Sympathy for the Devils...

[blindpig]

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

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’

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’

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’

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?”

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/

' Bipartisanship' is the ruling class consensus.

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

That, after weeks of defiant statements from the White House for the media to depict this apparent debacle as a 'win-win' tells you all you need to know about the media's alignment. It is not so much that the media is Dem but rather that the ruling class consensus supports the Dems. Such alignment is situational: said consensus generally supported the Republicans for decades and could easily swing back once the spectre of Trump and his faux populism is dispelled. The bosses hate populism of any kind: witness the treatment of the Jan 6 'conspirators', the government has the monopoly on violence and that government belongs to the bosses, lock, stock and barrel.

[blindpig]

Hurting the Democratic Party is essential for revolutionaries, & voting Cornel West is our best way to do this

BY RAINER SHEA
JUNE 9, 2023

At this moment, the best thing we can do to weaken the Democratic Party’s monopoly over organizing spaces is back Cornel West. Communists should vote for him not because he’s a communist, which he isn’t, but because voting for him will have an impact that advances our cause. What it will do is greatly expand the fissure that’s long been developing within the country’s left, the fissure that makes the communist movement better able to grow outside the DNC’s influence.

This fissure first became visible during recent decades when, in reaction to the Democratic Party’s reactionary turn in the 1990s, an element of the left emerged that sought to build a movement separate from the Democrats. Obama was able to re-assimilate this element, but with the heightening of class contradictions that we’ve experienced since 2008, the fissure re-appeared in time with the 2016 election. Bernie Sanders tried to pacify his movement by endorsing Clinton and promoting the new cold war, but a great amount of his voters ended up leaving his cult of personality and committing to a full rejection of the Democratic Party. With the even further rightward turn the Democrats have taken over the last decade, where they’re no longer merely just as pro-imperialist as the Republicans but now the most pro-war of the two, there’s appeared a need for a new front within this conflict to emerge. A front where the Democratic Party’s left enemies attack the party based primarily on anti-imperialism.

Cornel West fills this need. He’s said to the imperialism-compatible “left”: “You’re still locked into a very knee-jerk defense of NATO so that the militarism still goes on—everybody knows if Russia had troops in Mexico or Canada there would be invasions tomorrow.” For him to say things like this makes him better on anti-imperialism than virtually all of the left, including most of the country’s self-described communist orgs. Because even though almost none of the left’s opportunists want people to think they’re outright pro-NATO, they’re not willing to point out this reality that any country in Russia’s situation would be doing what it’s doing. They prefer to change the subject to Russia’s real or supposed contradictions, and cultivate an “equal blame on both sides” perception of the conflict. Never to act serious about combating NATO’s narratives.

Sanders has said that he isn’t focused much on Ukraine, but basically supports what Biden is doing. The Green Party’s de facto leader Howie Hawkins has come out in support of Ukraine. The PSL has joined the Democrat front group the CPUSA in denouncing both NATO and Russia, and has declined to become a truly active agent in the anti-NATO movement; it only decided to hold its March 18th antiwar rally after the Rage Against the War Machine event, and since then hasn’t done anything notable in this area. Orgs like the People’s Party, which West is running as a candidate under, are the ones that are proactive in fighting against NATO. The People’s Party made RAWM possible. The people and orgs who are invested in tailing the Democrats have at most been doing the bare minimum of anti-imperialist actions to try to not look bad in comparison, and are otherwise apathetic towards combating U.S. hegemony. That’s how we can tell which side is opportunistic, and which side is having a progressive impact.

The more voters go to West, the less the Democrats will be able to manipulate our discourse. The Democrats will obviously continue to attack West as a spoiler, like they’ve done to every past counter-hegemonic candidate, but the nature of our conditions has made us able to effectively counter this argument. The Democrats have let the pandemic keep destroying millions of bodies, started a war that’s greatly accelerated our inflation crisis, and made both of these problems worse by deliberately neglecting social spending to pay for the war. In increasing numbers, the people know they’ve been betrayed by the same leaders who were supposed to make things better after Trump.

This consciousness shift is evident in how support for aid to Ukraine has been declining since fall of last year, when it started to become clear both that the war was not going to be over soon and that the experts had lied about how effective the sanctions would be. The Democrats said that destroying Russia is an easy and worthwhile thing to do. Now with these developments, and the recent mainstream recognition that the Russians are fighting against actual Nazis, doubt is growing over whether those on the left should keep enabling the Democrats.

The answer we can give to the liberals when they say West will spoil Biden’s campaign is: “and why should we care about protecting Biden?” The lesser evilism argument is not good enough, at least not for those who’ve gotten a sense of the argument’s long history of shutting down radicalism. That excuse for voting blue already came to be used too many times decades ago. Because of the left’s failure to be genuinely radical, our ruling class has been able to take its war against the working class as far as it has. The reality we’re living out is the consequence of our having followed the advice of the liberals during all those past opportunities for advancing revolutionary change.

The severity of our situation is making many more willing to defy the Democratic Party, and come to the proletarian movement. Someone new to politics who’s a West voter today has a great chance of becoming a communist, more than did those who were Sanders voters seven years ago. They also have a greater chance of becoming a more principled kind of communist than many former Sanders supporters are. Because plenty of Sanders voters gravitated to the PSL, and then became committed to advancing PSL’s Democrat tailism rather than growing wary of it. There’s a reason why Midwestern Marx, which has decided to become an active rather than reactive agent in the anti-NATO struggle, is helping lead the communist support effort behind West. It’s because Midwestern Marx, and the element of U.S. Marxists they represent, understand that defying U.S. hegemony and building a movement outside the Democratic Party are our most important goals at the moment.

The answer we can give to the other types who are attacking West’s campaign, those being the radical liberals who aren’t even planning to vote Biden, is: what exactly are your priorities? If a person or organization is joining with the Democrats in attacking West, yet claims to oppose the Democratic Party’s anti-revolutionary politics, why are they strategically aiding the DNC? An actor who understands and cares about what’s strategically best for the revolutionary struggle would not make a decision like this. Not when the Democrats are making it so clear, via their deployment of a domestic version of the NAFO troll campaign, that they view discourse management as extremely important.

If the problem these actors have is with how Midwestern Marx supports patriotic socialism, they should call that group in, and enter into a good-faith dialogue with the group’s members on which ideas are optimal for a Marxist to uphold. Since I decided to start doing this with those in the ideological element that Midwestern Marx represents, both they and myself have been able to learn things from our exchanges. But the actors I’m talking about are not interested in that kind of constructive activity.

If someone has suddenly come to have an extremely strong opinion against West’s favor, and won’t listen to any of the arguments about why voting for him advances the class struggle, you know they’re fighting a different kind of battle than the one serious Marxists are fighting. They’re fighting to further a particular idea they have of what “the left” should be, an idea that’s not informed by an honest analysis of our conditions. It’s like when all of the radlibs suddenly decided to aggressively oppose Rage Against the War Machine, and thereby decided they’ll oppose any serious project to construct a movement outside the Democratic Party’s control. We should operate according to what best advances the anti-imperialist movement, which is the most urgent and meaningful part of advancing the class struggle at this stage. By voting West, we’ll be doing the most significant thing we can to weaken the Democrats, which are communism’s foremost enemies in this country for the time being.

https://newswiththeory.com/hurting-the- ... o-do-this/

This is correct and pretty much what we've been saying in this thread for years. I have been partial to John Parker of the Socialist Unity Party for his work on Donbass but if West is tactically more advantageous then that's the way we gotta go.

As I've probably repeated 50 times in this thread, 'there will be no progress until the Democratic Party is totally rejected by the working class.'

[blindpig]

CIA And Intelligence Agencies Lied About Hunter Biden Laptop To Help Joe Biden Win 2020 Election, New Report Proves Beyond Any Reasonable Doubt
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - June 14, 2023 5


From left to right: Bradley Birkenfeld, Jerry Johnson, and author Garrett Ziegler at an event on May 20 promoting a new report on the Biden laptop at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel at Tysons Corner in McLean, Virginia. [Photo courtesy of Jeremy Kuzmarov]

So When Will They Be Punished? Don’t Hold Your Breath
If the Pinocchio story were true, then former CIA Directors John Brennan, Leon Panetta and Michael Hayden, and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper would have such long noses that they would take up entire city blocks.

In October 2020, the four habitual liars, along with 47 other top intelligence officers, signed a public statement claiming that emails and correspondence found on an abandoned laptop belonging to Hunter Biden “had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

Such an operation, the former spooks claimed, would be “consistent with Russian objectives…to create political chaos in the U.S. to deepen political divisions here” and “undermine the candidacy of Vice President Biden and thereby help the candidacy of President Trump.”


[Source: citizensjournal.us]


Garrett Ziegler at launch event for report at Ritz-Carlton Hotel in McLean, Virginia, on May 20. [Source: Photo courtesy of Jeremy Kuzmarov]

A comprehensive new study by Garrett Ziegler, a former White House staffer, published by Marco Polo—a research organization dedicated to exposing government corruption—combined with Miranda Devine’s book, Laptop from Hell (2021), shows that Brennan and company appear to have been deceitful.[1]

It should be noted that Ziegler is a conservative who worked for Peter Navarro, a former Trump adviser, and some might argue that his report is biased.

However, if they read the report along with Devine’s book, they will see that the evidence is incontrovertible: the hard drive copy of the laptop is authentic and that Hunter Biden was a drug-addicted playboy—something Biden himself wrote about in his memoir Beautiful Things—and should be in jail for serial drug and prostitution offenses.


[Source: simonandschuster,com.au]
Hunter further was involved in influence-peddling business arrangements that helped skew U.S. foreign policy, particularly in Ukraine, and cast a pall of corruption over the Biden White House.

Legal Trouble and a Historical Pattern
Federal prosecutors are currently considering charging Hunter Biden with three tax crimes, including tax evasion and a charge related to a gun purchase.

A separate congressional inquiry into Hunter Biden’s business affairs by the House Oversight Committee, headed by James R. Comer (R-KY), has combed through bank records to substantiate claims of influence peddling, uncovering that the Biden family had set up over a dozen companies while Joe Biden was Vice President, has received over $10 million from foreign nationals and their related companies, and engaged in many intentionally complicated financial transactions to hide these payments and avoid scrutiny.[2]

Concern was further raised about the Biden family’s pattern of courting business in regions of the world in which Vice President and now President Biden has had an outsized role and influenced U.S. foreign policy.


Republican-led House Oversight Committee announcing preliminary findings of investigation into Hunter Biden’s influence peddling. [Source: nytimes.com]
During a news conference in May, Comer acknowledged that Hunter Biden would have been far from the first relative of a President or Vice-President to try to make money off the family name.

Comer invoked Billy Carter, the brother of former President Jimmy Carter, who visited Libya and received a $220,000 loan; and Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, whose firm has received billions of dollars from Persian Gulf nations.

“This has been a pattern for a long time,” Comer said. “Republicans and Democrats have both complained about presidents’ families receiving money.”


Jared Kushner attending the Future Investment Initiative conference in Saudi Arabia last year. Mr. Kushner’s private equity firm has received investments from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. [Source: nytimes.com]

What is different about the Bidens, however, is their brazenness—Joe Biden bragged at an event before the Council on Foreign Relations that he blackmailed the Ukrainian government into firing the prosecutor of an energy company, Burisma, that paid Hunter as much as $5 million after appointing him to his board of directors, and which appears to have functioned as a CIA front for financing right-wing militias fighting a proxy war for the U.S. in eastern Ukraine.

The Bidens’ involvement in Ukraine—like Kushner’s in the Gulf Arab States—epitomizes the interconnection between capitalism and U.S. imperialism, which is leading us toward a potential world war.

Since he became Vice-President, Biden has been a super-hawk on Ukraine and pushed for escalation of the war with Russia at the same time that members of his families profited financially in Ukraine and gained access to new business opportunities.

Numerous theorists of imperialism have detailed the influence of private industries under capitalism in hijacking governments and driving imperialistic foreign policies among Western nations, including those that resulted in World War I.[3]

Today, we see the same phenomenon combined with heightened levels of profiteering by U.S. Presidents and their families for whom control over government offers an opportunity for obscene levels of personal enrichment along with impunity from prosecution for criminal acts.

Rosetta Stone of White and Blue-Collar Crime
Over a 13-month period, Ziegler carried out a forensic examination of every email and file on the copy made of Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drive. The laptop had been abandoned in a Wilmington, Delaware, repair shop in April 2019 and turned over to the FBI by its owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, who believed it contained evidence of felonies. The FBI at this time did not launch any formal criminal investigations.


“The Mac Shop” in Wilmington, Delaware. [Source: abcnews.go.com]

The forensic analysis was commissioned by Ziegler and produced by a former federal investigator, a retired U.S. Secret Service agent Konstantinos “Gus” Dimitrelos, and Maryman Associates, founded by Brad Maryman, a 29-year veteran of the FBI.


Konstantinos “Gus” Dimitrelos [Source: danhappel.com]


Brad Maryman [Source: maryman.com]

Ziegler’s examination determined that there were approximately 459 violations of state and federal law on the laptop, including tax evasion, money laundering and violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), as well as drug and prostitution-related offenses.

The report is an embarrassment not only for Hunter but for the entire Biden family, as it reveals severe problems with drug and alcohol abuse and unethical business practices whereby family members individually got rich by playing off the Biden name.

Ziegler calls the laptop the “Rosetta Stone of white and blue collar crime under the patina of the ‘Delaware Way.'” This “way” is basically a form of crony capitalism where corrupt businessmen around the world provide high-paying jobs and covertly bribe Joe Biden and members of his family in return for political favors and protection from prosecution.

In Laptop from Hell, Miranda Devine wrote that Delaware was named “American Lichtenstein” in the Financial Security Index, which “crowned Delaware the world’s most opaque jurisdiction, attracting capital from around the world, with no questions asked, and where legislation beneficial to financial services interests is worked out with lawmakers behind closed doors.”[4]


Joe and Hunter Biden: partners in crime [Source: foxnews.com]

Back in 2001, Hunter was given a lucrative job right out of law school with MBNA Corporation, a major bank and credit card company that was his dad’s largest donor.

Senator Joe Biden in turn championed legislation favorable to MBNA, including a law that made it harder for consumers to declare bankruptcy and write off credit card debt, and helped block a bill that would require credit card companies to provide better warnings about the perils of making only minimum monthly payments.[5]

The classic example of the “Delaware Way” applied on the global stage was Hunter Biden’s appointment to the Board of Directors of Burisma as part of a scheme that was designed to protect the company from prosecution for tax evasion and to save it from paying millions of dollars in fines.


[Source: bankinfosecurity.com]

According to Ziegler, Hunter and his partner Archer Devon, who was later convicted of swindling a Native American tribe out of $60 million in bonds (a scam Hunter was deeply involved with), acted as unregistered foreign agents by intervening on behalf of Burisma’s titular head, Mykola Zlochevsky, at the State Department and organizing a dinner for Vadym Pozharskyi, a key adviser to Burisma, with Joe Biden at Café Milano in Washington, D.C.

Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) told the Senate on June 12 that the Burisma executive who allegedly paid Joe Biden and Hunter Biden kept 17 audio recordings of his conversations with them, which the FBI has been informed about.

Hunter Biden email

In January 2018, Joe bragged in a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations about how he had pressured the Ukrainian government into firing prosecutor Viktor Shokin by threatening to withhold a $1 billion loan guarantee because Shokin was intent on prosecuting Burisma and holding them accountable for white-collar crimes.

Burisma was controlled by Ihor Kholomoisky, a billionaire oligarch and Governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast in 2015 who financed private militias that were used to fight pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine.

The likelihood that Burisma was a CIA proprietary corporation used to clandestinely finance the war in eastern Ukraine—which began after the 2014 Maidan coup—is enhanced by the fact that Cofer Black, the former number three man at the CIA and director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center after 9/11, was appointed to its Board alongside Hunter.

Besides the Burisma affair, Ziegler’s report on the laptop includes more evidence of war profiteering in Ukraine: Jimmy Biden, Joe’s younger brother, secured more than half a million dollars in private mortgage loans for a vacation home in Florida from John Hynansky, a donor to Joe, immediately after Hynansky was granted a multi-million dollar loan from the U.S. government to sell luxury cars in Ukraine.

In the summer of 2014, Hunter was given a fully loaded Porsche valued at $129,000 for his involvement in illicit back-channel communications with the Prime Minister of Kazakhstan, Karim Massimov, who was trying to strengthen his ties to the U.S. State Department (Hunter was trying to get an oil and gas deal for Burisma in Kazakhstan and, according to Ziegler, acted as an unregistered foreign agent for both Massimov and Kazakh banking oligarch Kenes Rakishev).[6]

According to Ziegler, Hunter also acted as an unregistered foreign agent for Gabriel Popoviciu, a Romanian real estate tycoon charged with bribery and abuse of power involving commercial development in Bucharest.

Hunter received more than $100,000 from Popoviciu which he did not disclose to the Department of Justice, and teamed with former FBI Director Louis Freeh to try to remove the Romanian prosecutor, Laura Kovesi, who was prosecuting Popoviciu and was fired in June 2018.[7]

Remarkably, Hunter and his partners in another company at the same time were working to strike a deal with Popoviciu involving the same real estate tract in Bucharest over which Popoviciu was convicted of bribery. Romanian President Klaus Iohannis—the one who fired Kovesi—was later celebrated by Joe Biden after he became president at a reception in New York.


Romanian President Klaus Iohannis and his wife with Joe and Jill Biden at a reception in New York in September 2022. [Source: romania-insider.com]

As for tax evasion, Ziegler suggests that Hunter evaded taxes on approximately $400,000 of his unreported Burisma income in 2014 because Hunter “couldn’t have lived on approximately $550,000 per year.”

In an i-message to his oldest daughter, Hunter confessed to how Joe for three decades did not report income he received from Hunter.

According to Hunter, Joe insisted that Hunter cough up half his earnings.

Based upon the decades of tax returns that he released as a member of the U.S. Senate, and then as Vice President, Joe illegally received these hefty payments from Hunter—though the illegal financial arrangement was flipped around as Hunter came to blow through millions of dollars in women and drugs and Joe had to step in and help pay his bills.

War on Drugs Farce
The blatant hypocrisy of Joe Biden is apparent in the section of Ziegler’s report detailing Hunter Biden’s drug-related crimes.

It was Joe Biden who allegedly came up with the phrase “drug czar” and, in 1982, played a leading role in crafting stricter sentences for drug offenders that if applied equally, according to Ziegler, “would have sent his own son and daughter to prison for decades.”

Besides Hunter, Joe’s daughter Ashley had a serious drug problem in the past and went through drug rehab; Joe’s daughter-in-law Hallie was also a drug addict.


Hunter Biden on the left smoking crack, as featured in a photo drawn from his laptop. On right, Joe Biden championing harsh drug laws and draconian penalties for crack as a U.S. Senator. If the legislation applied to his son, Hunter would be in jail for many, many years like so many African Americans who were locked away for years for smoking crack and crack-related offenses. [Source: bizpacreview.com]

Incredibly, Joe once admitted to Hunter that he may have gotten his drug problem from Joe and Hunter’s mother, Neilia, stating: “You got the disease from mommy [Neilia] and me.”

This indicates that an architect of America’s modern War on Drugs violated the very draconian laws he helped to create.[8]

Hunter admitted in his 2021 autobiography that he routinely smoked crack cocaine—a drug for which penalties were particularly harsh under the drug laws Biden helped develop in the 1980s.

According to Ziegler, Hunter was not just a user but trafficked in drugs. He helped procure drugs for Hallie Biden—brother Beau’s widow with whom he had an affair—and conspired to commit mail fraud with his crack dealer who was featured on Maryland’s Most Wanted List by having him Fed Ex crack to him when he was in Los Angeles.

Sex Crimes
As is by now well known, the laptop details Hunter’s decadent lifestyle in which he routinely filmed himself having sex with prostitutes who were procured illegally. Some of the prostitutes were paid to travel cross-country for a tryst, thereby violating the Mann Act which forbids interstate transport of “any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery.”[9]

A Window into America’s New Gilded Age
Ziegler suggests that Hunter Biden has compromised American national security because foreign governments have leverage over the Bidens because of all the illegal things that they have allegedly done.

Hunter’s extensive business dealings with Chinese business elites has also given these elites the opportunity to influence U.S. government policy while being granted favors like having their kids admitted into Ivy League colleges.[10]

The impunity and protection that wealthy people were able to purchase from the Bidens was true as much at home as abroad.

When Beau Biden was Attorney General of Delaware, he gave a sweetheart deal to a member of the du Pont family, Robert Richards IV, who had raped his three-year-old daughter. The du Ponts had given Joe large sums of money and helped advance his political career for five decades.[11]

Ziegler is ultimately correct when he says that Hunter Biden’s laptop is like a Rosetta Stone for uncovering corruption.

It offers a window into the two-tiered nature of the justice system, double standards of the War on Drugs, shady business dealings and blackmail carried out by America’s first family, and sexual perversion and overall decadence, which Hunter has been pretty open about.

Rather than serving the public, we see that the real function of top-level politicians under the current capitalist order is to shill for and grant impunity to one percenters for their crimes as part of a quid pro quo in which they enrich their campaign coffers and are able to live the high life.

The mainstream media are currently debating whether Biden is too old to run for office again in 2024; however, the issue should not really be Biden’s age.[12]

Rather, it should be about him and his family’s deep-seated immorality and corruption, which is not only symptomatic of American capitalism in general, but specifically a degenerate era in politics that is comparable, if not far worse, to the First Gilded Age in American history during the late 19th century.


1.Miranda Devine, Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide (New York: Post Hill Press, 2021). ↑

2.In early June, Comer introduced a resolution to hold FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt of Congress for his refusal to hand over an FBI document in which was recorded allegations, from a long-term trusted, paid confidential FBI source, that Joe Biden was allegedly paid a $5 million bribe by someone in Ukraine while he was Vice President. Two IRS whistleblowers have alleged that the Department of Justice has sabotaged the investigation into Hunter’s foreign business dealings conducted by Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss since 2018.

3.See, for example, V.I. Lenin, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, rev ed. (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1970); J.A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, originally 1902). ↑

4.Devine, Laptop from Hell, 47. ↑

5.Devine, Laptop from Hell, 49, 51, 52; Peter Schweizer, Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite (New York: Harper Collins, 2020), 52. Hunter became a senior vice president at MBNA and then continued to receive lucrative consulting fees after he left the firm to work for the Clinton administration’s Commerce Department. Subsequently, Hunter was given a corporate board position with Eudora Global, an investment firm founded by one of his father’s biggest donors, Jeff Cooper. In 1996, Joe sold the Du Pont mansion where he was living to John Cochran, Vice Chairman of MBNA, for $1.2 million–more than twice what the house was worth in what journalist Miranda Devine calls a “corrupt, sweetheart deal.” ↑

6.In January 2022, Massimov was charged with treason. ↑

7.The Guardian described Kovesi as a “quiet, unassuming chief prosecutor who is bringing in the scalps,” leading “an anti-corruption drive quite unlike any other in Eastern Europe—or the world for that matter.” ↑

8.Hunter claimed to have smoked crack cocaine every 15 minutes for a period in his memoir. An alcoholic, he says he first drank champagne when he was eight years old and that he smoked crack with former Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry when he was an undergraduate at Georgetown University. ↑

9.Ziegler reports that Hunter aspired to be a minor porn star. He was forbidden for a period from being in the company of his 14-year-old niece without Joe’s presence because it was feared he would behave inappropriately in front of her. The diary of Ashley Biden—who is Hunter’s half-sister since Jill is her mother—indicates that Hunter may have inherited his deviant sexual behavior from Joe. Ashley wrote in her diary that Joe had inappropriately showered with her when she was a child. Joe has also been accused of sexual assault in the 1990s by Tara Reade, a former Senate staffer. ↑

10.During the 2020 presidential debates Biden claimed falsely that no one in his family had received money from China. ↑

11.Richards IV was a great-grandson of chemical magnate Irénée du Pont and heir to the du Pont family fortune. He received only probation and served no time in prison. In 1975, Joe somehow bought a Du Pont mansion when he was a 32-year-old widowed Senator making $44,600 a year. Devine, Laptop from Hell, 48, 49. For more on the Richards IV case, see Deniz Çam, “How a DuPont Heir Avoided Jail Time For a Heinous Crime,” Forbes Magazine, June 14, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/denizcam/2 ... 1f886329db

12.As a note, the laptop emails suggest that Joe Biden began to suffer from memory loss as early as 2012. ↑

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/0 ... ble-doubt/

Edited for excessive photos, they're at the link. My one gripe about material from this site is too many pictures. Do we really need to know what these jerks look like? Are we going to arrest them?

Don't care that Hunter was(is?) a junkie. Don't get too riled that these scum are cashing in on their positions, they all do it and it's the system we must bring down. But Joe Biden's sabotage of each and every progressive endeavor of any substance and his purposeful incitement of the war in Ukraine, that's unforgivable.

[blindpig]

UKRAINE AND THE AMERICAN ELECTIONS

Part 1

There are two summer military campaigns left in Ukraine before the American elections. Accordingly, only the current "counteroffensive" remains before the primaries. Of course, foreign policy is rarely the main factor for America, where many people are unaware that planet Earth is a sphere. But there are exceptions.

Today, Biden is associated with the shame of the US retreat from Afghanistan. It is understood that everything was leading up to it, and the decision to withdraw was made before him. But the subsequent catastrophe is somehow associated with him. This includes shame for the fate of thousands of Afghans who still cannot enter the US. It is not exactly a question of foreign policy, but it is a question of the President's shame.

Problems related to the "racist" Trump and the tragedy of refugees at the Mexican border are unresolved. The same camps are still there, where, in literal sense, a lottery for green cards takes place under cattle-like conditions. The losers can either try to cross the border again or go to jail—also a lottery. Considering the size of the Latin American community in the US, this issue is also internal, not external.

Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on Ukraine, and Ukrainian refugees flooding the US on privileged terms only exacerbate racial conflicts. Who would be pleased to hear that Uncle Pedro died in the Mexican desert on a smuggling route, while a Ukrainian named Pyotr was allowed in with honors?

Add to this the patient (Biden) having the oratory skills of the late Brezhnev (or Yeltsin, if you prefer). And we have a fairly familiar picture.

https://t.me/Slavyangrad/51553

***

Part 2

Of course, Biden is trying to gain the love of a portion of society by becoming the most liberal of liberals. A hundred genders, a ban on civilian possession of "assault weapons," BLM, quotas for women, defunding the police—every scene from that opera. But even Biden becoming the darling of Hollywood and Harvard will not secure victory in the elections. In essence, he will either be the president who gave so much money to a losing Ukraine, or he will become the president under whom America defeated Russia.

Of course, we remember that Americans are sensitive to unjust wars under false pretenses. But they dislike defeats the most! Therefore, Ukraine and Ukrainians (and the exiled Russian opposition) are a promotional asset which the Democratic Party will happily burn for victory in the elections. Just like during Trump's victorious elections, for example, where the Ukrainian government simply worked as part of the Democratic Party.

In summary, for the current commander-in-chief, the Ukrainian counteroffensive must serve as a good promotional video for the elections. Occupation of anonymous settlements near the front line is not enough. Donetsk or Luhansk, which were initially presented either as rebellious or occupied and where Ukraine failed to fulfill the Minsk agreements, are also not good enough. Minsk being a copy of Belfast (the agreement which ended the conflict in Northern Ireland), their triumphant occupation by Ukraine will look rather two-sided to the Western layperson.

https://t.me/Slavyangrad/51554

***

Part 3

A real victory for Biden would be Crimea. It all started there, with polite people, no civil war, clear interests of America and NATO (unlike the mines of Donbas), and so on. Biden could redeem himself with Crimea and rid himself of the Afghan disgrace and internal problems. Moreover, seizing Crimea is not even necessary; it would be enough to achieve a realistic development line in the next campaign. "Vote for Biden, and in his new term, he will win back Crimea"—something like that.

Another option is to transfer the war to the old territory of Russia. Becoming the second president to carry out intervention in Russia would be very powerful. With a significant probability, it guarantees victory in the elections. Yes, the strange young people (the "Russian Volunteer Corps") must symbolize civil war in Russia, even though they come there from Ukraine in American equipment for the Democrats' primaries; everyone understands this.

It should also be taken into account that all this is happening against the backdrop of the opponent's overwhelming advantage in the information war.

Minimal military successes of the enemy will be exaggerated to the scale of the Kursk Bulge, while defeats and crimes will be hidden. We won't change anything. Today, they can orchestrate another massacre in Songmi and declare it Russian propaganda. Or simply conceal it. Biden must remember the American society of the Vietnam era and the shifting sentiments. That's how his rapid political career began. And he clearly learned lessons from that period. In the end, Lieutenant Kelly (participant in the Songmi massacre) was convicted, while his Ukrainian counterparts are publicly awarded medals on their chests.

https://t.me/Slavyangrad/51555

Gleb Bazov is the founder of Slavyangrad and a Canadian Lawyer.

[blindpig]

15 Questions That Are More Useful Than “What Presidential Candidate Should Americans Vote For?”



People keep asking me to weigh in on the US presidential race and its candidates, which is what always happens whenever there’s a US presidential race on because media saturation makes it so central in the minds of Americans it’s often the main issue they want to talk about, even if they’re fairly aware.

I really don’t have anything to say about who Americans should vote for, other to repeat what I’ve said already about the fact that you can’t vote your way out of a mess you never voted yourself into in the first place.

But what I can do instead is offer my American friends some questions to ask that would probably be much more helpful to them and their nation than the question “Which presidential candidate should we vote for?”

Here are 15 such questions:

1. Why does nothing change no matter who we vote for?

2. Why does US foreign policy always continue along the same trajectory regardless of the president’s party or platform?

3. What keeps our voting population split right down the middle into two political factions of equal size, with neither side ever gaining enough of a majority to democratically change society in any meaningful way?

4. Why does the stalemate described in #3 always seem to benefit the rich, the powerful, and the war-horny?

5. Why is it that the most consequential US government policies like plutocratic influence, privatization, globalization, ecocidal capitalism and nuclear brinkmanship are never on the ballot? Why do these things keep happening, against our interests, without our ever voting for them or electing anyone who campaigned on the pledge to enact them?

6. If our federal government’s behavior never changes no matter who we elect, could it be that there are other bodies involved in government policy-setting whom we did not elect, and who remain in positions of influence regardless of the comings and goings of our official elected government?

7. If the above is the case, then who is it? Who’s really calling the shots in this country?

8. Could it be that everything we’ve been told about our country, our government, our political processes and our world is untrue?

9. If so, what are the implications of the fact that our schools and our media have been feeding us lies since we were small?

10. What forces would be responsible for keeping all these lies flowing throughout our society? What might keep an ostensibly free press spinning more or less the same lies throughout the western world day after day, year after year, generation after generation?

11. Is it possible that our entire electoral system is a sham designed to give the public the illusion of control so that they’ll let oligarchs and empire managers run the country undisturbed?

12. If the electoral system is a sham, then how do we enact the changes we so desperately need?

13. Is it possible that there are other ways to effect change in the United States which don’t involve casting a pretend vote in a fake election?

14. Could it be that those other means of forcing change are precisely what the charade of casting pretend votes in fake elections is meant to divert us from?

15. Should we perhaps spend less energy bickering about who should get sworn into the White House a year and a half from now, and more energy examining other possible avenues toward advancing meaningful change?

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/06/21 ... -vote-for/

[blindpig]

We can’t trust the liberal tailist “left” groups to lead a revolution. We have to build a workers movement outside the Democratic Party.

BY RAINER SHEA
JUNE 26, 2023

The class struggle in this country—which encapsulates not just the labor movement but the Native sovereignty movement, the Black liberation movement, the LGBT movement, etc—is experiencing a crisis of leadership at the time when it needs leadership most. The opportunism of the “left” organizations has put the communities most vulnerable to fascist terror in danger of being unable to defend themselves when our class conflict escalates, and when the reactionaries try to carry out a purge. The big cities, despite having the largest numbers of revolutionary-compatible people, are to remain at risk of such a violent campaign. Or at least they’ll remain at risk for as long as the left opportunist groups are allowed to keep their monopoly over organizing spaces within the urban areas.

The big cities are naturally where the spontaneous revolts are the biggest and most concentrated. Simply due to the size of their populations, the U.S. military has effectively said that it fears having to fight off domestic rebels within America’s megacities. The Pentagon’s strategists know just 1% of a big city’s people would represent massive numbers on the rebellion’s side. Yet if we put our faith in the country’s most prominent “socialist” orgs, this scenario where the people can exploit the U.S. army’s counterinsurgency weaknesses within megacities will never come. Because those in the impoverished majority of the country’s urban centers can’t become part of a seriously threatening rebellion effort until a vanguard has emerged to organize and educate them. And the major orgs that claim to be able to take on such a leadership role are not serious about doing so.

I’m talking about not just the DSA, which any educated Marxist-Leninist knows is blatantly pro-reformist, but about CPUSA, FRSO, PSL, and smaller Democrat tailist orgs like Socialist Party of America. It’s not a coincidence that those first four orgs have been repeatedly referenced by imperialism-compatible leftists as either functioning within a coalition, or capable of becoming a coalition. They’re theoretically compatible in this way because they all share an important trait: willingness to let the sentiments of liberals influence their practice.

Each of them have denounced Russia’s military action against Ukrainian fascism and U.S. hegemony, because even though they claim to oppose imperialism, they’ll never break from the view that defeating U.S. hegemony is secondary to stopping supposed “imperialism” or “aggression” from countries like Russia. This view is motivated, at least in part, by a desire to exclusively appeal to liberals. As liberals are the only element of the people who are ideologically committed to opposing Russia. Who can never be brought to a consistently anti-imperialist position, due to their investment in bourgeois politics.

From this belief that liberals have the most revolutionary potential, so much that all other demographics should effectively not be treated like priorities in our outreach, comes a practice that renders these orgs incapable of leading the people to victory. There’s a reason why a new equivalent of the Black Panther Party, which successfully brought great numbers of people from U.S. imperialism’s internal colonies into a principled communist org, still hasn’t emerged. It’s because the liberal tailist parties could become that new BPP any time they like, yet choose at every opportunity to continue doing what will let them keep favor within the “left” spaces. Spaces which incentivize their members not to do what a serious dialectical analysis would tell them to do, but to do what’s needed for fitting in.

What strategic change would transform these orgs from a coalition of liberal tailists, to a coalition that helps cultivate the vanguard? That change would be to start collaborating with the parts of the anti-NATO movement which aren’t on the “left,” and which are therefore both non-insular and more principled on anti-imperialism. This is what pro-Russian communist orgs like PCUSA have done, and it’s the equivalent of when the Panthers collaborated with white proletarian groups via the Rainbow Coalition. When communists embrace the united front strategy, and refuse to be insular in which types of people they reach out to, they both become able to build a relationship with the people and become free to act more principled. Tailing liberals incentivizes one to act unprincipled.

An org that acts totally unaccountable to the liberal activists (and pseudo-activists) who seek to gatekeep the class struggle, and adopts the mindset that it must appeal to the people as a whole, will feel comfortable with being consistent in its anti-imperialism. As well as in its opposition to the Democratic Party, in its commitment to physically equipping its cadres, and in every other area where one can be tempted to compromise when trying to appease liberals.

The left opportunist orgs would sooner denounce the pro-Russian orgs than join with the united anti-NATO front. And increasingly, that’s what they’re doing. PSL is the one that’s most notably targeted the Rage Against the War Machine coalition, revealing its willingness to participate in the types of sectarian attacks that members of these other orgs habitually direct towards groups like PCUSA. And if they’re willing to hurt the anti-imperialist movement for the sake of opportunism, it’s clear they lack the integrity required to lead the people.

The problem isn’t even necessarily that the established “left” orgs in this country are too moderate, or too ambivalent on geopolitics; I would be glad to work with them if they were to enter into the anti-NATO united front. The Green Party has entered into this front despite the party’s non-Marxist character, and that’s fine, because a united front by definition doesn’t have to be ideologically pure. The biggest problem is that these other left groups have shown they prefer to direct unprincipled criticisms towards pro-Russian communists, and to try to discredit the notion of a united front.

Orgs that do this will never win the people, because they’ve shown they’re not interested in winning the people. That would require them giving up their sectarianism and left opportunism, so that they no longer contribute to the needless divisions which COINTELPRO seeks to perpetuate. Divisions that have kept the workers movement from successfully building a relationship with the people for half a century. These divisions have been so destructive for revolutionary progress both because of the effects they’ve had (keeping different elements of the struggle from collaborating), and because of the liberal mentalities within our organizing spaces that they’ve been symptomatic of.

A “socialist” org that views its task as a competition for who can gain the most donations and email subscribers will only reach so far into the masses, because it will be satisfied as soon as it becomes well-established enough. We’ve seen this with the PSL, which consistently tries to interfere in the affairs of its adjacent groups such as the Peace and Freedom Party. I’ve personally seen the ways in which PSL treats PFP branches as synonymous with its own branches, despite PFP’s constitution not saying anything that indicates this is how it should be run. And I’ve seen the kinds of prescriptions PSL gives those under its domineering control, those being to act apathetic about mass work and to become insular. Under its non-consensual leadership, our branch for a while became relegated to holding screenings, neglecting all work that would have given us the slightest bit of true power.

I know that my former PFP branch’s experience with PSL was not an isolated example, and that these kinds of self-imposed limitations are normal for it, simply from looking at the ways it and other orgs like it act on a national scale. Even when it doesn’t look as bad as it did in my case, they don’t seek to become active agents in history, especially when it comes to leading the anti-NATO movement. They only hold rallies in response to preexisting spontaneous mass activity, like during last year’s abortion protests, and then cease such activities until they again become opportune.

The only reason PSL and its adjacent orgs held this year’s March antiwar rally was because they didn’t want to look bad in comparison to RAWM, which had proven itself to be genuinely counter-hegemonic by receiving concerted attacks from the empire’s narrative managers. PSL did not try to sustain this January’s Tyre Nichols protests, it simply let them run out of energy after collecting as many benefits from them as it could. When it comes to taking risks; to investing energy and resources into projects that could make them into serious targets, and will benefit the class struggle rather than their short-term self-interests; these kinds of orgs don’t show up.

The alternative to the left opportunists that RAWM’s communist flank is building has much progress to make before it can become a vanguard. Orgs like PCUSA will need to expand their union presence, to the point where a significant proportion of the workers in the big cities are involved. This won’t have to mean them growing their membership to the millions. The Bolsheviks were a small org which won power by building enough of a relationship with the existing labor institutions, and training their own members well enough, that they could maneuver towards taking control of the state after the revolution came.

This had necessitated them forming a united front with the other ideological elements which shared their interests, whether in the long-term or momentarily. They couldn’t afford to close themselves off from the reactionary trade unions, or to preemptively alienate the majority of the Russian people by publicly ranting about how reactionary the people were. That they were surrounded by contradictions didn’t compel them to act foolishly, and lash out against anybody who wasn’t presently within their circle. That’s how modern American leftists tend to act.

The Bolsheviks had to be hard-headed, only doing what the conditions mandated them to do. So is not the case for the left opportunists, who build followings within niche circles, denounce the people as a great amorphous bad, and then use the many likes they gain from saying this as evidence that they don’t need to change their thinking. The “popularity” that you can gain from being a left influencer or org is limited to a minority of society. A minority that’s detached from the majority, enough for those within these circles to often have the view that most Americans are labor aristocrats. These are the types of unserious individuals who our “left” orgs are trying to attract, with the intent of leaving their anti-materialist views about the people and about geopolitics unchallenged.

Because Marxists can’t simply generate a new Black Panther Party out of pure will, we’ll have to build what we can with what we have. Building a substantial relationship between Marxists and the unions will no doubt be a big part of this. Because the factor that gives the people the ability to make their spontaneous outrage coherent, that lets them defeat the state rather than carry out riots which go nowhere, will be the construction of a mass organizing presence. One that can mobilize them to fulfill the roles in the state’s overthrow that the people have traditionally taken on, such as mass strikes. Only with such participation from a great number of the people can we, the minority within the cadres, effectively fulfill our own roles in the state’s demise.

https://newswiththeory.com/we-cant-trus ... tic-party/

[blindpig]

Who is National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, the man running U.S. foreign policy?
Originally published: Al Mayadeen on June 30, 2023 by Rick Sterling (more by Al Mayadeen) | (Posted Jul 03, 2023)

National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan is arguably the key person driving U.S. foreign policy. He was mentored by Hillary Clinton with regime changes in Honduras, Libya and Syria. He was the link between Nuland and Biden during the 2014 coup in Ukraine. As reported by Seymour Hersh, Sullivan led the planning of the Nord Stream pipeline’s destruction in September 2022. Sullivan guides or makes many large and small foreign policy decisions. This article will describe Jake Sullivan’s background, what he says, what he has been doing, where the U.S. is headed, and why this should be debated.

Background
Jake Sullivan was born in November 1976. He describes his formative years like this:

I was raised in Minnesota in the 1980s, a child of the later Cold War—of Rocky IV, the Miracle on Ice, and ‘Tear down this wall’. The 90s were my high school and college years. The Soviet Union collapsed. The Iron Curtain disappeared. Germany was reunified. An American-led alliance ended a genocide in Bosnia and prevented one in Kosovo. I went to graduate school in England and gave fiery speeches on the floor of the Oxford Union about how the United States was a force for good in the world.

Sullivan’s education includes Yale (BA), Oxford (MA) and Yale again (JD). He went quickly from academic studies and legal work to political campaigning and government.

He made important contacts during his college years at elite institutions. For example, he worked with former Deputy Secretary of State and future Brookings Institution president, Strobe Talbott. After a few years clerking for judges, Sullivan transitioned to a law firm in his hometown of Minneapolis. He soon became chief counsel to Senator Amy Klobuchar who connected him to the rising Senator Hillary Clinton.

Mentored by Hillary
Sullivan became a key advisor to Hillary Clinton in her campaign to be Democratic party nominee in 2008. At age 32, Jake Sullivan became deputy chief of staff and director of policy planning when she became secretary of state. He was her constant companion, traveling with her to 112 countries.

The Clinton/Sullivan foreign policy was soon evident. In Honduras, Clinton clashed with progressive Honduras President Manuel Zelaya over whether to re-admit Cuba to the OAS. Seven weeks later, on June 28, Honduran soldiers invaded the president’s home and kidnapped him out of the country, stopping en route at the U.S. Air Base. The coup was so outrageous that even the U.S. ambassador to Honduras denounced it. This was quickly overruled as the Clinton/Sullivan team played semantics games to say it was a coup but not a “military coup.” Thus the Honduran coup regime continued to receive U.S. support. They quickly held a dubious election to make the restoration of President Zelaya “moot”. Clinton is proud of this success in her book “Hard Choices.”

Two years later, the target was Libya. With Victoria Nuland as State Department spokesperson, the Clinton/Sullivan team promoted sensational claims of a pending massacre and urged intervention in Libya under the “responsibility to protect.” When the UN Security Council passed a resolution authorizing a no-fly zone to protect civilians, the U.S., Qatar and other NATO members distorted that and started air attacks on Libyan government forces. Today, 12 years later, Libya is still in chaos and war. The sensational claims of 2011 were later found to be false.

When the Libyan government was overthrown in the Fall of 2011, the Clinton/Sullivan State Department and CIA plotted to seize the Libyan weapons arsenal. Weapons were transferred to the Syrian opposition. U.S. Ambassador Stevens and other Americans were killed in an internecine conflict over control of the weapons cache.

Undeterred, Clinton and Sullivan stepped up their attempts to overthrow the Syrian government. They formed a club of Western nations and allies called the “Friends of Syria.” The “Friends” divided tasks over who would do what in the campaign to topple the sovereign state. Former policy planner at the Clinton/Sullivan State Department, Ann Marie Slaughter, called for “foreign military intervention.” Sullivan knew they were arming violent sectarian fanatics to overthrow the Syrian government. In an email to Hillary released by WikiLeaks, Sullivan noted “AQ is on our side in Syria.”

Biden’s advisor during the 2014 Ukraine Coup
After being Clinton’s policy planner, Sullivan became President Obama’s director of policy planning (Feb 2011 to Feb 2013) and then national security adviser to Vice President Biden (Feb 2013 to August 2014).

In his position with Biden, Sullivan had a close-up view of the February 2014 Ukraine coup. He was a key contact between Victoria Nuland, overseeing the coup, and Biden. In the secretly-recorded conversation where Nuland and the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine discuss how to manage the coup, Nuland remarks that Jake Sullivan told her “you need Biden.” Biden gave the “attaboy” and the coup was “midwifed” following a massacre of police AND protesters on the Maidan plaza.

Sullivan must have observed Biden’s use of the vice president’s position for personal family gain. He would have been aware of Hunter Biden’s appointment to the board of the Burisma Group, the Ukrainian energy company, and the reason Joe Biden demanded that the Ukrainian special prosecutor who was investigating Burisma be fired. Biden later bragged and joked about this.

In December 2013, at a conference hosted by Chevron Corporation, Victoria Nuland said the U.S. has spent five BILLION dollars to bring “democracy” to Ukraine.

Sullivan helped create Russiagate
Jake Sullivan was a leading member of the 2016 Hillary Clinton team which promoted Russiagate. The false claim that Trump was secretly contacting Russia was promoted initially to distract from negative news about Hillary Clinton and to smear Trump as a puppet of Putin. Both the Mueller and Durham investigations officially discredited the main claims of Russiagate. There was no collusion. The accusations were untrue, and the FBI gave them unjustified credence for political reasons.

Sullivan played a major role in the deception as shown by his “Statement from Jake Sullivan on New Report Exposing Trump’s Secret Line of Communication to Russia.”

Sullivan’s misinformation
Sullivan is also a good speaker, persuasive and with a dry sense of humor. At the same time, he can be disingenuous. Some of his statements are false. For example, in June 2017 Jake Sullivan was interviewed by the Frontline television program about U.S. foreign policy and especially U.S.-Russia relations. Regarding NATO’s overthrow of the Libyan government, Sullivan says, “Putin came to believe that the United States had taken Russia for a ride in the UN Security Council that authorized the use of force in Libya… He thought he was authorizing a purely defensive mission… Now on the actual language of the resolution, it’s plain as day that Putin was wrong about that.” Contrary to what Sullivan claims, the UN Security Council resolution clearly authorizes a no-fly zone for the protection of civilians, no more. It’s plain as day there was NOT authorization for NATO’s offensive attacks and “regime change.”

Planning the Nord Stream Pipeline destruction
The bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines, filled with 50 billion cubic meters of natural gas, was a monstrous environmental disaster. The destruction also caused huge economic damage to Germany and other European countries. It has been a boon for U.S. liquefied natural gas exports which have surged to fill the gap, but at a high price. Many European factories dependent on cheap gas have closed down. Tens of thousands of workers lost their jobs.

Seymour Hersh reported details of How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline. He says, “Biden authorized Jake Sullivan to bring together an interagency group to come up with a plan.” A sabotage plan was prepared and officials in Norway and Denmark were included in the plot. The day after the sabotage, Jake Sullivan tweeted:

I spoke to my counterpart Jean-Charles Ellermann-Kingombe of Denmark about the apparent sabotage of Nord Stream pipelines. The U.S. is supporting efforts to investigate and we will continue our work to safeguard Europe’s energy security.

— Jake Sullivan (@JakeSullivan46) September 28, 2022

[Jean-Charles] Ellerman-Kingombe [Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Danish Prime Minister’s Office] may have been one of the Danes informed in advance of the bombing. He is close to the U.S. military and NATO command.
Since then, the Swedish investigation of the Nord Stream bombing has made little progress. Contrary to Sullivan’s promise in the tweet, the U.S. has not supported other efforts to investigate. When Russia proposed an independent international investigation of the Nord Stream sabotage at the UN Security Council, the resolution failed due to a lack of support from the U.S. and U.S. allies. Hungary’s foreign minister recently asked.

How on earth is it possible that someone blows up critical infrastructure on the territory of Europe and no one has a say, no one condemns, no one carries out an investigation?

Economic Plans devoid of reality
Ten weeks ago Jake Sullivan delivered a major speech on “Renewing American Economic Leadership” at the Brookings Institution. He explains how the Biden administration is pursuing a “modern industrial and innovation strategy.” They are trying to implement a “foreign policy for the middle class”, which better integrates domestic and foreign policies. The substance of their plan is to increase investments in semiconductors, clean energy minerals and manufacturing.

However, the new strategy is very unlikely to achieve the stated goal to “lift up all of America’s people, communities, and industries.” Sullivan’s speech completely ignores the elephant in the room: the costly U.S. Empire including wars and 800 foreign military bases which consume about 60% of the total discretionary budget. Under Biden and Sullivan’s foreign policy, there is no intention to rein in the extremely costly military-industrial complex. It is not even mentioned.

US exceptionalism 2.0
In December 2018, Jake Sullivan wrote an essay titled “American Exceptionalism, Reclaimed.” It shows his foundational beliefs and philosophy. He separates himself from the “arrogant brand of exceptionalism” demonstrated by Dick Cheney, criticizes the “American first” policies of Donald Trump, and advocates for “a new American exceptionalism” and “American leadership in the 21st Century.”

Sullivan has a shallow Hollywood understanding of history: “The United States stopped Hitler’s Germany, saved Western Europe from economic ruin, stood firm against the Soviet Union, and supported the spread of democracy worldwide.” He believes that “the fact that the major powers have not returned to war with one another since 1945 is a remarkable achievement of American statecraft.”

Jake Sullivan is young in age but his ideas are old. The United States is no longer dominant economically or politically, and it is certainly not “indispensable.” More and more countries are objecting to U.S. bullying and defying Washington’s demands. Even key allies such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are ignoring U.S. requests. The trend toward a multipolar world is escalating and Jake Sullivan is trying to reverse the trend, but reality and history are working against him. Over the past four or five decades, the U.S. has gone from being an investment, engineering and manufacturing powerhouse to a deficit-spending consumer economy waging perpetual war with a bloated military-industrial complex.

Instead of reforming and rebuilding the U.S., the national security state expends much of its energy and resources trying to destabilize countries deemed to be “adversaries”.

Conclusion
Previous national security advisers Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski were very influential.

Kissinger is famous for wooing China and dividing the communist bloc. Jake Sullivan is now wooing India in hopes of dividing that country from China and the BRICS alliance (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa).

Brzezinski is famous for plotting the Afghanistan trap. By destabilizing Afghanistan with foreign terrorists beginning 1978, the U.S. induced the Soviet Union to send troops to Afghanistan at the Afghan government’s request. The result was the collapse of the progressive Afghan government, the rise of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and 40 years of war and chaos.

On 28 February 2022, just four days after Russian troops entered Ukraine, Jake Sullivan’s mentor, Hillary Clinton, was explicit: “Afghanistan is the model.” It appears the U.S. intentionally escalated the provocations in Ukraine to induce Russia to intervene. The goal is to “weaken Russia.” This explains why the U.S. has spent over $100 billion sending weapons and other support to Ukraine. This explains why the U.S. and UK undermined negotiations which could have ended the conflict early on.

The Americans who oversaw the 2014 coup in Kiev, are the same ones running U.S. foreign policy today: Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland and Jake Sullivan. Prospects for ending the Ukraine war are very poor as long as they are in power.

https://mronline.org/2023/07/03/who-is- ... gn-policy/

*******

Aging Iraq Invaders Keep Accidentally Saying ‘Iraq’ Instead Of ‘Ukraine’



President Biden accidentally referred to Putin’s war in “Iraq” when answering questions from the press, a year after former president George W Bush made the same gaffe. Both men played crucial roles in the push to invade Iraq.

Asked on Wednesday whether the short-lived Prigozhin rebellion was a sign that Putin was weakening, Biden replied, “It’s hard to tell really. But he’s clearly losing the war in Iraq.”



During the 2020 presidential race, Current Affairs’ Nathan J Robinson wrote the following about Biden’s pivotal role in manufacturing support for the Iraq invasion:

In 2003, Biden was “a senator bullish about the push to war [in Iraq] who helped sell the Bush administration’s pitch to the American public,” who “voted for — and helped advance — the Bush agenda.” He was the war’s “most crucial” senate supporter. Biden repeated the myth that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, saying that “these weapons must be dislodged from Saddam Hussein, or Saddam Hussein must be dislodged from power.” The resulting war was one of the most deadly catastrophes in the history of U.S. foreign policy — the Iraqi death toll was in the hundreds of thousands or possibly even the millions, and 4,500 American troops died.

That Biden’s decomposing brain would find the word “Iraq” when reaching for the word which means “nation that has been illegally invaded by an evil government” is positively Freudian.

In May of last year during a speech in Dallas, George W Bush made a similar Freudian confession, saying, “The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean, of Ukraine.”

After correcting himself with a nervous chuckle, Bush broke the tension with the words, “Iraq too. Anyway.” He then quipped that he is 75 years old, leaning harder on his “Aw shucks gee willikers I’m such a goofball” persona than he ever has in his entire life.



I defy you to find me anything that is more quintessentially representative of the state of the US empire than these two clips. Two decaying empire managers fumbling around in their skulls for the name of nation that’s been invaded by murderous thugs, and coming up with the name of the nation they themselves invaded. It’s truly a thing of beauty.

It’s absolutely ridiculous that they’re trying to charge Putin with war crimes while these two mass murderers are walking free. As American law professor Dale Carpenter has said, “If citizens cannot trust that laws will be enforced in an evenhanded and honest fashion, they cannot be said to live under the rule of law. Instead, they live under the rule of men corrupted by the law.” This is all the more true of laws which would exist between nations.

It’s not a “whataboutism” to say it’s absurd to charge Putin with war crimes without charging men like Bush and Biden — it’s a completely devastating argument against the claim being made. If the law doesn’t apply to everyone, then it’s not the law, it’s just corruption. It’s a tool of the powerful.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/06/29 ... f-ukraine/

**************

From the Telegram account of Slavyangrad:

Slavyangrad
By intervening in the conflict in Ukraine, Joe Biden violates the American Constitution, says Andrew Napolitano, a columnist for The Washington Times.

"Congress could not legally declare war on Russia, because there is no reason for this from a military point of view. Russia does not pose a threat to American national security. Moreover, the United States does not have a treaty with Ukraine that would require the provision of American military protection," he writes, recalling that under the constitution only Congress can declare war.

Napolitano claims that American soldiers are taking part in the conflict, although there is no legal basis for this.

NOTE: I smell a shift in the winds, brother…

Non-paywalled source:
https://news.yahoo.com/war-honesty-deba ... 10036.html

***

Slavyangrad
Former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard accused Joe Biden of imminent nuclear war.

" The actions and policies of President [US Joe] Biden have brought us to the brink of nuclear war. This is an existential threat not only for us, but for the whole world. This proxy war, which is being waged against Russia at the expense of the lives of the population of Ukraine, continues to escalate. We We hear talk that NATO countries want to send troops to Ukraine, which will only increase the risk of a direct confrontation between the United States, NATO countries and Russia, which has the most powerful nuclear weapons in the world,” she said.

The former congresswoman believes that Washington does not see the difference between a nuclear war and a conflict with the use of conventional weapons. " President Biden, members of his administration or so-called experts on television talk about the third world, about nuclear war as if it were just another war, just another conflict. <...> We will do this, they will do that, blah - blah blah, and then we won , "- this is how, according to Gabbard, the US leadership argues.

https://t.me/s/Slavyangrad

[blindpig]

Presidents Keep Hiring Elliott Abrams Because The US Empire Is Just That Evil



CNN reports that President Biden has nominated criminal neocon Elliott Abrams for a position on the United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, which according to the US State Department is responsible for “appraising activities intended to understand, inform, and influence foreign publics” and pays “acute attention” to the US government’s official foreign propaganda arm, the US Agency for Global Media.

Usually when you hear someone called a “neocon” it’s not a strictly accurate description from a technical point of view and is frequently used to just mean “warmonger”, but Abrams is actually a proper PNAC neoconservative ideologue with deep ties to the old-school neocons of the 1970s, and has helped promote violent US imperialism in Latin America and the Middle East for decades.

In addition to serving as the Trump administration’s special representative for both Iran and Venezuela (two of the nations where Trump’s foreign policy was at its most murderous), Abrams is probably best known for confessing to his role in the criminal coverup of Iran-Contra during the Reagan administration. CNN — notoriously reluctant to criticize both US foreign policy and Democratic presidential administrations — was surprisingly critical on this point in its report on Biden’s nomination of Abrams to the position.


In an article titled “Biden nominates controversial former Trump-appointee to Public Diplomacy Commission,” CNN’s Jack Forrest writes the following:

Elliott Abrams, who has served in three Republican administrations, most recently acted as the Trump administration’s special envoy to Iran and Venezuela where he was tasked at the time with directing the campaign to replace Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro.

The Republican insider’s long history in foreign policy is marked by a 1991 guilty plea for withholding information about the Iran-Contra affair that earned him two misdemeanor counts, two years probation and 100 hours of community service — though his crimes were later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush.

The secret Iran-Contra operation, which took place during Abrams’ time as an assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration, involved the funding of anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua using the proceeds from weapon sales to Iran despite a congressional ban on such funding.

Again in his role under former President Ronald Reagan, Abrams was also blasted by a Human Rights Watch report for his attempts in a February 1982 Senate testimony to downplay reports of the massacre of 1,000 people by US-trained-and-equipped military units in the Salvadoran town of El Mozote in December 1981 — the largest mass killing in recent Latin American history. He insisted the numbers of reported victims were “implausible” and “lavished praise” on the military battalion behind the mass killings — stances he doubled down on when they were put on display during a 2019 House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing by Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, who used his history in Latin American to call into question his credibility.

When you’re so gross that even CNN is disgusted by you, you’re a special kind of gross.

As Forrest noted, this would be the fourth presidential administration that Abrams has been a part of, despite being a confessed crook and despite pushing for bloodshed at every opportunity in some of the US empire’s most notorious criminal actions. Abrams is such a cold-hearted killer that he openly admitted during a 1985 conference that the purpose of aiding the Contras in Nicaragua was “to permit people who are fighting on our side to use more violence,” and has promoted US military violence against Iraq, Syria and Iran with remarkable forcefulness throughout his career. The fact that someone so tyrannical, so corrupt and so unscrupulous keeps getting appointed to positions involved with US foreign policy tells you everything you need to know about the nature of US foreign policy.

It’s actually a damning indictment of our entire civilization that swamp monsters like Elliott Abrams remain esteemed members of society instead of reviled outcasts who can’t safely show their faces in public. They should be driven from every town they try to enter and unable to secure even entry-level jobs working for minimum wage, but instead they’re employed as high-profile pundits, think tankers and political officials providing expertise on some of the most consequential matters in the world.

To paraphrase a quote often attributed to Jiddu Krishnamurti, it is no measure of health to be well-rewarded in a profoundly sick society. Because our society is so profoundly sick, one of the fastest ways to fortune and esteem is to be as gross as Elliott Abrams. That’s how messed up you have to be inside to rise to prominence within the US power structure: willing to say and do whatever needs to be said and done in order to secure the continued dominance of a global empire that is sustained by human blood.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/07/04 ... that-evil/

Elliot Abrams and John bolton are both certified war criminals going back to the 'Contra wars' in Central America in the 80s. Biden hires Abrams, Trump hired Bolton for a little while until Bolton found that Trump was an incompetent imperialists. Viva la difference!

Western hypocrites want to send Putin to the Hague even as the US establishment is up to it's neck in murderous bastards. The USA is indeed 'exceptional'.

[blindpig]

(The Dept of Lesser Evil just keeps on giving...)


A cluster bomb capsule is seen on the ground amid the Russia-Ukraine war at the frontline city of Avdiivka, Ukraine on March 23, 2023. (Photo: Andre Luis Alves/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images/Common Dreams)

Cluster bomb opponents ‘appalled’ by Biden becision to send banned weapons to Ukraine
Originally published: Common Dreams on July 7, 2023 by Jake Johnson (more by Common Dreams) | (Posted Jul 08, 2023)

President Joe Biden has reportedly given final approval for the transfer of U.S. cluster munitions to Ukraine, ignoring warnings from human rights groups and progressive lawmakers who underscored the indiscriminate weapons’ devastating impacts on civilians immediately upon use and far into the future.

According to The Washington Post, a drawdown of the globally deplored weapons from Pentagon stocks is set to be formally announced on Friday. The U.S., which has used the weapons around the world, is believed to possess more than 3 million cluster munitions containing over 400 million submunitions.

More than 120 countries have signed the United Nations Convention on Cluster Munitions, which prohibits the use or stockpiling of the weapons. But the U.S., Russia, and Ukraine have opposed global efforts to ban the weapons, which are notorious for failing to explode on impact and littering landscapes with what are effectively landmines.

Human Rights Watch (HRW), which urged the Biden administration not to transfer the weapons to Ukraine, has documented the use of cluster munitions by both Russian and Ukrainian forces since the start of the war last year.

We can support the people of Ukraine in their freedom struggle, while also opposing violations of international law.

The Cluster Munition Coalition, a global civil society campaign working to eradicate the weapons, said it was “appalled” by the U.S. president’s approval of the transfer to Ukraine.

“The Biden administration’s decision to transfer cluster munitions will contribute to the terrible casualties being suffered by Ukrainian civilians both immediately and for years to come,” said Paul Hannon, vice chair of the coalition’s governance board.

Russia and Ukraine’s use of cluster munitions is adding to Ukraine’s already massive contamination from explosive remnants and landmines.

The Post reported Friday that “the principal weapon under consideration, an M864 artillery shell first produced in 1987, is fired from the 155mm howitzers the United States and other Western countries have provided Ukraine.”

“In its last publicly available estimate, more than 20 years ago, the Pentagon assessed that artillery shell to have a ‘dud’ rate of 6%, meaning that at least four of each of the 72 submunitions each shell carries would remain unexploded across an area of approximately 22,500 square meters—roughly the size of 4½ football fields,” the Post added.


https://t.co/HekzoUh77W

In order to deliver the weapons to Ukraine, the Post noted, Biden is trampling on “U.S. law prohibiting the production, use, or transfer of cluster munitions with a failure rate of more than 1%.”

Mary Wareham, advocacy director of the arms division of HRW, told the newspaper that “it’s dismaying to see the long-established 1% unexploded ordnance standard for cluster munitions rolled back as this will result in more duds, which means an even greater threat to civilians, including de-miners.”

HRW released a report this week detailing its research showing that “Ukrainian cluster munition rocket attacks on Russian-controlled areas in and around the city of Izium in eastern Ukraine during 2022 caused many casualties among Ukrainian civilians.”

“Transferring these weapons would inevitably cause long-term suffering for civilians and undermine the international opprobrium of their use,” the group said.

The use of cluster munitions in areas with civilians makes an attack indiscriminate in violation of international humanitarian law, and possibly a war crime.

Reports that Biden has approved the munitions transfer to Ukraine—which has repeatedly pressed the White House for the weapons—came after Germany, a NATO member and U.S. ally, expressed opposition to sending the bombs to Ukraine, citing its commitments under the Convention on Cluster Munitions.

In the U.S., progressive Reps. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) on Thursday proposed an amendment to the nation’s annual military policy bill that would prohibit the transfer or sale of cluster munitions.

“If the U.S. is going to be a leader on international human rights, we must not participate in human rights abuses,” Omar told Politico.

We can support the people of Ukraine in their freedom struggle, while also opposing violations of international law.

https://mronline.org/2023/07/08/cluster ... o-ukraine/

From what I've read the Pentagon has said that it has no definitive proof that Russia is using cluster bombs in Ukraine. It certainly has them but has refrained.

Giving these things to Nazis is a double war crime, imho.

[blindpig]

The Democratic Party isn’t interested in protecting trans folks; only in furthering U.S. imperial violence

BY RAINER SHEA
JULY 10, 2023

To the liberals who say that refusing to vote blue is a betrayal of trans folks and other marginalized groups, we radicals can reply: if enabling the Democratic Party is essential for protecting these groups, why are the Democrats leading an effort to nurture fascism? The Biden administration’s backing of Ukraine’s fascist regime and its partnered Nazi militias—which isn’t even a new practice for the Democrats, since Obama installed that regime in 2014–shows the strategic calculus behind the “you must vote blue to protect the most vulnerable” argument is not a sound one. It was never a sound one; the difference is that with the desperate reaction of the liberals to U.S. supremacy’s decline, we’ve now gotten to a point where the Democratic Party’s fascism-compatible nature is more visible than ever.

The backing of Ukraine’s Banderite fascists proves that every time you see a Democratic politician claim to be in solidarity with trans folks, it’s a completely hollow statement. The same goes for their supposed commitment to aiding the Black community; or the other parts of the LGBT community; or the cause to combat the Republican Party’s fascistic recent book banning campaign. The Democrats support a government within Ukraine that’s advancing a project by modern Hitler followers to fight a race war; that’s cultivated an environment where the Nazi militias can commit violence against LGBT people with impunity; and that’s been banning books in an even more reactionary way than the Republicans are, with Kiev’s central aim behind the censorship being to suppress knowledge about Bandera’s Nazi collaboration.

A party that’s assisting in a policy of institutionalized Holocaust denial is not a party we should vote for if we care about fighting hate and systemic injustice; voting for it will have the effect of worsening these evils. One’s attempts at trans advocacy become undermined when they act complicit in the whitewashing of a historical crime of which trans people were among the victims.

Should the Democratic Party’s apologists within the “left” or “Marxist” spaces even admit that these heinous actions of the Ukrainian state are real, they’ll essentially argue that it’s still possible to separate the foreign policy of the Democrats from their domestic policy. That whatever evils the party is advancing abroad, they represent the only political force that can stop the Republicans from doing even worse harm towards trans folks than they already have. We Marxists must shatter the thinking behind this “harm reduction” rationale by objecting: no, you can’t act like the global is separable from the domestic. To do so is to abdicate your responsibility as a citizen of the imperial center to assist in the effort to end your government’s global crimes, as if the world is only as big as the United States and the United States isn’t perpetrating gargantuan injustices against most of the rest of the world.

You can’t pretend the things the Democrats are doing worldwide are irrelevant to the question of whether we should continue enabling them with our votes. I phrase it like this because voting blue, inescapably, is an act of enablement; a decision that reinforces the dominance of the Democratic Party over our discourse, and over our organizing spaces. To do so is not only a disservice towards the peoples around the globe who are being blown apart, subjected to starvation sanctions, and placed under fascist rule due to Democrat foreign policy; it’s also against the interests of our revolutionary struggle in the center of imperialism.

Voting blue strengthens the structures of imperialism, which are what’s fundamentally to blame for the violence that trans people are subjected to. A carceral state that puts trans people at the greatest risk of being sexually assaulted; a socioeconomic order that disproportionately impoverishes LGBT people; a privatized healthcare system that by default limits access to trans-affirming care, regardless of whether the discrimination is codified. If liberals want to use trans rights to justify their pro-imperialist decisions, by the standard of their own argument their stance is still indefensible. The anti-imperialist (i.e. anti-Democrat) stance is correct regardless, as it’s the stance that advances historical progress; these ways in which it aligns with the interests of trans liberation only strengthen the argument behind it.

Whatever justifications liberals use, the effect of their actions is to fortify a system that both subjugates all working class people, and concentrates its structural violence upon the same disadvantaged groups the liberals claim to care about so much. Voting blue also means supporting this violence; it’s only a kind of violence whose arbiters aren’t forthright about their role in. Should we be grateful to these hypocrites for deciding only to perpetuate the benign types of harm?

The essence of the lesser-evil argument, the argument the liberals use to try to negate all of these points, is the notion that there’s no viable alternative; that enabling the Democratic Party at least produces the best net outcome, since there’s supposedly no other option that can bring a better one. Such a superior option exists; it exists in the form of committing oneself to revolutionary politics, which is what can bring down the system behind all of this institutionalized violence. The Democrats are portraying this situation as one where we have no choice but to help them with their crimes against the targets of the American imperial hegemon, or else we’ll end up helping in the targeting of trans folks here. They’re lying; we do have another choice.

We can build a movement to overthrow our capitalist dictatorship, and replace it with workers democracy. Which requires sufficiently combating U.S. hegemony, a task that entails forming a united front against NATO; fighting the information war against imperialism’s psyops; and breaking from the control of the Democratic Party. Achieving trans liberation, like achieving victory in the broader class struggle, requires upending our social order. It requires making extinct this system that depends on exploitation and subjugation, and therefore will continue to delay the coming of social equality for as long as it exists.

The liberals want us to compartmentalize the Democratic Party’s backing of fascism and broader efforts to maintain the imperial order; to only focus on the ways the Republicans are worse than the Democrats in a domestic sense. This is a denialistic way of thinking; a mindset where we tell ourselves that the evil of this party shouldn’t stop us from enabling it, no matter how overwhelming this evil is, because of the “good” that exists in one area. The implications of our votes go beyond the borders of the United States; they extend to all the places where imperialist violence, which the Democrats are at present the foremost purveyors of, is being committed. And to act complicit in this global violence is to strengthen the structures of capital that hold back social progress.

From both a moral and a strategic perspective, voting blue is the wrong choice if your goal is to advance the revolutionary cause. We need to keep repeating this throughout the rest of the presidential race, as the liberals try to place intensifying pressure upon us to comply with their wishes.

https://newswiththeory.com/the-democrat ... -violence/