Stop Pretending Biden Is Some Passive Witness To Israel’s Warmongering
The more I think about it the more obnoxious I find the Biden administration’s “Gee whiz, I sure hope Israel doesn’t drag us into a giant war in the middle east” posturing and the imperial media’s facilitation of it.
Caitlin Johnstone
April 15, 2024
The more I think about it the more obnoxious I find the Biden administration’s “Gee whiz, I sure hope Israel doesn’t drag us into a giant war in the middle east” posturing and the imperial media’s facilitation of it.
CNN has a new article out titled “As Iran attacks Israel, Biden confronts an escalating Middle East crisis he had hoped to avoid,” which is a genre of story that has been coming out in slightly different iterations again and again for the past six months. Every time Israel does something that makes things more dangerous in the middle east with the assistance of the United States, the American press fall all over themselves to inform the world that the president really doesn’t want this to happen and that his feelings are very upset about it.
“For President Joe Biden, an attack on Israel launched from Iranian soil amounts to a scenario he’d greatly sought to avoid since the start of the current Middle East conflict,” writes CNN, saying the strikes “heighten the risk of a wider regional conflict that could directly draw in the United States, along with other countries.”
“Israel will respond to Iran’s attack, but the scope of that response has yet to be determined,” CNN reports, citing an anonymous Israeli official.
And it’s just such an obscene insult to our intelligence to suggest that the Biden administration is some kind of passive witness to all this, sitting around wringing its hands hoping Israel doesn’t do something so horrible that the United States will have no choice but to leap into World War Three in defense of its dear ally. It’s insulting in that it asks us to believe the US would have no choice but to enter into a war of unimaginable horror if Israel acts belligerently enough, and it’s insulting in that it asks us to ignore the fact that Biden could have ended this insane cycle of escalation with one phone call to Israel at any time over the last six months.
Being asked to accept that the Biden administration is just standing there hoping Israel doesn’t ignite the worst war in middle eastern history is like seeing a dog owner letting their rottweiler run around biting people all over the neighborhood and saying “Yeah he just does what he likes, I just hope he doesn’t kill anybody.”
It’s like, no. Stop that. You’re not just crossing your fingers and hoping Israel doesn’t do something monstrous, you’re letting them do whatever they want because that’s what you’re choosing to do. Israel’s entire existence is as dependent on US support as a scuba diver is on their oxygen tank, and as such the White House has essentially limitless leverage it can use to make Israel do as it pleases — and it has done so in the past. Hell it’s done so during this very Gaza assault, successfully commanding Israel to stop cutting off Gazan telecommunications and to start letting more aid trucks in to the enclave.
If Biden truly didn’t want Israel to be turning the middle east into a hurricane of death and fire, he would stop it. He would put the damn dog on a leash.
The western press have a well-established track record of consistently framing US wars as these traps that Washington just clumsily stumbles its way into, like there’s some giant Macaulay Culkin-like deity sneaking around laying tripwires to force the Pentagon to regime change Libya or whatever. After a certain number of wars you have to figure that a regime is starting a bunch of wars because it’s just a warmongering regime, though — and the US has been involved in a whole, whole lot of wars. Nobody’s that clumsy or that unlucky; it’s like believing your husband when he tells you he keeps slipping and falling with his man parts inside the lady parts of various coworkers.
The most powerful empire that has ever existed is not just passively sitting there praying that big bad Israel doesn’t force it to go to war with Iran. That is not happening. All the violence and chaos that’s happening in the middle east right now is happening because the US empire wants it to happen, and because the people who steer that empire are psychopathic ghouls. And don’t let the crooked manipulators of the western mass media tell you otherwise.
KEVIN GOSZTOLA: BIDEN TERRIFYINGLY GROWS RANKS OF GOVERNMENT SPIES
APRIL 23, 2024 NATYLIESB 1 COMMENT
By Kevin Gosztola, Substack, 4/22/24
On April 20, Edward Snowden declared, “America lost something important today, and hardly anyone heard. The headlines of state-aligned media screech and crow about the nefarious designs of your fellow citizens and the necessity of foreign wars without end, but find few words for a crime against the Constitution.”
The NSA whistleblower was referring to the United States Senate reauthorizing and expanding surveillance under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
President Joe Biden circulated a memo that cast the Fourth Amendment right to privacy as a “threat to national security.” Biden National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Attorney General Merrick Garland called members of Congress to ensure that they voted to give spy agencies renewed power.
Specifically, “Patriot Act 2.0,” as Representative Zoe Lofgren called it, broadened the definition of service providers and exponentially increased the power that the government has to force numerous business and industries to aid warrantless surveillance.
Senator Ron Wyden strongly opposed the legislation and even introduced an amendment that would have prevented this assault on civil liberties. But the Senate rejected his effort to protect privacy.
“The Senate waited until the 11th hour to ram through renewal of warrantless surveillance in the dead of night,” Wyden stated. He also added, “It is clear from the votes on very popular amendments that senators were unwilling to send this bill back to the House, no matter how common-sense the amendment before them.”
Although the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) renewed Section 702 until April 2025, allowing lawmakers plenty of time to appropriately draft and amend legislation, panic was stirred by Biden and the national security state.
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Wyden, who has a track record of challenging surveillance, did not mince words. He described the provision that he fought, which was dubbed the “Make Everyone A Spy” provision, as “one of the most dramatic and terrifying expansions of government surveillance authority in history.”
“It allows the government to force any American who installs, maintains, or repairs anything that transmits or stores communications to spy on the government’s behalf. That means anyone with access to a server, a wire, a cable box, a wifi router, or a phone. It would be secret: the Americans receiving the government directives would be bound to silence, and there would be no court oversight.”
Forcing More Service Providers To Spy On Customers
The Biden administration applauded the passage of legislation that expanded warrantless surveillance. “The President will swiftly sign the bill into law, ensuring that our security professionals can continue to rely on Section 702 to detect grave national security threats and use that understanding to protect the United States,” Sullivan stated.
Section 702 used to primarily apply to telecommunications or technology companies. Now, as detailed by Demand Progress, Section 702 may be used to force business landlords, cleaning contractors, delivery personnel, utility providers, etc, to help U.S. security agencies spy without probable cause.
Entities and individuals required to help with surveillance cannot speak about it. Their First Amendment speech rights are curtailed as they violate their customers’ Fourth Amendment privacy rights.
Also, according to Demand Progress, House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Turner and House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Jim Himes drafted the expanded surveillance reauthorization without defining terms like “any other service provider,” “access to equipment,” or “custodian.”
Only as a result of opposition did security hawks insert an exemption for coffee shops, hotels, and libraries.
Writing about the impact on journalism for The Nation, longtime national security journalist James Bamford wrote, “A requirement could easily be added to Section 702 that compels the need for a warrant as soon as an NSA employee or FBI agent recognizes that the communication involves a journalist conducting an interview, or an attorney engaged in a conversation with a client or source.”
“In the end,” Bamford argued, “insight gained from the American journalist’s interaction with a foreign source may be far more valuable and provide considerably more insight than inhibiting sources to interact with journalists.”
The FBI consistently abused the surveillance power it was granted under Section 702 before the authority was reauthorized. It is a certainty that the FBI will abuse this ill-defined authority handed to them by Biden and Congress.
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No Justification For Opposing A Warrant
House Speaker Mike Johnson was at one point an opponent of warrantless surveillance under FISA. He claimed that he shifted his position because as Speaker he is privy to “confidential briefings” that have showed him how critical Section 702 is to “national security.”
“I personally used 702 authorities at NSA,” Snowden responded. “There is absolutely nothing in any briefing of any level, then or now, that would justify opposition to recognizing the government’s obligation to seek a warrant for searches of Americans’ communications, which are constitutionally-protected.”
“And frankly, let’s be serious: the NSA and FBI have plainly demonstrated that they’re more than comfortable violating the law when they feel it binds too tightly. 278,000 times just for one auth: 702. Millions and millions of times under others for [President Barack] Obama. And on a literally innumerable scale under [President George W.] Bush—we couldn’t even count it.”
“So let’s not pretend that, in the apocryphal ‘ticking time-bomb’ scenario of the Hollywood imagination, that a series of agencies which have since their inception been characterized by a criminally casual respect for the Constitution would feel in the slightest way encumbered by something as parochial as the law,” Snowden added. “After all, the legislation rarely ascribes penalties for federal infractions.”
The House Judiciary Committee passed legislation—the Protect Liberty and End Warrantless Surveillance Act—at the end of 2023 that would have required a warrant for any U.S. person search. However, through the House Intelligence Committee, U.S. officials thwarted attempts to constrain the national security state.
During a private meeting on reauthorization, WIRED reported that Turner “presented an image of Americans protesting the war in Gaza while implying possible ties between the protesters and Hamas, an allegation that was used to illustrate why surveillance reforms [would be] detrimental to national security.”
It is highly likely that antiwar or pro-Palestinian protests, particularly on college or university campuses, will be targeted. Biden will probably have no problem with using this expanded spying power against students.
A day after Biden signed the reauthorization bill, White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates accused student demonstrators opposed to Israel’s assault on Gaza of “echoing the rhetoric of terrorist organizations.”
Hawkishly Backing The National Security State
Back in 2008, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama campaigned against retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that helped Bush engage in warrantless wiretapping. He even promised to filibuster the FISA Amendments Act. But Obama voted for the bill when there were 46 different lawsuits pending against the companies and angered many progressives and civil liberties advocates.
Biden, who was Obama’s vice president, did not even pretend to support reform, greater accountability, or limits to government surveillance. Fifteen years after Obama flip-flopped, Sullivan, his national security advisor, made it clear that the administration believed that “failure to reauthorize Section 702” would be “one of the worst intelligence failures of our time.”
He additionally urged Congress to reauthorize Section 702 “without new and operationally damaging restrictions on reviewing intelligence” and “with measures that build on proven reforms.” That was subtle language, which sent a message to representatives and senators that Biden opposed adding a warrant requirement to protect Americans’ privacy rights.
Hawkish lawmakers, intelligence officials, and the Biden White House conspired to pass an updated surveillance law that not only avoided meaningful reforms but also expanded the law in a way that U.S. intelligence agencies could only dream about a year or two ago.
For many months, news reports detailed stories of spying abuses and enraged lawmakers. That gave some hope to those in favor of privacy that Congress might rein in government surveillance. Yet the national security state stayed the course. They once again hid the truth from elected officials, accelerated the process, and fear-mongered and spread propaganda to escape accountability.
Biden pledges to approve billions of dollars in bombs for Israel
The new foreign aid package for Israel comes as the army is preparing to assault the city of Rafah, where over one million displaced Palestinians are taking shelter
News Desk
APR 24, 2024
(Photo Credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
US President Joe Biden says he will sign a foreign aid package approved by Congress with tens of billions of dollars for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan “as soon as it reaches [his] desk” on 24 April.
“Tonight, a bipartisan majority in the Senate joined the House to answer history’s call at this critical inflection point. Congress has passed my legislation to strengthen our national security and send a message to the world about the power of American leadership,” Biden said in a statement released by the White House on Tuesday.
“This critical legislation will make our nation and world more secure as we support our friends who are defending themselves against terrorists like Hamas and tyrants like Putin,” the US president added.
Earlier in the night, the Senate passed the bill with a 79 to 18 vote a few days after the House of Representatives voted 311 to 112 in favor of funneling more weapons to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan.
The $95 billion foreign aid package includes $26.4 billion for Israel, with the legislation specifying the funds are to support “[Tel Aviv's] effort to defend itself against Iran and its proxies, and to reimburse US military operations in response to recent attacks.”
The sum includes $4 billion for the Iron Dome and David’s Sling missile defense systems, $1.2 billion for the Iron Beam defense system, $4.4 billion to replenish “defense items and services provided to Israel,” and $3.5 billion for “the procurement of advanced weapons systems and other items through the Foreign Military Financing Program.”
The legislation will also provide “additional flexibility” for weapons transfers to Israel from US stockpiles held across the world and prohibits explicitly sending funds to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), an organization that has been the target of a disproven Israeli smear campaign.
Roughly $9.5 billion of the Israeli portion of the bill is earmarked for “humanitarian aid to Ukraine and Gaza.”
“The Israel aid package that now passed both houses of Congress is a clear testament to the strength of our alliance and sends a strong message to all our enemies,” Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said after US lawmakers approved the bill.
Since the start of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, Washington has quietly approved over 100 arms transfer deals for Tel Aviv, as Biden says his support for the country is “ironclad” and has repeatedly pledged there are “no red lines” despite the scope of the humanitarian disaster.
As Israel prepares to storm Gaza's southernmost city of Rafah with US support, the death toll inside the besieged strip has surpassed 34,000, with thousands more missing under the rubble.
Amal Clooney’s Silence on Gaza Shows the Limits of Liberalism
APRIL 23, 2024
Amal Clooney speaks during a conference called “Press Behind Bars: Undermining Justice and Democracy” at the 73rd session of the United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters, Sept. 28, 2018. Photo: Craig Ruttle/AP.
By Alan Macleod – Apr 15, 2024
Amal Clooney, the internationally acclaimed lawyer, is a liberal icon. She and her organization, the Clooney Foundation for Justice (CFJ), never shrink from pronouncing their global verdicts on human rights matters. And yet, despite being Lebanese and of Palestinian descent herself, Time magazine’s 2022 Woman of the Year has maintained complete silence on Israel’s continued bombardment of those very countries – a crime other human rights experts have labeled a genocide.
It has now been six months since the October 7 attack, Israel’s wholesale destruction of Gaza and its attacks on Lebanon, yet Clooney has made no public statement on the matter, either in public or on social media, despite mounting calls for her to do so.
Condemning enemy nations, ignoring crimes of friends
Born in Lebanon to a Druze Lebanese father and a Sunni Muslim mother of Palestinian descent, Clooney’s family sought refuge in the United Kingdom after the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War. After practicing law for many years in the U.K. and U.S. in 2016, she founded the CFJ alongside her film star husband, George. “We founded the Clooney Foundation for Justice to hold perpetrators of mass atrocities accountable for their crimes and to help victims in their fight for justice,” the pair explain on their website.
Today, the CFJ works in over 40 countries. This includes many countries the U.S. treats as enemy nations or candidates for regime change. Clooney and her foundation have taken strong stances against many of those nations. She has demanded that Russia be prosecuted for war crimes. “Ukraine is, today, a slaughterhouse. Right in the heart of Europe,” she told the U.N. Security Council in 2022. The following year, the CFJ filed three cases in Germany. The cases accused Russia of many war crimes, including leveling a civilian building in a missile strike on Odesa, killing 40 people, unlawfully detaining, torturing and killing four Ukrainians in the Kharkiv region, and sexual violence and looting in the Kiev region. The CFJ is also suing the Venezuelan government over alleged human rights abuses.
In 2016, Clooney condemned Iran and North Korea for serially abusing their citizens’ human rights. She did this at a conference in the United Arab Emirates, attended by the country’s ruler, Sultan bin Muhammad Al-Qasimi. Far from criticizing the UAE’s dismal human rights record, she praised the government and merely offered friendly “advice” to the emirate on how it could improve.
And yet, the Clooney Foundation has been entirely silent regarding arguably the dominant human rights issue of our time. A search for the words “Israel,” “Gaza,” and “Palestine” on both its website and its Twitter account elicits zero relevant results.
While we cannot expect either Clooney or her organization to work on every country simultaneously, it has disappointed many of Clooney’s admirers that neither has even put out a statement about the country of her birth and the country of her ancestry being torn apart by a Western-backed power.
Even when directly questioned about it, George Clooney appeared to dodge the question, stating:
The whole area [the Middle East] is just on fire, and it is heartbreaking all the way around. All you can do is pray that there is some version of this that comes to some peaceful end soon. But I don’t see it happening in the very near future, and I don’t think anybody does.”
This relative silence on Gaza contrasts with other major Western human rights organizations, who have vociferously condemned the state of Israel. Amnesty International, for example, wrote that “there are alarming warning signs of Genocide given the staggering scale of death and destruction” and that “The collective punishment of Gaza’s civilian population by Israeli authorities is a war crime – it is cruel and inhumane.” This sentiment was shared by Human Rights Watch, which noted that “The Israeli government is using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare in the Gaza Strip, which is a war crime.”
Friends in high places
Why have Clooney and her foundation shown little to no interest in Palestine (or Lebanon)? Firstly, the CFJ is sponsored primarily by large liberal institutions, such as the Ford Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and foreign sources like the German and Swedish Postcode Lotteries, none of whom have shown any interest in pro-Palestine activism.
Moreover, Clooney herself has close connections to many in the Democratic Party establishment, including some of the most hardcore pro-Israel zealots anywhere. In 2016, she and her husband hosted a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton with Israeli-American billionaire Haim Saban at their mansion. Tickets for the event cost $34,000 each.
Saban is one of America’s most influential political donors but considers himself a “one-issue guy.” “And my issue is Israel,” he once said. He has also called for “higher scrutiny” of Muslim Americans, suggesting they are a threat to the country’s security, and branded Muslim-American Democrats such as Keith Ellison “anti-semites.” Clinton, who describes herself as an “emphatic, unwavering supporter” of Israel, wrote Saban an open letter promising to stamp out the spread of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement by any means necessary.
George and Amal Clooney, right, pose with Hillary Clinto and Bryan Lourd and Bruce Bozzi at at an event at the Clooney home in Hollywood. Photo | Instagram
Moreover, Clooney has accepted a number of U.K. government posts – positions that rarely go to radical outsiders but rather to those firmly inside the establishment beltway. Those posts include being appointed to the Attorney General’s Office Public International Law Panel, meaning she represented the British government in domestic and international courts. The government also appointed her the U.K. Special Envoy on Media Freedom and the Deputy Chair of the High Level Panel of Legal Experts on Media Freedom.
One senior position Clooney publicly rejected, however, was to serve on the United Nations Human Rights Council inquiry looking into Israeli war crimes in Gaza during Operation Protective Edge (2014). When pressed to explain her decision, she simply cited a scheduling conflict (while refusing to condemn Israel), stating:
I am horrified by the situation in the occupied Gaza Strip, particularly the civilian casualties that have been caused, and strongly believe that there should be an independent investigation and accountability for crimes that have been committed… I am honored to have received the offer, but given existing commitments – including eight ongoing cases – unfortunately could not accept this role. I wish my colleagues who will serve on the commission courage and strength in their endeavors.”
“Moral Mercenary”
The refusal to investigate Israeli war crimes is especially notable, given that Clooney has made her career taking controversial posts concerning the Middle East. She previously served as an advisor on Syria to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan. She currently represents hundreds of Yazidi survivors of ISIS massacres and is in the process of suing cement maker Lafarge. The lawsuit alleges that the French company provided material support to the terrorist group, which kept many Yazidi women as slaves.
In 2014, she defended Abdullah al Senussi, the Former Chief of Intelligence under Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. The International Criminal Court charged Senussi with crimes against humanity, who was alleged to have overseen torture, assassinations and public executions.
Perhaps most surprising, however, was her appointment as legal advisor to King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa of Bahrain during the Bassiouni Commission – a royal investigation into the events of the Arab Spring. The people of Bahrain briefly participated in their own popular anti-government uprising before the monarchy called in Saudi, Emirati and Kuwaiti forces to crush the revolt, killing hundreds and injuring or torturing thousands more. In this instance, Clooney worked on behalf not of the oppressed but of the monarchy, presumably attempting to absolve it of any blame or responsibility for the crackdown on civil liberties, leading one commentator to dub her a “moral mercenary.”
Silent on Genocide
It is barely in doubt that Israel is currently engaged in some of the most egregious crimes against humanity seen anywhere in the 21st century, from genocide to attacks on schools, hospitals, mosques and churches to the deliberate targeting of journalists and other civilians, to the leveling of entire cities and the systematic starvation of a people.
And despite this, Amal Clooney, who presents herself as a champion of progressive, liberal values and human rights, has had nothing to say about it. This is doubly noteworthy, given her country of birth and her ancestry. As an ethical leader with a considerable audience, any pronouncement she utters on the issue would likely make a significant impact.
Palestine is so often, however, the rocks on which the moral and ethical underpinnings of liberalism are dashed. While Western liberals constantly speak in the language of human rights, using them as a weapon against enemy states and even justifying the bloodiest military interventions on their basis, they fall silent when allied nations carry out similar barbaric actions.
This “progressive except for Palestine” mentality is pervasive across the Western world and highlights the profound limits of modern liberalism. While foreign leaders like Vladimir Putin, Nicolás Maduro or Xi Jinping (or even domestic ones such as Trump) are considered beyond the pale for their transgressions on human rights, beltway politicians like Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama are held up as heroes. This is despite their crimes, which range from using jihadists to overthrow the most prosperous country in Africa to bombing seven countries simultaneously.
It should, therefore, be of little surprise that Clooney and her foundation have remained tight-lipped about the current slaughter. Those who are shocked by their inaction underestimate the moral bankruptcy of modern liberalism.
Speaking on a panel with Michelle Obama and Melinda Gates (two other liberal icons), Clooney outlined the “real driving force” behind her work.
“My son drew a picture the other day of a prison, and he was like, ‘Putin should be here,’” she said before continuing:
I do think about in a few years when they’re more than five when they start to learn about some of these issues that we’re talking about and what’s happening in the world… When they ask us, ‘What did you do about this? What did you say about that?’ I’ve thought about what will my answer be, and I hope it will be a good one.”
If Clooney’s son ever asks her what she was doing as Israel carried out war crimes across the Middle East, she will also have a clear answer: she was silent on genocide.
Selective humanitarianism is one of the more disgusting tactics of the ruling class. While primarily a liberal tactic the right employs it too, as in celebrating the 'rights' of a non-sentient fetus over that of the mother.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Biden refuses to sanction Israeli units behind 'gross' war crimes
The crimes committed by these units include torture, rape, and executions
News Desk
APR 26, 2024
(Photo credit: Kenny Holston/The New York Times)
The government of US President Joe Biden has decided against imposing sanctions on Israeli army units responsible for human rights violations against Palestinians, despite initial plans to do so.
ABC News reported on 26 April that a government assessment determined that three battalions in the Israeli army committed “gross human rights violations” against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank “but will remain eligible for US military aid regardless because of steps Israel says it’s taking to address the problem.”
The assessment, which has not been made public, was outlined in a letter written by US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to House Speaker Mike Johnson, which the news network obtained.
The rights violations committed by Israeli forces “will not delay the delivery of any US assistance and Israel will be able to receive the full amount appropriated by Congress.” Billions in US aid to Israel was approved by Biden just two days ago after passing in the Senate on Tuesday.
The violations in question were committed prior to 7 October and took place in the occupied West Bank. They include the execution of Palestinians by Israeli border police, as well as torture and rape during interrogation.
None are related to Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, the majority of whom were women and children.
Yet the decision is expected to frustrate many critics of the Biden administration who believe Washington has not done enough to hold Israel accountable for war crimes.
Under the US Leahy Law, Washington should withhold military aid to states committing severe human rights abuses. Yet the law allows exceptions if measures are taken to punish those responsible.
An informed source told ABC that Israel and the US have a “special agreement” that Washington must consult with Tel Aviv over any decision relating to foreign assistance. The source added that these consultations are ongoing.
Blinken’s letter states that four of the Israeli army units have undergone “remediation” steps, meaning that those within the units that are responsible for the crimes have been internally held accountable.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on 21 April: “If anyone thinks they can impose sanctions on a unit of the IDF, I will fight it with all my strength.”
According to Hebrew news site Ynet, Israeli pressure on the US helped shape the decision not to impose sanctions on the units. “The reasonable estimate is that we will be able to convince the US not to impose these sanctions,” an Israeli official told the outlet.
In addition to Netanyahu, opposition leaders Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid both called on the US not to proceed with the decision. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant reportedly promised Blinken that “steps” would be taken.
A special State Department panel proposed months ago to bar certain Israeli police and army units from receiving US funds over human rights abuses. A ProPublica report from last week indicates that Blinken disregarded the panel’s recommendations for action against the units.
The Guardian reported in January, citing interviews and State Department documents, that “special mechanisms have been used over the last few years to shield Israel from US human rights laws."
Opposing The Gaza Genocide While Supporting Biden Is A Dishonest, Nonsensical Position
It’s like saying “Sure my husband’s a serial killer, but he’s great with the kids.” If someone said that to you, the only conclusion you could possibly come to is that they’re really not all that bothered by the serial killing.
Caitlin Johnstone
April 29, 2024
Nobody who claims to oppose the Gaza genocide while simultaneously supporting Joe Biden actually opposes the Gaza genocide. They’re just saying what needs to be said to win approval in the political sector they want the approval of. They’re not taking a moral stand, they’re cultivating an image. They’re building a brand.
One of many possible examples of this ridiculous posturing is Instagram progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has called Israel’s atrocities in Gaza “an unfolding genocide” while continuing to support and defend the US president who’s currently backing that genocide, and who recently attended one of the pro-Palestine campus demonstrations which her president recently smeared as “antisemitic protests”.
What AOC is doing here is attempting to straddle the impossible divide between what progressive Democrats claim their party is about and what it’s actually about in real life. She’s paying lip service to opposing injustice, supporting a ceasefire and siding with anti-genocide activists because that’s the sort of thing progressives are supposed to do, while simultaneously throwing her political support behind an administration that is facilitating injustice, keeping the genocide going, and smearing those who protest against it.
You really couldn’t put together a more incoherent position if you tried. You can’t acknowledge that Israel is committing genocide without also acknowledging that the Biden administration has been actively participating in that genocide. If you acknowledge that Biden is guilty of genocide, then you are acknowledging that he is guilty of the most horrific crime a state leader can possibly commit short of initiating a nuclear exchange.
Once you’ve acknowledged that Biden is guilty of doing pretty much the worst thing any state leader could possibly do, you’ve crossed a threshold. After such an acknowledgement, it is not logically or ethically coherent to follow it by saying you support him anyway because at least he’s a bit nicer to LGBT people than Donald Trump would be, or because he might try a tiny bit harder to reduce global warming.
You’ve acknowledged that he is participating in genocide. Genocide. There’s no “but” that could possibly follow that. It’s like saying “Sure my husband’s a serial killer, but he’s great with the kids.” If someone said that to you, the only conclusion you could possibly come to is that they’re really not all that bothered by the serial killing.
Those who support Israel’s actions in Gaza are the worst people on earth, but at least their position has some kind of integrity. They’re not contradicting themselves by pretending to oppose what they’re actually fine with. They’re not tearing themselves in half trying to straddle two completely incompatible positions while smiling for the camera and pretending it doesn’t hurt. They’re not posturing as compassionate anti-imperialists while serving the evil empire.
Those who are supporting Biden while opposing the destruction of Gaza do not have any kind of integrity. They’re just wearing whatever mask is politically convenient based on the way the winds are blowing on a given moment, while continuing to support the US-centralized empire which cannot be sustained without nonstop tyranny and bloodshed. They are providing social media-friendly soundbites which pay lip service to peace, while their true loyalty lies with the globe-spanning power structure whose existence makes peace impossible.
US Congress Makes Downpayment on World War III: US President Proclaims Enduring Peace
APRIL 30, 2024
US President Joe Biden delivers remarks after signing legislation giving $95 billion in aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, on April 24, 2024. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.
By Roger D. Harris – Apr 29, 2024
The US Congress authorized a $95 billion military aid package for continuing the wars in Ukraine and Gaza as well as for war preparations against China. This represents, in effect, a downpayment on World War III. US President Joe Biden, reading from a playbook that could well have been scripted by George Orwell, announced: “it’s a good day for world peace.” And in order to dispel any doubt, he added, “for real.”
Biden proclaimed: “It’s going to make the world safer.” In fact, the bipartisan authorization, passed on April 23, could nudge the doomsday clock a little closer to midnight.
Lest there be any confusion about what the head of the US empire means by making the world safer, Biden explains: “It continues America’s leadership in the world.”
US leadership is the crux of the matter. That is, at a time of increasingly challenged US hegemony, the official US strategy is still global “full spectrum dominance.” No longer does the empire justify itself as leading the crusade against communism, or even against what it considered “terrorism,” or its “war on drugs.” Today, the official national security doctrine is naked “great power competition.”
Continuing the Orwellian theme, the US president backed up his claim about US world leadership, saying, “everyone knows it.” This was not reflected in the UN General Assembly vote on an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, where the US side was trounced by an overwhelming 153 in favor. Besides the US and Israel, only eight others voted against and a mere 23 abstained. On any number of issues, the majority of the world’s population opposes the US.
Biden’s boast that “Ukraine has regained over half the territory that Russia took from them” is not particularly reflected by the Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community, which concluded that the current deadlock “plays to Russia’s strategic military advantages and is increasingly shifting the momentum in Moscow’s favor.”
Hailing the “brave Ukrainians,” Biden overlooks that 650,000 Ukrainian men of fighting age have fled the country.
Diminishing prospects for a decisive US/NATO victory in Ukraine have precipitated a particularly dangerous response from Washington, which rejects a negotiated settlement. The current administration’s plan is not to pull for peace but to push for more war. This is spun as a strategy “to stop Putin from drawing the United States into a war.” Yet it is the US, which is doing its part in feeding the conflict by giving yet more armaments to the military effort.
The expansion of NATO, contrary to earlier US assurances not to advance east, is hailed in Biden’s speech. Yet, this march of NATO toward the Russian border is the very cause that Russian President Putin gave for his country’s incursion into Ukraine. This abundantly articulated Russian “redline” should be well known in Washington.
Yet, Biden in his speech goes on to ominously raise NATO’s Article Five for mutual defense which declares “an attack on one is an attack on all.” This is plainly a taunt for a war with another nuclear power. Veterans for Peace antiwar activist and author Dee Knight calls the military aid package “an open-ended commitment to the NATO war against Russia.”
In yet another spin on reality, Biden condemns “a brutal campaign” that has “killed tens of thousands” and “bombed hospitals.” If you think he is referring to Israel’s US-enabled war on Gaza, guess again.
Biden is not about to call a halt to the genocide of the Palestinians, though he could. In 1982, for instance, Israel bombed civilians. Then US President Ronald Reagan called his counterpart in Tel Aviv and told him to stop what he explicitly called a “holocaust.”
Twenty minutes later Israel ordered cessation of its bombardment. In contrast, The New York Times reports that a member of Israel’s war cabinet predicts the current war may last “a year, a decade or a generation.”
“My commitment to Israel, I want to make clear again, is ironclad,” says the US politician who is by far the “biggest recipient in history of donations from pro-Israeli groups.”
The aid package schizophrenically commits tax-payer dollars to both lethal weapons and humanitarian aid for “the innocent people of Gaza, who are suffering badly.” No recognition is given to what is obvious – that an immediate and permanent ceasefire is the first step for relieving the suffering.
War may not be good for most of humanity, but it is a bonanza for US military contractors. As Biden brags, the weapons are “made by American companies here in America…in other words, we’re helping Ukraine while at the same time investing in our own industrial base.” That is, our own merchants of death are making a killing.
Biden has over-performed in his promise to make sure the weapons shipments “start right away.” Without legal pre-authorization, the US has supplied both Ukraine and Israel with proscribed weaponry.
Most of the funds, according to economist Jack Rasmus, are for weapons that have already been delivered or from military stocks that are in the process of being shipped. “Only $13.8 billion of the $61 billion is for weapons Ukraine doesn’t already have!” In a tweet embarrassing to the US-backed war effort and subsequently deleted, CBS News suggested only about 30% of US military aid for Ukraine ever reaches the front lines, in part due to pervasive corruption.
“Everything we do,” the US president explains is, “setting the conditions for an enduring peace.” The question his proclamation raises is what does this vision of a militarily imposed pax Americana look like?
Is it Haiti, where under Yankee benevolence they do not even have a government and even the disgraced appointed prime minister just resigned? Or is it Libya, where a US-led colonial coalition overthrew a major force for African unity and replaced it with military factions allowing slaves to be openly bartered on the streets? Or is it Afghanistan, where the US engineered the overthrow of a socialist government that stood for women’s emancipation, occupied the land for two decades, and then withdrew leaving a humanitarian disaster?
In short, the Biden’s promise of “enduring peace” looks a lot like chaos and “endless war.” “History will remember this moment,” he predicts. And well it may.
Aviator sunglasses hide demented eyes
in a skull full of bank logos and forgotten AIPAC speeches,
boozy nights of rapefinger whisperings and Beltway balrogs,
and fundraising wisecracks with smiles made of Gaddafi’s bones,
brain now crowded with paper shredders
and frantic, sweaty interns
staying up all night working
to dispose of the evidence.
Aviator sunglasses with glowing pentagons in them,
with mountains of skulls in them,
with dismembered children in them,
with gutted babies in them,
with screaming mothers in them,
with burning flesh in them,
with flattened neighborhoods in them,
crushed limbs sticking out of rubble in them,
fathers carrying tiny bags of body parts in them,
laughing, mocking, blood-soaked soldiers in them,
bombs and food falling from the sky together in them.
Demented eyes gazing out upon a dying world
through aviator sunglasses full of dead faces,
skin illuminated by a burning sky,
licking an ice cream cone
that is dripping deep red.
Opposing Every War But The Current One, Supporting Civil Rights But Never Right Now
As Democrats get worse and worse the longer Biden’s genocide in Gaza continues, I find myself recalling a tweet that went viral back in November by an account with the handle @eyeballslicer, “A liberal is someone who opposes every war except the current war and supports all civil rights movements except the one that’s going…
Caitlin Johnstone
May 3, 2024
In remarks defending the brutal suppression of university demonstrations protesting his genocide in Gaza, President Biden argued that protesting is allowed in the United States so long as it’s polite and doesn’t disrupt anything or upset anybody.
“We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent,” said Biden. “The American people are heard. In fact, peaceful protest is in the best tradition of how Americans respond to consequential issues.”
“But,” the president continued, “neither are we a lawless country. We are a civil society, and order must prevail.”
Biden went on to argue that “violent protest is not protected” as a form of free expression, sailing right past the fact that the only actual violence we’ve seen from these protests came from the police sent in to crack skulls and the bands of pro-Israel thugs who’ve been attacking campus demonstrators. Biden instead followed his false accusation of “violence” by listing offenses against inanimate objects: destroying property, vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows. He also listed the offenses of “shutting down campuses” and “forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations” — none of which were done by the demonstrators.
“Threatening people, intimidating people, instilling fear in people is not peaceful protest,” said Biden, citing zero examples of this ridiculous allegation, adding that “dissent must never lead to disorder” and that “there’s the right to protest but not the right to cause chaos.”
The president then of course went on to babble about “antisemitism” for awhile, on no basis whatsoever.
Again, this person is defending an authoritarian police crackdown on peaceful demonstrators protesting against his own actions. The US president is saying don’t worry about the jackbooted tyranny and suppression you’re seeing against critics of the US president, because the tyranny and suppression is approved of by that same US president.
And that’s the Democratic Party for you, folks. That’s everything it is right there. It is violence wrapped in politeness. It is fascism cloaked in lip service to civil rights.
Shortly before Columbia University called in police to smash the anti-genocide demonstrations on campus the other day, 21 House Democrats signed a letter addressed to the university’s board of trustees demanding they shut down the “anti-Jewish activists on campus.”
“It is past time for the University to act decisively, disband the encampment, and ensure the safety and security of all of its students,” the lawmakers declared.
This is the same party that always cites its support for civil rights and social justice as a primary reason for people to vote for them, constantly referencing Martin Luther King Jr and other civil rights leaders — who were all intensely despised by the establishment of their own time — as heroes we should all strive to emulate.
Now they’re openly supporting the same tyrannical measures as Republicans to shut down criticism of their government’s genocidal and unjust policies, with no regard for the constitutional rights of those critics to speech and assembly. They try to make themselves look progressive and reasonable while doing it, saying it’s about fighting “antisemitism” and keeping the peace, but their actual behavior is no different from the tyrants who attacked anti-war protesters and civil rights activists in the sixties.
As Democrats get worse and worse the longer Biden’s genocide in Gaza continues, I find myself recalling a tweet that went viral back in November by an account with the handle @eyeballslicer, “A liberal is someone who opposes every war except the current war and supports all civil rights movements except the one that’s going on right now.”
That tweet has gotten more and more relevant every day since. If you were to pick a banner to hang above western liberalism over the past seven months, that banner would need to contain those words. It’s been true of mainstream liberals for a very long time, but it encapsulates the response we’ve been seeing to Gaza with a special kind of perfection.
Have you ever noticed how the spinmeisters responsible for normalizing our dystopian status quo use time as a psychological weapon? It’s the damnedest thing. They push all support for revolutionary change into either the past or the future, while insisting that status quo norms must be maintained in the present.
Once you notice this tactic, you see it everywhere. When they’re not shaking their fists at the crimes of the past like Vietnam, Iraq or segregation and applauding past struggles for social justice like women’s suffrage or Black civil rights, they’re claiming that you can get all the drastic revolutionary change you want in the future if you just elect more Democrats into office.
Over and over again in many different ways, people are fed the message: “Revolution and change are wonderful, just not right now. The revolutionary sentiments of the past did great things we should all celebrate, and one day in the future we will have revolutionary change once again, but right now we need to keep supporting the way things are and hold very still and try very hard not to annoy the powerful people who rule over us.”
It’s actually kind of impressive once you notice it, because this malignant manipulation requires an almost buddha-like understanding of time and the present moment. At some point the manipulators figured out that there’s only ever the here-and-now and that the past and the future have no existence except in our memory and imagination, so you can give the people all the revolution they want so long as you’re only giving it to them in the past or the future.
You saw an early prototype of this manipulation with the rise of Christianity, wherein people were encouraged to forget about the material comforts enjoyed by their rulers and focus instead on how great it’s going to be when they die and go to Heaven. All their hopes are deferred to this imaginary, invisible reward in the future, and in the meantime they’re told to glorify poverty, meekness, obedience, and above all never rise up against all the rich people and take back what they stole from you.
This world will never see the changes it so desperately needs as long as we keep letting them manipulate us like this. Change needs to happen, and it can only happen now. Now is the only place where revolution can possibly occur. Stop letting them bury it under the appearance of time, and birth it into reality.
Majority of Democratic Voters Believe It’s ‘Genocide’: Poll
May 8, 2024
One political strategist called the party’s establishment “dysfunctionally out of touch with its voters on this issue.”
“Stop arming the genocide” protest at San Francisco Pier 32, which hosted a media event for local Democrat, U.S. Rep Nancy Pelosi, on March 29. (Peg Hunter, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)
By Julia Conley
Common Dreams
A day after U.S. President Joe Biden commemorated the Holocaust, speaking about Americans’ “obligation to learn the lessons of history” to ensure another mass slaughter of a religious or ethnic group never takes place, new polling shows the majority of U.S. voters, whose support Biden is counting on in November, believe Israel — with U.S. backing — is committing genocide.
Journalist Mehdi Hasan’s new media organization, Zeteo, partnered with progressive think tank Data for Progress to poll 1,265 U.S. voters from April 26-29 as Israel’s ground invasion of Rafah loomed, threatening more than 1 million Palestinians in Gaza who have been forcibly displaced since October.
The poll released Wednesday found that 56 percent of Democratic voters believe Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians in the enclave, where in addition to constant bombings and ground attacks, residents have faced Israel’s blockade on nearly all humanitarian aid.
The blockade has pushed northern Gaza into famine and is causing acute food insecurity among the entire population.
Nearly 40 percent of all voters believe Israel is committing a genocide, and 7-in-10 support a permanent cease-fire.
People’s State of the Union protest, delaying Biden’s speech, March 7. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Israel’s full-scale assault on Gaza, where 2.3 million Palestinians live, has been ineffective at bringing the Israeli hostages kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 7 to safety, more than 50 percent of voters said.
Fifty-four percent said they support suspending all U.S. arms sales to Israel until it stops blocking American humanitarian aid from entering Gaza. Such a suspension would be in accordance with Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961.
Israel and the U.S. have repeatedly claimed that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is taking steps to protect the lives of civilians — even as the world has learned of mass graves found with the bodies of Palestinian women and children, some with their hands tied behind their backs.
In April, Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham of +972 Magazine reported that military officials have permitted up to 100 civilian deaths for every Hamas member killed, and that the IDF has targeted Hamas fighters in their homes instead of at military outposts.
The Zeteo/Data for Progress poll was released more than four months after the International Court of Justice announced an interim ruling that Israel is “plausibly” committing genocide, which came after South Africa brought its case to the United Nations court.
South African attorney Tembeka Ngcukaitobi gave a 22-minute speech during the hearing, cataloging the numerous genocidal statements made by top Israeli officials since October, up to that point. Last week, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the “total annihilation” of Gaza cities, including Rafah, [where Israel has begun its attack.]
The poll was also released as mass protests continued on college campuses across the U.S., with police aggressively cracking down at many schools as they ignore attacks on students by pro-Israel mobs, as in the case of University of California, Los Angeles last week.
A separate poll released Wednesday by USA Today and Suffolk University found that Democratic voters are split in their views of the student movement. Thirty percent supported the protests, while 39 percent agreed with their demands but questioned some of their tactics. Two-thirds of respondents said they feared more violent confrontations would arise from the protests.
The Data for Progress survey is the latest sign that Biden, who signed a foreign aid package including $17 billion in additional military aid for Israel last month, faces widespread discontent among the coalition of voters who supported him in 2020.
In January, The Economist and YouGov found that a full 50 percent of people who voted for him believed Israel was committing genocide.
More than 100,000 Democratic primary voters in Michigan — which Biden won by just 150,000 votes in 2020 — voted for “uncommitted” on their ballots in February, hoping to send the message to the president that U.S. support for Israel must end. Similar results were seen in primaries in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Washington state.
Strategist Nadia Rahman said the poll shows the Democratic establishment is “dysfunctionally out of touch with its voters on this issue.”
“This is some of the clearest data yet that there’s a massive disconnect between the media and what’s happening on the ground,” said journalist Ed Oswald. “And why yes, Biden’s re-election is in big trouble."
One might consider the Democratic Party dysfunctional only if one believes their propaganda. In fact the party has functioned brilliantly, diffusing and misdirecting the working class since forever. It is obvious that the party leadership and it's 'grey cardinals' sure as hell don't believe all that 'pro-working class' bullshit, know them by their acts(or lack thereof). For instance, Biden managed to crush near all of what passes for progressive legislation by persuading those dimbulbs in Congress to bundle all their bills knowing that his old bud Manchin would torpedo the whole shebang. There's that 'dog & pony show' you hear about.
OTOH, on the policy side the technocrats and 'interested parties'(Merchants Of Death) really do believe all their own bullshit. Which is how we got the bloody debacle in Ukraine, which has resulted in exactly the opposite of the stated goals. Russia's army and economy are stronger, it's international reputation has not suffered except among US lackeys. Their only 'accomplishment' is derailing German industry. Brilliant!
(The purpose of NATO since Day One has been to "Keep the Russians(Soviets) out, the USA in and the Germans down.)
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
(calling the liberal Democratic Party 'Left' sticks in my craw but anyway...)
Dear US Left: Stop Asking Me to Vote
MAY 9, 2024
By Mike Flugennock – May 2, 2024
Dear US Left:
With all due respect — I really do love ya, we’ve worked together and hit the barricades and been ride-or-die n’all that, but — you’ve just gotta stop this shit right now, y’all, ‘cos it’s the biggest waste of time ever at this point. Seriously, for myself and all of our comrades, I’m here to tell you, you just gotta STOP IT, brah.
Stop asking us to VOTE.
Stop asking us to play in a crooked rigged casino, to participate in a phony “democracy” and vote in a useless “election” in which the candidates and platforms are already decided by the Party and the permissible issues and voices already decided by the media. Stop asking us to drag ourselves off to participate in an empty ritual in an empty institution which has achieved absolute zero.
Stop insulting our intelligence by asking us to participate in the “democracy” of a nation in which the State, the Party and Establishment institutions have at long last finally, thoroughly, utterly and completely alienated us and then relentlessly implores us to participate in their useless, capitalist media-controlled “democratic” institutions. After doing their level best to beat down and silence the dissent and outrage of billions across the nation and the Earth, they’ve got the spectacular gall to try to shame, frighten, and browbeat us into slinking back to their polls for “abortion rights” — for affluent, professional-class American women, of course; not the reproductive rights of working-class and poor women, nor immigrant women, nor Afghan or Iraqi women, and for goddamn sure not the reproductive rights of PALESTINIAN women…
After this staggering mass alienation and good old-fashioned ideological witch hunt, the likes of the Democratic Party and MSNBC just can’t shut the hell up about “abortion rights”, and their broadcasts are wall-to-wall with the Trump Trials and the threat to Democracy™. The more of that crap I hear, the more it disgusts and amuses me because the more I think back, the less evidence I see that Democracy™ has ever brought us anything approaching absolutely jack in the way of positive, substantive change; that voting for politicians in an “election” has ever done anything but drag our misery out endlessly while we wait around for the politicians to fight our struggle for us.
That “democratic” institutions in a “democratic” nation practically break their necks to be first in line to suppress the People’s voices and cover their eyes and ears while two “democratic” nations with the assistance of the “International Community” carry out the most horrid industrial-strength genocide of the past century should tell us everything we need to know about Democracy™ at this point. It’s truly gobsmacking that after six or seven months of some of the most vicious beatdowns on dissent and public expression worldwide, the Democratic Party — and their pals on cable TV “news” and on the US Left — still have the nerve to come around whining and scraping and begging us to participate in their goddamn little fake Democracy™, to vote in their empty-ass “elections” which change absolutely nothing.
Malcolm X teaches us that “democracy is hypocrisy”; he teaches us that every bit of positive change won for the People anywhere on Earth was not the result of “democracy”, but by the People, the people who were willing to organize and take direct action on their own behalf and do whatever it takes to achieve what they deserve and what belongs to them — up to and including armed force. Malcolm X teaches us this, Lenin teaches us this, Abbie Hoffman and Audre Lorde teach us this — hell, even George Carlin teaches us this.
“Democracy” is an impediment to change. “Democracy” is a prison, and we need to jump the guards and bust out. At this point, it should be abundantly clear that “revolution is the ONLY solution” isn’t just a tight, clever slogan, and it’s time to cut the crap and get the hell on with it.
Stop asking us to try to tear down the Master’s house with the Master’s tools.
THE POLITICAL-ELECTORAL PLOT BEHIND STUDENT REPRESSION IN THE US
May 8, 2024 , 8:00 pm
New York police forcibly remove pro-Palestinian protesters from Columbia University (Photo: AFP)
<snip>
PROTESTS WITH ELECTORAL IMPACT
The policies of the United States and the Joe Biden administration towards Israel, which have led thousands of students across the country to oppose it, could be influencing the behavior of youth voters, historically more inclined to vote for Biden — Democrats — for the November elections, which represents a serious obstacle to his chances of re-election.
According to a Gallup poll , Americans after narrowly backing Israel's military action in Gaza in November 2023 now oppose military action by a solid margin. Currently, 55% disapprove of Israel's behavior, while 36% support them.
However, the data vary substantially when addressing young people's preferences in relation to the conflict in Gaza. According to a survey conducted by Harvard University , 32% of those surveyed affirm that Israel's response was not justified, compared to 21% who do justify it.
The same study confirms that young Americans support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza by a margin of five to one—51% support, 10% oppose. No major subgroup of young voters opposes such action.
The problem, electorally speaking, is not that the young Democrats who disagree with the handling that Biden and his administration have had with the war in Gaza, and who represent the vast majority of demonstrators protesting at universities, are going to vote for Trump; It's almost a given that none of them will vote Republican. That is not the problem in electoral terms. The danger for them is much simpler: that they will simply become discouraged and not vote, which would favor the businessman who aspires to return to the White House.
Participation could be key for Biden to win the November elections, given the militancy of Trump's base, and there are signs that Biden's handling of the situation in Gaza is already costing him support, since it would be demobilizing youth dissatisfied with the handling of the Palestinian crisis.
This scenario is already beginning to be seen in the Democratic primaries. In states like Wisconsin and Michigan, voters have demonstrated against the candidate and the party itself by voting for the "uneducated" and "uncommitted" options, respectively, reflecting serious disagreements that do not go unnoticed.
REEDITING HISTORY?
The highly violent response to university demonstrations in the United States is not new, the pacifist movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s experienced firsthand the excesses of the forces of public order. The highlight on this occasion, as we mentioned at the beginning, is that the protests are exposing the brutal lobbying that exists on the part of Zionist groups and factors and the impact that it can have on the youth electorate, openly expressed against US support for Israel. have on the results of the November presidential elections.
And, as Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor of the United States, says in an opinion column published in The Guardian :
"Describing the protesters as 'pro-Palestinian' is also inaccurate. Most do not support Palestine as such; they do not know enough about the history of Israel and Palestine to make a moral judgment. But they have a deep and abiding sense that what happening in Gaza is morally wrong and that the United States is complicit in that immorality.
In any case, the conflict in Gaza and, specifically, the genocide that the Palestinian people have been suffering, adds a new topic to the long list of issues that tend to further polarize American society, which is becoming fragile and cohesive on issues that are becoming increasingly everyday such as abortion, migration, inflation and now unconditional support for Israel.
With an important US presidential election-- we are told-- only months away, but one posing two repugnant, disheartening choices, it may be a good time to explore where we are and how we got here.
What we can agree is that most of us, when asked, believe that things are going badly: an October, 2023 AP-NORC poll finds that 78% of those polled responded that “the country is going in the wrong direction;” a January Morning Consult poll concludes that less than a third of those responding “say the country is headed in the right direction; a recent Harvard Kennedy school poll says that less than 10 % of youth 18 to 29 believe that the US is “generally headed in the right direction” and so on with NBC, ABC, Pew, etc. polls. We could quarrel over the exact numbers expressing dissatisfaction, but all polls point to a nation decidedly unhappy with our direction.
Of course, there is room to debate exactly what people mean by the “wrong direction.” They may mean in regard to their own current situation or that of their family or friends; they may mean their sense of security; they may mean their own or others’ prospects. Or they may mean that “society” is heading the wrong way culturally, politically, or economically. No doubt respondents to the various polls have complex, even contradictory reasons for losing confidence in the US trajectory. Moreover, one cannot discount the influence of monopoly media reportage and commentary in constructing the sense of dissatisfaction.
It is fair to say, however, that most people believe that our future will be determined by political outcomes. Whether or not they have confidence in the political system-- polls say they don’t-- they do, in fact, rely on campaigning and elections to determine the future course of the country. Most US citizens have not yet chosen or do not know of other political courses of action beyond voting or indifference.
A fixture of our political system is the two-party monopoly. While it is not unlawful or completely uncommon that there be other parties, tradition, entry-demands, financing, chicanery, and even violence have worked to deny third-party movements access or ensure their lack of success. Popular sentiment is denied by Republican and Democratic leaders and functionaries and those others invested in the two-party system who control the rules of the game. A fall, 2023 Gallup poll finds that “Sixty-three percent of U.S. adults currently agree with the statement that the Republican and Democratic parties do ‘such a poor job’ of representing the American people that ‘a third major party is needed.’” For a poll-based summary of US voters’ overall negativity, see this Pew article.
So ahead of a November election, we face two poles: one represented by a self-styled nationalist-populist promising to “Make America Great Again,” while weighted down with a sordid, vulgar, and elitist history; and the other represented by a corporate Democrat once known as the “senator from MBNA” (the infamous credit card company) for his cozy relationship with the credit card industry, a reliable friend of wealth and power, and a history of supporting legislation hostile to the interests of Black people.
This is where we have arrived.
Do the two-parties offer answers to the negativism expressed in polls?
I don’t see it.
The Republican Party remains a corporate party wedded first and foremost to the interests of capital. It has a relatively independent wing that is able and willing to force its own cultural and social agenda on the entire party. Parts of that wing recognize that the self-proclaimed “party of labor” -- the Democratic Party-- has long failed to deliver anything of deep or lasting value to working people. Elements of this wing have-- in the twenty-first century-- constructed a faux-populist image to attract working people, with some success. Variations of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” had been used earlier by Reagan and the Clintons to entice workers’ votes.
Trump and others have attracted angry voters with their vocal disdain for the “establishment,” elite arrogance, East Coast condescension, and US leaders’ general superciliousness. While “draining the swamp” is a worthy goal, four years of the Trump administration provided no relief from elitism.
The Republicans historically vacillate between isolationism and belligerence. But at least they vacillate.
While the Republicans do not want to identify with racism, misogyny and the many other know-nothing-isms, they are not above courting the scum that do.
The Democratic Party-- the other option that we are allowed by our ruling class-- wears the mythical mantle of “the party of the people.” The sole basis for this claim is dim recollections of the New Deal, a little understood period of US history that brought some benefits to working people as a result of a desperate attempt to save capitalism from itself.
With capitalism on a firmer footing after World War II, US rulers, with the full cooperation of Democratic Party Cold Warriors, dealt a fatal blow to the so-called popular front, purging left-wing militancy from unions, universities, schools, media, and any other area of influence.
The coup de grâce to New Deal thinking came after the collapse of the Keynesian paradigm/New Deal political coalition in the 1970s. When Reagan ushered in market fundamentalism and ushered out government intervention, the Democrats were not long in jumping on board. Soon, every Democrat saw the wisdom of efficiency, balanced budgets, private initiatives, and entrepreneurial sovereignty. As the Republican Party embraced religious zealotry and medieval justice, many saw the Democrats as the new Republicans, with their stealth attacks on welfare, Social Security, and Medicare.
Today’s Democratic Party is neither democratic nor a party, but a brand. It lives and breathes on money from corporate sponsors. Its contact with its supporters is through advertising, television talking heads, the punditry, and indirectly through various media; the idea of human contact with potential voters is only useful if it can be filmed and included in a television commercial.
Like the Republicans, the Democrats have an activist wing that provides a social democratic veneer to the party’s image. Unlike the Republican counterpart wing, the “progressive” Democratic wing never dares to attempt to impose its views on the party. Without exercising “leverage,” the Democratic Party left wing simply serves as a cover, a safe space for “progressives” to welcome other progressives into the party’s arms.
The truth is the Democratic Party is a corporate party, but a party that has occasionally been forced by social pressure, circumstances, or crises to play a people-friendly role. The pressure is not there now.
Moreover, the Democratic leadership has nothing to offer working people. The class base of the party has shifted. With the loss of the South to the Republicans and the ugly Nixon fiasco in the 1970s, the Democrats captured the suburban petty-bourgeoisie and its aspirants who were comfortable with the shrinkage of the welfare state, lower taxes, and deregulation, yet socially liberal on personal questions. Stable super-voters, active in social movements, and financially generous to the Democrats, they (and their contemporary urban gentry counterparts who share a similar profile) are the new keystone of the Democratic Party. The traditional backbone of the Democratic Party-- minorities, unions, youth, the poor-- are taken for granted. After all, according to the reasoning of Democratic leaders, those groups have nowhere else to go.
This realignment has refashioned its core issues around lifestyle, personal rights, and a hyper-regard for the diversity of individual values. The traditional left's concerns for common social values of equality, community, and material security have been forced into the background. Good jobs, health care, education, and secure retirement are not there for all to have, but for those who earn them.
Democratic leaders celebrate achievers-- those who have broken through glass ceilings-- but have contempt for those fallen or stuck in the basement. Both Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama have arrogantly, and with little forethought for appearances, relegated the heartland of the US to a land of gun-loving, Bible-thumpers-- in Clinton’s unforgettable words, “the deplorables.” Never mind that the Midwest has been ravaged by corporate deindustrialization, leaving cities and small towns depopulated, poor, with shrinking social services, and marginal employment. The “deplorables” have failed to push on, get a late-life STEM education, and rise by their own bootstraps. In the meantime, let’s extend a welcoming, helping hand to those few who merit admission to the highest rungs of elite society.
This contempt for the non-coastal residents came forth most recently in a New York Times bestseller, White Rural Rage, by Schaller and Waldman, who depict small town USA as backward and infected with racism. Like so many in the Democratic Party intelligentsia, they see this as a threat to “our” democracy. That is to say, the authors worry about contempt for the democracy of the “successful,” but care little for the democracy of the “losers.” For a tightly argued, thoughtful rejoinder to this dose of elitism, read Les Leopold’s Wall Street War on Workers, though I wish Leopold would have as a sub-title “and the Two Parties’ War on Workers.”
For the forthcoming election, the Democrats will once again hope to corral those left-of-center with Trump’s alleged threat to “our” democracy. They will go so far as to raise the specter of fascism. Ironically, the closest move against democracy that resembles the realities of life under fascism is the recent bipartisan passage of an expanded section 702 of the infamous FISA, an act that permits warrantless spying on US citizens. The ACLU comments that it is a “bill that gives the government more ways to secretly surveil us.” Even more ironically, Trump-- the alleged enemy of democracy-- denounced the entire FISA act.
Leftish Democrats will again raise the old canard about divisions on the left in Germany opening the door to fascism in the 1930s. According to this historical reconstruction, the failure of the Communists and Social Democrats to unite against Hitler allowed him to take power. It is an ill-informed, simplistic take on a complex situation. But suffice it to say, it excuses the real causes of Hitler’s rise: the draconian Treaty of Versailles, discredited centrist politics, compromised industrialists and business people, a profound economic crisis, displaced workers whose voices were not heard, their desperation, and-- yes-- a rotten, broken capitalist system.
The Democrats face an enormous problem with poor management of the economy and support for unpopular wars. Some say the Democrats are the war party. But that is not fair. Both parties are war parties, each with its own badges of shame.
But Biden and the Democrats will pay a price for enabling the bloodletting in Ukraine and, especially, for complicity in the massacres in Gaza. The intensity of the outrage against the genocidal slaughter in Gaza will only increase.
Regardless of which of the two parties wins in November, we are in for a rough patch. While the candidates are different, they are different in equally despicable ways.
I will follow the wise council of most of my fellow citizens who say that “a third majority party is needed” and cast my one vote towards that goal.
When Your Rulers Ignore Voters But Are Terrified Of Protesters, That Tells You Something
When nobody in power will lift a finger to earn your vote but they’re falling all over themselves trying to stomp out a robust protest movement, that tells you what the powerful are actually afraid of and where you should really be focusing your political energy.
Caitlin Johnstone
May 12, 2024
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Politico reports that the DNC is planning to move the Chicago convention partially online in order to “tamp down demonstrators” against Biden’s genocide in Gaza. The Democratic Party’s apathy toward this election is almost as blatant as its support for police crackdowns on political dissent.
When nobody in power will lift a finger to earn your vote but they’re falling all over themselves trying to stomp out a robust protest movement, that tells you what the powerful are actually afraid of and where you should really be focusing your political energy.
Your votes don’t matter, but your activism does. These freaks are terrified that one day the people will stop playing with the toy steering wheel of voting that they were given to divert their political energy and use the power of their numbers to grab the real steering wheel.
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If I were Jewish I would be enraged that the world’s most powerful governments and the world’s most influential media outlets keep telling everyone over and over again that opposing mass murder is anti-Jewish.
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Israel supporters pretend to believe pro-Palestine protesters have a genocidal hatred of Jews when their real crime is that they don’t share Israel’s genocidal hatred of Palestinians.
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The difference between liberals and rightists on middle east policy is that rightists openly believe middle easterners are apelike savages who should be beaten into submission or eliminated, whereas liberals believe exactly the same thing but have the decency to lie about it.
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The way to see past the distortions of the imperial propaganda matrix is to learn to distinguish between empty narrative fluff and the raw data of where weapons, money and resources are moving to. Antiwar.com is probably the best resource at documenting the day-to-day raw data of these movements. I also keep a public Twitter list with a bunch of journalists, commentators and public figures who provide information about the daily movements of the imperial machine.
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It’s hard to understand the tyranny of a system that relies on propaganda and manipulation as opposed to overt totalitarianism, in the same way it can be harder to recognize a psychologically abusive relationship than a physically abusive one.
You grow up learning that if a man puts his hands on a woman she needs to get the hell out of there, but you can live your entire adult life in a relationship where your partner twists your mind into knots to bend you to his will without recognizing what’s happening. In exactly the same way, we grow up learning about Evil Dictatorships in other countries where dissent is banned and the government controls the populace with an iron fist, but we can go our entire lives without recognizing that we are ruled by powerful people who use mass-scale psychological manipulation to exert an even greater degree of control over us.
The truth is we live in a highly abusive mind-controlled dystopia where people’s thoughts, words and actions are largely predetermined by an information system controlled by powerful plutocrats and empire managers, and the genius of it is that it controls us to a greater degree than overt tyranny ever could while at the same time giving us the collective delusion that we are free.
We are indoctrinated from childhood by corrupt education systems which construct the mainstream empire-authorized worldview inside our skulls, and that worldview is continually bolstered, steered, and added onto throughout adulthood from every direction we’ve been trained to get our information from. The news media are controlled by wealthy oligarchs with a vested interest in preserving the political status quo upon which their wealth is premised. Silicon Valley tech plutocrats quickly learn that living the high life is a lot easier for them if they collaborate with US government agencies and help protect the information interests of the US-centralized empire. Wealthy elites control mainstream culture by restricting which people and what ideas are given a platform in the culture-manufacturing centers of New York and Los Angeles.
We grow up thinking we are free, but in a very real sense people are less free in our society than they are under a proper dictatorship: under a standard dictatorship people’s minds are freer, because people know they are not free. In our society people think, speak, vote, shop, work and behave exactly how the powerful want them to, mindlessly regurgitating political opinions that were inserted into their brains by their rulers and sincerely believing they came up with it themselves.
A quote from Chomsky:
“Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.”
Another quote from Chomsky:
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
Another:
“Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state."
Chomsky is just right enough on this issue to camouflage how wrong he's been about real, existing socialism. A rich anarchist whom Bakunin would punch in the nose.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."