Sympathy for the Devils...

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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Tue May 16, 2023 2:23 pm

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Saudi army officers walk past U.S.-made F-15 fighter jets displayed at King Salman air base in Riyadh. Jan. 25, 2017 (AP)

Biden breaks all-time record for most weapons sold during fiscal year
Originally published: Al Mayadeen on May 14, 2023 by The Intercept (more by Al Mayadeen) | (Posted May 15, 2023)

A report issued by The Intercept on Thursday reveals that the U.S. has sold weapons to the majority of states labeled as autocratic in the year 2022, a year during which the U.S. sold weapons to a combined total of 142 countries and territories.

The total of weapons that were sold that year reportedly amounted to $85 billion in bilateral sales.

Of the 84 countries that are labeled as autocracies, the U.S. reportedly made sales of weapons to at least 48 percent to 57 percent of them, according to The Intercept.

Data was gathered using recently released country-level data for last year’s Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) authorization that was issued by the State Department Directorate of Defense Trade Control, as well as the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency’s Foreign Military Sales (FMS) figures for fiscal year 2022.

There are two ways through which the U.S. fulfills its foreign demands: either through FMS or through DCS. The FMS implies that the government acts as an intermediary in the purchase of raw materials from a private company and then delivers the goods to foreign clients.

On the other hand, the DCS involves a system in which a U.S. company readies an agreement with a foreign government.

Both systems require approval from the U.S. government.

“While Biden signaled early on that his arms sales policy would be based primarily on strategic and human rights considerations, not just economic interests, he broke from that policy not too long after entering office by approving weapons sales to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other authoritarian regimes,” the report states.

‘Battle between democracy and autocracy’
The Intercept notes that data provided by the U.S. government lacks clarity as it fails to disclose who the client states are and what their mode of governance is.

This comes in light of the White House’s narrative about defending the values of democracy and the “rules-based” order against global autocracies.

“Democracies have become stronger, not weaker. Autocracies have grown weaker, not stronger,” Biden previously said in one of his addresses.

During a speech in Warsaw in 2022, Biden likened the battle between democracy and autocracy to one “between liberty and repression” and “between a rules-based international order and one goverened by brute force.”

“The most pressing strategic challenge facing our vision is from powers that layer authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy,” the White House’s 2022 National Security Strategy reads.

According to the State Department’s annual tally, “which uses an opaque but seemingly broader accounting of yearly FMS and DCS figure,” figures for the year 2022 show a record number of arms sales ever made in years.

Weapons sales in Biden’s full fiscal year as president were recorded at a staggering amount of $206 billion—a number slightly higher than the previous record-holder set by Donald Trump of of $192 billion.

Arming countries through military aid programs to fulfill U.S. strategic interests is also considered in this context.

The largest amount delivered in military aid to date is the Ukraine conflict with more than $75 billion of U.S. taxpayer money spent on financial and military assistance to Kiev.

The Biden administration has resorted to the Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA) to enable such money transfers to occur. Through the use of PDA, Congress has recently greenlit up to $1 billion worth of weapons aid for Taiwan.

https://mronline.org/2023/05/15/biden-b ... scal-year/

Cause ya know this is what ya voted for...USA!



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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Wed May 17, 2023 5:35 pm

A Minus And Plus For The Debt Ceiling Crisis

The debt ceiling discussions in Washington may well be help President Biden's secret domestic agenda but it is hampering on of his foreign policy aims.

The New York Times economy columnist Paul Krugman is aghast that the Biden administration had not prepared for the obvious showdown with the Republicans:

As soon as Republicans took control of the House last November, it was obvious that they would try to take the economy hostage by refusing to raise the federal debt limit. After all, that’s what they did in 2011 — and hard as it may be to believe, the Tea Party Republicans were sober and sane compared to the MAGA crew. So it was also obvious that the Biden administration needed a strategy to head off the looming crisis. More and more, however, it looks as if there never was a strategy beyond wishful thinking.
...
[R]ight now I have a sick feeling about all of this. What were they thinking? How can they have been caught so off-guard by something that everyone who’s paying attention saw coming?


I am amused over this. Krugman seems to have believed Biden's election campaign talk about being 'progressive' or on the 'left'. Joe Biden was and is far from that. I for one would characterize him as a centrist with strong leanings towards the right.

The fight over the debt ceiling is arbitrary but a chance for Republicans to threaten some damage. The fear is then used to push for domestic policy concessions:

For those somehow new to this, the United States has a weird and dysfunctional system in which Congress enacts legislation that determines federal spending and revenue, but then, if this legislation leads to a budget deficit, must vote a second time to authorize borrowing to cover the deficit. If even one house of Congress refuses to raise the debt limit, the U.S. government will go into default, with possibly catastrophic financial and economic effects.
This weird aspect of budgeting allows a party that is sufficiently ruthless, sufficiently indifferent to the havoc it might wreak, to attempt to impose through extortion policies it would never be able to enact through the normal legislative process.


I do not for one moment believe that Biden is unhappy about that.

In the 1990s and early 2000s Biden supported bankruptcy reform that made it more difficult, especially for the poor, to get rid of debt:

[Biden] had pushed for two earlier bankruptcy reform bills in 2000 and 2001, both of which failed. But in 2005, BAPCPA made it through, successfully erecting all kinds of roadblocks for Americans struggling with debt, and doing so just before the financial crisis of 2008. Since BAPCPA passed, Chapter 13 filings went from representing just 24 percent of all bankruptcy filings per year to 39 percent in 2017.

Before that Biden had called for cuts to Social Security:

In 1984 he proposed freezing Social Security benefits — that is, ending cost-of-living adjustments that boost benefits to keep up with inflation. In January 1995 he gave a speech endorsing a balanced budget amendment (an utterly lunatic policy) and boasted about his previous record of proposing "that we freeze every single solitary program in the government, anything the government had to do with, every single solitary one, that we not spend a penny more, not even accounting for inflation, than we spent the year before." In November 1995 he did so again, boasting that "I tried with Senator Grassley back in the '80s to freeze all government spending, including Social Security, including everything."

There are other non-progressive laws and several wars that had Biden's support. In the current fight over the debt ceiling the Republicans demand cuts to several welfare bills. It is certainly not obvious that Biden is against those. He may well be using the debt ceiling fight to push for politics he favors but which a majority of Democrats would otherwise oppose.

Talks have been held in the White House with Senate and House majority and minority leaders. There were no serious results because the Democratic Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer held Biden back from making concessions to the Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy:

The California Republican had vented to his colleagues just hours before the meeting that the current format of negotiations — with all four party leaders in a room with the president — wasn’t fruitful. Speaking to his conference on Tuesday morning, McCarthy said the five of them had achieved little in their first sitdown last week, arguing that Schumer had prevented Biden from fully engaging with the speaker and McConnell, according to two people familiar with his remarks. Whenever Biden did seem to agree with Republicans, McCarthy said Schumer would try to cut him off.

The talks will now continue without the Senate leadership:

Leaders agreed to narrow a bicameral negotiation down to Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Biden, hoping fewer players might be more productive in reaching a bipartisan deal to raise the debt ceiling. Even then, it looks like a longshot to some Senate Democrats.

That setting will give Biden the opportunity to make 'concessions' that are favored by his rich donors but opposed by a majority of people who voted for him. He will then sell those by presenting them as the only possible step to take. Maggie Thatcher's "There is no alternative!" will again succeed.

The current due date for a debt ceiling deal is Friday:

Reflecting the growing sense of urgency, the White House announced Tuesday that the president will cut short his trip to Asia and now plans return to Washington on Sunday in order to resume negotiations with Republicans as soon as possible.
Biden will depart Wednesday for a trip to Japan but will no longer make stops in Papua New Guinea and Australia before returning stateside.


(more, not relevant to thread.)

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/05/a ... .html#more

Red' added for emphasis.

Do you smell a rat? 'b' is on the money, such a move would be entirely consistent with the conduct of this regime thus far.



He's a clown
Gonna get bounced around
If he don't keep his business underground
He's a player
And every time he deals a round
It's just a bad hand
What a bad man.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Thu May 18, 2023 3:48 pm

CovertAction Bulletin: The Debt Ceiling is Political Theater
By Rachel Hu and Chris Garaffa - May 17, 2023 0

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CLICK HERE to listen on podcast platforms worldwide https://linktr.ee/CovertActionBulletin
Support this broadcast: become a patreon!

The “debt ceiling” crisis playing out between President Biden and Congressional Republicans is manufactured by capitalism to justify spending cuts to critical social programs while continuing to bail out big businesses and fund the Pentagon’s endless war drive.

This comes after the taxpayer-funded bailouts of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and First Republic Bank show the willingness of the capitalist system to do everything it can to keep itself afloat.

To talk about the debt ceiling, bank bailouts, inflation and more, we’re joined by Chris Caruso from the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights & Social Justice.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/0 ... l-theater/

If this wasn't a done deal, and if Biden gave a damn about the working class, he'd have stayed in D.C. to fight this out. But he'll return and simply claim the the Republicans forced his hand to do what he's always wanted anyway.

If Biden was in any way a decent human being he'd counter with proposed cuts to the Pentagon.....Never mind.

There will be no progress until the Democratic Party is utterly rejected by the working class. Biden is scum but those so-called 'progressives'' in the party are worse, treacherous sheep dogs.
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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Fri May 19, 2023 2:47 pm

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The Democratic Party exposed itself as anti-worker long ago. Now it’s trying to hold on to power using “radical” front groups.

BY RAINER SHEA
MAY 13, 2023

The Democratic Party’s essential lie has been successfully exposed for quite some time. This lie being that it’s a party of the working class, and by extension of peace, racial justice, and the environment. This was the lie that the DNC initially tried to put forth when it got confronted by a working class movement in 2016: that the left insurgents lacked a case because the party was already sufficiently “progressive.” This was the basis on which the DNC and its adjacent media outlets, particularly the Washington Post, tried to construct the narrative that Sanders and his supporters were not challenging the party’s establishment out of genuine policy concerns but out of misogyny, vindictiveness, and other shallow motives. This was the idea that the Post was trying to convey when it put out an intensive concentration of trollish headlines directed at Sanders during the first couple months of the primary voting period.

Because Sanders always intended to capitulate to the DNC, as indicated by prior pro-imperialist actions of his like when he called Hugo Chavez a “dead communist dictator,” these attacks by the liberal gatekeepers were not ultimately directed at him. Their true target was the working class movement, which the ruling class knew was capable of soon going in a revolutionary direction even if Sanders told them to do what the DNC wanted. The reality was that the “Democrats don’t actually have a reactionary politics problem” argument simply wasn’t a sustainable one. Clinton did not win the primary on a fair basis. Sanders could only be taken out of the election by vast voting irregularities, voter suppression, and a coordinated effort by the DNC to arrange the debates in Clinton’s favor. This fraudulent victory for Clinton was able to partially maintain the illusion of popular support for what Clinton represented, but November exposed that illusion.

It was because of Clinton’s lack of working class popular momentum, and pro-war record which alienated swing state voters who’d been victimized by the war machine, that Trump won. The Russiagate psyop could only do so much to perpetuate the lie that the Democrats have a popular mandate, even when Sanders himself started promoting this psyop. The reality that the Democrats are a pro-corporate, pro-war party had become permanently part of the mass consciousness. Even though the Hillary Clinton psyop had succeeded insofar as it maintained the Democratic Party’s perceived respectability within the mainstream of our discourse, outside that insular political and media space, the people had come to recognize the reality of our system being fully corrupt on both sides. And when the party tried to defend itself by embracing an even more clearly pro-war stance, advancing cold war military buildup to validate its narrative about Russia “hacking the election,” this gave the working class movement’s revolutionary wing more of a reason to distrust it. Sanders tried to divert us back into the Democratic Party by reinforcing its war propaganda, but the reaction to this from many was to come to distrust him as well, all while intensifying our resistance towards the DNC.

The DNC preemptively found a way to remain electorally viable after this full break from the left occurred. Chuck Schumer said in 2016 that “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” This strategy has been enough to get them to take advantage of the political pendulum swing, but it’s made it harder for the Democratic Party to continue fulfilling its real purpose: acting as a means for diverting the class struggle towards reformism. There are still working class people who plan to vote for Biden next year, but not enough for the proletarian movement to not exist as a serious threat, like was the case for so many decades until recently.

We’ve gotten to a point where, amid a rise in strikes and union involvement over the last decade, the Democrats have started a proxy war that’s tangibly exacerbating working class poverty. The war machine’s worsening of the inflation crisis, along with the plot by the Fed to sabotage living standards for the benefit of executives, are provoking the people into anti-imperialist mobilization. And when anti-imperialism is combined with labor struggles to form a synthesis, a genuine threat towards the ruling class emerges.

The Democratic Party’s goal at this stage is to impede this progress within our movement. Which it can’t do simply by assimilating all of today’s politically passionate people into the Vote Blue stance—as plenty of these individuals will never be convinced to adopt that stance again—but rather through a combination of Vote Blue and other psyops. Psyops which aim not necessarily to sell that lie about the Democrats being pro-worker (which only still works on petty-bourgeois liberals who think they’re helping those less fortunate), but also to convince developing radicals that they’re fighting the system when they’ve actually embraced imperialism-compatible “solutions.” Solutions that the Democrats have given to them as placebos for truly doing something productive.

An example of this is what Marxists Speak Out has observed from the organizers of ANSWER, and how this contrasts with the ways serious anti-imperialists think and act: “We do not want war, but nor are we pacifists. We must break with the politics of pacifism and Russophobia. The organizers and leaders of the March 18th protests in the USA for example tried to isolate and censure the organizations that support a Russian victory over imperialism in the war and instead aimed to pressure the imperialist Democratic Party that is waging the war. Such politics only cowers in the face of public opinion and serves imperialist governance. No progress will be made appealing to either of the vicious imperialist Republican or Democrat wings of the US ruling class.” Even though these organizers don’t take a stance as shamelessly reformist as that of the CPUSA’s leadership, which openly advocates for voting blue, their Democrat tailism is undeniable. And their sectarian actions towards the pro-Russian orgs are more notable at this stage than what the CPUSA is doing, since CPUSA’s liberalism has over time made it less and less relevant.

The only threat CPUSA’s radical liberal element poses towards revolutionary progress now is one where it can assimilate developing radicals, ones who have potential to contribute something real to the class struggle, into this element’s insular space. Which is becoming even more terminally online as these radlibs grow less present in the organizing scene. Lately they’ve been gravitating towards the types of online communities that effectively seek to replace anti-imperialism with anti-colonialism. By which I mean a distorted iteration of “anti-colonialism” that’s anti-Leninist, due to its arbiters using their “anti-colonial” rhetoric to orient themselves against the anti-NATO struggle. For example, when they refuse to support anti-NATO coalitions or organizations (like the ones ANSWER attacked) based on the idea that these forces are “reactionary” for not exclusively drawing from the left, the rationale they use is that they’re simply trying to be “principled” in their support for oppressed groups. The big problem with this argument is that the groups they claim to care so much about will never be liberated as long as the American state remains undefeated, which can never happen as long as there isn’t a serious anti-imperialist movement.

A serious anti-imperialist movement is instrumental for defeating the state both because we can’t form an international revolutionary alliance without one, and because we can’t destroy the Democratic Party’s influence over organizing spaces without one. U.S. hegemony is the strongest link in the chain that our ruling class uses to keep us within the capitalist prison. There can be no land return for the tribes, no black liberation, no LGBT or women’s victory, without us making anti-imperialism our foremost priority. That’s the reality the Democratic Party’s tailists and discourse agents are trying to convince us not to see. When we adapt our practice according to this reality, we’ll be able to recognize when somebody is trying to sell us a brand of “radicalism” that’s actually designed to help the DNC.

https://newswiththeory.com/the-democrat ... nt-groups/
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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Thu May 25, 2023 2:29 pm

Biden's Debt Ceiling Betrayal is a Democratic Party Tradition
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 24 May 2023

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Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich in 1995. (Photo: John Mottern/AFP)

Joe Biden is continuing the ignoble tradition of colluding with republicans while pretending to fight them. The latest debt limit drama is another betrayal of the people.

When Joe Biden was first elected president his propagandists and their friends in corporate media told us that he was “the most progressive president since FDR” and that he would “cut child poverty in half.” Yet the temporary covid relief programs have all gone, from the Child Tax Credit, to emergency SNAP nutrition benefits, to automatic medicaid enrollment, and all with little fightback from the democrats. Now Biden is continuing the democratic presidents’ tradition of using sleight of hand to sell out the millions of people who have already lost what little help they had. The republican bogeymen and women have returned just when Biden needed them to make the case for his plan to further eviscerate the social safety net and continue the race to the bottom which results in precarity for the people.

Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives in the mid-term elections in 2022 and now they get to do their worst. They point at their fake enemies, the republicans, and whine that they are being forced to do things they claim they want to avoid. The routine is pretty stale but it worked for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and Joe Biden isn’t straying from the tried and true theatrical plot.

As always, republicans threaten to shut down the government if the debt limit isn’t raised. Biden, begins like his democratic predecessors did, saying that a shutdown would be terrible and would destroy the economy. He calls names like “extreme MAGA” and says that his alleged opponents are all very bad and awful people. After that act in the drama was over, Biden then announced his willingness to cut $1 trillion from the federal budget. What is being cut? Not money for Ukraine, which is getting an additional $375 million in military aid. The republicans insist on stealing from the people, the poorest people, and after pretending to be outraged Biden is going along.

He said that he would accept republican demands that medicaid and SNAP benefit recipients be required to work at least 20 hours per week. According to the Congressional Budget Office some 600,000 people would lose health coverage and 275,000 people would lose SNAP benefits every month if these rules go into effect.

The game hasn’t changed much since the Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich agreements of 1995, or Barack Obama’s attempt at a “grand bargain” with republicans in 2011. Dissent within republican ranks saved cuts to entitlement programs and Congressional Black Caucus leader Emmanuel Cleaver dubbed the proposals as a “sugar coated satan sandwich” and later added , “This debt deal is antithetical to everything the great religions of the world teach, which is take care of the poor, aged, vulnerable.”

Now the highest ranking member of the CBC, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries , says that democrats are willing to freeze spending, which would actually cut $1 trillion from the budget over a ten-year period. His justification is all too familiar, “We're willing to discuss freezing spending at current levels. That's an inherently reasonable position many in our party might even be uncomfortable with, but President Biden recognizes we're in a divided government situation.”

The CBC has certainly devolved over time, but Biden’s willingness to cut deals goes back decades. When Clinton was caving to Newt Gingrich he did so with Senator Biden’s full support. “When I argued that we should freeze federal spending, I meant Social Security as well. I meant Medicare and Medicaid. I meant veterans’ benefits. I meant every single solitary thing in the government. And I not only tried it once, I tried it twice, I tried it a third time, and I tried it a fourth time.”

During Biden’s 2020 campaign reluctant democrats were told that his presidency provided “harm reduction” from the very bad and evil republicans. But there is no harm reduction in a system dedicated to killing government spending with cut after cut. The recycled drama would be funny if it weren’t so serious. Democratic presidents tend to win congressional majorities when first elected but then lose control in midterm elections and that is where the dirty deeds are done.

They first proclaim themselves adamantly opposed to austerity measures but after a few meetings in a smoke filled room they announce what they call a compromise. They shake hands with their erstwhile opposition and then announce that all is well.

Now members of the CBC or progressives don’t even bother with pretend push back. If they say anything at all their words are muted and they defend the stab in the back as Hakeem Jeffries does. The 2024 presidential campaign has already begun and we can be certain that lesser evilism and harm reduction will be the democrats’ talking point yet again. Democratic presidents are like characters added to sequels that Hollywood churns out with a winning movie franchise. Just as in the movies the suspense is phony and the endings are the same, with the protagonists living to fight another day and doing the same thing all over again.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/biden ... -tradition
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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Mon May 29, 2023 5:20 pm

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President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California walk down the House steps Friday, March 17, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington. [AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib]

Manufactured crisis over U.S. debt ceiling sets stage for bipartisan assault on Social Security and Medicare
Originally published: World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) on May 25, 2023 by Barry Grey (more by World Socialist Web Site (WSWS)) | (Posted May 27, 2023)

It is now one week out from the “X-date,” June 1, when the U.S. will purportedly default on its debt obligations, triggering a “catastrophe,” unless the Democrats and Republicans can agree on a bipartisan deal raising the debt ceiling in return for brutal cuts in social programs on which tens of millions of working people rely.

Behind the mutual recriminations between the two capitalist parties and the stage-managed crisis negotiations, there is a basic agreement: All of the social gains made by the working class in the course of more than a century of struggle must be wiped out to pay for the drive by the American ruling class to remove, by force of arms, Russia and China as obstacles to U.S. hegemony, even if it means triggering a nuclear war.

The social cuts implemented in an eventual debt limit/budget deal will be only a down payment. They will set the stage for an assault on the core entitlement programs—Medicare and Social Security—extracted from the ruling class in the class battles of the 1930s and 1960s.

On Wednesday, with the talks between President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy having hit a “speed bump” and the financial markets indicating increasing nervousness, the Washington Post published an editorial backing Biden’s proposal for a two-year spending freeze and $1 trillion in cuts over the next decade. At the same time, the newspaper owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos reiterated its demand that both parties tackle what it deems the real problem, the cost of the mandatory programs that stand outside of annual discretionary spending—Social Security and Medicare.
“Mr. McCarthy keeps claiming the nation has a ‘spending problem,’” the Post wrote.

The part he leaves out is the spending problem is driven largely by the fact that Social Security, Medicare and health-care costs are shooting up. Yet House Republicans and Mr. Biden don’t want to touch Social Security and Medicare.

The editorial is part of an expanding wave of media commentary on the need to “reform” or privatize these core social programs. On Sunday, CNN’s “State of the Union” program featured Louisiana Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, a so-called “moderate” who advocates tying Social Security to the stock market and essentially privatizing it.

“Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan interviewed congressmen Brian Fitzpatrick, Republican of Pennsylvania, and Josh Gottheimer, Democrat of New Jersey, members of the “moderate” Problem Solvers Caucus in the House. Fitzpatrick declared:

Medicare will run out of money in 2028. Social Security will run out of money in 2034 … until we tackle the mandatory spending and get a handle on our long-term sustainability of our debt and deficit, we’re just playing around the margins.

McCarthy himself spoke along similar lines before his meeting Monday with Biden, while refraining from explicitly targeting Social Security and Medicare. “I don’t want you to think at the end of the day, the bill that we come up with is going to solve all this problem,” he told reporters.

But it’s going to be a step to finally acknowledge our problem and put one step in the right direction. And we’re going to come back the next day and get the next step.

Biden has already made a large down payment on the new austerity drive with his ending of the national COVID-19 emergency, which has not only increased the risk of infection and death from the ongoing pandemic, but authorized state governments to review their Medicaid rolls in order to terminate people’s benefits. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that between 5.3 million and 14.2 million people will lose Medicaid coverage just through that process alone.

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Graph showing decline in tax receipts even as corporate profits rise. [Photo: This graph was published by the Center for American Progress. (online)]

Far from increased social spending driving the rise in the national debt, it remains sharply down, when adjusted for inflation and population growth, from the levels preceding the bipartisan Budget Control Act of 2011. That bill, which followed the financial collapse of 2008, the multitrillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street, and the imposition of wage and benefit cuts and wage tiers under the auto restructuring overseen by the Obama administration, marked the first use of the debt ceiling, previously raised as a matter of course, to impose brutal attacks on the working class.
In all the media coverage, no explanation is given as to the real causes of the soaring national debt or why it is the working class that must pay the price.

What are the real sources of the increase in the national debt to its current $31.4 trillion?

Military and war spending: The United States spent between $4 trillion and $6 trillion on the 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a Harvard analysis.

Last year alone, the Biden administration allocated $113 billion in arms to Ukraine and this year proposed a record $1 trillion Pentagon budget. Last week at the G7 summit in Hiroshima, before returning to the U.S. and holding budget talks with McCarthy, Biden announced an additional $375 billion in arms for the right-wing puppet regime in Kiev.

Tax cuts for corporations and the rich: The George W. Bush administration enacted two rounds of tax cuts, overwhelmingly benefiting the wealthy. The Obama administration made them permanent in 2012. That has cost $4 trillion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The Trump tax cut of December 2017 handed over $2 trillion to the corporate elite, including the reduction of the official corporate tax rate to 21 percent. As Biden noted in his press conference last Sunday from Hiroshima, 55 U.S. corporations that made $400 billion last year paid zero in taxes, and U.S. billionaires pay an average tax rate of 8 percent.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, corporate profits rose by 20 percent between 2014 and 2020, while corporate tax receipts fell by more than 60 percent.

In 2018, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), corporate tax revenue as a share of GDP in the U.S., at 1.1 percent, was lower than every other member country except Latvia.

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Graph showing the U.S. has the second-lowest percentage of corporate tax revenue as a share of gross domestic product, just above Latvia. [Photo: This graph was published by the Center for American Progress. (online)]

Bank and corporate bailouts: The Bush and Obama administrations enacted $2 trillion in emergency measures following the subprime mortgage collapse in 2008 and the ensuing Great Recession. In addition, the Federal Reserve funneled trillions more to Wall Street through its program of “quantitative easing.” Meanwhile, tens of millions of workers lost their homes and life savings as a result of the criminal practices of the bankers.
The Trump administration, with the support of the Democrats in Congress, allocated $3.4 trillion in the March 2020 CARES Act to unfreeze the Treasury bond market and rescue banks and corporations from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Fed added trillions more through its expansion of “quantitative easing.”

War mongering, greed and criminality have impelled the policies pursued by the parasitic American ruling elite and driven up the national debt.

https://mronline.org/2023/05/27/manufac ... -medicare/

It ain't all a 'dog & pony show' but this little set piece, which we've seen so many times before, certainly is.

The Democratic Party is the piss which sets the Republican dye in the national fabric.

We twiddle our thumbs with culture wars while they stomp us with class war.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Thu Jun 01, 2023 2:56 pm

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: Sheepdogging and Liberal Fantasy
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 31 May 2023

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Image: Twitter @RobertKennedyJr

There is an understandable yearning for a progressive president. But like dreams of happily ever after endings, the fantasy is just that.

In 2015, Black Agenda Report co-founder Bruce Dixon coined the term “sheepdog” to describe the role that Bernie Sanders would play in the 2016 presidential campaign. Dixon presciently said, “Bernie's job is to warm up the crowd for Hillary, herding activist energies and the disaffected left back into the Democratic fold one more time. Bernie aims to tie up activist energies and resources till the summer of 2016 when the only remaining choice will be the usual lesser of two evils.” The word stuck and since that time the question is rightly asked whether a particular democratic challenger is serious about getting the nomination or is merely a sheepdog who will herd supporters back into the hands of their party’s oligarchy.

That question arises again now that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has announced his presidential campaign. Kennedy obviously has the advantage of name recognition, and he isn’t shy about making frequent references to “my uncle” and “my father.” Yet he is attractive to leftists in the party because he is willing to take positions in opposition to its established orthodoxy. He does make the obligatory references to Russia’s “brutal invasion” of Ukraine but he also points out what no one in the Democratic Party will say, that the war was provoked by U.S. actions and he calls the billions of dollars in allocations to the Ukrainian government a “money laundering operation for the military industrial complex.”

Yet Kennedy also falls back into line if pressured. He said that the CIA assassinated his uncle John F. Kennedy, and he points out the many CIA interventions around the world as a practice he would end as president, but he backtracks if criticized, making a lie out of his pronouncements. “The majority of people working at the CIA are good, patriotic people committed to their missions and the law. My own daughter-in-law was a field agent, and she is among the bravest people I have known.”

He certainly got the zionist message about Israel . Kennedy praised musician Roger Waters for his opposition to the war in Ukraine but then deleted his comment on twitter because Waters also opposes Israeli apartheid. For good measure he added meaningless blather about the “aspirations of the Palestinian people.” After being called out when he ran for cover, he then deleted his comments which rescinded his first comment.

There is another issue aside from Kennedy’s willingness to back pedal when criticized for taking the positions he claims to run against. Will his supporters end up like those who worked for Jesse Jackson, Dennis Kucinich, or Bernie Sanders, who believed in their candidate only to be told that they had to support Mondale or Dukakis or Kerry or Clinton or Biden? One must ask, what is the point of going out on a limb yet again when history gives a strong indication of how this campaign will end?

The selective amnesia of many Kennedy supporters indicates another problem with what passes for left politics in this country. People here have been so thoroughly indoctrinated about the value of electoral politics that they believe it is the only way to bring about the changes they want to see. The end result is the search for a savior, the belief that we can vote our way out of a situation created by the oligarchy which controls both wings of the duopoly. It is comforting to think that the right president would end capitalist exploitation and imperialism but such a belief, while understandable, doesn’t hold water.

Would the military industrial complex suddenly disappear if Kennedy were president? Would the democrats and republicans who are bought off by big oil, big pharma, big agriculture, big healthcare, and other powerful interests suddenly throw off the shackles they happily accepted? Would their patrons allow them to do so even if they were so inclined? The answer to all of these questions is a resounding, “No.” Both parties are run by capitalists who have not gone to a lot of trouble to maintain their hold on the system only to give it all up because some democrats can’t end their habit of engaging in wishful thinking.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. takes positions that need to be heard. It is good that a presidential candidate opposes U.S. interventions around the world and pledges to end the censorship that the state and big tech carry out. But there’s no savior, just the hard work of mobilizing left movements. Kennedy speaks of the need for a "peaceful revolution." It isn't clear that revolutions can be peaceful, but they certainly won't come from U.S. presidential politics.

The question is the same. It doesn't change every four years. How do we mobilize against interests that won't be placated, whose imperatives are antithetical to human needs? They don't care if leftists want to believe that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. can win the Democratic Party nomination and become president. They won't be wished away.

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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Sat Jun 03, 2023 2:49 pm

Four ways Democrats and Republicans just agreed to attack workers
Walter SmolarekJune 1, 2023

By an overwhelming 314-117 vote, the House of Representatives just passed the “debt ceiling” deal negotiated by Joe Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy. One hundred and sixty-five out of 211 Democrats voted yes, as did 149 out of 220 Republicans. It is expected to pass the Senate by an even wider margin. This piece of legislation contains provisions that would deepen hunger and weaken a wide range of public services, all while keeping the money flowing into the pockets of fossil fuel executives and weapons manufacturers.

Biden is presenting this deal as a necessary compromise to allow the government to keep borrowing money and avoid a default. But nothing about this was necessary. Instead of sitting down to politely negotiate with the Republicans, he could have fought them — calling the right wing’s bluff and daring them to bring about an economic crisis just to force through widely unpopular austerity measures. He also could have simply ignored the debt ceiling by citing the provision of the 14th amendment that requires him to pay the government’s debt with no exceptions, or explored a legal provision that could authorize him to mint new currency in platinum coins.

Biden is pushing through these measures because he wants to. His bluster about refusing to negotiate quickly melted away as the deadline approached. The Democrats and Republicans are not two opposite ends of the political spectrum, they are partners in the war on workers and the environment. Here’s how they’re teaming up:

1. Kick people off of food stamps

One area of consensus the politicians hammered out was making sure more poor people go hungry. The debt ceiling deal imposes new bureaucratic requirements on many recipients of the SNAP program that will lead to large numbers of people losing their benefits.

This is being sold to the public as “work requirements,” but really it just means more paperwork. The deal expands the age range in which recipients are required to submit evidence that they worked for 20 hours a week or spent an equivalent amount of time trying to get work. Inevitably, a significant number of people will simply be unaware of changes to the technicalities and details of the program, and lose their benefits as a result. This will deepen the exploding hunger crisis in the country, something that the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse survey found affects 25.4 million people — 11.3% of the population.

2. Produce more planet-killing fossil fuels

The deal takes the extraordinary step of giving the green light to the construction of a specific gas pipeline — the Mountain Valley Pipeline. It also will clear the way for many more infrastructure projects to sustain fossil fuel production in the future by making it easier to get regulatory approval.

For years, activists have been fighting the construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline. But instead of listening to them, Biden and his Republican friends decided to give a gift to the gas industry executives.

3. Cut everything – except the Pentagon

The bill to raise the debt ceiling essentially freezes the budget of every government agency that doesn’t involve killing people until 2025. Because of inflation, this will effectively mean a budget cut for offices involved in making sure food is safe, air is clean, labor laws are enforced, etc. A dollar in two years will buy less than a dollar does today.

The Pentagon, however, gets a free pass. The budget of the Department of “Defense” is exempted from the spending freeze, proving yet again that war for empire is a point of bipartisan unity.

4. Help rich people evade taxes

The deal involves a $10 billion cut to funding for the IRS next year, and an additional $10 billion cut the year after. This will diminish plans to increase the agency’s workforce and make it more effective. This makes some of the ultra-rich nervous, since they rely on complex arrangements and legal gray areas to avoid paying taxes, making the calculation that their personal legal and accounting resources are superior to the IRS.

The Republican hype about the supposed 87,000 new IRS agents that Biden wanted to hire was inflated to begin with. They would be hired over the course of 10 years, mainly as replacements for retiring workers and employees in roles other than auditors, and work within the confines of a tax system rigged in favor of the rich. But nevertheless, Biden and his Republican partners wanted to make completely sure that the millionaires and billionaires who cheat on their taxes had nothing to worry about.

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I was listening to Stumblin' Joe put lipstick on the pig yesterday evening and threw up in my mouth.

Viva la difference.....

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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Mon Jun 05, 2023 3:08 pm

For Media, Giving in to Debt Limit Blackmail Was a Triumph of Bipartisanship
JULIE HOLLAR AND JIM NAURECKAS

For Media, Giving in to Debt Limit Blackmail Was a Triumph of Bipartisanship

When Congress passed the debt ceiling deal hammered out by President Joe Biden and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, centrist media celebrated.

If we had anything like a responsible White House press corps, we never would have gotten to this point. Treating the Republican gambit—demanding deeply unpopular policy measures in exchange for allowing the government to pay off debts Congress had already authorized—as anything other than economic hostage-taking gave it the legitimacy the party needed to stick with it without fear of massive political blowback (CounterSpin, 5/5/23).

Instead, the press corps we have gave three cheers for bipartisanship.

‘Complaints on either side’
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NPR (6/1/23): “For one night, the pragmatists won.”
NPR‘s Domenico Montanaro (6/1/23) hailed the compromise in a piece headlined, “Don’t Believe the Hype: Low-Key Lawmakers Helped Avert a Debt Ceiling Crisis.” A paean to “pragmatists,” the article argued that

it will be those who eschewed the wings of their parties—which have some of the most vocal, attention-getting members—who averted a potentially calamitous, first-ever US debt default.

Call them perhaps the Silent Middle Majority.

Montanaro offered a both-sides framing of the deal:

There were plenty of well-founded complaints on either side—on the left, worries about increased work requirements that could hurt people in poverty, nervousness about the environmental impact of sped-up energy permits; on the right, continued head-shaking about what they see as out-of-control spending and debt, now topping $30 trillion.

But in the end, two-thirds of House Republicans and more than three-quarters of Democrats voted for the bill for a total tally of 314–117.


It’s an analysis that simply assumes the validity of the premise that some sort of deal needed to be worked out to begin with: If a hostage-taker complains that their demands have only partially been met, how well-founded is that complaint?

And on top of the false premise, Montanaro has to stretch to make both sides’ “complaints” seem at all comparable, matching the left’s “worries” and “nervousness”—about harming people and the environment—to the right’s “what they see as” problems. But there’s solid research behind the “worry” that work requirements exacerbate hardship (CBPP, 3/15/23), and speeding up energy permits is intended to increase fossil fuel production (American Prospect, 6/2/23), which is precisely what must be halted to stave off the worst of climate change outcomes.

And however much right-wing politicians shake their heads about the debt, it’s journalists’ duty to point out the disingenuousness of a party that runs up debt via tax cuts, and then pretends to favor fiscal responsibility when it comes time to pay the bills (FAIR.org, 1/25/21).

‘Far-right and hard-left…in revolt’
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New York Times (5/29/23): “Some economists say the economy could use a mild dose of fiscal austerity right now.”
The New York Times also luxuriated in the outpouring of bipartisanship, with chief White House correspondent Peter Baker (5/28/23) reporting that Republicans’ success in holding the economy hostage “bolsters President Biden’s argument that he is the one figure who can still do bipartisanship in a profoundly partisan era.” He added, though, that the deal “comes at the cost of rankling many in his own party who have little appetite for meeting Republicans in the middle.”

Another piece, by congressional reporter Catie Edmondson (5/31/23), presented the deal as “a broad bipartisan coalition” in support of “a critical vote to pull the nation back from the brink of economic catastrophe”:

With both far-right and hard-left lawmakers in revolt over the deal, it fell to a bipartisan coalition powered by Democrats to push the bill over the finish line, throwing their support behind the compromise in an effort to break the fiscal stalemate that had gripped Washington for weeks.

When the Times reports that the “far right” and “hard left” both oppose something, that’s a sure sign that the paper thinks it’s a good thing. Another front-page piece in the paper, by Jim Tankersley (5/29/23), went out of its way to argue that not only was it good that the White House made a deal, but that, all in all, it was a good deal:

Economists say the agreement is unlikely to inflict the sort of lasting damage to the recovery that was caused by the 2011 debt ceiling deal—and, paradoxically, the newfound spending restraint might even help it.

“The economy could actually use a mild dose of fiscal austerity right now,” Tankersley reported economists were saying; the cuts will throw people out of work, so the Federal Reserve won’t have to. In the 23rd of 25 paragraphs, after presenting the Republican argument that the deal “will help the economy by reducing the accumulation of debt,” the reporter acknowledged that the cuts “will affect nondefense discretionary programs, like Head Start preschool, and…new work requirements could choke off food and other assistance to vulnerable Americans.”

‘Centrists’ vs. ‘fringes’
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The Washington Post (5/30/23) reported that “Biden and McCarthy have each struggled at times to balance governing responsibly with appeasing their party’s base voters”—making it clear that it thought giving in to McCarthy’s threats to torpedo the economy was the responsible thing to do.
The Washington Post (5/30/23) seemed practically giddy at the deal: “A Washington Surprise: Centrists Push Back Against Fringes in Debt Deal.”

In the piece, White House bureau chief Toluse Olorunnipa found a way to equate Republicans willing to blow up the economy if they weren’t given policy concessions—ones they didn’t think they could achieve through legislation—with Democrats who insisted that government debts simply had to be paid:

For weeks, conservative Republicans warned House Speaker Kevin McCarthy not to back down from sweeping spending cuts, saying anything else would be an unforgivable betrayal. Liberals implored President Biden to abandon the debt ceiling talks altogether, insisting the Constitution enabled him to simply ignore Republican demands.

But in the end, the two leaders opted for a middle-of-the-road settlement, aiming to coalesce center-right and center-left lawmakers around the idea that an imperfect deal was preferable to a historic default that could devastate the economy. It was the first significant test for the Biden/McCarthy era of divided government, and if a theme emerged, it was the unmistakable reassertion of the political center.

“Both sides were initially sounding very ardent about an inflexible position,” said presidential historian Douglas Brinkley. “Yet both sides ultimately blinked—and that is what American politics is all about.”

Winners and losers
In all of the coverage, one consistent theme was the compulsion to declare winners and losers. Some outlets picked one side or the other: “House Passes Debt Ceiling Bill in Big Win for McCarthy,” judged the Hill (5/31/23), and USA Today (6/2/23) similarly had “McCarthy Gets Win Passing Debt Deal.” “Apostle of Bipartisanship: Why US Debt Ceiling Deal Was a Victory for Joe Biden,” explained the British Guardian (6/1/23), while the Washington Post (6/1/23) had a more confusing “Biden Won on the Debt Ceiling. Why Doesn’t He Want It to Look That Way?”
Image
USA Today (6/1/23) acknowledged in passing that the deal would hurt people with student loans and those who need nutritional assistance, among others—but they won too, apparently.
Others declared both dealmakers victorious. Politico‘s popular Playbook newsletter (6/1/23) ran with “How McCarthy and Biden Both Won the Debt Deal.” The Washington Post (6/1/23) simply offered the two sides’ own declarations: “Sidestepping Crisis, Biden and McCarthy Claim Victory in Debt Deal.” Another USA Today piece (6/1/23) made the bold claim, “Debt Ceiling Plan Passes Senate. Who Wins? Everyone, and Here’s Why.”

In a different twist, CNN (5/30/23) offered its perspective on which companies were “winners” in the deal—leading off with Equitrans Midstream, the lead developer of the Mountain Valley Pipeline project that Sen. Joe Manchin forced into the agreement.

It also included lending company SoFi, which would profit from an end to the student loan repayment freeze included in the deal, and H&R Block and TurboTax, which are expected to benefit from the deal’s cuts to the IRS. This curtailment will likely stymie the agency’s plan to develop a free electronic tax filing system, which would have rendered those tax preparers’ offerings much less profitable.

CNN‘s “winners” begin to suggest who some of the “losers” are in this deal. It preserves tax cuts for the wealthy and funding for the Pentagon, while cutting the rest of discretionary funding, forcing more work requirements on recipients of public assistance, fast-tracking fossil fuel projects and weakening environmental protections—all great for corporations and wealthy political donors, and terrible for most people. But both major parties agreed to inflict this damage—and that in itself makes it good news for establishment media.

https://fair.org/home/for-media-giving- ... tisanship/

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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Tue Jun 06, 2023 2:29 pm

Biden Appoints Strong Candidate For Nuremberg-Style War Crimes Tribunal As New Head of Joint Chiefs of Staff
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - June 5, 2023 0

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[Source: bbc.com]

Charles “CQ” Brown, Jr., Oversaw Secret Bombing Campaigns in Iraq and Syria that Killed Many Civilians and Has Been Deeply Involved in Dispursing Weapons to Ukraine
When President Joe Biden named General Charles “CQ” Brown, Jr., to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top military officer in the U.S., the mainstream media gushed that he would be the first African American to hold the position since Colin Powell held it from 1989 to 1993.

Many news outlets highlighted Brown’s outspoken comments about racism in the military following the George Floyd killing, as if to suggest that Brown’s appointment would finally allow the military to begin a reckoning with its racist past.

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Charles Quinton Brown, Jr., U.S. general and chief of staff of the United States Air Force, on July 11, 2022, Laage, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Germany. [Source: cnn.com]

The latter would certainly be a good thing; the media, however, universally sugarcoated Brown’s record during his military career, including his role in overseeing bombing operations in Iraq and Syria that killed many civilians.

The media further glossed over the fact that Colin Powell had disgraced himself by lying about WMD and Saddam Hussein’s alleged threat to the world in a critical speech before the UN in February 2003 that helped build support for U.S. criminal aggression in Iraq.

A person in a suit holding a piece of paper Description automatically generated with medium confidence
Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell holding up a vial that could be used to hold anthrax in his presentation to the UN in February 2003 ahead of the Iraq invasion. [Source: nytimes.com]
Powell in his career also helped to whitewash the massacre of civilians at My Lai during the war against Vietnam, pushed hard for the Gulf War in the 1990s, and gave the green light to Ariel Sharon in his murderous assault on civilians in Jenin and land grabs in the occupied West Bank.

What a great model for Brown to follow!

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Colin Powell with Ronald Reagan in the White House. [Source: counterpunch.org]

Bombs Away
When announcing his nomination, Biden referred to General Brown as a “proud, butt-kicking airman” and “warrior,” whom he said was “descended from a proud line of warriors. His father, a U.S. Army colonel, CQ Brown, served in Vietnam. His grandfather, U.S. Army Master Sgt. Robert E. Brown, Jr., led a segregated unit in World War II.”

The nomination of an Air Force officer as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is generally quite rare, and signals the growing significance of air power to the U.S.’s imperial grand strategy.

According to CNN, Brown was recommended to Biden by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. The two appear to have crossed paths in 2016 when Austin was head of the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), which is responsible for all military operations in the Middle East, and Brown was CENTCOM’s number two general.

Commissioned in 1984 as a graduate of the ROTC program at Texas Tech University, Brown, who was born in San Antonio, Texas, is a career F-16 fighter pilot with more than 3,000 flight hours and command experience at all levels.

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Lieutenant Charles Q. Brown, Jr., receiving his wings, c. 1985. [Source: wikipedia.org]

In 2020, he was appointed as U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff and subsequently as Commander of the Pacific Air Forces—the air component of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command where he led the U.S.’s air strategy to counter China in the Indo-Pacific.

During his time as U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff, Brown worked closely with the first chief of space operations, Jay Raymond, in support of the U.S. Space Command, whose goal is to militarize outer space.

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Vice President Mike Pence ceremonially swears in Brown as the 22nd chief of staff of the United States Air Force in the Oval Office, August 4, 2020. [Source: wikipedia.org]

During the 2010s, according to NBC News, Brown helped build and lead the U.S. air campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. This latter campaign resulted in significant war crimes and large numbers of civilian deaths.

In December 2021, The New York Times reported on the existence of a clandestine army unit in Syria which, from 2014 to 2019 (Brown was deputy commander of CENTCOM from 2016 to 2018), launched tens of thousands of bombs and missiles and repeatedly killed civilians, including farmers, children, and villagers sheltering in buildings.

The secret unit—which officially did not exist—was called Talon Anvil, and it embraced a loose interpretation of the military’s rules of engagement, according to the Times. Under pressure to obtain results, commanders, according to Air Force intelligence officers, would push analysts to say they saw evidence, such as weapons that could legally justify a strike, even when none existed.

The U.S. also a) illegally bombed the Taqba dam on the Euphrates River in March 2017 despite it being on a “no target list”; b) devastated much of Raqqa in 2017 while dropping ten thousand bombs on it; c) killed 120 civilians in July 2016 in an air strike in Tokhar; and d) in May 2023 killed a shepherd in northern Syria whom the U.S. military had claimed was an al-Qaeda leader.[1]

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U.S. bombing in Syria [Source: nytimes.com]

The U.S. had long claimed to have intervened in Syria to fight and defeat ISIS when it had actually supported ISIS offshoots in a long campaign to unseat Syria’s secular nationalist leader Bashar al-Assad, and to take control over Syria’s oil.

In Iraq, all too typical was an incident on September 20, 2015, when the U.S. Air Force bombed the home of a descendent of one of Mosul’s grand old families, Basim Razzo, killing his wife Mayada and 21-year-old daughter Tuqa along with Razzo’s brother and 18-year-old nephew.

[/img]https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagazine. ... C392&ssl=1[/img]
Basim Razzo—one more victim of U.S. air power. [Source: cbc.ca]

The U.S. afterwards released a video purporting to show an attack on a car-bomb factory—one of hundreds released to present evidence of a supposedly surgically precise air campaign when it was nothing of the sort.

In a study for The New York Times Magazine, journalists Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal determined that one in five of the 27,500 coalition air strikes over Iraq to that point had resulted in at least one civilian death, more than 31 times that acknowledged by the coalition.

According to Khan and Gopal, the second war in Iraq—in which Brown played a key role—“may be the least transparent war in recent American history.”[2]

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Bombs away in Iraq. [Source: washingtonpost.com]

Involvement in Yet More War Crimes
A lack of transparency has also been seen in the disbursement of more than $100 billion of weapons to the Ukrainian Army, in which Brown has also played a crucial role.

These weapons have been used in yet more war crimes, particularly in the Donbas, which Ukraine has been bombing and shelling since a February 2014 Obama administration-backed coup, which prompted the people of Donbas to vote for their autonomy after the new Ukrainian government tried to impose the Ukrainian language on them.

In late April, the Donbass Insider reported that two U.S.-supplied High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) rockets struck a bus in the center of Donetsk at lunchtime. The bus caught fire with civilians trapped inside, and nine people died, including a child, while 16 people were injured.

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Bus struck by U.S.-supplied HIMARS rocket. Brown oversaw weapons shipments from the U.S. to Ukraine which were used in the commission of war crimes—something the mainstream U.S. media failed to disclose. [Source: donbass-insider.com]

Brown may sleep well at night since he has been insulated from the human suffering that has resulted from U.S. foreign policies he has helped oversee working in air-conditioned military command centers while hobnobbing with the U.S. military and political elites.

But perhaps one day he may feel the pangs of his conscience—if he is indeed human.

Brown’s work in Ukraine has been particularly damaging because it has prolonged the agony and suffering of the Ukrainian people by helping to sustain the illusion that the Ukrainians can actually defeat Russia, making Ukrainian leaders reluctant to negotiate an end to the war.

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Clementine Starling [Source: atanticcouncil.org]

According to Clementine Starling, Director of the Forward Defense Program in the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, Biden’s choice of Brown to head the Joint Chiefs of Staff “shows how seriously the administration takes the intensification of competition with China.”

That is because of Brown’s experience as commander of the Pacific Air Force and because the joint force is now set to be led by an Air Force fighter pilot (Brown) and a Navy surface warfare officer (Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Christopher Grady), and any “potential conflict in the Indo-Pacific [is] likely an air and maritime fight,” Starling said.

In August 2020, Brown authored a report, “Accelerate Change or Lose,” which characteristically emphasized China’s alleged military aggressiveness and threat to the U.S., and called for greater integration of the U.S. Space Force into the U.S. military.

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Then-Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. CQ Brown, Jr., answers questions after delivering his “Accelerate Change to Empowered Airmen” speech during the 2021 Air Force Association Air, Space and Cyber Conference on September 20, 2021. [Source: defensenews.com]

At the end of the day, Brown’s race matters very little compared to his career background and worldview—which is arch-imperialist and pro-war.

There is nothing in his policy brief that warns about the devastation that would inevitably result from a war with China, or policy ideas for how this war—and death and suffering it will cause, including to U.S. servicemen—can be averted.

Perhaps the latter would be too much to expect for a career Air Force officer who has been appointed as the U.S.’s top military man. However, there is a tradition of military dissent and pragmatism, to which Brown clearly does not belong.


1.See Anand Gopal, “America’s War on Syrian Civilians,” The New Yorker, December 14, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020 ... -civilians. ↑

2.Jeremy Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019), 177, 178. ↑

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/0 ... -of-staff/

Nuremberg? Nazis?Have we got a theme going here?

Scratch a liberal and find a fascist.
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