Biden Leaves Office But Risks War with Russia
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 20 Nov 2024

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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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)

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)

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

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/