Sympathy for the Devils...

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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Fri Nov 15, 2024 3:30 pm

The US: An Abyss in the Center
November 14, 2024

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Kamala Harris addresses supporters at a campaign rally. Photo: EFE

By Atilio Boron – November 10, 2024

The resounding defeat of Kamala Harris in the recent US presidential election certifies, for the umpteenth time, that when a society has been won over by a generalized tension, lukewarm, moderate, and evasive proposals such as those put forward by the Democratic candidate are a sure way to promote a crushing electoral setback. The social ill-humor produced by economic or political frustrations, by the fear perversely instilled by the ruling class, or by the hatred directed against stigmatized social categories—immigrants of Latino origin in the US case—makes the citizenship attracted to those who better tune into their anger and frustration. Trump appeared before the eyes of millions as someone willing to put an end to that state of affairs. Conclusion: when social circumstances are marked by immoderation, moderation becomes a sin. The Democratic candidate committed this sin.

Harris certainly ran at a disadvantage. She entered the campaign very late, a product of the unexpected collapse of President Joe Biden’s candidacy after the fateful debate with Donald Trump. To make matters worse, her administration as vice president had a grayish tone that did little or nothing to build a presidential and attractive image in the eyes of public opinion. A society bombarded by the continuous catastrophist preaching of the ultra-right, its worst tribal instincts whipped up by the insane conspiracy theories of Trump and his spokesmen who spoke about a country “invaded” by undesirable foreigners, could hardly lend its support to someone who was seen as co-responsible for such an unfortunate situation, given her status as vice-president of the United States.

The Democrats and their supporters in the academic establishment and in the corrupt media ecosystem were confident that since “the macro numbers” were positive, the population would reward their rulers by ratifying the continuity of the Democratic leadership. But as we know very well in Argentina, the fact that certain “macro numbers” look very favorable has little or nothing to do with the concrete living conditions prevailing in a society. This is especially true in the United States, the country with the worst income distribution among developed capitalist nations and characterized by a persistent increase in inequality. For example, the CEO, who in 1965 earned 20 times what an average worker in their company earned, in 2018, had managed to make their income 278 times higher than that of their employees, and the figure continued to rise after the pandemic. Middle-class households that, in 1970, captured 62% of the national income, by 2018, had seen their share plummet to 43%. With these figures in sight, Bernie Sanders, re-elected senator from Vermont, said that there was nothing surprising about this defeat because the Democratic Party abandoned the working class, and the working class abandoned that party and largely went on to make up Trump’s plebeian hosts.

The Democrats’ suicidal run to the right facilitated the mogul’s landslide victory. On several key issues, it was very difficult to discern what the difference was between him and his opponent. Harris and the New York tycoon were competing to see who would most emphatically support the genocide perpetrated by the Zionist regime in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria. Harris was even more warlike than Trump when it came to talking about the situation in Ukraine. Both considered China an enemy of the United States. Their differences on the immigration issue were reduced to a few nuances and neither made the slightest allusion to the phenomenal concentration of wealth experienced in recent years, much less suggested tax reforms capable of mitigating it. The differences between both candidates were discernible in a sensitive issue such as abortion—sensitive for a sector of the female electorate, not for all—where, while Harris appeared to be very assertive, Trump showed his great skills in evading any questions on the subject.



In conclusion: Trump arrives at the White House endowed with almost omnipotent powers. He won the presidency in the electoral colleges, where he harvested 295 votes against 226 for Harris, and in the popular vote, where he won just over 72 million votes, 50.9% of the total (and almost five million more than his opponent). He also has a majority in the Senate, almost a majority in the House of Representatives, and six of the nine votes of the Supreme Court, which has already set to work to close the 34 pending cases against the president-elect.

What does this result mean for Latin American countries? In principle, it was assumed that Harris would follow in the footsteps of Barack Obama and would have a more dialogue-oriented and respectful attitude towards the countries of the region. But Obama’s record is complex: resumption of diplomatic relations with Cuba but also an infamous executive order declaring Venezuela an “exceptional and imminent threat” to the national security of the United States. Trump made no secret of his contempt for the countries of the region, insulting them as he has done in an even more accentuated way in this campaign and fulfilling his mandate without having visited even one country in the area. He went to Argentina in 2018 for the G20 meeting and to Puerto Rico when Hurricane Maria hit in 2017. But shortly before the end of his term, he ordered the inclusion of Cuba among the countries promoting terrorism, a decision that was a tremendous blow to Cuba in the economic and financial field. He also complained about the stupidity (in his words) of the Democrats because, when he was about to seize Venezuelan oil, they let Venezuela escape. “Now we have to pay Maduro,” lamented Trump. In other words, nothing good can be expected from Trump, and neither from Harris, because the policy towards Latin America and the Caribbean is decided by the “deep state” and to a very small degree by the presidents in office.

For Washington, Our America is a region of exclusive and exclusive access for the United States, which must chase away, by all possible means, the evil outsiders—according to General Laura Richardson—such as Russia, China, and Iran. But I think it is very unlikely that Trump will decide to apply the “military card” against Cuba or Venezuela because such a measure could revive the fiasco suffered in Afghanistan or Vietnam, and, in addition, it would have very serious repercussions throughout the international system because it would indirectly affect China and, to a lesser extent, Russia and Iran. It is most likely that Trump will further tighten the blockade against Cuba and increase the paraphernalia of unilateral coercive measures applied against Venezuela. These blockades are carried out in open violation of international legality. That is why today, it is necessary to strengthen solidarity with these countries, privileged targets of imperial ambitions in the geopolitical sphere of the Greater Caribbean. And that is why Brazil’s veto of Venezuela’s entry into BRICS is incomprehensible, just as the fundamental support that Mexico has been providing to the Cuban Revolution is worthy of all praise.

https://orinocotribune.com/the-us-an-ab ... he-center/

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Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) arrives for a House hearing on September 20, 2023. (Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images/Common Dreams)

No thanks to these 52 Dems, House defeats Bill enabling Trump assault on nonprofits
By Jake Johnson (Posted Nov 15, 2024)

Originally published: Common Dreams on November 13, 2024 (more by Common Dreams) |

Legislation that would have handed President-elect Donald Trump sweeping power to investigate and shutter news outlets, government watchdogs, humanitarian organizations, and other nonprofits was defeated in the House of Representatives on Tuesday after a coalition of progressive advocacy groups and lawmakers mobilized against it, warning of the bill’s dire implications for the right to dissent.

But 52 Democratic lawmakers—including Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), and Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.)—apparently did not share the grave concerns expressed by the ACLU and other leading rights groups, opting to vote alongside 204 Republicans in favor of the bill.

One Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, joined 144 Democrats in voting no.

The measure ultimately fell short of the two-thirds majority needed to approve legislation under the fast-track procedure used by the bill’s supporters, but progressives wasted no time spotlighting the Democrats who supported the measure.

“If you’re looking for a handy list of Democrats who have no fucking clue what is about to hit and need their spines stiffened ASAP, this is a good place to start,” wrote Leah Greenberg, co-executive director of the advocacy group Indivisible.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who vocally opposed the legislation, wrote that “these 52 Democrats voted to give Trump the power to shut down any nonprofit he wants.”

“The NAACP, ACLU, Planned Parenthood, no organization would be safe,” Tlaib added.

Shameful.

If passed, the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act would grant the Treasury Department—soon to be under the control of a Trump nominee—the authority to unilaterally strip nonprofits of their tax-exempt status by deeming them supporters of terrorism.

The bill could be revived in the next Congress, which is likely to be under full Republican control.

Kia Hamadanchy, senior policy counsel with the ACLU, told The Intercept late Tuesday that “we will continue our sustained opposition.”

It is already illegal under U.S. law to provide material backing for terrorism, and the executive branch has significant authority to target groups it considers terrorist-supporting.

This isn’t just an attack on our communities; it’s a fundamental threat to free speech and democracy.

The ACLU noted ahead of Tuesday’s vote that while the bill contains “a 90-day ‘cure’ period in which a designated nonprofit can mount a defense, it is a mere illusion of due process.”

“The government may deny organizations its reasons and evidence against them, leaving the nonprofit unable to rebut allegations,” the group said.

This means that a nonprofit could be left entirely in the dark about what conduct the government believes qualifies as ‘support,’ making it virtually impossible to clear its name.

Opponents of the bill warned that Palestinian rights organizations would be uniquely imperiled if it passed.

“This bill dangerously weaponizes the Treasury against nonprofit organizations and houses of worship—Christian, Jewish, or Muslim—that dare to support Palestinian and Lebanese human rights or criticize Israel’s genocidal actions,” said Robert McCaw, director of government affairs at the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

“Allowing such sweeping, unchecked power would set a chilling precedent, enabling the government to selectively target and suppress voices of dissent under the guise of national security,” McCaw added.

This isn’t just an attack on our communities; it’s a fundamental threat to free speech and democracy.

Georgia State Rep. Ruwa Romman (D-97), a Palestinian American, echoed that sentiment following Tuesday’s vote and condemned the legislation’s 52 Democratic supporters.

“Every single Democrat who voted for this is not taking the threat of Trump remotely seriously and should be disqualified from any leadership positions moving forward,” Romman wrote on social media.

This is no longer business as usual. To agree to give him this kind of power is beyond egregious.

https://mronline.org/2024/11/15/no-than ... onprofits/

While I have little to no respect for the vast majority of the organizations that the author worries about the precedent is still very bad indeed.

" need their spines stiffened ASAP"...Ho ho, that's a good one I haven't heard in a while.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Sun Nov 17, 2024 6:48 pm

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The crisis of Liberalism
By Prabhat Patnaik (Posted Nov 16, 2024)

Originally published: Peoples Democracy on November 17, 2024 (more by Peoples Democracy) |

TRUMP’s victory in the U.S. Presidential election conforms to a pattern presently observable across the world, namely a collapse of the liberal centre and a growth in support either for the Left, or for the extreme Right, the neo-fascists, in situations in which the Left is absent or weak. This was visible in France where Macron’s party lost substantially, and the ascendancy of neo-fascism was prevented only by a hastily-formed Left alliance; this is also evident in our own neighbourhood, in Sri Lanka, where a Left candidate emerged as president through a sudden and substantial increase in his vote-share, defeating the incumbent president who belonged to the liberal centre. This ubiquitous collapse of the liberal centre, indicative of a crisis of liberalism, is the most striking phenomenon of contemporary times; its roots lie in the fact that political liberalism today remains tied to economic neoliberalism which itself has run into a crisis.

The political philosophy of classical liberalism, which provided the basis for liberal political praxis, was sustained by a long tradition of bourgeois economic thought, straddling both classical political economy and neo-classical economics. Both these strands believed, notwithstanding significant differences between them, in the virtues of the free market, whose shackling by State interference had to be removed on a priority basis.

The vacuity of this entire line of reasoning was exposed by the First World War (whose economic roots belied all claims relating to the virtues of the market) and even more blatantly of course by the Great Depression. Keynes showed that laissez faire capitalism, leaving aside “brief periods of excitement”, systematically kept large numbers of workers involuntarily unemployed, that the free market, far from being the ideal institution it was portrayed to be, was so flawed that it exposed capitalism to the danger of being overthrown by the rising tide of socialism. But being a liberal, and apprehensive about the socialist threat if the system was not rectified, he proposed a new version of liberalism (which he called “new liberalism”) that was to be characterised by perennial State intervention to boost aggregate demand and to achieve high employment, rather than an avoidance of it that had been the hallmark of classical liberalism.

Keynesianism however was never accepted by finance capital. Keynes himself was intrigued by this and attributed it to a lack of understanding of his theory. The real cause however lay deeper, in the fear that any systematic State intervention would delegitimise the social role of the capitalists, especially of that section of capitalists which was engaged in the sphere of finance and whom Keynes had called “functionless investors”; this is a persistent fear and remains to this day. Keynesianism became State policy only after the war, since the war had weakened finance capital and had led to the ascendancy of social democracy which had embraced Keynesianism.

The post-war boom in advanced capitalist countries saw a consolidation of finance capital and an expansion in its size to a point where it became increasingly international. At the same time post-war capitalism, even though supplemented by State intervention, ran into a different kind of crisis, not one caused by inadequate aggregate demand but one that consisted in an inflationary upsurge that occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This crisis was rooted in the twin phenomena that characterised post-war capitalism: high employment that diminished the reserve army of labour and removed its “stabilising influence” in a capitalist economy, and decolonisation that removed the mechanism for compressing third world demand to keep primary commodity prices low. It allowed the new international finance capital to discredit the regime of Keynesian demand management (aided and abetted by a revival of apologetic bourgeois economics re-propagating the virtues of the free market) and to promote neoliberal economic regimes everywhere. Since in the new situation, retaining the “confidence of the investors” (that is, preventing capital flight by kow-towing to the demands of international finance capital) was the overriding concern of State policy, Keynes’ “new liberalism” had to be jettisoned; the liberal centre, much of social democracy and even certain sections of the Left, lined up behind neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism however brought immense suffering to the working class in advanced capitalist countries and still greater suffering to the working people in the third world, even before it had run into a crisis; and the suffering increased greatly when it did run into a crisis. The growth rate of the world economy slowed down significantly in the neoliberal era compared to the dirigiste period; and it slowed further in the period after 2008 when the last of the U.S. asset price bubbles burst. This crisis, a result of inadequate aggregate demand caused by the massive increase in income inequality under neoliberalism (which invariably produces a tendency towards over-production) had only been delayed by the U.S. asset price bubbles that had kept up world aggregate demand through a wealth effect; the crisis manifested itself with the bursting of the bubble. It cannot be overcome within the bounds of neoliberalism, because neoliberalism eliminates the scope for Keynesian demand management; and a new bubble that could mitigate somewhat its intensity, is ruled out by the very experience of the previous ones that have made people more circumspect. In fact monetary policy aimed at stimulating a new bubble has only succeeded in stimulating inflation through higher profit-markups even in the midst of stagnant demand, which only aggravates the crisis even further.

Contemporary liberalism in short, committed as it is to the neoliberal order, does little, and indeed can do little, to alleviate the people’s distress. Not surprisingly, the people are turning away from it towards other political formations to the Right and to the Left. The Right too can do little to alleviate the people’s distress: its pre-election rhetoric is invariably at variance with its post-election policy which is neoliberal, as Meloni in Italy has shown, and as Marine Le Pen’s prime ministerial candidate, Jordan Bardella, was beginning to show even before the elections through a shift in his party’s stand vis-à-vis international finance capital. But the Right whips up a rhetoric against the “other”, typically some minority religious or ethnic group, or immigrants, to produce a semblance of some sort of activism in the face of the crisis, while the liberal centre barely acknowledges the existence of the crisis. Monopoly capital in this situation shifts its support towards the Right, or the neo-fascists, in order to maintain its hegemony in the face of the crisis, which is another reason for the weakening of the liberal centre and the crisis of liberalism.

Trump, it may be argued, does have an economic agenda, of protecting the U.S. economy against imports not just from China but even from the European Union; he cannot be accused of merely adhering to the old neoliberal script like Meloni. But several points must be noted here: first, even while moving away from liberal trade to protectionism, Trump has never mentioned putting restrictions on the free cross-border flow of international finance capital, so that the crux of the neoliberal arrangement remains unchallenged by him even in his pre-election rhetoric. Secondly, protectionism is not Trump’s original idea; it had begun even under Obama. Besides, protectionism alone would not revive the U.S. economy; it can at best encourage domestic production at the expense of imports from competing economies, but it cannot per se expand the size of the domestic market, for which an expansion of State expenditure, financed either through a fiscal deficit or through taxes on the rich, is essential. But with his penchant for corporate tax-cuts revealed from his last presidency, Trump will not resort to higher State spending, so that at best after a temporary blip caused by greater protection the U.S. economy will settle back into stagnation and crisis.

While Trump’s victory therefore was expected, being in conformity with the globally-observed phenomenon of a collapse of the liberal centre, it does show that the people have not seen through his economic agenda, of adherence to the basic tenets of neoliberalism (other than introducing greater protectionism which can at best produce a temporary increase in jobs while worsening the inflationary situation because of the absence of cheap imports).

The international context, it follows, is favourable for the ascendancy of the Left, which alone can bring an end to the ongoing crisis by bringing an end to neoliberalism, and which alone can bring about an end to the wars that are currently going on (and for which the liberal centre is culpable, a matter to be discussed on a later occasion). The Left however has to be prepared for this task.

https://mronline.org/2024/11/16/the-cri ... eralism-2/

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How the genocide in Gaza influenced Kamala Harris' defeat
14 Nov 2024 , 12:46 pm .

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https://misionverdad.com/sites/default/ ... k=py8vDi8f

Sami Al-Arian, a Palestinian who heads the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) at Zaim University in Istanbul, puts forward a number of arguments that support his conclusions in the article entitled "Trump did not win this election. Harris was defeated by a Gaza-inspired boycott."

Before the US presidential election, some Western media outlets analysed the influence of tensions and conflict in West Asia on the decision that Americans might make on 5 November.

The final month of the campaign coincided with the anniversary of the Hamas-led Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and the beginning of the Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip, as well as the opening of another war front in Lebanon against Hezbollah.

Before going into the journalist's arguments, it is necessary to note that both Kamala and Trump expressed their unconditional support for Tel Aviv.

On October 7, marking one year since the resistance operation, both candidates held events in memory of the victims of the Hamas incursion, but they failed to take into account the more than 42,000 Palestinians killed by Israel, most of them civilians and a large proportion of children and young minors.

At a tree-planting ceremony on the grounds of the vice presidential residence in Washington, DC, Harris made only a passing mention of the need to "alleviate the suffering of innocent Palestinians in Gaza who have experienced so much pain and loss over the year," though without holding the Israeli government responsible for those deaths.

Al-Arian argues that Donald Trump's victory over the Democratic candidate was not due to his rise in popularity "but to a conscious decision by millions of people to boycott the vote on the Democrat-backed genocide."

The journalist explains Trump's victory based on the results of the 2020 and 2024 elections. He recalls that 158 ​​million voters participated in the elections in which Joe Biden was victorious, which represents an increase in voters compared to the 151 million who turned out this year.

"The majority of the American people were clearly fed up with Trump. Yet in 2024, nearly 17% of Biden voters did not support Harris," he notes, adding that it shows that the Republican has not improved much as he did not even match his 2020 numbers.

"So what explains the decline in voter turnout from 155 million in 2020 to 140 million in 2024?" asks Sami Al-Ariana, who replies that foreign and national security policy were instrumental in causing a significant number of voters to boycott or vote for third parties.

In this sense, it analyzes the points on which the candidates could agree, but also those that influenced the change in voting patterns in key states.

Protest against genocide
Al-Arian says the only campaign issue on which there was notable agreement was America's unconditional support for Israel in its current rampant genocidal phase.

Several polls suggest that Democrats are currently more likely to support Palestinians than Israelis, which is why there have been nationwide "dump Harris" movements calling for voting for third-party candidates like Jill Stein or abstention.

In October, some media outlets were projecting that the genocide in Gaza could erode the traditional Democratic vote of young people. “Kamala Harris has made it very clear that she does not value my vote,” said Maryam Iqbal, adding: “We have an obligation not to vote so as not to reward the Democratic Party for its funding of this genocide.”

Iqbal is a 19-year-old Louisiana native who was voting for the first time. She was one of thousands of students arrested in the wave of pro-Palestinian protests that swept across the country's universities in April 2024. On the eve of the presidential election, it was not known how many young citizens would choose not to participate or vote for a third party.

In 2020, Biden swept six of the seven key states in the race, receiving a total of 12.73 million votes to Trump's 12.38 million, for a combined voter turnout of 25.11 million.

Harris lost the support of the Arab-American communities
Al-Arian's article details that this year Trump received 12.55 million votes to sweep the same swing states, while 12 million voted for Harris, a drop of more than 730 thousand votes compared to Biden.

He also noted that a similar phenomenon was experienced in the heart of the Arab-American communities of Dearborn, Dearborn Heights and Hamtramck, in the state of Michigan, where the Uncommitted movement was born, an NGO that focuses on supporting the Palestinian people , and where the largest Arab population in the United States lives.

"With the eyes of the world on Gaza, the president must listen to us, the more than half a million voters who are against the war and who are demanding that he change course in Gaza to end the suffering and death. It is appalling that Biden has the power to save so many lives and yet chooses not to intervene. The Democratic Party must heed our call and unite before the November elections to fight racism," Uncommitted says on its website.

Dearborn is an industrial city nicknamed the Arab capital of the United States, as 54.5% of its population is of Arab origin. In the 2020 presidential election, it voted for Biden, which led to his victory in Michigan, one of the swing states. However, since the beginning of the war, many inhabitants have declared themselves against the Democrats.

Turnout in this community was also much lower than in 2020. Biden received 88% in the southern Dearborn district, while Trump got 10.9%. In Hamtramck, Biden received 85% to Trump's 13%.

For the Arab community in the United States, as well as for the general population that rejects genocide, it was outrageous that the Biden administration approved the shipment of weapons to Tel Aviv to continue the slaughter of Palestinians.

Given all of this, it can be assumed that support for the Democrats decreased due to the conscious decision of millions of people to boycott the process, so one of the reasons, if not the main one, for Trump's victory in 2024 was not a sudden increase in his popularity.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/co ... ala-harris

Google Translator

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Liberal Arrogance and Hatred on Display After Trump Victory
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 13 Nov 2024

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While Donald Trump is frequently called a fascist and is even compared to Adolph Hitler, some angry democrats are engaging in their own racist and eliminationist rhetoric in the wake of his impending return to the presidency. Their reaction to Trump’s victory reveals that intolerance and bigotry are not unique to Trump and his followers.

“Fuck ‘em. I hope they are all deported. And I can’t wait until Netanyahu gets the green light to turn Gaza into a parking lot.”

“Can’t wait for the next Muslim ban. Fuck them. They get the president they deserve.”

“I hope every woman who voted for Trump and lives in a no abortion state gets what they wanted. To bleed out in a parking lot due to a miscarriage and no doctor will help you because THAT’S what you voted for. Y’all deserve it.”

“To the black men in Georgia that voted for Trump next time a cop has their knee on yall necks PLEASE LEAVE US BLACK WOMEN OUT OF IT!”

“Good morning to all my Arab Americans, dearborn Michigan, Palestinian supporters and Gaza pearl clutchers!

Black Americans, Black Women & Black Men are done! We won’t donate to your causes or feel sorry about any bombings! We had your back but you turned your back on us!”

These are just a few of the missives that angry democrats posted on social media after Kamala Harris was defeated in her campaign against Donald Trump. While every Trump utterance is examined for proof of racism and other forms of bigotry, liberals suddenly became very illiberal after the campaign ended. Many of them literally wished death upon Black men, Latino men, Arabs and anyone they hold responsible for Trump’s return to the white house. The white people who still form the base of his support are somehow exempt from these attacks.

While disturbing, these behaviors are not entirely unexpected. Instead of telling their voters how a Harris administration would benefit their lives, her campaign engaged in a propaganda effort, amplifying former Trump officials to attest to his fascist beliefs or resuscitating old stories about his alleged affinity for Hitler and Nazi ideology .

If Trump and his supporters are in fact comparable to Nazis then no scorn or condemnation of them is too harsh. But these opinions did not indicate any level of political maturity or analysis. The tit for tat expressions which wished suffering upon others are akin to the worst sloganeering of the MAGA hat wearing Trump followers who are so despised, the “deplorables” as it were. The people who think of themselves as being more enlightened actually took the time to consider and publicly share their violent sentiments as they wished bombings on civilians or death from abortion bans.

Much of the blame falls on the Democratic Party itself which, absent any intention of legislating programs that would help their voters prosper in their material lives, has instead chosen to stoke hatred against republicans. Emotions are substitutes for policy, as the administration which billed itself as the “most progressive since FDR” allowed covid era stimulus payments, expansions of unemployment insurance, freezes on student loan payments, eviction protection, and SNAP and Medicaid benefits to lapse. There was no action on the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act or on the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act which would restore enforcement provisions to the Voting Rights Act. The federal minimum wage didn’t go up and, as Joe Biden promised, Medicare for All was never on the agenda. In the absence of tangible policies to run on, they had nothing but a bipartisan vote to make Juneteenth a national holiday and then tapped into fear mongering against republicans.

The end result is not only anger and sadness that Trump will again be president but also a kind of mass psychosis that endlessly repeats that he is a liar who received five draft deferments for bone spurs while never mentioning that Biden also received five draft deferments as a student and a medical exemption for asthma. Trump’s lies are endlessly dissected but not Biden’s campaign promise that he would not permit oil drilling on federal land but did just that in 2023 when he approved the Willow Project in Alaska.

Black democrats are particularly confused. Every four years they are barraged with appeals to vote for the “Black party” and send the republicans, the “white party” down to defeat. The Republican Party has received the majority of votes from white people in presidential elections since 1964. It is the home of open and unfettered white racist sentiment and action, so the feelings of doom are understandable. But the duopoly trap creates political passivity, encouraging voter participation only in presidential election years while giving a myriad of reasons for telling Black people not to demand anything other than a democrat sitting behind the big desk in the oval office while promising little else in return.

In such a system, everyone becomes an enemy. If a democratic presidency is the one and only prize, then every issue that argues against support must be ignored or opposed and anyone raising issues such as the US-funded genocide in Gaza is also an enemy. Palestinians who refuse to support the genocidal Democratic Party which is killing their people are now called the enemies of Black people. Latino support for the democrats falls every election cycle but still, a majority of voters in that group voted for Harris, approximately 53% . No matter. If the media say that Latino men are voting for Trump then liberals conclude they must all be punished by the deportations they claimed to oppose before the election. Of course, only citizens can vote and by definition cannot be deported. The anger defies logic.

It is noteworthy that there is a great deal of punching down, but very little punching up. The Democratic Party clearly failed its voters after raising more than $1 billion and still losing to the man they spent so many years vilifying as a liar, buffoon, criminal, and evil incarnate. The not-so-enlightened liberals rarely even questioned how the debacle came about, much less showed anger at the candidate, or the party, or the process by which an unpopular and frail president face planted in a debate before being taken out of the election by rich donors, and replaced by a Vice President without a vote – a Vice President who did not even earn one delegate in earlier primary elections. Liberals also did not challenge the questionable strategy of chasing a handful of “never Trump” republican votes and spending millions of dollars on concerts with celebrities. One would think that the mental energy needed to conjure up a destroyed Gaza might also manage to ask hard questions of the woman at the top of the ticket.

Apparently, Trump is not the only authoritarian in U.S. politics. Democratic voters also believe in a hierarchy that tells them to act like children abused by an unstable parent who demands their silence. Politics is now about feeling superior to others rather than being able to cogently argue against them or defend one’s own position. It is not about asking their betters anything, including why they lost.

It seems that the U.S. is full of mean and angry people. Of course, their own government engages in austerity meant to grind them down economically and to deprive them of any political recourse. But the people don’t have to accept this treatment. They don’t have to become the angry mob.

The truth is that people in this country have been dehumanized to the point where they lack empathy for others. They also have been kept uninformed and ignorant. Even the liberal professional class, which holds itself up as the best among the population, is just as indoctrinated as thousands of Trumpers on January 6th. Its members do not know how to activate themselves politically, how to struggle with like minded people, or how to make political demands. Seeing oneself as the good group is thought to be enough.

Or perhaps these enraged liberals know what they are up against. Despite the celebrity endorsements and happy talk, maybe they know that their party is controlled by an oligarchy that will fight them tooth and nail. They only feel safe spewing vitriol on social media.

https://blackagendareport.com/liberal-a ... mp-victory
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Mon Nov 18, 2024 3:50 pm

Joe Biden – one foot in the grave and he wants to take the rest of us with him

This evening’s edition of ‘News of the Week’ on Russian state television carried the ‘breaking news’ that President Biden has just given permission to Ukraine to use American ATACMS medium range ground launched missiles to attack deep within the Russian Federation. The same news also appears on the latest online edition of The New York Times, and so we may assume that the report is correct.

Host Dmitry Kiselyov did not go beyond the bare statement of fact. Surely the Kremlin will require a bit of time to react, but react it will.

The fate of the world does not hang on my every word and so I do not have to be so circumspect.

Regrettably, we are witnessing a replay of what occurred the first time Donald Trump was elected, back in November 2016. The reaction of the Obama administration was to use the couple of months before handover of power to sabotage the most salient aspect of his intended foreign policy initiative, to normalize relations with Russia. I say ‘salient’ not because it was Trump’s first priority but because in Hillary Clinton’s vicious campaign to portray Trump as a Russian asset all that we heard for months was Russia, Russia, Russia. In any case, it was during the transition period that the United States illegally seized Russian consular properties with the intention to create a scandal that would poison relations with Moscow.

That dirty trick was child’s play compared to what Biden & Company are intent on doing now.

Just over two months ago, this very question of allowing Kiev to fire missiles using US technology on strikes deep inside the Russian Federation had been vetoed by Biden when it was proposed to him by visiting UK Prime Minister Starmer. That refusal followed by a day a direct threat from Vladimir Putin that the use by Kiev of medium range missiles supplied by nuclear powers in the West for such attacks on Russia would make the providers of those missiles co-belligerents. We said then that the Pentagon had prevailed upon the President to take the threat seriously and to decline to give his permission to the British, so that Starmer went home empty-handed.

What has happened to change the thinking in the Oval Office? There can be no doubt that Donald Trump’s victory on 5 November and the clear indications that he will cut American aid to Ukraine and push for a negotiated settlement of the war on terms acceptable to Moscow has enraged the Neocons who hold the Collective Biden in their thrall. The flip-flop on use of such missiles is a testament to the utter irresponsibility of this administration. It calls for an urgent move in Congress to stop an action that is tantamount to a declaration of war on Russia.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2024/11/17/ ... -with-him/

I greatly doubt that Trump will make an offer that Moscow finds acceptable. He'll not be tarred a 'loser' and the screams of anguish from the Nazi-lovers here will be very hard for him to ignore.

The latest volley against Ukraine's electric infrastructure shows this escalation to be another losing tactic.

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Biden Ramps Up Nuclear Brinkmanship On His Way Out The Door

We are living in dark and dangerous times.

Caitlin Johnstone
November 18, 2024


The New York Times reports that the Biden administration has authorized Ukraine to use US-supplied long-range missiles to strike Russian and North Korean military targets inside Russia — yet another dangerous escalation of nuclear brinkmanship in this horrific proxy war.

The Times correctly notes that authorizing Ukraine to use ATACMS, which have a range of about 190 miles, has long been a contentious issue in the Biden administration for fear of provoking military retaliations against the US from Russia. This reckless escalation has been authorized despite an acknowledgement from the anonymous US officials who spoke to The New York Times that they “do not expect the shift to fundamentally alter the course of the war.”

As Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp notes, Vladimir Putin said back in September that if NATO allows Ukraine to use western-supplied weapons for long-range strikes inside Russian territory, it would mean NATO countries “are at war with Russia.” This is about as unambiguous a threat as you’ll ever see.


NYT reports that Biden’s policy shift “comes two months before President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office, having vowed to limit further support for Ukraine.” And it is here worth noting that last week it was reported by The Telegraph that British PM Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron had been scheming to thwart any attempt by Trump to scale back US support for Ukraine by pushing Biden to authorize long-range missile strikes in Russian territory.

But it is also true that the day before the US election Mike Waltz, Trump’s next national security advisor, had himself endorsed the idea of authorizing long-range missile strikes into Russia with the goal of pressuring Moscow to end the war. His plan for disentangling the US from the conflict entails ramping up sanctions on Russia and “taking the handcuffs off the long-range weapons we provide Ukraine” in order to pressure Putin into eagerly accepting a peace deal.

So while this is being framed as an administration that’s more hawkish on Russia executing a maneuver that’s designed to hamstring the peacemongering of an incoming administration that’s less favorable to assisting Ukraine, in reality it may just be goal-assisting the next administration in a policy change it had planned on implementing anyway.


Either way, it’s insane. Putin ordered changes to Russia’s nuclear doctrine in September in order to ward off these sorts of escalations by lowering the threshold at which nuclear weapons could be used to defend the Russian Federation, and they’re just barreling right past that bright red line like they barreled over the red lines which led to the invasion of Ukraine. And the fact that they’re adding yet another nuclear-armed state into the mix with North Korea is just more gravy for the nuclear brinkmanship pot roast.

At one point in 2022, US intelligence agencies reportedly assessed that the odds of Russia using a nuclear weapon in Ukraine was as high as fifty percent, but the Biden administration kept pushing forward with this proxy war anyway. These freaks are taking insane risks to advance agendas that stand to yield the slimmest of benefits even by their own assessments.

We are living in dark and dangerous times.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/11 ... -the-door/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Tue Nov 19, 2024 5:46 pm

CIA Democrats and Other Party Hawks Win Races in 2024 Election
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - November 17, 2024 2

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[Source: republicbroadcasting.org]

They embody a party that crossed over to the dark side years ago
In March 2018, Patrick Martin of the World Socialist Web Site published a political pamphlet entitled “The CIA Democrats.”

In it, he wrote that “an extraordinary number of former intelligence and military operatives from the CIA, Pentagon, National Security Council and State Department” were “seeking nomination as Democratic candidates for Congress in the 2018 midterm elections.”

This is a departure from the 1960s and 1970s when Democrats like George McGovern, Leo Ryan and Frank Church were against wars like Vietnam and sought to reign in the CIA.

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[Source: mehring.com]

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A lost breed today. Even most of the Squad supported NATO and the war in Ukraine though some have opposed the Israeli genocide in Gaza. They have also done nothing to take on the CIA. [Source: amazon.com]

Some of the Class of 2018 CIA Democrats, like Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA operative with three tours in Iraq, were recruited as part of a “red-to-blue” program targeting vulnerable Republican-held seats.

In the 2018 race, there were far more former spies and soldiers seeking the nomination of the Democratic Party than for the Republicans. Martin wrote that there were so many “spooks” that with a “nod to Mad Magazine,” one might call the primaries “spy vs. spy.”

CovertAction Magazine has kept tabs on the “spook-soldiers” who were elected as part of the Class of 2018 and followed their careers in Congress. (According to Martin, 30 spook-soldiers won primaries and 11 were elected to Congress.)

Below is a summary of how some of them fared in the 2024 election:

1. Elissa Slotkin:

Slotkin narrowly defeated Republican challenger Mike Rogers in Michigan on November 5 for a seat in the U.S. Senate.

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[Source: mlive.com]

Slotkin is the one-time assistant to Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. Prior to her election to Congress, Slotkin put her stamp on the U.S.’s disastrous Ukraine policy as Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense following the U.S.-backed Maidan coup in 2014.

Over the past six years as a Member of Congress, Slotkin has continued to fervently support the Ukraine war, telling an NPR reporter: “I think we’ve got to give them [Ukraine] what they need….This is a black and white issue. Our weapons have made a huge difference.”

In reality, the only difference those weapons made is in killing more people while prolonging Ukraine’s inevitable defeat.

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Elissa Slotkin, second from left, and other members of Congress with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. [Source: wins.com]

Described as a “moderate” or “conservative” Democrat of the kind the CIA and the plutocratic elite that it serves like, Slotkin is one of only five Democratic House members who voted against an amendment to prohibit support to and participation in the Saudi-led coalition’s military operations against the Houthis in Yemen—a genocidal operation.

Endorsed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) because of her strong pro-Israel stance, Slotkin further voted against H.Con.Res. 21, which directed President Joe Biden to remove U.S. troops from Syria within 180 days.[1]

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Elissa Slotkin’s favorite film. [Source: itunes.apple.com]

When asked by a reporter about her favorite CIA movie, Slotkin tellingly named Zero Dark Thirty, which glorified the use of torture in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

In the same interview, Slotkin praised the CIA’s Hollywood liaison office, which she said helps Hollywood to “really understand what is going on”—comments that are in line with the CIA’s official cover story for their PR operations in Hollywood, and make it seem like the Agency is merely concerned with greater accuracy, not covering up its crimes or trying to rehabilitate its public image.

2. Andy Kim:

The seat of disgraced New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) has now been filled by Class of 2018 CIA Democrat Andy Kim (D-NJ), an adviser to former CIA Director David Petraeus who served as director for Iraq on Barack Obama’s National Security Council (NSC).

A graduate with degrees in political science from the University of Chicago and Oxford University who was a member of the progressive congressional caucus, Kim has been a staunch supporter of massive U.S. weapons supplies to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

The first person of South Korean descent elected to the U.S. Senate, Kim voted for a congressional bill declaring that the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is anti-Semitic, and referred to the death of Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny as a “murder”—absent any proof that this was the case.

Predictably, Kim adopts alarmist rhetoric regarding North Korea that could lead directly into a war. He claimed that “there’s a madman with his finger on the button that can send nuclear weapons to annihilate my family.” However, it is the U.S. that precipitated the development of North Korea’s nuclear program as a security blanket after it bombed North Korea nearly back to the Stone Age during the Korean War and has tried for decades to overthrow its government.

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Warmonger Andy Kim celebrates election night victory with his young sons. [Source: nytimes.com]

3. Jared Golden:

Class of 2018 CIA Democrat Jared Golden narrowly defeated Republican Austin Theriault to retain his seat in Maine’s 2nd congressional district on November 5.

Golden is a tattooed Iraq and Afghan war veteran who served as a policy adviser on the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

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War hawk Jared Golden is a tool of the Israeli lobby at a time Israel is committing genocide. [Source: nytimes.com]

A conservative Blue Dog Democrat who was named Vice Chairman of the Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, Golden has urged President Biden to give F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine, and bragged about voting for more than $78 billion in border security funding during his time in Congress.[2]

Additionally, he has championed record military budgets that provided funding for the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine, and for developing new naval destroyers and F-35 jets and CH-53K helicopters, which will benefit Pratt & Whitney’s factory in North Berwick, Maine, and the Hunting Dearborn factory in Fryeburg, Maine.

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Golden has done his job by keeping the dollars flowing to the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine. [Source: defensenews.com]

According to Opensecrets.com, Golden took in $375,091 from AIPAC in 2023-2024 and more than $439,999 in total from pro-Israel lobby groups in the same period.[3] Not surprisingly given these totals, Golden has supported every U.S. military aid package to Israel while opposing calls for a cease-fire.

Golden showed himself to be totally deluded from reality when he claimed that Israel was not committing war crimes in Gaza, when they have been widely documented on the pages of mainstream newspapers.

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Peace activists calling for a cease-fire in the Israel-Gaza war who were arrested at Golden’s office. [Source: mainemorningstar.com]

4. Jason Crow

Jason Crow, a former Army Ranger who served in Afghanistan, handily defeated John Fabbricatore on November 5 to win a fourth term in Congress.

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Jason Crow with his family on election night. [Source: youtube.com]

Holding a childish view of world affairs out of the 1950s McCarthy era, Crow promotes on his website his role in securing provisions within the National Defense Authorization Agreement (NDAA) to help finance Buckley Space Force base in Colorado as part of his goal of making Colorado a global aerospace leader.

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Congressman Crow with Senator John Hickenlooper and other local leaders discussing the future of the Buckley Space Force Base in October. [Source: crow.house.gov]

Buckley Space Force Base is headquarters of the U.S. Space Command, which follows a Nazi blueprint of trying to dominate the world by militarizing and controlling outer space.[4]

Space expert Bruce Gagnon has warned that exhaust from escalating numbers of rocket launches by the U.S. Space Force is diminishing the ozone layer, and the growing space debris could even cause the Earth to go dark as collisions become more likely.

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Debris in space from space weapons (artist’s rendition). [Source: in.mashable.com]

Since Ukraine has been a key theater for testing new space-based weapons, it is no surprise that Jason Crow is a staunch supporter of that war and has established close friendships with Ukrainian military and political leaders who have turned their country into a neo-colonial vassal.

Crow claims that “Taiwan will eventually fall if we’re not able to help Ukraine win.”

To avert this outcome, he has called for increased military training to Ukraine and sending more long-range weapons and missiles to hit inside Russia, which he wants to sanction even more than it already is.[5]

A hawk on Israel, Crow supported legislation with Mike Walz (R-Fl), Trump’s new National Security adviser, to strengthen U.S.-Israeli intelligence sharing in the Gaza war, stating that his years fighting terrorism taught him that “intelligence is the key to effective counter-terrorism.”

One of Crow’s biggest donors is Palantir Technologies, a data-analytics company founded with CIA seed money, which signed a major cooperative agreement with the Israeli Defense Ministry while providing artificial intelligence (AI) software used by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for bomb-targeting and for accumulating data on Palestinians in the occupied territory.

Palantir has also played a key role in the Ukraine War by tracking Russian military movements and helping Ukraine to coordinate battlefield maneuvers along with bomb-targeting and there is concern that the company’s AI software platform also is being weaponized against ordinary Americans.

5. Mikie Sherrill:

Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ), a U.S. Navy helicopter pilot with an intelligence background and Class of 2018 CIA Democrat, defeated Republican Joe Belnome on November 5 to win a fourth term in the 11th congressional district of New Jersey.

The New Jersey Globe reported that Sherrill might not serve out her full term if her gubernatorial campaign takes off.

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[Source: patch.com]

Sherrill has served on the House Armed Services Committee and Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, a relic of the Cold War which promotes Sinophobia and confrontation with China.

On her website, Sherrill states that, serving on the House Armed Services Committee, she has been able to “significantly increase funding for Picatinny Arsenal—a major military research and manufacturing institute in her district—which remains the Army’s leading research institution for armaments and ammunition.”

Sherrill continues: “Beyond supporting the critical research and development programs at Picatinny, I am also proud to support the many defense technology companies that call NJ-11 home and are on the cutting edge of modernizing our Armed Forces. Many of my provisions in the FY23 National Defense Authorization Act support funding for our local defense industrial base and businesses.”

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[Source: milbases.com]

Sherrill is an anti-Russia and anti-China national security hawk. On her website, she writes:

“Both Russia and China have continued to build their military might and promote their influence across the globe. Neither country shares our values and often they are undermining our interests across the world. We must ensure we modernize our military to meet this threat and provide critical funding for cybersecurity and election protection.

“Putin instigated an unprovoked attack against Ukraine—a sovereign, democratic nation. He has attempted to rewrite history and has unleashed propaganda and disinformation in pursuit of his clear desire to rebuild the Soviet Union’s so-called sphere of influence. [In 2022], I traveled twice to Ukraine, once in January before Putin’s invasion and again in July. I met with President Zelensky and other top Ukrainian officials about the support they need from us and imparted to them the fierce support in New Jersey—home to one of the largest Ukrainian American communities in the country—for their independence and democracy.

“We secured emergency funding through a bipartisan package to support the Ukrainian people in their fight for freedom. American weapons support has made a tangible difference in the Ukrainians’ ability to hold off Russian aggression, including the M-777 Howitzer, developed here at Picatinny Arsenal.”


The M-777 howitzer, it should be noted, has been used to strike at and kill civilian targets in the Donbass, though has not reversed the failings of Ukraine’s summer 2023 counteroffensive.

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M-777 howitzer that Sherrill champions. [Source: en.defense-us.com]

Sherrill favors continued military support to Israel and a growing police state at home. She boasts on her website about supporting the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2022, which she claims would “better equip our law enforcement with information related to possible attacks and their relationship with hate crimes.”

In May 2022, Sherrill and then-Representative Mike Gallagher (R-WI), Chairman of the Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, participated in a strategic-operational war game, “Dangerous Straits: Battle for Taiwan 2027,” with the Center for a New American Security and NBC’s Meet the Press.

The war game provided important insight into how a potential war with China over Taiwan could develop, and how the U.S. and its allies and partners could defeat an attack on Taiwan by China.

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Meet the Press war game in which Mikie Sherrill participated. [Source: nbc.com]

A Party That Years Ago Crossed Over to the Dark Side

The Class of 2018 CIA Democrats are emblematic of the Democratic Party’s support for the warfare and surveillance states, which have made it hated among broad sectors of the population.

Kamala Harris is estimated to have gotten around 9 million fewer votes than Joe Biden did in 2020 in good part because of her embrace of war-mongering policies.

A key turning point in the history of the Democratic Party was the 1980 election, where many of the progressives of the 1970s were defeated by a big-money offensive and CIA campaign to destroy its congressional enemies.

Bill Clinton (and possibly Hillary too) had a background as a CIA “asset,” as did Barack Obama, who worked for a CIA-linked company that produced economic intelligence reports following his graduation from Columbia University.[6]

During their presidencies, Clinton and Obama helped re-empower the CIA while working to rehabilitate its reputation

The Class of 2018 CIA Democrats did not come out of nowhere. They fit a historical trajectory by which the Democratic Party has completely crossed over to the dark side.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/1 ... -election/

With the exception of a few years in the 1930s the Democratic Party has always been on the dark side. Slavery, Andrew Jackson, Jim Crow, Japanese-American Internment.....what's to like? They've been running on the New Deal for 85 years now even as they started reneging on it before WWII was over. When was it they repealed Taft-Hartley?
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Wed Nov 20, 2024 3:24 pm

Biden Leaves Office But Risks War with Russia

Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 20 Nov 2024

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President-elect Donald Trump meets with President Joe Biden at the white house on November 13, 2024 (REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)

Democrats are in a collective state of panic because Donald Trump is returning to the presidency. But Joe Biden is escalating conflict in the Ukraine proxy war against Russia and endangering the whole world in the process. If Trump is a fascist, then surely Biden is as well.

While every Donald Trump utterance is given great attention and dissected for proof of nefarious intent, dangerous actions taken by Joe Biden are minimized or go unreported altogether. The corporate media have never investigated the likelihood that Biden and his foreign policy team sabotaged the NordStream pipelines in 2022 in order to cut European allies’ connection to the Russian gas they depended upon. Two years went by before the New York Times reported that Turkiye hosted peace talks between Russia and Ukraine which might have ended the proxy war before thousands of lives were lost. Even as the Times reported that talks had taken place, the “paper of record” neglected to mention that the Biden administration and the former prime minister of the UK, Boris Johnson , scuttled the talks and kept a dangerous conflict in place.

It is important to remember these and other failures to adequately report Biden administration actions which have very serious consequences. Biden will be president of the United States only until January 20, 2025. Yet with less than nine weeks remaining in his presidency, he has chosen to escalate tensions with Russia in an effort to continue his failed policies and also to prevent Trump from changing them.

On November 17, 2024, the corporate media began to report a serious change in policy which the Biden administration suddenly instructed them to cover. Biden decided to give Ukraine permission to use the U.S. Army Tactical Mission System (ATACMS) and send missiles into Russian territory. ATACMS requires U.S. staffing and technical expertise, which puts the U.S. and all NATO nations in direct conflict with the Russian government. President Vladimir Putin already said that such an action crosses a “red line” and is an act of war. In response to Biden’s decision, Putin changed the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons. The new doctrine states, “Aggression from any non-nuclear state, but with the involvement or backing of a nuclear state, will be considered a joint attack on Russia.” While the not-yet-president Trump is routinely labeled as deranged and a danger to the nation and to the world, the current president is behaving very irresponsibly and risking conflict with another nuclear power.

It is not just anti-imperialists and peace activists who oppose this rash act. The Department of Defense, the Pentagon, opposed the administration's neo-conservatives who recommended allowing Ukraine to attack inside Russia. On September 13, 2024, the prime minister of the UK, Keir Starmer, met with Biden at the urging of National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who is the administration leader in advocating for escalation. Starmer wanted to use British-made Storm Shadow missiles to strike inside Russia. Biden didn’t make the call at that moment but obviously, the subject was not far from his mind.

While the Pentagon gave a thumbs down to the plan, others in the administration never gave up hope that they could carry out an escalation that was unlikely to change the course of the war. They added a dose of war propaganda to their misguided efforts in order to make the case for endangering the rest of the world. Suddenly reports appeared claiming that up to 10,000 troops from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), commonly referred to as North Korea, are stationed in Russia and are assisting in the war effort. While there are countless images of the war in Ukraine, no one has managed to produce a photograph or any video footage of thousands of Koreans. It strains credulity that such a presence could be kept secret or would not be documented in one of the most documented conflicts in modern history.

In the end, it is the neocons who usually win in this and other administrations. It is unlikely they had to do very much convincing to Biden, who as Barack Obama’s vice president was in charge of the policy which used Ukraine to counter Russia. The 2014 coup against Ukraine’s elected president and the subsequent sabotaging of the Minsk I and Minsk II agreements all led to the current moment. In 2022 Ukraine baited the Russians by attacking the Donbas and daring them to leave that region unprotected after years of provocations and many civilian deaths.

Donald Trump has indicated that he would change U.S. policy towards Ukraine, although he also led the republicans to approve $61 billion in funding for this war effort in April of this year. Biden is tenacious in his maniacal determination and remains obsessed with his Ukraine project and with Vladimir Putin. He leaves office with a last gasp, a throw of the dice to force Trump’s hand and give him a war that he would be unlikely to end.

No members of the Senate or House of Representatives have raised their voices to sound the alarm about Biden’s disregard for their prerogatives and for the safety of the nation. The corporate media continue to act like scribes and refuse to provide the analysis that is needed to adequately cover this important story. While liberals stay in a constant state of panic about Trump’s appointments and about what he might do as president, the current president has brought the nation to the brink because of what will ultimately be a futile effort to crush Russia’s sovereignty.

As we enter a new phase of Trump derangement syndrome, it is important to know that he should not be treated as some sort of exception in the pantheon of presidents. The doctrine of Full Spectrum Dominance prevails no matter who is president of the United States. Bill Clinton bombed Yugoslavia, George W. Bush invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, Barack Obama destroyed Libya, Donald Trump attempted regime change in Venezuela and Iran, and Joe Biden is determined to continue a bloody proxy war in Ukraine, even as he commits himself to genocide in a gruesome partnership with Israel. The U.S. has entered a new and very dangerous phase of its attempt to dominate the world because of Joe Biden’s unhinged determination.

https://blackagendareport.com/biden-lea ... war-russia

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Who Is Authorizing Biden’s Nuclear Brinkmanship While The President’s Brain Is Missing?

It’s so fun how the Biden administration is using its lame duck months to skyrocket hostilities between nuclear superpowers and we don’t even know who’s really making these decisions because the president’s brain is cottage cheese.

Caitlin Johnstone
November 20, 2024



Ukraine has already begun using US-supplied long-range missiles in Russia, despite Putin’s warning that this exact sort of escalation will place NATO at war with Russia. This happens as Russia officially changes its nuclear doctrine to lower the threshold for when it’s permissible to use nuclear weapons in retaliation for attacks on its territory.

So far the attacks appear to have been mostly repelled without having done any significant damage.

This is frightening, but I have a hard time imagining that Russia makes any extreme moves against the US before Trump takes office. It seems like they’d want to wait and see what Trump does once he gets in before taking any horrifying risks like that. It is much more likely that Russia will instead respond to this escalation by escalating its attacks on Ukraine, like it normally does.

Who knows, though? If these attacks on Russia continue, there’s literally no limit to how bad this could get.



It’s so fun how the Biden administration is using its lame duck months to skyrocket hostilities between nuclear superpowers and we don’t even know who’s really making these decisions because the president’s brain is cottage cheese.



These escalations happen as Ukrainians begin moving into a majority consensus that it is time to seek peace. A new Gallup poll has found that a majority of Ukrainians throughout the country now support peace talks to end the war with Russia, with 52 percent favoring peace and 38 percent wanting to fight on.

As usual people are more opposed to continuing the war the closer they are to the frontline, with 63 percent of the respondents in eastern Ukraine supporting peace talks and only 27 percent wanting to continue fighting. The further you are from the effects of this horrific proxy war the more likely you are to support it; it’s just as true inside Ukraine’s borders as it is when you include all the western armchair warriors who want to continue fighting to the last Ukrainian.

“Listen to the Ukrainians,” we were told when all this started. Well, here they are. This proxy war has been waged in the name of defending Ukrainian democracy, and yet it continues to dangerously escalate against the will of the majority, at the direction of a president in Kyiv whose elected term ended months ago.



Fighting a war with Russia always seems like a swell idea until you actually try it. The fact that the majority of Ukrainians now support ending the war is yet another example of this oft-repeated history lesson.



The only way to view Trump as significantly worse than Biden is to take very little interest US foreign policy, and the only way to take so little interest in US foreign policy is to care very little about non-western lives.



Every day I’m interacting with liberals who inadvertently reveal that they are only just now beginning to pay close attention to what’s happening in Gaza, now that they’ll be able to blame the genocide on someone else. I was just talking to a Democrat who informed me I’m going to miss Biden after hundreds of Palestinians begin starving to death in Gaza when Trump gets into office. I told him Palestinians are believed to be starving to death by the tens of thousands presently; we just don’t hear about it because indirect deaths like malnutrition aren’t part of the official daily death toll.

It’s so much worse than they realize because they spent more than a year looking the other way while it was happening, so now you’ll often see them warning that Trump is going to do things that Biden has been doing this entire time.



People who say you get more conservative as you get older are just projecting their own personal shittiness onto everyone else. I get more radicalized by the year. It’s not even about older people having more wealth to protect; I’m making more money than ever before and I still want to obliterate capitalism.

You get more conservative and right wing as you get older if you fail to grow as you age. It just means you’ve been wasting your time on this planet and allowing yourself to become intellectually lazy and morally stagnant.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/11 ... s-missing/

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How the Wall Street Journal Blew the Story of the Democrats and Inflation
Posted on November 20, 2024 by Yves Smith

Yves here. Some things can’t be said often enough. In this case, the topic is what caused the inflation that is still stinging many Americans. It’s become a favorite hobbyhorse that the admittedly hefty Biden stimulus is the perp. But a more carefully look show that that idea is, to quote the wags, “Neat, plausible, and wrong.”

The initial driver was Covid supply chain shocks. That’s why there were very big increases in some items like lumber, meat and eggs (there due to chicken culls) and not others (gasoline). But then, as Tom Ferguson and Servaas Storm explain, the further impetus was elite spending. Remember the much decried “greedflation” where some companies put through price increases simply because they could, as opposed to due to rises in labor and materials costs? Those excess profits went into the pocket of capitalists.

Another factor not addressed here: Even if statisticians maintain that inflation has moderated (even before getting to the fact that the items they measure may not correspond well enough with the what middle and lower income Americans buy regularly), their time horizon is Wall Street’s and the Fed’s: months, a quarter, at most a year. The inflation increases were so large in categories that many consumers find essential that the fact that the rate of increase has dropped a lot still leaves them at a durable new high level compared to a few years back.

By Thomas Ferguson, Research Director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Boston; and Servaas Storm, Senior Lecturer of Economics, Delft University of Technology. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website

It must be the Wall Street Journal’s DNA. Nothing else easily explains why the normally careful Nick Timiraos would focus so much of his account of “How the Democrats Blew It on Inflation” on the hoary argument that the “Biden Stimulus” somehow triggered worldwide inflation back in 2021.

The argument never made much sense, since, as numerous studies have documented, supply-side factors drove the biggest part of the inflation and it hit virtually everybody, regardless of their stimulus policies. This is shown in Figure 1, which presents the consumer price inflation rates during 2021-2024 in the U.S., the Euro Area, Great Britain, and Canada. It can be seen that all countries went through a very similar inflation experience, with consumer price inflation in the Eurozone and the U.K. peaking at even higher levels than in the U.S.

Figure 2 presents the structural government budget deficits (as a percentage of potential GDP) of these four countries during 2021-2024. It is evident that the U.S. government ran much larger structural budget deficits than governments in the Euro Area, the U.K., and especially Canada. Despite these substantial differences in the fiscal policy stance, the consumer price inflation experience has been remarkably similar across the countries (Figure 1). This just shows that the inflation was largely driven by supply-side factors, as numerous studies including the study by Bernanke and Blanchard (2024) for 11 economies have shown.

Figure 1: Consumer Price Inflation in the U.S., the Euro Area, the U.K. and Canada (Annualized monthly inflation rates; January 2021-September 2024)
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Source: FRED database.

Figure 2: Structural Government Budget Deficits in the U.S., the Euro Area, the U.K. and Canada (as a percentage of potential GDP)
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Source: IMF World Economic Outlook database (October 2024).

We are far from the only people making these arguments, but we found the Journal’s blithe resuscitation of this almost prehistoric line particularly jarring. Back in early 2023, we traced very carefully how federal spending flowed into the economy, using a variety of data. It quickly became obvious that most of the stimulus money was long out the door when most of the supply shock inflation hit. As we summarized: “the key data series—stimulus spending and inflation—move dramatically out of phase. While the first ebbs quickly, the second persistently surges.”

Besides climate change, war, and the other shocks that everybody but the Journal now seems to recognize, we identified another cause of inflation that the Biden administration never tried to deal with: the vast increase in spending coming from the rich. As we have documented in two subsequent studies, the firehose of affluent consumption continues to drive inflation, especially in services.[1]

There is nothing mysterious about the source of this spending: Mostly it arises from the vast, historically unprecedented (in peacetime) increase in the wealth of upper-income groups produced by the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing program.

What’s bizarre though, is, that both of these arguments find support in recent research even by the Federal Reserve.[2]It’s simply silly for the Journal to keep preaching the gospel according to Joe Manchin as if there is no counter-evidence. And Democrats and everyone interested in serious election postmortems need to get their facts straight if their deliberations are to be anything but pure vanity projections.

Notes

[1] Ferguson and Storm, “Trump vs. Biden: The Macroeconomics of the Second Coming”; Good Policy or Good Luck? Why Inflation Fell Without a Recession.

[2] Cf. Thomas Ferguson,”INET Research and the 2024 Election;”; S.H. Hoke, L. Feler, and J. Chylak, “A Better Way of Understanding the US Consumer: Decomposing Retail Spending by Household Income.”

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/11 ... ation.html

Inflation has never had a whole lot to do with the presidency, it is mostly about the holy and sacred Market, which must remain inviolate and that wishy-washy Mr Keynes be damned. Ya gotta wonder why the Dems didn't campaign on that, proly cause that would give away the game.

*****

Trump’s Victory and the Collapse of the Liberal Center
November 19, 2024

Image
Donald Trump at a campaign rally in 2019. Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta (AP).

By Prabhat Patnaik – Nov 16, 2024

Donald Trump’s victory in the US Presidential election conforms to a pattern presently observable across the world, namely, a collapse of the liberal center and a growth in support either for the left, or for the extreme right, the neo-fascists, in situations in which the left is absent or weak. This was visible in France where Emmanuel Macron’s party lost substantially, and the ascendancy of neo-fascism was prevented only by a hastily-formed left alliance. This is also evident in our own neighbourhood, in Sri Lanka, where a left candidate emerged as president through a sudden and substantial increase in his vote share, defeating the incumbent president who belonged to the liberal center.

This ubiquitous collapse of the liberal center, indicative of a crisis of liberalism, is the most striking phenomenon of contemporary times. Its roots lie in the fact that political liberalism today remains tied to economic neoliberalism, which itself has run into a crisis.

The political philosophy of classical liberalism, which provided the basis for liberal political praxis, was sustained by a long tradition of bourgeois economic thought, straddling both classical political economy and neo-classical economics. Both these strands believed, notwithstanding significant differences between them, in the virtues of the free market, whose shackling by state interference had to be removed on a priority basis.

The vacuity of this entire line of reasoning was exposed by the First World War (whose economic roots belied all claims relating to the virtues of the market) and even more blatantly, of course, by the Great Depression.

Keynes showed that laissez-faire capitalism, leaving aside “brief periods of excitement,” systematically kept large numbers of workers involuntarily unemployed, that the free market, far from being the ideal institution it was portrayed to be, was so flawed that it exposed capitalism to the danger of being overthrown by the rising tide of socialism.

But being a liberal, and apprehensive about the socialist threat if the system was not rectified, Keynes proposed a new version of liberalism (which he called “new liberalism”) that was to be characterised by perennial state intervention to boost aggregate demand and to achieve high employment, rather than an avoidance of it that had been the hallmark of classical liberalism.

Keynesianism, however, was never accepted by finance capital. Keynes himself was intrigued by this and attributed it to a lack of understanding of his theory. The real cause, however, lay deeper, in the fear that any systematic state intervention would delegitimise the social role of the capitalists, especially of that section of capitalists which was engaged in the sphere of finance and whom Keynes had called “functionless investors;” this is a persistent fear and remains to this day.

Keynesianism became state policy only after the war, since the war had weakened finance capital and had led to the ascendancy of social democracy, which had embraced Keynesianism.

The post-war boom in advanced capitalist countries saw a consolidation of finance capital and an expansion in its size, to a point where it became increasingly international. At the same time, post-war capitalism, even though supplemented by state intervention, ran into a different kind of crisis, not one caused by inadequate aggregate demand, but one that consisted of an inflationary upsurge that occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

This crisis was rooted in the twin phenomena that characterised post-war capitalism: high employment that diminished the reserve army of labour and removed its “stabilising influence” in a capitalist economy, and decolonisation that removed the mechanism for compressing third world demand to keep primary commodity prices low. It allowed the new international finance capital to discredit the regime of Keynesian demand management (aided and abetted by a revival of apologetic bourgeois economics re-propagating the virtues of the free market) and to promote neoliberal economic regimes everywhere.

Since in the new situation, retaining the “confidence of the investors” (that is, preventing capital flight by kow-towing to the demands of international finance capital) was the overriding concern of state policy, Keynes’ “new liberalism” had to be jettisoned; the liberal center, much of social democracy, and even certain sections of the left, lined up behind neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism, however, brought immense suffering to the working class in advanced capitalist countries and still greater suffering to the working people in the third world, even before it had run into a crisis; and the suffering increased greatly when it did run into a crisis.

The growth rate of the world economy slowed down significantly in the neoliberal era compared with the dirigiste period; and it slowed further in the period after 2008 when the last of the US asset price bubbles burst.

This crisis, a result of inadequate aggregate demand caused by the massive increase in income inequality under neoliberalism (which invariably produces a tendency toward over-production) had only been delayed by the US asset price bubbles that had kept up world aggregate demand through a wealth effect; the crisis manifested itself with the bursting of the bubble.

The crisis cannot be overcome within the bounds of neoliberalism, because neoliberalism eliminates the scope for Keynesian demand management; and a new bubble that could somewhat mitigate its intensity is ruled out by the very experience of the previous ones that have made people more circumspect. In fact, monetary policy aimed at stimulating a new bubble has only succeeded in stimulating inflation through higher profit-markups, even in the midst of stagnant demand, which only aggravates the crisis even further.

Contemporary liberalism, in short, committed as it is to the neoliberal order, does little, and indeed can do little, to alleviate the people’s distress. Not surprisingly, the people are turning away from it toward other political formations to the right and to the left.

The right, too, can do little to alleviate the people’s distress: its pre-election rhetoric is invariably at variance with its post-election policy which is neoliberal, as Giorgia Meloni in Italy has shown, and as Marine Le Pen’s prime ministerial candidate, Jordan Bardella, was beginning to show even before the elections in France through a shift in his party’s stand vis-à-vis international finance capital.

But the right whips up rhetoric against the “other,” typically some minority religious or ethnic group, or immigrants, to produce a semblance of some sort of activism in the face of the crisis, while the liberal center barely acknowledges the existence of the crisis. Monopoly capital in this situation shifts its support toward the right, or the neo-fascists, in order to maintain its hegemony in the face of the crisis, which is another reason for the weakening of the liberal center and the crisis of liberalism.

Trump, it may be argued, does have an economic agenda, of protecting the US economy against imports not just from China, but even from the European Union. He cannot be accused of merely adhering to the old neoliberal script like Meloni. But several points must be noted here: first, even while moving away from liberal trade to protectionism, Trump has never mentioned putting restrictions on the free cross-border flow of international finance capital, so that the crux of the neoliberal arrangement remains unchallenged by him, even in his pre-election rhetoric.

Second, protectionism is not Trump’s original idea; it had begun even under Barack Obama. Besides, protectionism alone would not revive the US economy; it can, at best, encourage domestic production at the expense of imports from competing economies, but it cannot per se expand the size of the domestic market, for which an expansion of state expenditure, financed either through a fiscal deficit or through taxes on the rich, is essential.

But with his penchant for corporate tax cuts revealed from his last presidency, Trump will not resort to higher State spending, so that, at best, after a temporary blip caused by greater protection, the US economy will settle back into stagnation and crisis.

While Trump’s victory was, therefore, expected, being in conformity with the globally-observed phenomenon of a collapse of the liberal center, it does show that the people have not seen through his economic agenda, of adherence to the basic tenets of neoliberalism (other than introducing greater protectionism which can, at best produce a temporary increase in jobs while worsening the inflationary situation because of the absence of cheap imports).

The international context, it follows, is favourable for the ascendancy of the left, which alone can bring an end to the ongoing crisis by bringing an end to neoliberalism, and which alone can bring about an end to the wars that are currently going on (and for which the liberal center is culpable, a matter to be discussed on a later occasion). The left, however, has to be prepared for this task.

https://orinocotribune.com/trumps-victo ... al-center/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Sat Nov 23, 2024 4:11 pm

Dems Rip Musk-Ramaswamy Plan for Spending Cuts as Illegal ‘Power Grab’
Posted on November 23, 2024 by Yves Smith

Yves here. I’ve been waiting for legal arguments against the planned wholesale Federal budget whackage under the Trump DOGE initiative to start. Admittedly its leaders Musk and Ramaswamy had not given much insight into how they intended to achieve their ambitious aims. The little I have seen suggests that they effectively intend to override regulations….which implement statutes passed by Congress and signed by the President (or where Congress overrode a veto). Those statutes are sometimes implemented by regulations, which are subject to an elaborate approval process where opponents get to weigh in and their objections very often do lead to changes in the final rules.

In other words, the current DOGE implementation plan seems likely to run into successful court challenges. This piece provides the latest detail.

By Jake Johnson, staff writer at Common Dreams. Originally published at Common Dreams

Democrats on the House Budget Committee said Friday that the plan Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy outlined to eliminate spending already appropriated by the U.S. Congress would run afoul of a federal law enacted in response to former President Richard Nixon’s impoundment of funds for programs he opposed.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published earlier this week, Musk and Ramaswamy specifically mentioned the 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act (ICA) only to wave it away, arguing it would not hinder their effort to enact sweeping spending cuts as part of the “government efficiency” commission President-elect Donald Trump appointed them to lead.

But House Budget Committee Democrats said Friday that the Nixon-era law and subsequent Supreme Court rulings make clear that “the power of the purse rests solely with Congress.”

“Fifty years after the ICA became law, Congress once again confronts a threat attempting to push past the long-recognized boundaries of executive budgetary power,” the lawmakers wrote in a fact sheet. “During his first administration, President Trump illegally impounded crucial security assistance funding for Ukraine in an effort to benefit his reelection campaign. Now, Donald Trump and his far-right extremist allies are pushing dangerous legal theories to dismantle that system.”

“They want to give the president unchecked power to slash funding for programs like food assistance, public education, healthcare, and federal law enforcement—all without congressional approval,” the Democrats continued. “American families would be forced to pay more for basic necessities, investment in infrastructure and jobs would decline, and our communities would become less safe. Instead of working within the democratic process, Trump and his allies want to sidestep Congress entirely. But the Constitution is clear: only Congress, elected by the people, controls how taxpayer dollars are spent.”

The fact sheet was released days after Musk and Ramaswamy, both billionaires, offered for the first time a detailed explanation of their plan to pursue large-scale cuts to federal regulations and spending, as well as mass firings of federal employees, in their role as co-heads of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

The pair noted that Trump “has previously suggested” the ICA is unconstitutional and expressed the view that “the current Supreme Court would likely side with him on this question.” The former president appointed half of the court’s right-wing supermajority.

“But even without relying on that view, DOGE will help end federal overspending by taking aim at the $500 billion-plus in annual federal expenditures that are unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended, from $535 million a year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and $1.5 billion for grants to international organizations to nearly $300 million to progressive groups like Planned Parenthood.”

Other programs that would be vulnerable if Musk, Ramaswamy, Trump, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.)—who’s set to lead a new related House subcommittee—get their way are veterans’ healthcare, Head Start, housing assistance, and childcare aid, according toThe Washington Post.

Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said in a statement Friday that “the legal theories being pushed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are as idiotic as they are dangerous.”

“Unilaterally slashing funds that have been lawfully appropriated by the people’s elected representatives in Congress would be a devastating power grab that undermines our economy and puts families and communities at risk,” said Boyle. “House Democrats are ready to fight back against any illegal attempt to gut the programs that keep American families safe and help them make ends meet.”

(From the comments:)

ambrit
November 23, 2024 at 5:22 am
I notice that there is no mention of the Military Industrial Complex budget(s.)
In relation to the above, I see no suggestions that “excess” military bases on American soil be repurposed for “pet projects” like “Illegal Immigrant” detention and ‘processing,’ climate control programs, (a new CCC perhaps?) or “green enterprise zones.” (As precedent, the ‘repurposing’ of the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba as a “detention centre” for “terrorists” and other quasi-political prisoners can be cited.)
I’m still waiting for the official announcement of those fabulous FEMA Re-education Centres.
This entire process reminds me, curiously, of Franklin Roosevelt’s attempt to “pack” the Supreme Court. That might still be a possibility today. With Trump’s clear win this time, the knives will be out on both “sides” of the political divide. Said “political divide” is not shaping up to be strictly along the ‘traditional’ Party lines. With the Democrat Party going all Establishment Republican Lite and the Trump wing of the Republican Party shifting “populist” and pseudo working class, a big shuffling of political factions is happening.
A hundred plus years ago, the Democrat Party supported slavery and the rule of landed oligarchs. They seem to be returning to their roots today.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/11 ... -grab.html

Neglecting Health Care May Have Cost Democrats the Election
Posted on November 23, 2024 by Yves Smith

Yves here. This article discusses a vector of US/Democratic party negligence that I have not heretofore seen discussed in the context of the Trump election. Let us first remember that the Covid vaccines, even with the issue of vaccine injuries, were a reasonable measure during wild type (and I suffered a vaccine injury that required a hospital procedure, so do not accuse me of being naive). That was before mutations made the vaccines increasingly an exercise in whack-a-mole and more and more vaccinations seemed to produce immune system fatigue in enough patients as to raise doubt about overall benefit.

Minority groups were the vanguard of essential workers and very often paid on an hourly basis. To be crass, those communities enabled the “much less minority” white collar employees to work from home, so as a group, they were much more exposed to Covid (recall that these exposed and infected essential workers would take the contagion back into their households). Many hesitated to take the vaccines because they would make even healthy people often unable to work for a day or two. People who go paycheck to paycheck cannot afford to lose their source of income.

On top of that, lower income cohorts, and blacks are disproportionately represented among them, generally have worse access to health care and hospitals in poor neighborhoods also provide lower level of care, for among other reasons insufficient staffing levels. Lower baseline levels of health care similarly results in lower levels of health population-wide.

By Max Jordan Nguemeni, M.D., M.S., an assistant professor of general internal medicine and health services research at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he conducts health policy research. He writes the Substack Column “Adverse Reaction” about culture, politics and health. He can be found online at X and Bluesky. Originally published at Undark

In January 2021, I was in my last year of medical school and applying for a residency. During one interview with a program, I asked a resident how the pandemic had affected his medical training, especially as a Black man. He began to cry. Every patient in his hospital’s ICU had Covid-19, and they were all Black. Soon after, I started residency at another hospital and witnessed firsthand the devastating toll Covid-19 had on Americans, predominantly Black and Hispanic communities. The pandemic dominated the news in 2020 and was a significant issue during and after that year’s U.S. presidential election.

This year, one election cycle later, news mentions of Covid-19 and the havoc it wreaked on people in the U.S. — especially on racial minorities — seemed rare. In post-mortem analyses of the Democrats’ presidential loss in mainstream media, little has been said about the pandemic’s impact. However, neglecting the topic of health care, especially health care inequality, during the campaign may have cost Democrats the White House. Doing so in future elections will continue to be a risky strategy, if not a losing one.

Between 2020 and 2023, nearly 1.3 million more Americans died than expected. These people were disproportionately Hispanic, Black, and Native American, with the overwhelming majority dying of Covid-19. A recent study found that among young people, Black Americans accounted for over 50 percent of excess deaths despite comprising less than 14 percent of the population. The past few years have been traumatic, and health care has been a top concern for voters. Yet many felt that health care didn’t receive enough attention in the campaign discourse. Polls showed increased support for Donald Trump among Black voters, especially Black men. Scant attention has been given to how much this shift might be due to health-related concerns and the lasting impacts of the pandemic and its associated health crises.

I trained in internal medicine and primary care during the pandemic. I treated Covid-19 patients in various settings and stages of illness, and I’ve been studying and writing about the opioid epidemic since 2016. I believe that many Black Americans who might have supported Kamala Harris in this election died prematurely — either from Covid-19 or opioid overdoses — which has weakened the Democratic electorate. While this might seem far-fetched, preventable deaths tied to systemic inequalities can indeed shape the electorate in consequential ways. A study found that of 2.7 million Black Americans who died prematurely due to inequality between 1970 and 2004, 1.7 million would have been of voting age past 2004, with most of them likely to have supported Democrats.

This election’s exit polls showing increased support for Trump among Black men may partly reflect a form of survivor bias. Black men, who were more vulnerable to Covid-19 and overdose deaths, were underrepresented in the voter pool. Indeed, while the media covered racial disparities in Covid-19 incidence and mortality widely, not as much coverage was given to the specific burden among Black men. For example, a colleague and I analyzed nine months’ worth of Michigan’s Covid-19 data to look at disparities in disease incidence and mortality. We found that the gaps between Black people and White people shrunk at roughly the same rate for men and women over time. Still, the gaps remained worse among men, underscoring Black men’s unique vulnerability.

Beyond Covid-19 deaths, we saw other conditions affected: Opioid overdose deaths among Black men surged dramatically. In 2020, the overdose death rate for Black Americans surpassed that of White Americans, with the rise concentrated almost entirely among older Black men over 55. The social conditions of the pandemic — including disruptions to health services, increased isolation, and economic devastation — likely exacerbated overdose deaths, adding yet another layer of mortality and loss to Black communities.

What’s more, the so-called unwinding of Medicaid effectively discouraged millions of those who survived the pandemic from voting. Medicaid, the largest public health insurer, covers more than 79 million low-income Americans, with racial minorities disproportionately represented. Perhaps surprisingly, research over multiple elections from 2008to 2014 has shown that Medicaid expansion can increase voter turnout, especially for men and in Democratic counties.

During the pandemic, the Democratic-led Congress mandated that Medicaid beneficiaries remain enrolled continuously. However, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023 waived this requirement after Republicans won control of the House of Representatives, even though the health crisis was still ongoing. The mandate for continuous enrollment had driven a surge in Medicaid participation. Since the unwinding began, experts estimate that some 8 to 24 million people risk losing coverage. Those losing coverage are disproportionately young and Black — voter demographics that could have made a crucial difference for Democrats in this year’s election.

A 2023 survey revealed that many Medicaid beneficiaries, especially those aged 18 to 29, had not renewed their coverage. In this age group, Harris saw a relative decrease in percentage of votes compared with the number Joe Biden received in 2020. The Medicaid unwinding resulted in a 17 percent relative decrease in enrollment nationwide between 2023 and 2024. This enrollment decrease was about the same or worse than the national average in critical swing states like Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

Trump spent his first presidency trying to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, which was signed into law in 2010, and included Medicaid expansion as one of its most significant accomplishments. In the 2016 presidential election, greater insurance coverage rates correlated with an increase in Democratic vote share compared with in 2008. This is likely because people who feel supported by government programs, and thus by those in charge, are more likely to participate in the electoral process. Alas, young voters, Black voters, and men — all groups disproportionately affected by the Medicaid unwinding or sensitive to improvements in insurance coverage — are the groups that had the most consequential relative decrease in voter turnout in 2024 compared with 2020, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.

To be sure, the Biden-Harris administration has delivered some health care wins. Capping out-of-pocket insulin costs for seniors and empowering Medicare to negotiate medication prices are notable improvements. Voter turnout for seniors increased, with significant gains for Harris, who earned 49 percent of their vote, closing the 7-point advantageTrump had over Biden in 2020. However, younger, low-income voters — half of whom are on Medicaid — might not feel like beneficiaries of these wins. Harris missed an opportunity to amplify these victories as part of a larger vision to expand benefits, framing them as the foundation for a more inclusive health care system.

For example, she could have proposed lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 50, a pragmatic step that would not have alienated centrist voters wary of Medicare for All. Such a proposal could have also been seen as a form of economic relief for those workers who don’t qualify for enough health insurance subsidies under the ACA and who spend disposable income on health care. A 2023 survey from the Commonwealth Fund found that nearly one-third of Americans with private insurance and two in five with Medicaid found it harder to pay for food and other household bills because of health care costs. By addressing these costs, Democrats could have simultaneously tackled a significant worry for many Americans during this election: the economy.

Health care inequality shapes U.S. society, placing Democrats at a structural disadvantage. The Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath have only intensified this effect. These past four years saw minority communities devastated by preventable deaths. This reality has altered the electorate in tangible ways. In 1966, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, according to Cleveland’s Call and Post, “Of all forms of discrimination and inequalities, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhuman.” This still resonates today. For future elections, Democrats must adopt a compelling vision for a healthier, more equitable America. By prioritizing health care reform, Democrats can rally an electorate deeply affected by health and economic crises. Health care should be at the forefront of their platform — if they want to win.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/11 ... ction.html

Oh the Dems do want to win, those offices are goldmines of personal aggrandizement, but not so much as to upset the top 10%of wealth. They've taken a dive every time that strata might be offended even a wee bit. They have shit on the phony socialist sheepdog every time it looked like he might take control of the party. And he showed his true Democratic allegiance by taking the abuse without complaint. What's to like about this party? Are they the lesser evil their apologists claim or are they actually a misdirection away from genuine effective opposition to oligarchic rule?

The gang of deranged billionaires which Trump is populating his cabinet with will no doubt generate outrage once they're in the saddle. We cannot allow the Dems to capitalize on this and must hammer home that Trumpian madness is the result of the Democratic Party's duplicitous game.
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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Sun Nov 24, 2024 9:12 pm

Pew poll: Democrats’ pessimism about their party’s future is at its highest level in the Trump era
By Ariel Edwards-Levy, CNN

Published 10:00 AM EST, Fri November 22, 2024

In the aftermath of the 2024 elections, Democrats are less optimistic about their party’s future than they’ve been at any point in the past eight years, according to new Pew Research Center polling released Friday.

The poll, which was conducted November 12-17, also finds that views of President-elect Donald Trump continue a pattern seen pre-election: Americans largely express confidence in his plans for the economy, while continuing to rate him negatively on many personal characteristics.

Roughly half (51%) of Democrats and independents who lean toward the party say they’re optimistic, while 49% say that they’re pessimistic about its future. Democratic pessimism is up compared with both 2016, when 38% said they were feeling that way in the wake of Trump’s first presidential victory, and in 2020, when 17% of Democratic-aligned adults described themselves as pessimistic after Joe Biden’s win in 2020. They also didn’t feel this pessimistic in the wake of the 2018 and 2022 midterms.


By contrast, 86% of Republican-aligned adults now call themselves optimistic about the GOP’s future, up from 65% who said the same two years ago. Roughly 8 in 10 said they were optimistic following Trump’s 2016 election and the 2018 midterms, with 74% calling themselves optimistic after Biden’s 2020 victory.

Democratic pessimism this year is particularly pronounced among younger members of the party, with 55% of Democratic-aligned adults younger than 50 taking a negative view of the party’s future, compared with 39% among their older counterparts.

Overall, half of US adults say that the Republican Party represents their interests at least somewhat well, modestly higher than the 43% who currently say the same of the Democratic Party. While the Democratic Party’s standing on this metric is largely unchanged from July 2023, the GOP number is up 11 percentage points over that time. That shift, Pew finds, is due almost wholly to Republican-aligned adults’ increasingly positive assessments of their party.

Just over half, 53%, say they approve of Trump’s “policies and plans for the future,” with the same share giving him positive ratings for his conduct since winning the election. A 59% majority say they’re at least somewhat confident in him to make good decisions about economic policy, with majorities also expressing confidence in him to effectively handle law enforcement and criminal justice issues (54%), make wise decisions about immigration policy (53%) and make good decisions about foreign policy (53%). Fewer express confidence in Trump to make good decisions on abortion policy (45%) or to bring the country closer together (41%). And less than half of the public thinks Trump is well described as someone who cares about the needs of ordinary people (45%), or somehow who’s honest (42%), even-tempered (37%) or a good role model (34%).

Overall, half of Americans express positive feelings about Trump’s election victory, with 22% saying they’re excited and 28% saying that they’re relieved, while the rest say they’re disappointed (33%) or angry (15%). In a separate question, about one-third express surprise about his win.

Asked to rate their feelings about Trump on a scale from 0 to 100, 43% of Americans give him a “warm” rating of 51 or higher, an uptick from 36% following the 2016 election and 34% after his election loss in 2020. A 78% majority of Republican-aligned adults rate him warmly today, compared with 9% among Democratic-aligned adults.

Views of the president-elect’s ideology also have shifted from eight years ago: a 64% majority of the public now sees Trump’s views as conservative on most or all issues, up from 46% who said the same in December 2016.

The Pew Research Center poll surveyed 9,609 US adults from November 12-17, using a nationally representative online panel. Results among the full sample have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 1.5 percentage points.

https://us.cnn.com/2024/11/22/politics/ ... index.html

Kick'em when they're down. They do that and much more to our side.

It is likely that a significant portion of those who 're-aligned conservative' are more reacting to their disgust with the 'neoliberal' Democratic Party and have been persuaded that the Republicans are somehow better. I expect that bubble to pop in probably two years. 'Both are worse.'
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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Mon Nov 25, 2024 4:03 pm

Biden’s final days: Escalating aggression against Venezuela
November 24, 2024 Lallan Schoenstein

Image
Supporters of Nicolás Maduro attend a rally in Caracas on July 18, 2024.

After imposing genocidal policies that cost his party the U.S. election, President Joe Biden is filling out his final days of office with a slash-and-burn agenda that is even worse than the one he instigated before the elections.

In an outrageous attack on a sovereign country, the U.S. government is attempting to deny the Venezuelan people the leadership of their freely elected president, Nicolás Maduro. The Biden administration declared its belated recognition of Edmundo Gonzalez, the U.S.-funded candidate and big-time loser, in the July elections four months ago.

Biden waited until after the U.S. elections on Nov. 5 to more fully exercise his powers of “regime change” — a bid to overthrow a democratic election in Venezuela. Gonzalez is an old hand, a mercenary for the U.S. During the 1980s Contra war in Central America, Gonzales, operating from then-President C. A. Pérez’s Venezuelan embassy in El Salvador, was instrumental in running the covert U.S. counter-revolutionary campaign responsible for murdering thousands of Salvadorans.

Even before the Venezuelan election took place, the United States government preemptively declared them illegitimate. Nicolás Maduro succeeded in winning the election despite widespread sabotage and an economy devastated by U.S. sanctions. The election was conducted with internationally recognized standards of transparency. Following Maduro’s victory, the U.S.-backed rightwing opposition encouraged street violence in an attempt to invalidate the election and ignite a civil war. This failed completely, and Gonzalez quickly fled to exile in Spain.

During his first term in office, President Donald Trump imposed harsh punitive actions by tightening sanctions and seizing Venezuelan assets. President Joe Biden maintained the brutal sanctions in punishment for Venezuela’s resistance to the imperialist expropriation of their vast reserve of oil. Opposition in Venezuela is rooted in the oligarchy that profited from their affiliation with the U.S. oil companies.

Sanctions on Venezuela, as on Cuba and at least 13 other countries, have a lethal impact on the general population. Their imposition has been called “A War Without Bombs” in the outstanding book The Social, Political and Economic Impact of Sanctions Against Venezuela. An authorized abridged and edited version of the book is titled U.S. Sanctions Are Killing Venezuelans.

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2024/ ... venezuela/
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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Thu Nov 28, 2024 2:51 pm

Fear is Still the Motivation for Black Voters
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 27 Nov 2024

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Kamala Harris is now a historical footnote who is heading for the dustbin of history. Yet this harsh truth is avoided by many Black people, who cast aspersions and scorn when they should see the election result as an opportunity to forge a new political reality, instead of clinging to a party that has lost legitimacy with many of its voters.

“More directly, the Black electoral imperative to seek protection from the Republican/White Man’s Party reduces African Americans to an appendage of the Democratic Party apparatus, and thus of the capitalists that fund and control the Party. It subverts the essentially progressive nature of the Black polity, objectively enfeebling Black America, even as rich white Democrats pander to Black voters as the “soul” of the party.”
Glen Ford

The always prescient Glen Ford wrote those words in February 2016 as he correctly hypothesized that Black voters would continue their tradition of supporting the candidate they believed was most likely to defeat a republican in that presidential election year. Eight years later his words still ring true. Donald Trump’s defeat of Kamala Harris has engendered anger, fear, and retrograde politics, but surprisingly little criticism of the Democratic Party which failed its most loyal voters so spectacularly.

The Kamala Harris/Tim Walz campaign raised more than $1.5 billion , more than the Donald Trump/J.D. Vance campaign was able to raise. Harris had the support of Democratic Party donors, corporate media, and the entire liberal class establishment yet received 7 million fewer votes than Joe Biden did in his 2020 race against Trump. Trump received 2.5 million more votes in 2024 than he did in 2020.

The reaction of many Black voters was epitomized by MSNBC commentator Eddie Glaude , who insists that Trump only gets votes from people who feel their “whiteness” is under threat and dismisses the idea that there is any other explanation for Trump’s victory. One can never underestimate the power of racist and supremacist feelings among white people in this country, but that sentiment is not only simplistic in political terms but ignores the flaws in the Harris campaign and in Harris herself. But any such analysis seems to be off limits to millions of Black people, who are capable of navigating many other contradictions in their lives but who demur whenever there is a need to honestly address the party which would never win presidential elections without them.

The notion of choice, even the choice of how to think or express oneself has been declared off limits. There is not nearly h dismay and anger that the party with resources to do anything it wanted still could not make enough of a case to win. There is precious little curiosity about the wisdom of making a top down choice after the donors’ coup against Biden’s re-election campaign.

There is a suspension of disbelief from otherwise intelligent people who claim not to notice the famous Harris “word salads” and odd pronouncements about coconut trees. There is an unwillingness to understand that people who depended on the covid era stimulus payments, child tax credits, and expansions of SNAP and medicaid benefits would not bother to vote for the democratic candidate who served with the president claiming to be the “most progressive president since FDR” but who stood down when these programs ended.

The trancelike state of much of Black America is a result of a deep fear of republican control of government, particularly if Trump is the republican in question. The fog is so heavy that it blocks out logic, empathy and even the need for self-preservation.

It should be clear to anyone that a candidate who can raise more than $1 billion is automatically compromised. Having buy-in from the wealthy means that any message that might motivate voters will be off the table. The obedience to the oligarchic class that doomed the Build Back Better legislation is now permanent for the party and unfortunately for its voters as well.

The spending spree didn’t even help Black democrats much. The Harris campaign paid $350,000 to Nu Vision Media, which is run by hack propagandist Roland Martin, before Martin’s softball interview with her. The money was not well spent, as Martin is only capable of reaching the choir Harris already preached to. Similarly, Al Sharpton’s National Action Network was also the recipient of useless largesse to the broader community when it received two payments of $250,000 each before the good reverend also held a very friendly interview with Harris. When the payments were revealed, Martin’s only comment was that “It should have been a hell of a lot more. More should have been spent on Black-owned media.” While Black people clung to the hope of a Harris victory, the grifters saw the campaign as just another opportunity for a chump change payday. Well connected party consultants got rich, some of them making millions of dollars as they do every four years.

Despite the resounding defeat, this columnist noticed a stubborn unwillingness to even question Harris’ campaign strategy. Her website was devoid of policy statements for 50 days, she chose to pursue non-existent “never Trump” republicans, and she was unable to explain how she would differ from Biden or Trump even when speaking to friendly interviewers. Loyal Black democrats have rendered these and other critiques as being off limits for discussion or even of thought.

The people who were once so organized that their actions changed U.S. politics and whose activism created programs like medicare and medicaid, now see themselves as powerless supplicants who can only support whomever the system spits out for consideration. Having decided to narrow their analysis only to how racist and misogynistic white voters are, there is no room to confront their predicament of Democratic Party loyalty.

Lamentation about Trump 2.0 supersedes critical thought or discussion of options or how to change the Black relationship to the Democratic Party which has now been brought to such a low point. Money and the Black misleadership class are the main culprits in the continuation of this perverse relationship. The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) and the civil rights organizations are bought off. Like Martin and Sharpton they are brought out every four years to prevent any hard questions from breaking out and to be paid off for their meager efforts.

The hapless and hollow Harris has now been raised to a strange demi-goddess status. Her spectacular failure goes unexamined and so does any discussion of a new politics for Black people to seek. Even rudimentary questions about making demands or even asking questions are dismissed in favor of anger directed at Trump voters.

There are certainly reasons for anger but they should not be directed at Trump supporters and non-voters. All blame should be placed squarely on the shoulders of the democrats. Black people need a new political vision, one that does not depend solely on electoral politics at four year intervals. Black people have achieved many great things but that won’t happen again if there is no willingness for introspection and for denunciation of the people who have driven them over a political cliff yet again

https://blackagendareport.com/index.php ... ack-voters
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Fri Nov 29, 2024 3:09 pm

Biden Declares Another ‘National Emergency’ Because of the Threat Posed by Tiny Nicaragua
November 27, 2024

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US President Joe Biden (Left) and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. Photo: AFP/Getty Images/Bloomberg. Composition: Mark Kelly/WSJ.

By John Perry – Nov 25, 2024

In the dying days of his administration, President Biden must have needed a reminder by his officials on November 22. He had to decide whether Nicaragua still poses an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States”. Presumably he agreed that it does, because he renewed its status as a “national security threat” for a further year, repeating the designation that first began under the last Trump presidency.

As figures from the Latin America Security and Defense Network show, this “threat” comes from a state which spends less of its national income on defense than almost any other country in the hemisphere. It even spends slightly less than neighboring Costa Rica, which has no army. Its total national income (GDP) is the equivalent of a small US city. Its seven million people have the second lowest income per capita in the region.

Source: REDAL, 2024 Atlas Comparativo de la Defensa en América Latina y el Caribe.

What “unusual and extraordinary threat” does Nicaragua pose to a country with 50 times its population and the world’s biggest military budget, whose southern border is in any case nearly 2,000 miles away? According to the White House press release, the first threat is the Nicaraguan government’s “violent response” to a coup attempt that took place over six years ago and was, it omits to mention, instigated by the US. This attempted justification turns the story of what happened on its head. The uprising that shook Nicaragua lasted roughly three months, resulted officially in 251 deaths (including 22 police officers; others put the total deaths as higher) and over 2,000 injured. It allegedly “caused $1 billion in economic damages,” and led to an economic collapse. (After years of continuous growth, GDP fell by 3.4% in 2018). What other government would not have responded to such a damaging attack on its country?

In Washington’s view, further “threats” arise because Nicaragua’s government is “undermining democracy”, using “indiscriminate violence” against its citizens and destabilizing its economy through “corruption”. Quite apart from the fact that these are gross distortions of reality in Nicaragua and are in any case blatantly hypocritical, nothing in the press release shows how – even if true – these conditions could present any threat to the US, let alone an “unusual and extraordinary” one.

Or could it be something else? Recently, in response to Nicaragua’s support for Palestinian liberation, the Israeli regime has made allegations that “radical Iranian forces and terror groups operate freely” in the country, again with no evidence, presumably hoping to encourage Washington to add Nicaragua to the list of “state sponsors of terrorism”. However, this is not mentioned in the White House press release.

Nevertheless, perhaps Nicaragua’s “threat” to the US comes from its international relations? General Laura Richardson, until recently the head of the US Southern Command, put the blame for Russia’s “malign activities” in the region on its links with Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela. Nicaragua’s growing relationship with China is also seen as a problematic, with Taiwan warning that China’s planned deep-water port for Bluefields in Nicaragua will be its “naval outpost” in Central America. However, Nicaragua is hardly alone in developing close links with major powers seen by Washington as key adversaries. Peru’s Chinese-built port is also viewed as a threat by General Richardson. Many other countries in the region, including Brazil, now have close ties with China and, to a lesser extent, Russia. In part, the drive behind these links is a desire to be less dependent on the US and insure against its economic sanctions.

Of course, if any country is showing threatening behavior here, it is the US itself. Its sponsoring of the 2018 coup attempt involved the US embassy in Managua and funding from bodies like USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy, which (as they boasted at the time) trained 8,000 young Nicaraguans to take part in the coup. Washington has been trying to undermine Nicaragua’s Sandinista government since the moment it returned to power in 2007. It has repeatedly refused to acknowledge the outcomes of democratic elections, scores of Nicaraguan officials have been sanctioned, development loans via bodies like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund have been blocked for the last six years, Nicaragua’s government has been falsely accused of “preying on migrants”, and its people have been encouraged to migrate to the US. The State Department advises tourists not to visit a country which, according to an international Gallup poll, is “the most peaceful place on earth”.



Nicaragua has suffered 17 years of continuous bullying by its near neighbor but this, of course, is only a short episode in a history of US intervention that began in 1854 when US warships were sent to threaten Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast. Later it included two decades of the country’s occupation by US Marines, Washington’s support for the Somoza dictatorship for four more decades and then, under the Reagan administration, its sponsoring of the “Contra” war which cost 30,000 Nicaraguan lives in the 1980s. Reparations ordered by the World Court for the economic damage caused by that war were, of course, never paid.

So, not only is Washington the guilty party in terms of threatening behavior, but Biden’s declaration and his administration’s policies towards Nicaragua augment this by labelling Nicaragua as a pariah state, which holds “pantomime” elections and where its people flee “communism” and “political persecution”. This labelling is, of course, then repeated by corporate media.

In 2025, Nicaragua can expect new threats from Washington. Marco Rubio is penciled in as the Trump administration’s Secretary of State, acting as Trump’s “sharpshooter” against governments such as those in Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela. One target is likely to be the remittances sent by migrants in the US. As in neighboring Central American countries, they account for a quarter of Nicaragua’s national income, and could soon fall both because Trump plans to tax them and because he promises to deport large tranches of those migrants, who will return, jobless, to their home countries.

Those searching for evidence of the “threat” which the country poses to US interests might usefully look at developments in Nicaragua itself. For example, a recent report by the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) showed that it is one of the countries in the region that invests most, proportionate to its population, in public health services. Health care is free in Nicaragua and it has by far the largest number of public hospitals in Central America, many of them recently built or modernized. ECLAC’s figures show that life expectancy in Nicaragua is one of the longest in Latin America, despite its income per capita being among the lowest. ECLAC showed that Nicaragua spends a high proportion of its national budget on social investment, and this is reflected not only in comprehensive health care, but in its advances in education, social housing, transport, electricity and drinking water coverage and its transition to renewable energy. The Sandinista government’s current plan to reduce poverty shows that its initial efforts led to it falling from 48.3 per cent of Nicaraguans in 2005 to 24.9 per cent in 2016. Clearly those who planned the 2018 coup attempt saw the “threat” presented by improved public services, since their violence deliberately targeted town halls, health centers, universities, schools and facilities for pregnant women (casas maternas).

In 1985, at the height of the Contra war, the aid agency Oxfam published a book entitled Nicaragua: The Threat of a Good Example? At the time, Nicaragua’s achievements in raising literacy levels, improving food security and bringing public services to remote rural areas were legendary, but necessarily much limited by a US trade embargo and the US-funded attacks on health and education facilities and their workers. Perhaps in 2024, after a popularly elected government has had 17 years to develop public services and reduce poverty, with results obvious to all, Nicaragua really is the “good example” that Washington finds so threatening.

https://orinocotribune.com/biden-declar ... nicaragua/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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