump was indicted for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election after his loss to Joe Biden. It can be argued that Obama has immunity for his actions relating to the plot to get Trump. He does in fact have reason to be grateful for Trump’s determination to fight the charges lodged against him.
Of course Trump wouldn’t be Trump without rubbing salt into the wound. It isn’t enough for him to begin an investigation of the Obama team; he goes further, posting an A.I. deep fake video showing Obama being arrested in his presence and sitting in a jail cell in an orange jump suit. The video engendered more outrage than Trump’s very serious and well documented accusations.
It can be difficult to discuss Trump as he bullies other nations with tariff threats and U.S. universities and law firms with financial shake downs, and builds concentration camp immigration detention facilities and names them Alligator Alcatraz. It is easy to condemn someone who is so openly racist and vulgar and it can be harder to condemn someone like Barack Obama, who was as smooth as Trump is rough, but who behaved like all other presidents. Obama oversaw the trillion dollar bail-out of Wall Street and the financial sector. He presided over the loss of Black people’s homes during the mortgage crisis. He destroyed the state of Libya and began the destruction of Syria which was completed after a 13-year long effort in 2024. He used the Ukrainian right wing in 2014 to overthrow the elected president of that nation which still suffers as a result of his actions. He was subservient to zionism and supported all of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza and elsewhere.
How different is Obama from Trump? He is the master of image making and, in this case, can appear to be the victim of Trump when, in fact, Trump was the victim of Obama and the democrats. Actually the democracy which we are told is sacrosanct was victimized by the Russiagate witch hunt. Suppression of dissent was legitimized, lawfare against political opponents was legitimized and so was endless war. The corporate media became even more dependent on the state for access and approval and they still uphold the Russiagate lie at every opportunity.
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama did great damage in their effort to undermine Trump and no one should shrink from saying so, regardless of opinions about Trump’s actions in his terms in office. The truth of the subversion of the system that they claimed to protect must come out. The fight against Alligator Alcatraz and all the other violations of human rights must go on. At the same time, the people who harmed the little bit of democracy we have must be exposed. Don’t condemn Trump for exposing Clinton and Obama. Let the chips fall where they may.
RAY McGOVERN: The Deep State’s Burst Appendix
August 1, 2025
RUSSIAGATE UPDATE: A newly released 29-page secret Appendix to the Durham report reveals even more damning evidence that the Russiagate affair was a stitch-up from the get-go.
Edgar J. Hoover FBI headquarters in Washington. (David Gaines, Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0)
By Ray McGovern
Special to Consortium News
Small wonder that the Deep State tried to keep under lock and key the explosive appendix to Special Counsel John Durham’s anemic May 2023 report on the Russiagate “scandal.” Sen. Charles Grassley, head of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, made it public on Thursday and it became the latest revelation in July to blow open the real scandal behind Russiagate.
It’s small wonder, too, that when Kash Patel won Senate approval to be F.B.I. director, former C.I.A. Director John Brennan, former F.B.I. Director James Comey, and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper “lawyered up.” Clapper told CNN colleague Caitlin Collins last week he’d been lawyered up with “perpetual attorneys, since I left the government in 2017.”
But the trio will need more than clever lawyers. Grassley has awoken to what his Oversight Committee is supposed to do – such as oversee the Department of Justice. Better late than never. In 2021, Grassley displayed his own anemia when he plaintively called the DOJ “the Department of JUST US”.
Grassley was lamenting that F.B.I. lawyer Kevin Clinesmith got a slap on the wrist after falsifying a FISA Court application to eavesdrop on Trump associate Carter Page, who was supposed to have been the lynchpin of Russia-Trump “collusion.” But Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s $32 million, two-year investigation found no such “collusion.”
Out of the Burn Bag; Onto the Front Burner
Kash Patel sworn into office as director of the FBI by Attorney General Pamela Bondi in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 21, 2025. (White House)
It had long been clear that Patel, given the breadth of his earlier experience investigating “Russiagate”, knew “where the bodies were buried” – and, not least, could identify the bodies of very senior miscreants still walking around free.
Reportedly, he had some luck in finding a secret room at F.B.I. headquarters that contained burn bags filled with thousands of Russiagate-related documents revealing evidence that incriminated the top gurus of the Deep State. (It’s a wonder why they weren’t burned).
Among these documents was a particularly damning 29-page secret Appendix to the not-so-thorough-yet-four-year-long investigation by Special Counsel Durham, appointed by Trump’s first-term Attorney General William Barr in May 2019 to look into the origins of the Russiagate mess.
(Burn bags commonly are simply paper bags containing classified documents to be burned, shredded, or otherwise destroyed beyond recognition. Deep State miscreants were rather careless. Remember, they were convinced Mrs. Clinton was going to win.)
Durham’s Appendix burst, so to speak, into the media Thursday, the day after the burn-bag story broke on Wednesday. But not before The New York Times obliged Clapper and Brennan the same day with a Guest Essay titled “Let’s Set the Record Straight on Russia and 2016” – an apparent attempt to pre-empt the damage from Durham’s Appendix.
It is a hard thing to do. Within a day of the discovery of the Appendix, Grassley on Thursday asked the F.B.I., C.I.A., and others to declassify it, which was done before the ink was dry on the Clapper-Brennan piece.
Among other things, the Appendix reveals that President Barack Obama intended to scuttle any F.B.I. investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s mishandling of classified information. And it is replete with evidence that the Clinton campaign, with the help of “special services” were hatching plots to falsely connect Trump to Russia.
The following three observations are drawn from Sen. Grassley’s Key Findings from the Durham Appendix. (We strongly recommend reading the whole Appendix. We include below salient excerpts from the full text.)
• During the first stage of the campaign, due to lack of direct evidence, it was decided to disseminate the necessary information [about alleged Russian interference] through the F.B.I.-affiliated…technical structures… in particular, the Crowdstrike and ThreatConnect companies, from where the information would then be disseminated through leading U.S. publications.
• Julie [Julianne Smith] says it will be a long-term affair to demonize Putin and Trump. Now it is good for a post-[DNC] convention bounce. [See below for the lurid detail.]
• It is a logical deduction Smith was, at a minimum, playing a role in the Clinton campaign’s efforts to tie Trump to Russia. And the communications Durham reviewed certainly lends some credence that such a plan existed. [NOTE: Yes, the same Julianne Smith whom President Joe Biden appointed U.S. Ambassador to NATO.]
The Full Text (Short Excerpts)
Hillary Clinton at a campaign rally in Tempe, Arizona, November 2016. (Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
The text of the Appendix dwells largely on information coming from memoranda prepared by Russian intelligence. These Russian memoranda analyzed the take from Russian hacking of communications sent by two senior members of the Open Society Foundations (formerly known as the Soros Foundation).
A few appetizing nuggets from the Appendix itself:
• Barack Obama sanctioned the use of all administrative levers to remove possibly negative effects from the F.B.I. investigation of cases related to the Clinton Foundation and the email correspondence in the State Department. [Revealed by WikiLeaks].
• Based on information from [DNC head] Wasserman-Schultz, the F.B.I. does not possess any kind of direct evidence against Clinton, because of their timely deletion from the email servers.
• The political director of the Hillary Clinton staff, Amanda Renteria, regularly receives information from Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the plans and intentions of the F.B.I.
Again, quoting from the Appendix:
“In late July 2016 the F.B.I. received a report that summarized certain hacked emails allegedly sent by Leonardo Bernardo of the Open Society Foundations.
The translated [Russian] draft memorandum stated in relevant part:
According to data from the election campaign headquarters of Hillary Clinton obtained by the U.S. Soros Foundation, on 26 July 2016 Clinton approved a plan of her policy adviser, Juliana (sic) Smith to smear Donald Trump by magnifying the scandal tied to the intrusion by Russian secret services in the pre-election process to benefit the Republican candidate.
As envisioned by Smith, raising the theme of Putin’s support for Trump to the level of an Olympics scandal would divert the constituents’ attention from the investigation of Clinton’s compromised electronic correspondence. …”
A ‘Crimes Report’ Filed
The Durham Appendix notes that the C.I.A. sent the F.B.I. an investigative referral regarding “the purported Clinton campaign plan” to tie Trump to Russia. Investigative referrals are widely known as “Crimes Reports.” U.S. intelligence agencies are required by statute to file a Crimes Report with the Department of Justice, when an unauthorized disclosure of classified information (or another potential federal crime) is believed to have occurred.
Had someone leaked, or was someone about to leak the Russian information on the “purported Clinton anti-Russian campaign plan”? I don’t know. In any case, a Crimes Report was filed – perhaps because more than one intelligence agency was involved; the content was so explosive; and it seemed necessary to work out a common response, just in case; and to brief those with “a need to know”.
Two months later, responding to a Senate Judiciary Committee request, then Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe wrote the following:
• In late July 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that U. S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee. …
• According to his handwritten notes, former Central Intelligence Agency Director Brennan subsequently briefed President Obama and other senior national security officials on the intelligence, including the ‘alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016 of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.’
• On 07 September 2016, U.S. intelligence officials forwarded an investigative referral to F.B.I. Director James Comey and Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok regarding ‘U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private mail server.'”
Shocked?
Strzok testifying to U.S. House Judiciary Committee on July 12, 2018 on F.B.I. probe in to 2016 election. (House Judiciary Committee/YouTube)
It hardly needs saying that neither F.B.I. Director Comey nor the equally infamous F.B.I. official Strzok could have been shocked at the information Russia had acquired and the conclusions drawn by Russian intelligence. Comey and Strzok knew chapter and verse – and all the footnotes.
Recall that Strzok, a veteran F.B.I. counterintelligence agent leading the probe into alleged Russian interference, told his F.B.I. lawyer/lover later of his reluctance to join the Mueller investigation: “My concern is that there’s no big there there.” Nor was there any there there then (summer 2016). Few knew more about that than Comey and Strzok.
Nothing to worry about because most Americans had been conditioned to believe the Russians are “almost genetically driven” (as Clapper testified) to do all manner of bad things. So who would believe the Russians that they didn’t interfere? And if someone with access to the truth dared to leak to mainstream media,it would be highly unlikely that the media would give him/her air or ink. In such circumstances who would take such a big risk?
Not surprisingly, there has been no additional information about the investigative referral/Crimes Report.
Coincidence?
July 26, 2016: The timing may be coincidence, but on the same day Mrs. Clinton reportedly endorsed the big push to tie Trump to Russia, David Sanger and Eric Schmitt of The New York Times co-authored an article titled: “Spy Agency Consensus Grows That Russia Hacked D.N.C.”
“WASHINGTON: American intelligence agencies have told the White House they now have ‘high confidence’ that the Russian government was behind the theft of emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee, according to federal officials who have been briefed on the evidence.”
Sanger and Schmitt have won Pulitzers for regurgitating what the C.I.A. and F.B.I. whisper in their ears. I have a bitter, war-of-aggression memory of Sanger one day stating as flat fact seven times that “Weapons of Mass Destruction” were in Iraq. That article, co-authored with Thom Shanker, appeared on July 29, 2002 as Dick Cheney and George Bush Jr. began browbeating Congress to authorize the unprovoked attack on Iraq.
Don’t Fret; We’re Still Here
Some of us got Russiagate right, and we are pledged to stay at it. Actually, one of us got it right on day one. That would be Consortium News favorite, Patrick Lawrence (whom The Nation fired for exposing the lie about “Russian hacking” of those embarrassing DNC emails).
Patrick let it all out in a column at Salon.com after watching some of the chicanery at the 2016 Democratic Convention. Strangely, the day he let loose was the same day that now-Ambassador Julianne Smith got the bright idea to blame the Russians – July 25, 2016 – and sold it to Mrs. Clinton the following day.
47 Years of Neoliberalism, Started by Carter & Callaghan
Democrat & Labour
Roger Boyd
Aug 22, 2025
It was Jimmy Carter and James Callaghan who brought neoliberalism to the US and UK, not Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Without their about turns in 1978 quite possibly both Reagan and Thatcher would never have come to power. If we should blame anyone for opening the door to neoliberalism it should be Carter and Callaghan, from the Democratic and Labour parties respectively.
Carter
On August 9th, 1974 Richard Nixon resigned for crimes that look quaint in comparison to those of Reagan’s Iran-Contra criminal activity or the widespread criminality of the Bush Jr. years or the blatant criminality of the present US administration. Although he may have been not a very nice person (which US president was a nice person?), Nixon was a moderate Republican of the type that would perhaps now be referred to as “communist”. His major achievements were:
In 1969 began a period of detente with the Soviet Union, warming up the Cold War
Signed the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union
In 1972 visited China and re-established diplomatic ties between China and the US
Signed the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in 1969
Signed the Tax Reform Act of 1960
Established the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) to tax high-income earners who had previously avoided paying taxes due to various exemptions and deductions.
New rules to force charitable foundations created and controlled by the wealthy to pay out charitable dollars annually and avoid self-dealing
Signed the Occupational Health & Safety Act (OSHA) in 1970
Signed the Environmental Protection Act (EPA) in 1970
Signed the Clean Air Act in 1970
Signed the State and Local Fiscal Assistance Act in 1972
Provided federal support for the funding of state and local public services
Signed the Endangered Species Act in 1973
Lowered the voting age from 21 to 18
Ended the Vietnam War and the draft
Nixon even used price controls in an attempt to limit inflation. He was re-elected with 60.7% of the vote, the largest share for the Republican Party in any presidential election. He had nearly won the presidency in 1960, losing by only 119,000 votes in an election clouded by questions of vote rigging in favour of JFK; especially in Illinois and Texas.
The whole Watergate scandal is highly questionable, with some commentators considering the break-in to be an operation to undermine Nixon. The break in served no purpose given Nixon’s dominance in the polls, and was utterly botched by a group of highly skilled operatives with CIA affiliations. The famous “Deep Throat” turned out years later to be the second in command at the FBI, and the editor of the paper (the Washington Post) that nurtured the story had been one of JFK’s best friends. Geoff Shepard details many of the highly questionable aspects of the scandal, including the false statements that Nixon personally approved the payments to Gordon Libby.
In 1973, Nixon’s vice president Agnew had been forced out of office for the kind of corruption that was routine within the US political class. He was like a schoolboy with his hands in the cookie jar compared to the extensive corruption of Lyndon Johnson. Agnew’s replacement was Gerald Ford, a man who had served the US establishment on the Warren Commission cover up and was a member of the “Young Turks” within the Republican Party along with Donald Rumsfeld. After Nixon’s resignation, Ford served as the president of the US from 1974 to 1977. He appointed Rumsfeld as the Secretary of Defence, Richard Cheney as Chief of Staff, and George Bush Sr. as Director of the CIA.
He lost the 1976 election to the “clean outsider” Jimmy Carter, an image belied by Carter’s appointment of so many Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and Trilateral Commission members and other establishment figures to his cabinet. He was also a neoliberal at heart, as Jonathan Schlefer detailed.
Carter spurred the nation, even the world itself, toward the dark place we find ourselves in today. Turning sharply toward neoliberalism (before that term was commonplace) and weaponizing markets, he set the US economy on its path toward lousy working-class wages and steeper financial crises. If he hadn’t, maybe Donald Trump would still be a reality-TV star … Thus the Democrat Jimmy Carter—not Republicans Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan—first discarded New Deal policies that had long sustained growth and raised wages for all workers. He spurned Keynesianism, deregulated industries from airlines to banking, and fatally abandoned a labor-reform bill that unions saw as vital to their survival.
He also deregulated the tucking industry, which destroyed the stable well paid jobs in that industry. His deregulation of the Savings & Loan Industry was responsible for the later S&L crisis that destroyed that industry and consolidated financial power within the private banking system. He also blocked labour relations legislations that would have aided the unions in reversing their steady post-WW2 and post Taft-Hartley decline. Part of his opposition to the legislation was his support for the anti-union “right to work” laws. When Carter came to office there was a solid groundswell supporting the introduction of a national healthcare system, but Carter wanted one based on private insurance as against Ted Kennedy’s “Medicare for All” (MFA) plan. The chance for MFA was thrown away by Carter, opening the way for the massive medical inflation and profiteering of the next decades and the present.
And he appointed Paul Volcker in August 1979, who used the excuse of the 1979 oil crisis to impose a brutal deflation that helped crush the labour unions even further. In that crisis, global oil production only fell by 4% with the crisis driven much more by hoarding, panic buying and speculation. Carter made the situation worse by banning imports of Iranian oil in late 1979, after the US embassy in Tehran had been stormed. Itself in response to Carter’s decision to allow the deposed Shah to visit the US. It was the Iran hostage crisis, created by Carter’s decision on the Shah, that can be said to have cost him the 1980 election; exacerbated by the farcical and disastrous rescue attempt of the hostages in the US Embassy. It was also Carter who set out to destroy the progressive (and feminist!) socialist government of Afghanistan, that was slowly but successfully ridding the country of the warlords, to antagonize the Soviet Union into a reaction. It was his actions that precipitated the eventual fall of that socialist government, the imposition of Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan, and the growth of Al Qaeda.
It would be another Democratic president, Clinton, who fully embedded neoliberalism in the US. And another, Obama, to forestall any move backwards after the 2008 GFC and to embed the authoritarian security state put in place by Bush and Cheney.
Callaghan
The early years of the 1970s witnessed the destruction of a Conservative government by the labour movement. A 1972 miner’s strike had ended after a matter of weeks when the Conservative government (elected in 1970) provided substantial pay rises (miner’s pay had fallen significantly behind other industrial workers during the 1960s). This had been the first miner’s strike since 1926 and followed a 1960s of extensive pit closures. In 1968 alone, one sixth of the British coal mines had been closed with the loss of nearly 60,000 jobs. For the whole of the 1960s, coal mining employment had fallen from 643,000 to 284,000; by 1974 it had fallen further to 260,000. Between 1972 and 1974 high inflation had quickly erased the miner’s gains and they went out on strike again in 1974 when offered a 7% pay raise when inflation had been 7% in 1972, 9.1% in 1973, and was running at 16% in 1974.
The Conservative government refused to back down and a strike ensued which brought rolling power cuts, a three day working week and two elections in 1974 which ended the Conservative government and brought in the Labour Party under Harold Wilson. Taxes were raised on the rich to fund increased spending on the welfare state. A voluntary incomes policy was also agreed with the trades unions which worked with reasonable success, bringing inflation down to single digits by 1978.
The core disagreement within the government was over the role of the National Enterprise Board (NEB), a tool of industrial planning, between the left-wing Tony Benn (Secretary of State for Industry) and the right wing Callaghan (Foreign Secretary) and Denis Healey (Chancellor of the Exchequer). Benn envisaged a more radical central planning, facilitating greater worker control and support for worker cooperatives. After Benn’s opposition to Britain’s 1973 membership of the European Economic Community, and support for the “no” side in the 1975 EEC referendum going against his own government, he was shunted over to be Secretary of State for Energy. The NEB was moved to more of a role of bailing out failing and badly managed British firms rather than as a source of real industrial planning and reorganization.
In the 1970s oil had been discovered in the North Sea and the country was looking forward to increasing flows of oil and gas export earnings that could be used to fund an extensive industrial policy and renewal. Instead, those earnings were to be given away to private corporations and frittered away on Thatcher’s tax cuts. How did that happen? In March 1976 Harold Wilson suddenly resigned as prime minister. James Callaghan won the election for head of the Labour Party and thus prime minister, and he kept Dennis Healey as Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Labour right wing were in control. Although being the favourite of rank and file membership, Tony Benn was defeated by the trades union block votes.
In 1976 Britain experienced a Sterling crisis, and Benn and Healey proposed two very different approaches. Benn proposed his Alternative Economic Strategy that envisaged a protectionist trade policy to provide time for British industry to be efficiently reorganized. This would have also been supported by the significant rise in British oil revenues in the second half of the 1970s. Healey pushed an IMF package of deflation. In effect, Healey (backed by Callaghan) picked a time of immediate crisis, that could have been relatively easily staved off until the oil revenues started flowing in even greater quantities, to implement right wing economic policies. In December 1976 the Labour government accepted the IMF loan and its deflationary conditions. In 1977, the UK ran a trade surplus due to increasing oil revenues showing the very short-term nature of the crisis. It turned out in fact that the whole crisis had been created by the Healey-managed UK Treasury that had significantly overestimated the public sector’s borrowing needs! Healey had invented a crisis during which he used the IMF as a cover for his own aims of implementing right wing economic policies; unfortunately, such traitorous behaviour has been a regular occurrence in the Labour Party.
The austerity u-turn lead to the government being at odds with the very trades unions that had facilitated Callaghan’s election as Labour Party leader. The government had made working people bear the brunt of fighting inflation through wage raises that were below the rate of inflation as part of the voluntary wage controls, and tensions were rising within the union memberships. While profits were rising in many companies, and management staff were being rewarded handsomely with higher salaries and bonuses. At the same time, Callaghan inexplicably decided not to call an election in the Autumn of 1978 that he was set to win. Instead, he decided to push his luck by foregoing the winnable election, while offering public sector pay raises which were well below the rate of inflation, and even below the level being won at some private companies (e.g. Ford). The two decisions together represented political suicide, and resulted in the Winter of Discontent and the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives. It was as if the Labour leadership wanted the Conservative Party to win, to serve the interests of the British establishment that they tended to be loyal to (and disloyal to their membership).
[youtube]http/youtu.be/MBSAXCvSTVQ[/youtube]
Thatcher’s best electoral asset was James Callaghan. He remained as Labour Party leader after losing the election, to help Dennis Healey take over from him in the service of the British establishment. This was foiled and Michael Foot became the leader of the Labour Party. In 1987, Callaghan was made a life peer by Margaret Thatcher, Baron Callaghan of Cardiff. Healey was made a life peer in 1992, Baron Healey of Riddlesden by Conservative PM John Major. In response to the leadership of Foot, a number of Labour right-wingers (Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Bill Rodgers, Shirley Williams - the “Gang of Four”) founded a competing party - the Social Democratic Party which formed an alliance with the Liberal Party before merging with it in 1988.
The Liberal-SDP alliance served to pull votes away from the Labour Party, gaining 25.4% of the votes in the 1993 general election and driving down the Labour vote to 27.6%; facilitating the Conservative 1983 landslide with 42.4% of the vote (greatly aided by the Falklands War). The Labour Party traitors achieved their aim as Michael Foot resigned just days after the defeat, and was replaced with the right winger Neil Kinnock. In 1987 Roy Jenkins was made a life peer, Baron Jenkins of Hillhead by Thatcher and became the Chancellor of Oxford University and was awarded the Order of Merit in 1993. David Owen was made a life peer in 1992 by PM John Major, Baron Owen of Plymouth and Major was instrumental in having him appointed as the European Union negotiator with respect to the former Yugoslavia (1992 to 1995). Owen then became the Chancellor of the University of Liverpool. Bill Rodgers was also made a life peer Baron Rodgers of Quarry Bank in 1992 by John Major. Shirley Williams was made a life peer in 1993 by John Major, Baroness Williams of Crosby and became a member of the Council on Foreign Relations as well as a professor at Harvard University.
Without Carter there may very well not have been a Reagan. Without Callaghan no Thatcher. And without the “Gang of Four” there may not have been a Kinnock and then a Blair. Ironically, both Blair and Jeremy Corbyn entered parliament in the 1983 election. It took a lot of work by the ruling classes of both countries, together with willing collaborators in the Democratic and Labour parties, to get Reagan and Thatcher into power. Sadly, there always seem to be willing collaborators. Just like Clinton and Blair who embedded and deepened the neoliberal work of their Republican and Conservative predecessors. Just like Obama who did the same, just like Starmer who is serving his masters well after being instrumental in the political assassination of Corbyn. Just like Ramsay MacDonald the Labour leader who formed a national government with the Conservatives and Liberals in 1931, only 2 years into a Labour Party electoral term; due to his refusal to move away from deflationary economic policies during the Great Depression. The result was an electoral disaster for the Labour Party, while MacDonald carried on as PM until 1935 as head of the national government.
Hopefully Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana have learnt from these examples, and their own experiences within the Labour Party, and will work hard to make sure that such establishment fifth columnists and traitors do not find their way into their new party. As for the US, the Democratic Party will always be a willing tool of the US oligarchy, an oligarchy which is now far, far to the right of where it was even in the early 1970s, and a traitor to the very people whose votes it woos as the “progressive” sheep dog of US politics; corralling and nullifying the energy for real change within America.
(Like we've been saying for getting on 20 years:"The Democratic Party is the piss which sets the Republican dye in the national fabric."
******
Looking Back at the Positions on South African Apartheid Taken by Ambitious Democrats
Posted on August 23, 2025 by Yves Smith
Yves here. To some, this post might seem quaint. It looks back on a period when some Democrats were willing to act in a principled manner, at least when the costs were not high. It even show members of what Black Agenda Report calls the black misleadership class like Charles Rangel and Maxine Waters acting as if they had some decency.
But a key, albeit secondary part, of this account on how the South African divestment and sanctions movement got rolling is the seminal role of year of campus activism, which included targeting university endowments for divestiture of South African holdings. No wonder Zionist billionaire have been so savage in their efforts to stamp out student and faculty opposition to Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing.
By John P. Ruehl, 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
By the early 1980s, South Africa’s system of racial apartheid had evolved from an issue of limited concern to becoming a major issue globally. Years of campaigning by anti-apartheid activists, the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), and student-led divestment movements were beginning to bear fruit. This momentum, however, stalled due to the conservative turn in U.S. politics after Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election victory. His constructive engagement policy toward South Africa “prioritized resistance against communist expansion over efforts to end human rights violations internationally,” stated the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
Moreover, Cold War concerns over some anti-apartheid groups’ links to radical or communist entities made the cause politically sensitive for many Democrats. The breakthrough came with the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act (CAAA) of 1986, when Congress overrode President Reagan’s veto to impose sanctions on South Africa, a result of years of pressure from progressive lawmakers and Democrats. It marked a turning point that would help see apartheid officially dismantled by 1994, assisted by the easing of Cold War tensions and the end of Soviet backing for South Africa’s liberation movements.
Apartheid was never a decisive electoral issue for most Americans. For Democrats with presidential ambitions in the 1980s and early 1990s, support for ending it was strongest in liberal centers like New York and on university campuses, where protests and local resolutions aligned with activist solidarity. Nationwide, however, the cause risked alienating some conservatives and foreign policy hawks. Still, prominent Democrats helped normalize legislation against South Africa, including bans on state entities doing business with companies operating there. Their pressure on the Reagan administration cemented a Democratic brand of foreign policy based on moral conviction. But having claimed a leading role in dismantling apartheid, this legacy has increasingly come back to haunt them.
Carter to Reagan
By the 1970s, events like the 1976 Soweto uprising and the rise of independent trade unions created a link between South African struggles and U.S. civil rights, student activism, and labor movements. For many Democrats, condemning apartheid was becoming a public litmus test for moral internationalism and prioritizing genuine social change abroad over realpolitik. President Jimmy Carter’s administration favored heavier pressure against South Africa, backing the 1977 UN-sponsored arms embargo and restricting exports of certain products.
Carter’s defeat in 1980 led to a policy turnaround. Ronald Reagan’s administration viewed South Africa’s liberation movements—the African National Congress (ANC) and the United Democratic Front (UDF)—as too closely tied to the Soviets, and embraced the constructive engagement policy with the South African government. Seeking gradual reform while maintaining political links, the White House downplayed apartheid as a priority in favor of retaining South Africa as a Cold War ally.
Some Democrats continued to see the issue as both morally and politically urgent. In 1983, Representative Stephen Solarz introduced H.R. 1693 to limit U.S. financial assistance to business operations in South Africa and ban the import of certain goods from the country. The bill failed, but Solarz emerged as a prominent foreign policy force throughout the 1980s.
In an 1985 Opinion piece in the New York Times, he pointed out that “Just as President Reagan’s policy of constructive engagement could not bring Pretoria to its senses, American economic sanctions alone will not bring it to its knees. It will take a combination of increasing internal and international pressure to convince the South African Government that the price of maintaining apartheid exceeds the cost of abandoning it.”
By 1992, political analyst Charlie Cook floated him as a possible presidential contender, but his prospects faded after losing his House seat in post-1990 redistricting. He was offered the Indian ambassadorship by Bill Clinton, which fell through following allegations that he had sought a U.S. visa for a Hong Kong businessman with a criminal record.
Solarz’s actions, however, showed that standing against South Africa’s apartheid didn’t negatively impact one’s political career. National security concerns, especially over South Africa’s suspected nuclear activities (including a possible 1979 nuclear test), also helped build some bipartisan support for sanctions. In 1983, Representative Charles B. Rangel introduced H.R.1020 to ban exports of nuclear materials and technology to South Africa, while Representative William H. Gray III proposed H.R. 1392 to limit U.S. investment in the country.
He also introduced the Anti-Apartheid Action Act of 1985, which called for prohibiting loans and new investments and restricting imports. Though it passed the House and Senate, the bill stalled before becoming law.
The legislative push against apartheid actually began more than a decade earlier, with Representative Ron Dellums, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, issuing the first legislative challenge to apartheid in 1972. By the mid-1980s, community leaders and CBC politicians like Maxine Waters,Ron Dellums, and Charles Rangel had all helped raise awareness, notably after the 1984 arrests of Dellums and Representative John Conyers at the South African Embassy for protesting against “racial segregation.”
Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign showed that voters could support a more radical stance on apartheid. In 1984, while speaking at the United Nations Special Committee Against Apartheid, he said, “The present U.S. partnership with apartheid is a violation of our national morality.”
Senior Democrats like Gary Hart and John Glenn, also running for president that year, were less vocal on the issue. However, Democratic nominee Walter Mondale, long critical of apartheid since the 1960sand vocal against it as vice president under Jimmy Carter, endorsed strengthening the strategic embargo and limiting diplomatic contact as part of his presidential campaign.
Mondale was defeated in a landslide, winning only in his home state of Minnesota and Washington, D.C., in an election where his pledge to raise taxes and lingering dissatisfaction with the Carter administration weighed heavily. Despite his defeat, Mondale helped normalize opposition to apartheid within mainstream Democratic discourse, and after retiring from politics following the 1984 presidential election, he later served as U.S. ambassador to Japan under Clinton and narrowly lost a 2002 Senate race.
Democrats continued to introduce new legislation in their fight against apartheid and found success at the local and state levels. By 1985, numerous cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and Boston, had passed divestment ordinances, while states like Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, Michigan, and Nebraska had enacted divestment laws. The same year, New York Governor Mario Cuomo said that “to demonstrate the abhorrence of… [New York] residents to the pernicious system of apartheid… he would soon propose legislation to require the divestiture, over the next five years, of billions of dollars in state funds.” Despite it being struck down, Cuomo remained a powerful Democratic figure until his 1994 electoral loss.
The movement’s momentum spread from House members to mayors and governors, and senators. Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, who challenged Jimmy Carter in the 1980 Democratic primary, stayed a vocal critic of apartheid, traveling to South Africa in 1985 and meeting anti-apartheid activist and bishop Desmond Tutu. Kennedy’s strong liberal base and national profile allowed him to champion sanctions, even as personal scandals invited criticism.
In 1986, Senator Joe Biden of Delaware made headlines by sharply rebuking Secretary of State George Shultz during a Senate hearing over the Reagan administration’s lenient policy toward South Africa. Joined by fellow Democrats and several Republicans, Biden pressed for a timetable to end apartheid. While his national profile was still rising, he remained popular in Delaware.
The turning point came in 1986 when Congress, led by Democrats unanimously, reintroduced the Anti-Apartheid Action Act as the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act. The victory marked the moment when apartheid became mainstream Democratic policy, reflecting growing public support nationwide.
Moving into the Mainstream
Widespread Democratic support for anti-apartheid measures was clear by the 1988 presidential race. Representative Dick Gephardt, a co-sponsor of the 1983 bill to reduce investment in South Africa, won early 1988 election contests like Iowa but later withdrew amid declining support. Joe Biden also ran briefly in 1988, while Jesse Jackson, in his second presidential campaign, made helping end apartheid an integral part of his foreign policy.
The nomination ultimately went to Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. Dukakis had already divested state pension funds from companies doing business in South Africa in 1983. During his campaign, Dukakis, influenced by Jesse Jackson, labeled South Africa as a terrorist state. Although he lost the general election, he continued his stance by signing an executive order in 1989, which banned Massachusetts state contracts with firms operating there. However, his political capital had diminished, and he chose not to seek reelection as governor in 1991.
A major reason behind growing Democratic activism against apartheid in the 1980s stemmed from greater public awareness. Campus divestment movements further entrenched anti-apartheid activism into the Democratic Party and wider American political culture.
“Beginning in the late 1970s, a grassroots movement of American college students and faculty across the country started demanding that their academic and civic institutions divest their holdings in companies doing business in South Africa and that pension funds and banks divest any South African assets. … By 1988, more than 155 academic institutions had fully or partially divested from South Africa… In addition, by 1989, 26 U.S. states, 22 counties and more than 90 cities had taken economic action against companies doing business in South Africa,” stated the U.S. Mission to International Organizations in Geneva.
A series of events organized globally further helped bring apartheid into the national spotlight. These included the 25th anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre in 1985, the 1985 global hit “Sun City,” a song that had roots in the protests against a whites-only resort in South Africa, and the 1988 televised London concert for Mandela’s 70th birthday.
Negotiations to dismantle apartheid began in 1989 when Frederik Willem de Klerk became South African president. In the United States, Democrats were critical of President George H.W. Bush’s decision to lift certain sanctions on South Africa in 1991. It was not, however, a major campaign issue in the 1992 election, with foreign policy sidelined due to the Soviet Union’s collapse and a deep recession at home. The election was primarily shaped by domestic concerns, which Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton and his vice-presidential pick Al Gore successfully navigated to win.
Both men had taken relatively cautious public positions on apartheid in the 1980s. Gore was a vocal supporter of the 1986 CAAA but did not make it a strong part of his political identity. Clinton was, meanwhile, governor of a southern state and did not advance any divestment initiatives. But the 1992 South African referendum, where white South Africans voted to end minority rule, provided a welcome opening. The Clinton presidential administration strongly backed South Africa’s ongoing reforms and offered strong assistance. In April 1994, apartheid was formally dismantled, and South Africa held its first free elections. Six months later, Clinton welcomed President Nelson Mandela on his first official state visit to the U.S., with Clinton later visiting South Africa in 1998.
Yet Clinton’s trip also exposed early strains. Mandela rejected U.S. trade proposals and defended ties with leaders in Libya, Iran, and Cuba. Still, Democrats retained much of the moral authority associated with their stance on apartheid, a perception reinforced by contrast with President George W. Bush’s wars in the 2000s, until disappointment followed. Barack Obama’s presidency, with Biden as vice president, often appeared to be pushing for overall reform but was morally inconsistent with new military campaigns being initiated during his term. Trump’s 2016 campaign leaned on a promise not to start new wars, a record that Biden was able to match.
But what defined Biden instead was his steadfast support for Israel after October 7, 2023. His administration’s political and military backing split Democrats more sharply than any foreign policy issue in decades, alienating younger, progressive, and Muslim and Arab American voters who once saw the party as a vehicle for moral clarity abroad. Biden’s anti-apartheid legacy has been recast as hypocrisy amid his support for Israel as Palestinians suffer. The wider Democratic Party’s inaction on Israel, aside from its progressive voices, showed that the problem was not just Biden’s but reflected the wider sentiment of the party.
What began as a story of global solidarity and moral clarity has become a painful point of contention, particularly over Israel and other perceived failures of Democratic presidents since then. South Africa’s post-apartheid promise, based on U.S. support, has also faltered, with ongoing racial divisions, corruption, crime, power outages, and a water crisis. These issues drove the African National Congress, dominant for 30 years, to its worst-ever electoral results in 2024. South Africans’ frustration has extended to the U.S., with lingering distrust over American intentions over the past two decades, leaving space for China and Russia to expand their influence.
The Democrat legacy of ending apartheid has not only set higher expectations that the Biden administration failed to meet but also contributed to a geopolitical setback. Democrats’ legacy has been further complicated by President Donald Trump’s renewed focus on white South Africans. Beginning in 2018 and escalating during his second term, Trump has framed their plight as evidence of ongoing racial discrimination in the country. In February 2025, he issued an executive order titled “Addressing Egregious Actions of The Republic of South Africa,” and during an Oval Office meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in May, he accused him of enabling a white genocide in the country. Trump’s refugee program for white South Africans saw its first arrivals during the same month.
The lesson of the Democratic anti-apartheid legacy extends beyond the single historic victory of helping end South Africa’s discriminatory and oppressive system. While its role in ending apartheid was essential and historic, lasting political change depends on the willingness to act decisively, endure political costs, and uphold principles even when they are inconvenient or unpopular. It also means applying the same standards across countries and time periods, which the Democrats have been unable to achieve.
The problems of South Africa today stem from capitalism, apartheid was a tool of capitalism. A symptom was treated but the disease organism remains...Had capitalism in South Africa been banished along with apartheid you can be assured that the Democratic Party would never(in a million years...) have supported that. Such are their priorities.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Super Predators, Born Criminals, and the Black Misleadership Class
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 10 Sep 202
Baltimore mayor Brandon Scott and Maryland governor Wes Moore announce a policing surge on September 5, 2025. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
The treachery of the Black misleadership class knows no bounds. While Trump’s latest racist dog whistle about “born criminals” is condemned, double-talking scoundrels may pretend to be horrified while giving legitimacy and assistance to the racist police state.
“Unless we do something about that cadre of young people, tens of thousands of them, born out of wedlock, without parents, without supervision, without any structure, without any conscience developing because they literally have not been socialized. They literally have not had an opportunity, we should focus on them now . . . If we don’t they will or a portion of them will, become the predators 15 years from now.” - Senator Joe Biden speech in support of Bill Clinton’s 1993 Crime Bill
“They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘super predators.’ No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.” - Hillary Clinton
“We took many people off the streets of Washington DC. They’re hard core. They’re not going to be good, in 10 years, in 20 years, in 2 years they're going to be criminals, they were born to be criminals frankly. They were born to be criminals and they're tough and mean and they'll cut your throat and they won't even think about it the next day. They won't even remember that they did it. And we’re not gonna have those people.” - Donald Trump
“If you want to have a serious conversation about things that the federal government could provide that could be helpful, it could be FBI and ATF support.” - Maryland Governor Wes Moore
“We greatly appreciate the surge of officers that enhance what MPD has been able to do in this city,” - Washington DC Mayor Muriel Bowser
There is nothing more bipartisan in the United States than a racialized crime panic. Neither Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, nor Donald Trump makes a direct reference to Black people in their screeds. But their policies were and are directed at Black people. Which group is arrested more often than any other in this country? Who is most likely to be incarcerated? Whose neighborhoods are over policed? Who do the police kill most often? It is reasonable to say that Black people are the targets of this hate speech which comes from democrats and republicans alike. Even worse, the Black misleadership class gives cover to this incitement of fear and loathing against their people.
Donald Trump’s 30-day emergency takeover of the Washington DC police department was met with praise and acquiescence from Muriel Bowser, that city’s current Black mayor. It is true that the federal government’s role overseeing the District of Columbia’s governance gives Trump and congress the legal right to do as they wish. Yet there is nothing about that right which forces mayor Bowser to give Trump a stamp of approval. Not only did the mayor thank Trump for his cynical intrusion into Washington’s local affairs with comments such as, “The fact that we have more law enforcement and presence in neighborhoods, that may be positive,” but she has said nothing about Black residents being racially profiled by federal police and spending days in jail for minor offenses. She even resorted to dubious claims of her own to help make the case for his actions.
The mayor attempted to excuse her traitorous support for Trump by claiming there was a large decline in the number of carjackings because of Trump’s intervention. She pleased Trump and made herself a partner in the politically expedient imperative to demonize Black people. Bowser said that the number of carjackings during the first 20 days of Trump’s emergency declaration had dropped 87% from the same period in the previous year. That data seems impressive but the number of carjackings, along with all crime rates, had been declining significantly without a federal presence. In July, the last full month before Trump’s usurpation, carjackings had dropped to 16 incidents, a 64% decline from the same period the year before, the lowest number since May 2020. Mayor Bowser played fast and loose with crime numbers, which is not unusual for politicians, but she did so in the service of a gigantic race baiting exercise which has been very dangerous for Black people.
Bowser is not alone in going along with the pro-police narrative. Trump’s outburst about born criminals was made in part to justify his threat to send National Guard troops to Baltimore, Maryland. Maryland’s Black governor, Wes Moore, made a big show of saying he opposed a National Guard presence but at the same time, felt obliged to go along with the political imperative of over policing Black people.
Moore may have recoiled at the thought of a National Guard presence but added that he wanted Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) agents instead. The FBI was the source of the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) which killed and imprisoned so many leaders of the liberation movement. The FBI didn’t leave its past behind, but instead under the Barack Obama administration added the Black Identity Extremist designation to the law enforcement lexicon. It was never clear how the term was defined but as Black Agenda Report said in 2017, “It is a catch-all for blanket repression of Black activism of any kind.” The same agency which prioritizes the targeting and surveillance of Black activists is now lifted up as a cure for the crime that bedevils Baltimore, a city long ago impoverished by an official policy of deindustrialization which has left it in a devastated state for decades.
Baltimore mayor Brandon Scott joined the governor in requesting assistance from the FBI, ATF and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). Both men proudly proclaimed a “surge” of police including Maryland state police, as they mimicked Trump in over-policing a majority Black city.
Bowser, Moore and Scott must be exposed but it would be a mistake to single them out when there is such a long history of Black collaboration with politicians whose rhetorical bread and butter are declarations of being “tough on crime” while refusing to ever “coddle criminals.” These expressions may appear to be silly but they are deadly serious code words representing the determination to maintain physical control of Black people and a system of mass incarceration which remains a foundational centerpiece of U.S. politics.
The Bill Clinton era Crime Bill became a reality with the support of Senator Joe Biden who bragged about his role in sending so many Black people to prison. His actions didn’t hurt him politically and in fact played a part in his being chosen as Obama’s running mate in 2008. What better way to make himself acceptable to white people than to have a vice president who went out of his way to put Black people in prison.
Hillary Clinton made her infamous “super predator” remarks in 1996 in service to her husband’s second presidential campaign. Whipping up fear of crime is a sure fire winner in politics and she did not disappoint. She also wasn’t hurt by her remarks. She was endorsed by Black officials and received the lion’s share of votes cast by Black people when Trump defeated her. Trump stands out only for his consistent lack of finesse. He browbeat the milquetoast mayor Bowser into giving him public approval and despite their talk, inspired Moore and Scott to take the same actions against their Black constituents as he did residents of Washington DC.
The Black misleaders owe their positions to whites who give them access to the wealthy and influential white people who provide campaign donations, and to the corporate media who decide who is and isn’t a viable candidate. They don’t reach out to Black people until the endorsements have been made and all the deals have been struck. It isn’t surprising that they show so little concern for a powerless group, even if they are putatively members of that same cohort.
As long as white people whip up fear and hatred of Black people we can expect politicians to benefit from leading the charge for demonization and dehumanization. The larger question is how to achieve even a modicum of self-determination instead of relying upon racists and their ambitious and cowardly enablers.
