Sympathy for the Devils...

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 12684
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Mon Dec 02, 2024 4:00 pm

Joe Biden Pardons Hunter Biden
December 2, 11:10

Image

Funny.

1. Joe Biden swore that he would not pardon Hunter Biden for the crimes he committed in two criminal cases.
2. Joe Biden pardoned Hunter Biden in both criminal cases before his departure.

Consistency, integrity, family ties.
Enduring lessons of democracy.

P.S. However, Hunter Biden may still be prosecuted in other cases that have not yet reached the criminal case and for which Joe Biden cannot pardon Hunter Biden.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9529223.html

Google Translator

******

Color Me Surprised... Not.

So, the US is now politically a third world corrupt shithole. All despite many signs, diminishing as they are, of the first world economically.

Outgoing US President Joe Biden has gone back on his word and pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, who was convicted earlier this year of breaking federal gun and tax laws. In June, the younger Biden was convicted of three felony charges related to the purchase of a revolver in 2018. According to the prosecutors, he lied on his gun-purchase paperwork that he was not addicted to or using illegal drugs. In a separate case, the younger Biden pleaded guilty to three felony tax offenses and six misdemeanor tax offenses in September. The sentencing for both convictions was supposed to happen this month. In a statement issued on Sunday evening, the president argued that his son was prosecuted “selectively and unfairly” because of his familial ties. He claimed that “people are almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out a gun form.”

This is everything you need to know about the state of the affairs in the US. Since the tragedy of 9/11 the US was rolling down the hill in every aspect of social and cultural life (economic and military too) but it got boosted by Obama cabal on the way to hell. And here we are--corruption and lying became virtues embraced by a large portion of Americans, especially the US corrupt pretentious intelligentsia. Many still cannot grasp the gravity and scale of the damage both to the world and the United States Biden (Obama's) Admin did.

http://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2024/12 ... d-not.html

"Industrial grade scumbag", as someone put it yesterday, still the state of the world cannot be laid entirely at Biden's door, he stands on the shoulders of equal monsters going back generations.

*****

Why Did Joe Biden Pardon His Son?

Which of Joe Biden's crimes did Hunter Biden threaten to reveal to thereby extort his father into pardoning him?

Biden Pardons Son
President Joe Biden had earlier pledged not to take clemency on Hunter.

President Joe Biden gave his son, Hunter Biden, a full and unconditional pardon Sunday night.

The younger Biden had been found guilty on three felony charges in June in a federal case surrounding his acquisition and possession of a firearm, and pleaded guilty (..) to federal tax evasion charges in September.
...
Prior to the pardon, Hunter was facing up to 25 years in prison on firearms charges and up to 17 years in prison on tax charges.

Biden had earlier pledged not to pardon his son. “I’m extremely proud of my son Hunter. He has overcome an addiction. He is one of the brightest, most decent men I know,” the president stated in June, after his son’s conviction in his federal gun trial. “I abide by the jury decision. I will do that and I will not pardon him.”


Just asking ...

Posted by b on December 2, 2024 at 8:03 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2024/12/w ... l#comments

So much for 'saving democracy' and such claptrap. The senile fuck just gave Trump carte blanc to pardon every miscreant in his universe, including himself, and after this who could gainsay him?

On Joe's tombstone it will say 'He was a Family Man and he stayed Bought'.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 12684
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Tue Dec 03, 2024 3:13 pm

An open letter to President Joe Biden: Free Leonard Peltier
December 3, 2024 Stephen Millies

Image
Brenda Martinez, American Indian Activist Leonard Peltier’s niece, at a rally for Peltier’s release in front of the Federal Courthouse in downtown Fargo on June 20, 2024. Photo: Chris Flynn / The Forum

Mr. President, If you can pardon your son, why can’t you free the Indigenous political prisoner Leonard Peltier?

The 80-year-old man, a leader of the American Indian Movement, has been imprisoned for 48 years. He suffers from diabetes, high blood pressure, and a heart condition.

The FBI framed Leonard Peltier in retaliation for the historic 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee. Three years of violence followed this courageous stand for Indigenous rights, with over 60 AIM members and supporters murdered. Despite a large FBI presence, nothing was done to stop these murders and even more numerous assaults.

Peltier was convicted of killing two FBI agents — Jack Coler and Ronald Williams — in a shootout on the Pine Ridge Reservation on June 26, 1975. The agents were in unmarked cars.

Leonard Peltier was asked by traditional people at Pine Ridge, who were being targeted, to protect them from violence. Peltier and a small group of young AIM members set up camp on a ranch owned by the traditional Jumping Bull family. More than 150 FBI agents, cops, and vigilantes surrounded the ranch when shooting began.

Besides the two FBI agents killed, an AIM member — Joseph Stuntz Killsright — was shot and killed by a sniper’s bullet. His death has never even been investigated.

Although the FBI claim that 40 Indigenous people were involved in the gunfight, only AIM members Bob Robideau, Darrell Butler, and Leonard Peltier were brought to trial. A jury acquitted Robideau and Butler on grounds of self-defense.

Leonard Peltier was arrested in Canada on Feb. 6, 1976. The U.S. government in its extradition request, used affidavits signed by Myrtle Poor Bear who claimed she saw Leonard Peltier shoot the two FBI agents.

Ms. Poor Bear had never met Mr. Peltier and wasn’t present during the shoot-out. Soon after, Ms. Poor Bear recanted her statements and said the FBI threatened and coerced her into signing the affidavits.

Leonard Peltier was brought to the United States and tried in 1977. Myrtle Poor Bear wasn’t allowed to testify by the Nixon-appointed Judge Paul Benson. Not one witness identified Mr. Peltier as the shooter of the FBI agents.

More than 140,000 pages of FBI documents were withheld from the defense. A ballistic test proving that a bullet casing found near the FBI agents’ bodies did not come from the gun tied to Mr. Peltier was intentionally concealed.

Because this evidence was withheld, the jury found Leonard Peltier guilty. Judge Benson sentenced Mr. Peltier to two consecutive life terms.

The Eighth Federal Appeals Circuit ruled that “there is a possibility that the jury would have acquitted Leonard Peltier had the records and data improperly withheld from the defense been available to him in order to better exploit and reinforce the inconsistencies casting strong doubts upon the government’s case.”

Yet, the court denied Mr. Peltier a new trial. The late Federal Judge Gerald William Heaney, who wrote the decision denying a new trial, later urged Leonard Peltier’s release, stating that the FBI used improper tactics to convict him.

Among those calling for Leonard Peltier’s freedom was the late South African President Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in apartheid prisons. Leonard Peltier has spent 48 years in federal prisons.

Mr. President, you recently apologized for the federal government’s role in running boarding schools where thousands of Native American children endured abuse, neglect, and eradication of their tribal identities.

Follow up on your apology by freeing Leonard Peltier.

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2024/ ... d-peltier/

Damn unlikely, the demented douchebag used up his clemency on his utterly corrupt pedo son.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 12684
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Wed Dec 04, 2024 3:26 pm

The Problem with Joe and Hunter
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 04 Dec 2024

Image
Hunter Biden and Joe Biden, AP Hunter Biden, DailyMail.com

The outrage surrounding President Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter Biden is not just about clemency for the relatively minor charges he was facing. The younger Biden has lived a life of great privileges, all granted to him by his father, who is equally undeserving of his own success. Fortunately, the two mediocrities will soon fade away and the public will be spared from watching them fail upward.

“If you have a piece of crack cocaine, no bigger than this quarter that I’m holding in my hand, one quarter of one dollar, we passed a law through the leadership of Senator Thurmond and myself and others. A law that says you’re caught with that, you go to jail for five years. You get no probation. You get nothing other than five years in jail, judge doesn’t have a choice.”
Senator Joe Biden in 1991

“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together.”
Vadym Pozharsky , Burisma executive

President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter Biden was inevitable and inevitably controversial. Hunter Biden is the quintessential nepotism baby, the recipient of privileges such as being appointed to the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company. Burisma paid him $50,000 per month for doing nothing other than existing with the last name Biden. The younger Biden was the butt of jokes for years, a cocaine addict who somehow managed to never have any interaction with the criminal justice system and who achieved nothing without an assist from his father. He lamented having to give up his lucrative lobbying business after his father became Barack Obama’s running mate. “Dad joined the Obama ticket, and I had to find new work.”

Hunter Biden came to greater public attention in the waning days of the 2020 presidential campaign, when an email in his laptop (which he left unclaimed at a repair shop) indicated that his father had at least one meeting with a Burisma colleague, creating a possible conflict of interest. The laptop also contained videos of the younger Biden using the drug that if his father is to be believed, warranted five years in prison.

The laptop story affair should have been a bigger news story but was quashed by the Biden campaign in collusion with corporate media, especially social media platforms such as Facebook and the site then known as Twitter. Twitter and Facebook censored any links about the laptop from appearing in any posts. In addition, the Biden campaign convened a group of intelligence “experts” who claimed the laptop story was little more than a Russian disinformation campaign. This conspiracy among the media and the permanent government may have killed the story late in the campaign, but the establishment interference was never forgotten or forgiven.

It isn’t surprising that there is so much conversation about the pardon, especially after Biden previously stated that he would not pardon his son. The case can be made that absent being Joe Biden’s child, Hunter wouldn’t be facing any charges at all.

But there are two big problems for the elder Biden. One is his lackluster record of issuing pardons for others during his term in office. He can pardon anyone convicted of a federal offense before January 20, 2025, the date he leaves office and Donald Trump returns to the white house. But to date his pardon record has been stingy, with the fewest number of presidential pardons since Richard Nixon .

The other issue is Ukraine. Hunter Biden’s pardon is interesting because it covers any crimes committed from January 1, 2014, to the present. The year 2014 is the year of the U.S. backed Maidan coup against the elected Ukrainian government. He was charged with an illegal gun purchase made in 2018 and of tax evasion from 2016 to 2019. Why does the pardon begin in 2014?

Vice President Biden was the Obama administration point man on Ukraine. The Maidan coup was the beginning of an effort to destroy Russia’s economy and use Ukraine as a proxy in that conflict. As president, Biden is very much committed to this misguided plan, claiming in 2022 that sanctioning Russia’s economy would “turn the ruble to rubble.” Now as he leaves office he is escalating conflict with Russia in Ukraine and in Syria.

It isn’t clear what the younger Biden might have been doing on his Burisma seat that caused his father to extend the pardon back to 2014. Now we will never know or if we ever do know, it won’t matter because Hunter Biden cannot be prosecuted for any activity related to his work in Ukraine. It’s possible that there isn’t really much to find out, that Hunter Biden existed as a cipher for his father, contributing little to any of his endeavors.

Biden was at the center of a scandal but all in all things turned out well for him. He wrote a memoir, “Beautiful Things ,” and he even sold artwork which netted him $1.5 million . He made money from a book and his paintings and in all probability didn’t worry about his legal troubles, knowing that his father would pardon him.

The outrage generated by the pardon is in large part due to Hunter’s failson status. He is a man who only succeeded because his father was a powerful senator, then vice president, and finally president of the United States. His drug addiction created personal problems for himself and his family but he once smoked crack in a rental car which means his identity could have been easily traced, but no one called the police.

If father and son have anything in common, it is mediocrity. Biden was never thought of as an intellectual giant in the senate. He was known as a right winger, in 1977 he warned that school busing would create a “racial jungle ” and in later years he proudly shepherded Bill Clinton’s 1994 Crime Bill, and bragged about the draconian sentences and mass incarceration that resulted.

Senator Biden’s conservatism made him an attractive running mate for Barack Obama, who had marketed himself as a progressive when he was anything but that. The phony leftist needed racist, right wing cover, and the senator who bragged about “death penalty for jaywalking” was the perfect antidote.

Biden was no different as vice president, known for blurting out what are kindly referred to as gaffes, a nice way of saying that he is not very bright. This not very bright man was influential however, and was able to make sure that his lightweight son had every advantage that he didn’t deserve.

Hunter Biden was troubled though, so addicted to drugs that he forgot that he left a laptop in a Delaware repair shop that contained video of sex and drugs and embarrassment for his equally mediocre father who was fortunate to have the Democratic Party establishment coalesce around his presidential campaign in 2020.

Aside from deadender democrats, the nation is sick of Joe Biden. Some 7 million people who voted for him couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Kamala Harris, his handpicked successor. Instead of concluding his affairs as a lame duck soon to leave office, he instead moves the anti-Russia proxy battle from Ukraine to Syria and continues funding the Israeli genocidal apartheid government.

Millions of people watched as a man whose health declined, yet who continued his re-election bid. The top down oligarch machinations which made Kamala Harris the nominee were a bridge too far and of course she was defeated.

Now with less than two months in office, Joe threw his disgraced son a lifeline. It is perhaps fitting though. President Biden will not be missed. Even before he was shoved out of the race his approval ratings were in the basement.

He said himself he was a “transitional” figure and he should have acted like it and left office without trying to run again with his dignity intact. Instead he’ll be remembered for genocide, cognitive decline, and a failed son who always manages to land on his feet.

https://blackagendareport.com/problem-joe-and-hunter

I Beg Your Pardon! People of Color Say Hunter Biden’s Clemency Represents White Privilege in Overdrive
Jon Jeter 04 Dec 2024

Image
Joe Biden's pardon of his son, Hunter Biden, is viewed as hypocritical to people of color, yet given their experiences is unsurprising.

A Chicano activist in Oakland, California, Al Osorio, said he was appalled but not surprised to hear that President Joe Biden had pardoned his son Hunter Biden on federal tax and gun charges stemming from a period when he was addicted to crack cocaine .

“My first thought regarding Biden was: ‘what about Marcellus Williams?’” Osorio told Black Agenda Report in an interview, recalling the African American man executed by the state of Missouri in September despite the absence of forensic evidence linking him to the murder of a St. Louis woman. “What about Leonard Peltier?” he said of the 80-year-old Native American activist who has been imprisoned since 1976 for allegedly murdering two FBI agents. Osorio added:

“Then I thought ‘wait, these men are (or) were innocent. Hunter is guilty as f*ck. In the words of Brother Fred Hampton, he needs to free ‘em all!. If he's gonna free the guilty he's got to open up the gates and pardon ‘em all!”

Biden’s decision to renege on a pledge to let stand his son’s criminal conviction has sparked a nationwide conversation about white privilege and the rank hypocrisy of a criminal justice system that is rigged against ordinary defendants, African Americans and people of color most of all.

In September, the younger Biden pleaded guilty in Los Angeles federal court to a nine-count indictment that alleged he evaded the payment of $1.4 million in taxes by falsifying records between 2016 and 2019 and failing to file a return in 2018. In June, jurors in Delaware found Hunter Biden guilty of three felony counts for lying on a federal firearms application. He was scheduled for sentencing in Los Angeles later this month and faced up to 17 years in federal prison although sentencing experts said he was unlikely to serve more than three years.

By extending clemency, President Biden spared his son any prison time for the crimes for which he was convicted, as well as any other federal offenses he may have committed between 2014 through 2024 in an apparent attempt to preempt prosecutions by the incoming Trump administration.

Legal experts say the scope of Biden’s pardon is unprecedented, “with the closest being Gerald Ford’s 1974 pardon of Richard M. Nixon after Nixon resigned post-Watergate,” wrote the Washington Post.

Ford pardoned Nixon for any crimes he may have committed from 1969 to 1974.

Osorio: “How can you pardon him for things he hasn’t been charged with?”

Biden defended the pardon, saying that the charges against his son were motivated by partisan politics. But in the days since the administration announced the clemency, there has been an eruption of withering broadsides from a wide-range of critics, from conservatives demanding pardons for the January 6 Capitol Hill assailants to borrowers demanding that their student debts be forgiven, and perhaps most vocally, African Americans and Latinos.

As a U.S. senator, Biden authored the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act which mandated a five-year minimum sentence for trafficking in 500g of powder cocaine or 5g of crack cocaine which is more associated with African Americans. Research has shown that there is no chemical difference between crack and powder cocaine yet the disparity has only been lowered, from 100 to 1 to 18 to 1, rather than abolished. Hours after Biden announced the pardon, one African American man posted online a song by the slain rapper Tupac Shakur–who denied the sexual assault charges that he was convicted of–White Man’z World , while an African American woman posted on social media:

“MEMO TO BLACK DEMOCRAT SUPPORTERS: Biden just pardoned his crackhead, gun toting, tax evading, junkie ass son for doing THE SAME DAMNED THING THAT HE LOCKED BLACK YOUTH UP FOR DOING!

Wrote another African American in response:

“I think about my Grandson who has done his base sentence. He's still, locked up(over 8 years). . . . He locked up off under Biden's strikes. Everything you said about this Peck a Wood Is true.. .

And yet another wrote:

The only question is WHEN WILL BLACK PP TIRE OF PLAYING BUFFOONS for the demoncRatic party?

The White House can only pardon defendants convicted of federal crimes but many posts on social media have questioned why neither he nor his Vice-President Kamala Harris used their bully pulpit to appeal for clemency–or at the very least a new trial–for African Americans such as Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted in 1981 for the murder of a white Philadelphia police officer; Jamil al-Amin–formerly H. Rap Brown–who was convicted of killing a white, Atlanta-area police officer in 2000; and Marcellus Williams, who was executed in September for the 1998 stabbing murder of Felicia Gayle in her St. Louis home.

In each of those cases, there exists exculpatory evidence. Despite a mountain of forensic evidence left at Gayle’s home, for instance, none of it implicated Williams. He was executed solely on the word of two witnesses: a jailhouse snitch who had recently been diagnosed with HIV and expressed a keen interest in the reward money offered by Gayle’s husband, and Williams’ former girlfriend, who may herself have been involved in Gayle’s murder.

Moreover, many trial lawyers have noted that Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to tax evasion on the day that his trial was scheduled to begin. That is highly unusual, they said–guilty pleas typically are part of an agreement brokered before the trial–and suggests that Biden knew that his father planned to pardon him, despite repeated assurances that he would not.

Compounding matters even more is that Hunter Biden’s drug addiction is linked to a broader narrative of influence peddling while the elder Biden was Obama’s Vice-President. Despite no experience in the energy sector, Hunter Biden was appointed to the board of a Ukrainian gas company, Burisma. While Democrats have complained that Trump and his fellow Republicans have invented claims that Hunter used his political connections to benefit a foreign company, he did write at least one letter to the U.S. Ambassador in Italy seeking assistance in landing a lucrative contract, according to the New York Times which wrote:

“This is a Ukrainian company and, purely to protect ourselves, U.S.G. should not be actively advocating with the government of Italy without the company going through the D.O.C. Advocacy Center,” the official wrote. Those acronyms refer to the United States government and a Department of Commerce program that supports American companies that seek business with foreign governments.”

Osorio and others say that while Biden’s pardon of his son represents white hypocrisy at its worst, African Americans and Latinos have largely made a mental note of it and simply kept it moving. So precarious is daily life in America’s cities today that most people of color are simply too preoccupied with getting through the day to pay much attention to the latest political scandal in the nation’s capital.

https://blackagendareport.com/i-beg-you ... -overdrive
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 12684
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Thu Dec 05, 2024 5:54 pm

Amazing Grace! The miracle of Biden’s forgiveness

Lorenzo Maria Pacini

December 5, 2024

Daddy Joe has forgiven his son Hunter, Christmas is saved.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me

(Amazing Grace, John Newton, 1772)

Santa Claus is coming to town and to make himself conspicuous, he has already left a nice present under the chimney of the White House: Daddy Joe has forgiven his son Hunter, Christmas is saved.

On the plane’s steps

It looks like a scene from a Christmas cult, and yet it really happened like this: on the steps of the plane that was taking him to Angola for the first time, outgoing US President Joe Biden signed the document in which he decreed a full pardon for his son Hunter, convicted of tax fraud and the purchase of a weapon with the omission of previous drug addiction. The verdict would have been pronounced between 12 and 16 December, but the good Joe, by virtue of his Christian values and good heart, decided to relieve his son of his prison days.

Once again this year Christmas is saved, a good deed has been done and the world will be a better place. After all, everyone is entitled to a second chance, right?

Joe Biden was forced by his party to resign 100 days before the election, leaving the scene to his deputy, Kamala Harris, who is running for election. Disappointed by this dismissive gesture, he thoughtfully compensated with a good dose of fatherly love. The pardon issued is full and unconditional, rescinding all criminal responsibility for his son – who had taken a plea bargain admitting his guilt in court – and has aroused the indignation of Donald Trump who called Biden a ‘hypocrite’. Nothing to say about the 34 pending convictions that Trump carries, but which will be postponed indefinitely because he won the election. The hypocrisy accused has been linked to the 6 January 2020 assault on Capitol Hill, which still has some of the ‘American patriots’ involved in prison, who have not received a pardon from Joe, but may find it with Donald, consistent with election promises. In the US, pardoning at the last minute is a classic: Trump pardoned Charles, the father of Jared Kushner – proposed yesterday as the new ambassador to Paris – in 2020, who was in prison at the time because he had intimidated a witness by hiring a prostitute to seduce her husband, subsequently sending the sex tape, and the witness was his own sister. Charles will now fly to France. Little does it matter that Jared is the husband of Ivanka Trump’s daughter and had been sent to the Middle East as a special envoy, where he then founded an investment company receiving some $2 billion from Saudi coffers. But the American history books are full of other examples, such as Ford pardoning Nixon, or Clinton cleaning up his brother Roger’s resume.

In short, Americans at heart are good.

A caricature of democracy

The affair, as corny as it is, should give us pause for thought. Maria Zakharova said it well, commenting on the incident: ‘it is a caricature of democracy’. At stake once again is the rule of law (or what little is left of it), which is being sold out in favour of a little sentimentality and the protection of personal interests, in violation of the laws and the very balance of powers that constitute the state.

The rule of law (Rule of Law) is a fundamental principle in both common law systems such as the American and civil law systems. In general, it means that everyone – individuals, governments, public and private institutions – are subject to the law and equally protected by it. In the context of the United States, the Rule of Law takes on specific characteristics: first of all, the Constitution is the supreme law and everything must respect it. The Supreme Court plays the role of interpreter of the Constitution, ensuring that no law or act violates the fundamental rights enshrined therein. The rule of law is guaranteed through the classic tripartition of powers, legislative to Congress, executive to the President and federal agencies, and judicial to the federal and state court system. The balancing of these three powers is the guarantee against concentration and abuse of power.

Surely the destructive parable of events, decisions and gossip that engulfed Hunter Biden was a black mark that had to be cleaned while there was ‘authority’ to do so, certainly not afterwards. Indeed, no comment was made about other ‘crimes’ (inverted commas needed) and conflicts of interest, such as Hunter’s participation in the boards of Ukrainian and Chinese companies, in conflict with American diplomacy and in abuse of his father’s role as president.

The process of destroying the few structural certainties of American politics has certainly not started now. This fact about Biden is one among many and not even the most scandalous. His term of office will end with a collective laugh, because at the end of the day there is something profoundly American about it, which suits both Reps and Dems: business is business, even with justice, the self-made man must be able to redeem himself, always. In such cases, all political parties turn a blind eye.

The deconstruction of the administrative state will now be carried out by Kash Patel, appointed director of the FBI. Patel is a fierce advocate of an ‘imperial’ presidency, in which the legal bodies are an extension of the government. On his agenda is a total restructuring of the legal system as an apparatus of revenge and consolidation of the authoritarian power of the president. So much for the independence of the judiciary (if there was one before).

Forgiveness, it is known, is also a matter of interest. Joe pardoned his son in just a few steps to get on the plane, not like when he declared in 2021 that he would not forgive the $50,000 student loan debts of the thousands of students and families involved because he ‘did not have the authority to do so’, a statement immediately denied by the White House, which emphasized his authority under current law. Probably the nice pictures of Hunter at parties and orgies with prostitutes are more stimulating for the now degraded cognitive processes of his presidential father.

The important thing remains to have made an action of Christmas value. Whether this was done towards needy people or a multi-condemned prodigal family member, doesn’t matter.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... rgiveness/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 12684
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Fri Dec 06, 2024 3:22 pm

PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Biden Family of Liars
December 5, 2024

Given Joe Biden’s apparently intimate involvement in Hunter’s dealings, it follows that his intent in pardoning his son is effectively to secure a pardon for himself.

Image
U.S. President Joe Biden in November (White House, Carlos Fyfe)

By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News

This is the sixth in Consortium News’s series on the extensive criminal allegations leveled at Hunter Biden in the course of the past year and President Biden’s apparent involvement in his son’s influence-peddling affairs. We conclude the series with this commentary on Joe Biden’s announcement last weekend that he has granted his son a full pardon. Our earlier reports can be read here, here, here, here and here .

With his shocking presidential pardon of his son Hunter, announced Thanksgiving weekend, when the maximum number of Americans would be watching football games and consuming potato chips, Joe Biden goes out just as he was the whole of his tatty career as a politician — a self-serving fiddler, indifferent to democratic process, ever going against his word.

Peter Baker, that inimitable (thank goodness) clerk The New York Times posts as its chief White House correspondent, tells us in Wednesday’s editions, “We don’t really know how history will remember Joe Biden. It’s too early to say, obviously.”

Actually, we really know at this point. Obviously.

Much has been made of Biden as the family man torn between his duties as president and his compassion for an errant son as the victim of perverted justice. The Times unfolded a singular line of argument on Tuesday.

“President Biden was deeply concerned,” Katie Rogers and Glenn Thrush reported, “that legal problems would push his son into a relapse after years of sobriety, and he began to realize there might not be any way out beyond issuing a pardon.”

No other way out. Here we have Joe Biden pimping the helpless suffering of his son’s addictions (to alcohol and crack). It is of a piece with Biden’s very regular references, always for similar political advantage, to the death of his other son, Beau, and the earlier deaths of his first wife and daughter.


The Rogers and Thrush piece now passes for news reporting Americans are invited to take seriously. It is one among countless others of its kind and quality that are together a measure of how the corruptions of the Bidens, father and son as well as others, have deepened an already severe crisis in American media and turned public discourse into bad afternoon television.

The reporting on the pardon has been defective since the White House released the Executive Grant of Clemency, along with Biden’s official statement, last Sunday. The Times, The Washington Post, the other major dailies and the broadcast networks all reported as if in unison that Joe Biden’s motivating concerns were the guilty verdicts Hunter Biden faces on gun-possession and tax-evasion charges.

Hunter was scheduled to be sentenced later this month. Biden père has told the nation his intent was simply to protect Hunter from a judicial system that political antagonists had unduly politicized.

From the president’s statement:

“The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election. Then, a carefully negotiated plea deal, agreed to by the Department of Justice, unraveled in the court room—with a number of my political opponents in Congress taking credit for bringing political pressure on the process. Had the plea deal held, it would have been a fair, reasonable resolution of Hunter’s cases.

No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong.”

You read a statement such as this and you have to wonder whether Joe Biden is capable of speaking truthfully in any circumstance bearing upon his personal interests.

The plea deal, negotiated in the summer of 2023, was indeed carefully negotiated — by Hunter’s attorneys and corrupt Justice Department prosecutors acting to keep the president’s son out of prison. The agreement collapsed not due to political pressure — there was none — but because an un-beholden judge with a commitment to the rule of law, Maryellen Noreika, read it and threw it out of court.

The feature of the plea bargain that moved Judge Noreika to put an end to the negotiated arrangement was its stipulation that Hunter would be immune from further prosecution not only for the matters then tried — the gun and taxes charges — but for any other crimes he may have committed. Preposterous, Noreika rightly concluded.

Special Treatment

Image
Joe Biden, foreground, and Hunter during inauguration of President Barack Obama, Jan. 20, 2009. (acaben, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Was Hunter Biden singled out as his father asserts? Not as his father asserts, but yes, singled out. He had made a mess of his life, breaching various laws while doing so, and was singled out for special treatment in a judicial system that plainly leaves elites and their families above the law.

This context is essential to understanding why Joe Biden decided — and one strongly suspects this was not, as reported, a decision Biden considered and took over the Thanksgiving weekend — to grant his son clemency in the manner he did. The operative language in the official document, the raison d’être of the case, is this:

“Be It Known, That This Day, I, Joseph R. Biden, Jr., President of the United States, Pursuant to My Powers Under Article II, Section 2, Clause 1, of the Constitution, Have Granted Unto ROBERT HUNTER BIDEN A Full and Unconditional Pardon For those offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024, including but not limited to all offenses charged or prosecuted (including any that have resulted in convictions)…”

As is easily discerned, President Biden has reinstated, not quite verbatim but nearly, the terms of the plea agreement thrown out of court a year and a half ago — the agreement he defended in his official statement as fair and reasonable. He has granted his son precisely what Judge Noreika found objectionable — open-ended immunity for crimes “he has committed or may have committed or taken part in.”

The dates are what matter in this language. Hunter Biden assumed his infamous board seat at Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas supplier, in March 2014, a few months after the beginning of the period his father’s pardon covers. Years of bribe-taking, extortion schemes, and various other financial machinations involving Burisma and other foreign clients followed.

The tax and gun charges, to put this point another way, were all along minor matters next to the far graver allegations leveled at Hunter Biden. This is why guilty verdicts on the lesser infractions went through. They were effectively displays intended to demonstrate prosecutors’ integrity and seriousness as they ignored or otherwise quashed compelling evidence of grand-scale corruption.

As has been widely remarked, Hunter’s attorneys were almost certain to argue successfully for very light prison time, or none, during the sentencing hearings due this month. The gravity of the foreign business dealings allowed for no such prospect. Not only did these yield Hunter, his business colleagues, and his uncle, Joe’s brother James, tens of millions of dollars; the evidence implicating Joe Biden — “the Big Guy,” as Hunter referred to his father — is hard and plentiful.

It is possible, providing one has followed various investigations into Hunter Biden’s influence-selling schemes, to read the terms of Hunter’s pardon as Joe Biden’s upside-down admission of his son’s guilt.

And given Joe Biden’s apparently intimate involvement in Hunter’s dealings — as an enabler and a beneficiary — it follows that Joe Biden’s ultimate intent in pardoning his son is effectively to secure a pardon for himself — that is, to protect himself by immunizing the master of all the malign ceremonies from prosecution.

It was more than a year ago, in September 2023, that the House speaker at the time, Kevin McCarthy, authorized the Oversight Committee to open preliminary hearings to determine if the full House should begin impeachment proceedings against the president for his alleged involvement in Hunter’s corruptions.

Plenty of Evidence

Image
Vice President Biden during a meeting with Ukrainian legislators in Kiev, April 22, 2014. (U.S. Embassy Kyiv, Flickr, Public domain)

Evidence had already begun to accumulate. It was obvious Biden was headed into increasing political peril. And it was obvious that the White House and the Democratic machine, having concluded neither Biden nor his son could win at trial, would fight their corner in the media.

Evidence? What evidence? There is no evidence. This was the Democrats’ rather pitiful counter as the case against Biden mounted.

In mid–December 2023 the full House voted to begin a formal investigation into the president’s alleged involvement in Hunter’s affairs, based on the accumulating evidence, implicating the president as a participant in and/or a beneficiary of Hunter’s years of manifestly criminal conniving during his father’s years as Barack Obama’s vice-president and during the post–Obama interim before Joe was elected president in 2020.

This evidence was formidable. It included very considerable email and text message archives, 36,000 pages of bank records, and 2,000 pages of the Treasury Departments “suspicious activity reports,” which cover irregular international bank transfers. There was also testimony from Hunter’s business partners, federal agents, federal attorneys, and Mykola Zlochevsky, the chief executive of Burisma Holdings.

The investigators’ inventory included records of gross payments to the Biden family, chiefly Hunter and Joe’s brother James, of more than $20 million during the years (2009–2017) Joe was vice-president. Investigators also uncovered a network of more than 20 shell companies the Biden family set up to disguise payments received from influence-peddling schemes Hunter conducted in Ukraine, Russia, China, and elsewhere.

Image
U.S. Vice President Biden visiting Kiev in January 2017. (U.S. Embassy Kyiv, Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0)

At that time of the House vote a year ago, Oversight made clear those areas where it would further focus its attention. These include what Hunter Biden and James Biden took in from their dealings with various foreign entities and where it went, the numerous occasions when Joe met with Hunter’s foreign partners, and the extent to which the Biden White House and the Justice Department had obstructed or suppressed investigations conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service.

Among the most significant findings of F.B.I. and IRS investigators was a payment of $10 million Joe and Hunter Biden allegedly extorted from Burisma in an even split, as described by Zlochevsky in several interviews with an F.B.I. informant, and a payment of $240,000 James made to his older brother immediately after a Chinese equity investor paid Hunter several million dollars.

As the stonewalling at the Biden White House continued, mainstream media began reporting, again in unison, that the House hearings had reached a dead end. But the propaganda operation against the Oversight Committee was failing.

More than two-thirds of Americans, according to a poll conducted earlier this year, thought the House hearings should continue; half of these respondents — 34 percent of those surveyed — “think Joe Biden is guilty of corruption and should be impeached.”

Hunter Biden agreed to testify under oath last February, an appearance he refused until he was threatened with contempt of Congress. The House Ways and Means Committee, which also had an investigative function in the Biden case, voted on May 22 to release 100 pages of new evidence showing that Hunter Biden lied three times during that testimony.

The evidence of this was provided by Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, the two IRS investigators who had previously presented the Oversight Committee with evidence of the Biden family’s corruption.

It is a family of liars, we can now conclude. Joe Biden, having denied any involvement in his son’s businesses on multiple occasions, was proven to have lied on just as many. He went on to assert numerous times that he would not pardon his son.

Strangely enough, he said in the official statement issued last Sunday, “From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word… .” This is Joe Biden. He has operated for half a century on the understanding that people believe his lies if he repeats them often enough.

It is likely that the case against the Biden crime family, as various commentators have taken to calling it, is closed, but it is too early to conclude this with certainty. Biden’s pardon is perfectly legal, but a court challenge would be legal, too, if the House or another entity chose to mount one.

While Biden’s intent appears in part to have been to protect himself a well as his son, it does not automatically follow that he cannot be investigated after he leaves office.

How far the House investigations would go, where they would lead, always hinged partly on political will: Oversight and Ways and Means had sufficient evidence to try Joe Biden, but it was never certain the full House would advise the Senate to do so. And it was highly unlikely the Senate, with a Democratic majority until last month, would proceed to trial.

The damage the Bidens have done to an already failing republic is very formidable. This is chiefly due to the gross corruption of the Justice Department, from attorney general on down, and straight through the F.B.I.’s leadership. As I have written elsewhere, when the judicial system decays, the road to failed-state status opens.

Democrats are fond of asserting that Donald Trump, in his second term, will politicize the Justice Department as a matter of avenging his enemies. One hopes not, although Trump has plenty of cause to seek revenge for actual politicized prosecutions against him.

It was the Democrats who corrupted Justice, in large measure to protect Joe Biden and Hunter Biden. And this will be the deepest, most enduring scar they leave on the American polity.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/12/05/p ... -of-liars/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 12684
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Tue Dec 10, 2024 3:32 pm

Genocide as the Principal Cause of the Democrat’s Crushing Defeat
Arnold August 04 Dec 2024

Image

While genocide is a clear cause of the democrats' defeat, economic issues are usually mentioned. What lingers behind the significance of the “it’s the economy” narrative?

This claim, which focuses on genocide, is controversial, as numerous other analysts assert that “the economy” was the decisive factor in the elections, based on polls. Nevertheless, we may gain further insight by consulting the views of an expert in the field:

“John Della Volpe is the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics. The Washington Post referred to John as one of the world’s leading authorities on global sentiment, opinion, and influence, especially among young Americans and in the age of digital and social media .”

Della Volpe writes about the U.S. election results:

“…Ms. Harris’s campaign needed to shift about one percentage point of voters across Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin to secure the presidency, but instead struggled in college towns like Ann Arbor, Mich., and other blue places.

… When young Americans voiced deep moral concerns about Gaza and the humanitarian crisis unfolding there, they received carefully calibrated statements rather than genuine engagement with their pain. I believe this issue contributed to lower enthusiasm and turnout in battleground states in 2024 compared to 2020 .”

“One percentage point of voters.” Let that sink in! The citation above is from an abridged version of a New York Times opinion piece, now accessible only via a paywall .

Polls are not necessarily objective; they are often part of the mainstream media narrative surrounding elections and their outcomes. What implications does the question of “the economy”
have for the voter? Such a poll is inherently biased. Does it consider that the economy is inextricably linked to the accumulated U.S. multi-trillion military objectives around the globe, and therefore not an abstract soundbite up in the air, thus instead linked to imperialism? No.

The narrative of “it’s the economy,” as detached from its external manifestation of massive military and related expenditures, is so pervasive in popular consciousness that a spontaneous response of “the economy” is understood to refer to that relatively abstract and emasculated view based exclusively on domestic considerations such as inflation.

Given the above, if the issue of genocide played a decisive role in tipping the scales against Kamala Harris, one might wonder why it was not more prominently reflected in polling data. The pervasive narrative in the United States and the West is so omnipresent and airtight against even mentioning “Palestine” or “Gaza” that it becomes insidious. This narrative conflates pro-Palestine sentiments with anti-Zionism and antisemitism, creating an environment where voters might hesitate to provide such answers in surveys that could identify them. The fear of retaliation is a genuine concern in this highly charged atmosphere. However, as the Director of Polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics has shown, in the anonymity of the voting cycle, many individuals who might have supported the Democratic candidate opted either to abstain or to vote for the anti-genocide Green Party, ultimately contributing to Harris’s defeat.

In addition to the conventional polling procedures that align with the prevailing status quo narrative, it is significant to consider a fundamental premise. The extensive, prolonged opposition in the streets and on campuses, including pervasive arrests, police brutality, and attacks against academic careers affecting millions of primarily young but voting-age individuals and Faculty, all occurred for the public to see. Therefore, did this historical series of events not serve as a foundation for punishing the Democrats? Moreover, considering the broader social context of these activists, who have parents, grandparents, friends, and siblings, is essential. The students are grounded in principles, ideas, and values. While they may not yet operate entirely at the theory level, Karl Marx's observation seems valid: "theory … becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses .” This “material force” contributed to the Democrat debacle.

As part of the debate surrounding the Democrats’ punishment for the genocide, a rhetorical question has emerged: What would Trump have done on October 7, 2023?

First, even posing this question risks significantly to diminish the gravity of the genocide carried out by Biden and Harris. It diverts attention from the root cause while possibly revealing a lingering bias that views the Democrats as the “lesser of two evils.”

Second, as Trump prepares to take office in January, the pro-Palestine movement’s focus will shift to opposing his administration.

Still uncertain about genocide being the leading cause of the Democratic disaster? From the viewpoint of young voters, consider if Harris had won. Such a victory would likely have been interpreted as a public endorsement of genocide—as reflected in the popular monikers “Genocide Joe” and “Holocaust Harris”—which would have severely undermined the pro-Palestine movement.

Thus, many young voters defied their constraints and rejected the “lesser of two evils” mindset. Their resistance has strengthened the movement, positioning it to confront the challenges the Trump administration poses more effectively. The above-related anecdotal account of a presumptive Trump reaction to October 7 also often includes the notion that Trump represents fascism and that he had to be deterred by a so-called united front against fascism. However, fascism is already here. The most glaring proof is the genocide against the Palestinian people. In doubt? Just look at your TV screen or smartphone. Furthermore, the U.S.-Israeli genocide policy in Palestine is applied simultaneously inside the U.S. itself. Their complete airtight, unfounded assertion that the pro-Palestine movement is anti-Semitic to crush all dissent follows Hitler’s Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels: “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.”

The narrow vision of the “economy” narrative so amenable to the capitalist status quo account, as juxtaposed to the profoundly anti-imperialist genocide version, is also convenient for co-optation by the “left” veneer attributed to the Democratic Party. At the risk of sounding presumptuous, it became clear as soon as Bernie Sanders launched his “political revolution” speech in June 2016, leading up to the Democratic primaries that year. Why? Sanders’ narrative, exemplified by his trademark line “It is about creating an economy that works for all of us, not just the 1 percent ” was fundamentally fraudulent. Aside from the non-sequitur of using the Democratic Party as a platform for a “political revolution,” Sanders’ rhetoric about a “fair share of the pie” immediately raised red flags. Coupled with his brief, almost overlooked comment on U.S. foreign policy—lost in the broader focus on the “economy” and the “fair share of the pie”—it was clear something was amiss. The credit for this insight goes to Lenin’s analysis, in which he referred to the German social democrats as “‘social-imperialists,’” that is, socialists in words and imperialists in deeds . Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is of the same ilk as Sanders and the rest of the “democratic socialists” wing of the Democratic Party, and thus looking ahead to 2028: “‘Democratic Socialist’ Ocasio-Cortez Considering Presidential Run.”

These figures play the role of sheepdogs to retain people within the confines of the Democratic party rather than organizing in opposition to the imperialist duopoly. Thus, that party is known as the gravedigger of progressive social movements. Therefore, there is rejoicing over the crushing defeat of the Democrats because this new situation potentially allows for more room and time to organize against the political system. On July 9, 2020, the late Glen Ford wrote in Black Agenda Report under the title “Don’t Let the Democratic Party Bury the Movement,” warning that the “Black movement will be asphyxiated by the ubiquitous fingers of the Democratic Party if it does not build independent nexuses of people’s power.”

The joy is felt throughout much of the West's progressive circles because this significant shift in the American political system is also crucial for the world at large, given the continuous American wars of aggression and violent interference in the affairs of other countries.

https://blackagendareport.com/genocide- ... ing-defeat
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 12684
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Sat Dec 14, 2024 4:17 pm

The Democratic Party Faces Its Day of Reckoning
Posted on December 14, 2024 by Yves Smith

Yves here. This post provides a compact, long-term view of the Democratic Party’s abandonment of the working class in favor of cultivating wealthy donors. Obama deservedly plays a large role in this sellout. There does not seem to be remotely enough self-recrimination among party leaders and operatives to hope for much of a course change. So what comes next?

By Leonard C. Goodman. a Chicago criminal defense lawyer and an adjunct professor of law at DePaul University .Originally published at ScheerPost; cross posted from Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute

Following its crushing defeat in the 2024 election, the Democratic Party might finally face its day of reckoning. The party markets itself as the champion of the working class and a bulwark against the party of the plutocrats. But this has been a lie for at least three decades.

The Democratic Party has partnered with Wall Street donors since at least the 1990s. Under President Bill Clinton, the party overturned Glass Steagall and other New Deal programs that had effectively restrained Wall Street greed for 60 years. It also sold out American workers with so-called trade deals that freed their bosses to ship American jobs overseas. It ended welfare “as we know it” and passed draconian crime bills that destroyed mostly black and brown communities, sending mothers and fathers to prison for decades in the name of a cruel and senseless war on drugs.

Into the 21st century, the Democrats continued pushing the lie that they were fighting for working people. After September 11, 2001, the party put up a token resistance to the Bush/Cheney regime of illegal regime-change wars, black sites, indefinite detention and torture. All the while, it continued soliciting campaign contributions from the arms dealers profiting from Bush’s wars.

In 2008, the party found a Black face to carry on its Wall Street-friendly agenda. Gullible Americans, myself included, were taken in by Barack Obama’s promises to end “dumb wars” and to institute a single payer healthcare system. We ignored the red flags, like the fact that Obama’s campaign broke records in pocketing Wall Street donations. It was later revealed by Wikileaks that nearly every member of Obama’s cabinet had been selected by the giant Wall Street bank Citigroup.

It didn’t take long for President Obama to crush our hopes that he was a different kind of Democrat. One of his first acts as president was to funnel trillions of dollars to the big banks that, newly freed by Clinton from FDR-era regulations, had embarked on an orgy of unbridled greed, swindling millions of Americans out of their homes and retirement savings with a scheme to sell worthless mortgage-backed securities.

Adding insult to injury, Obama saw to it that the bailed-out bank executives faced no criminal prosecutions and received their year-end bonuses. In their place, the Obama Justice Department brought federal mortgage fraud charges against thousands of poor people—I represented a half dozen of these folks—who had signed their names to the phony mortgage loans that the Wall Street bankers encouraged, packaged and sold to pension funds and other unwitting investors.

The pipe dream that Obama would be an anti-war president was also quickly dispatched. During his two terms, Obama ushered in a new era of continuous war, envisioned by George Orwell and favored by Wall Street. Obama expanded Bush’s bombing campaigns into Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria and Somalia. Today’s Democratic Party is indistinguishable from the Republicans in its ties to war profiteers and trillion-dollar Pentagon budgets.

Obama also effectively ended the Democrats’ promise to fight for a true national health care system in which all Americans would be able to go to the doctor when sick without fear of bankrupting their families. In its place, Obama pushed through a health care plan developed in right-wing think tanks, that guaranteed profits (and taxpayer subsidies) for the private insurance industry and did little to contain costs.

By 2012, Glen Ford of the Black Agenda Report was describing the Democratic Party as the “more effective evil” for using its reputation as protector of the working class to neutralize effective opposition and push through right-wing policies that the Republicans could not get passed.

In 2016, the Democrats received a wake-up call when their chosen successor to Obama lost the White House to a crude-talking New York City real estate developer and game show host with no prior political experience. But with the help of its partners in corporate media, the party managed to limp along for another eight years, first by telling the American people that President Trump was an agent of Russia, and then by claiming that Trump was Hitler who was planning concentration camps and firing squads for his political enemies.

Now after the November 2024 elections in which Trump won every swing state and the popular vote, the Democratic party is finally being forced to face some uncomfortable truths. The party’s partners in the corporate media initially tried blaming the election result on the voters for being too misogynist, too racist, or too dumb to vote correctly. But there is little trust that remains in corporate media.

The party’s corporate consultants have put the blame on the party’s excessive focus on identity politics. But the issues for the Democrats run much deeper than bad messaging. The real problem is that the party takes direction from plutocrats whose interests are antagonistic to the needs of the working people it pretends to represent. Both Democrats and Republicans are financed by the same corporate interests. Thus, there is general agreement and support for policies that guarantee high rates of return on investment capital, policies like continuous war, for-profit health care, and outsourcing jobs. This leaves few issues for the parties to fight about other than abortion and identity politics.

Fifty years ago, American capitalists still relied on American workers to build everything from cars and televisions to sneakers and light bulbs. These titans of industry had to care about things such as functioning schools, decent wages, cities and public transportation. But the times have changed. Today’s plutocrats support outsourcing jobs to low-wage countries and have little concern for the condition of American workers. And while ordinary Americans want the country’s resources to be spent at home, plutocrats are heavily invested in foreign wars, and they shun diplomacy.

These contradictions could only be covered up for so long. Even with reliable partners in the corporate press, the internet has given Americans alternative sources for their news. During the last few years, in a desperate effort to keep its scheme afloat, the Democrats embraced censorship and a regime of corporate “fact checkers” to police social media and remove or punish unsanctioned speech. In so doing, the party abandoned the last of its core principles: standing up for free speech and the right to dissent.

Many Democrats argue that they had to go after Wall Street money to compete with the Republicans. In 2016, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer explained the strategy: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” But for this plan to work, the party still needed an actual message to take to the voters.

Forbes Magazine reports that during the 2024 presidential race, Kamala Harris’s campaign raised a billion dollars while Trump’s campaign raised $388 million. Harris’s substantial edge in fundraising allowed her to flood the airwaves with commercials. But she had nothing of substance to say to voters.

The Atlantic Magazine reports that early in her campaign, Harris gained ground by attacking Trump as a stooge of corporate interests—and touted herself as a relentless scourge of Big Business. But then, suddenly, Harris abandoned her attacks on big business at the urging of her brother-in-law, Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer.

Many Democrats, especially in swing states, opposed the Biden Administration’s unfailing support for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, which has killed more than 43,000 Palestinians and displaced nearly all of its 2.3 million residents. Harris could have gained the support of many of these voters by promising to stop arming Israel during the genocide. But her Party’s donors wouldn’t allow her to even hint at such a change in policy. Two days before the election, while campaigning in the swing state of Michigan, Harris stated, “I will do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza.” But as Ali Abunimah of the Electronic Intifada pointed out on election night, this promise carried no weight because Harris had also promised that she would never do the one thing within her power to stop the slaughter: cut off the flow of bombs to Israel.

After decades of malfeasance and deception, it has become evident that the corporate Democratic Party cannot serve as the lone opposition party to the corporate Republicans. The American people need a viable political party that represents the interests of ordinary working people.

A true workers party will not raise as much money as the corporate Democrats. But it will have an honest message with the potential to appeal to large numbers of Americans. Further, a political party that actually represents workers will press for reforms that begin to even the playing field between the haves and the have nots.

For example, one the most effective ways plutocrats game the political system is by flooding campaign contributions to the lawmakers who sit on the key committees that oversee their businesses. Members of Congress covet these committee chairs because they guarantee high fundraising numbers. Lawmakers who sit on the House Financial Services Committee have jurisdiction over banks and insurance companies and are targeted by those firms with campaign contributions. Lawmakers who sit on the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees provide funding for lucrative government contracts and are flooded with war industry cash.

These practices are corrupt and deprive American citizens of their right to be governed by representatives free from conflicts of interest. A judge who has received political contributions from a litigant must be removed from the case. Similarly, the most important functions of government, such as determining tax and how our tax revenue will be spent, should be performed by lawmakers who have not been bribed.

In 2017, the Center for American Progress, a think tank aligned with the Democratic Party, proposed a “Committee Contribution Ban” for Congress. It asserted: “Congress should enact a law to make it unlawful for members of Congress to accept campaign contributions from entities that fall within the jurisdiction of their committees.” Unsurprisingly, this proposal never reached the floor of Congress, that I could find.

Some states have enacted similar conflict of interest rules. And Congress could certainly pass such a law, if it chose. Of course, this will never happen as long as we are ruled by two corporate parties that benefit from the corruption. But if we had a political party that represented ordinary people, countless opportunities for positive change would soon emerge.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/12 ... oning.html

There will be no progress until the Democratic Party is abandoned by the working class. I expect the working class support of Trump to evaporate in the next few years as the Orange Man, free of re-election considerations, displays his plutocratic self vividly. We cannot allow the Dems to rebound on this with their shelf worn litany of lies. Time's a wastin'.

*****

Image

Who should get a presidential pardon but won’t!
Originally published: Dissident Voice on December 11, 2024 by Charles Pierce (more by Dissident Voice) | (Posted Dec 14, 2024)

President Joe Biden has pardoned his son, Hunter, after having repeatedly promised that he would not. Biden justifies this act based upon his presumption (likely accurate) that Hunter’s denial of a plea deal was on account of political opposition from Trump Republicans. Nevertheless, Hunter’s consideration for a lenient plea deal was undoubtedly influenced by his status (white privileged son of a prominent politician), whereas such leniency would be far less likely to be considered for a poor racial minority person guilty of similar crimes likewise motivated by the stresses of drug addiction. Similar favoritism for family members manifested: with Bill Clinton’s pardon for his half-brother’s drug-crime conviction, and Donald Trump’s pardon for his son-in-law’s father’s conviction of tax evasion and witness-tampering. Both Presidents Bush gave pardons to close political associates. In fact, who does or does not receive leniency (including pardons) is determined almost entirely by class privilege or lack thereof.

Abuse and impunity
Especially concerning, in the Hunter Biden case, is that said pardon preemptively covers all possible federal crimes with which Hunter could possibly be charged, if committed at any time during the past 11 years. And there are unresolved questions concerning his shady business dealings during Joe Biden’s Vice-Presidency. Moreover, unlike Biden, previous Presidents (including Trump) had (with the exception of the political crimes of one ex-President) always followed precedent by limiting their pardons to crimes for which the accused had been actually prosecuted. Biden now sets a corrupt example which Trump will almost certainly copy as he (Trump) pardons those whose yet-to-be-charged crimes (including violent ones) were perpetrated by his supporters.

Meanwhile, crimes perpetrated by Joe Biden and other U.S. government decision-makers against people of color in other countries get, not lenient treatment, but absolute impunity. Among their never-to-be-prosecuted crimes, Biden (and Harris) are full participants with the fascist settler-colonialist state in its genocidal mass murder, rooted in their de facto embrace of the proposition that Zionists are entitled to treat the resistant indigenous population of Palestine as white American expansionists had treated the indigenous nations of this continent.

As for the liberal left, they (being more concerned over possibly somewhat increased repression of liberal dissent in the U.S. than over actual U.S.-backed fascist repression and mass murder elsewhere) shelved their anti-racism and anti-imperialism as they campaigned for the center right Harris-Walz-Cheney-Bolton ticket. Left liberal fervor to elect the Democrat ticket was despite: Biden-Harris and other centrist Democrat politicians’ complicity in the existing domestic repression of pro-Palestine and other anti-imperialist dissent, as well as their decision to obstruct access to due process for most migrant and asylum-seeking people of color. Thusly the liberal left has given its allegiance to centrist Democrat politicians, whose opposition to racism and repression is, like that of Trump, entirely expedient and selective.

Will Biden provide clemency for U.S. prisoners who are not of the privileged class? Consider the U.S. political prisoners, unjustly convicted in rigged political trials, victims who have languished for decades in U.S. prisons! As these were prosecuted on account of their having acted in opposition to the regime to which Biden et al are committed, it is very unlikely that Biden will pardon them. Three current examples follow.

[1] Extraordinary prosecution: Ricardo Palmera
Context. Colombia has been almost continuously torn apart by civil war since 1948 when Jorge Eliécer Gaitán (the populist Liberal Party candidate for President) was assassinated by a lone gunman. As a proponent of land reform and with a history of advocacy for workers’ rights, Gaitán had incurred the enmity of the ruling elites and of U.S.-based transnational capital. At the time of his assassination, he was opposing the U.S. project for the formation of the Organization of American States which would be a tool for facilitating U.S. domination and for suppressing “Communist” influence in Latin America. The assassination provoked armed civil conflict among political factions. Eventually, rightwing forces gained control of the Liberal Party which then entered into a ruling coalition with the Conservative Party. The conflict then evolved into one between:

The central government (controlled by the oligarch-dominated ruling coalition and relying upon police, armed forces, and right-wing paramilitaries); and
Leftist guerrilla armies.
The latter eventually consisted mainly of:

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia [FARC] which had begun as an offshoot of the Colombian Communist Party, and
The National Liberation Army [ELN].
Both sides in this civil war had engaged in practices which were widely condemned as human rights violations: the FARC for ransom kidnappings and extortions; the government (and its rightwing paramilitary death squads) for brutal repression, torture, and assassinations of peasant and labor leaders and other noncombatant left-leaning activists. The two sides had sometimes engaged in peace talks. While a negotiated truce was in effect from 1984 until 1987, leftist groups (including the FARC) formed the Patriotic Union [UP] to seek social and political reforms thru peaceful political processes. In the 1986 elections UP candidates achieved victories in many of the local contests. The ruling oligarchs became alarmed, and over the following years some 4,000 to 6,000 UP members (including its 1986 and 1990 Presidential candidates) were murdered (with near-universal impunity) by rightwing paramilitaries backed by oligarchs. The U.S. has actively intervened (since 1964) with material assistance to the armed forces of the central government. In 2004 the U.S. targeted FARC negotiator Ricardo Palmera.

Ricardo Palmera (a.k.a. Simón Trinidad) had worked as a professor of economic history and had participated in the 1986 UP election campaign. As the death squads assassinated leftist leaders and activists with impunity, Palmera decided (in 1987) to join the FARC. He rose to a position of leadership and served as a negotiator for the FARC during the 1998 to 2002 peace process. He went to Quito, Ecuador (in 2004 January) to meet with James Lemoyne, a United Nations special advisor on peace processes to facilitate a prisoner exchange. At the behest of the CIA, the Ecuadoran government arrested Palmera and turned him over to the Colombian government, which then conspired with the U.S. (which had no charges against him at the time) to invent a case for his extradition for trial in the U.S.

The case. The U.S. DoJ [Dept of Justice] then subjected Palmera to four illegitimate trials on inappropriate charges. Specifics follow.

The U.S. misclassified FARC revolutionaries as “terrorists”; but, under international law captured participants in a revolutionary civil war are entitled to prisoner-of-war [POW] status. By prosecuting Palmera for participation in the armed conflict, the U.S. has violated his right to POW status.
The prosecution charged complicity in hostage-taking based on the FARC’s shoot-down and capture of three U.S. contractors on a reconnaissance mission over FARC-held territory in 2003. Thus, the prosecution misrepresented a legitimate act of war as being a crime.
Even if the capture and detention of the contractors were a crime, the U.S. had no jurisdiction over the area where the event occurred. Moreover, Palmera had no command authority over the relevant FARC forces or advance knowledge of their operations.
The prosecution charged complicity in “narco-trafficking”, but U.S. government sources had determined: that, although it taxed operators profiting from cocaine production, the FARC did not engage in or control Colombian drug trafficking; and that, meanwhile, many of the rightwing paramilitaries opposed to the FARC were employed by the drug traffickers. In four trials the DoJ was unable to get a conviction on this accusation.
In the first trial (2006) the jury deadlocked on all charges. At its conclusion the judge illicitly questioned the jurors in order to obtain information to help the prosecution obtain convictions in the next trial. Consequently, a new judge had to be found for the subsequent trials.
In the second trial the jury told the judge that they were at an impasse and unable to agree upon a verdict. The judge required them to continue deliberations until, after another four days, they consented to a guilty verdict on one of five counts—conspiracy to hold three U.S. citizens hostage. However, there was no evidence of any act by Palmera that involved the capture or detention of the three U.S. citizens. Consequently, this conviction could only be a verdict of guilt-by-association.
The third and fourth trials on narco-trafficking charges ended with deadlocked juries, and the prosecution then dismissed those charges.
In 2008 Palmera was sentenced to 60 years in prison. He has been held in solitary confinement with very limited access to his lawyer for nearly all of his 20 years in U.S. detention.
[2] Repressing resistance in the First Nations: Leonard Peltier
Historical context. The U.S. government has a long history of atrocious abuse of the indigenous nations and their peoples throughout its territory. These abuses include: genocidal wars, ethnic cleansings, coerced assimilation with suppression of the native languages and cultures, forcing their peoples into conditions of degrading poverty, imposition of fraudulent and inequitable treaties, subjugation as subordinate nations, routine violations of treaty rights, corrupt governance, theft of their land and resources thru outright seizures and thru imposition of inequitable leases to U.S. capitalists, and so forth.

In mid-20th century, Amerindian resistance grew and produced a number of activist organizations. The American Indian Movement [AIM] (founded in 1968) adopted a militant posture and gained nationwide prominence. The poverty and lack of opportunity on reservations had induced many Amerindians to move to urban areas where they concentrated in urban slums and suffered the afflictions common to other disadvantaged racial minorities. AIM responded by starting remedial projects: health programs, education and job training programs, legal rights centers, and so forth. In 1969 AIM joined Fred Hampton’s original revolutionary Rainbow Coalition. During the next few years AIM brought public attention to Amerindian grievances thru participation in a series of militant protest actions including: the occupation of Alcatraz (1969—71), the Thanksgiving Day occupation of the replica Mayflower (1970), the occupation of Mount Rushmore (1971), a brief occupation of U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs [BIA] headquarters (1971), the “Trail of Broken Treaties” cross-country caravan and protest which included the occupation of the BIA offices (1972). The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI] and DoJ decided that AIM was a “threat to national security” and set out to destroy it.

Repression on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Tribal members on the (Oglala Lakota) Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota had formed the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization [OSCRO]:

To seek justice for Oglala victims of racist attacks in neighboring off-reservation communities where the white perpetrators were routinely given impunity or biased leniency, even in murder cases; and
To seek reform of tribal government then ruled by a corrupt and autocratic tribal Chairman, Dick Wilson, who engaged in blatant favoritism, with respect to jobs and other benefits, for his relatives and cronies.
In 1973 some tribal councilors brought misconduct charges against Wilson (who held the chairmanship from 1972 until 1976), and the tribal council then voted 11 to 7 to suspend him, but he managed to have his impeachment trial stopped. Wilson had already organized his own private militia, Guardians of the Oglala Nation [GOONs], which he illegally paid with tribal funds and used to suppress his political opponents. When several hundred Oglala gathered to protest the quashing of the impeachment trial, the BIA sent in a force of the U.S. Marshals Service [USMS] to sustain Wilson’s position.

A few days after the foiled impeachment trial, some 200 local protestors and AIM activists occupied the remote Reservation village of Wounded Knee (site of the 1890 massacre of over 200 Lakota men, women, and children by a trigger-happy U.S. Cavalry Regiment). Using the action to publicize Amerindian grievances, the occupiers demanded: the removal of Wilson, and negotiations to address U.S. violation of its treaty obligations. USMS, FBI, and other police cordoned the area thereby creating a standoff with frequent shooting from both sides. After 71 days the occupiers ended the occupation and withdrew. One FBI agent, two occupiers, and one visitor had been killed; and 13 individuals wounded.

During and after the Wounded Knee siege, the Wilson regime and his GOONs intensified repression of his political opponents of whom more than 60 were killed during the following 3 years, while the Reservation’s homicide rate grew to 17 times the U.S. average. Meanwhile, the DoJ indicted 185 individuals for alleged crimes involving their actions in occupying Wounded Knee; these included: arson, theft, assault, and interfering with federal officers. Numerous trials followed, the most prominent being the government’s 1974 show trial of AIM leaders, Dennis Banks and Russell Means. This (8 ½ month) trial ended when the judge ruled that the prosecution had committed such egregious misconduct, including withholding of evidence and use of perjured witness testimony, that dismissal was the only appropriate outcome. Nevertheless, the DoJ persisted in its persecution of AIM leaders.

From the start of the conflict between Dick Wilson with his supporters and his opponents (including OSCRO and AIM), the federal agencies (BIA, FBI, USMS, and DoJ) naturally sided with the Wilson regime which leased tribal lands to nearby white ranchers and politically influential American capitalists under inequitable contracts deemed unfair to reservation residents. The FBI provided Wilson’s GOONs with intelligence on AIM activists and other opponents of the Wilson regime and looked away while the GOONs assaulted, terrorized, and murdered Wilson’s critics. The FBI also perpetrated warrantless no-knock assaults on homes as it used the Pine Ridge Reservation to train its first militarized commando (i.e. SWAT) teams. Meanwhile, the FBI and DoJ targeted AIM members and supporters for prosecution on any and every possible charge. This hostile environment created the tension which eventually erupted into the shootout at the Jumping Bull Ranch. The DoJ ultimately obtained a fraudulent murder conviction against Leonard Peltier.

Subject events. In 1975 June 26, two FBI agents, Jack Coler and Ronald Williams, in unmarked cars were following a red pickup truck which they believed belonged to an Oglala alleged to have stolen a pair of cowboy boots. As they entered the Jumping Bull Ranch (where several AIM members were camped) shots were fired, and a shootout then ensued between the feds and the AIM activists. There were more than 30 people at the ranch including women, children, and other non-belligerents. By the end of the confrontation, the ranch was surrounded by some 150 armed agents (FBI, BIA, local police, and GOONs). Which side fired first is in dispute. Casualties: the two FBI men were wounded by fire from the AIM side and then killed execution-style by person unknown; AIM member, Joe Stuntz, was killed by a government sniper.

FBI investigators and DoJ prosecutors, embarrassed by their failures to obtain convictions of AIM leaders involved in the Wounded Knee occupation, responded by pursuing only prominent AIM members, the objective being to convict some AIM leaders on charges of having murdered the two FBI men. For this purpose, they indicted three prominent AIM members who had participated in the shootout, namely: Leonard Peltier, Robert Robideau, and Darrelle Butler.

Trials. In September Butler and Robideau were arrested. Peltier fled to Canada, where he was arrested and extradited to the U.S. (1976 December). While Peltier was not yet in custody, Robideau and Butler were tried and acquitted (1976 July, with Judge McManus presiding) when their jury concluded that, with the level of violence and government intimidation on the Reservation, they could plausibly claim to have acted in self-defense during the exchange of gunfire.

Peltier was extradited and subjected to a rigged trial (in Fargo, ND in 1977) before an all-white jury which convicted him on two counts of first-degree murder. The judge then sentenced him to two consecutive terms of life imprisonment. The improprieties in the legal proceedings were as follows.

The FBI coerced one, Myrtle Poor Bear, to allege in a signed affidavit that she had been Peltier’s girlfriend and had seen him kill the two FBI men. In fact, she had never met Peltier and was not present at the shootout. The FBI then used this false affidavit to obtain Peltier’s extradition from Canada.
Ms Poor Bear recanted her allegations against Peltier, but the judge refused to permit the defense to present her as a witness (claiming: that she was too mentally unstable to provide competent testimony, and that exposure of the FBI’s extradition fraud would prejudice the jury against the prosecution). The judge also refused to allow the defense to present evidence of other cases where the FBI had been rebuked for tampering with evidence and witnesses.
An FBI agent changed his story by testifying at trial that the vehicle, which the two agents had pursued and whose occupant had fired at them, was Peltier’s red and white van. In fact, the two FBI agents had identified the pursued vehicle as a red pickup truck, and it was red pickup trucks which the FBI first sought and searched after the shootout.
The prosecution alleged at trial that the two FBI agents had been killed by Peltier’s AR-15 rifle. The prosecution also asserted that Peltier’s AR-15 was the only one present, but it was later compelled to admit to the appellate judge that several other AR-15 rifles were present in the area and possibly present at the shootout. An FBI ballistics expert testified that extractor marks on a shell casing found at the scene matched Peltier’s rifle; he also testified that a more accurate firing pin test had not been performed because of damage to Peltier’s gun. Some years after Peltier’s conviction, a FOIA request produced documentation of a pre-trial FBI ballistics test on the firing pin which proved that the shell casing had not been fired by Peltier’s AR-15. The DoJ had withheld this crucial exculpatory evidence from the defense during trial.
No trial witness identified Peltier as the person who killed the FBI men. And during Peltier’s appeal (in 1986), the prosecution admitted that it had no real evidence to establish who fired the fatal shots. Nevertheless, the appellate court refused to overturn the conviction based on the prosecutor’s new assertion that the jury had found Peltier guilty of “aiding and abetting” the murders, notwithstanding that the prosecution had never actually pursued that issue at trial. Moreover, this allegation would have applied equally to Robideau and Butler, whose jury (having heard all of the defense case) had acquitted them.
Other apparent violations of Peltier’s rights to a fair trial include: the arbitrary and never-explained replacement of the originally assigned judge (McManus) by another judge (Benson) more disposed to exclude evidence favorable to the defendant, an undisclosed FBI pre-trial meeting with trial judge Benson, infiltration of FBI informants into the defense team, the presentation of coerced testimony by juvenile witnesses who had been intimidated by the FBI, and the DoJ use of tactics to frighten and bias the jury by always transporting them to and from court under escort by a SWAT team.
Evaluation. Many organizations and individuals have examined the case and concluded: that the DoJ and federal courts violated Peltier’s right to a fair trial, that he was targeted and convicted for his political associations, that the government has no evidence that he committed the murders for which he was convicted, and that he should be immediately released from prison. These include: Amnesty International, the UN Commissioner for Human Rights, Robert F Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, National Lawyers Guild, Center for Constitutional Rights, European parliament, Belgian parliament, Italian parliament, several Nobel Prize winners, and many other well-known advocates for human rights.

Frame-up in Milwaukee. 2 ½ years prior to the 1975 shoot-out, AIM activist Leonard Peltier, was sitting in a Milwaukee restaurant where 2 off duty cops (in 1972 November) picked a quarrel with him. Then, as he was leaving, the same 2 cops jumped and beat Peltier. They then arrested Peltier on a charge of attempted murder (of themselves) with what was later shown to be a nonfunctional gun. Fearing that he would be killed or railroaded to prison on perjured police testimony, Peltier obtained release on bond and then fled. In 1978, while in prison following his frame-up conviction for the premeditated murders of the two FBI agents, he was finally brought to trial on this “attempted murder” charge. At trial the girlfriend of one of the two cops testified that her cop friend had shown her a photo of Peltier prior to the incident and had told her that “he was going to help the FBI get a big one”. Thus, it became clear that the entire incident had been a set-up and fraud. The prosecution’s case then collapsed, and the jury acquitted this “notorious AIM felon”.

Sources
[1] Wagner & Lynch PLLC: Wounded Knee—the Massacre, the Incident, & the Radical Lawyer (© 2023).
[2] International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee: Facts (accessed 2024 Dec).
[3] FOIA Documents—U.S. v Leonard Peltier (CR NO. C77-3003): Post-Trial Actions—Criminal (© 2015 Dec).
[3] Criminalizing Muslim charities
The Holy Land Foundation [HLF] was the largest Islamic charity in the U.S. in 2000. It distributed charity (food, clothing, healthcare services, et cetera) thru established local zakat [charity] committees in the Israeli-occupied territories of Palestine. Because it provided charitable relief to victims of Israeli persecution, HLF was targeted first by American Zionists and then, at their behest, by the U.S. government.

Islam in Palestine. 90% of Palestinian Arabs are Muslim. Naturally, they vary widely in their devotion to religious prescriptions. Until the PLO’s capitulation and corruption cost it most of its popular sympathy, Hamas had the allegiance of only a small minority of Palestinian Muslims. Hamas, which is a political and social force within Palestinian Muslim communities, was founded in 1987 as an offshoot of the (Islamist Egyptian) Muslim Brotherhood [MB]. Until 1987, MB in Palestine maintained peaceful relations with the Zionist state, and its leaders had met regularly with Israeli officials. Because said MB was hostile to the secular and leftist Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO], the Israeli state: had happily encouraged the former as a potential alternative Palestinian leadership to that of the PLO, and had refrained from interfering when MB Islamists perpetrated violent attacks against secular groups aligned with the PLO. However, violent Israeli repression impacted all Palestinians (including MB adherents) in the occupied territories; and overwhelming Palestinian support for the First Intifada (1987—93 civil disobedience campaign) finally induced Palestinian MB, reconstituted as Hamas, to embrace the resistance to Israeli occupation. When Hamas responded to Israeli violence by forming a military arm to retaliate with its own violent counterattacks upon Israelis, the Zionist state branded it as a “terrorist” organization. In 1995 the U.S. accommodated its Israeli ally by also branding Hamas as a “terrorist” organization.

Target. Although a Hamas fundraiser, Musa Abu-Marzuk, had provided financial support at its founding (in 1989), HLF was not an affiliate of Hamas, and its actual activities had nothing to do with violent resistance to Zionist oppressions. Nevertheless, Zionist groups targeted HLF with smears and demands for revocation of its tax-exemption. HLF continued its charitable work until 2001, when the U.S. government used the 9-11 Al-Qaeda attacks as pretext for a so-called “war on terror” which became largely an attack upon civil liberties with widespread targeting of (mostly innocent) Arab-American activists and U.S.-based Islamic institutions. One such target was HLF. The federal government (in 2001 December): seized its assets, shut down its operations, and branded it as a “terrorist” organization.

Prosecution. In 2007 the DoJ brought the HLF and five of its principal officers (now known as the Holy Land Five) to trial on allegations of providing material support to a designated terrorist organization (meaning Hamas). In this trial (which included violations of the defendants’ due process rights), the jury acquitted on some counts and deadlocked on the others. A more egregiously rigged retrial in 2008 resulted in convictions on all remaining counts. Specific violations of due process follow.

(1) The prosecution contended that, by providing charity to needy Palestinians thru the local charity committees which the prosecution alleged were controlled by Hamas, HLF was bolstering Hamas’ popularity and thereby providing material support for “terrorism”. Thus, the prosecution sought conviction of the accused based upon guilt-by-association.

(2) The prosecution’s classification of the local charities as agents of “terrorism” was baseless. The relevant facts: (1st) the local committees were independent entities devoted to charitable purposes, and their leaders included individuals with no ties to Hamas as well as those who were members or sympathizers with Hamas; (2nd) immediately after the U.S. had listed Hamas as “terrorist”, HLF had sought advice from the federal government as to which, if any, of the charities were deemed unacceptable; (3rd) none of the charity committees was listed by the U.S. as a terrorist organization; (4th) the U.S. (thru its USAID program) had provided funding for many of the same local charity committees until 2006 (for five years after the HLF had been shut down); and (5th) the prosecution acknowledged that none of the funding of the charities was used for acts which the U.S. deemed to be “terrorist”.

(3) The prosecution was permitted, over defense objections, to present two unidentified Israeli state security agents as “expert” witnesses for the purpose of tying the charity committees to Hamas. The anonymity of these “experts” prevented effective defense cross-examination to challenge their credentials and the validity of their assertions thereby violating the defendants’ 6th Amendment rights to confront and rebut their accusers.

(4) In the retrial the only significant change in the prosecution’s presentation was its move to bolster its case by introducing additional “evidence” which consisted of untestable assertions, hearsay, and irrelevant material, all of which served only to prejudice the jury against the defendants. The appeals court (in 2011): ruled this additional “evidence” inadmissible, then astonishingly asserted that its use did not affect the outcome, and finally refused to overturn the convictions.

(Ω) The Holy Land Five are: Ghassan Elashi, Shukri Abu-Baker, Mufid Abdulqader, Abdulrahman Odeh, and Mohammad El-Mezain. Their prison sentences were: 65 years for each of the first two, 20 years for the third, and 15 years for the remaining two.

Source
For more on Hamas, see Pierce, Charles: Gaza War: Palestine, Zionism, imperialism, Hamas, previous wars, atrocities. What are the relevant actual facts?.

Conclusion
For 3 reasons (their liberal capitalist indoctrination, their attachment to their own privileges and entitlements, and their dependency upon their capitalist campaign funders), governing centrist Democrat politicians are incapable of providing: equal justice in law enforcement, or consistent enforcement of the civil rights of opponents of their imperial and capital-serving policies. Moreover, any concessions (reforms) which they offer, in support of greater social justice, will always be limited to what does not seriously impinge against the interests of powerful factions of the ruling class.

https://mronline.org/2024/12/14/who-sho ... -but-wont/

Joe's pardons are a joke and naught but ass covering.

Um, didja forget Mumia Abu-Jamal? Well we know neither he nor Peltier nor those Panthers still locked up will ever be free, the owners, even if they wanted to(damn unlikely!) would never do it for fear of disaffecting their hired muscle, the cops.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 12684
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Tue Dec 24, 2024 3:38 pm

Biden Aims to Go Out With a Bellicose Bang
Posted by MLToday | Dec 23, 2024

Image

By Eve Ottenberg
December 13, 2024 CounterPunch



Having failed thus far to ignite Nuclear Armageddon, what’s up next for the U.S. military industrial complex? I’ll tell you: New bases in Europe, 47 of them, to be exact, in Scandinavia in coming years. That’s Joe Biden’s legacy, a blood transfusion to NATO’s moribund carcass by adding Finland and Sweden and thereby ballooning the Empire’s global military footprint, a footprint of over 800 imperial foreign military bases already bankrupting us Welp, we’re gonna get 47 more, per journalist Patrick Hennigsen, and they’re gonna be near Russia. If you’re a Finn or a Swede, you might want to consider emigrating, since the pusillanimous NATO to which you now belong has set you up as a tripwire for the Atomic Apocalypse. That’s Biden’s legacy.

Don’t think for a minute these bases make anyone safer. Quite the contrary. Besides being hugely provocative and thus endangering the local population, the bases’ U.S. soldiers are in harm’s way. Moscow eloquently demonstrated this on November 25. That was when Russia retaliated for recent ATACMS assaults, manned and operated by U.S. personnel. Most of that personnel are now dead. That’s because Russia shot its unstoppable Iskander missiles at the launchers, killing at least 30 U.S. operators.

Also “up to 40 fighters, mostly from the U.S. were eliminated in a missile strike on a command center…in the city of Kharkov on November 25,” RT reported November 28 [“Russian Defense Ministry reveals response to long-range Ukrainian strikes”]. This is the fate that may await U.S. soldiers on foreign military bases, because Russia’s extensive weapons menu is chock-a-block with all types of hypersonic missiles against which the west is defenseless. And Washington’s so busy provoking Moscow, that the kremlin will much more eagerly share this technology with its allies – China, Iran and North Korea – than it did before Joe “War Is My Legacy” Biden idiotically triggered Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

So dozens of Americans have or will be coming home in body bags, and U.S. weaponry got crushed and surprise! Not a peep in U.S. corporate media. That’s because our news outlets report American, ahem, “Ukrainian” strikes on Russia, using our vaunted but really mainly symbolic ATACMS, and report it with great fanfare, groveling before supposed superlative American weapons, but the consequences? The punishment? Not so much, since, Gee, that might make Biden and by extension Washington look bad. Can’t have that in American legacy news media. But hey, the Hindustan Times reported it, with headlines, like, “Russia Reduces Ukraine’s Western Weapons to Rubble,” and “Ukraine Loses All ATACMS, Storm Shadows? ‘NATO Train’ with Long-Range Missiles Blown Up by Russia.” How reassuring to know some nations still have a free press, even if they are halfway across the globe.

Meanwhile, all-around nitwits in the Biden administration chatter blandly about “Ukraine taking the fight to Russia.” Ukraine? Hello? Is that the new shorthand for the United States? Because make no mistake, the kremlin isn’t under any illusions about who’s firing ATACMS into Russia. Moscow’s leadership knows full well the info downloaded from U.S. satellites is classified and thus only Americans can eyeball it, and that only Americans are allowed to do the targeting. A Ukrainian may push the last button, but everything done before that comes from Washington. And the Russians are mad as hornets. For those of us who dwell in or near major American cities, that paints a big bullseye on us; in fact, the only thing stalling such targeting is the patience and sanity of Russian president Vladimir Putin. But remember, he’s a politician too, and one under tremendous pressure from his right flank to retaliate hard against the U.S.

Luckily, for those of us oddly averse to being incinerated, the recent Russian Iskander strikes, as the Hindustan Times reported, may well have destroyed much of the ATACMS and Storm Shadow cache. And we all know the west lacks the military industrial production depth to replace them quickly. Once the western military cupboard is bare, it will stay that way for a good while. The U.S. simply ain’t the manufacturing behemoth it once was.

In fact, much of our military production depends deeply on supply chains linked to China and, indeed, directly on Chinese manufacturing. And clouding the American defense picture, on December 1, Beijing’s sanctions on “the export of about 700 dual-use items took effect,” reported Asia Times that day, although what really grabbed headlines two days later was Beijing’s ban on sale of three rare earth minerals – gallium, germanium and antimony – to the U.S., a ban predicted in these CounterPunch pages, long ago. China has also sanctioned multiple American defense firms and senior executives. And more such export controls are coming. Bye the way, dual-use refers to civilian-military. So at the very least, Beijing’s new export control list will “prevent the U.S. from obtaining China’s critical metals, rare earths and key electronic parts.” China, long in the cross-hairs of voluble American congressional nincompoops, finally took their blather seriously. Incidentally, it’s not at all clear how these sanctions will affect China shipping weapons materials to Russia. My suspicion is, they won’t.

According to one Chinese military writer quoted by Asia Times: “The launch of the export control list is a precise attack to the heart of the U.S. military industry. This is not an ordinary ‘embargo’ but an all-round blockade to completely cut off the Chinese supply chain that the U.S. relies on.” So Biden’s oft-repeated, imbecilic crowings about war over Taiwan, and congress’ dimwitted howls for attacks on China have consequences, namely, Beijing taking steps to defang the American military beast, a monster directed, apparently, by birdbrains.

Does the white house get it, any of it? No. See the RT headline, December 2: “White House touts ‘massive surge’ in arms shipments to Kiev.” The article quotes Jake “World War III” Sullivan blabbering about throwing more money down the endless Ukraine drain. You’d think he might have got the November election message that half the country has had it with this war. But no, the morons in charge shout from the rooftops that they will not be deterred from their wickedness and stupidity.

China’s list of weapons-necessary products now prohibited from sale to the U.S. includes “computers, electronic devices, chemicals, sensors, lasers and aviation navigation systems. If China uses the list to fight a technology war, the U.S. won’t be able to find alternative products elsewhere.” So, um, about arming and equipping those 47 military bases in Scandinavia, I suppose Uncle Sam could always cannibalize dishwashers and washing machines to propel American weapons, the way the Biden team’s supposed geniuses like commerce secretary Gina Raimondo told us the Russians did in Ukraine (ho, ho!). Or we could use shovels, like the bubbleheads in our corporate media claimed those desperate Slavs did. Those were the same news outlets that told us, early on, Russia would soon run out of missiles. Well, now we learn that in addition to Russia positively BRISTLING with missiles, Moscow has all sorts of unstoppable hypersonic missiles, some of them as powerful as nuclear bombs without the radiation, and evidently, to judge from the Oreshnik, far more precise and capable of busting bunkers hundreds of meters underground. We in the west have failed to assemble even one hypersonic missile, while a few Russian Oreshniks could likely wipe out an entire military base. I guess now they’ll all be pointed at Scandinavia.

https://mltoday.com/biden-aims-to-go-ou ... cose-bang/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 12684
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Fri Dec 27, 2024 3:04 pm

Image

Bloodstained hypocrisy: Biden’s bombs are louder than his words on Islamophobia
Originally published: Mondoweiss on December 26, 2024 by Nadia B. Ahmad (more by Mondoweiss) | (Posted Dec 27, 2024)

On December 12, 2024, the Biden administration released its National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia and Anti-Arab Hate. The document is a moral obscenity that should insult the intelligence and dignity of every self-respecting person of conscience in America. The breathtaking hypocrisy of releasing this document while U.S.-funded bombs obliterate Palestinian civilians in Gaza defies comprehension.

The national strategy is a grotesque attempt at laundering the reputation of an administration actively enabling what genocide scholars recognize as textbook genocide in Gaza. The same government that maintains a sprawling surveillance apparatus targeting Muslim communities, operates a discriminatory watchlist system, and continues to run Guantanamo Bay now wants to lecture America about “countering Islamophobia.” The contempt for Muslim lives embedded in this cynical performance is staggering.

Hina Shamsi of the ACLU captures the outrageous inadequacy of this document: “While this strategy acknowledges discrimination and its harms, it does little to end them and is a squandered opportunity.” But calling this a “squandered opportunity” is far too gentle. This propaganda is the active gaslighting of Muslim communities while enabling their oppression.

As Shamsi notes: “For decades, American officials have invoked national security to pass laws and implement programs that disproportionately harm Muslims and people perceived to be Muslim.” Incidentally, this strategy does not actually dismantle a single one of these oppressive programs. Not one. While Palestinians are being bombed with U.S. weapons, while Muslim children face intensifying harassment in schools, while mosques require armed security to hold Friday prayers, the Biden administration offers empty verbiage about “understanding” and “dialogue.”

The timing of the release is particularly repugnant. How dare this administration speak of “countering hate” while expediting weapons shipments that have killed over 44,800 Palestinians? How dare they preach about religious tolerance while providing diplomatic cover for the destruction of mosques, churches, and entire neighborhoods? The cognitive dissonance would be laughable if it were not so blood-soaked.

This strategy’s proposed “solutions” are an insult to basic intelligence. Cultural sensitivity training while maintaining the surveillance state. Hate crimes reporting while continuing to arm governments that massacre Muslims. Interfaith dialogue while refusing to even acknowledge the institutional nature of anti-Muslim discrimination. As Shamsi states, the administration wouldn’t even take “the basic, overdue step of recognizing that anti-Muslim discrimination is uniquely normalized and embedded in government policies.”

The document’s studied silence on U.S. foreign policy’s role in fomenting Islamophobia is particularly egregious. There’s no mention of ending the endless wars that have killed millions of Muslims; No commitment to stopping support for apartheid and authoritarian regimes; No acknowledgment that dropping bombs on Muslim populations might somehow contribute to anti-Muslim sentiment. The intellectual dishonesty is staggering.



Most infuriating is the strategy’s complete failure to address the discriminatory national security apparatus built after 9/11. There’s no plan to dismantle the vast surveillance infrastructure targeting Muslim communities. No reform of biased counterterrorism frameworks. No meaningful civil rights protections. Instead, we get a document that pretends to address Islamophobia while carefully preserving every system that perpetuates it.

For this strategy to have even basic credibility, it would need to:

Immediately dismantle discriminatory surveillance programs
End the racist watchlisting system
Provide reparations for communities devastated by post-9/11 policies
Stop arming governments that massacre Muslims
Hold accountable every official who enabled discrimination
End U.S. support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza

We get what Shamsi describes as the normalization of anti-Muslim discrimination by refusing to even acknowledge its institutional nature. The message to Muslim and Arab communities is your lives matter only as PR opportunities. Your children can be bombed with U.S. weapons, your communities can be surveilled, and your civil rights can be violated, but here’s a nice document about “countering hate” to make you feel better.

The strategy document is a blood-stained insult to every Muslim victim of U.S. policy. It’s a cynical attempt to whitewash decades of state violence while that violence actively continues. Until the U.S. government ends its war on Muslim communities at home and abroad, documents like this remain what they are: propaganda written in the blood of Muslim children.

The time for gentle critique is long past. Muslim communities need justice. They need an end to state violence. They need their children to stop being killed by U.S. weapons. Anything less is complicity in ongoing crimes against humanity.

https://mronline.org/2024/12/27/bloodstained-hypocrisy/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 12684
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Tue Dec 31, 2024 3:20 pm

Image

Homelessness in U.S. has doubled under Biden
Originally published: World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) on December 29, 2024 by Patrick Martin (more by World Socialist Web Site (WSWS)) | (Posted Dec 31, 2024)

The number of homeless people living in shelters or on the streets topped 770,000 this year, according to the annual report by the Department of Housing and Urban Development released Friday, a rise of 18 percent over 2023. That is more homeless people than the population of Seattle, Detroit, Boston or Atlanta. Homeless Americans outnumber the inhabitants of Washington DC, the capital city of the richest country in the world.

The estimate is also a gross underestimate of the real scale of homelessness in America. It is based on a one-day “point-in-time” survey conducted every January in cities throughout the country. That methodology ensures a low count, since it is conducted during the coldest period of the year, when very few people can live unsheltered in northern cities, many of which bar evictions and utility shutoffs during the winter for that reason.

Moreover, the survey took place in January 2024, 11 months ago, so it does not include the tens of thousands driven from their homes by natural disasters like Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton. Nor does it reflect the deepening social crisis, in which rising interest rates, soaring rents, and shrinking real wages have made it increasingly difficult for working class families to pay their most important expense, housing.

It is thus quite likely that the homeless population is well past one million, and that the number of people who experience homelessness for some part of the year is millions higher than that.

The perfunctory press accounts that followed the HUD report did not take note of the starkest finding, one that HUD itself did not highlight, for obvious reasons: Official US homelessness has doubled since Joe Biden entered the White House. The homeless count in January 2021 was 381,000, due to the freeze on evictions imposed as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. The lifting of this moratorium resulted in the homeless figure skyrocketing to 580,000 in January 2022, to 650,000 in January 2023, and then to 772,000 in January 2024 (see graph).

Image
Growth in homelessness in the United States beginning in 2020. [Photo: Datawrapper/WSWS]

These figures explain more about why Democrat Kamala Harris lost the U.S. presidential election than all the millions of words written, and endless hours of television time devoted to the sweatings and head-scratching of media pundits and Democratic Party politicians searching for the cause of the Democratic debacle. The Democratic Party and the capitalist two-party system as a whole are completely indifferent to the rapid growth of poverty and social deprivation confronting working people in the United States. Naturally, there was no mention of the homelessness report on any of the Sunday morning television talk shows.
Donald Trump, who profited politically from the social crisis, has no solution to homelessness, unless a Hitler-type “solution” is to be imposed. Trump’s top adviser, billionaire Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, fulminated this month that there was no such thing as genuine homelessness. “In most cases, the word ‘homeless’ is a lie,” he claimed.

It’s usually a propaganda word for violent drug addicts with severe mental illness.

Speaking on the podcast of fascist Tucker Carlson in October, Musk declared,

Homeless is a misnomer. It implies that someone got a little bit behind on their mortgage, and if you just gave them a job, they’d be back on their feet … What you actually have are violent drug zombies with dead eyes, and needles and human feces on the street.

Trump, Musk and Vice President-elect JD Vance demonstrated their attitude to the homeless on December 14, when they feted New York subway strangler Daniel Penny at their skybox viewing the Army-Navy football game. Penny, an ex-Marine, killed a homeless man who was acting erratically—but threatening no one but himself—by applying a chokehold on his neck for a full eight minutes. He was acquitted in early December of all charges after the judge dismissed the most serious charge, manslaughter.

As for the Democrats, their rhetoric may be less vile, but their policies are no less dictated by the interests of big business. In California, the largest U.S. state with a GDP of $3.23 trillion, there are more than 181,000 people homeless, while Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom has spearheaded sweeps of homeless encampments that have actually reduced the homeless street-count in Los Angeles—not by providing shelter, but by driving the homeless out, into other locations.

The causes of homelessness are easily described: People are homeless because they lack the income to purchase or rent a home. Rent is too high, wages are too low and interest rate rises over the past two years have made this disparity far, far worse. Young people—and here the age might be extended to 40 or beyond—cannot afford a down payment, except with hefty assistance from parents or other family, and then struggle to pay the monthly mortgage.

As for Musk’s reactionary and ignorant slurs about mental illness and drug addiction, the fastest rising categories among the homeless are children, up 33 percent, and families, up 40 percent. Family homelessness more than doubled in Denver, Chicago and New York City, fueled in part by the illegal shipping of busloads of migrants from the state of Texas at the orders of Governor Greg Abbott.

According to HUD, 150,000 children experienced homelessness on “count night” in January 2024. This figure is again a lowball estimate: there are more than 100,000 homeless children enrolled in the New York City public school system alone.

One of the most savage responses to growing homelessness came this year from the right-wing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court. In a case involving the town of Grant’s Pass, Oregon, the court ruled by 6-3 that local governments had the right to make sleeping in cars or on the streets illegal, even though, as one dissenting justice observed, sleeping was not a crime, but a “biological necessity.”

Since this decision, handed down in June, at least 100 cities, towns and counties have passed local ordinances against the homeless, in some cases criminalizing them outright. In one Republican-controlled county in California, the ordinance requires anyone living on the street to walk at least 300 feet every hour, on pain of arrest.

The HUD report on homelessness cited a series of small-bore measures adopted by the Biden administration, and hailed the reduction in veteran homelessness, which has been a special target of emergency spending, as a demonstration that progress can be made.

This, however, only begs the question. If homelessness among veterans can be reduced by 50 percent over the past two decades, why cannot the same thing be done for the rising tide of homelessness among all other sections of the population?

Veteran homelessness was becoming something of a public relations black eye for successive administrations, Democratic and Republican, which have faced increasing popular reluctance to volunteer for military service. The shattered bodies and psyches of soldiers who survived imperialism’s wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries, displayed on the streets of most American cities, were bad for recruitment.

There is no such ruling class concern in relation to the vast majority of homeless people who are not veterans. They are just bad for the tourist business, bad for business generally, and need to be kept out of sight and out of mind. The Trump administration plans to build huge detention centers for migrant families arrested and held for deportation. These would certainly provide a tempting place to dispose of the homeless, either after or during the mass round-ups and deportations.

None of the infrequent media commentaries on homelessness takes note of the obvious and overriding fact about the homeless crisis: There is no shortage of housing in America. There are ample supplies of homes and apartments, and millions more could be built in short order. The problem is one of distribution, and the economic organization of society. Millions of homes are owned as second, third and fourth homes by the wealthy, or as speculative investments by hedge funds and private equity firms confident that the real estate market always goes up.

A government genuinely devoted to the interests of the working class would have no difficulty matching up those without homes and the homes currently unoccupied or deliberately left vacant in order to drive up prices and rents. But that would require the building of a political movement in the working class to fight for a socialist solution to the housing crisis, one that starts from the needs of the working people, not the profit interests of the billionaires and speculators.

https://mronline.org/2024/12/31/homeles ... der-biden/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

Post Reply