Sympathy for the Devils...

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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Thu Feb 03, 2022 3:56 pm

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Manchin Raked in Record Q4 Donations While Killing Build Back Better Act

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) received PAC donations from the fossil fuel, finance, and insurance industries in a record fourth quarter haul while killing the Democrats' signature bill.

PUBLISHED ONJAN 30, 2022 12:44PM EST

David Moore
@ppolitics
Co-founder of Sludge

As he worked to kill the Build Back Better Act at the end of last year, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) was cheered on with hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from corporate PACs.

Manchin raised over $1.57 million in the fourth quarter of 2021, the highest total he’s ever raised in a year-end report, according to FEC records. The senator is the only Democrat who has said he will not vote for the Build Back Better Act, which contains much of President Biden’s domestic agenda and needs the support of every Senate Democrat to pass. The record Q4 amount raised by Manchin’s committee was first noted by journalist Derek Willis and confirmed by Sludge.

On October 15, the New York Times reported that Manchin told the White House he opposed a major climate program in the Build Back Better Act, a clean energy standard to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation. Days later, he received donations from several energy industry PACs representing companies that opposed the program.

The PAC of the Electric Power Supply Association donated $2,500 to Manchin on October 20. The trade association represents companies in the power generation business and oil and gas companies including private equity firm Energy Capital Partners, BP, Shell, and Tenaska. It reported lobbying Congress in the fourth quarter on “development of a Clean Electricity Performance Program.” Also on that day, the senator received $5,000 from the PAC of oil and gas exploration company Devon Energy. On October 24, the American Fuel and Petrochemicals Manufacturers’ PAC gave $5,000 to Manchin. That group’s board members include executives of oil majors like ExxonMobil and Chevron, and it retains Manchin’s former senior advisor and communications director Jonathan Kott as a lobbyist to “Provide strategic counsel and general lobbying support on core AFPM issues,” according to Senate filings.

On December 19, Manchin appeared on Fox News Sunday to announce he would not support the budget reconciliation package, claiming that the spending package of $1.7 trillion over 10 years ​​posed too much risk to the national debt in a time of “geopolitical unrest” and the COVID-19 pandemic. “We are also facing increasing geopolitical uncertainty as tensions rise with both Russia and China,” Manchin said in a statement released on the same date. “Our ability to quickly and effectively respond to these pending threats would be drastically hindered by our rising debt.”

Manchin in the fourth quarter brought in $5,000 maximum contributions from the PACs of corporations including CVS, Intuit, Cigna, Equitrans Midstream, chemistry company Celanese, insurance company Lockton, and several more.

We follow the money. Sign up here to get our free Sludge newsletter, with our latest stories and money-in-politics news from around the internet. 📨

The fourth quarter sum brings the total raised by Manchin’s primary campaign committee to over $4.83 million in 2021, compared with nearly $495,000 in 2020. The 74-year-old Manchin has not announced if he intends to run for re-election in 2024. The committee’s cash on hand is over $6.71 million, according to records maintained by ProPublica.

Manchin raised nearly $295,000 from corporate PACs, including the PACs of trade associations and law firms, according to Sludge’s review of FEC reports released yesterday. The largest share of corporate PAC donations came from companies and trade associations in the financial, insurance, and real estate sector, followed by donors in the health and energy sectors.

Real estate industry donors gave nearly $32,000 to Manchin in donations that were earmarked through the Votesane PAC.

Manchin’s leadership PAC, Country Roads, brought in $116,500 in PAC donations in the month of December, according to Sludge’s review. His joint fundraising committee, Manchin Victory Fund, has not yet filed its year-end report.

The Q4 contributions came as the Biden White House claimed that Manchin was ostensibly negotiating with the president to vote for their budget reconciliation bill, only to drop his willingness late in the year. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in a Dec. 19 statement, “If his comments on FOX and written statement indicate an end to that effort, they represent a sudden and inexplicable reversal in his position, and a breach of his commitments to the President and the Senator’s colleagues in the House and Senate.”

In its expenditures, Manchin’s campaign reported spending over $76,000 on Allied Universal Executive Protection & Intelligence Services, the first time the company has been mentioned in his disclosures. Manchin’s campaign also spent over $14,000 on catering at the River Oaks Country Club in Houston, Texas.

https://readsludge.com/2022/01/30/manch ... etter-act/

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

Manchin Says Build Back Better Act Is Dead

February 1, 2022 at 1:32 pm EST By Taegan Goddard 288 Comments

When Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) was asked about the Build Back Better Act, he responded: “What Build Back Better bill? I don’t know what you guys are talking about.”

When asked if he’s had any talks on the matter since December, he added: “No, no, no, no. It’s dead.”

https://politicalwire.com/2022/02/01/ma ... t-is-dead/

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

Biden Moves To Block Student Debt Victory

The president created draconian bankruptcy laws — now his administration appears to be trying to overturn a ruling that helps those bankrupted by student loans.

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Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, and Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Despite increasing pressure to fulfill a campaign promise to forgive student debt, President Joe Biden is now going in the opposite direction: His administration has taken an initial step to try to overturn a key legal victory for borrowers, according to court filings reviewed by The Daily Poster.

If the administration wins an appeal, it could bolster a legal precedent against millions of debtors being crushed by bankruptcy laws that Biden infamously helped his finance industry donors sculpt during his four decades in Washington.

On January 14, a federal judge in Biden’s home state of Delaware moved to eliminate nearly $100,000 in student loan debt held by a 35-year-old epileptic man. In response, the Justice Department filed a notice of appeal in the case on behalf of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona.

If Biden officials now follow through with a fully formed appeal, they would not only be aiming to keep this man overwhelmed with debt, but also moving to solidify a legal interpretation that could preclude even the most beleaguered student debtors from getting relief through bankruptcy courts.

“In light of the administration’s commitment to reforming the process for student loan borrowers in bankruptcy, it is both surprising and disappointing to see that they appear to be backtracking,” Dan Zibel, Vice President and Chief Counsel for the National Student Legal Defense Network, a nonprofit that represents students in cases related to education and student debt, told The Daily Poster. “With bipartisan calls to lower the bar for borrowers seeking relief from student loans in bankruptcy, the Department should not be arguing in court to raise that bar.”

The legal maneuver comes more than six years after the Obama administration called on Congress to make it easier for some borrowers to discharge their student loans through bankruptcy.

Over the last four decades, Biden has led the fight against initiatives to reduce student debt. As a senator from Delaware, Biden sculpted the laws that have made it so difficult for Americans to reduce their student debts in bankruptcy court.

On the presidential campaign trail, Biden appeared ready to take a new position on the matter. He promised to make it easier for people to reduce their student debt through bankruptcy proceedings, and to “immediately cancel a minimum of $10,000 of student debt per person.”

But instead of doing so, his Justice Department is moving to further entrench legal precedent against borrowers.

“His Inability To Pay His Student Loan Debt Will Persist”

In the Delaware case, a bankruptcy judge found that Ryan Wolfson, who held nearly $100,000 in student loan debt, faced “undue hardship” due to the debt and eliminated all of it. According to the lawsuit, Wolfson graduated from Penn State in 2010 and struggled to find full-time employment. In 2019, while Wolfson was working full-time driving for Uber, Lyft, and Grubhub, he suffered a seizure while driving and totaled his vehicle.

“The evidence shows that, despite considerable effort, Wolfson has been chronically un- or underemployed since graduating from college; that his sporadic full-time employment has consisted of low-paying gig work or jobs with little prospect of advancement; and that he has avoided living in abject poverty only through significant financial support from his father,” the judge wrote in her opinion. “The record further shows that Wolfson's career prospects are unlikely to materially improve over time, and thus, his inability to pay his student loan debt will persist.”

Not only did the court discharge Wolfson’s debt, but the judge’s decision also departed from other bankruptcy courts which have been hesitant to find “undue hardship” in cases related to student loans, and have rarely ruled in favor of the debtors.

Student debt is typically exempt from bankruptcy cases unless borrowers can prove that they face “undue hardship” as a result of their debt, a higher standard than almost all other types of consumer debt. Federal circuit courts have interpreted this language in different cases to demand that debtors show a “certainty of hopelessness” or “intolerable difficulties” or “a total incapacity to repay.”

That higher standard is in part thanks to Biden himself, who as a senator spearheaded a law in 2005 that made it more difficult for student debtors to claim bankruptcy for private loans. About half of Wolfson’s debt was held by a private loan provider, and half by the federal government.

When those like Wolfson file for bankruptcy, they must undergo a separate process to address their student debt, known as an adversary proceeding. In an adversary proceeding, debtors must sue their student loan lenders and prove they face “undue hardship” as a result of the loans. In this case, the creditors are the federal government and Educational Credit Management Corp., a private loan collection service that has long been “the main private entity hired by the Department of Education to fight student debtors who file for bankruptcy on federal loans,” according to the New York Times.

In Wolfson’s case, Judge Laurie Selber Silverstein wrote in her opinion that the federal courts have been far too strict in their interpretation of “undue hardship” and their application of the Brunner test, a test developed in a 1987 U.S. Supreme Court case to assess undue hardship.

“In short,” she wrote, “I agree with the general premise that the most exacting interpretations of Brunner are unmoored from the original test and the plain language of ‘undue burden.’”

Silverstein is one of a handful of judges to have issued recent rulings that take a less stringent approach to undue hardship.

By beginning the appeal process and bringing the case into federal district court, the administration could help to entrench harsher interpretations of Brunner and prevent rulings like Silverstein’s from setting a precedent for a broader interpretation. A district court ruling, while not binding on future Delaware bankruptcy decisions, could influence judges’ decisions in other cases in and around Delaware.

A Surprising Appeal

After campaigning on a promise to cancel at least $10,000 in debt for student loan borrowers, Biden has retreated from that pledge, putting him at odds with top Democratic lawmakers.

In its first year, the Biden administration also routinely fought such attempts by people who hold student debt to have it relieved in bankruptcy court.

Soon after Biden took office, his administration said that the Education Department was reviewing its authority to cancel student debt through executive order. For months, the administration claimed that such a legal review was ongoing. But a public records request filed by the Debt Collective, an organization pressuring Biden to cancel student debt, revealed that the Education Department had completed its review in early April 2021.

The memo detailing the administration’s legal authority was highly redacted when released in response to the public records request, and top Democrats are now calling on the administration to release an unredacted version.

The Justice Department and Education Department have also claimed to be reviewing their own policy of fighting student borrowers in bankruptcy cases.

Part of the problem may be that Assistant U.S. Attorney Jacob Laksin, who filed the appeal in Wolfson’s case, was appointed by a Trump holdover in the Justice Department.

“The blame could fall to [Attorney General Merrick Garland], as the attorney general is supposed to appoint assistant U.S. attorneys,” explained Hannah Story Brown, a researcher at the Revolving Door Project, an executive branch watchdog. “But they can functionally be appointed by their local U.S. attorney — who in Laksin’s case is Trump appointee David Weiss, the only Trump-appointed U.S. attorney not asked to resign when Biden took office.”

“This underscores the necessity of de-Trumpification at the Department of Justice: the conservative subordinate of a Trump-holdover is pushing Biden’s education agenda in a cruel and nonsensical direction,” she added.

A Bipartisan Senate Coalition

Meanwhile, a bipartisan coalition of senators has been working to reform bankruptcy laws in a way that would be favorable to student debtors. Reforming these laws has been a longtime crusade of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has been a staunch critic of Biden’s support for legislation that made it more difficult for debtors to triumph in bankruptcy proceedings.

Warren previously attributed Biden’s support for those laws to his coziness with the financial industry.

“His energetic work on behalf of the credit card companies has earned him the affection of the banking industry and protected him from any well-funded challengers for his Senate seat,” she wrote of Biden in 2002.

Warren has introduced legislation to treat student loans in bankruptcy cases with the same legal standard as other types of consumer debt. She, alongside Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and other Democratic lawmakers, have also been pressuring Biden to cancel at least $50,000 worth of student debt for federal student loan borrowers.

In August, the Senate Judiciary Committee, led by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), convened a hearing to explore reforms to bankruptcy laws on student loans. During the hearing, Durbin and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) introduced a bill that would allow student debtors to discharge their federal student loans through bankruptcy proceedings after ten years of holding the debt, rather than requiring them to meet the standard of “undue hardship.”

Even the insurrectionist Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) supports the legislation.

“I can’t think of very many good reasons to keep students with massive amounts of debt as lifelong serfs of banks and universities by not allowing them to discharge in bankruptcy their debt under appropriate circumstances,” he said.

The Biden administration would apparently beg to differ.

https://www.dailyposter.com/biden-moves ... t-victory/

A Party dysfunctional by design. A party Leader as duplicitous as his predecessor though in a more traditional style. What in the hell is there to like?

Oh, I forgot, Trump.....but as the days pass the functional, material differences that remain are nearly irrelevant and the only remaining difference all a matter of rhetoric. Pick your lies.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Fri Feb 11, 2022 4:26 pm

Joe Biden urges US citizens to leave Ukraine

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Joe Biden said he has no plans to send troops to Ukraine to assist in an evacuation of US citizens. | Photo: EFE
Published February 11, 2022 (5 hours 59 minutes ago)

Russia has dismissed as false and unfounded the accusations made by the US and its Western allies about Russian intentions to invade Ukraine.

US President Joe Biden has urged US citizens to immediately leave Ukraine, as tensions between the US and its Western partners against Russia rise.

"American citizens should leave now," Biden said Thursday in an interview with NBC. "We are dealing with one of the largest militaries in the world," Trump said.

During the interview, Biden assured that he does not plan to send troops to Ukraine to collaborate in a hypothetical evacuation of US citizens in the event of violent incidents on Ukrainian territory.


Tensions between the US and Russia are at their highest peak since the Cold War, due to Washington's accusations of Moscow's intentions to invade Ukraine, a situation that has been denied by the Kremlin.

Comments from Joe Biden, as well as the State Department, which also renewed its warning to American citizens to leave, are almost certain to raise tensions again.


Accusations of a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine have been intensifying in the West since last November, when several media outlets aired alleged plans to carry out such an operation.

Russia has repeatedly branded these accusations as false and unfounded and denounced the military pressure of the US and NATO in the vicinity of its borders, they represent a threat to its security.

Ukrainian authorities have repeatedly ruled out any indication of a Russian military operation against Ukraine.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/joe-bide ... -0003.html

Google Translator

Izzat 'passive-aggressive' or something?

It seems to me that if Russia actually intended to invade Ukraine then these big bad sanctions would not carry much weight. Threatening more sanctions if Russia is forced to defend Donbass from US proxy Nazis is also futile as in that case Russia must act. So it is likely that more sanctions will be imposed, proving that Biden is a tough guy who will stand up to the commies.(oh, wait...) If not then Joe is the tough guy anyways cause his threats are effective.

Joe may be able to bank this sham for domestic political purpose but on the policy aspects,sinking Nord Stream II and weakening the growing Russia/China ties both history and economics suggest abject failure.

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

Foreign policy "Blob" backs Biden on Ukraine
Axios
Hans Nichols, Zachary Basu

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Ukrainian service members conduct live-fire exercises on Thursday. Photo: Sergey Bobok/AFP via Getty Images

Republican senators and establishment columnists who brutalized President Biden for the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal are now praising his handling of Russia's threatened invasion of Ukraine.

Why it matters: The endorsements give the president and his team more political space to pursue diplomacy. They also allow a president who ran on his competence and foreign policy experience to reclaim some of that mantle.

The challenge is maintaining support if the situation deteriorates as both sides pour more arms and personnel into the area.

The big picture: The Biden administration has made transatlantic unity its top priority throughout the crisis.

It's engaged European allies during over 200 phone calls and meetings to coordinate red lines and prepare crushing sanctions if Russia invades Ukraine.

*Biden's straddled a fine line between supporting Ukraine with military aid and limiting the deployment of U.S. troops exclusively to NATO allies — well aware there's no public appetite for direct involvement in another war.
*The two-track "diplomacy-and-deterrence" approach has won support from Americans across the political spectrum, according to a recent Morning Consult poll.
*It's also earned plaudits from "the Blob," a term coined by former Obama deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes to describe old-guard foreign-policy types.
*They believe U.S. power should be used to uphold the rules-based international order.
*What they're saying: "The U.S. has organized a comprehensive response," Richard Haass, the Council on Foreign Relations leader who's been called the "Pope" of the Blob, wrote this month.

8“Policy has been clearly framed and communicated to allies and adversaries alike — blunting Russia's ability to manipulate events," decreed the Washington Post's David Ignatius, whose scoops and analysis drive coverage in foreign policy circles, on Feb. 1.
*"Mr. Biden has a few flaws but he was a child of the Cold War and, unless I’m mistaken, has surprised and discombobulated Vladimir Putin with his un-Obama-like response to renewed tensions over Ukraine,” Holman Jenkins, a conservative columnist, wrote Tuesday in the Wall Street Journal.
*Even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell seems willing to give his former Senate colleague credit, even when he hasn’t adopted policies as quickly as he’d like: "I was glad to hear that U.S. forces are finally moving to reinforce our Eastern flank allies," McConnell said on Feb. 2.

Flashback: After Biden’s Aug. 31 speech on Afghanistan, Haass called parts of it "unbecoming," and deemed the overall approach "a questionable policy terribly executed."

*In mid-August, before the suicide blast at Kabul's airport that killed 13 Americans and at least 170 Afghans, Ignatius called the situation a "disaster," and concluded, “Biden owns the final decision, for better or worse."
*The title of Jenkins's Aug. 17 Afghanistan column: "Biden’s Eyes-Open Debacle."
*McConnell called the withdrawal "one of the worst foreign policy decisions in American history."

The other side: Biden still has plenty of critics on Ukraine — including some unlikely bedfellows.

*Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has called on Biden to drop long-standing support for Ukraine's eventual membership in NATO. He argues a binding commitment to defend the country would undermine efforts to counter China.
*Senate Republicans also have continued to hammer Biden for his decision to waive sanctions on Nord Stream 2, the Russia-to-Germany natural gas pipeline Ukraine has called an "existential threat" to its security.
*Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has warned new sanctions on Russia could cause "massive economic upheaval," and Russia's concerns about NATO expansion "were not just invented yesterday by Putin out of thin air."
*But Sanders praised Biden's approach on the Senate floor on Thursday.
*Between the lines: Even Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a reliable Biden critic, has voiced his support on Ukraine.

"I completely support the Biden Administration’s decision to send more U.S. troops to bolster NATO allies in the face of Russian aggression," he tweeted Feb. 2.

https://www.axios.com/biden-ukraine-for ... 45378.html

Imperialism is and always has been a bipartisan project, inevitably as the two parties are wings of the same vulture. Hubert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson would be proud.

Do note that Bernie Sanders tries to have it both way, which is what Democratic Party 'progressives'(yeah, he effectively is a Dem) do when their lying rhetoric slams into imperialist interests.

PS - Did ya see that 'crusader cross' on that Uke tank? These are some seriously fucked-up people.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Mon Feb 14, 2022 4:23 pm

Looking for Evidence? Trust Us, Biden Administration Says

President Joe Biden's administration has refused to share evidence for national security claims in recent days, and officials have even accused reporters of buying into foreign propaganda.

By Associated Press
|
Feb. 5, 2022, at 8:23 a.m

WASHINGTON (AP) — When President Biden's administration was asked for evidence to back up dramatic claims about national security developments this past week, it demurred with a simple rejoinder: You’ll have to trust us on that.

No, they would not reveal what led them to say they knew that Russia was plotting a false flag operation as a pretext to invade Ukraine. No, they would not explain their confidence that civilian casualties were caused by a suicide bombing rather than U.S. special forces during a raid in Syria.

The administration's response took a particularly caustic turn as spokespeople suggested that reporters were buying into foreign propaganda by even asking such questions.

The lack of transparency strained already depleted reserves of credibility in Washington, a critical resource diminished over the decades by instances of lies, falsehoods and mistakes on everything from extramarital affairs to the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The exchanges were also a sign of increased skepticism of the Biden administration when it comes to intelligence and military matters, particularly after officials failed to anticipate how swiftly the Afghan government would fall to the Taliban last year and initially defended a U.S. missile attack in Kabul as a “righteous strike” before the Pentagon confirmed the action had killed several civilians but no terrorists.

“This administration has made statements in the past that have not proven accurate,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “Kabul wasn’t secure. The drone strike did kill civilians. The press is doing its job when it asks, ‘How do you know that?’”

The latest scrutiny seemed to have struck a nerve, resulting in barbed interactions with White House press secretary Jen Psaki and State Department spokesman Ned Price that stood out even amid the typically contentious relationship between the government and the press.

Jamieson described the responses, which included insinuations that reporters were being disloyal, as “completely inappropriate.”

“These are cases in which the reporters’ role is even more consequential because the matters” — the use of lethal force by the U.S. military and a potential war in Europe — “are so important,” she said.

The first exchange took place Thursday aboard Air Force One en route to New York as Psaki fielded questions about the U.S. special forces raid in Syria, which resulted in the death of Islamic State leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi.

U.S. officials said al-Qurayshi killed himself and his family with a suicide bomb, but NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe said there “may be people that are skeptical of the events that took place and what happened to the civilians.”

Psaki asked whether the reporter was suggesting that “ISIS is providing accurate information” as opposed to the U.S. military.

“I mean, the U.S. has not always been straightforward about what happens with civilians,” Rascoe responded.

Asked about her comments, Psaki said Friday that “we welcome tough questions and good faith scrutiny.”

She said officials were committed to providing as much detail as possible about the Syria raid and she was relying on “firsthand reports from our elite servicemembers" to describe the incident.

Price similarly sparred with a reporter at a State Department briefing on Thursday after U.S. officials said Russia was preparing a “false flag” operation as the opening act for an invasion of Ukraine. The alleged scheme included a staged explosion and enlisting actors to portray people mourning the dead.

"Where is the declassified information?" asked Matthew Lee of The Associated Press.

“I just delivered it," Price said.

"No, you made a series of allegations," Lee responded.

Price said U.S. officials needed to protect “sources and methods.” After a contentious back and forth, Price said that if reporters want to “find solace in information that the Russians are putting out, that is for you to do.”

He later walked back his comments.

(more...)

https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/ar ... ation-says

Yeah, yeah, US News &WR is a right wing rag, but other than a few adjectives this is straight up reporting.

If the Trump regime had pulled this shit the entire liberal establishment would be screaming, but 'Not Trump', ya know. It's gonna be a sorry day for the Dems when Trump Derangement Syndrome is past sell date.

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

(CNN)President Joe Biden spent the weekend leading what is looking like an increasingly desperate final effort to forestall a Russian invasion of Ukraine -- an incursion that could have grave consequences for his own political standing.

If President Vladimir Putin orders his tanks into Russia's smaller, democratic neighbor, he would send shockwaves around the world and trigger one of the worst and most dangerous national security crises since the Cold War.

And while it is not his prime intention, Putin would cause significant damage to Biden's prestige and inflict real-time consequences on Americans in an already tense midterm election year -- including with likely new hikes to already soaring gasoline prices that often act as an index of voter anger and perceptions about the economy.

The President's national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, on Sunday encapsulated a weekend in which the tone of Western governments warning of a possible invasion became more alarming, exacerbating a sense that the weeks-long Russian buildup around Ukraine might be racing to a decisive moment.

<snip>

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby added to the impression that this could be a fateful week, saying on Fox on Sunday that the US had good intelligence sources that pointed to a "crescendo opportunity for Mr. Putin."

Domestic blowback

The United States will not send troops into Ukraine to defend it. The former Soviet federated republic is not a member of NATO, the alliance that has defended the Western world since soon after World War II. So direct conflict between Russian and US soldiers is unlikely. Biden has, however, ordered several thousand troops to frontline NATO states to deter any further Russian adventurism -- including to Romania and Poland, two countries that were once behind the Iron Curtain but are now members of the alliance -- much to Putin's fury.

A Russian invasion of Ukraine would crush democratic principles and the idea that people can chose their leaders for themselves -- principles on which the United States had built decades of foreign policy.

<snip>

But more immediately, a Russian invasion could have a significant domestic blowback inside the United States in a way that would impose more economic pain and ultimately hurt the prospects of Biden and his Democrats in November's elections.

<snip>

A Russian invasion of Ukraine could also cause oil prices to shoot up and translate into direct pain at the pump for US drivers. High gas prices, currently averaging $3.48 according to the American Automobile Association, have been a contributing factor to Biden's fall in popularity. The President cannot afford a crisis with the potential to push them even higher just days after key data on Thursday showed that inflation rose 7.5%, in the worst such figures since 1982.

A Russian invasion could also cause stocks to tumble in a way that would hit voter perceptions of economic security and prosperity, deepening worries that would further bite into Democratic hopes of staving off a rout in an election that could hand the House of Representatives and the Senate to Republicans. Then there is a psychological and political backlash that Biden could face with an already disgruntled electorate if a Russian invasion of Ukraine added to the impression of a world racing out of control in ways that make him, and the US, look outmaneuvered.

<snip>

Ex-President Donald Trump is making an argument that will become familiar if an invasion does occur. He claimed in a Fox interview on Saturday that Putin had been encouraged to challenge the United States because of the Biden's team's chaotic evacuation from Afghanistan.

<snip>

A second Trump presidency would raise real questions about the future of NATO that would again play into Putin's goal of dividing or even destroying the alliance. The New York Times reported, for instance, in 2019 that Trump had privately spoken about withdrawing from the organization that he frequently criticized -- a move that, if it went ahead, would represent a massive victory for Russia. Any action in Ukraine that hurts Biden might help Trump and his campaign-in-waiting, a factor that could play into the calculations of a Russian leader who has already interfered in US elections with the goal of helping the 45th President.

<snip>

Biden's presidency is already reeling. His approval rating dipped to 41% in a new CNN/SSRS poll released last week, and a Russian invasion of Ukraine would deepen the sense of crisis that is already tightening its grip on the White House. History suggests that presidents in that much trouble suffer stinging defeats in midterm elections in their first term. The CNN survey, conducted in January and February, found that only 45% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters wanted to see the party renominate Biden in 2024, while 51% preferred a different candidate. There was not much better news for Trump, however, with 50% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters wanting the GOP to nominate him again and 49% wanting an alternative candidate.

Biden is unlikely to get much credit from voters for what has, despite a few rhetorical missteps, been a multi-front and successful effort to unite America's NATO allies and build a punishing set of consequences for Moscow if it invades Ukraine.

Any decision by Putin to stop at the brink of an invasion and stand down his forces would allow the President to argue in the run-up to the midterms that his strength and statesmanship had caused Russia to back down.

https://us.cnn.com/2022/02/14/politics/ ... index.html

Red added.

The drama(torture) never stops...

It's Trump and Putin against Biden and the angels. But given that Russia is NOT going to invade Ukraine(tho it could defend Donbass in a limited manner) then Biden gets to declare victory by bluffing the US populace, cause the Russians ain't fooled. A no lose situation that Biden desperately needs as through mistakes, the necessities of capitalism and a little bad luck his regime is already on the ropes for the mid-terms.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Sat Feb 19, 2022 4:10 pm

Image

Hedges: Democrats, the More Effective Evil
February 18, 2022
By Chris Hedges – Feb 14, 2022

The US is a de facto one-party state where the ideology of national security is sacrosanct, unsustainable debt props up the empire and the primary business is war.

When all else fails, when you are clueless about how to halt a 7.5% inflation rate, when your Build Back Better bill is gutted, when you renege on your promise to raise the minimum wage or forgive student debt, when you can’t halt the Republican suppression of voting rights, when you have no idea how to handle the pandemic which has claimed 900,000 lives – 16% of the world’s total deaths although we are less than 5% of the world’s population – when the stock market fluctuates on wild rollercoaster rides of highs and lows, when what little help the government offered to the labor force — half of whom, 80 million, experienced a period of unemployment last year — sees the termination of the extended unemployment benefits, rental assistance, forbearance for student loans, emergency checks, the moratorium on evictions and expansion of the child tax credits, when you watch passively as the ecocide gathers momentum, then you must make the public afraid of enemies, foreign and domestic. You must manufacture an existential threat. Terrorists at home. Russians and Chinese abroad. Expand state power in the name of national security. Beat the drums of war. War is the antidote to divert public attention from government corruption and incompetence. No one plays the game better than the Democratic Party. The Democrats, as journalist and co-founder of Black Agenda Report Glen Ford said, are not the lesser evil, they are the more effective evil.

The US, burdened by de facto tax boycotts by the rich and corporations, is sinking in debt, the highest in our history. The US government budget deficit was $2.77 trillion for the 2021 budget year that ended Sept. 30, the second highest annual deficit on record. It was exceeded only by the $3.13 trillion deficit for 2020. Total US national total debt is over $30 trillion. Household debt grew by $1 trillion last year. The total debt balance in our government Ponzi scheme is now $1.4 trillion higher than it was at the end of 2019. Our wars are waged on borrowed money. The Watson Institute at Brown University estimates that interest payments on the military debt could be over $6.5 trillion by the 2050s. None of this debt is sustainable.

At the same time, the US is facing the ascendency of China, whose economy is projected to overtake the US economy by the end of the decade. Washington’s slew of desperate financial tricks – flooding the global market with new dollars and lowering interest rates to near zero – staved off major depressions after the 2000 dot.com crash, 9/11 and the 2008 global financial meltdown. The cheap interest rates led corporations and banks to borrow massively from the Federal Reserve, often to paper over shortfalls and bad investments. The result is that US businesses are deeper in debt than at any time in US history. Added to this morass is rising inflation, caused by businesses that have increased prices in a desperate effort to make up for lost revenue from supply chain shortages and rising shipping costs, the economic downturn and the slight wage increases triggered by the pandemic. This inflation has forced the Fed to curtail the growth of the money supply and raise interest rates, which then pushes corporations to further raise prices. The desperate measures to stave off an economic crisis are self-defeating. The bag of tricks is empty. Massive defaults on mortgages, student loans, credit cards, household debt, car debt and other loans in the United States is probably inevitable. With no short-term mechanisms left to paper over the disaster, it will usher in a prolonged depression.

An economic crisis means a political crisis. And a political crisis is traditionally solved by war against enemies inside and outside the nation. The Democrats are as guilty of this as the Republicans. Wars can get started by Democrats, such as Harry S. Truman in Korea or John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam, and perpetuated by Republicans. Or they can get started by Republicans, such as George W. Bush, and perpetuated by Democrats such as Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Bill Clinton, without declaring war, imposed punishing sanctions on Iraq and authorized the Navy and the Air Force to carry out tens of thousands of sorties against the country, dropping thousands of bombs and launching hundreds of missiles. The war industry, with its $768 billion military budget, along with the expansion of Homeland Security, the FBI, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the National Security Agency, is a bipartisan project. The handful of national political leaders, such as Henry Wallace in 1948 and George McGovern in 1972, who dared to challenge the war machine were ruthlessly hounded into political oblivion by the leaders of both parties.

Biden’s bellicose rhetoric towards China and especially Russia, more strident than that of the Trump administration, has been accompanied by the formation of new security alliances such as those with India, Japan, Australia, and Great Britain in the Indo-Pacific. US aggression has, ironically, pushed China and Russia into a forced marriage, something the architects of the Cold War, including Nixon and Kissinger with their opening to China in 1971, worked very hard to avoid. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, after meeting recently in Beijing, issued a 5,300-word statement that condemned NATO expansion in eastern Europe, denounced the formation of security blocs in the Asia Pacific region, and criticized the AUKUS trilateral security pactbetween the US, Great Britain and Australia. They also vowed to thwart “color revolutions” and strengthen “back-to-back” strategic coordination.

Warmongering by the Democrats always comes wrapped in the mantle of democracy, freedom and human rights, making Democrats the more effective salespeople for war. Democrats eagerly lined up behind George W. Bush during the calls to invade Afghanistan and Iraq in the name of “humanitarian intervention” and “liberating” the women of Afghanistan, who would spend the next two decades living in terror, burying family members, at times their children. Even when Democrats, including Barack Obama, criticized the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq while running for office, they steadfastly voted to fund the wars to “support our troops” once elected. Now, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), says “an assault on Ukraine is an assault on democracy,” the same argument Democrats clung to a half-century ago while launching and expanding the disastrous war in Vietnam.

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, is currently crafting legislation he proudly calls “the mother of all sanctions bill.” The bill led in the House by Gregory Meeks of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, also a Democrat, demands that the administration “not cede to the demands of the Russian Federation regarding NATO membership or expansion.” NATO expansion to Ukraine along Russia’s borders is the central issue for Moscow. Removing this for discussion obliterates a diplomatic solution to the crisis. Sanctions under the legislation can be imposed for any act, no matter how minor, deemed by Ukraine to be hostile. The sanctions cannot be lifted until an agreement is reached between the government of Ukraine and Russia, meaning Ukraine would be granted the authority to determine when the US sanctions will end. The proposed sanctions, which target Russian banks, the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline, state-owned enterprises and leading members of the government and military, including President Vladimir Putin, also calls for blocking Russia from SWIFT, the international financial transaction system that uses the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

“The legislation would grant at least $500 million in foreign military assistance to Ukraine, in addition to the $200 million in new assistance sent over the last month,” writes Marcus Stanley. “This makes Ukraine the third leading recipient of US military assistance globally, after Israel, and Egypt. While it wouldn’t come close to giving Ukraine the ability to combat Russia on its own, it may come with US military advisors that would increase the danger the US would be drawn into a conflict. The bill also takes steps to directly involve countries bordering Russia in negotiations to end the crisis, which would make it much more difficult to reach an agreement.”

While cutting Russia off from SWIFT will be catastrophic, at least in the short term, for the Russian economy, pushing Russia into the arms of China to create an alternative global financial system that no longer relies on the US dollar will cripple the American empire. Once the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency the dollar will precipitously drop in value, perhaps as much as by two-thirds, as the pound sterling did when the British currency was abandoned as the world’s reserve currency in the 1950s. Treasury bonds, used to finance America’s military-based balance-of-payments deficit and the ballooning government budget deficit, will no longer be attractive investments for countries such as China. The nearly 800 US military outposts abroad, sustained by debt – the Chinese have lent an estimated $1 trillion to the US on which they collect hefty interest – will dramatically shrink in number. Meanwhile, the massive US interest payments, at least in part, will continue to fund the Chinese military.

The US domination of the world economy, after 75 years, is over. It is not coming back. We manufacture little, short of weapons. Our economy is a mirage build on unsustainable levels of debt. The pillage orchestrated by the capitalist elites and corporations has hollowed the country out from the inside, leaving the infrastructure decayed, democratic institutions moribund and at least half the population struggling at subsistence level. The two ruling parties, puppets for the ruling oligarchs, refuse to curb the rapacious appetites of the war industry and the rich, accelerating the crisis. That the rage of the dispossessed is legitimate, even if it is expressed in inappropriate ways, is never acknowledged by the Democrats, who were instrumental in pushing through the trade deals, deindustrialization, tax loopholes for the rich, deficit spending, endless wars and austerity programs that have created crisis. Instead, shooting the messenger, the Biden administration is targeting Trump supporters and winning draconian sentences for those who stormed the capital on January 6. Biden’s Justice Department has formed a domestic terrorism unit to focus on extremists and Democrats have been behind a series of moves to de-platform and censor their right-wing critics.

The belief that the Democratic Party offers an alternative to militarism is, as Samuel Johnson said, the triumph of hope over experience. The disputes with Republicans are largely political theater, often centered around the absurd or the trivial. On the substantive issues there is no difference within the ruling class. The Democrats, like the Republicans, embrace the fantasy that, even as the country stands on the brink of insolvency, a war industry that has orchestrated debacle after debacle, from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq, is going to restore lost American global hegemony. Empires, as Reinhold Niebuhr observed, eventually “destroy themselves in the effort to prove that they are indestructible.” The self-delusion of military invincibility is the scourge that brought down the American empire, as it brought down past empires.

We live in a one-party state. The ideology of national security is sacrosanct. The cult of secrecy, justified in the name of protecting us from our enemies, is a smoke screen to hide from the public the inner workings of power and manipulate public perceptions. The Democratic courtiers and advisers that surround any Democratic presidential candidate – the retired generals and diplomats, the former national security advisers, the Wall Street economists, the lobbyists, and the apparatchiks from past administrations – do not want to curb the power of the imperial presidency. They do not want to restore the system of checks and balances. They do not want to challenge the military or the national security state. They are the system. They want to move back into the White House to wield its awful force. And now, with Joe Biden, that is where they are.


Featured image: “Let’s Make a Deal,” an original work by Mr. Fish.

https://orinocotribune.com/hedges-democ ... tive-evil/

Good to see Mr Hedges has gotten with the program. I can recall when he was a 'lesser evil' man. This is very good.
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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Fri Mar 04, 2022 3:56 pm

War and hollow promises: Biden’s State of the Union address
Walter Smolarek
March 2, 2022
Download PDF flyer https://flyer-generator.herokuapp.com/? ... sts/102806

President Joe Biden delivered his first State of the Union address last night, an hour-long speech mixing the war-mongering propaganda and empty promises of change that have become so typical of the Democratic Party establishment. Facing a potential wipe-out in the midterm election, Biden desperately tried to portray his time so far in office as a success story about the recovery of the country.

His administration, having proven to be an utter disappointment in terms of domestic policy, has pivoted in recent weeks to focus on an ultra-aggressive approach towards Russia that provoked the current war in Ukraine and imperils the whole world. This was reflected in his hypocritical, distorted and truly uninspiring address.

War in Ukraine not about “democracy”

Biden cast the war in Ukraine as a struggle to defend democracy. “In the battle between democracy and autocracy, democracies are rising to the moment,” Biden claimed, praising the “freedom-loving nations” that are confronting Russia.

But democracy has absolutely nothing to do with U.S. foreign policy. One of the U.S. government’s closest allies, for instance, is Saudi Arabia – perhaps the least democratic country on the planet, where crucifixions are a legal form of punishment and one can be publicly beheaded for the crime of witchcraft. So is Israel, an apartheid regime reviled the world over for its abject denial of rights to Palestinians. The United States backs the dictatorship of Paul Kagame in Rwanda, who has caused so much suffering not only among his own people but also for the people of neighboring Congo. In 2019, the United States backed a coup against the democratically-elected president of Bolivia, Evo Morales – much in the same way it backed a military coup in 2009 to remove elected Honduran president Manuel Zeleya. The list goes on and on, and extends back throughout U.S. history.

The U.S. government wants to dominate all of Europe, and they view Russia as an obstacle to that domination. They want to be the unchallenged rulers of the whole world so that the banks and corporations they serve will reign supreme. This, and nothing else, motivates the actions of the U.S. ruling class on the world stage. That is why in the run up to the invasion they stubbornly refused to give assurances that NATO would stop expanding up to Russia’s borders or that Ukraine’s territory would not be the staging ground for advanced weapons that threaten Russia – which would have averted a war. The suffering of the people of Ukraine (and Russian workers bearing the brunt of the sanctions) mean nothing to them as they pursue their imperial ambitions.

Biden gave a completely false explanation of NATO’s purpose, “Throughout our history we’ve learned this lesson when dictators do not pay a price for their aggression they cause more chaos … That’s why the NATO Alliance was created to secure peace and stability in Europe after World War 2.”

But NATO has always been an offensive alliance. Far from aiming for peace and stability in Europe, NATO was formed in 1949 to group together the main imperialist powers of the world in preparation for a war of annihilation against the Soviet Union. Instead of fighting each other for colonies and spheres of influence like in World War One and World War Two, NATO was designed to ensure that in a Third World War the major capitalist powers would fight together to destroy the socialist countries. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, NATO has also set its sights on Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Libya, coordinating brutal wars that caused tremendous death and suffering.

Biden pretends domestic agenda hasn’t collapsed

The last time Biden addressed a joint session of Congress, in April 2021, he laid out a progressive reform program that included substantial measures to improve the lives of working people. In his first official State of the Union address, Biden returned to many of the same themes. But this time, instead of an ambitious agenda these appeals came off more like cruel jokes.

He reiterated his positions in favor of raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, cutting medical costs, combating climate change, providing monthly payments to parents, guaranteeing paid family and sick leave, raising taxes on corporations, and more. Many of these measures were in the “Build Back Better” social program expansion that Biden made a centerpiece of his domestic agenda.

But this legislation was dealt a death blow by right-wing Democrats over two months ago. Politicians like Senators Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema, along with like-minded Democrats in the House of Representatives, refused to support the most important elements of this plan. Once it was hollowed out, Manchin delivered the finishing move on Fox News of all places by announcing that he would not vote for the legislation at all. Because the Senate is evenly-divided, every Democrat is needed to vote in favor of the measure for it to succeed.

Biden expressed support for immigration reform, calling for action to “Provide a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, those on temporary status, farm workers, and essential workers.” He also touched on abortion rights, expressing his desire to “preserve a woman’s right to choose.” Biden reiterated his support for the Equality Act to federally prohibit discrimination against LGBTQ people, and for the PRO Act to expand the rights of workers to form a union. But none of these measures have any chance of succeeding as long as the undemocratic “filibuster” rule is still in place in the Senate, which requires a 60-vote majority for most pieces of legislation to pass. The Democrats could get rid of the filibuster without needing any Republican support, but Manchin and Sinema are once again opposed to this.

If Biden was serious about reviving the program he laid out nearly a year ago, he would have used the State of the Union to slam Manchin, Sinema and their allies. Occupying the most prominent office in the world, Biden has a huge capacity to generate public pressure on these right-wing opponents of the working class. But as he has done consistently since taking office, Biden declined to fight. In fact, he even included a pathetic appeal to Manchin in his address, talking extensively about how much he cares about reducing the federal budget deficit – one of the fake reasons Manchin has given to explain his opposition to social and environmental programs.

On the issue of police terror, Biden has dropped the pretense of being sympathetic to the demands raised in the historic 2020 uprising against racism that brought tens of millions of people into the streets. Biden declared, “We should all agree: The answer is not to defund the police. The answer is to fund the police.” Both Democrats and Republicans rose in thunderous applause after Biden delivered this line, illustrating the essential role played by the police in defending the wealth and power of the elite.

While Biden asserted, “the state of the union is strong … and we will be stronger a year from now than we are today,” the reality is workers are experiencing profound hardships that won’t simply go away with the passing of time. Fundamental changes are needed right now to guarantee a dignified standard of living for workers, ensure equal rights for all, and combat climate change and the scourge of war. Biden has no interest in bringing this about – it can only happen through determined struggle against the billionaires and multi-millionaires he represents.

https://www.liberationnews.org/war-and- ... rationnews

This was not a 'war of choice' for either Biden or Putin: Russia was facing an existential challenge because of NATO expansion. As the trend continued Russia would be balkanized. If Russian nukes in Cuba was a condition that might excuse war then NATO nukes on Russia's doorstep equally applies.

Biden, whatever his personal preferences, was the US president heading a long term imperialist program. No president can stop that, look how the otherwise completely fubar Trump failed when he tried to bring troops home on several occasions. Only a change in class rule can do that. That this will improve the prez's poll numbers is without doubt, the muted whimpering of a few Republicans drown out by the bipartisan jones for imperialism.

Domestically Biden showed his mastery of the 'democratic process'...By bundling all of the progressive policies as 'his' program he compelled said 'progressives' to support him thru thick and thin and when his old buddy Manchin threw a monkey wrench in that, which I think Biden anticipated, relied upon, they all went down together, the progressives as a political force totally obliterated. When something does eventually pass it will be so pathetic as to be meaningless. And that's why Joe was handed the nomination, to make sure there was no drift to the left in the mainstream, however minute.

When do people tire of being played? Apparently Bernie Sanders never does.
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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Wed Mar 09, 2022 3:38 pm

Biden admitted in 1997 NATO expansion would cause Russian ‘hostile reaction’

Current US President Joe Biden admitted in a 1997 talk at the Atlantic Council that eastward NATO expansion into the Baltic states would cause a “vigorous and hostile reaction” by Russia.

ByBenjamin NortonPublished21 hours ago

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Current US President Joe Biden acknowledged in 1997 that eastward NATO expansion into the Baltic states would cause “the greatest consternation,” which could “tip the balance” and result in a “vigorous and hostile reaction” by Russia.

The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania did indeed become part of NATO in 2004. Estonia and Latvia directly border Russia, and frequently do military exercises with Western troops a mere 100 kilometers from the border.

Biden’s 1997 comments were a clear admission that Washington knew its policy of pushing the US-led military alliance right up onto Russia’s borders could force Russia to respond with force, as Moscow did by invading Ukraine in February 2022.

Biden made these remarks in a June 18, 1997 event at the Atlantic Council, NATO’s de facto think tank, and one of the most powerful organizations in Washington.

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At the time of the event, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland were actively seeking to join NATO. (They later did in 1999.)

Then a senator representing Delaware, Biden enthusiastically praised NATO and criticized fellow lawmakers who opposed its expansion. Biden called for the military alliance to continue to grow into Eastern Europe.

But he conceded that this expansion could precipitate a “hostile reaction” from Moscow.

“I think the one place where the greatest consternation would be caused in the short term, for admission – having nothing to do with the merit and preparedness of the countries coming in – would be to admit the Baltic states now, in terms of NATO-Russian, US-Russian relations,” Biden said.

“And if there was ever anything that was going to tip the balance, were it to be tipped, in terms of a vigorous and hostile reaction, I don’t mean military, in Russia, it would be that,” he added.

A video clip of Biden’s comments was published on Twitter by user @ImReadinHere. https://twitter.com/ImReadinHere/status ... 1831662592


When Biden made these remarks, he was the ranking member, or top Democrat, on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Biden was introduced at the event by James Woolsey, a former CIA director who at the time served as head of the Atlantic Council.

Woolsey celebrated Biden as “one of the leading and most important senators… in both the areas of judiciary and foreign policy.”

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These 1997 comments are by no means the only time that a top US government official admitted that NATO expansion could force Russia to respond.

When the Senate approved NATO expansion in 1998, it was condemned by none other than leading cold warrior George Kennan, the architect of US containment policy toward the Soviet Union. Kennan warned in prescient words published by the New York Times:
I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs.
In a 2008 classified State Department cable published by WikiLeaks, former US Ambassador to Russia William Burns, who now serves as Biden’s CIA director, likewise cautioned that NATO expansion into Ukraine would cross Moscow’s security “redlines” and “could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene.”


Senior US, British, French, and German officials repeatedly promised the former Soviet Union in 1990 that NATO would not expand eastward after the reunification of Germany. This is an undeniable historical fact confirmed by numerous documents from Western governments.

NATO broke this promise, however, adding 14 new member states, all east of Germany.

https://multipolarista.com/2022/03/08/b ... -reaction/

Mebbe he forgot, huh? Joe is soo old and seems about as sharp as safety scissors. OTOH, mebbe he's a reckless tool of the imperial state and is willing to chance planetary holocaust in a desperate bid to preserve US hegemony. In which case there should be a private room in The Hague for him.
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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Wed Mar 16, 2022 3:15 pm

My Talk with President Joe from Scranton about Ukraine
Mark P. Fancher 15 Mar 2022

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Image by NOUGAT

Despite the dangers it presents, the crisis in Ukraine is ripe for satire.

A few days ago, I was overdosing on the war porn coming out of Ukraine that CNN calls “news” when it occurred to me that I should do something about this awful violence. I found my phone and called the White House. “May I speak to the President please?” To my surprise, they put the call right through to the Oval Office. I was shocked when I heard:

“Hello this is Joe from Scranton. Who is this?”

Me - Wow! Is this really the President? My name is Mark Fancher. I don’t know if you remember me, but I wrote you a letter back in 1991 – you know, when you chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee. I was trying to let you know back then that Clarence Thomas was really bad news, and you should do all you could to keep him away from the Supreme Court.

POTUS - Oh yes! Hi Mark, I remember you well. I don’t really remember you, but I’m telling you I do because it’s good politics. How can I help you?

Me -I’m calling to ask you to do something about this war in Ukraine.

POTUS - I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place. You see, this is a war between Russia and Ukraine. I’m the President of the United States and I have nothing to do with any of that.

Me -With all due respect Mr. President, give me a break. Back in 2014, you were right there with President Obama when you guys played a huge role in the coup that overthrew Viktor Yanukovych’s democratically elected government in Ukraine. Then, you didn’t exactly rein in the new government when it started attacking so-called separatists in the Donbas region. More than 14,000 people died. In fact, you didn’t lift a finger when the new government violated peace accords that were reached in 2015. All these things helped cause the tensions that have erupted into war. Say what you want, but I believe your objective all along was to install a regime in Ukraine that would be friendly to NATO and that would make it possible to militarize the Ukraine/Russian border.

POTUS - Uh…well…why would we do that?

Me – I’m just guessing, but perhaps, you were hoping that Putin would do exactly what he did. You know, maybe conclude that a war was inevitable, and decide that if war was going to happen, it wasn’t going to be on Russian soil.

POTUS - I still don’t see why you think the U.S. and NATO would have anything to gain from that.

Me -Oh, I don’t know. It seems to me that having Putin bogged down in a protracted war would have its strategic advantages. But I’m just speculating here. What I don’t have to speculate about are the benefits of war to you personally and to western capitalists.

POTUS – I’m just Joe from Scranton. I ride trains and do working class stuff. How would I benefit personally?

Me – You’ve got to admit that your performance ratings were in the toilet before this whole war thing started. And it’s conventional wisdom that Presidents can revive their support by creating a national crisis.

POTUS - So what’s your point?

Me – Facts are facts. You got a bounce in public support after this conflict started. Not only that, Presidents in trouble like wars because they give a boost to the economy.

POTUS - Are you suggesting that I planned this?

Me – Why not? Wars – endless wars are what imperialists do. All of you guys benefit from them. Just think of the mega-bucks that Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and all the other defense contractors are making and stand to make from this war. Also, let’s not forget disaster capitalism.

POTUS - I’m afraid I don’t know what that is.

Me – Come on now. You’re talking to me, not some guy in a tavern who gets his information from Tucker Carlson. You know as well as I do that corporate executives are more excited than a kid on Christmas morning about prospects for going into Ukraine after the dust settles to make huge profits by rebuilding the country at a cost of trillions of dollars.

POTUS – I’m not admitting to any of this. America is a compassionate defender of democracy. When we see people traumatized and devastated by war, we reach out and help.

Me – Uh…yeah…as long as they’re white..

POTUS – Hey I resent that. It sounds like you’re implying that I’m a racist. Don’t forget, Barack Obama is one of my best friends.

Me – I’m not implying anything. I just can’t help but notice that the U.S. has welcomed with open arms white Ukrainians crossing the southern border while turning away those from places like Guatemala, Haiti and other places who have been devastated by conflicts in their countries. I also can’t help but notice that while the U.S. provides all types of humanitarian aid to Europe and is very slow to engage militarily on that continent, the only type of “assistance” the U.S. supplies consistently to Africa is military involvement through U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM). The U.S. military is not only responsible for the destruction of Libya under your buddy Barack Obama’s leadership, but it has also killed so many in Africa with armed drones. Beyond that it just really bothers me that even though the war in Ukraine is essentially a war between white people in Europe, somehow those involved have found a way to insult, humiliate and jeopardize Africans. Those Africans in Ukraine trying to get out have been told to go to the back of the line. Worse still is the fact that your administration does great harm to Africans in the U.S. because even though we are an essentially anti-imperialist community, you confuse many around the world who are in solidarity with our struggle when you position Kamala Harris and U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield as voices of NATO. We’re still trying to overcome the confusion Barack Obama created. There are many oppressed people who see black faces uttering imperialist swill, and they begin to wonder whether all we Africans in the U.S. are on board with that program – and I can’t blame them.

POTUS – Whatever you may think of us, we do the right thing because we are guided by a higher power. We pray daily.

Me – You mean you actually ask God to help you foment violence and plunder and exploit the world’s resources?

POTUS – No, we pray that he will cover his ears and close his eyes when we do those things.

Me – Then, who is this “higher power” that you are guided by?

POTUS – A group of bankers, CEO’s of multinational corporations and folks like that.

Me – Sigh…Well I don’t think we’re getting anywhere here. But before I let you go, let me say that if you played a big role in creating the tensions that erupted in war, you ought to be able to do something to stop it.

POTUS – Hey, I think you overestimate my power. I’m just Joe from Scranton. I’m just sitting on the sidelines watching all of this, just like you.

Me – Goodbye Mr. President.

POTUS – Hey Mark, one more thing…

Me – Yeah, what is it?

POTUS – This was kind of cool talking to you like this – almost as much fun as chatting with Barack or Jim Clyburn. Might you be willing to be one of my Black friends?

https://www.blackagendareport.com/index ... ut-ukraine

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

Black Caucus Fails on Ukraine
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 15 Mar 2022

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The founding members of the Congressional Black Caucus in 1971. (Photo Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives)

The members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) follow Biden's Ukraine policy in lock step. In doing so they fail their constituents and discredit the legacy of Black politics.

On June 11, 2015, the late Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) member John Conyers made this statement about Ukraine. “House passed my amendment to prohibit assistance to Azov Battalion—a far-right white supremacist militia at front lines of Ukraine conflict.” Conyers was right of course. The Azov Battalion was and is a core part of Ukraine’s military. They have Nazi roots, as do many other organizations in that country. But after the Pentagon objected the amendment was stripped from the spending bill and never saw the light of day.

It is important to remember what Conyers tried to achieve the year after Barack Obama sided with right wing Ukrainians and brought down the elected president of that nation. The Conyers amendment passed unanimously in the House but was killed because the administration was well aware of the Azov Battalion’s role and approved of it. The policy of using Ukraine against Russia was settled and any effort to remove a central component of its military was off the table.

Now the CBC is a shell of its former self. Conyers and others from his era would not be welcome among its current membership. They say nothing about Ukraine that isn’t a chapter and verse recitation of Biden administration policy. Even members such as Barbara Lee , still famous for providing the sole vote against the Afghanistan invasion, mouths dangerous platitudes.

“This is a march against democracy. What Putin wants to do is remake and reshape the Soviet Union. It’s not going to stop with Ukraine. No democracy is exempt from what Putin’s moves are, not even against our own country.” She went on to blame Russia for election interference and the usual charges that have held sway ever since Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat.

Her colleagues are no better. The most one can expect is that they oppose U.S. troops being sent to Ukraine. They all repeat the Biden narrative word for word, like wound up robots. None of them question administration policy or even suggest that the crisis might be de-escalated with negotiations between the U.S., Russia, and Ukraine.

Of course foreign policy doesn’t seem to interest the CBC very much. According to their website, their last joint statement on the Foreign Affairs and National Security page was made in December 2020. Those last missives were all rather shallow and consisted of congratulations that Lloyd Austin was appointed Secretary of Defense and happiness that military bases were no longer named after civil war confederates. Apparently they will express no contradiction with Biden and his team on Ukraine or any other foreign policy issue.

The comparison between the current CBC and founding members such as John Conyers is stark. Of course the goal of the democrats has long been to neuter and defang Black politics and sadly they have succeeded in doing so. The power of corporate funding, gerrymandering that makes districts less and less Black, and Barack Obama’s assault on progressive politics have all done their job. Now CBC members do what their leadership instructs them to do and dare not step out of line.

A CBC member, Gregory Meeks, is Chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, but he has his position because of seniority and going along to get along. When the House Democrats met at a retreat, Meeks told struggling people that rising gas prices caused by sanctions against Russia are a worthy sacrifice . "I'm asking the people of the United States to also make that kind of sacrifice because in the long run, democracy is at stake. Putin counted on us being divided. He counted on us not staying together.” The democrats don’t even go through the motions. There is not even a pretense that they are the party of working people. Black members are no different in this regard.

If the U.S. was the great democracy that it pretends to be, politicians would be able to express a modicum of disagreement, even when their party is in the White House. Those days are long gone. Now CBC members outdo one another with Ukrainian flags on their twitter pages and no attempt to make a principled case for negotiations which might lead to peaceful resolution.

John Conyers knew that right wing forces were very powerful in Ukraine. Their position has not changed in that government in recent years but what has changed is the nail in the coffin of Black politics. Now CBC members vote to approve billions of dollars for a government full of neo Nazis and take covid relief funds from their constituents in the process. The CBC was once known as the Conscience of the Congress but that moniker is dead, just like Black politics.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/black ... ls-ukraine
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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Sat Mar 19, 2022 2:48 pm

Greenwald: The NYT Now Admits the Biden Laptop — Falsely Called “Russian Disinformation” — is Authentic
by
EDITOR
March 15, 2022

The media outlets which spread this lie from ex-CIA officials never retracted their pre-election falsehoods, ones used by Big Tech to censor reporting on the front-runner.

Image
President Joe Biden embraces his son Hunter Biden (L) on stage after delivering remarks in Wilmington, Delaware, on November 7, 2020. (Photo by ANDREW HARNIK/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

By Glenn Greenwald / Substack

One of the most successful disinformation campaigns in modern American electoral history occurred in the weeks prior to the 2020 presidential election. On October 14, 2020 — less than three weeks before Americans were set to vote — the nation’s oldest newspaper, The New York Post, began publishing a series of reports about the business dealings of the Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in countries in which Biden, as Vice President, wielded considerable influence (including Ukraine and China) and would again if elected president.

The backlash against this reporting was immediate and intense, leading to suppression of the story by U.S. corporate media outlets and censorship of the story by leading Silicon Valley monopolies. The disinformation campaign against this reporting was led by the CIA’s all-but-official spokesperson Natasha Bertrand (then of Politico, now with CNN), whose article on October 19 appeared under this headline: “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”

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Natasha Bertrand, Politico, Oct. 19, 2020

These “former intel officials” did not actually say that the “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo.” Indeed, they stressed in their letter the opposite: namely, that they had no evidence to suggest the emails were falsified or that Russia had anything to do them, but, instead, they had merely intuited this “suspicion” based on their experience:

We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.

But a media that was overwhelmingly desperate to ensure Trump’s defeat had no time for facts or annoying details such as what these former officials actually said or whether it was in fact true. They had an election to manipulate. As a result, that these emails were “Russian disinformation” — meaning that they were fake and that Russia manufactured them — became an article of faith among the U.S.’s justifiably despised class of media employees.

Very few even included the crucial caveat that the intelligence officials themselves stressed: namely, that they had no evidence at all to corroborate this claim. Instead, as I noted last September, “virtually every media outlet — CNN, NBC News, PBS, Huffington Post, The Intercept, and too many others to count — began completely ignoring the substance of the reporting and instead spread the lie over and over that these documents were the by-product of Russian disinformation.” The Huffington Post even published a must-be-seen-to-be-believed campaign ad for Joe Biden, masquerading as “reporting,” that spread this lie that the emails were “Russian disinformation.”



This disinformation campaign about the Biden emails was then used by Big Tech to justify brute censorship of any reporting on or discussion of this story: easily the most severe case of pre-election censorship in modern American political history. Twitter locked The New York Post‘s Twitter account for close to two weeks due to its refusal to obey Twitter’s orders to delete any reference to its reporting. The social media site also blocked any and all references to the reporting by all users; Twitter users were barred even from linking to the story in private chats with one another. Facebook, through its spokesman, the life-long DNC operative Andy Stone, announced that they would algorithmically suppress discussion of the reporting to ensure it did not spread, pending a “fact check[] by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners” which, needless to say, never came — precisely because the archive was indisputably authentic.

The archive’s authenticity, as I documented in a video report from September, was clear from the start. Indeed, as I described in that report, I staked my career on its authenticity when I demanded that The Intercept publish my analysis of these revelations, and then resigned when its vehemently anti-Trump editors censored any discussion of those emails precisely because it was indisputable that the archive was authentic (The Intercept‘s former New York Times reporter James Risen was given the green light by these same editors to spread and endorse the CIA’s lie, as he insisted that laptop should be ignored because “a group of former intelligence officials issued a letter saying that the Giuliani laptop story has the classic trademarks of Russian disinformation.”) I knew the archive was real because all the relevant journalistic metrics that one evaluates to verify large archives of this type — including the Snowden archive and the Brazil archive which I used to report a series of investigative exposés — left no doubt that it was genuine (that includes documented verification from third parties who were included in the email chains and who showed that the emails they had in their possession matched the ones in the archive word-for-word).

Any residual doubts that the Biden archive was genuine — and there should have been none — were shattered when a reporter from Politico, Ben Schreckinger, published a book last September, entitled “The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power,” in which his new reporting proved that the key emails on which The New York Post relied were entirely authentic. Among other things, Schreckinger interviewed several people included in the email chains who provided confirmation that the emails in their possession matched the ones in the Post‘s archive word for word. He also obtained documents from the Swedish government that were identical to key documents in the archive. His own outlet, Politico, was one of the few to even acknowledge his book. While ignoring the fact that they were the first to spread the lie that the emails were “Russian disinformation,” Politico editors — under the headline “Double Trouble for Biden”— admitted that the book “finds evidence that some of the purported Hunter Biden laptop material is genuine, including two emails at the center of last October’s controversy.”

The vital revelations in Schreckinger’s book were almost completely ignored by the very same corporate media outlets that published the CIA’s now-debunked lies. They just pretended it never happened. Grappling with it would have forced them to acknowledge a fact quite devastating to whatever remaining credibility they have: namely, that they all ratified and spread a coordinated disinformation campaign in order to elect Joe Biden and defeat Donald Trump. With strength in numbers, and knowing that they speak only to and for liberals who are happy if they lie to help Democrats, they all joined hands in an implicit vow of silence and simply ignored the new proof in Schreckinger’s book that, in the days leading up to the 2020 election, they all endorsed a disinformation campaign.

It will now be much harder to avoid confronting the reality of what they did, though it is highly likely that they will continue to do so. This morning, The New York Times published an article about the broad, ongoing FBI criminal investigation into Hunter Biden’s international business and tax activities. Prior to the election, the Times, to their credit, was one of the few to apply skepticism to the CIA’s pre-election lie, noting on October 22 that “no concrete evidence has emerged that the laptop contains Russian disinformation.” Because the activities of Hunter Biden now under FBI investigation directly pertain to the emails first revealed by The Post, the reporters needed to rely upon the laptop’s archive to amplify and inform their reporting. That, in turn, required The New York Times to verify the authenticity of this laptop and its origins — exactly what, according to their reporters, they successfully did:

People familiar with the investigation said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer and others about Burisma and other foreign business activity. Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.

That this cache of emails was authentic was clear from the start. Any doubts were obliterated by publication of Schreckinger’s book six months ago. Now the Paper of Record itself explicitly states not only that the emails “were authenticated” but also that the original story from The Post about how they obtained these materials — they “come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop” — “appears” to be true.

What this means is that, in the crucial days leading up to the 2020 presidential election, most of the corporate media spread an absolute lie about The New York Post‘s reporting in order to mislead and manipulate the American electorate. It means that Big Tech monopolies, along with Twitter, censored this story based on a lie from “the intelligence community.” It means that Facebook’s promise from its DNC operative that it would suppress discussion of the reporting in order to conduct a “fact-check” of these documents was a fraud because if an honest one had been conducted, it would have proven that Facebook’s censorship decree was based on a lie. It means that millions of Americans were denied the ability to hear about reporting on the candidate leading all polls to become the next president, and instead were subjected to a barrage of lies about the provenance (Russia did it) and authenticity (disinformation!) of these documents.

The objections to noting all of this today are drearily predictable. Reporting on Hunter Biden is irrelevant since he was not himself a candidate (what made the reporting relevant was what it revealed about the involvement of Joe Biden in these deals). Given the war in Ukraine, now is not the time to discuss all of this (despite the fact that they are usually ignored, there are always horrific wars being waged even if the victims are not as sympathetic as European Ukrainians and the perpetrators are the film’s Good Guys and not the Bad Guys). The real reason most liberals and their media allies do not want to hear about any of this is because they believe that the means they used (deliberately lying to the public with CIA disinformation) are justified by their noble ends (defeating Trump).

Whatever else is true, both the CIA/media disinformation campaign in the weeks before the 2020 election and the resulting regime of brute censorship imposed by Big Tech are of historic significance. Democrats and their new allies in the establishment wing of the Republican Party may be more excited by war in Ukraine than the subversion of their own election by the unholy trinity of the intelligence community, the corporate press, and Big Tech. But today’s admission by The New York Times that this archive and the emails in it were real all along proves that a gigantic fraud was perpetrated by the country’s most powerful institutions. What matters far more than the interest level of various partisan factions is the core truths about U.S. democracy revealed by this tawdry spectacle.

https://scheerpost.com/2022/03/15/green ... -authentic

We who were watching Ukraine closely back then were quite familiar with Biden's shenanigans in getting his boy a plush sinecure. Those of us on the Left shrugged, it is what we expect from the hypocritical bourgeoisie, big on the 'rule of law' but bigger on 'influence'. That the story got buried was no surprise either: Trump had to go, it was Biden or a bullet and they rely upon lip service to the law to prevent ruling class anarchy.

The whole Trump/Russia fiasco was more of the same: petty influence peddling for relatively petty gain, run of the mill corruption but no danger to an utterly corrupt republic. But Trump had to go, he was fucking up the imperial program left and right, not for any good reason but through ignorance and egomania, his fortes. And so a happy conjunction was found: Trump+Russia was an irresistible twofer, sink the Orange Man and prepare the ground for the next round of aggression against Russia, of which part was a US backed Nazi coup in Ukraine. Well, it halfway worked...
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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Thu Mar 24, 2022 2:51 pm

Biden Says The Quiet Part Out Loud
BY TYLER DURDEN
TUESDAY, MAR 22, 2022 - 03:00 PM
Authored by Thomas Lifson via AmericanThinker.com,

I sort of sympathize with puppet masters using Joe Biden as their front man in the Oval Office. He doesn’t know his limitations, he’s headstrong, and he’s garrulous. So, he is prone to spilling the beans when he’s been briefed about the plans for the schemes they are implementing.

That happened Monday when he made a brief speech to the Business Roundtable – a group of powerful executives, just the sort of people Biden loves to schmooze and (he thinks) impress.

Toward the end, as his voice and demeanor were weakening, he blurted out the real agenda. Ryan Saavedra of The Daily Wire spotted the classic Kinsley gaffe (accidentally telling the truth).

“I think this presents us with some significant opportunities to make some real changes.

You know, we are at an inflection point, I believe, in the world economy, not just the world economy, in the world, occurs every three or four generations.


As one of my, as the one of the top military people said to me in a secure meeting the other day, 60 million people died between 1900 and 1946 and since then we established a liberal world order and that hadn’t happened in a long while.

A lot of people died, but nowhere near the chaos.

And now’s the time when things are shifting.

We’re going, there’s gonna be a new world order out there and we’ve got to lead it and we’ve got to unite the rest of the free world and doing it.”


You see, the invasion of Ukraine is a great excuse to impose a “new world order.”

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/ ... t-out-loud

Biden is the monster-swine we always knew he was, but hey, he ain't Trump.....................

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

Biden has Money for War, but Not for the Poor
Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor 23 Mar 2022

Image
State of the Union Address, March 1, 2022.

Joe Biden and congress have plenty of money for the military industrial complex, but only austerity for the people. The imperialist machine is always fed.

The following lyric in Tupac Shakur’s legendary 1993 track, Keep Ya Head Up, aptly describes the Joe Biden administration:

“You know it's funny when it rains it pours. They got money for wars, but can't feed the poor.”

Joe Biden has provided $14 billion in aid to Ukraine in a span of weeks, much of which will be used for military purposes. The U.S.’s lust for war with Russia has grown by many proportions since the rising power to the East launched its military operation in Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Joe Biden gave his first State of the Union address just a week later. In it, he assured ordinary working Americans that life has improved under administration and that the best has yet to come.

Of course, Biden was lying. U.S. sanctions on Russia have already sent shockwaves throughout the global capitalist economy. Working class people are being told to return to their offices amid a global pandemic while facing gas prices that are upwards of 50 percent higher than prior to the intensified U.S. sanctions regime against Russia. The failure to maintain tax credits for working class families has increased the rate of child poverty by 41 percent . Deaths from COVID-19 are approaching the one million mark and Biden has shown that both he and his corporate masters are ready to move on from a pandemic that has yet to end.

The U.S. role in the Russia-Ukraine conflict has sent chickens flocking home to roost in their imperialist nesting place. Sanctions, once a weapon of war thought to only harm poor and oppressed people in Global South countries such as Venezuela, are now having a direct impact on the living conditions of workers in the United States. Ceaseless war propaganda has bamboozled a majority of Americans into supporting a no-fly zone in Ukraine despite the risk of World War III that it portends. Yet this same majority also opposes a direct U.S. military intervention in Ukraine against Russia. While masses of people in the U.S. can certainly be convinced to support imperialist policies they don’t understand , they also don’t trust their government enough to cosign onto another endless war if it risks their lives or livelihoods.

Warmongers in Washington have attempted to push through this contradiction with a non-stop propaganda blitz that predictably weds the interests of humanity with that of their New Cold War aims. Stopping Russia at all costs, according to Biden, is a crusade for “democracy” against “autocracy.” Millionaire celebrities have repeatedly lectured workers at risk of homelessness and unemployment that they should pay higher gas prices to support Ukraine. But what about democracy in the United States? Who decides whether the U.S. wages war abroad or invests in the needs of the people at home?

The Biden administration would have us believe that militarism facilitates peace and “democracy,” and that Russia’s demise is a boon for the interests of masses of people around the world. This is simply not true. The never-ending increase of the U.S.’s military budget has occurred in the context of the neoliberal phase of U.S. capitalism. Stagnant wages and the rise of burdensome debt, homelessness, and poverty have all correlated with the expansion of militarism. Militarism drains public wealth in order to increase private wealth.

The last war to benefit the masses of working people in the United States was World War II. An increase in public spending, including in the military, indeed raised living standards. But this so-called “Golden Age” of U.S. capitalism was not brought about by the benevolence of the capitalist class. Increased living standards were dependent upon the strength of social movements at home and abroad. Millions of striking workers threatened the collapse of capitalism in the United States and the presence of the Soviet Union forced the ruling class to portion off some of its profits in the form of a “welfare state.”

Of course, the persistence of Jim Crow left many Black workers excluded from this arrangement and the “Golden Age” of capitalism was short lived as employers used their influence to strip all workers of their gains. This process continues forward in the current epoch of imperialism. Rampant racism against Black Americans and oppressed nations, including Asian America, is fueling state repression. Joe Biden has used his short time as President to call for more funding of local police and escalate the imprisonment and deportation of migrants fleeing nations that the U.S. destroyed . The rapid rise of attacks on people on Asian America due to the U.S.’s incessant scapegoating of China for COVID-19 has also led to renewed calls for stronger law enforcement.

Imperialism is a system and not merely another term for war. Under imperialism, monopoly and finance capital reign supreme. The U.S. is leading an imperialist system in decline. Joe Biden personifies this decline with his ailing mental capacity and furious commitment to the status quo amid a rapidly changing world. The so-called “Build Back Better” presidency has offered nothing to working people but more war and austerity. As the U.S. continues to pour gasoline on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, it will become increasingly clear that the pursuit of endless war only erodes the standard of living of the people who reside in the imperialist orbit.

The opportunity thus emerges for the question of war and peace to enter the realm of class struggle where it belongs. Whether radical and progressive forces seize the opportunity to resuscitate the left remains to be seen. As Frantz Fanon so poignantly advised, “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.” Our duty is not to side with a Joe Biden-led imperialist system in decline, but to sharpen and take the contradictions between its endless war agenda and the consequences they are reaping for humanity to their logical conclusion: the replacement of this system of exploitation with a socialist system designed and governed in the interests of the toiling masses and their allies, everywhere.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/biden ... r-not-poor
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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Sat Mar 26, 2022 2:26 pm

Biden Casually Says Food Shortage "Going To Be Real" As Necessary "Price" Of Anti-Russia Sanctions
BY TYLER DURDEN
FRIDAY, MAR 25, 2022 - 05:11 AM

Update(15:55ET): Nothing to see here... only the President of the United States speaking at an emergency summit of NATO heads making somewhat overly casual sounding references regarding likely massive energy and food shortages...

"It’s going to be real," Biden said at a news conference in Brussels. "The price of the sanctions is not just imposed upon Russia. It’s imposed upon an awful lot of countries as well, including European countries and our country as well."

As Bloomberg observes, "Ukraine and Russia are both major producers of wheat, in particular, and Kyiv’s government has already warned that the country’s planting and harvest have been severely disrupted by the war."

And The Federalist's Sean Davis aptly summarizes where things stand...

"We’re about to face massive energy and food shortages, and Biden’s solution is to ban drilling and put expensive and inefficient solar panels and windmills on what’s left of American farmland that hasn’t been bought up by China or BlackRock," he wrote on Twitter.

Meanwhile, below are Biden's comments on China, coming after the formal NATO statement published Thursday:
Arthur Schwartz
@ArthurSchwartz
Biden says that he expected China to provide assistance to Russia in their invasion of Ukraine.

If that’s true, why did he share intelligence about Russian military movements with the Chinese?
[youtube]http://twitter.com/i/status/1507065172619313152[/youtube]
2:41 PM · Mar 24, 2022·Twitter for iPhone
The NATO statement included the following: We call on all states, including the People’s Republic of China (PRC), to uphold the international order including the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity, as enshrined in the UN Charter, to abstain from supporting Russia’s war effort in any way, and to refrain from any action that helps Russia circumvent sanctions.

Also of note from the Thursday afternoon speech is that Biden said he supports booting Russia - and thus Putin - from the Group of 20:

President Biden said Thursday that he would support Russia being expelled from the G20 over its invasion of Ukraine, a step that would further Vladimir Putin on the international stage.

Biden said the decision would ultimately be up to the G20, but that he has proposed allowing Ukraine to attend as an observer nation if other members do not agree to remove Russia.

Here's what he said when asked about the G20 issue by a reporter:

“My answer is yes,” Biden said during a news conference when asked about whether Russia should be removed. “It depends on the G20. That was raised today, and I raised the possibility that, if that can’t be done – if Indonesia and others do not agree – then we should, in my view, ask to have both Ukraine be able to attend the meetings as well as … basically (having) Ukraine being able to attend the G20 meeting and observe.”

In bears recalling concerning the global food shortage the president is warning about...
Image
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/ ... -out-china

Even an arch-capitalist like Durden recognizes the shameless hypocrisy and cold-blooded murder inherent in the prez's pronouncements. Just as the too-late deceased Albright and the Polish prince Brzezinski categorically stated that mass murder was acceptable to further US foreign policy so the cranky quasi-senile Biden is right on board with the same. But he ain't Trump and that's what's really important.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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