Sympathy for the Devils...

[blindpig]

Democrats’ VP Choice Tim Walz Has a History of Working on the Side of Monied Interests Against Workers
Posted on August 7, 2024 by Conor Gallagher

I suppose the headline is obvious at this point, or Minnesota Governor Tim Walz wouldn’t be on the Democrats’ ticket, but it’s worth remembering amid all the hype.

I first became familiar with Walz last year when some in the media were describing Minnesota as a shining example of progressivism and the “best state for workers”, so I started to look into the legislation.

No doubt the state passed some decent bills. Here’s a thread listing them all: https://x.com/whstancil/status/16610175 ... rkers.html

What the thread misses, however, is that last year working Minnesotans organized and got two major pieces of legislation near the finish line that would’ve dramatically improved their lives, but those bills threatened the interests of the capital class. The monied interests in this case were Uber, Lyft, and the Mayo Clinic, and when their bottom lines were threatened they all responded with various threats. In each of these instances, Minnesota’s elected officials — led by Walz — quickly backed down.

So while Walz might be a former union member, he might look positively saintly next to the other finalist for the VP spot Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, he might make for a friendly photo op and sound relatable to people who work for a living, but recent actions make it questionable just how much of a friend he is to American laborers.

Let’s look at the two cases last year where the Mayo Clinic, Lyft, and Uber provided marching orders to Walz. First the Mayo Clinic. Here are the details on the nurse staffing legislation from The Minnesota Reformer:

The Keeping Nurses at the Bedside Act (HF1700/SF1651), backed by the nurses’ union, would require hospitals to form committees made up of nurses and other hospital staff to create “core staffing plans” that include the maximum number of patients each nurse can typically safely care for.

In response Mayo threatened to take its plans for new facilities and infrastructure worth billions to other states. [1] A Mayo executive wrote the following to the governor and legislative leaders:

Because these bills continue to proceed without meaningful and necessary changes to avert their harms to Minnesotans, we cannot proceed with seeking approval to make this investment in Minnesota. We will need to direct this enormous investment to other states.

Democrats quickly caved, led by Walz who agreed to exempt the Mayo Clinic from the union-backed legislation. Once Mayo sprung a leak in the legislation, cracks began to emerge everywhere as other hospitals declared the double standards unfair, and soon the entire bill was dead.According to Mayo, Walz was key in throwing nurses under the bus. From Becker’s Hospital Review:

Its relationship with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was essential to its exemption from the Keeping Nurses at the Bedside Act — and the bill’s final-hour revisions, the health system said.

Mayo Clinic’s President and CEO Gianrico Farrugia, MD, said the health system remained “steadfast” in its position throughout the legislative session and expressed gratitude to those who backed them up — including the governor.

The good news is that Mayo workers are soldiering on without him. From The Star Tribune:

Mayo Clinic is one of the world’s top hospitals, but hundreds of Rochester workers say the medical system isn’t treating its workers like they’re world-class. About 1,600 unionized clinical technicians, personal care attendants, janitors and others are seeking at least $20-per-hour wages, in line with other hospitals around Minnesota. Rochester nurses are looking into unionizing, which would create a union with more than 6,500 members in Minnesota’s third-largest city.

Meanwhile, thousands more workers are set to come to Rochester as Mayo builds its $5 billion expansion downtown.

Aside from better wages, the chief concern of nurses at Mayo facilities is inadequate staffing — the very problem that Walz caved to Mayo on:

Karrie Ellingson, a personal care attendant and a member of the SEIU bargaining team at St. Marys, said her department needs 28 attendants to serve about 150 patients on average each day.

“We consistently have been working 30 percent short every day, not including PCAs who may call in ill,” she said.

Ashley Rohwer, a certified surgical technologist at Mayo for almost two decades, said in her department at St. Marys, union and nonunion workers put in a combined average of 30 hours of overtime each day.

“Most employees if they’re [scheduled] at an eight-hour shift on a regular basis, most of them are working 12-hour shifts,” she said.

Mayo is now threatening its nurses with more limited work flexibility and “workforce issues” should they unionize.

Mayo, which in 2017 decided to prioritize the care of privately insured patients over those on Medicare and Medicaid, also killed efforts to create a Health Care Affordability Board in Minnesota last year. The committee would have monitored health care market trends and provided recommendations and oversight. Mayo didn’t just demand to be exempted from this bill but that it be axed altogether, writing:

This bill is extremely problematic and poses a huge threat to the well-being of Minnesota’s health care system as drafted. It must be removed from the HHS omnibus bill and consideration for Mayo to move forward with the previously stated investment.

Once again, Mayo got what it wanted.

Now to Uber and Lyft. Details of the failed worker-friendly bill from the Minnesota Reformer:

The bill required transportation network companies, including Uber and Lyft, to pay drivers a $5 minimum fee plus $1.45 per mile and 34 cents per minute in the seven-county Twin Cities metropolitan area. Drivers in greater Minnesota would have been entitled to $1.25 per mile and 34 cents per minute. The minimum rates would have increased with inflation.

Drivers would also have been entitled to 80% of cancellation fees if they already departed to pick up a rider as well as $1.25 per mile and 10 cents per minute if the companies charge customers for a “long pickup.”

Drivers were ecstatic at the prospects of better pay and protections:


But elected officials lacked the courage to stand behind workers when Uber went scorched earth, and in statements to news outlets across the state said the following:

If the bill is signed into law, beginning August 1, Uber will stop operating our ride service outside of Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area. In the metro area, we will only offer premium products to match the premium prices required by the bill.

In the end, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz vetoed the bill. A watered down version passed this year, however, which raises pay by $1.28 per mile and $0.31 per minute. Eid Ali, president of the Minnesota Uber/Lyft Drivers Association, said the law is progress, but still a letdown, especially in light of Walz vetoing a better version last year. “Letdown” is putting it kindly. What this year’s bill really did was strengthen Uber and Lyft’s duopoly in the state of Minnesota. From the Minnesota Reformer:

…the new law includes a series of anti-competitive mechanisms that will disadvantage any new competitor against the incumbents.

The application fees for ridehail companies are the biggest unaddressed issue that cements an anti-competitive market in place. Any Uber competitor entering the market first has to hand over nearly $100,000 in annual licensing fees to Minneapolis, St. Paul, and the Metropolitan Airports Commission.

The Minnesota bill also removed cities’ ability to set wages, enforce them, and to collect data about ridehail operations in their jurisdiction. More:

Lastly, the bill didn’t advance Minneapolis’ ordinance language requiring ridehail companies to pay 80% of special event or surge pricing, and drivers know very well that “platform fees” and “external fees” eat deeply into their existing take rate. Some drivers have publicly posted earnings of $13 on a $55 Lyft ride.As only 28% of riders ever tip, and gross Uber wages are overall down 17% since 2022, it would be no surprise if drivers saw even less earnings after the implementation of this bill. It’s odd that this element of Minneapolis’ language didn’t make the final bill, but then again, it’s odd that most elements of this bill benefit Uber and Lyft at the cost of drivers, riders and competitors.

So, to summarize: the Legislature’s ridehail bill is anti-competitive. It increases the costs for new competitors and for riders, and raises the barriers of entry for competitors, while not readjusting the regulatory fee to compete against Uber and Lyft. It removes the ability for drivers to influence their city councils to secure higher wages again. It introduces potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars of undefined and extortive costs to be compliant with nameless driver’s advocacy organizations, while disallowing those organizations to once again coordinate with competitors to provide an alternative for Uber and Lyft.

Walz, obviously, touts the bill as a major win for workers, but a closer look at the rideshare legislation and his servitude to big healthcare money show that “America’s dad” isn’t quite the friend of the common man he’s being made out to be.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/08 ... rkers.html

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Kamala Harris’s Environmental Deceptions

Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor 07 Aug 2024


Kamala Harris’s vaunted “environmental justice unit” prosecuted only the most trivial violations in San Francisco’s toxic Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood.

Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency and the strongest environmental protections the US had ever seen in response to the mass movements of the 1960s.

After Nixon, environmental laws gradually improved until Bill Clinton’s administration started rolling them back, especially through global “free trade” deals like NAFTA and those of the WTO, putting the environmental movement on the defensive. Every president since Clinton, Democrat or Republican, has successively worsened environmental protections. Obama expanded fossil fuel production more than any other president in US history, and Biden continued to expand it even more than Trump had. There’s little reason to think that Kamala Harris would be different, and she’s already reversed her opposition to fracking.

I spoke to Bradley Angel, Executive Director of San Francisco-based Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice , about her environmental record as San Francisco District Attorney and California State Attorney General.

ANN GARRISON: Bradley Angel, it would be hard to find anything more fraudulent than Kamala Harris’s claim to have been an environmental champion in San Francisco’s Bayview Hunters Point, a largely Black and Asian American neighborhood that’s been besieged by industrial and US military polluters ever since World War II. Could you talk about that?

BRADLEY ANGEL: Sure. When Kamala Harris was San Francisco’s District Attorney, she established what she called an environmental justice unit , and her statements announcing that actually sounded really great and much needed. Bayview Hunters Point is the picture postcard of environmental injustice and racism, and this environmental justice unit was one of the first established in the country.

As you know, I’ve been working with folks in this community for many years, so we were heartened by her promises, but then we never heard much more, if anything at all.

AG: You had hopes that she’d go after the really big polluters out there.

BA: Yes, because if it was done properly, if it had actually lived up to its stated mission, that would have been awesome, and it is so much needed. Bayview Hunters Point residents have suffered health disparities, from asthma to cancer and heart problems, which even government agencies acknowledge is linked to the many sources of pollution in the neighborhood. There continues to be a great need for criminal prosecution and enforcement of environmental laws in this heavily impacted community, but she just went after some really small-time folks, not the big industries and not at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard Superfund site, where the waste left behind by the US Navy continues to be scandalous.

It would have been great if she had taken this on both as San Francisco District Attorney and California Attorney General, but that never happened.

AG: Didn’t she go after a small newspaper publisher who had dumped 40 5-gallon buckets of ink in an abandoned lot, and an auto body shop that produced fraudulent smog check records on cars?

BA: Well, that’s what we understand. And it was appropriate to enforce the laws banning those things, but a few small-time folks trying to make a living shouldn’t have been the main focus of a so-called environmental justice unit in a neighborhood as environmentally damaged as Bayview Hunters Point.

For example, there are major industries that have been emitting harmful pollution into the air in Bayview Hunters Point without proper permits or proper environmental studies for decades, and no one, including Kamala Harris, took them on.

She certainly did nothing around the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard Superfund site, neither as DA nor as State Attorney General. And why didn’t she have to answer to that? It could be because she has powerful friends like Willie Brown, the former San Francisco Mayor and California State Assembly Speaker who kickstarted her political career and is now involved in developing real estate in Bayview Hunters Point. He actually ended up working for the Five Points Development Corporation , a spinoff from the Lennar Corporation , on a real estate development that’s been building luxury housing out there despite the pollution.

I can't read her mind about her motivations, but what we do know for a fact is that her so-called environmental justice unit did not take on the big polluters or the Navy’s scandalous environmental damage or the flawed cleanup at the shipyard.

AG: Tell us about that real estate corporation, the Lennar Corporation, which has close ties to then Mayor Gavin Newsom, now Governor Gavin Newsom, political kingmaker Willie Brown, and the Pelosi family. Tell us about their real estate project on or around the radioactive shipyard that the Navy left behind.

BA: Well, the Navy actually still has it, and they're trying to declare that, parcel by parcel, they're cleaning it up and making it suitable for real estate development, but they're not. As you know, the Lennar Corporation, one of the biggest developers in the United States, started working with the City and County of San Francisco several decades ago. At the time, in fact, Greenaction and a group called Poder sued the city over the inadequate environmental review of their development projects, and that battle has continued.

Now Lennar’s spin-off, Five Points Communities, plans to build more than 10,000 additional luxury houses at an inadequately and incompletely cleaned Hunters Point Shipyard Superfund site that they hope the government will declare clean and then give to the city, who will give it to their buddies from Lennar.

One parcel was deemed clean quite a few years ago, Parcel A up on the hill. The Navy, the federal and state agencies, and City Hall all said that it was no longer contaminated, even though it's part of the Shipyard, but a whistleblower exposed that it had not been cleaned up.

Hundreds of luxury condos have now been built on that hill, but they never tested under the homes. They never tested under the children's playground. When they were finally forced to do some testing a couple of years ago, what do you know? They found radioactive waste right next to the homes.

There's since been a big push to deem the other parcels clean. Back on June 29, Greenaction sued the Navy and the EPA about the inadequate cleanup and inadequate testing of the Shipyard Superfund site, and about two weeks ago now, the Navy gave in on some of the retesting issues. That’s our first victory on that, and it clearly pushes the development back, so that's where we stand now.

When Kamala Harris was DA, we didn’t see her environmental justice unit actively involved in any of this, and she did absolutely nothing about it as State Attorney General either.

AG: Wasn't the real estate construction causing the release of toxins into the air in Bayview Hunters Point?

BA: Yes, and quite a few years ago there was an underground chemical fire out there. We know that air monitors have often been turned off, so it's a really difficult situation. Even if people with super technical expertise were deployed, it’s not clear that it would be possible to ever properly and fully clean up that Superfund site, but the plan has never been for a full cleanup. It has been to do a partial cleanup, leaving radioactive and otherwise toxic waste buried at the shoreline, where the shipyard sits on San Francisco Bay. That shoreline will be underwater in years to come, spreading contamination further into the Bay and into Bayview Hunters Point.

Greenaction has been standing shoulder to shoulder with the community around this for decades, but they have not gotten the help they need on any of these issues, from the DA’s office to City Hall to the Attorney General’s office and all the way up to the federal government.

AG: Doesn't Bayview Hunters Point have one of the highest, if not the highest, breast cancer rate in the country?

BA: Well, a number of years ago that was apparently the case, and now, not surprisingly, industrial polluters including defense contractor Martin Marietta are operating on a couple of piers out there. Two freeways surround the neighborhood, and in addition to the toxic Shipyard Superfund site, there are many more contaminated brownfield sites, a sewage treatment plant, and heavy diesel freight traffic.

Unlike when I first started this work in the late ’80s, all the government agencies, from City Hall to the State of California and the US EPA, at least acknowledge that Bayview Hunters Point ranks way up there as one of the most polluted and vulnerable communities in the entire state of California, but they haven’t done anything about it.

AG: So in this super toxic neighborhood, Kamala Harris went after a small publisher dumping buckets of toxic ink in an abandoned lot and someone else falsifying smog check tests at an auto body shop. Then, when she was running for Attorney General, she produced a television advertisement in which she bragged about creating the “first ever environmental justice unit” in a District Attorney’s office. It seems extremely cynical.

BA: I have to agree. I'm not a big fan of the mainstream political parties in our country, and I think one is worse than the other, but that doesn't excuse inaction or the false claim that she did all these great things for the environment and these poor people in Bayview Hunters Point.

AG: Okay, there's one thing I can't help mentioning before we leave the subject of Bayview Hunters Point. Laurence Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi’s nephew, became Gavin Newsom's campaign treasurer when he was running for mayor the first time. He had been the head of the Lennar Corporation’s Southwest Acquisitions unit and after Newsom’s victory, the Lennar development took off in Bayview Hunters Point, right?

BA: Yes, again, there’s quite a nefarious network of connections and relationships in play here. It stinks and this is why Greenaction and residents continue to fight for the neighborhood against whoever is in power.

We at Greenaction also don’t want to see the Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood gentrified. We want to see it cleaned up for the people who live there, not for the millionaires who would move in.

AG: What can you tell us about Kamala Harris’s record as California Attorney General?

BA: I think it's mixed. It's a little better than when she was a DA in terms of environmental enforcement. She actually did take on some big polluters , not just the small potatoes she took on in San Francisco, but I don't think she did enough. Once again, she did nothing about Hunters Point and the Hunters Point Shipyard.

One of the most underreported stories is her failure to uphold her duties as Attorney General with regard to a farmworker community in the Central Valley of California called Kettleman City, which is halfway down the Interstate 5 highway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. If you make a left and go a mile, you wind up in the dusty farmworker town of Kettleman City . Then, if you go to the right two miles, you come to the biggest hazardous waste landfill in the West. Over the years, that toxic landfill has been allowed to operate with permits issued in straight-up racially discriminatory processes. It’s a largely Spanish-speaking community, and these were English-only permit processes enforced by police intimidation and harassment of residents.

Near the end of 2014, Greenaction and El Pueblo, a community group in Kettleman City, filed an administrative federal and state civil rights complaint against the EPA’s California State Department of Toxic Substances Control for approving the expansion of this landfill using these straight-up racially discriminatory processes. It was so bad that the United States EPA actually accepted our federal Title Six civil rights complaint for investigation within a matter of weeks, more quickly than they ever had. We had submitted a complaint to Attorney General Harris’s office under state civil rights laws, but we didn’t hear back from her for months. Then I got a call from her office saying they lost it and asking us to resend it.

So I resent it, but ultimately, we got a letter signed by Kamala Harris saying—I'm just paraphrasing here—that since her office represented the parties we had filed a complaint against, she couldn't do anything. And what that told us, in a nutshell, was that there was no enforcement mechanism for civil rights violations in California at the time. She didn't tell us to contact this person or that agency.

AG: You filed a complaint against the state agencies that had permitted this landfill in a racially discriminatory process, and she said she couldn’t do anything because she represented the state agencies?

BA: That’s right. It was a complaint filed against the State Department of Toxics and the California EPA. The Attorney General does represent those state agencies, but she also represents the people of the State of California, and we believed she had an obligation to do something for them.

I was honestly and pleasantly shocked that the feds took it so much more seriously, and it actually resulted in a landmark federal civil rights settlement with the state agencies, but nothing of the sort happened under Kamala Harris's watch as Attorney General.

AG: And what about her claims to have gone after Big Oil while she was Attorney General?

BA: I'm not 100% familiar with everything she did or did not do as Attorney General, but she did go after some bigger cases , and I think that's a good thing. Could she have done more? I'm sure she could have, but at least her record was a little better on that end than it was with her so-called environmental justice unit in San Francisco.

AG: She claimed to have sued Exxon Mobil for lying about their impact on climate change, but Politifact , Inside Climate News , and the New York Times all reported that that never happened. Her campaign responded that her office had investigated Exxon Mobil, and her critics were quibbling about the difference between an investigation and a lawsuit.

BA: I did not know that, but I wouldn't compare it to her hypocrisy about her environmental justice unit in San Francisco.

AG: Is there anything else you'd like to say about Kamala Harris's environmental record?

BA: Yes, I would. We have a presidential election coming up, and Greenaction does not endorse or oppose candidates for political office. I want to make that really clear.

Much of her rhetoric over the last couple of years around environment and environmental justice, has been positive. She has been acknowledging the reality of environmental injustice, of climate change, and the need for environmental, climate, and racial justice. That's a good thing, and the Biden-Harris administration has done some good things and bad things on these issues.

They've supported some of the pipeline projects and opposed others. They've protected—at least for now—the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, which is really important. They’ve also created some important national monuments like Bears Ears, which Trump had undone.

The bad things include promoting an increased domestic uranium reserve for advanced nuclear reactors, which means more uranium mining and more dumping of uranium mining tailings at the one uranium mill in the United States. It just happens to be—no surprise—next to an impoverished Native American community in southern Utah that Greenaction works with, the White Mesa Ute community.

We're also hearing that she’s reversed her position on fracking, which is very unfortunate, but I'm not surprised. This is what the Democratic Party does, of course, in our view.

AG: The Hill reported it as a fact that she’s reversed her position on fracking to court voters in the swing states.

BA: We’ve joined other environmental groups to pressure the White House on that, and I know she's going to be called out for it.

A few days ago I was at the Indigenous Environmental Network’s Protecting Mother Earth Conference , and a lot of people there were talking about her changing her position on fracking, so we’re very concerned. Donald Trump has been and will be horrible for the environment, but that doesn't excuse her speaking out for environmental justice and then not following through. Greenaction and a lot of others will be doing our best to hold her accountable and call her out as needed.

AG: Bradley, thank you for speaking to Black Agenda Report.

BA: Thanks, Ann.

https://blackagendareport.com/kamala-ha ... deceptions


"hold her accountable...", ho-ho, file that with 'hold my feet to the fire'...

It's easy to think these mainstream environmentalists had been dropped on their heads in infancy or something but I suspect that class interest, and not just the material aspect which is huge but the social effects which are required to seriously address environment and survival also figure.

It's been overall downhill for environmental legislation since Richard Nixon, think of the implications...They give us smoke and mirrors, then more smoke...

[blindpig]

Don’t be fooled by Tim Walz
August 7, 2024 Lev Koufax


At the University of Minnesota. As the genocide continued and the campus encampment movement against Zionism grew, Gov. Tim Walz condemned protesters and framed the pro-Palestine movement as anti-Semitic.


So, the Democratic Party finally has a complete ticket in the race for Warmonger in Chief. In a text message to supporters, presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris announced that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz will be her running mate this November. Within minutes of Harris’ selection, the entire Democratic party establishment was crowing over Mr. Walz.

Marc Mellman, chair of the Democratic Majority for Israel fundraising PAC, commented that Walz is a “proud pro-Israel Democrat with a strong record of supporting the U.S.-Israel relationship.” Former President but forever corrupt racist, Bill Clinton heralded Walz as “a terrific choice.” That alone should give one pause.

Several media outlets commented on the electoral logic of Harris’ decision to pick Walz instead of Pennsylvania governor and genocide cheerleader Josh Shapiro. Unlike Shapiro, Walz does not have a long history as an openly firebrand Zionist. Walz’s campaigns and political administrations have focused on domestic and Minnesota-specific issues, and his comments on foreign policy are limited.

Luckily, the Zionist propaganda service known as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) was kind enough to compile and publish all of Walz’s pro-”Israel” comments and policies, presumably to comfort conservative Zionist-Jewish voters who may view the selection of Walz as a move away from “Israel.” These Zionists need not be worried. Their genocidal regime is safe in the hands of Harris and Walz.

As Minnesota’s governor, Walz consistently refused to take any action to repeal Minnesota’s anti-BDS law or disinvest Minnesota’s government from its $3 billion investment in Israeli war bonds and U.S. defense contractors.

As printed in the JTA, Walz referred to the Palestinian rebellion of Oct. 7 as demonstrative of an “absolute lack of humanity, terrorism and barbarism.” Walz continued, “That’s not a geopolitical discussion. That’s murder.” So, Gov. Walz, are the Palestinian people supposed to meet missiles with “geopolitical discussion”? Imperialist politicians can’t help but shame the oppressed for their resistance.

In June, Walz told the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas that those who fail to recognize “Israel” are anti-Semitic. For what it’s worth, there are plenty of Jewish people as well who refuse to recognize “Israel.” Tim Walz from Minnesota does not have the right to call anti-Zionist Jews anti-Semites.

As the genocide continued and the campus encampment movement against Zionism grew, Walz condemned protesters and framed the pro-Palestine movement as anti-Semitic.

Tim Walz, from Minnesota to Palestine, has made his position clear. Harris’s decision to choose Walz over Shapiro should not fool anyone into believing that a Harris administration will mean the end of the U.S.-backed genocidal regime in Palestine. After all, Walz essentially said so himself.

Lev Koufax is an anti-Zionist Jewish activist.

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2024/ ... -tim-walz/

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From Aaron Bushnell To “I’m Speaking” In Five Months

I can’t really find the words to express how depressing it is to watch the life get sucked out of the anti-genocide movement in the United States because one of the candidates running for president this year happens to come from the administration that’s been overseeing said genocide.

Caitlin Johnstone
August 8, 2024

I can’t really find the words to express how depressing it is to watch the life get sucked out of the anti-genocide movement in the United States because one of the candidates running for president this year happens to come from the administration that’s been overseeing said genocide.

Kamala Harris shouted down protesters against the US-backed incineration of Gaza during a campaign rally on Wednesday, responding to their chants of “we won’t vote for genocide” by telling them they’re helping Trump win.

The Hill reports:

Demonstrators in the crowd at Harris’s Detroit rally repeatedly shouted out as the vice president spoke to an airplane hangar packed with supporters, “Kamala, Kamala you can’t Hide, we won’t vote for genocide.” The crowd booed and drowned out the protesters with chants of “Kamala.”

“I’m here because we believe in democracy. Everyone’s voice matters, but I am speaking now. I am speaking now,” Harris said to applause.

As protesters continued to interrupt, Harris delivered a more blunt warning.

“You know what, if you want Donald Trump to win then say that. Otherwise I’m speaking,” she said.

The crowd thunderously applauded the comments from Harris. Social media is full of Democrats sharing the footage of the interaction and fawning over what a commanding girlboss she is.

Like I said. Depressing.


Shortly after Biden withdrew from the race and endorsed Harris I noted that we were “already seeing some strong ‘shut up shut up SHUT UP about Gaza’ energy from Kamala supporters toward those to their left,” and since that time this phenomenon has been growing steadily worse. Now we’ve got this freakish dynamic where criticizing an administration that is guilty of the crime of genocide will get people telling you “Hey, nobody’s perfect!” like it’s some petty little quibble.

And I can’t help watching all this and wondering what Aaron Bushnell would think. On February 25 Bushnell self-immolated in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington while screaming “Free Palestine” to draw attention to the horrors his country was helping to inflict upon the people of Gaza, and now the cause he gave his life for in the most agonizing way possible is being intentionally subverted by people who claim to care about justice and human rights. What would this look like to him?

If, before igniting the accelerant, Bushnell had been granted a vision of Harris silencing anti-genocide protesters to the applause of her followers months in the future, would he still have gone through with it? Or would he have cast his lighter aside and collapsed in a fit of despair while Gaza burns, like the rest of us are doing right now?


Five months. In a bit over five months we went from seeing an active-duty airman light himself on fire to turn America’s eyes toward Gaza, followed by a highly energized student protest movement against their country’s facilitation of genocidal war crimes, to seeing those student protests crushed with the approval of the current president, and then his would-be successor telling anti-genocide protesters to shut the fuck up and fall in line so that Democrats can win.

Every time a light gets sparked in the darkness, the empire scrambles to snuff it out. Which wouldn’t be so depressing if not for all the brainwashed masses falling all over themselves to help them do it.

Ah well. The fight goes on. Even if these pricks are going to set the whole world on fire, we can still at least try to make it difficult for them.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/08 ... ve-months/

[blindpig]

On the Call Not to Protest in Chicago
August 8, 2024

According to LA Times editorialists, Chicago in 1960 and 1964 had good protesters who “worked within the party apparatus.” The 1968 protesters, they say, were bad and “set back the cause,” writes Riva Enteen and Ann Garrison.


Vice President Kamala Harris in August 2021. (White House /Erin Scott)

By Riva Enteen and Ann Garrison
Special to Consortium News

Two college professors who studied and lived in the 1960s recently published an opinion piece in The Los Angeles Times urging dissidents not to protest at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The first paragraph is a stark example of uber-liberals suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome:

“A collection of fringe radical groups are calling for demonstrations in Chicago this August at the Democratic National Convention — a ‘March on the DNC’ for Palestine. We study political movements, and we’ve participated in more than a few ourselves. We share the concerns of many Americans about Israel’s actions in Gaza, the need for an immediate cease-fire and the release of hostages and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel. But we’re not going to heed the call to protest in Chicago. We hope others will stay away as well.”

Cheri Honkala, an advocate for decades for the poor and homeless in the streets of Philadelphia, plans to lead the Poor People’s Army in a march to the steps of the United Center on the convention’s opening day. If she is “radical fringe,” then so am I.

The tireless and fearless founder of Philadelphia’s Kensington Welfare Rights Union in 1991, Honkala is now the Poor People’s Army’s national spokesperson and national coordinator of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign.

She has been arrested over 200 times, but says that her worst was at the July Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee where she tried to serve an arrest warrant on Trump and the Republican Party for crimes against humanity.

Police cuffed her, then drove her alone in a van to a closed prison where 200 military police officers sat at tables, ready to be of service to convention security on demand. They locked her in a room with glass walls for hours, then drove her to an empty warehouse district where they let her out at night in a thunder and lightning storm, with no wallet and no phone.


Honkala in 2012. (Jill Stein, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

She is now preparing to confront the Democrats. Chicago was compelled to grant the Poor People’s Army a permit to march to the steps of the convention at Chicago’s United Center after failing to respond to her appeal of a permit denial. Authorities are now attempting to reroute the march, but the Poor People’s Army does not plan to back down.

The protests will address domestic crises as well as the genocide against Palestinians. Honkala talks about the reality of the streets, telling Black Agenda Report that,

“More Americans have died because of the opiate crisis than died in the Vietnam War. Millions of dollars have come into Philadelphia, supposedly to help with recovery programs and housing and services here, but it never makes it to the people.”

However, these learned professors of the 1960s writing in the LA Times assert that those preparing to protest must support the Democratic Party and its candidates because Donald Trump is a new Hitler who will end democracy. They say this is not the time for protest.

Malcom X Comes to Mind

But who determines when to be patient and ask for incremental change, and when to demand radical change? At this point even national health care, closing Guantanamo, or increasing the national minimum wage to minimum subsistence, would be radical change. Malcom X comes to mind: “That’s not a chip on my shoulder. That’s your foot on my neck.” Sometimes, incrementalism doesn’t work.

Though the professors express “concern” about the genocide in Gaza, their piece speaks only of the Israeli hostages, not of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners, many of them children, held without charges, sexually assaulted, and tortured. A Knesset member recently said that rape of Palestinian prisoners is legitimate.

Oct. 7 happened in part because of all the Palestinians in prison with no charges or hope of a trial. The only ceasefire after Oct. 7 brought Palestinian prisoners home at a 3:1 ratio to Israeli hostages but the ratio of remaining Palestinian prisoners to Israeli hostages is still far higher. Prisoner release will be part of any negotiation and must be one of the demands of the Palestinian solidarity movement.


Palestinian Youth Accord for Prisoners rally in Gaza support of Palestinian administrative detainees on a mass hunger strike, May 12, 2014. (Joe Catron, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)

The professors say they support a two-state solution, but that dream is long dead; members of the U.N. Security Council and the General Assembly have repeated it like a mantra for decades as Israel colonized more land in the West Bank and rained bombs on Gaza. President Joe Biden and the U.S. State Department continue to invoke it but say that it can only be created by negotiation between Israelis and Palestinians, which is to say not at all.

Oct. 7 happened because 75 years of negotiations failed. The recent Israeli assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh dimmed hopes of a negotiated settlement any time soon.

These men of the ’60s claim that “the convention protests of 1960 and 1964 followed a sophisticated and pragmatic strategy of working within and without the party apparatus.” But why would anyone trust their “within and without” strategy after the Democratic Party elite stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020 and kept Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from running as a Democrat this year?

The long cover-up of Biden’s decline and his unceremonious replacement with Kamala Harris, a lock-em-up candidate who has never won a single delegate, reeks of Deep State. Many are asking, “Who is in charge, given the president’s obviously impaired faculties?”

Notice how Tony Blinken keeps addressing nation regarding all conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine over the last week?

Joe Biden is effectively AWOL & Kamala can’t be bothered to be questioned on what looks like could potentially be WWIII.

The U.S. gov is on autopilot pic.twitter.com/yZjBDXpfuX

— Duopoly Destroyer (@realnikohouse) August 6, 2024

While praise is showered on Biden’s alleged prowess in negotiating the recent historic and complicated international prisoner exchange, his incompetence was evident in the disastrous June 27 debate. He confuses Haifa with Rafa, and Mexico with Egypt. There is no way he negotiated the prisoner exchange.

According to the LA Times editorialists, Chicago in 1960 and 1964 had good protesters who “worked within the party apparatus.” The 1968 protesters, they say, were bad and “set back the cause.”

The DNC protests are allegedly why Hubert Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon, who continued the Vietnam War longer — they hypothesize — than Humphrey would have. Of course the anti-war candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, had probably just been assassinated by the Deep State, after winning the California primary, all but assuring his nomination. But rather than protest, we should have quietly urged an anti-war platform?

Humphrey promised to stop bombing North Vietnam and seek a ceasefire after the convention and before the election, because it was clear that the anti-war movement couldn’t be ignored. Would he have made those promises without the protests in Chicago? Would he have kept them if elected? There is no way to know for sure.

As one who was on the streets protesting the Vietnam War, I knew that it was imperative to let the Vietnamese know we were in solidarity with them, and the Palestinians deserve no less. We must express our outrage at both parties for their support of the ongoing genocide in Gaza.


Demonstration outside the The Watergate Hotel in Washington, where Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu was staying, July 22. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

“The key organizers,” the professors write,

“the ones who will determine the message this protest conveys by its slogans and actions, are members of the ultra-leftist Party for Socialism and Liberation, and its front organization, the ANSWER coalition. This is the same group behind the demonstration that burned an American flag and defaced monuments in a ‘day of rage’ as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Congress last week.”

If burning an American flag, a form of protest protected by the Supreme Court, and defacing monuments as acts of rage against war criminal Netanyahu make protestors “ultra-leftist,” then sign me up.

Rather than using labels like ultra-leftist, why not challenge what this group actually says, specifically and factually? The global stakes are quite high, so clarification and accuracy are essential. The Poor People’s Army and Code Pink are also among the organizers. The protests are organized by a coalition of groups determined to challenge the Democrats in the streets over their position on Palestine. Let’s not bring back Red baiting.

According to the professors, “…the primary goal has to be to defeat Donald Trump, and to help Democratic candidates win in the House and Senate.”

They don’t want to lose voters “to a perception that Democrats are the party of chaos…” But it is past time to expose the chaos to the light of day. We would be immoral to stand passively by as the U.S. funds genocide in Palestine and plays a game of nuclear chicken with Russia in Ukraine.

Rather than conceding all political space to the Democratic Party’s coronation of Kamala Harris, we must expose how fundamentally undemocratic it is. They stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders twice, kept RFK Jr out of this year’s Democratic primary, then shoehorned Kamala Harris into place with the barest semblance of Democratic process; a bunch of no-name delegates quickly met and agreed to throw their support to her.

According to renowned journalist Seymour Hersch, Barack Obama threatened Biden with the 25th Amendment if he didn’t step down. It’s all about backroom deals and Deep State manipulations, while the rest of us wonder who’s really in charge. Yet the professors scoff at the notion that the Democratic Party is “a tool of billionaires and corporations.” It’s not?

Insane story from Seymour Hersh…

Biden was threatened with the 25th Amendment by top level Democrats.

"Obama called Biden after breakfast [on July 21] and said, ‘Here’s the deal. We have Kamala’s approval to invoke the 25th Amendment.’” pic.twitter.com/pxL27A7fhB

— Geiger Capital (@Geiger_Capital) July 28, 2024

Ajamu Baraka recently wrote:

“The fact that select oligarchs, in this case, the cabal that actually runs the Democrat Party, can remove a presidential nominee and expeditiously anoint Kamala Harris as his replacement cannot be characterized as anything else but a coup…The oppressed must have a clear and sober understanding of the class and power dynamics in the Democrat Party but also in the broader society. The gangster move by the oligarchs who control the Democrats stripped away any pretense that any real structures of democracy exist in that party.”

People who went to Chicago in 1968 to protest the Vietnam War at the DNC were courageous and righteous. People planning to go to Chicago’s DNC this year to protest Democratic Party complicity in the ongoing Gaza genocide are also courageous and righteous. Crash the party is a slogan of the Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. Sign me up. We need to get that foot off our necks.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/08/08/o ... n-chicago/

But will those protesting Gaza also protest Ukraine? If DSA is involved I doubt it. Are some dead victims of US policy more worthy than others? The civilians of Donbass who have endured 10 years of Nazis shelling want to know.

[blindpig]

Nobody Would Vote For Any Of This Bullshit Without Extensive Manipulation

It is a well-documented fact that under the western empire not only are our political systems aggressively manipulated by the rich and powerful for the benefit of the rich and powerful, but public opinion is as well. Insane systems which rely on exploitation, injustice, ecocide, militarism and war are actively normalized via mass-scale psychological manipulation,…

Caitlin Johnstone
August 10, 2024

One of the biggest lies we are sold in western politics is that election results paint an accurate picture of what the public truly wants. We are told that candidates who promote peace and economic justice lose elections because their platforms are unpopular with the wider public, as though the people are organically coming into worldviews which support poverty, inequality, war and militarism all on their own.

“Socialism just isn’t popular!” we are told, as though we don’t live under a capitalist empire that has spent generations violently stomping out socialism wherever it pops up and brainwashing the public into despising socialism at home.

“Americans just don’t care that much about foreign policy,” we’re told, as though Americans aren’t being propagandized to the gills every day of their lives into seeing their government’s bloodthirsty warmongering as normal and acceptable.

It is a well-documented fact that under the western empire not only are our political systems aggressively manipulated by the rich and powerful for the benefit of the rich and powerful, but public opinion is as well. Insane systems which rely on exploitation, injustice, ecocide, militarism and war are actively normalized via mass-scale psychological manipulation, and we are then presented with candidates and platforms which support those systems and told that anything else is fringe commie extremism.

If left to their own devices nobody would organically come to the conclusion that there should be people living on the streets while investment properties are left empty, that normal people should be working two jobs to feed and house their families while Machiavellian plutocrats amass billions of dollars, that we should be destroying the ecosystem we depend on for survival to increase profits for corporate shareholders, or that we should be encircling the planet with war machinery to terrorize and murder any population on earth who disobeys the dictates of Washington. But that’s what our elections serve us up year after year, decade after decade — because no part of this is organic.

So now we’re seeing a US election where two tyrannical capitalist warmongers are squaring off against each other, appealing to the votes of America’s two mainstream political factions which are only mainstream because vast fortunes have been poured into propaganda manipulations to make them mainstream. Then you’ve got candidates like Jill Stein saying normal, sane and common sense things about peace and justice while being framed as an extremist lunatic by the consent manufacturers of the mainstream press. And when Stein loses in this aggressively manipulated information environment within this aggressively manipulated electoral system, it will be framed as evidence that her politics were seen as too fringe and kooky for the mainstream public.

Whenever I talk about this dynamic during a high-profile election season I am always inundated with a deluge of knee jerk point-missers asking “Well who SHOULD we vote for then??”, which is kind of like Morpheus telling Neo he’s been living his whole life in the matrix and Neo going, “Okay but how do I get my boss to give me a raise in my cubicle job where I work?” It doesn’t matter, Neo. The whole thing’s an illusion. What matters is getting people to open their eyes to this reality so that real meaningful action can be taken.

If you’re having a dream about being chased by a lynch mob, your only concern is making sure your own interests win out over the interests of the mob. When you wake up from the dream, you don’t spend the rest of your day wondering how you’re going to get away from the mob. You concern yourself with your real material interests in your waking life.

That’s what this should be like. If you really grasp what’s being pointed to here, you won’t keep getting swept up in the mass psychosis of election season hysteria, and party politics won’t have any gravitational pull on your mind. Instead, your focus will be on helping people to realize that this is all a carefully manufactured illusion, because until enough of us are awake to the real world, there’ll be no chance of using the power of our numbers to overthrow the tyrants who’ve been pulling the wool over our eyes this entire time.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/08 ... ipulation/

[blindpig]

Benchmarking the Coming Democratic Convention Protests in Chicago
Posted on August 16, 2024 by Yves Smith.

Conventions are normally hum-drum affairs, with all the charm of a Jerry Lewis telethon. The Democrats hope to extend the Kamala honeymoon by having a festive, well-publicized, and problem-free event. The recent big wave of anti-Israel-genocide protests and possible anti-immigration demonstrations are looming threats. If either happens on any scale, it’s all too easy to make comparisons to Chicago 1968.

That also means the incentives for the dominant Democratic-party friendly media to minimize any effective political action will be strong. That means good odds of under-reporting on any embarrassing scuffles or ambushing of officials or participants. It also means the protests will be held up to artificially high standards for result.

This post is intended to raise some questions as opposed to deliver answers. Activists in our readership and those familiar with theory and practice of protest and social change are encouraged to speak up.


Sadly, the group with the most expertise in using protests and other means of effecting change is the CIA. That would also suggest that they could readily devise the playbook as to how to undermine their usual moves. Have any readers come across scholarly or good journalistic work seeking to reverse engineer the CIA color revolution manual? Or does it involve too many hard to replicate measures, like finding promising young people and getting them indoctrinated educated in the US?

Many readers decry the idea of violent or even merely inconvenience-creating actions. Frederick Douglass disagrees:

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress

How do we think about whether protests “work”? The officialdom and media have done a very good job of persuading the great unwashed public that organized resistance is ineffective. And in many senses that is correct because it takes so long to move the Overton Window and effect change. From a 2010 post:

It’s astonishing to see how Americans have been conditioned to think that political action and engagement is futile. I’m old enough to have witnessed the reverse, how activism in the 1960s produced significant advances in civil rights blacks and women, and eventually led the US to exit the Vietnam War.

I’m reminded of this sense of despair almost daily in the comments section. Whenever possible action steps come up, virtually without fail, quite a few will argue that there is no point in making an effort, that we as individuals are powerless.

I don’t buy that as a stance, particularly because trained passivity is a great, low cost way to hobble people who have been wronged. I mistakenly relegated an article by Johann Hari in the Independent on this topic to Links, and Richard Kline’s commentary on it made me realize it deserved its own post, so I am remedying that error now.

As Kline observed:

The nut of the matter is this: you lose, you lose, you lose, you lose, they give up. As someone who has protested, and studied the process, it’s plain that one spends most of one’s time begin defeated. That’s painful, humiliating, and intimidating. One can’t expect typically, as in a battle, to get a clean shot at a clear win. What you do with protest is just what Hari discusses, you change the context, and that change moves the goalposts on your opponent, grounds out the current in their machine. The nonviolent resistance in Hungary in the 1860s (yes, that’s in the 19th century) is an excellent example. Communist rule in Russia and its dependencies didn’t fail because protestors ‘won’ but because most simply withdrew their cooperation to the point it suffocated.

So let’s return to the headline issue. How do you benchmark particular protests or protest programs? Please do not point out the obvious, that this question seems to contradict the notion right above, that protest does not result in fast, easy, or even much visible wins, but slowly grinds away at the legitimacy and foundations of support for the behavior being targeted.

Yet one of the ways to tamp down demonstrations and other forms of opposition is to subject them to performance tests or expected results that movement members never had. For instance, it’s common to criticize Occupy Wall Street for not achieving anything, even though its members never promised that. The fact that it is still remembered even though the original occupation in New York City lasted all of two months until it was cleared as part of a 17-city paramilitary crackdown shows its very existence in representing the 99% v. the 1% (that was their meme and it has endured) shows it did have an impact, and was perceived as a threat. The press regularly insisted that Occupy serve up leaders and present demands, which it never did. Its cumbersome collective decision-making process was an impediment to action, but was arguably a good vehicle for what in the 1960s was called consciousness-raising.

Or consider Black Lives Matter. It was starting to get traction, witness even some Congresscritters taking up the poorly-formulated and therefore discrediting demand to defund the police. But by that point, it had already been infiltrated by Democrats, with actual or pliable potential leaders bought off with various paid opportunities. Lambert can fill in vastly more detail, but even yours truly noticed that the co-opting process started around when Black Lives Matter started organizing die-ins, which got high levels of white and Hispanic participation.

More recently, I’ve had readers and contacts depict the late spring wave of US campus protests as ineffective because they saved no Palestinian lives. But even though this is the ultimate aim (and sadly looks unlikely to be achieved absent an escalation of Axis of Resistance action, which as we all know risks all sorts of collateral consequences), they had specific demands, such as that school endowments divest holdings in Israel-related ventures (which frankly have to be miniscule) and supporting the BDS movement. Even though the tangible impact on these fronts seems marginal at best, as far as I can tell, an effect of the protests was to greatly increase the media’s willingness to use the word genocide. It also exposed the power of Zionist billionaires in stomping on the schools and threatening to ruin the careers of student protestors.

There is no reason to think these protests won’t continue when the school year resumes, and so the soft costs of backing Israel will continue to increase.

These examples underscore the difference in timescales, that for most reform campaigns, progress is so slow and hard to discern that it’s easy to dismiss them as unproductive. And that’s before getting to subversion or simply trying to crush them out of existence, as we saw with the recent wave of campus anti-Israel genocide uprisings.

So the expected anti-genocide and anti-immigration protests at the Democratic Convention are vanishingly unlikely to produce a strategic win, absent a horrible miscalculation by the police that turns participants into martyrs.

What type of tactical gains could they achieve? This is a partial list:

Increasing morale among their sympathizers, perhaps at the margin increase participation and other support

Get media attention. Donald Trump has shown that there is no such thing as bad press

Show that they have power, by virtue of numbers or cleverness of tactics undermining the Kamala party. This might be more consequential than it appears. The Democrats hope to keep the ‘gasm going through elections. Effective protests, even if way below Chicago ’68 levels of disruption, could undermine the party efforts to project a Kamala win as inevitable

The venues, United Center and McCormick Place, are already being cordoned off, so demonstrations at the site. beyond stragglers somehow getting close enough to make a fuss and being quickly removed, is na ga happen. .

So what about outside? Again this is not my area, but the recent protestor blockage of the 405, a major highway in Los Angeles, suggests that strangling transportation arteries is not hard and has high payoff, at least in terms of getting attention.

Chicago has a major point of vulnerability: the Kennedy Expressway, which goes from downtown Chicago to O’Hare airport. It is also a major commuter road. There is a good public train from the airport to downtown, but it is highly unlikely to have the capacity to replace the expressway if protestors were to stop traffic for any length of time. I’ve had cabs take the streets rather than the expressway at peak traffic times. Few knew how to do that, and the route is a bit convoluted. Of course, with GPS, knowledge is no barrier, but those side streets would presumably get choked pretty quickly too.

McCormick Place is isolated, meaning it is already a logistical hassle for convention participants to get there from their hotels. A convention is like a fashion show; one big point is to show foot soldiers a good time. So the use of McCormick Place undermines that at the margin. McCormick Place is also near a big highway, and former Chicagoans tell me they think it would not be hard to block that and chock traffic around that convention center.

Having said all that, ironically the test here is likely not old-school effective action, which depended on scale to show the protestors had mass or at least considerable numbers, but the ability to generate video vignettes that could and do go viral and succeed in amplifying protestor positions. But we’ll see soon enough if Team Dem has successfully pre-positioned its anti-agitator measures, or whether the demonstrators manage to dent the plan to have a glossy, friction-free event.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/08 ... icago.html

*****



Democrats Are Pigs

That’s right: they’re using her condescending shutdown of pro-Palestine demonstrators as a fun girlboss campaign slogan now.

Caitlin Johnstone
August 16, 2024

❖

Author Stephen King has a new viral tweet featuring a picture of himself wearing a Kamala Harris t-shirt modeled after an Obama campaign sticker captioned with the words “I’M SPEAKING” — a phrase with which she drew headlines and severe public outcry last week by using it to shut down anti-genocide protesters at a campaign rally in Detroit.

That’s right: they’re using her condescending shutdown of pro-Palestine demonstrators as a fun girlboss campaign slogan now.

God damn it I hate Democrats so fucking much.


❖

It’s actually kind of obnoxious that Gaza gets framed as a “political” issue at all. If you turned into an alleyway and saw a man dismembering a child, would your reaction to what you were witnessing be “political”? We’re all witnessing raw video footage of horrific atrocities every day; our reaction to this is not comparable to our opinions about prison reform or fiscal policy.

This idea that professors shouldn’t discuss “politics” in class with regard to an active genocide, or that a pianist deserves to have his concert canceled because he expressed “political views” by dedicating a piece to the journalists who’ve been killed in Gaza, or that we shouldn’t bring up Gaza in polite company because it’s talking about “politics” — these are symptoms of a civilization that has gone stark, raving mad.

Our visceral response to what we are witnessing is no more “political” than our reaction to someone stomping on puppies would be “political”. This isn’t one of those “oh yeah well you have your opinion and I have mine and that’s cool” things. Human beings are being butchered by the thousands in full view of the whole world. You don’t get to run cover for this by filing it away under the label of political opinion.

❖

Saying Iran and Hezbollah should not retaliate when Israel goes on an assassination spree in the capital cities of their countries is exactly the same as telling the world that Israel gets to kill whoever they want whenever they want with no consequences.

❖

Israeli officials are reportedly showing more and more support for a war with Hezbollah, largely because support from the US and its allies has proved so unwaveringly reliable no matter what Israel does over the past year.

Washington’s unconditional support for Israel keeps making the middle east a more and more dangerous and deadly place. They say they’re working to bring “peace and stability” while demonstrably having the exact opposite effect in every possible way.

❖

Perhaps the strongest evidence that the US empire is not run by rational actors is the way all facts show that a war with China would be completely unwinnable and would destroy the economy and the ecosystem — and yet all facts also show they’re preparing to wage this war anyway.

❖

The only way to believe Democrats are significantly better than Republicans or vice-versa is to both (A) be unable to distinguish actions from words and (B) to completely ignore foreign policy.

(A) means you have to look solely at your preferred party’s platform while ignoring the actions they actually take, which are not drastically different from the actions the other party takes relative to the 99.99% of policies and systems they leave in place from administration to administration.

(B) means you have to pay zero attention to all the violence, tyranny and abuse the US government inflicts upon populations around the world, of which there is no meaningful difference between parties at all. The overwhelming majority of American violence, tyranny and abuse is directed not at Americans but at people outside the United States, so by excluding this from your analysis you are excluding almost all of the evils of your preferred party when claiming it is morally superior to the other.

❖

US foreign policy is much, much more consequential, destructive and deadly than US domestic policy. It’s not a “single issue”, it’s almost all of the issues.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/08 ... -are-pigs/

*****

Kamala Harris in Her Own Words
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 14 Aug 2024


Image: BET Awards

Kamala Harris stands with the corporate democrats who are committed to austerity and imperialism. No one needs to wonder what she will do should she become president. What did Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden do? President Harris would follow in their ignoble footsteps.

“People have said if you look at for example the whole, remember the whole, the heat that ended up around the bend the knee and Colin Kaepernick. Many smart people have said it actually was not a thing. The Russian bots started taking that on.”

Kamala Harris on the Breakfast Club, July 12, 2019

Voters in the United States who feel compelled to choose between political duopoly presidential candidates are once again faced with two terrible choices. Donald Trump is the known quantity, a former president and a man of very limited intelligence. So much so that he recently confused Willie Brown with Jerry Brown . He is unsuited for anything other than what he did most of his life, promote himself as a business success when his companies filed for bankruptcy on six occasions . In 2016 he rallied white peoples’ feelings of grievance, pretended to be a champion of working people and won an electoral college vote due to his opponent’s arrogance and incompetence. When he lost the election for a second term in 2020, Trump insisted that he hadn’t and encouraged a mob to enter the Capitol and stop the electoral college election certification.

Kamala Harris is the current Vice President who stepped into the role of presidential candidate and Democratic Party nominee when Joe Biden’s physical and mental frailty became so obvious that the rich donors who put him in office decided to take him out of the race. Her campaign consists of little more than repetition of typical party talking points and a lot of good press from corporate media. In this case “good” means no journalists to speak of. The New York Times coverage consists of stories about vibes, joy, and the wonders of Kamala’s once derided laughter.

As a presidential candidate in 2020 she won no delegates and dropped out of the race before she could be embarrassed by a bad primary loss in her home state of California. Yet she became Biden’s running mate and ultimately vice president, a job for which she was spectacularly unsuited.

Harris became known for having a stunning inability to speak intelligently unless she was in front of a teleprompter. When unscripted she would often blurt out that young people are very stupid or gibberish about not falling out of a coconut tree. “Everything is in context. My mother used to… she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’ You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”

The coconut tree line was rightly dismissed as nonsense coming from a woman who has enough self-awareness to know when she sounds silly who then laughs to cover up her discomfort. Yet the embarrassing flub has now been turned into a campaign slogan. If nothing else Harris demonstrates how the state and its partners in corporate media can work together and turn a vice president who is perceived as a joke into a credible candidate for the top job if that is what the oligarchy wants to happen.

The kindest thing that one can say about Harris is that she wouldn’t be the first mediocrity to become president of the United States. After all, Joe Biden was never thought of as being smart during his years in the senate and yet he became vice president and then president. He still sits in the Oval Office, and is not even in his right mind. Harris word salads and laughter at odd moments will join Reagan stammering, Bush 43 malaprops, and Trump fantasies about event crowd size as proof that anyone with the right political connections and money can in fact assume the highest office in the land.

It is striking that at the moment U.S. proxy Ukraine sends troops into Russia and Israel is again instigating a U.S. attack on Iran, that KamalaHarris.com says nothing about foreign policy or domestic policy either for that matter. One can donate, volunteer, and buy merchandise, but what you can’t do is find out where Harris stands on the issues.

Eventually her site will show a neo-liberal and imperialist wishlist that adds fake concern about women’s rights or voting rights or something else democrats claim to care about but don’t fight to achieve. Policy information is not shown because Harris stands for nothing but a continuation of the status quo. She is a careerist who was helped along the path of becoming a district attorney, attorney general of California, a United States Senator and then presidential candidate by rich white people. Her climb up the ladder came without ideology or serious thought on any issue.

How could anyone claim that the reaction to Colin Kaepernick’s very principled stance against police killings was the result of Russian bot activity? A cynical and unserious person would make such a statement. A person so shallow that she would think those words would be acceptable cannot be taken seriously as a change agent or a harm reducing “lesser evil.” If Kamala Harris becomes president it will because she avoids talking about anything that voters need or want. The whole point of buying politicians is to make sure they do not represent the people. Sometimes we end up with an intelligent person like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, and sometimes we get a lesser light intellectually. The end result is the same, immiseration at home, and death around the world.

One of the issues that brought Biden’s campaign to an end was public protest over the ongoing U.S./Israeli genocide in Gaza. If it continues, Harris’ shot at the white house is also in jeopardy. While in Selma, Alabama where she and other politicians go to pimp off of memories of the liberation struggle, Harris stated that she supported a six-week pause in the Gaza killing spree. “And given the immense scale of suffering in Gaza there must be an immediate ceasefire for at least the next six weeks, which is what is currently on the table. This will get the hostages out and give a significant amount of aid in.”

She merely restated Biden administration policy. The U.S. can stop the war crimes any time it wants, instead the government pretends that a six-week pause in the fighting that it controls is a reality and not a fake effort meant to quiet discontent.

When Harris was interrupted by Palestine solidarity protesters in Detroit she acted like a frustrated teacher trying to tame an unruly class. “You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.” The routine didn’t go over well and three days later a change in tone appeared. “I have been clear: now is the time to get a ceasefire deal and get the hostage deal done.”

Campaign wordsmithing notwithstanding, she may as well have stuck with the first statement because she makes clear that she will not change U.S. policy towards Israel. On the same day she claimed to want a ceasefire, the Biden and Harris administration announced another tranche of aid for Israel totaling $3.5 billion with an additional $20 billion allocated the following week. In case there was any doubt where she stands, her National Security Adviser made it clear. “She does not support an arms embargo on Israel.”

Kamala Harris is an opportunist in over her head but who has decided she wants to be president. She has a history of actions and statements that speak for her. She is an establishment democratic who is beholden to the party’s donor class. Of course that is a description of every president. All one needs to do is pay attention to what they say.

https://blackagendareport.com/kamala-ha ... -own-words

SPEECH: Address to the AIPAC Policy Conference, Kamala Harris, 2017
Editors, The Black Agenda Review 14 Aug 2024


Kamala Harris: Your Auntie, AIPAC’s servant.

Any confusion concerning Kamala Harris’ stance on zionism can easily be cleared up by reading her speech to the 2017 policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC.

What is AIPAC? AIPAC, a supposedly non-profit organization concerned with social and cultural affairs, is actually the most powerful political lobby in the United States for the occupying zionist entity in historic Palestine. It was formed in 1954 during yet another zionist massacre against Palesitians in the West Bank village of Qibya. The goal of AIPAC was to give cover to the massacre with pro-zionist propaganda. Since that time, AIPAC has become a powerhouse - one of 9 major pro-zionist lobby firms operating in the US. Its power comes from its billionaire donors club, its direct control of US politicians through funding and, lately, near-complete control over the US political process. In 2022, AIPAC created a “political action committee” (PAC) that gave it the ability to provide unlimited funding to US congresspeople. Today, AIPAC funds 342 out of 535 members of Congress, and through this funding – through these open payoffs – it has been able to control US foreign policy towards the zionist terrorist entity.

AIPAC has become even more powerful since October 7, 2023 when Palestinian resistance forces attacked the settler colonial state. Almost a hundred million dollars in donations poured in from some of the richest zionist Jews in the US in the 2 months after October 7th. Now, bold and belligerent, AIPAC promises to punish any US political leader who dares criticize the current genocide of the Palestinian people. It has succeeded in unseating two Black US congress members in the past 2 months and it is confident that it will be able to impact the US presidential election in its diabolical quest to protect the zionist terrorist entity. We were told that Russia interfered with the 2016 elections; AIPAC loudly proclaims its quest to unseat elected government officials without fear of backlash, criticism, or censure. People in the US must ask why it is that this organization is not registered as a foreign agent.

Very few politicians have declined the invitation to express their fealty to the zionist lobby by attending and addressing the yearly AIPAC conferences. Indeed, Kamala Harris has regularly addressed AIPAC to assure the lobby of her complete devotion to zionism. During her 2017 speech to AIPAC, Harris spoke of not only her longstanding personal ties to “Israel” (ties strengthened by her marriage to lawyer Doug Emhoff, Biden’s unofficial adviser on antisemitism), but also of her belief in a robust, pro-Israel political and economic policies on the part of the United States. Harris does not equivocate, proclaiming her support for “Israel’s security and right to self-defense.” She wanted her audience to be clear about her support: “I stand with Israel because of our shared values, which are so fundamental to the founding of both our nations. I believe the bonds between the United States and Israel are unbreakable…” Those “shared values” are those of genocide, white supremacy, and a general depravity.

Now that Harris has been (undemocratically) chosen to be the flag bearer for the misnamed Democratic Party, she has not stepped back from her support for the genocidal zionist entity. Of course, one need not merely listen to her words. One can always judge her actions. A day after voicing support for a ceasefire, the Biden-Harris government released an additional $3.5 billion in military aid to Israel (and as we write, a sale of additional $18.8 billion in military equipment has been approved). As if on cue, the next day the zionist massacred 100 people, mostly women and children, in a school in Gaza City. Nice work, Auntie.

As the Democratic party’s presidential candidate, Kamala Harris is now being feted and deceivingly constructed as a “progressive” candidate. Already, she has gleaned overwhelming support from Black populations. It must be noted that Harris’s campaign has been vague on policy, but her policy position on the genocidal zionist terrorist entity was made clear in her groveling speech to AIPAC.

While this column was initiated to give a platform to the long legacy of Black radical thought, we think it occasionally important to document the treachery of Black misleaders working in the service of U.S. empire. Kamala Harris’s remarks to AIPAC are reprinted below.

Senator Kamala Harris’ Address to 2017 AIPAC Conference, Washington

Good morning, AIPAC, good morning. What an honor. Lillian (Pinkus), congratulations on your outstanding presidency, and it’s great to be with you again this year. I also want to thank AIPAC’s executive director, Howard Kohr, and I’m just thrilled to see all of the students in the audience. In you, I see our future. I want to especially recognize the nearly 1,000 Californians who are here today, and of course including my dear friends and AIPAC board members Anita Friedman and Sissy Swig and Amy Friedkin. And I’m proud to say and be that among the many voices represented here, the California delegation is the largest and hopefully the loudest. There you go.

So having grown up in the Bay Area, I fondly remember those Jewish National Fund boxes that we would use to collect donations to plant trees for Israel. Years later, when I visited Israel for the first time, I saw the fruits of that effort and the Israeli ingenuity that has truly made a desert bloom. I soaked in the sights and sounds and smells of Jerusalem. I stood in Yad Vashem, devastated by the silent testimonies of the 6 million Jews that were murdered in the Holocaust, and we must always remember that solemn promise: “Never again.”

And I did what I often do when visiting a new country: I visited the highest court in the land. And as I toured Israel’s Supreme Court, I was struck by the iconic architecture, which embodies Israel’s founding principles of democracy and rule of law. The design of that building left a lasting impression on me: its straight lines, which represent the immutable nature of truth, while the curved walls and glass represent the fluid nature of tzedek, of justice.

And this is a concept that is personal for me because it’s that same commitment to justice for the voiceless and the vulnerable that led my parents as students to march for civil rights in the 1960s while pushing me in a stroller. And it’s why I became a prosecutor and personally prosecuted everything from low-level offenses to homicides. It’s why I became San Francisco district attorney and was later elected attorney general of California, where I took on, thank you, where I took on transnational gangs, cyber criminals and mortgage fraud.

And that commitment to justice is why I ran to become a United States senator from the great state of California, the point being to continue that fight. And a critical piece of my agenda is the fight to defend and strengthen our national security. As a member of both the Senate Intelligence Committee and Homeland Security Committee, I have a front-row seat to these issues, and I am proud to stand strongly with America’s allies, including Israel.

So let me be clear about what I believe. I stand with Israel because of our shared values, which are so fundamental to the founding of both our nations. I believe the bonds between the United States and Israel are unbreakable, and we can never let anyone drive a wedge between us. Our bonds are rooted in our shared history and are strengthened by the ties between our peoples. And in the words of Shimon Peres, whose loss we mourn so deeply, “For Israel’s existence, we need the friendship of the United States of America.”

And of course he knew that feeling goes both ways, and there’s no question that friendship and our partnership must be unwavering. And I believe that Israel must be — the teleprompter has stopped, and now I’m going to catch it back up. There we are.

I believe Israel should never be a partisan issue, and as long as I’m a United States senator, I will do everything in my power to ensure broad and bipartisan support for Israel’s security and right to self-defense.

I believe that the only viable resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is two states for two people, living side by side in peace and security.

I believe that a resolution to this conflict cannot be imposed. It must be agreed upon by the parties themselves. Peace can only come through a reconciliation of differences, and that can only happen at the negotiating table.

I believe that when any organization delegitimizes Israel, we must stand up and speak out for Israel to be treated equally.

And that is why the first resolution I co-sponsored as a United States senator was to combat anti-Israel bias at the United Nations and reaffirm that the United States seeks a just, secure and sustainable two-state solution.

And as someone who’s personally prosecuted hate crime, I also believe that we cannot stand by while antisemitism, hate crime and bigotry are on the rise, whether that’s a swastika on a Jewish Family and Children’s Services bus in San Francisco or the burning of a mosque in Tampa.

That’s why I am pleased to announce for the first time here at AIPAC that I’m introducing a Senate resolution that condemns targeting of Jews, as well as any form of religious bias, racism, misogyny or other hateful acts targeting minorities across the United States.

And let’s be candid. Many, including those in this hall, have been directly impacted by the outrageous incidents targeting the Jewish community. This violence and hate is alarming and simply unacceptable.

No one should have to worry about their children’s safety when they drop them off at the JCC.

No one should have to be afraid to put a menorah in their front window or on their front lawn.

And no one should ever have to fear that the grave of a loved one might be desecrated because of their faith.

So my resolution calls on law enforcement to expedite investigations of hate crime and hold perpetrators accountable. My resolution calls on law enforcement to fully report hate crime statistics, and my resolution calls on the administration to support victims and fund security at places of worship and other institutions that have been targeted — of any faith.

And as I fight to promote human rights and security, Israel and the Jewish community will always be a priority for me. And that is why as senator I am particularly focused on three areas where I believe the United States and Israel can expand our cooperation and where California plays an important and central role, and the three are defense, cybersecurity and water security.

So let’s think about it. First, defense. In the midst of uncertainty and turmoil, America’s support for Israel’s security must be rock-solid.

And as Iran continues to launch ballistic missiles while it arms and funds its terrorist proxy Hezbollah, we must stand with Israel.

As Hamas maintains its control of Gaza and fires rockets across Israel’s southern border, we must stand with Israel.

And as ISIS and civil war in Syria destabilize the region, displacing millions and threatening shared security interests, we must support all those affected by ongoing violence and terror, and we must stand with Israel.

Our defense relationship is critical to both nations, which is why I support the United States’ commitment to provide Israel with $38 billion in military assistance over the next decade.

It is why I support full funding for Israel, including for the Arrow, David’s Sling and the Iron Dome missile defense systems, which save lives, and that’s why I am fully committing to maintaining Israel’s qualitative military edge.

At the same time, the United States must never permit Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. The Iran nuclear deal must be vigorously enforced through robust monitoring, inspection and verification. And if Iran cheats, there’s no question Iran must be held accountable.

And so as Iran inserts itself in Syria, including through the deployment of advanced military equipment and missiles that threaten Israel, we must not tolerate Iran fanning the flames of instability and violence in the region.

In addition, Russia’s explicit support for these actions is a direct threat to American interests, and it makes Israel less secure. So I say the Trump administration must be crystal-clear with Putin: Russia must stop its support of Iran. This is a threat to the United States, and it is a threat to Israel.

A second area where I believe we can expand our cooperation is cybersecurity and technology. As cyber attacks expose the vulnerabilities of our most essential systems and infrastructure, the United States and Israel must strengthen our innovation and technological capacities and our defenses together.

Israel has more scientists and startups per capita than any other country in the world. And I’m proud that California, building on the 2014 commitments made by Prime Minister Netanyahu and Governor Brown, has facilitated many of these technological partnerships and investments.

Today, Tel Aviv and Silicon Valley are inextricably linked, ensuring that our two countries remain on the cutting edge. And when I met with Prime Minister Netanyahu last month, I was proud to discuss California’s cyber advancements and the way we can expand those joint efforts.

And the third area of growing cooperation is water security.

So as any Californian in this hall can tell you, water is the lifeblood of our economies and our communities, and because of California’s history of droughts, we know we cannot take water for granted. In this regard, we could not have a better example than Israel. Yes. Israel is a nation that is 60% desert yet so water-secure that it exports water to its neighbors.

And Israel has been a great partner to California in this area. Take, for example, Carlsbad, California, where an Israeli company built a desalination plant, which provides 50 million gallons of water to 400,000 Californians every day. So while the United States and Israel are geographically separated by water, we can also be bound by water.

And I’m eager to champion these three partnerships in the Senate now and in the future and to ensure that California plays a key role in the relationship between the United States and Israel.

So in conclusion, AIPAC, we all know these are difficult times. I stand here clear-eyed about the dangers of division in our country and in our world, understanding why a state for the Jewish people is so essential.

And I also stand here as someone with a lifelong commitment to justice, a lifelong faith in the power of democratic values and the innate oneness and goodness of human beings. And I believe that it’s the common ground that unites so many of us — values like faith, family, respect and empathy — that will see us through.

Just look for example at the response when Jewish cemeteries in St. Louis and Philadelphia were so horribly, horribly vandalized. Muslim activists quickly raised money to restore the headstones, with one organizer posting on social media, quote, “I want to ask all Muslims to reach out to your Jewish brothers and sisters and stand together against this bigotry.”

Common ground.

Look at the words of Elie Wiesel, who I knew personally and loved, when he said, “The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference.”

Common ground.

Look at Israel’s Supreme Court, that beautiful place I visited, upon which sits a Tunisian judge alongside an Israeli Arab Christian and a Brooklyn-born Israeli, all presided over by a female chief justice.

Common ground.

Or look at my own life, where a daughter of a South Asian mother and a Jamaican father concluded her own interfaith wedding with her husband breaking a glass and everyone yelling mazel tov.

So that’s who we are, and if we embrace those values that have always made the United States and Israel great, then I believe our two nations will continue to move forward together for years and years to come.

I thank you, AIPAC. Thank you.

Senator Kamala Harris’ Address to 2017 AIPAC Conference, Washington reprinted from the Center for Israel Education.

https://blackagendareport.com/speech-ad ... arris-2017

*****

Biden's legacy
Posted by @nsanzo ⋅ 12/08/2024


​
“Biden promised peace, but will leave his successor a nation consumed by war,” was the title of an article published by The New York Times last week. Joe Biden’s resignation, forced by circumstances clearly against his initial will, has opened the door to criticism from media that have always been loyal. “Speaking from the Oval Office last month as he explained his decision not to seek reelection, President Biden boasted of his successes. One of them, he suggested, was presiding over an era of peace,” the media outlet says in the opening of a text headed by an image of Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev on the only visit that the American president has made to Ukraine and which was possible thanks to the security coordination and guarantees offered by the Russian Federation. Having to coordinate a state visit, not only with the ally you intend to visit, but especially with the enemy with whom you are at war does not exactly denote a time of peace. The circumstances of the visit also negate the epic nature that Biden has sought to give to his trip by showing his pride in being the first American president “to enter a war zone not controlled by American troops since President Lincoln.”

However, from the exceptionalism of presenting itself as the only country capable of resolving international conflicts and avoiding new outbreaks, the Biden administration has always wanted to highlight its successes, real or imagined. For example, days before October 7, Biden's National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, stated at The Atlantic Festival that "the Middle East is now calmer than it has been in the last two decades." Sullivan's words were a way of highlighting the successes of Joe Biden, a president who did not return, for example, to the Iranian nuclear agreement that Donald Trump had unilaterally and unjustifiably broken. The stability that Biden has always boasted of not only did not exist, but his actions have contributed to the opposite.

Two conflicts are marking Trump's presidency: the Middle East and Ukraine. In both cases, Democratic policy has not distanced itself excessively from that inherited from Trumpism. Biden not only did not recover Obama's nuclear diplomacy, which had achieved an opening with respect to Iran, but he also did not reverse decisions of his predecessor such as the recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Syrian Golan Heights or the idea of ​​moving the US embassy to Jerusalem. The last few months have shown that US support for Israel continues to be practically absolute. Washington has not only protected Tel Aviv politically and diplomatically - and also Netanyahu - but, despite the evidence of the use of weapons being made, it has continued to supply ammunition. The era of peace that Biden will leave to Harris or Trump includes a serious risk of regional war in the Middle East that, if avoided, will possibly be due more to Iranian moderation than to Washington's capacity for diplomacy.

Something similar can be said of another active war whose consequences have been catastrophic for the civilian population, caught in the fight between two heavily armed groups and who, despite lacking much popular support, continue to fight without much chance of reaching an agreement: Sudan. Ignored by the Western press, the war between al-Burhan's regular army and Hedmeti's militias has caused millions of refugees, huge casualties and a famine to which the international community has not known - or wanted - to react. With nothing to offer in search of a peace agreement, Washington has ceded the leading role of diplomacy to countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia or Egypt.

Although its hegemony has been somewhat undermined by the growing importance of other international actors, the role of the United States remains relevant in each and every international conflict, whether as an instigator or aspiring peacemaker. The case of Ukraine, the most important of the international conflicts that have marked Biden's presidency, may be the clearest. And it is in this war that the role of the United States is being most decisive. Hence, it is also central to the Biden administration's discourse when it comes to showing its successes, questionable given the enormous destruction that is taking place in this war in which Washington is not only the main supplier, but has marked the events even before Russian troops violated the Ukrainian borders on February 24, 2022.

“To counter Russian aggression, we must keep the alliance’s military capabilities sharp while expanding its ability to confront nontraditional threats such as armed corruption, disinformation, and cyber theft. We must impose real costs on Russia for its violations of international norms and support Russian civil society, which has courageously stood up again and again to President Vladimir Putin’s kleptocratic authoritarian system,” he wrote in an article published by Foreign Policy on January 23, 2020, twelve months before his inauguration and two years before the Russian invasion. The Ukrainian conflict , a war in which Ukraine was then the aggressor, not only the one that had initiated the fighting by decreeing an anti-terrorist operation to resolve a political problem by military means, but the one that openly refused to implement the peace agreement it had signed, was already emerging as one of the important issues for the future Democratic administration.

And while the war has changed significantly, the American discourse and actions have not. Even before the Russian invasion, Washington was the basis on which Ukraine knew it could build a policy of rapprochement with NATO despite the risk of war with Russia that this entailed. Unlike European countries, which at least pretended to have the intention of respecting Minsk, the United States was never interested in the peace agreements, which it considered a European mistake. Ukraine was able to use this position as a shield to reject any compromise with Moscow. Washington was also the arms partner that kyiv was looking for and the ideal ally in the fight against the launch of the Nord Stream extension, then still under construction.

Over the past few months, Biden has boasted of revitalizing NATO, something that can only be considered positive in terms of the economic benefits for the United States of increased military spending in Europe, both in terms of material used for war and future investment in rearmament already underway. For the first time since World War II, Western tanks are now participating in military operations on the territory of the Russian Federation, a new escalation made possible only by Western supplies led by Washington and the progressive intensification of the permission granted to kyiv to use weapons with increasingly fewer limitations.

As The New York Times recalls , “I am the first president in this century to inform the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world,” Biden told the nation. The US involvement in the war in Ukraine has never been direct, but its presence is essential for Ukraine to continue to act as a proxy force in a conflict against Russia that has long been common. “What is hard to grasp is that, although the United States is not directly involved in the wars in Ukraine or Gaza, the risks of large-scale conflict have increased over the course of the Biden presidency,” explains Stephen Wertheim, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“The NYT cautiously raises a fundamental question about Biden’s presidency: To what extent do the wars in Ukraine and Gaza fall on him? Not to the same extent, of course, as on Putin, Hamas and Netanyahu. But to what extent?” asks Russian opposition journalist Leonid Ragozin – always from a point of view of legitimizing Western action both in Ukraine and in the Middle East. However, in their eagerness to protect Kiev and its Western allies from even a small part of the blame for the outbreak of the 2022 war, neither the New York Times article nor others similarly critical of part of Biden’s foreign policy question the reasons for the Ukrainian conflict or focus on the tools at Washington’s disposal to resolve it or prevent its escalation. The West had two tools at its disposal to avoid a wider war: compliance with the Minsk agreements to resolve the Donbass issue and guarantees that Ukraine would not join NATO to avoid a conflict with Russia. In 2019, with Volodymyr Zelensky’s sweeping electoral victory after a campaign in which he promised a commitment to Russia to end the war, the only moment when a change could have occurred came.

Instead, Zelensky and his team changed their rhetoric, with the December 2019 Normandy Format summit being the stage where the Ukrainian president communicated to his partners his intention not to implement the Minsk agreements and months later he would issue the “Crimea Declaration” in which he pledged to use all means at his disposal to recapture the territory. All this while encouraging his partners, namely the United Kingdom, to create military bases in Ukraine. If it ever was, the compromise was no longer possible. “The escalation that led to Russia’s full aggression in Ukraine,” Ragozin recalls, “begins with Biden’s entry into the presidency and Zelensky’s sharp turn on peace talks, probably as a result of Honcharuk’s mission to the United States during Biden’s presidential campaign. Honcharuk himself announced this turn at the same time.” Honcharuk, who held on to his post despite his scandalous appearance at the concert of the neo-Nazi group Sokira Peruna but not despite a leak in which he criticized Zelensky's economic knowledge,

The assessment of Biden's presidency, which will in part depend on what happens in the next six months and on which presidency succeeds him, will be debated, as usual, in future years. However, it is not too early to say that his legacy was never one of peace or stability, but that he actively contributed to the escalation of tensions in different parts of the world, especially in Eastern Europe, into a war that diplomacy should have been able to prevent. That is the part that articles evaluating Biden's legacy prefer not to deal with.

https://slavyangrad.es/2024/08/12/el-legado-de-biden/

Google Translator

[blindpig]

Crash the DNC’s Party
By Riva Enteen - August 12, 2024 2


[Source: nitaykatrine.pages.dev]

Two college professors who studied and lived the 1960s, Peter Dreier and Maurice Isserman, recently had published an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times urging dissidents not to protest at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

The first paragraph is a stark example of uber-liberals suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome:

A collection of fringe radical groups are calling for demonstrations in Chicago this August at the Democratic National Convention—a “March on the DNC” for Palestine. We study political movements, and we’ve participated in more than a few ourselves. We share the concerns of many Americans about Israel’s actions in Gaza, the need for an immediate cease-fire and the release of hostages and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel. But we’re not going to heed the call to protest in Chicago. We hope others will stay away as well.


Peter Dreier [Source: harvard.com] [NOTE: Sorry. Somehow I lost his photo]


Maurice Isserman [Source: alchetron.com]

Cheri Honkala, a poor and homeless advocate for decades in the streets of Philadelphia, plans to lead the Poor People’s Army in a march to the steps of the United Center on the convention’s opening day.

If she is “radical fringe,” then so am I. The tireless and fearless founder of Philadelphia’s Kensington Welfare Rights Union in 1991, Honkala is now the Poor People’s Army’s national spokesperson and national coordinator of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign. She has been arrested more than 200 times, but says that her worst was at the July Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee where she tried to serve an arrest warrant on Trump and the Republican Party for crimes against humanity.

Police cuffed her, then drove her alone in a van to a closed prison where 200 military police officers sat at tables, ready to be of service to convention security on demand. They locked her in a room with glass walls for hours, then drove her to an empty warehouse district where they let her out at night in a thunder and lightning storm, with no wallet and no phone.


Cheri Honkala [Source: inquirer.com]

She is now preparing to confront the Democrats. Chicago was compelled to grant the Poor People’s Army a permit to march to the steps of the convention at Chicago’s United Center after failing to respond to her appeal of a permit denial. Authorities are now attempting to reroute the march, but the Poor People’s Army does not plan to back down.

The protests will address domestic crises as well as the genocide against Palestinians. Honkala talks about the reality of the streets, telling Black Agenda Report: “More Americans have died because of the opiate crisis than died in the Vietnam War. Millions of dollars have come into Philadelphia, supposedly to help with recovery programs and housing and services here, but it never makes it to the people.”

However, these learned professors of the 1960s writing in the Los Angeles Times assert that those preparing to protest must support the Democratic Party and its candidates because Trump is a new Hitler who will end democracy. They say this is not the time for protest.

But who determines when to be patient and ask for incremental change, and when to demand radical change? At this moment even national health care, closing Guantánamo, or increasing the national minimum wage to minimum subsistence would be radical change. Malcolm X comes to mind: “That’s not a chip on my shoulder. That’s your foot on my neck.” Sometimes, incrementalism doesn’t work.

Though the professors express “concern” about the genocide in Gaza, their piece speaks only of the Israeli hostages, not of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners, many of them children, held without charges, sexually assaulted, and tortured. A Knesset member recently said that rape of Palestinian prisoners is legitimate.

October 7 happened in part because of all the Palestinians already in prison with no charges or hope of a trial. The only cease-fire after October 7 brought Palestinian prisoners home at a 3:1 ratio to Israeli hostages but the ratio of remaining Palestinian prisoners to Israeli hostages is far higher. Prisoner release will be part of any negotiation and must be one of the demands of the Palestinian solidarity movement.

The professors say they support a two-state solution, but that dream is long dead; members of the UN Security Council and the General Assembly have repeated it like a mantra for decades as Israel colonized more land in the West Bank and rained bombs on Gaza. President Biden and the U.S. State Department continue to invoke it but say that it can only be created by negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, which is to say not at all.

October 7 happened because 75 years of negotiations failed. The recent Israeli assassination of Ismail Haniyeh dimmed hopes of a negotiated settlement any time soon.

These men of the 1960s claim that “the convention protests of 1960 and 1964 followed a sophisticated and pragmatic strategy of working within and without the party apparatus.” But why would anyone trust their “within and without” strategy after the Democratic Party elite stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020 and kept Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., from running as a Democrat this year?

The long cover-up of Biden’s decline and his unceremonious replacement with Kamala Harris, a lock-em-up candidate who has never won a single delegate, reeks of the Deep State.

Many are asking, “Who is in charge, given the president’s obviously impaired faculties?” While praise is showered on Biden’s alleged prowess in negotiating the recent historic and complicated international prisoner exchange, his incompetence was evident in the disastrous June 27 debate. He confuses Haifa with Rafah, and Mexico with Egypt. There is no way he negotiated the prisoner exchange.

According to the Times opinion writers, Chicago in 1960 and 1964 had good protesters who “worked within the party apparatus.” The 1968 protesters, they say, were bad and “set back the cause.” The DNC protests are allegedly why Humphrey lost to Nixon, who continued the Vietnam War longer—they hypothesize—than Humphrey would have.

Of course, the anti-war candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, had just been assassinated by the Deep State after winning the California primary, all but assuring the nomination. But rather than protest, we should have quietly urged an anti-war platform?

Humphrey promised to stop bombing North Vietnam and seek a cease-fire after the convention and before the election, because it was clear that the anti-war movement could not be ignored. Would he have made those promises without the protests in Chicago? Would he have kept them if elected? There is no way to know for sure.


Chicago 1968 protests. [Source: pdfprof.com]

As one who was on the streets protesting the Vietnam War, I knew that it was imperative to let the Vietnamese know we were in solidarity with them, and the Palestinians deserve no less. We must express our outrage at both parties for their support of the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

“The key organizers,” the professors write, “the ones who will determine the message this protest conveys by its slogans and actions, are members of the ultra-leftist Party for Socialism and Liberation, and its front organization, the ANSWER Coalition. This is the same group behind the demonstration that burned an American flag and defaced monuments in a ‘day of rage’ as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Congress last week.” If burning an American flag, a form of protest protected by the Supreme Court, and defacing monuments as acts of rage against war criminal Netanyahu make protesters “ultra-leftist,” then sign me up.


Supposedly [/img]ultra-left ANSWER Coalition during protest against Asian hate crimes. [Source: answercoalition.org]

Rather than using labels like ultra-leftist, why not challenge what this group actually says, specifically and factually? The global stakes are quite high, so clarification and accuracy are essential. The Poor People’s Army and CodePink are also among the organizers. The protests are organized by a coalition of groups determined to challenge the Democrats in the streets over their position on Palestine. Let’s not bring back red-baiting.

According to the professors, “the primary goal has to be to defeat Donald Trump, and to help Democratic candidates win in the House and Senate.” They do not want to lose voters “to a perception that Democrats are the party of chaos.” But it is past time to expose the chaos to the light of day. We would be immoral to stand by passively as the U.S. funds genocide in Palestine and plays a game of nuclear chicken with Russia in Ukraine.

Rather than conceding all political space to the Democratic Party’s coronation of Kamala Harris, we must expose how fundamentally undemocratic it is. They stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders twice, kept RFK Jr out of this year’s Democratic primary, then shoehorned Kamala Harris into place with the barest semblance of Democratic process; a bunch of no-name delegates quickly met and agreed to throw their support to her.


[Source: bbc.com]

According to renowned journalist Seymour Hersh, Obama threatened Biden with the 25th Amendment if he did not step down. It is all about backroom deals and Deep State manipulations, while the rest of us wonder who is really in charge. Yet the professors scoff at the notion that the Democratic Party is “a tool of billionaires and corporations.” It’s not?

Ajamu Baraka recently wrote: “The fact that select oligarchs, in this case, the cabal that actually runs the Democrat Party, can remove a presidential nominee and expeditiously anoint Kamala Harris as his replacement cannot be characterized as anything else but a coup…The oppressed must have a clear and sober understanding of the class and power dynamics in the Democrat Party but also in the broader society. The gangster move by the oligarchs who control the Democrats stripped away any pretense that any real structures of democracy exist in that party.”

People who went to Chicago in 1968 to protest the Vietnam War at the DNC were courageous and righteous. People planning to go to Chicago’s DNC this year to protest Democratic Party complicity in the ongoing Gaza genocide are also courageous and righteous. Crash the party is a slogan of the Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. Sign me up. We need to get that foot off our necks.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/0 ... ncs-party/

DSA, huh? These people are known of old, "anything but real existing socialism". If they were real socialists they would advocate socialism by any and all means possible. But they stay in the petty booj comfort zone. Still, anything that shits on the Dems from even a vaguely 'left' flank is useful.

Idiots think the game is or can be genuinely democratic...

*****

Federal Judge Rules Against Coalition to March on the DNC 2024
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor 14 Aug 2024


A federal judge has ruled that the Coalition to March on the DNC must remain two blocks away from the convention.

The Democratic National Convention will be held in Chicago from August 19th to 22nd. On Monday night a federal judge in Chicago ruled against the Coalition to March on the DNC 2024 , who were appealing the city’s denial of their proposed march route.

The city initially attempted to keep them in Grant Park three miles from the United Center, where the convention will be held. It eventually conceded to their demand to rally in Union Park, which is 15 minutes away. The coalition wanted to march for 2.3 miles on wide streets that pass alongside the convention center, but the city’s route confines them to 1.1 miles, largely on narrow streets and several blocks from the convention center.

A circuit court has been set aside for individual and mass arrests during the convention.

I spoke to Coalition organizer Faayani Aboma Mijana.

ANN GARRISON: Who composes your coalition and what are your demands?

FAAYANI ABOMA MIJANA: Our coalition is over 200 organizations from 21 states around the country, and our principal demand is to stand with Palestine and end US military aid to Israel. We also have secondary demands—stopping police crimes, community control of the police, legalization of all undocumented immigrants, defending the right to unionize and strike, and defending reproductive rights and LGBTQIA rights. These demands ultimately show that we recognize the connection between the deprivation and deterioration of rights for working and oppressed people here, and the funding of endless wars, most specifically for this genocide and occupation of Palestine.

AG: You’ve said you expect tens of thousands of people joining the march. Could you tell us how you came to that estimate?

FAM: We came to that estimate because we've been holding lots of marches and rallies here in Chicago where we have the largest Palestinian American population in the country, roughly 85,000 people. The Chicago Coalition for Justice in Palestine has played the leading role in mobilizing around these protests since October 7, and we've been holding them every week, sometimes multiple times a week, everything from street protests and marches to bird-dogging politicians. It's that week-to-week practice, the extenuating need to protest this genocide, the growing anger, and the Democrats’ and Republicans’ unity in this genocide that brought us to this estimate.

AG: Did that include communications you’ve had with people planning to bus in from outside Chicago?

FAM: Yes. We’ll have buses coming in from Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, even as far away as New Mexico, and within the Chicago area. So this all comes together, combined with the national political situation and the gravity of this Democratic National Convention. It's a high profile event of a party that has abandoned its base.

AG: What have you won by suing the city in federal court to appeal its denial of your proposed march route?

FAM: The city has conceded that we can start from Union Park, about 15 minutes from United Center, but the city is giving us a march route that's only 1.1 miles in length, which won't be long enough to facilitate tens of thousands of people. The march route they’ve given us also doesn't go through main thoroughfares. It just goes on side streets. And we think that exposes protesters to danger.

We should be marching on streets wide enough to accommodate us. The city’s route is also beyond clear sight and sound of United Center.

Our proposed route addresses all of these issues. It's within sight and sound of United Center because we want those genocidal politicians to see and hear us showing that we don't stand with this genocide. Second, it's on main roads. And third, it's long enough to hold the tens of thousands of protesters that we expect.

AG: Have you decided how to respond to their denial of the march route you proposed?

FAM: We’re discussing that now. None of us have applied for permits before this march, but we thought that getting a permit for this march was important to ensure that the tens of thousands of people who come are safe. We want people from all walks of life, all ages, regardless of immigration status, disability, and so forth to be able to come to this march and express their opposition to genocide.

AG: Well, will you now agree to be confined within the route that they're willing to give you? I know this might not be something you want to talk about, but I'll ask anyway.

FAM: We’re discussing the judge’s ruling now and we hope to issue a response tomorrow.

AG: I believe you'll be holding your first rally with speakers at noon in Union Park at 1501 West Randolph. Is that right?

FAM: Yes.

AG: How long are you planning for that rally to go on and how long do you expect the march to last?

FAM: It's hard to be precise about how long a rally will go on, but we expect it to be around two to three hours and then the march itself to be around two hours. The rally will bring together Palestinian organizations and the Black liberation movement from all over the country, including the organization that I'm part of, the Chicago Alliance against Racist and Political Repression . It's important to know that the core of this coalition has been Black and Palestinian solidarity. The collaboration between the Chicago Alliance against Racist and Political Repression and the US Palestinian Community Network has been the beating heart of this coalition. You can expect to hear from us at the rally.

AG: In a bizarre twist, the city announced that it's going to set up a “free speech platform” where it will provide mics and a sound amplification system in Park 578 at 1919 West Maypole Avenue from 11am to 7pm every day of the convention. Isn't that address right along your march route?

FAM: Yes, that address is right along our march route, but we're not concerned, because we know that it's a sham. That isn't to delegitimize anyone who might go up there and raise genuine issues, but the city is doing that to try to undermine what we're doing.

We're still going to march against this genocide. We're still going to have our rally. We’re going to march by that park where the city sets up its platform. They can do what they're going to do, but we're going to do what we do.

AG: The city even opened up applications for speaker slots of up to 45 minutes at their platform, then closed it on Saturday. Did anyone from your organization apply to speak there?

FAM: Not that I know of.

AG: Do you know of any groups or individuals who did?

FAM: I do not.

AG: And what again, do you think the city is trying to accomplish with that?

FAM: Well, the city is not a monolith. We know the mayor is with us. He came out of the movement. But there are people within the city who want to make life difficult for us because they don't like what we're doing. They don't like that we’re protesting this genocide.

This progressive movement has a pinch of power in city government. Those who don’t like that are digging their heels in and trying to make life difficult for us, but we're going to have this march and we're going to bring tens of thousands of people with us.

The media all know about it. The masses all know about it.

AG: You feel that Mayor Brandon Johnson is on your side?

FAM: Yes. Earlier this year Mayor Johnson broke a tie at the Chicago City Council on a resolution calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. The US Palestinian Community Network led the organizing around that resolution.

That was unprecedented, for a mayor to go the way of the Palestinian liberation movement. So we see Mayor Brandon Johnson as a friend. Any difficulties that we've had in getting this permit are not because of him. It's because there are a host of federal agencies—Homeland Security, Secret Service, FBI—and even the Democratic Party, who don't want us protesting this genocide. They don't want us to spoil their party but we're going to spoil their party.

AG: The Philadelphia-based Poor People's Army will be marching from Humboldt Park at 4pm on the 19th, starting four hours after the start of your rally. They have a permit to march to the convention steps, since the city failed to respond to their appeal of a permit denial in time.

Have you done any coordination with them?

FAM: We have not done any coordination with them yet, but they are comrades of ours and we support their demands.

https://blackagendareport.com/federal-j ... h-dnc-2024

******



Peace Is Not On The Ballot In November

Peace is not on the ballot in November. Americans are voting for Red War or Blue War. That’s it. Those are the choices.

Caitlin Johnstone
August 15, 2024

I keep seeing liberal commentators like George Takei trying to frame Kamala Harris as the best candidate to bring peace to the middle east, despite her coming directly out of the administration which has been lighting the region on fire with its insane warmongering.

So let’s be clear here: Peace is not on the ballot in November. Americans are voting for Red War or Blue War. That’s it. Those are the choices.

I repeat: Peace. Is. Not. On. The. Ballot. Nobody who stands an actual chance at winning is going to bring about peace, because the US president is a manager of the US empire, and the US empire depends on constant warmongering.

Any debates over whether Trump or Harris are the one to bring about peace are nonsensical, because neither of them are. It’s like arguing over which car salesman might start handing out free cars — that’s not the job. It’s not what the people who have that job do.


Americans don’t get to vote on changes to US foreign policy; that can only come by way of mass-scale direct action. These elections are here to give Americans the illusion of democratic control and to let them feel okay about their political systems so they don’t start thinking about revolution. It’s all about feelings, so if you want to vote then vote in whatever way makes your feelings feel nice. That’s all this performative spectacle is ever about.

All this murderousness will only come to an end when enough people use the power of their numbers to force it to end, and people will only use the power of their numbers to force it to end when enough of them have awakened from their propaganda-induced coma to get a real revolutionary movement happening.

So that’s where the focus needs to be. Not on which empire manager you should vote for, but on sowing the seeds of revolution by showing as many people as you can that everything they’ve been trained to believe about their nation, their government and their world is a lie. Showing them how depraved their rulers are and how badly they’re being screwed over by exploitative status quo systems, and letting them know that a better world is possible.


There’s always something you can do every day to help accomplish this. Attending demonstrations. Participating in activist organizations. Distributing literature, online and offline. Making videos. Making memes. Having conversations. Today I saw a video of a young woman on a train giving a short speech about the genocide in Gaza and distributing flyers. Anything you can do to spread awareness of what’s really going on and how the media and politicians are lying about it all.

So the bad news is that not until a critical mass of people have reached a sufficient level of awareness will there be a real chance at meaningful change. But the good news is that you absolutely have the power to work towards expanding that awareness.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/08 ... -november/

[blindpig]

Ten Theses on the Far Right of a Special Type: The Thirty-Third Newsletter (2024)

Fascism is an insufficient term, as it denies the intimacy between liberal and far right forces. In this week’s newsletter, we present ten theses to understand this ‘intimate embrace’ and the rise of this far right of a special type.

15 August 2024



Dear Friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

There has been widespread consternation about how to understand Donald Trump’s emergence as a serious candidate for US president since 2016. Far from an isolated phenomenon, Trump rose to power alongside other strongmen such as Viktor Orbán (prime minister of Hungary since 2010), Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (president of Turkey since 2014), and Narendra Modi (prime minister of India since 2014). People like this, who came to power and cemented their rule through liberal institutions, seem to be impossible to permanently remove through the ballot box. It has become clear that a rightward shift is taking place in liberal democratic states, whose constitutions emphasise multi-party elections while allowing the space for one-party rule to be gradually established.

The concept of liberal democracy was and is a highly contested concept that emerged from European and US colonial powers in the 18th and 19th centuries. Its claims of internal pluralism and tolerance, the rule of law, and the separation of political powers came at the same time as its colonial conquests and its use of the state to maintain class power over its own societies. Liberalism today cannot be easily reconciled with the fact that the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) countries account for 74.3% of world military spending.

Countries with constitutions that emphasise multi-party elections have increasingly seen the gradual establishment of what is effectively one-party rule. This one-party rule may at times be masked by the existence of two or even three parties, concealing the reality that the difference between these parties has become increasingly negligible.


Helios Gómez (Spain), Viva octubre (Long Live October), 1934.

It has become apparent that a new kind of right wing has emerged not only through elections but by exerting dominance in the arenas of culture, society, ideology, and the economy, and that this new kind of right wing is not necessarily concerned with overthrowing the norms of liberal democracy. This is what we called ‘the intimate embrace between liberalism and the far right’, following the writings of our late senior fellow Aijaz Ahmad.

The formulation of this ‘intimate embrace’ allows us to understand that there is no necessary contradiction between liberalism and the far right and indeed that liberalism is not a shield against the far right, and certainly not its antidote. Four theoretical elements are key to understanding this ‘intimate embrace’ and the rise of this far right of a special type:

Neoliberal austerity policies in countries with liberal electoral institutions vanquished the social welfare schemes that had allowed liberal sensibilities to exist. The state’s failure to take care of the poor turned into a harshness toward them.
Without a serious commitment to social welfare and redistributionist schemes, liberalism itself drifted into the world of far-right policies. These include increased spending on the internal repressive apparatus that polices working-class neighbourhoods and international borders alongside the increasingly stingy distribution of social goods, disbursed only if the recipients allow themselves to be stripped of basic human rights (such as by ‘agreeing’ to the obligatory use of birth control).
In this terrain, the far right of a special type found that it became more and more accepted as a political force given the turn by the parties of liberalism to the policies for which the far right had advocated. In other words, this tendency to draw from far-right policies allowed the far right to become mainstream.
Finally, the political forces of liberalism and the far right unified across the board to diminish the left’s grasp on institutions. The far right and its liberal counterparts have no fundamental economic differences regarding class. In the imperialist countries, there is a very high confluence of viewpoints on maintaining US hegemony, hostility and contempt for the Global South, and increased jingoism, as seen by the full-throttled military support for the genocide Israel is conducting against Palestinians.



After the defeat of Italian, German, and Japanese fascism in 1945, commentators in the West worried about the incubation of the far right in their societies. Most Marxists, meanwhile, recognised that the far right had not emerged out of nothing, but out of the contradictions of capitalism itself. The collapse of the Third Reich was only a phase in the history of the far right and the development of capitalism: it would emerge again, perhaps wearing different clothes.

In 1964, the Polish Marxist Michał Kalecki wrote the stimulating article ‘The Fascism of Our Times’ (‘Faszyzm naszych czasów’). In that essay, Kalecki said that the new kinds of fascistic groups that were emerging at the time appealed ‘to the reactionary elements of the broad masses of the population’ and were ‘subsidised by the most reactionary groups of big business’. However, Kalecki wrote, ‘the ruling class as a whole, even though it does not cherish the idea of fascist groups seizing power, does not make any effort to suppress them and confines itself to reprimands for overzealousness’. This attitude persists today: the ruling class as a whole fears not the rise of these fascist groups, but only their ‘excessive’ behaviour, while the most reactionary sections of big business support these groups financially.


Mario Schifano (Italy), No, 1960.

A decade and a half later, when Ronald Reagan seemed to be on the threshold of becoming the president of the United States, Bertram Gross published Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America (1980), which drew liberally from The Power Elite (1956) by C. Wright Mills and Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (1966) by Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy. Gross argued that since large monopolistic firms had strangled democratic institutions in the United States, the far right did not require jackboots and swastikas: this orientation would come through the very institutions of liberal democracy. Who needs tanks when you have the banks to do the dirty work?

The warnings of Kalecki and Gross remind us that the intimacy between liberalism and the far right is not a new phenomenon but one that emerges from deep within liberalism’s capitalist origins: liberalism was never going to be anything but the friendly face of capitalism’s normal brutality.



Liberals are using the word ‘fascism’ to distance themselves from the far right. This use of the term is more moralistic than precise since it denies the intimacy between liberals and the far right. To that end, we have formulated ten theses on this far right of a special type, which we hope will provoke discussion and debate. This is a provisional statement, an invitation to a dialogue.

Thesis One. The far right of a special type uses democratic instruments as much as possible. It believes in the process known as the ‘long march through the institutions’, through which it patiently builds political power and staffs the permanent institutions of liberal democracy with its cadre, who then push their views into mainstream thought. Educational institutions are also key to the far right of a special type since they determine the syllabi for students in their respective countries. There is no need for this far right of a special type to set aside these democratic institutions as long as they provide the path to power not just over the state, but over society.

Thesis Two. The far right of a special type is driving the attrition of the state and transferring its functions to the private sector. In the United States, for instance, its proclivity for austerity is helping gut the quantity and quality of cadre in core state functions, such as the US Department of State. Many of the functions of such institutions, now privatised, instead take place under the auspices of non-governmental organisations led by newly emergent billionaire capitalists such as Charles Koch, George Soros, Pierre Omidyar, and Bill Gates.

Thesis Three. The far right of a special type uses the repressive apparatus of the state as much as is legally permissible to silence its critics and demobilise movements of economic and political opposition. Liberal constitutions provide wide latitude for this kind of use, which liberal political forces have taken advantage of over time to quell any resistance from the working class, peasantry, and left.


Maryan (Poland), Personnage (Character), 1963.

Thesis Four. The far right of a special type incites a homeopathic dose of violence in society by the more fascistic elements within its political coalition to create fear, but not enough fear to turn people against it. Most middle-class people the world over seek convenience and are disturbed by inconvenience to themselves (such as that produced by riots, etc.). But, on occasion, an arms-length assassination of a labour leader or an arms-length threat made to a journalist is not blamed on the far right of a special type, which often hastily denies any direct association with the fringe fascistic groups (which are nonetheless linked organically to the far right).



Thesis Five. The far right of a special type provides a partial answer to the loneliness that is woven into the fabric of advanced capitalist society. This loneliness stems from the alienation of precarious working conditions and long hours, which corrode the possibility of building a vibrant community and social life. This far right does not build an actual community, except when it comes to its parasitic relationship with religious communities. Instead, it develops the idea of community, community through the internet or community through mass mobilisations of individuals or community through shared symbols and gestures. The immense hunger for community is apparently solved by the far right, while the essence of loneliness melts into anger rather than love.

Thesis Six. The far right of a special type uses its proximity to private media conglomerates to normalise its discourse and its proximity to the owners of social media to increase the societal acceptance of its ideas. This highly agitational discourse creates a frenzy, mobilising sections of the population either online or in the streets to participate in rallies where they nonetheless remain individuals rather than members of a collective. The feeling of loneliness generated by capitalist alienation is dulled for a moment, but not overcome.

Thesis Seven. The far right of a special type is a tentacular organisation, with its roots spread across various sectors of society. It operates wherever people gather, whether in sports clubs or charitable organisations. It aims to build a mass base in society rooted in the majority identity in a given place (whether race, religion, or a sense of national being) by marginalising and demonising any minority. In many countries, this far right relies upon religious structures and networks to ever-more deeply embed a conservative view of society and the family.



Thesis Eight. The far right of a special type attacks the institutions of power that are the very foundation of its socio-political basis. It creates the illusion of being plebian rather than patrician, when in fact it is deep in the pockets of the oligarchy. It creates the illusion of the plebian by developing a highly masculine form of hyper-nationalism, the decadence of which drips out in its ugly rhetoric. This far right straddles the testosterone power of this hyper-nationalism while playing up its portrayed victimhood in the face of power.

Thesis Nine. The far right of a special type is an international formation, organised through various platforms such as Steve Bannon’s The Movement (based in Brussels), the Vox party’s Madrid Forum (based in Spain), and the anti-LGBTQ+ Fellowship Foundation (based in Seattle, Washington). These groups are rooted in a political project in the Atlantic world that enhances the role of the right wing in the Global South and provides them with the funds to deepen right-wing ideas where they have little fertile soil. They create new ‘problems’ where they did not exist at this scale before, such as the fanfare over sexuality in eastern Africa. These new ‘problems’ weaken peoples’ movements and tighten the right’s grip over society.

Thesis Ten. Though the far right of a special type might present itself as a global phenomenon, there are differences between how it manifests in the leading imperialist countries versus the Global South. In the Global North, both liberals and the far right vigorously defend the privileges that they have gained through plunder over the past five hundred years – through their military and other means – while in the Global South the general tendency amongst all political forces is to establish sovereignty.



The far right of a special type is emerging in a period defined by hyper-imperialism to mask the actuality of hideous power and pretend that it cares about the isolated individuals that it instead harms. It knows human folly well and preys on it.

Warmly,

Vijay

P.S. Unless otherwise noted, the art in this newsletter comes from the dossiers New Clothes, Old Threads: The Dangerous Right-Wing Offensive in Latin America (2021) and What Can We Expect from the New Progressive Wave in Latin America? (2023).

https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... cial-type/

[blindpig]

Remembering the DNC 1968 – 2024 Same struggle, same fight
August 16, 2024 Sharon Black


Chicago Democratic National Convention, 1968.

In August of 1968, I was barely 19 years old and several months pregnant when I embarked on a trip with other activists to attend the protests at the Democratic Party Convention.

It was a boring and long ride from Wilmington, Delaware, to Chicago, and I don’t remember much about the trip or even our sleeping arrangements on donated floor space — other than that we managed it — but I remember a lot about the streets of Chicago.

Like the thousands of other youth who had converged on Chicago, we were angry about the Vietnam War. The Pentagon was engaged in merciless carpet bombing and napalming villagers. The costs of the war were mounting along with the deaths of working-class GIs transported back home in body bags and unloaded on the tarmacs of military airports.

We were equally ignited and inspired by the Black liberation movement expressed by the Black Panther Party during that period. The Chicago DNC took place just months after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, which sparked nationwide rebellions in major cities.

The FBI’s COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) state repression against the Black movement was in full swing. And every bit of this was reflected outside and inside the convention.

While my politics were barely formed, my practical working-class instincts were polished. I quickly concluded that marching in the streets and fighting against the massive police repression was the best form of survival.

The less radical and perhaps naive youth who remained stationary in Grant Park took the brunt of Mayor Daley’s police billy clubs. “Give peace a chance” was not going to cut it for either tear gas and police brutality, or for that matter, the thousands of fully armed National Guard and U.S. Army units that were called in to back up Chicago’s gestapo police force.

Our group endured tear gas, but fortunately, no one got cracked over the head by a police club or sent to the hospital. The repression that took place shocked the world and was described in the later “Walker Report” as a “police riot.”

Today, the rhetoric is similar. Chicago’s top cop, Superintendent Larry Snelling, has already proclaimed, “We’re not going to allow you to riot,” promising arrests and a police crackdown. Cook County judges have announced that they are clearing their schedules as part of Chief Judge Tim Evans’ order to prepare for mass arrests.

The battle over the denial of permits for an accepted march route continues after U.S. District Judge Andrea Wood refused to force the city to alter the route proposed by the city officials. Protesters rightfully insist that the present route forces marchers into small side streets, creating unsafe conditions. Presently, the March on the DNC Coalition is being barred from using a stage or sound at Union Park.

Crisis for U.S. imperialism in 1968 and today

In both 1968 and 2024, the resistance of colonized and occupied people fueled an outpouring of protest and resistance. In 1968, it was the Vietnamese people; today, it is the resistance of the Palestinian people and the horror of the U.S.-funded genocide.

We would be remiss not to add to the above the continuing bloody U.S./NATO war in Ukraine on Russia, the not-so-cold war on China, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba, and all of the covert and overt schemes U.S. imperialism has cooked up in almost every part of the globe.

None of the top Pentagon brass or capitalist bankers would want to publicly categorize either period as a crisis for the system. But they know it is so.

The Tet Offensive, launched in January 1968 on the Lunar New Year by the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, struck major cities in the southern part of Vietnam, even breaching the outer walls of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.

The U.S. and the puppet South Vietnamese militaries suffered heavy losses. It proved that the liberation forces were far stronger than the Johnson administration claimed.

On Oct. 7, 2023, Palestinian liberation fighters stunned the world in a brazen and daring attack that broke through the “iron dome.” For many of the young Palestinian fighters, it was the first time they had stepped foot on stolen land, having been confined their entire lives to the apartheid Gaza Strip, which was described as an open-air prison.

Forgotten economic crisis

March 1968 saw the largest speculative run on gold in history. Massive expenditures on the Vietnam War helped fuel inflation during that period. This crisis later became popularly referred to as stagflation, characterized by rising unemployment and rising prices.

It ushered in one of the most pivotal changes for the capitalist world market in August of 1971 when Nixon held a secret meeting at Camp David with top representatives of the imperialist banking system that resulted in the unilateral delinking of the dollar from gold in the international arena. This action was tantamount to an economic coup against any country holding dollars.

Today, capitalist contraction continues. The chilling record drop in major stock markets on Aug. 5, 2024, due to a weak job market report, attests to this.

Inside the the Conventions – 1968 and 2024

Though the circumstances were different, there are some similarities, but with one big difference. Considering that none of the capitalist candidates of 1968 represented honest and unabashed working-class interests, there was rigorous debate, which sometimes ended up with punches thrown and actual competition between different candidates.

On March 31, 1968, Johnson announced that he would not seek a second term as president. This was a direct result of the Vietnam quagmire, as it was referred to at the time. Johnson then handed the baton to his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, to run for the presidency.

It is not all that different from Genocide Joe Biden handing over his nomination to his vice-president, Kamala Harris. A little more on that later.

Senator Robert F. Kennedy had already emerged as a major candidate in the primaries. He had just won the huge California delegate prize. It was at a Los Angeles rally that he was shot right after declaring, “Now it’s on to Chicago to win there.” He died the next day, on June 6. This left Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy as the favorite of Democrats opposing the war.

It should be noted that McCarthy’s anti-war opposition was rather milquetoast; it certainly wasn’t based on supporting the Vietnamese liberation struggle.

In fact, most of the Democratic Party opposition, while pushed by the masses in the streets and by a working class weary of the war, was based on the fact that the Vietnamese people were breaking the back of the U.S. war machine. It was tactical and still predicated on U.S. imperialist interests.

With all of its similarities, today’s DNC looks different from 1968. Vice President Kamala Harris was already crowned the winner virtually on Aug. 5. For all practical purposes, Harris will have no challengers.

Those outside the U.S. might peer at the DNC spectacle and wonder how something so autocratic and scripted could even remotely be considered democratic.

The 2024 convention will be held behind a giant barrier between eight and 10 feet high and non-scalable. The feds have already appropriated $75 million for security. So much for the Democratic Party being the party of the people.

But the echo of the streets, even if it’s faint, may still be felt on the conference floor.

There is much trepidation that the uncommitted delegates, mainly from Minnesota and Michigan, will mount a protest. Given the extraordinary control and orchestration of the 2024 DNC, any form of resistance is a sign of the movement’s strength.

The DNC theater spectacle

A seat at the table will cost you much more than an arm and a leg. According to Politico, prime seat packages run as high as $5 million, which published a breakdown of sponsorship levels obtained by Playbook.

The Democratic Party announced its Platform on July 13, and it’s another piece of theater. I would bet my meager Social Security check that most workers have not waded through the 80-page meandering, demagogic nonsense that is primarily a polemic against Donald Trump.

It has very little concrete connection for workers and the poor, who are weary of high prices and worried about the future, whether it’s racist police terror in the streets or at the border, or the worsening climate crisis.

And on the question of Palestine, the Platform reaffirms the U.S.’s support for Israel.

What trumps words (no pun intended) are deeds. On Aug. 13, Biden approved $20 billion in new weapons, including F-15 fighter jets, 120mm tank ammunition, tactical vehicles, AMRAAM anti-aircraft missiles, and high-explosive mortars. Talking peace is a smokescreen while they wage war.

The Democratic and Republican Parties remain imperialist war parties of the capitalist class. It is the Pentagon generals, the banks, and the obscenely wealthy members of the ruling class that determine the real and sometimes hidden program of war and plunder.

Hubert Humphrey, who lost to Nixon, reminisced that his mistake was capitulating to Johnson on the war plank (like Kamala Harris today, he pledged his support for the war then). But there is a small part of this history that needs to be underscored, and that is the role not just of Secretary of State Dean Rusk or National Security Adviser Walt Rostow, but of General Creighton Abrams, who was the commander of the U.S. forces in Vietnam who intervened on what the final wording of Humphrey’s platform would be.

You might ask yourself, what is a General doing poking himself into civil affairs, but it underscores who the real players are behind the curtain.

If we ended on this note alone, this would not only be a bad story but also untrue. The will of the masses of people, not only the youth in the streets or the working class of this country, but especially workers and the oppressed masses globally, will determine the ending.

This is true not only in some final sense but also in the coming week, regardless of how the corporate media frames the grotesque charade and spectacle before us.

When all is said and done, it is back into the streets where history is made! I intend to be at the 2024 Chicago DNC protests.

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2024/ ... ame-fight/

*****

For Over 150 Years, Democratic Party Operatives Have Infiltrated, Coopted and Destroyed Independent Political Movements in the U.S.
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - August 17, 2024


An 1867 meeting of the Grange, a farmers’ coalition that often backed populist groups. [Source: thoughtco.com]

When will people on the left get smart and build the wherewithal to prevent this from happening yet again?

William A. A. Carsey was a covert operative working for the Democratic Party in the late 19th century, who infiltrated labor organizations and other independent political groups with the goal of sabotaging them, coopting their messaging, and siphoning votes to the Democratic Party.

Mark A. Lause, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Cincinnati, has written an illuminating biography of Carsey called, Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice: William A. A. Carsey and the Shaping of American Reform Politics.

The book helps to explain the limitations of the U.S. two-party system and difficulties experienced by independent political organizers in the country.


[Source: press.uillinois.edu]


Mark A. Lause [Source: researchgate.net]

Lause calls Carsey a “pioneer of modern astro-turfing.”

He says that Carsey foreshadowed modern-day Democratic Party covert operators who have transformed the Green Party into an “allied outrider of the Democratic Party” and set up front groups—like MoveOn.org and Brand New Congress—whose primary purpose has been to channel discontented voters into the Democratic Party.[1]

When Carsey joined the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) in 1872-73, he tellingly functioned as an agent provocateur urging self-destructive confrontation with the police.[2] Carsey also promoted conservative platforms in other labor organizations of which he was part.[3]

Born to immigrant parents on New York’s Lower East Side in 1841, Carsey played professional baseball before serving in the Union Army in the Civil War. Afterwards, he embellished his war record, claiming to have served in General William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea.[4]

Following the end of the war, Carsey became active in union politics as a bricklayer and builder and became associated with the Democratic Party’s Tammany Hall political machine, which dominated New York City politics through patronage.


A photograph of the Democratic Party headquarters in Manhattan, commonly known as Tammany Hall. [Source: thecollector.com]


[Source: democraticpartyinfo.weebly.com]

From the 1870s through the 1980s, Lause wrote, “few national gatherings of labor organizations to launch labor reform parties took place without [Carsey’s] presence.” Through the Gilded Age, Carsey served as “the most persistent and patient Democratic field operative, laboring assiduously to mislead, misdirect, and destroy efforts to sustain independent political parties.”[5]

The latter goals were achieved through restructuring the parties to make them unworkable, or by “guiding them into fusion with the Democrats or shaping them as predetermined dead-end single-shot protests.”[6]

The Gilded Age of American history was known for sweeping social inequality, exploitative working conditions, vast market fluctuations, conservative politics and elite political corruption.


“Bosses of the Senate,” a political cartoon created by Joseph Keppler and also published in The Puck on January 23, 1889. It depicts large, overindulgent businessmen representing their corporate interests as they loom over tiny senators. The sign behind the businessmen reads, “This is the Senate of the Monopolists by the Monopolists for the Monopolists.” [Source: courses.bowdoin.edu]

Ascendant labor organizations sought to establish an independent party that would genuinely represent working class interests, as they did in other Western industrialized nations like Britain and France where viable labor and socialist parties emerged.

In the United States, however, Carsey proved to be a key figure in thwarting these efforts. The Socialist and Populist parties had some success at the turn of the 20th century but were not able to alter the conservative political structure in the U.S.

The Populist Party declined after the Democrats recruited its leader, William Jennings Bryan, and made him their candidate for president in the 1896 election while the Socialist Party faded into obscurity in the face of the repression of the First Red Scare after World War I.


[Source: archives.library.wcsu.edu]

A Political Pimp and Traitor to the Cause of Labor
Carsey’s job was particularly important coming at a time of growing labor militancy and Republican Party dominance in the aftermath of the Civil War. The Democrats at the time were associated with slavery and secession.

In 1874, Carsey launched the New York-based Industrial Political Party with Charles A. Dana, an assistant Secretary of War in the Lincoln administration and owner and editor of The New York Sun, which he had transformed into a Democratic Party organ.


William Jennings Bryan [Source: teachingamericanhistory.org]


Charles A. Dana [Source: mrlincolnswhitehouse.org]

The main purpose of the party was to get disaffected voters to the polls who would then vote for Democrats, since the Industrial Political Party only ran candidates for a few local offices and endorsed many Democratic Party candidates.[7]

Lause wrote that Carsey’s activities “reflected a general disposition among Democrats to coopt and defang insurgent impulses.” Carsey achieved this by “creating a labor reform party radically disconnected from working people that existed only on paper, or more accurately, in the papers.”[8]

In the late 1870s, Carsey served as a member of the governing body of the National Greenback Party where he espoused radical rhetoric but urged would-be insurgents to cast their lot with the Democratic Party in elections.[9]

Another organization that Carsey helped form, the Knights of Industry, opposed strikes and government ownership and supported jingoistic rhetoric. It was described by the Central Labor Union of New York as “the trick of a political trickster.”[10]

Periodically, Carsey would run for public office in order to “take the wind out of the sails of any possible genuine independent [candidate],” according to Lause.[11]

When testifying before a congressional committee on the labor question, he called for cutting government spending, moderate regulation that would not injure business, and ending of practices that “grind down the laboring class and employ Chinese and others, against whom American laborers could not compete, because the latter cannot live as the former do.”[12]

According to Lause, these latter comments exemplify Carsey’s effort, adopted more recently by Donald Trump and the GOP, to channel working class grievances into nativism, with Carsey raising alarm about a “swarm of foreigners driving out native laborers.”[13]


Governor David Bennett Hill [Source: nga.org]

Carsey was a close ally of New York Governor David Bennett Hill (1885-1891), a Democrat who promoted moderate labor reforms but believed that “there is no place in honorable American politics for the political guerrillas who do not attach themselves to either of the great political armies.”[14]

New York City in the 1880s had no less than ten “third parties,” all of which claimed to advocate for the cause of the discontented, but were really little more than “deliberate ploys by one or the other of the major parties—or a faction thereof—to weaken the voting strength of their rival.”[15]

Lause wrote that “not only did some of them [independent political parties] hope to siphon votes from the opposition, but they also sought to multiply insurgent options in order to dissipate their impact.”[16]

In reading this, one cannot help but think of the hapless presidential campaigns of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Cornel West, Jill Stein and a bevy of other independent candidates running in the 2024 race.


[Source: bbc.com]

In 1881, Carsey moved into the leadership of a nonpartisan anti-monopoly league whose purpose was to break up chartered corporate monopolies dominated by Republicans and replace them with new monopolies in which Democrats participated.[17]

Subsequently, he helped to form a new labor party that became preoccupied with “protective tariffs and foreigners rather than wages, working conditions, and the length of the workday.”[18]

The party made a point of criticizing the writings of Henry George, a brilliant left-winger who galvanized people with his vision of a more humane political economy. Carsey blasted George as “a crank, come from no one knows where.”[19]

A student of socialist history later recalled Carsey’s party as prone to ideological hairsplitting to such an extent that one of its main leaders “developed schizophrenia and split with himself.”[20]

With his cover blown, Carsey was denounced by members of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) as a “fraud with no right to speak in the name of labor.”

The Knights of Labor expelled him from its 1892 convention in Omaha, Nebraska, where Knights of Labor leader Terence V. Powderly blasted him as a “traitor to the cause of labor.”[21]


Henry George [Source: en.wikipedia.org]


Terence V. Powderly [Source: en.wikipedia.org]

The American Nonconformist and Kansas Industrial Liberator, a voice of the mid and southwestern-based Farmers Alliance, referred to Carsey as a “vulgar fraud and corrupt ruffian” who fit in well with “the political pimps and cesspool cleaners for the two old parties that oft times join the Alliance and other reform organizations for the purpose of deceiving and misleading the honest people.”[22]

Plenty of Heirs
Sadly, there were many charlatans and pimps like Carsey to take his place after he died.

Carsey’s heirs include provocateurs who infiltrated the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Black Panther Party in the 1950s and 1960s in order to coopt and destroy them, and Democratic Party operatives who have infiltrated media organizations and set up astro-turf organizations to channel leftist activism into the Party.

Since its takeover by the Clintonite “New Democrats,” the Democratic Party is increasingly beholden to corporate interests intent on gutting core New Deal programs and advancing hawkish and arch-imperialistic foreign policies.


[Source: inthesetimes.com]


Republican Party operative Lee Atwater. He became famous for helping George H.W. Bush win the 1988 election by depicting Democratic Party challenger Michael Dukakis as being “soft on crime.” [Source: en.wikipedia.org]

Lause concludes that “the work of Carsey became the professions of Lee Atwater, Michael Deaver, and other” seasoned political operatives known for their skilled public relations campaigns that involve the manipulation of public opinion.

Carsey’s spirit was evident during the 2020 Democratic Party primary when the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) manufactured new political candidates who decided to drop out of the race on the eve of Super Tuesday and urged their followers to support Joe Biden against Bernie Sanders who was more progressive.

According to Lause, “the century after Carsey’s death saw growth of the mechanisms of conscious misrepresentations into the mass production of disinformation, the strategic cultivation of mistrust, an ideology of deliberate dysfunctionality and pervasive civic demoralization.”[23]

Today, the United States promotes itself as a model democracy that must lead the world in a crusade against political authoritarianism. Carsey’s career, however, shows that America is far from a model democracy. Rather, it is an oligarchy that uses hired political hitmen to undermine popular movements and sustain its predatory rule.

(Footnotes at link.)

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/0 ... n-the-u-s/

******

FBI searches US home of Soviet-born Biden critic, Dmitri Simes
August 17, 2024 natyliesb
RT, 8/16/24

The FBI has executed a search warrant at the home of Russian-born US political pundit and author Dimitri Simes, who has been a vocal critic of the administration of President Joe Biden.

The search took place on Tuesday on the property located in Rappahannock County, according to a local news outlet.

The author’s son, Dimitri Simes Jr., described it as “a bandit-like intimidation attempt” by the US government in a statement released on X (formerly Twitter).

In an email on Wednesday night, FBI spokesperson Samantha Shero declined to comment on the raid, except to confirm that it had been authorized by a court, Rappahannock News has reported.

A former aide to Richard Nixon, Simes is a naturalized US citizen who immigrated to the country in 1973. He was described by US media as providing “a sympathetic platform for the Russian government in the heart of the DC policy establishment,” after Senator Rand Paul named him as a foreign policy adviser in 2014.

In 1999, he published a book on Russia’s search for a new place in the world following the collapse of the USSR. He was also the publisher and CEO of the National Interest magazine, which advocates a realist approach to international relations and geopolitics.

Simes was one of the people investigated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller as a suspected contact between Donald Trump and the Russian government. The report finalized in 2019, which failed to find any evidence of collusion between Moscow and Trump’s 2016 campaign, also vindicated the political expert, confirming that his activities were normal for how DC operates.

His family reportedly owns a 132.6-acre property in Rappahannock County, which they bought in 2021 for $1.63 million.

https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2024/08/fbi ... tri-simes/

******


Hamas political bureau member Sami Abu Zuhri was responding to U.S. President Joe Biden’s comment on Friday.

Biden claims of progress in Gaza truce deal ‘illusion’: Abu Zuhri to AFP
Originally published: Ahram Online on August 17, 2024 by AFP (more by Ahram Online) (Posted Aug 19, 2024)

“To say that we are getting close to a deal is an illusion,” Abu Zuhri told AFP.

We are not facing a deal or real negotiations, but rather the imposing of American diktats.

He was responding to Biden’s comment on Friday that “We are closer than we have ever been.”

Biden spoke after two days of talks in Qatar, where Washington sought to broker a ceasefire and captive-exchange deal between Israel and Hamas in the 10-month-old Gaza war.

In an effort to avert a broader conflict, Western and Arab diplomats have been shuttling around the Middle East to push for a Gaza deal which they say could help avert a wider regional conflagration.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is headed back to the region this weekend in a bid to help seal a deal.

In Israel, Blinken will seek to “conclude the agreement for a ceasefire and release of hostages and detainees,” the State Department said.

Egyptian, Qatari, and U.S. mediators are working to finalise details of a framework agreement initially outlined by Biden in May. He said Israel had proposed it.

In a joint statement after two days of talks in Qatar, the mediators said they presented both sides with a proposal that “bridges remaining gaps.”

Talks aiming to secure a deal are to resume in Cairo “before the end of next week,” they said.

Previous optimism during months of on-off truce talks has proven unfounded.

But the stakes have risen significantly since Israel’s assassinations in late July of Fuad Shukr, a top operations chief of Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement, and Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh.

Their deaths led to vows of vengeance from Hezbollah, Iran, and other Tehran-aligned groups in the region.

Hamas did not attend the Doha talks. An official of the Palestinian movement, Osama Hamdan, told AFP the group would join if the meeting set a timetable for implementing what Hamas had already agreed to.

On Friday, officials told AFP that Hamas will not accept “new conditions” from Israel.

A prospective cessation of hostilities has centered around a phased deal beginning with an initial truce.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office on Tuesday detailed its conditions for a truce, including “a veto on certain prisoners” being released from its jails.

In a joint statement, the foreign ministers of Britain, France, Germany, and Italy urged all parties to “engage positively and flexibly” in the negotiations.

“We underline the importance of avoiding any escalatory action in the region which would undermine the prospect for peace,” they added.

There is too much at stake.

https://mronline.org/2024/08/19/biden-c ... -illusion/

[blindpig]

Kamala’s National Security Adviser Points to Continuation of Biden’s Russia Policy
Posted on August 21, 2024 by Conor Gallagher

What would a President Kamala Harris’ foreign policy look like? She’s already signaled that Israel policy will remain unchanged. How about Russia?

For more insight there we can take a look at Philip Gordon, currently serving as Harris’s national security adviser. He’s been around for decades. He’s a regular at the Munich Security Conference. And he is widely expected to succeed Jake Sullivan as national security adviser should Harris win the presidency.

While it’s highly doubtful that the Kamala team is sitting around a table hashing out foreign policy that they think is in the best interests of all the American people (they likely do precious little in the way of big-picture decisions), their ideological makeup is likely a representation of what US oligarchs want. And judging by Gordon’s track record, it appears the American oligarchy has no intention of using Biden’s exit as an opportunity to change course or give up on Project Ukraine. So who is Philip Gordon?

He started out serving on the staff of the National Security Council under Bill Clinton. He then moved to a senior fellow position at the Brookings Institution from 1999 to 2009 where he founded the Center on the United States and Europe. Gordon was Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from 2009 to 2013. He then went on to serve as special assistant to then-President Barack Obama and White House coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa, and the Gulf Region until 2015.

Author James Mann writes in “The Obamians” that Gordon and others like him “represented the generation of Democrats who learned how to run foreign policy during the 1990s. They were eager to show that the Democrats were not a bunch of pacifists, that they understood national security issues and were willing to use American force where necessary.”

They just think they’re smarter about it. For example, there was a time when the Obama White House touted NATO’s role in toppling Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi as a vindication of the decision to “lead from behind.”

Gordon joined the Council on Foreign Relations in 2015 as a senior fellow focused on U.S. foreign and national security policy and stayed there until hitching himself to Harris in 2020 — first as foreign policy advisor to her disastrous campaign and then as National Security Advisor to the Vice President.

In a vice president’s office that has churned through staff, Gordon has been a mainstay and is among the select group of national security officials, which includes national security adviser Jake Sullivan and deputy national security adviser Jon Finer, to take part in the president’s daily intelligence briefing.

As a longtime survivor in Washington, it’s unsurprising that Gordon is an embodiment of all the violent orthodoxy that oozes out of the Blob, such as unwavering support for Israel and the indisputable belief that China is not only a threat to the US, but the biggest one.

On the issue of Ukraine where there isn’t quite consensus (the diehard Russophobes want to keep escalating while the China hawks want to hand the bag to the Europeans so they can focus on China), Gordon believes the US can do both.

A recent Politico piece describes how European Atlanticists, nervous that they’ll be forgotten if the US focuses too much on China and Asia, love themselves some Philip Gordon. He “speaks four European languages, wrote his thesis on Charles de Gaulle and even translated a book by the notoriously irascible former French President Nicolas Sarkozy.”

Best of all, Gordon loves soccer, writes Politico:

In June 2012, Gordon even took then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to see a UEFA Euro championship semi-finals in a bar filled with Germans, after a dinner in St. Petersburg with Sullivan and then-U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul.

Quite the entourage. If you dig through all the fluff, though, here’s the real money section of the whole Politico profile piece:

To this day, he’s in regular contact with the European Commission. Norbert Röttgen, a Christian Democrat member of the German Bundestag, trusts that Harris’ adviser still thinks “European security is the cornerstone of U.S. global power” and welcomes that he shares his “criticism” of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz for not sending long-range Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine.

The fact that Gordon is among those pressuring Berlin to send Taurus missiles to Ukraine places him among more hawkish, wreckless war cheerleaders.

Let’s not forget that the Taurus missiles have a range of roughly 500 kilometers, which means that they can hit Moscow. At the same time, they’re reportedly difficult to operate, the Ukrainians wouldn’t be able to do it, so Bundeswehr personnel would be called on to do so. That would mean Germany is openly firing missiles into Russia, and one can imagine all the consequences that would entail. Here’s German opposition politician Sahra Wagenknecht lambasting the warmongers in Germany back in March when it looked like those advocating for using the Taurus might carry the day:

“Have you all lost your minds?”.

Amazing and terrifying speech by @SWagenknecht on the folly of Germany’s warmongering approach to Russia.
(Video at link.)

So has Gordon lost his mind? You wouldn’t know from the Politico puff piece, which casually mentions his criticism of the German government for not going to war with Russia and moves right along to friendly quotes from former US ambassador to Russia and big advocate for WWIII Michael McFaul. He concludes that if Gordon becomes Harris’ national security adviser in a Harris administration, “Europe will have an ally.”

Here’s probably a better spot than any to insert the old Kissinger quote that is almost obligatory when dealing with US foreign policy these days: “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”

If we pair Gordon’s time in the Obama White House and its “lead from behind” mantra with regards to Libya with his current insistence that Germany should be launching Taurus missiles into Russia, well, that should be awfully concerning for Germans and Europeans in general. And how ironic is it that this is the person who European diplomats would greet as a major friend in a Harris administration?

While Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken aren’t expected to keep their jobs in a Harris administration, Gordon would be expected to seamlessly take the place of the former. From Politico:

We reported on initial skepticism about Harris earlier this summer, mostly due to Europeans’ unfamiliarity with the current vice president. But her choice of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as a running mate and the likelihood that Phil Gordon, a confirmed Europhile, would become her national security adviser, appear to have quelled some jitters.

Back in 2018, Gordon co-authored a Council on Foreign Relations report with the Russia hardliner Republican Robert Blackwill. They called for the kitchen sink to be thrown at Russia, including sanctions, weapons, an undying commitment to Ukraine and Europe — basically what the US has done since. The reason Gordon was calling for such approach wasn’t just the situation in Ukraine, but because “of Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”

So Gordon is also a purveyor of the misinformation that Russia was behind Clinton’s 2016 presidential election loss. [1] He and Blackwill proudly announced that, “If this package of measures sounds like a prescription for a new Cold War with Russia, it is.”

Gordon’s position has not changed. Here he is driving that point home more recently:

As @VP has said, US support for the Ukrainian people is enduring. This latest security assistance package will provide much-needed support as Ukraine bravely defends itself against Russia’s senseless aggression and works toward a just and lasting peace.

Of course, “enduring” could mean a few months in DC, but for now the Harris team — or its benefactors — are sticking to that line.

What about “America’s dad,” vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, the other figure Europeans are breathing a sigh of relief over? Maybe he could be a voice of sanity? Keep looking.

Ukraine’s Ambassador to the United States Oksana Markarova says that among American governors, “Walz is definitely one of the leaders of such support and a reliable friend of our country.”

Walz was one of the first US governors to condemn Russia in 2022 and issue an order requiring that state agencies terminate existing contracts with Russian entities and refrain from entering into any such future contracts. He’s been on board ever since.

Governor Tim Walz
@GovTimWalz
·
Follow
Minnesota will continue to support Ukraine as they defend freedom and democracy.

I visited the Ukrainian Embassy to establish a formal partnership between the public, private, and academic sectors of Minnesota and Chernihiv Oblast, strengthening our state’s ties to Ukraine.

In conclusion, all signs are that a Harris administration’s Ukraine policy would be a continuation of Biden (as would its Israel policy). In at least one way, it’s even worse because it’s throwing away another opportunity to take an off ramp. We’ve heard a lot about how the Biden team just wanted to drag the whole sorry affair across the election finish line. Now, the money behind Harris is announcing that even with new faces the losing and dangerous strategy will remain unchanged.

Notes

[1] Gordon is also a big believer in dubious chemical weapon allegations against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Not only that, but he is critical of one of Obama’s few successful foreign policy decisions — the one where he chose not to bomb Syria over the cooked intelligence that Assad crossed the chemical weapons red line in 2013. Gordon told The Atlantic in 2016 that “we should have bombed Assad.”

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/08 ... olicy.html

(These people are savages, 'D' or 'R' hardly matters...)

******

Biden’s Cruel & Orwellian Remarks on Gaza at the DNC
August 20, 2024

The speech that referred to Palestinian suffering was a journey into a universe of political guile from a president who had just approved sending $20 billion more weapons to Israel, writes Norman Solomon.



Biden addressing the Democratic National Convention Monday night. (C-span still)

By Norman Solomon
Common Dreams

An observation from George Orwell — “those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future” — is acutely relevant to how President Joe Biden talked about Gaza during his speech at the Democratic convention Monday night.

His words fit into a messaging template now in its 11th month, depicting the U.S. government as tirelessly seeking peace, while supplying the weapons and bombs that have enabled Israel’s continual slaughter of civilians.

“We’ll keep working, to bring hostages home, and end the war in Gaza, and bring peace and security to the Middle East,” Biden told the cheering delegates. “As you know, I wrote a peace treaty for Gaza. A few days ago I put forward a proposal that brought us closer to doing that than we’ve done since October 7th.”

It was a journey into an alternative universe of political guile from a president who just six days earlier had approved sending $20 billion worth of more weapons to Israel. Yet the Biden delegates in the convention hall responded with a crescendo of roaring admiration.

Applause swelled as Biden continued:

“We’re working around-the-clock, my secretary of state, to prevent a wider war and reunite hostages with their families, and surge humanitarian health and food assistance into Gaza now, to end the civilian suffering of the Palestinian people and finally, finally, finally deliver a ceasefire and end this war.”

In Chicago’s United Center, the president basked in adulation while claiming to be a peacemaker despite a record of literally making possible the methodical massacres of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

Orwell would have understood. A political reflex has been in motion from top U.S. leaders, claiming to be peace seekers while aiding and abetting the slaughter. Normalizing deception about the past sets a pattern for perpetrating such deception in the future.


Convention hall cheering Biden Monday night. (C-Span still)

And so, working inside the paradigm that Orwell described, Biden exerts control over the present, strives to control narratives about the past, and seeks to make it all seem normal, prefiguring the future.

The eagerness of delegates to cheer for Biden’s mendaciously absurd narrative about his administration’s policies toward Gaza was, in a broader context, the convention’s lovefest for the lame-duck president.

Hours before the convention opened, Peter Beinart released a short video essay anticipating the fervent adulation.

“I just don’t think when you’re analyzing a presidency or a person, you sequester what’s happened in Gaza,” he said. “I mean, if you’re a liberal-minded person, you believe that genocide is just about the worst thing that a country can do, and it’s just about the worst thing that your country can do if your country is arming a genocide.”

Beinart continued:

“And it’s really not that controversial anymore that this qualifies as a genocide. I read the academic writing on this. I don’t see any genuine scholars of human rights international law who are saying it’s not indeed there. . . . If you’re gonna say something about Joe Biden, the president, Joe Biden, the man, you have to factor in what Joe Biden, the president, Joe Biden, the man, has done, vis-a-vis Gaza.

It’s central to his legacy. It’s central to his character. And if you don’t, then you’re saying that Palestinian lives just don’t matter, or at least they don’t matter this particular day, and I think that’s inhumane. I don’t think we can ever say that some group of people’s lives simply don’t matter because it’s inconvenient for us to talk about them at a particular moment.”

Underscoring the grotesque moral obtuseness from the convention stage was the joyful display of generations as the president praised and embraced his offspring.

Joe Biden walked off stage holding the hand of his cute little grandson, a precious child no more precious than any one of the many thousands of children the president has helped Israel to kill.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/08/20/b ... t-the-dnc/

******

KHive Snitches, Right Wing Liberals, and Palestine
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 21 Aug 2024


Image: X platform

The allegation that only Trump threatens democracy is a useful ruse for the Democratic Party. They continue support for genocide and ethnic cleansing and fiercely attack anyone who dares to expose them and their very undemocratic ways.

“We could have confronted at any time at that convention, but we chose specifically during President Joe Biden’s address, because he’s the one who can stop this genocide by picking up the phone and making a phone call, and he has chosen not to do that.”
Nadia Ahmad , Florida delegate to the 2024 DNC convention

On August 8, 2024, Eman Abdelhadi, a sociologist and an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago, posted a seemingly uncontroversial missive on the X platform. “Oh Kamala is NOT ready for Chicago. But don’t worry; we’re ready for her.” Abdelhadi and thousands of other people are protesting the Democratic National Convention. For some reason this mild statement was offensive to the group who call themselves the KHive. They are Kamala Harris cult followers who will fight anyone who says or does anything that is out of alignment with their idolatry.

The KHive sprung into action upon seeing the post, accusing Abdelhadi of violent threats and vowing to punish her for daring to confront Kamala. “That’s a direct threat,” opined one misguided member of the mob. “The @FBI and @SecretService need to look into her. Definitely sounds like a threat,” said another who felt compelled to tag the agencies in question. While another confessed to the dirtiest deed of all, actual snitching. “I reported it/her and flagged FBI Secret Service and FBI Chicago Field office don’t play with #KHive ,” boasted a KHive fanatic known as @blckburn . She and others made good on their threats because the FBI did in fact contact Dr. Abdelhadi, who was able to secure legal representation before her interaction with that agency.

We are living in strange times when Black people tattle their hurt political feelings to the FBI in order to silence someone whose opinion they do not like. This is the same FBI that surveilled Martin Luther King and told him to commit suicide. This is the same FBI that murdered Fred Hampton. This is the same FBI whose director, J. Edgar Hoover , declared the Black Panther Party to be “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country” and whose Counter Intelligence Program killed BPP members, sent others to prison, and in so doing destroyed the liberation movement. Yet here we are, in an upside down world where Black people turn to the feds because their beloved neo-liberal imperialist might face a protest.

There is a larger story here beyond the mean girl activity that is amplified by the worst impulses of social media. Black people’s allegiance to the Democratic Party has been in existence for the past 60 years, but in recent decades has taken a turn towards the authoritarian indoctrination that is generally ascribed to Donald Trump’s MAGA followers.

We are told that Trump and his supporters are all fascists and that Kamala Harris must win to defeat them and to preserve democracy. But what is more fascist than reporting someone to law enforcement because they disagree politically? That is Exhibit A in the definition of fascism and the KHivers and other Democratic Party stalwarts are ready to act out the very behavior they claim to abhor.

While Joe Biden spoke during the opening night at the convention a group of delegates who want to end the Israeli genocide managed to sneak in a banner which read, “Stop Arming Israel .” One delegate felt compelled to hit one of the protesters on the head with a sign. Others moved to cover up the banner and then began shouting, “We love Joe!” Nadia Ahmad is the Florida delegate who was struck on the head. “They’re up there talking about fascism and like hitting me on the head with ‘I love Joe’ signs. That’s not a good look,” she said in what is perhaps the biggest understatement of the convention.

The Democratic Party is the party of militarism, neo-liberalism, imperialism, and now what is perhaps the most well documented genocide in human history. They will have a faux leftist operative at the convention podium like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who claims that Kamala Harris is “working tirelessly” on a ceasefire plan when in fact Harris has said that there will be no arms embargo of Israel, which is the only effective way of ensuring that the war crimes end. That sort of double talk doesn’t fool anyone who is dedicated to ending the genocide.

Everyone who wants to end Israel’s crimes or the proxy wars against Russia and China is forced to protest. Code Pink activists interrupted a Tim Walz appearance at the Women’s Caucus. Their chant was, “Stop killing women in Gaza!” Unlike the whining Karens who snitched on a protester or who snatched away a sign, they took it straight to the man who may be the next vice president and some of them were arrested in the process.

Doing otherwise is to be complicit. Of course the KHive Karens proved that there are many willing accomplices. Liberals may claim that Genocide Joe Biden is a good man, or that Trump and his supporters are the only villains in the country while they are either in support of or in denial about the fake democracy that tells the people their needs can’t be met while the system always does the bidding of weapons manufacturers, banks, fossil fuel producers, and big pharma.

As always there are many issues which could galvanize millions of people who want change or that could upend the election. In 2024 the issue that is most likely to have a great impact is genocide in Gaza. It encompasses militarism, racism, and the use of powerful lobbies to ensure that the people here do not get what they want. Joe Biden is still president and public relations stunts aside, is still dedicated to the zionist project. Kamala Harris dissembles but at the end of the day offers nothing different.

Perhaps being the target of a snitching KHive Karen or an irate convention delegate is a badge of honor. The biggest honor goes to those who refuse to participate in grotesque crimes that have killed at least 186,000 people . The ultimate punishment though is loss of power. No one has to vote for the war criminals. Voting for genocide is the ultimate fascist act.

https://blackagendareport.com/khive-sni ... -palestine

('red' added.)

[blindpig]

Democrats Release Insanely Hawkish Middle East Policy Platform

“When you’re siding with John Bolton on whether to bomb Iran, you’re as insanely hawkish as it gets.”

Caitlin Johnstone
August 21, 2024


Celebrity progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez falsely claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris “is working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza” at the Democratic National Convention on Monday night. There is literally no evidentiary basis anywhere for this assertion. She made it up.

Kamala Harris is not “working tirelessly” to do anything at this time besides become the next president. Her own staff are saying she is opposed to an arms embargo on Israel and won’t consider cutting or conditioning military aid, which is the only way the Israeli government can be effectively forced to stop sabotaging a peace deal so that the US-backed genocide can finally end. Saying you’ll continue pouring military explosives into a regime that is using those military explosives to conduct regular massacres of civilians is the exact opposite of working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire.

“This is false, it’s propaganda, and it’s making people misunderstand the issue,” Current Affairs’ Nathan Robinson said of AOC’s statement. “The Biden administration could have imposed a ceasefire anytime it wanted to. The only reason there isn’t one is that Biden has made sure Israel has no incentive to agree to one.”


As we deal with this crap, the DNC has approved a 2024 party platform whose section on the middle east is so surprisingly hawkish that it largely reads like it could have been written by some of Washington’s most war-horny Republicans. It repeatedly calls its support for Israel and the continuation of arms shipments thereto “ironclad”. It criticizes Trump as having been too soft on Iran, for god’s sake.

After boasting about the Biden administration’s bombing campaign against the “Iranian-linked Houthi forces” in Yemen, its “precision airstrikes on key Iranian-linked targets,” and its success in neutralizing Iran’s retaliatory strikes on Israel after Israel assassinated multiple Iranian military officials in Syria, the platform says that this “stands in sharp contrast to Trump’s fecklessness and weakness in the face of Iranian aggression during his presidency.”

Then they literally attack Trump for not going to war with Iran:

“In 2018, when Iranian-backed militias repeatedly attacked the U.S. consulate in Basra, Iraq Trump’s only response was to close our diplomatic facility. In June 2019, when Iran shot down a U.S. surveillance aircraft operating in international airspace above the Straits of Hormuz, Trump responded by tweet and then abruptly called off any actual retaliation, causing confusion and concern among his own national security team. In September 2019, when Iranian-backed groups threatened global energy markets by attacking Saudi oil infrastructure, Trump failed to respond against Iran or its proxies. In January 2020, when Iran, for the first and only time in its history, directly launched ballistic missiles against U.S. troops in western Iraq, Trump mocked the resulting Traumatic Brain Injuries suffered by dozens of American servicemembers as mere ‘headaches’ — and again, took no action.”

The “national security team” who suffered “confusion and concern” when Trump opted not to wade into a middle eastern war of unfathomable horror includes psychopathic war criminal John Bolton, who was reportedly “devastated” when Trump called off a deadly military assault on Iran in retaliation for its shooting down the aforementioned (unmanned) surveillance aircraft.

When you’re siding with John Bolton on whether to bomb Iran, you’re as insanely hawkish as it gets.


“President Biden and Vice President Harris believe a strong, secure, and democratic Israel is vital to the interests of the United States,” the platform reads. “Their commitment to Israel’s security, its qualitative military edge, its right to defend itself, and the 2016 Memorandum of Understanding is ironclad.”

The 2016 Memorandum of Understanding is the agreement by which the United States agrees to continue sending Israel $3.8 billion a year to spend on weapons.

This comes as Kamala Harris’ current and former staff members report that not only will the vice president refuse to cut or condition military support to Israel, she will also refuse to re-enter the Iran deal to ease tensions in the region. The Times of Israel cites congressman Brad Schneider saying he was told by the Harris campaign’s Jewish outreach chief that “the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee would oppose a return to the Iran nuclear deal.”



The Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was one of the only decent foreign policy moves made by the Obama administration, and killing it was one of the nastiest things Trump did as president — along with his other recklessly hawkish actions against Iran like implementing starvation sanctions and assassinating Soleimani. But rather than pledging to re-enter the Obama era of de-escalation and detente with Iran, the Democrats are attacking Trump for not fighting a war with Iran while pledging ironclad support for the nation that’s doing everything it can to get that war started.

So yeah, that’s the Democratic Party for you. Vote for them and you get a nicer-looking mask on the blood-spattered face of the US war machine. It’ll kill just as many middle eastern kids as the Republicans will, but it will kill them under the presidency of a woman of color with “she/her” in her Twitter bio.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/08 ... -platform/



Republicans Kill Civilians For Bad Guy Reasons, Democrats Kill Civilians For Nice Guy Reasons

The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans will kill a million Palestinians and say they’re doing it so Jesus will come back, whereas Democrats will kill a million Palestinians while making noises with their mouths like “ceasefire” and “two-state solution”.

Caitlin Johnstone
August 22, 2024

❖

NATO weapons are being used in the largest invasion of Russia since World War II, which according to the Ukrainian president proves Russia is bluffing about its “red lines” and it’s safe for NATO to be as aggressive as it likes inside Russia’s borders.

On a related note, the US is preparing to fight a nuclear war with Russia, China and North Korea simultaneously. The New York Times reports that the Biden administration has authorized a new nuclear strategic plan which “seeks to prepare the United States for possible coordinated nuclear challenges from China, Russia and North Korea,” in order to “examine in detail whether the United States is prepared to respond to nuclear crises that break out simultaneously or sequentially, with a combination of nuclear and nonnuclear weapons.”

❖

The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans will kill a million Palestinians and say they’re doing it so Jesus will come back, whereas Democrats will kill a million Palestinians while making noises with their mouths like “ceasefire” and “two-state solution”.

That’s basically it; one does an evil thing in an evil way, while the other does the same evil thing in a much more photogenic way. Republicans want to kill Muslims for evil reasons like claiming they’re all terrorists and irredeemable heathens, while Democrats want to kill Muslims for nice guy reasons like helping Israel defend itself and bringing peace and stability to the region. They both want to kill middle eastern civilians, but one of them will kill middle eastern civilians in ways that let liberals feel good about themselves.

It’s just a classic good-cop, bad-cop routine. One plays your friend and the other plays your enemy, depending on what end of America’s fake ideological divide you happen to land on. But really they both want the same thing — in this case to murder people around the world with total impunity without sparking domestic unrest.

❖

Progressive Americans often say “At least the Democrats can be pressured to end the killing in Gaza!”

Bitch, it’s been more than ten months. How has your “pressure” worked so far?

The same people who tell you Democrats are the better option to help Palestinians because they can be pressured to save Gaza will scream at you that you’re trying to get Donald Trump elected when you try to pressure Democrats to save Gaza.

❖

There’s not a single Palestinian American speaking at the main stage of the Democratic National Convention. Every possible demographic is being represented at this cringey bubblegum pop imperialism festival except Palestinian Americans, for some strange and mysterious reason.

❖

Whenever people say the Biden-Harris administration has been getting firm with Netanyahu, they mean issuing him a stern warning that if he doesn’t stop being so openly genocidal, they’ll be forced to get tough and issue him another stern warning.

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Claims made by Israel’s defenders over the years that have been thoroughly discredited by the evidence of the last ten months:

– That is wrong and unfair to scrutinize Israel more than other nations.

– That criticism of Israel arises from a hatred of Jews.

– That the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is very complicated and difficult to understand.

– That the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has bad guys on both sides who are both equally bad.

– That Israel’s violence is defensive in nature, arising from unprovoked aggressions by the Muslims in that part of the world.

– That IDF airstrikes on Gaza kill so many civilians because Hamas uses “human shields”.

– That Israel has ever been or will ever be ready to consent to a two-state solution.

– That the problems of the Palestinians are the fault of Palestinian leadership, or at least equally the fault of Palestinian leadership as Israeli leadership.

– That if not for Hamas and other Palestinian factions, the Palestinians would be living in peace with justice and happiness for all.

– That Israel deserves western support because it champions freedom, democracy and justice in a region that is otherwise bereft of those things.

– That Israel’s abuses have ever been about anything other than racism and colonialism.

– That the west’s support for Israel has ever been about anything other than geostrategic dominance of a resource-rich region.

– That Israel’s criminality is attributable to a small far right element within its government, rather than to the abusive nature that has been built into Israel from its very inception.

– That you can support the existence of Israel without supporting the violence, apartheid, theft and abuse that the state of Israel literally cannot exist without.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/08 ... y-reasons/

******

The DNC Fiddles While the World Burns
Posted on August 22, 2024 by Yves Smith

Yves here. This article gives a sobering picture of how disconnected Democratic party insiders are from the dangerous conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, and their poor grasp of the America’s deteriorating stature and military reach. There is one sour note in this article. It take a recent report in the Washington Post, that Ukraine and Russia were negotiating an end to their energy war. Both the Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Maria Zarakhova and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov denied it. At most, these “talks” were low-level feelers.

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies, the authors ofWar in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books in November 2022. Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq


DNC delegates unfurl banner during Biden’s speech at the DNC. Photo credit: Esam Boraey

An Orwellian disconnect haunts the 2024 Democratic National Convention. In the isolation of the convention hall, shielded from the outside world behind thousands of armed police, few of the delegates seem to realize that their country is on the brink of direct involvement in major wars with Russia and Iran, either of which could escalate into World War III.

Inside the hall, the mass slaughter in the Middle East and Ukraine are treated only as troublesome “issues,” which “the greatest military in the history of the world” can surely deal with. Delegates who unfurled a banner that read “Stop Arming Israel” during Biden’s speech on Monday night were quickly accosted by DNC officials, who instructed other delegates to use “We Joe” signs to hide the banner from view.

In the real world, the most explosive flashpoint right now is the Middle East, where U.S. weapons and Israeli troops are slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinians, mostly children and families, at the bidding of Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. And yet, in July, Democrats and Republicans leapt to their feet in 23 standing ovations to applaud Netanyahu’s warmongering speech to a joint session of Congress.

In the week before the DNC started, the Biden administration announced its approval for the sale of $20 billion in weapons to Israel, which would lock the US into a relationship with the Israeli military for years to come.

Netanyahu’s determination to keep killing without restraint in Gaza, and Biden and Congress’s willingness to keep supplying him with weapons to do so, always risked exploding into a wider war, but the crisis has reached a new climax. Since Israel has failed to kill or expel the Palestinians from Gaza, it is now trying to draw the United States into a war with Iran, a war to degrade Israel’s enemies and restore the illusion of military superiority that it has squandered in Gaza.

To achieve its goal of triggering a wider war, Israel assassinated Fuad Shukr, a Hezbollah commander, in Beirut, and Hamas’s political leader and chief ceasefire negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran. Iran has vowed to respond militarily to the assassinations, but Iran’s leaders are in a difficult position. They do not want a war with Israel and the United States, and they have acted with restraint throughout the massacre in Gaza. But failing to respond strongly to these assassinations would encourage Israel to conduct further attacks on Iran and its allies.

The assassinations in Beirut and Tehran were clearly designed to elicit a response from Iran and Hezbollah that would draw the U.S. into the war. Could Iran find a way to strike Israel that would not provoke a U.S. response? Or, if Iran’s leaders believe that is impossible, will they decide that this is the moment to actually fight a seemingly unavoidable war with the U.S. and Israel?

This is an incredibly dangerous moment, but a ceasefire in Gaza would resolve the crisis. The U.S. has dispatched CIA Director William Burns, the only professional diplomat in Biden’s cabinet, to the Middle East for renewed ceasefire talks, and Iran is waiting to see the result of the talks before responding to the assassinations.

Burns is working with Qatari and Egyptian officials to come up with a revised ceasefire proposal that Israel and Hamas can both agree to. But Israel has always rejected any proposal for more than a temporary pause in its assault on Gaza, while Hamas will only agree to a real, permanent ceasefire. Could Biden have sent Burns just to stall, so that a new war wouldn’t spoil the Dems’ party in Chicago?

The United States has always had the option of halting weapons shipments to Israel to force it to agree to a permanent ceasefire. But it has refused to use that leverage, except for the suspension of a single shipment of 2,000 lb bombs in May, after it had already sent Israel 14,000 of those horrific weapons, which it uses to systematically smash living children and families into unidentifiable pieces of flesh and bone.

Meanwhile the war with Russia has also taken a new and dangerous turn, with Ukraine invading Russia’s Kursk region. Some analysts believe this is only a diversion before an even riskier Ukrainian assault on the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Ukraine’s leaders see the writing on the wall, and are increasingly ready to take any risk to improve their negotiating position before they are forced to sue for peace.

But Ukraine’s recent incursion into Russia, while applauded by much of the west, has actually made negotiations less likely. In fact, talks between Russia and Ukraine on energy issues were supposed to start in the coming weeks. The idea was that each side would agree not to target the other’s energy infrastructure, with the hope that this could lead to more comprehensive talks. But after Ukraine’s invasion toward Kursk, the Russians pulled out of what would have been the first direct talks since the early weeks of the Russian invasion.

President Zelenskyy remains in power three months after his term of office expired, and he is a great admirer of Israel. Will he take a page from Netanyahu’s playbook and do something so provocative that it will draw U.S. and NATO forces into the potentially nuclear war with Russia that Biden has promised to avoid?

A 2023 U.S. Army War College study found that even a non-nuclear war with Russia could result in as many U.S. casualties every two weeks as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did in two decades, and it concluded that such a war would require a return to conscription in the United States.

While Gaza and Eastern Ukraine burn in firestorms of American and Russian bombs and missiles, and the war in Sudan rages on unchecked, the whole planet is rocketing toward catastrophic temperature increases, ecosystem breakdown and mass extinctions. But the delegates in Chicago are in la-la land about U.S. responsibility for that crisis too.

Under the slick climate plan Obama sold to the world in Copenhagen and Paris, Americans’ per capita CO2 emissions are still double those of our Chinese, British and European neighbors, while U.S. oil and gas production have soared to all-time record highs.

The combined dangers of nuclear war and climate catastrophe have pushed the hands of the Doomsday Clock all the way to 90 seconds to midnight. But the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties are in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry and the military-industrial complex. Behind the election-year focus on what the two parties disagree about, the corrupt policies they both agree on are the most dangerous of all.

President Biden recently claimed that he is “running the world.” No oligarchic American politician will confess to “running the world” to the brink of nuclear war and mass extinction, but tens of thousands of Americans marching in the streets of Chicago and millions more Americans who support them understand that that is what Biden, Trump and their cronies are doing.

The people inside the convention hall should shake themselves out of their complacency and start listening to the people in the streets. Therein lies the real hope, maybe the only hope, for America’s future.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/08 ... burns.html

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Russia Matters: Kamala Harris on Russia
August 21, 2024
Russia Matters, 8/8/24

Less than three weeks ago, Kamala Harris seemed to be firmly positioned in Joe Biden’s shadow as the incumbent fought to extend Democrats’ control of the White House for another four years. On July 21, however, the low-key VP was propelled to the front of this fight following Biden’s announcement that he was dropping out of the presidential race, a decision with roots in the incumbent’s disastrous debate performance against the GOP’s Donald Trump. The change of Democratic front-runner has made many (including RM’s staff) wonder what policies the world’s most powerful country might pursue under a President Harris. Given the aims of the Russia Matters project, we focused on trying to ascertain what Harris’ public words and actions may tell us about her potential policies toward post-Soviet Eurasia.

It follows from Harris’ role as vice president under Biden that overall, the new Democratic presidential candidate—who has just chosen Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate—shares the traditional post-Soviet American foreign policy establishment view of “Russian people good, Russia’s leaders bad.”

While Harris didn’t drive the Biden administration’s policy on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, she was, nevertheless, charged with “walking Volodymyr Zelenskyy through Western intelligence indicating an attack was days away, [and] pushing the Ukrainian president, who had been publicly dismissive of the threat, to prepare for war,” days before Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, according to WP’s recent review of her foreign policy views. Speaking five days before that invasion at the 2022 Munich Security Conference, Harris warned that the U.S. would impose “significant and unprecedented economic costs” on Russia if Moscow invaded Ukraine, but reiterated Biden’s position that U.S. forces would not be deployed to fight for Ukraine even as they would participate in “defend[ing] every inch of NATO territory.” One year later, speaking at the 2023 Munich Security Conference, Harris vowed that “the United States will continue to strongly support Ukraine… for as long as it takes.” During that same conference in the capital of Bavaria, Harris proved instrumental in advancing U.S.-led efforts to secure the release of U.S. citizens wrongly detained in Russia in exchange for Russian nationals held for espionage, assassination and other crimes in the West (these efforts bore fruit Aug. 1, 2024, with the largest prisoner exchange between Russia and the West since the Cold War). More recently, Harris represented the United States at the Ukraine Peace Summit in Switzerland on June 15 and 16, 2024, during which she announced $1.5 billion in aid for Ukraine.

While actively involved in shaping America’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Harris is also attuned to Russia’s domestic politics. For instance, she was among the first foreign leaders to comment on the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in a Russian prison colony on Feb. 16, 2024. “If confirmed, this would be a further sign of Putin’s brutality,” she said on that day. Harris also developed a relationship with Navalny’s wife, Yulia, writing a tribute to her after Time named her one of the 100 Most Influential People of 2024.

Given that Harris has followed Biden’s line on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and other issues described above, it could be tempting to predict that a President Harris’ foreign policy toward Russia will simply follow Biden’s lead. Indeed, Harris’ aides have recently told WP that the core of her foreign policy would not likely swerve from Biden’s robust support for Ukraine. However, she is still likely to approach global problems differently from Biden, who has longtime personal relationships with leaders such as Putin, which has shaped his rigid views on many issues, according to WP’s sources.

The compilation of Harris’ views on various issues, which you can find below, is part of Russia Matters’ “Competing Views” rubric, where we share prominent American figures’ takes on issues pertaining to Russia, U.S.-Russian relations and broader U.S. policies affecting Russia. All sections may be updated with new or past statements. The quotes below are divided into categories similar to those in Russia Matters’ news and analysis digests; reflecting the most pertinent topic areas for U.S.-Russian relations broadly, and for the drivers of the two countries’ policies toward one another.

I. U.S. and Russian priorities for the bilateral agenda
Nuclear security and safety:
Kamala Harris with Sens. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) writing in response to the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review: “Our review reportedly pays only superficial attention to the substantial threat posed by nuclear terrorism and nuclear proliferation. These efforts are just as important as deterring existing nuclear weapons states.” (Letter to President Trump, 01.29.18)
North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs:
Harris with Sens. Sanders and Warren signed a February 2018 letter to Trump, along with 15 other senators, saying he lacks the “legal authority” to carry out a preemptive strike on North Korea. (WP, 02.05.19)
Putin’s potential meeting with Kim Jong Un [would be] an act of desperation … when you look at Russia’s unprovoked war on Ukraine, and the idea that they would supply ammunition to Russia, well, it’s predictable where that ends up. I also believe very strongly that for both Russia and North Korea, this will further isolate them… We are all absolutely clear and unequivocal about the goal of the complete denuclearization of North Korea. (The Hill, 09.10.23)
Iran and its nuclear program:
Today’s decision to violate the Iran nuclear deal jeopardizes our national security and isolates us from our closest allies. This nuclear deal is not perfect, but it is certainly the best existing tool we have to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons and avoid a disastrous military conflict in the Middle East. (Kamala Harris’ statement, 05.08.18)
Iran poses a real threat to the United States based on its nuclear capabilities, and the negotiation of the JCPOA … was a smart way to put a cap on that in terms of escalating the threat. … If this president is thinking about putting us in a position where we are in a war with Iran, the consequences will be absolutely unacceptable and tragic in terms of the young men and women who are American soldiers sent and deployed into something that was completely avoidable. (MSNBC, 09.16.19)
Humanitarian impact of the Ukraine conflict:
Absolutely there should be an investigation and we should all be watching and I have no question that the eyes of the world are on this war and what Russia has done in terms of this aggression and these atrocities. (Reuters, 03.10.22)
First, from the starting days of this unprovoked war, we have witnessed Russian forces engage in horrendous atrocities and war crimes. Their actions are an assault on our common values, an attack on our common humanity. And let us be clear: Russian forces have pursued a widespread and systemic attack against a civilian population — gruesome acts of murder, torture, rape, and deportation. … In the case of Russia’s actions in Ukraine, we have examined the evidence. We know the legal standards. And there is no doubt these are crimes against humanity. And I say to all those who have perpetrated these crimes and to their superiors who are complicit in these crimes: You will be held to account. (White House, 02.18.23)
Military and security aspects of the Ukraine conflict and their impacts:
There is a playbook of Russian aggression, and this playbook is too familiar to us all. Russia will plead ignorance and innocence. It will create false pretext for invasion, and it will amass troops and fire power in plain sight. … Our forces will not be deployed to fight Ukraine, but they will defend every inch of NATO territory. (Times, 02.22.22)
Ukraine has regained more than half the territory Russia occupied at the start of the conflict thanks, in part, to a massive supply of American and European weapons. The Russian military has suffered severe setbacks. It has lost two thirds of its tanks and more than a third of its fleet in the Black Sea. Because of Putin’s aggression and recklessness, Russia has also suffered over 300,000 casualties. Remember, that’s more than five times what it lost in 10 years in Afghanistan. And now it forces conscripts onto the frontlines with as little as two weeks of training. (White House, 02.16.24)
Military aid to Ukraine:
The United States will continue to strongly support Ukraine. And we will do so for as long as it takes. (White House, 02.18.23)
In partnership with supportive, bipartisan majorities in both houses of the United States Congress, we will work to secure critical weapons and resources that Ukraine so badly needs. And let me be clear: The failure to do so would be a gift to Vladimir Putin. (White House, 02.16.24)
[To Zelenskyy] the President and I … will continue to work to secure the resources and weapons that you need to succeed. We will also continue to support your efforts to secure a just and lasting peace. … President Zelensky, as President Joe Biden and I have made clear, we will be with you for as long as it takes. (The Hill, 02.17.24)
Ukraine needs our support, and we must give it. (NBC, 02.18.24)
We see it in Ukraine, where our weapon deliveries and missile warnings help the people of Ukraine defend their homes and homeland, their sovereignty and territorial integrity. (White House, 05.30.24)
President Biden and my support for the people of Ukraine is unwavering. We support Ukraine not out of charity but because the people of Ukraine and their future is in our strategic interests. It is in our interest to uphold international rules and norms, such as sovereignty and territorial integrity and the international system we helped create following World War Two, which bolsters America’s security and prosperity. It is in the interest of the United States to defend democratic values and stand up to dictators. It is in our interest to stand with our friends, such as Ukraine. (White House, 06.15.24)
Punitive measures related to Russia’s war against Ukraine and their impact globally:
We are working with our allies in that regard, and we’ve been very clear that we are prepared to issue sanctions [on Russia over Ukraine] like you’ve not seen before. (CBS/RIAN, 12.26.21)
We will interpret any violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity by Russia and Vladimir Putin as an aggressive action and it will be met with costs, severe and certain, (ABC, 01.20.22)
If Russia further invades Ukraine, the United States, together with our allies and partners, will impose significant and unprecedented economic costs. (White House, 02.19.22)
We have also imposed economic costs on Russia for its aggression. And together with our G-7 partners, we have frozen Russia’s sovereign assets and made clear Russia must pay for the damages it has caused to Ukraine … If we fail to impose severe consequences on Russia, other authoritarians across the globe would be emboldened, because you see, they will be watching—they are watching and drawing lessons. (White House, 02.16.24)
We will work to make sure Russia pays damages to Ukraine and ultimately, we want to see Ukraine emerge from this war as a nation that is free, democratic and independent. (The Hill, 02.17.24)
Ukraine-related negotiations:
Russia continues to say it is ready to talk while at the same time it narrows the avenues for diplomacy. Their actions simply do not match their words. (AP, 02.19.22)
The U.S. was committed to continuing to impose costs on Russia and we will continue to work toward a just and lasting peace. (AP, 06.15.24)
In contrast, [Russian ruler Vladimir] Putin put forward a proposal yesterday. However, we must be frank: he is not calling for negotiations, he is calling for surrender. The United States is supporting Ukraine not out of charity but because it is in our strategic interest. (Ukrainska Pravda, 06.15.24)
Great Power rivalry/new Cold War/NATO-Russia relations:
Harris cited “public reporting” that the Russian government had put bounties on American soldiers in Afghanistan. (Responsible Statecraft, 10.14.20)
[At the beginning of talks with the leaders of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania:] I recognize the threats… we stand with you on this and many other issues… and we stand together as NATO allies. (White House, 02.18.22)
The NATO alliance is stronger and Russia is weaker because of what Putin has done. (NDTV, 03.10.22)
Russia is a bigger country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine so basically that’s wrong. (Mail Online, 03.01.22)
If Putin thinks he can wait us out, he is badly mistaken. Time is not on his side. (White House, 02.18.23)
The NATO alliance is stronger now than ever before, and the United States commitment to NATO and to its Article 5 is ironclad. … Our response to the Russian invasion is a demonstration of our collective commitment to uphold international rules and norms… if Putin were to succeed with his attack on these fundamental principles, other nations could feel emboldened to follow his violent example. (White House, 02.18.23)
The United States is prepared to defend every inch of NATO territory. (U.S. Embassy in Georgia, 03.14.22)
Now, thanks to the leadership of the United States, NATO is stronger, larger, more unified and more effective than ever before. We have reinforced NATO’s eastern flank with more weapons and forces, including air defense and fighter coverage, a sustained presence of army brigades, and a permanent U.S Army headquarters in Poland. (White House, 02.16.24)
Donald Trump has embraced Putin. … It’s not just happening today. It’s been happening, as he, Trump, threatened to abandon NATO and encouraged Putin to invade our Allies. (Politico, 07.21.24.)
China-Russia: Allied or aligned?
The reality is that North America and Europe have now done more together now than in many years. This is important in dealing with Russia’s aggressive actions, but also in dealing with a more competitive world and the security implications of China’s growth. (CE NoticiasFinancieras, 02.18.22)
We must maintain open lines of communication to responsibly manage the competition between our countries. (AP, 11.19.22)
We are also troubled that Beijing has deepened its relationship with Moscow since the war began. Looking ahead, any steps by China to provide lethal support to Russia would only reward aggression, continue the killing, and further undermine a rules-based order. (White House, 02.18.23)
Missile defense:
To be updated.
Nuclear arms:
Harris with Sens. Sanders, Warren, Booker and Gillibrand writing in response to the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review: “Your purported plans to develop new, more usable low-yield nuclear weapons and reintroduce Cold War-era weapons systems are unnecessary to maintain deterrence and are destabilizing. Further, your reported decision to expand the conditions under which the United States might use its nuclear weapons, including to respond to a broadened range of non-nuclear attacks, is equally disturbing.” (Letter to President Trump, 01.29.18)
Harris with Sens. Sanders, Warren, Booker, Klobuchar and Gillibrand to Trump: “Your administration’s efforts to double down on new, unnecessary nuclear weapons while scrapping mutually beneficial treaties risks the United States sliding into another arms race with Russia and erodes U.S. nonproliferation efforts around the world. … A collapse of the INF Treaty and failure to renew New START would lead to the absence of verifiable limits on U.S. and Russian nuclear forces for the first time since the early 1970s. … Abandoning the Treaty would free Russia to expand its capacity to directly threaten the entire U.S. homeland.” (Letter to President Trump, 12.12.18)
Counterterrorism:
[Harris on Russian bounties for U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan:] Is the intelligence in doubt? I would say during my three plus years of being on the Senate intelligence committee and therefore being in receipt of classified information about threats to our national security … I have come to highly respect the intelligence community for their professionalism, the detail and precision with which they work … It is well known and understood that part of the responsibility of the president of the United States is to concern himself or herself with the wellbeing of our service members … It would be wonderful to have a president who actually cares about those men and women and expresses some level of concern about their wellbeing but we don’t see that with Donald Trump in any meaningful way. (WP, 07.02.20)
No, there is no, whatsoever, any evidence [of Ukraine’s involvement in the Crocus City Hall terrorist attack]. And first, let me start by saying what has happened in an act of terrorism and the number of people who’ve been killed is obviously a tragedy and we should all send our condolences to those families. (The Hill, 03.24.24, ABC, 03.24.24)
Conflict in Syria:
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad viciously attacked innocent civilians, including scores of children, who suffocated to death from chemical weapons. This attack reinforces the clear fact that President Assad is not only a ruthless dictator brutalizing his own people—he is a war criminal the international community cannot ignore. President Trump must consult with Congress to address the administration’s lack of clear objectives in Syria and articulate a detailed strategy and path forward in partnership with our allies. (Statement, 04.06.17)
What has happened in Syria is yet again Donald Trump selling folks out. And in this case, he sold out the Kurds, who, yes, fought with us and thousands died in our fight against ISIS. And let’s be clear. What Donald Trump has done, because of that phone call with Erdogan, is basically giving 10,000 ISIS fighters a “get out of jail free” card. And you know who the winner is in this? There are four: Russia, Iran, Assad and ISIS. (Democratic debate transcript, 10.16.19)
Cyber security/AI:
[W]e must act urgently to bolster our country’s defenses like our election infrastructure and cybersecurity, a bipartisan issue that we have been working on in a bipartisan way. (Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 08.01.18)
Elections interference:
I think we’re all clear that Russia attacked our country during the 2016 election and that they are continuing to attack us today. Russia not only attacked one of our most sacred democratic values, which is a free and fair election, but also, I believe, our very American identity. … [T]hey manipulated us and they are an adversary and they provoked us and they tried to turn us against each other. (Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 08.01.18)
Russia was able to influence our election because they figured out that racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and transphobia are America’s Achilles heel. These issues aren’t only civil rights — they’re also a matter of national security. We have to deal with that. (Twitter, 02.05.19)
On this election issue, this long standing adversary decided that they wanted to attack us where we are strong, and one of the almost intangible strengths of America is we can hold ourselves out as a democracy, as flawed though we may be, it gives us the authority to walk in rooms and actually talk about human rights, talk about civil rights, talk about concepts of freedom. … [T]hey decide to attack the strongest pillar of democracy which is freedom and open elections. So let’s get Americans going at each other, what’s going to get heat? And they tried out a bunch of different things and you know what caught heat? The issue of race. So Russia exposed America’s Achilles heel. (NBC, 08.11.19)
We need to … upgrade the elections infrastructure, knowing that Russia needs to be held accountable for the fact that they interfered in the election of the president of the United States and will attempt to do it again. (Democratic debate transcript, 10.15.19)
When they influenced our elections, they diminished in some ways the integrity of our election system and therefore their goal was accomplished … and they did it through technology. … Until we can get legislation passed, I would urge that social media companies institute [requiring disclosures] as their policy … 2020 is not going to be immune and [there will be] attacks, misinformation campaigns, distortions of reality and truth to turn the American people off from this election. (Remarks at Lesbians Who Tech Pride Summit, 06.21.20)
I serve on the Senate Intelligence Committee. We have published detailed reports about exactly what we believe happened. And I do believe that there will be foreign interference in the 2020 election, and that Russia will be at the front of the line. (WP, 09.06.20)
Let’s take for example, Russia. So, I serve on the intelligence committee of the United States Senate. America’s Intelligence Community told us Russia interfered in the election of the president of the United States in 2016 and his plan in 2020. Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, said the same, but Donald Trump, the commander in chief of the United States of America, prefers to take the word of Vladimir Putin over the word of the American Intelligence Community. You look at our friends at NATO, he has walked away from agreements. (Vice presidential debate, 10.07.20)
I serve on the Intelligence Committee of the United States Senate. America’s intelligence community told us Russia interfered in the election of the president of the United States in 2016 and is playing in 2020. (Responsible Statecraft, 10.14.20)
Energy exports:
There could be a knock-on impact to energy prices paid by American consumers from ongoing tensions between Russia and Ukraine, U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris said, adding that the U.S. government is working to mitigate the effects. (Reuters, 02.20.22)
Climate change:
To be updated.
U.S.-Russian economic ties:
To be updated.
U.S.-Russian relations in general:
[On the release of Russian-held prisoners in the Aug. 1, 2024 exchange:] [They and their families] have shown incredible courage in the face of atrocious and devastating circumstances. Russian authorities arrested, convicted them in sham trials, and sentenced them to long prison terms. This has been an appalling perversion of justice. Over many years President Biden and I and our team have engaged in complex diplomatic negotiations to bring these wrongfully detained Americans home. We never stopped fighting for their release… We will never waver in our commitment to bring home every American who has been wrongfully detained or held hostage. That is my solemn commitment to my fellow Americans which I will always honor. (AP News, 08.01.24)
II. Russia’s domestic policies
Domestic politics, economy and energy:
[On Alexei Navalny’s death:] If confirmed, this would be a further sign of Putin’s brutality. … Whatever story they tell, let us be clear, Russia is responsible. (Independent Online, 02.16.24)
Alexei Navalny has been a brave leader who stood up against corruption and autocracy, and he stood up for the truth. (Presidendcy.ucsb.edu, 02.17.24)
[Yulia] Navalnaya has vowed to continue her husband’s fight for justice and the rule of law, giving renewed hope to those working against corruption and for a free, democratic Russia. And in so doing, she demonstrates exceptional selflessness and strength. Since that day in Munich, Navalnaya has emerged not only as a symbol of democratic values, but as a courageous fighter for them. The United States stands with her—and all those fighting for freedom and democracy. (Time, 04.07.24)
Defense and aerospace:
[On Russia’s test of an anti-satellite weapon] Without clear norms for the responsible use of space, we face real threats to our national and global security. By blasting debris across space, this irresponsible act endangered the satellites of other nations as well as the astronauts on the International Space Station. (CNN, 12.01.21)
Security, law-enforcement and justice:
N/A
III. Russia’s relations with other countries
Russia’s general foreign policy and relations with “far abroad” countries:
See Great Powers competition and U.S.-Russian relations in general sections above.
Ukraine:
The American people, you see, are in awe of the resolve of the people of Ukraine, in awe of their resilience and righteousness, their willingness to fight for freedom and liberty, and the extraordinary tenacity and leadership of President Zelenskyy. (White House, 02.18.23)
Other post-Soviet republics:
President Biden and I have been following events in Georgia with great concern. We worry about developments, such as the Georgian parliament’s recent passage of the foreign agents bill, that could threaten Georgia’s democracy and undermine Georgia’s relationship with the United States and Europe. We applaud your recent actions to veto that anti-democratic measure and your commitment to protect civil society as it comes under threat in Georgia. (Messenger Online, 05.28.24)

https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2024/08/rus ... on-russia/

Conclusion: "Meet the New Boss......"