Sympathy for the Devils...

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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Mon Aug 24, 2020 1:56 pm

Joe Biden is already planning a failed presidency

Ryan Cooper

August 19, 2020
In 2008, after eight years of a George W. Bush administration that had done staggering damage to the United States and the world, a moderate Democrat ascended to the presidency, promising that he would set things right.

That president, of course, was Barack Obama. He did nothing of the sort — instead he tried to "look forward, as opposed to looking backwards" to restore a bleary simulacrum of the pre-disaster status quo. Obama let severe problems fester for eight years, let war crimes galore go unpunished, and helped secure the nomination of his unpopular former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, as his successor. She lost to a game show clown.

Now Democrats have officially nominated Joe Biden, who served as vice president under Obama, after four years of catastrophe just possibly even worse than what happened under Bush. Team Biden clearly expects to win, and they are already starting to walk back their campaign promises, just as happened under Obama. If this proves to be how a President Biden will govern, he is already assuring us of another failed presidency.

The great problem with the United States today is twofold: First, the country is falling to pieces under President Trump, the most corrupt and incompetent president in American history. Second, as I have argued at length previously, the U.S. has been suffering severe problems for decades that Trump leveraged to squirm into power. Deindustrialization, the opioid epidemic, poverty, inequality, and so on — these are the soil in which racist demagoguery grows. Obama threw homeowners under the bus to save the banks, endorsed austerity instead of full employment, and Republicans reaped the political benefit in 2010, 2014, and 2016.

We see here a certain political trajectory that has ended in right-wing dictatorship on multiple occasions in other countries in the past. A country is being devoured from the inside by gangrenous capitalism. The status quo elites, who benefit from the rigged economy, are strong enough to throttle any reform effort from the democratic left. But they are not strong enough to fend off an anti-democratic attack from the right — or worse, they actively welcome it as the only way to avoid higher taxes and more regulation. As Dan O'Sullivan wrote after Trump was first elected, "This is all the result of kneecapping any attempt at reform of the system — the reform fails, the pain remains, only now it comes out sideways, through the only permissible path: the far right."

It's true that Joe Biden is being nominated for president on the most left-wing major party platform in many years. But his campaign is already distancing itself from that platform. As Aída Chávez writes at The Intercept, Biden's promised 100-day moratorium on the deportation of any immigrants residing in the United States has already mysteriously vanished. A promise to end fossil fuel subsidies has similarly gone missing. And campaign insiders are already assuring corrupt Big Medical swindlers that the promise to create some kind of public option on the ObamaCare exchanges was a lie.

This is not that surprising given Biden's long record of conservative neoliberalism. He worked with segregationists to stop school integration in the 1970s, he was long the credit card industry's man in Washington, and he was a big advocate of slanted free trade deals. He's been a status quo man for 40 years.

That said, it's unclear exactly who is in charge in this campaign. On Tuesday during the DNC, Biden facilitated a roundtable of ill people who described how the extant health-care system victimized them or how ObamaCare had allowed them to keep coverage, and promised he would help them. "Look, we're going to make sure we don't lose that ACA. We're going to provide a Medicare-like option as a public option," Biden said. "I'm going to protect you like I tried to protect my own family."

Similarly, activist Ady Barkan gave a moving speech directly afterward lamenting the horrible American health care system. "We live in the richest country in history and yet we do not guarantee this most basic human right," he said. "Everyone living in America should get the health care they need, regardless of their employment status or their ability to pay." What Barkan did not say is that Biden's own campaign estimates that about 3 percent of Americans would still be uninsured if Biden gets all he wants — and there is now an open question as to whether he wants even that. Is Biden lying about wanting to keep people uninsured so rich people can get more money? I certainly don't know.

With Bernie Sanders defeated, it is now up to Biden and his advisers whether he wants to try a repeat of the Obama formula that provided a lot of cushy consulting gigs for Democratic insiders and stuck the nation with Trump. They can have another couple years of fat profits selling the American people down the river to corporate swine, or they can have a democratic republic. They cannot have both.

https://theweek.com/articles/932075/joe ... presidency

Well we've been getting sold down the river in this booj 'democracy' for quite a while now, and perhaps due to multiple 'external factors'(they ain't really external, it all comes back to capitalism) the pimple will come to a head. Or perhaps it already is and these conventions are puss being 'expressed'.

The reading here of the dynamics of fascism is incorrect. The ruling class does not succumb to fascism, the ruling class promotes fascism, perhaps surreptitiously at first, then increasingly openly as the existential fear of socialism grows.We ain't there, there is no effective Left.

Professional Revolutionaries, Fosterites,
Our nation turns it's lonely eyes to you
woo woo woo

But the analysis of the Dems, past & present, is accurate enough. Shameless liars, betrayers of trust, whores of imperialism, it occurs to me that it might be better if Trump wins a second term, that he might wreak further damage. A harsh call & I ain't comfortable with it at all, am not sure which party will cause the working class the most pain. Both are worst.
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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Wed Aug 26, 2020 11:57 am

Freedom Rider: Democrats are Officially Republicans
Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist 26 Aug 2020

Image

Freedom Rider: Democrats are Officially Republicans
The Democrats claim to be the opposition party, but they seek out Republicans, hate the left of their own party, and don’t seem to care if they lose the election.

“Biden’s slogan may as well be He’s Not Trump because that is all the Democrats had to say.”

The Democratic Party has ended any debate or dispute about its true nature. It is a party representing neo-liberal interests and international gangsterism, just like their putative opposition, the Republican party.

Even a cursory observation of the recent Democratic National Convention proves that this assessment is correct. There were paeans of love to the late warmonger John McCain and even an appearance from his widow. A special segment was set aside for Republicans like John Kasich whose speech was used in part to beat down progressives and make clear that Joe Biden wants nothing to do with them. Not to be outdone with Kasich and McCain’s ghost, war criminal Colin Powell was dragged out to put the bipartisan imperialist seal of approval on Biden.

The convention was high on production value but skimpy on details. Speaker after speaker repeated that Donald Trump is a very bad, terrible, awful, pandemic denier who cozies up to dictators. They didn’t say how they would undo his evil deeds or make life better for the average person in this country. The awful Biden slogan of Build Back Better is meaningless. That of course is why they use it. The slogan may as well be He’s Not Trump because that is all the Democrats had to say.

“War criminal Colin Powell was dragged out to put the bipartisan imperialist seal of approval on Biden.”

Of course the truth can’t be hidden for long. Ted Kaufman was Biden’s Senate chief of staff and successor after he became vice president. He now heads the Biden transition team. Kaufman told the Wall Street Journal that no one should expect increases in government spending should Biden win. “When we get in, the pantry is going to be bare. When you see what Trump’s done to the deficit…forget about Covid-19, all the deficits that he built with the incredible tax cuts. So we’re going to be limited.” Government spending is exactly what people in this country need to recover economically. Yet they are told to expect nothing of the sort. More austerity is coming our way regardless of the electoral outcome.

The dust had hardly cleared when Rahm Emanuel , a former congressman, Barack Obama’s chief of staff, and mayor of Chicago explained what was obvious to even the casual observer. The Democrats are repeating their failed 2016 strategy of wooing republicans. “This is the year of the Biden Republican,” said Emanuel.

“No one should expect increases in government spending should Biden win.”

No one knows that there are any Biden Republicans. The presence of Republicans at the convention and a handful of prominent people known colloquially as “never Trumpers” didn’t help Hillary Clinton in 2016. New York Senator Charles Schumer can never live down his 2016 prediction. “For every blue collar Democrat we will lose in western Pennsylvania we will pick up two, three moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” The Democrats are letting us know two things. One, they are de facto Republicans, and seek out Republican voters by espousing conservative policies. Two, they aren’t particularly concerned about losing. They hope to thread the needle and win by using a strategy proven to be a failure. But devotion to their donors and their interests outweigh everything else, including winning. Disappearing any expectation of progressive policies is a victory for them.

The serious Democratic campaign took place earlier this year, when the party establishment took great pains to defeat Bernie Sanders. Black people were played by their misleaders into supporting the same neo-liberal policies that are destroying their lives. It was not difficult to do with a voting block that has whittled down its demands to just one, keeping Republicans out of office. Black primary voters were the marks in the con game, as the Democrats coalesced around Biden and Sanders agreed to play the role of dupe.

“Black people were played by their misleaders into supporting the same neo-liberal policies that are destroying their lives.”

Lest we forget, Barack Obama once declared himself to be a “moderate Republican.” Not that he needed to say it after repeatedly proclaiming his admiration for Ronald Reagan. There should be no surprise that his party now dispenses with any pretense. If Democrats choose to vote for Biden it should be with honesty and eyes wide open. There will be no holding feet to the fire, moving anyone left, or expecting Medicare for All or a minimum wage increase. A Republican will be inaugurated president in January 2021. No one should expect anything different.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/freed ... epublicans
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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Thu Aug 27, 2020 3:18 pm

Biden Offers Nothing But More War, Austerity and White Supremacy – Without Trump
Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor 27 Aug 2020

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Biden Offers Nothing But More War, Austerity and White Supremacy – Without Trump

Biden is an unreconstructed racist and warmonger who has been in the forefront of austerity, and Harris is a party hack and mass Black incarcerator who became a prosecutor with police union endorsement.

“Biden’s acceptance speech put forward not one word that hinted at programmatic change on racial matters.”

The corporate Democrats are once again running as the Not-Trump Party, the second consecutive election in which they have succeeded in suppressing every issue except the fitness for office of one very wretched man. The only way a party wholly-owned by oligarchs can deflect attention from its own culpability in dragooning its constituents into a Race to the Bottom amid never ending war, is to set up a straw man to be knocked down, leaving the machinery of racial capitalism and armed-to-the-teeth imperialism intact -- Hillary Clinton’s gambit in 2016.

She lost, but the oligarchy did just fine under the Orange Menace, as stocks and profits skyrocketed. In the interim, however, popular demands for relief from the duopoly’s bipartisan regime of austerity and war escalated, and a Black-led movement took to the streets in unprecedented numbers. China’s economy, which had already eclipsed the United States in purchasing power parity , continued to roar ahead, as Beijing countered U.S. military encirclement with the most ambitious multinational infrastructure project in world history: the Belt and Road initiative, formerly the New Silk Road.

“Popular demands for relief from the duopoly’s bipartisan regime of austerity and war escalated, and a Black-led movement took to the streets in unprecedented numbers.”

With the bulk of the U.S. ruling class and their servants in the national security apparatus now aligned with Democrats, Trump was made the scapegoat for both Black anger at institutional racial oppression and for imperial decline. Black Democratic elected officials played their assigned role, waving American flags as they pretended that only Trump stood in the way of racial “healing” in a nation born of native genocide and Black enslavement. Recent history was quickly rewritten, positing the rise of Trump as the demon who taunted Blacks into resurrecting a grassroots movement that had been dormant for two generations, when in fact the Black Lives Matter phenomenon arose to demolish a bipartisan Mass Black Incarceration regime under his predecessor, the First Black President.

Having strangled the anti-austerity (but loyal imperialist) internal challenge from Bernie Sanders, the oligarch-aligned Democrats and their media chose Joe Biden as front man: a political hack with impeccable corporate credentials and an architect of the “New Jim Crow” and white northern massive resistance to Black urban intrusion. His Black female running mate is a pure product of the corporate Democratic machine, who launched her electoral career with the endorsement of police unions.

But neither of them is Trump, and that’s all that matters.

“Trump was made the scapegoat for both Black anger at institutional racial oppression and for imperial decline.”

With Biden, the “white working class” champion carrying the corporate torch, there will be no talk of baskets of “deplorables” – because he is a certified denizen of the basket. Rather, Biden promised in his acceptance speech to “choose a different path, and together, take this chance to heal, to be reborn, to unite. A path of hope and light.”

Trump is darkness, the Democrats are light – ad nauseum for 3,000-plus meaningless words.

Biden acknowledges that the U.S. responded to the Covid-19 epidemic with “the worst performance of any nation on Earth.” But it was all the fault of the unmasked man, Trump. The methodical privatization and shrinkage of the public health system, a thoroughly bipartisan policy, had nothing to do with mass death. The austerity regime, of which Biden is a founding member, which apportions health care based on race and class, is blameless. There can be no true national health care system absent a single payer program, but Biden vowed to veto Medicare for all if it ever crosses his presidential desk. Biden joins Trump in scapegoating China for the coronavirus, promising “we will never again be at the mercy of China and other foreign countries in order to protect our own people.” Yet, he is the light.

“There can be no true national health care system absent a single payer program, but Biden vowed to veto Medicare for all.”

Biden assures us that his “economic plan is all about jobs, dignity, respect, and community” -- a claim that flies in the face of his history as budget-slasher. As journalist Branko Marcetic writes, “Biden is uniquely susceptible to budget-cutting dogma. He quickly became a fiscal hawk after entering the Senate in 1972, introducing the Federal Spending Control Act five years later to potentially put all federal spending programs on the chopping block, and musing that Reagan’s 1980 victory was 'more consistent with the budgetary thrust that a guy like me ... has been going for.'”

In his speech, Biden called Social Security a “a sacred obligation, a sacred promise made.” But, again citing Marcetic, Biden has proposed to means-test Social Security and, from the 1980s on “has called for and introduced legislation aimed at slashing federal spending, including by cutting Medicare and Social Security.” Vice-President Biden was point man for Barack Obama’s partially consummated “Grand Bargain” with Republicans, during which the administration offered four trillion dollars in cuts, mostly to social programs, including Social Security – a program that Obama put on the cutting table, along with Medicaid and “all other entitlements” at the very beginning of his presidency.

Biden has always been a soldier for austerity, a war against the poor. Why should anyone believe he has reversed course in his old age?

“Biden was point man for Barack Obama’s partially consummated ‘Grand Bargain’ with Republicans.”

Biden is an unreconstructed racist, as is proven every time he makes a remark even remotely related to race. His acceptance speech put forward not one word that hinted at programmatic change on racial matters. However, he did mention the name of George Floyd’s daughter, and seemed to think that John Lewis’ ghost will cause us all to “see the light.”

But Russia shall be consigned to darkness, along with Trump. Biden repeated the wholly unsubstantiated and historically bizarre charge that Moscow put “bounties on the heads of American soldiers” in Afghanistan, despite Russia’s longtime and invaluable assistance to maintain the U.S. presence in that country.

War. Austerity and White Supremacy are all that Biden/Harris offer – but without Trump. If that’s enough for you, then say “Hallelujah” -- and then tighten your belts and pass the ammunition.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com

https://www.blackagendareport.com/biden ... hout-trump
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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Tue Sep 08, 2020 10:31 pm

Why A Biden Presidency Will Disappoint Progressive Democrats
A Biden presidency will be another disappointment for the progressives who support the Democrats campaign.

The Washington Post is lauding Joe Biden's 'flexibility' on policy issues:

When Joe Biden released economic recommendations two months ago, they included a few ideas that worried some powerful bankers: allowing banking at the post office, for example, and having the Federal Reserve guarantee all Americans a bank account.
But in private calls with Wall Street leaders, the Biden campaign made it clear those proposals would not be central to Biden’s agenda.

“They basically said, ‘Listen, this is just an exercise to keep the Warren people happy, and don’t read too much into it,’ ” said one investment banker, referring to liberal supporters of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). The banker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks, said that message was conveyed on multiple calls.

By making promises to the more progressive parts of the Democrats while secretly pledging different policies to the rich Joe Biden is following the 'flexibility' of Barack Obama. During his first presidential campaign Obama promised several times that he would renegotiate NAFTA, the free trade agreement with Canada and Mexico. But behind the back of his supporters he secretly send envoys to Canada to let the government there know that he did not intend to implement that promise:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has ordered an investigation into how reporters obtained a memo detailing a discussion between Canadian diplomats and a member of Obama’s team. The memo said the Obama adviser indicated that the candidate’s criticism of NAFTA was primarily political.
Obama’s team denied he was being insincere, but rival Hillary Clinton said the memo showed her opponent could not be trusted. Both candidates blame the free trade agreement for U.S. job losses and vow to change or even abandon the deal, an act that could hurt Canada’s economy and damage ties between the world’s two largest trading partners.

Biden is showing such 'flexibility' on multiple issues:

This reluctance to be pinned down on policy details is central to Biden’s campaign, which has focused on a pledge to “restore the soul of the nation” rather than any particular legislative holy grail. While Biden has issued a raft of proposals, he’s often taken an all-things-to-all-people approach, sometimes making strong public declarations while relying on aides to soothe critics behind the scenes.
The ones who would be most disappointed with a center-right Biden regime will be those 'progressives' who currently support his campaign. Whatever they get promised now does not mean anything:

The Biden campaign said the economic recommendations were produced jointly by supporters of Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and were never intended as official policy.
...
[T]he Biden team views the task forces’ ideas as merely recommendations, while many Sanders supporters consider them binding.
At the same time Biden's foreign policy team is filling up with liberal interventionists from the Obama era and with neoconservatives:

Never-Trumper Republicans have been worming their way into the Biden campaign, offering to flesh out his “coalition” ahead of the election and pushing their way into the foreign policy discussions, particularly on China. Given their shared history with the liberal interventionists already in the campaign, don’t for a second think that there aren’t hungry neoconservatives among them trying to get a seat at the table.
...
These guys are charter members of the Washington foreign policy consensus, mixed in with neoconservative never-Trumpers like Eliot Cohen and Robert Kagan (his wife Victoria Nuland was a top neocon official in the Clinton State Department) who have despised Trump from the beginning and think his America First foreign policy is “deeply misguided” and leading the country to “crisis.” Kagan, who openly supported Hillary Clinton in 2016, has already authored at least one anti-Trump foreign policy op-ed with top Biden advisor Anthony Blinken. Wolves in sheep’s clothing.
A Biden win will mean a revival of the war on Syria, no renewal of the nuclear deal with Iran and other hawkish foreign policies:

Anyone therefore hoping for a softening of U.S. policy towards Iran, should Biden win, may be pinning too much hope on Bernie Saunders or ‘The Squad’ being able to ‘round off the sharp edges from U.S. foreign policy stances’ – they may be being overly-optimistic. It is just too obvious: As China veers towards Iran and the Middle East in search of energy-supply security, the temptation of any success with forcing a hawkish stance on China will be to link the two (Iran and China), and to try to push for a ‘kill-two-birds-with-one-stone’ policy stance.
Sure, the policies of a Biden presidency would look polished and presentable than the boorish ways in which Trump acts. That is the main reason why the Washington establishment rejects Trump and supports Biden.

But we can certainly expect that a Biden presidency, won in the election or through the Democrats well planned color revolution scheme, will be to the right of the center-right policies Barack Obama implemented. This will hold for domestic policies issues as well as with regards to foreign policy.

Posted by b on September 8, 2020 at 17:35 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/09/w ... .html#more

The reportage is good if some of the conclusions are whacked: The dems execute a color rev against Trump? All I can see is a trainwreck and four years of vengeance. Which would entirely fuck bourgeois democracy....they might really do it, it would be in character.
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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Sat Sep 12, 2020 11:49 am

The Democratic Opponent of the QAnon Congressional Candidate Has Dropped Out
By JIM NEWELL
SEPT 11, 20205:36 PM

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Georgia congressional candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene. United America First/Wikipedia

Kevin Van Ausdal, the Democratic candidate in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, abruptly and mysteriously announced Friday afternoon that he was dropping out of the race for “family and personal reasons.”

The “next steps in my life,” he said in a statement posted to Twitter, “are taking me away from Georgia, so I will be disqualified from serving in Congress and will give the Party a chance to put forward a candidate that can carry this fight to the end.”



He added in a separate statement that “Although all the details will remain my family’s alone, please understand this was not an easy decision. We are real people managing hard choices.”

Van Ausdal’s departure removes the last, albeit flimsy, barrier against the ascent of Republican nominee Marjorie Taylor Greene—an extremist QAnon supporter who, just recently, posted an illustration of herself holding a gun next to progressive members of the “Squad”—to the United States Congress. Though Greene has been repudiated by some individual House Republicans, GOP leadership has said they “look forward” to her election. The president, meanwhile, adores Greene, describing her as a “future Republican Star” and inviting her as a guest to his convention speech at the White House.

Just to get in on the weirdness, Rep. Tom Graves, the retiring incumbent Republican whom Greene is seeking to replace, announced later Friday afternoon that he would leave Congress in October instead of January to “avoid surprises” and because “it just doesn’t seem right to kill time on the taxpayer dime.”


The northwestern Georgia seat is about as red a seat as there is—look, for example, at whom Republicans in the district nominated—and Van Ausdal’s chances of winning the seat were marginal. But at least Democrats had someone on the ticket competing against a genuinely threatening Republican nominee. While Van Ausdal said his “team” believes there is a way to replace him, Georgia’s deputy secretary of state told the Associated Press on Friday that the deadline for replacing Van Ausdal had already passed.

A follow-up Twitter statement attributed to Van Ausdal’s campaign manager said, “Our finances are intact, and Kevin is safe.” Further details about why Van Ausdal is not just leaving the race against a radical conspiracy theorist with frightening followers but leaving the state of Georgia entirely, remain unknown at this time.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 ... -race.html

JFC, this whackjob woman has got the liberals shitting in their pants and this is their party's response, capitulation. Sure, he couldn't win, but he could have at least called out the madness and stupidity which are what passes for this dingbat's talking points.Has he received threats from other dingbats? Proly, but who doesn't these days? Call them out too.

“family and personal reasons”, chickenshit amateur, this is the best the Dems can do. Any surprise that Biden is their guy or that they still stand to lose the election against the guy who has greatly exacerbated the covid death toll thru a willful incompetence which is in fact the true expression of capitalist priorities.Yeah, they play their part in the duopoly but it is not like they follow a pre-ordained script. They're just doing 'what comes natural', following the ruling ideas of class society.
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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Sun Sep 13, 2020 5:57 pm

Biden says US must maintain small force in Middle East, has no plans for major Defense cuts

WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Joe Biden said Thursday that he supports drawing down troops in the Middle East but if elected president would keep a small force there to prevent extremists from posing a threat to the United States and its allies.

“These ‘forever wars’ have to end. I support drawing down the troops. But here’s the problem, we still have to worry about terrorism and [the Islamic State],” Biden told Stars and Stripes in a telephone interview.

He also said he does not foresee major reductions in the U.S. defense budget as the military refocuses its attention to potential threats from “near-peer” powers such as China and Russia.

<snip>

Biden said conditions in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq are so complicated that he cannot promise full withdrawal of troops in the near future.

However, he supports a small U.S. military footprint whose primary mission would be to facilitate special operations against the Islamic State, or ISIS, and other terror organizations.

<snip>

Despite the ongoing operations abroad, the pandemic at home, and increased government spending, Biden does not foresee major cuts to the Pentagon budget.

In fact, he said defense spending could increase in a Biden Administration.

(more)

https://www.stripes.com/news/us/biden-s ... s-1.644631

And there ya are....meanwhile..

Sanders Urging Biden to Do More to Excite Progressives
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/12/us/p ... biden.html

They didn't want Sanders cause he'd be accused of being the slippery slope into godless commie tyranny. Which is absurd. And how'd that work out?
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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Wed Sep 16, 2020 1:55 pm

Freedom Rider: Democrats’ Climate Change Lies
Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist 16 Sep 2020

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Freedom Rider: Democrats’ Climate Change Lies

The Republicans lie about the harm they do to the planet, and the Democrats lie and pretend they’re not doing the very same things.

“The Democrats have turned their backs on their own timid, mealy mouthed proclamations of concern.”

In recent weeks a combination of drought and record breaking heat have accelerated wildfire season to historic levels of devastation. More than 4.6 million acres have burned in the states of California, Oregon and Washington. Skies are colored orange and red, the air is unbreathable, lives have been lost and entire towns have been destroyed.

The connection between heat waves, droughts, and human made climate change are clear and the solution is known to every school child. There must be a drastic reduction in the production of fossil fuels. A radical restructuring of society, especially an end to capitalist incentives for planetary destruction, is no longer optional. Every form of plant and animal life is in very grave danger.

It is easy to blame Donald Trump, who among other things famously withdrew from the 2015 Paris climate accords. Although it must be pointed out that the agreement is an honor system based declaration of intent and not a requirement to take action. Signatory nations chose goals for themselves while also allowing temperature increases that are deadly for people living in the global south. The agreement specifically states that industrialized nations don’t have to pay compensation for the damage they do to the rest of the world. Trump’s stunt gives the impression that Democrats are serious about fighting climate change but the facts prove otherwise.

“There must be an end to capitalist incentives for planetary destruction.”

Barack Obama recently took to twitter with photos of orange California skies and implored voters to act. “Protecting our planet is on the ballot. Vote like your life depends on it -- because it does.” He didn’t say who voters should support. One assumes he meant the Democrats, but they have turned their backs on their own timid, mealy mouthed proclamations of concern.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) removed language from its platform which called for ending government subsidies to fossil fuel companies. That betrayal was just as well, because the Democrats’ record on the environment is nothing like the image they project on social media. Obama was joined by California’s Democratic governor Gavin Newsom who used some of the same photos and offered the same platitudes with capital letters for extra emphasis. “Climate change is REAL. So please VOTE.”

“The Democrats’ record on the environment is nothing like the image they project on social media.”

Obama and Newsom are both liars. This is what Obama said in a March 22, 2012 speech . “Now, under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years. That's important to know. Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some.”
Newsom is no better. Despite the social media rhetoric his administration continues to give fracking and other drilling permits. In fact, the state of California has given more fracking permits in the first six months of 2020 than it did in the same period the year before.

Neither of the two capitalist parties is in any position to stop the planet from heating up. That is because both do the bidding of the corporations causing the record breaking temperatures to occur. One party lies about the damage it is causing and promotes easily dismissed quackery to defend itself. As usual, the Democrats sneer and pretend to act differently when at every opportunity they do the very same things that are killing the planet.

“Both parties do the bidding of the corporations.”

Our lives do depend on bringing about change but that won’t happen if Biden is the man in the White House. Supposedly progressive Democrats stole the language of the Green Party, the party they otherwise scorn, and claim they will institute a Green New Deal. But the Democrats who promote a watered down version are openly thwarted by their leadership. Their progressive wing is not serious and the establishment doesn’t even pretend until the west coast is ablaze and then pretense is all they have.

Climate change did not begin after Donald Trump was inaugurated. The damage was done by Democrats and Republicans, by the United States and by every industrialized nation that bowed to the dictates of capital. Obama and Newsom and all the rest hope we aren’t paying attention when their handiwork produces a natural disaster. Pretending that one wing of the duopoly will behave differently than it has in the past is adding insult to one’s own injury. The least we can do is call out the scoundrels when they tell us lies as the sky turns red.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/freed ... hange-lies
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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Thu Oct 01, 2020 2:35 pm

The Politics That Led to the “Worst Debate”
Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor 01 Oct 2020

Image
The Politics That Led to the “Worst Debate”

The incoherence of the Biden-Trump debate will be repeated every election cycle until Blacks and progressives break with the corporate duopoly.

“There is nothing smart or ‘strategic’ about falling for the same trick every election cycle.”

The rich man’s media are calling it “the worst debate in modern American history,” but that’s because the truth is often painful to watch. The Biden-Trump confrontation revealed, with crystalline clarity, that the real “genius” of the American electoral process is its total imperviousness to popular demands for a healthier, more just and less economically precarious society and a peaceful, ecologically stable world. Instead, the Democratic alternative to the white supremacist Republican in the White House is — another lifelong racist, mass-incarcerating, corporate-serving, warmongering old white man.

“The party is me, right now. I am the Democratic Party,” Joe Biden shot back at the “clown” Donald Trump, who repeatedly tried to associate the former vice president with the Green New Deal, Medicare for All and Black Lives Matter demands to rein in the police — all issues supported by super-majorities of Democrats, and even large chunks of Republican voters, but opposed by the candidate now representing the Party.


“You just lost the left,” Trump twice hollered, wishfully. In an actual democracy the Democrats would, indeed, have committed political suicide by nominating a corporate hack and career race-baiter like Biden as their standard-bearer. But the U.S. is a corporate dictatorship where the rich have two parties and the rest of us effectively have none.

The voters that Trump referred to in the debate as “the left,” are actually at the center of the U.S. political spectrum, where super-majorities favor the positions taken by Bernie Sanders during the primaries. Exit polls in South Carolina and on “Super Tuesday” showed that the same Democrats that voted for Joe Biden nevertheless favored Sanders’ positions on the issues, but opted for Biden in fear of Trump and his rabid White Man’s Party. It’s a simple formula that allows Democrats to promise their base nothing — except that they are not Trump or some other flagrant racist.

“The U.S. is a corporate dictatorship where the rich have two parties and the rest of us effectively have none.”

The trick will continue to work until voters, especially Blacks, stop rewarding Democrats for their serial betrayals. There is nothing smart or “strategic” about falling for the same trick every election cycle – and anybody that tells you different is in on the con game.

The corporate Democratic stranglehold on Black America results in Black voters electing officials to office who resist the demands put forward by Black protesters in the street. We cheer the Black Lives Matter activists that demand defunding, abolishing and community-controlling the cops, but then vote to make president a politician who “wrote the bill” that imprisoned millions of our people and who continues to oppose cuts in police budgets. Such political schizophrenia extends to notables in the “movement,” like Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors. “I think we can call for Biden and [Kamala] Harris to be challenged for their past while also being the cheerleaders for them to win the election November 3.”

In fact, you can’t “challenge” Biden and Harris for their anti-Black behavior as elected officials by continuing to elect them. The vote is the reward.

Black folks and progressives are not to blame for Donald Trump, but do bear responsibility for the Democrats that are not much different from Trump on every issue that counts except race – and in Biden’s case, not even that.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/polit ... rst-debate

Bolding added.

Small matter, I think the phrase I most hear irl referring to Trump is "can't stand him", a purely emotional response primed by the media and derived from Trump's critical peers embarrassed by his vulgarity and now even more as he lays bare the scams they've emplaced for their benefit. Whereas his opponent, with all the sorry record posted by Ford above, gets a pass cause he ain't Trump. No critical thinking going on here but lots of the wishful variety: "He's a placeholder for upcoming progressives!", "He will swing to the left once elected." And, I shit you not, "He'll legalize reefer." The latter statements echo the 1992 Clinton campaign. Some people never learn, when has any Dem 'swung to the left' after being elected? Only one, FDR in 1936, his second term after a less than stellar first and purely in desperation. And discarded two years later at the first opportunity. And there will be no repeat of FDR's opportunistic apostasy, recent election cycles have made it plain the Dems ain't going near what they and their serious backers consider a slippery slope. Sanders, with his moderate leftish programs ain't never been anything but a sheepdog, as he's made clear in the past two election. The 'Squad' and the like are junior sheepdogs to take his place when the wretch finally chokes on his own hypocrisy. Fuck those people.

'There can be no progress in the US until the Democratic Party is utterly discredited in the eyes of the working class.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

solidgold
Posts: 68
Joined: Mon Aug 07, 2017 7:36 pm

Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by solidgold » Thu Oct 01, 2020 7:08 pm

blindpig wrote:
Thu Oct 01, 2020 2:35 pm
The Politics That Led to the “Worst Debate”
Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor 01 Oct 2020

Image
The Politics That Led to the “Worst Debate”

The incoherence of the Biden-Trump debate will be repeated every election cycle until Blacks and progressives break with the corporate duopoly.

“There is nothing smart or ‘strategic’ about falling for the same trick every election cycle.”

The rich man’s media are calling it “the worst debate in modern American history,” but that’s because the truth is often painful to watch. The Biden-Trump confrontation revealed, with crystalline clarity, that the real “genius” of the American electoral process is its total imperviousness to popular demands for a healthier, more just and less economically precarious society and a peaceful, ecologically stable world. Instead, the Democratic alternative to the white supremacist Republican in the White House is — another lifelong racist, mass-incarcerating, corporate-serving, warmongering old white man.

“The party is me, right now. I am the Democratic Party,” Joe Biden shot back at the “clown” Donald Trump, who repeatedly tried to associate the former vice president with the Green New Deal, Medicare for All and Black Lives Matter demands to rein in the police — all issues supported by super-majorities of Democrats, and even large chunks of Republican voters, but opposed by the candidate now representing the Party.


“You just lost the left,” Trump twice hollered, wishfully. In an actual democracy the Democrats would, indeed, have committed political suicide by nominating a corporate hack and career race-baiter like Biden as their standard-bearer. But the U.S. is a corporate dictatorship where the rich have two parties and the rest of us effectively have none.

The voters that Trump referred to in the debate as “the left,” are actually at the center of the U.S. political spectrum, where super-majorities favor the positions taken by Bernie Sanders during the primaries. Exit polls in South Carolina and on “Super Tuesday” showed that the same Democrats that voted for Joe Biden nevertheless favored Sanders’ positions on the issues, but opted for Biden in fear of Trump and his rabid White Man’s Party. It’s a simple formula that allows Democrats to promise their base nothing — except that they are not Trump or some other flagrant racist.

“The U.S. is a corporate dictatorship where the rich have two parties and the rest of us effectively have none.”

The trick will continue to work until voters, especially Blacks, stop rewarding Democrats for their serial betrayals. There is nothing smart or “strategic” about falling for the same trick every election cycle – and anybody that tells you different is in on the con game.

The corporate Democratic stranglehold on Black America results in Black voters electing officials to office who resist the demands put forward by Black protesters in the street. We cheer the Black Lives Matter activists that demand defunding, abolishing and community-controlling the cops, but then vote to make president a politician who “wrote the bill” that imprisoned millions of our people and who continues to oppose cuts in police budgets. Such political schizophrenia extends to notables in the “movement,” like Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors. “I think we can call for Biden and [Kamala] Harris to be challenged for their past while also being the cheerleaders for them to win the election November 3.”

In fact, you can’t “challenge” Biden and Harris for their anti-Black behavior as elected officials by continuing to elect them. The vote is the reward.

Black folks and progressives are not to blame for Donald Trump, but do bear responsibility for the Democrats that are not much different from Trump on every issue that counts except race – and in Biden’s case, not even that.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/polit ... rst-debate

Bolding added.

Small matter, I think the phrase I most hear irl referring to Trump is "can't stand him", a purely emotional response primed by the media and derived from Trump's critical peers embarrassed by his vulgarity and now even more as he lays bare the scams they've emplaced for their benefit. Whereas his opponent, with all the sorry record posted by Ford above, gets a pass cause he ain't Trump. No critical thinking going on here but lots of the wishful variety: "He's a placeholder for upcoming progressives!", "He will swing to the left once elected." And, I shit you not, "He'll legalize reefer." The latter statements echo the 1992 Clinton campaign. Some people never learn, when has any Dem 'swung to the left' after being elected? Only one, FDR in 1936, his second term after a less than stellar first and purely in desperation. And discarded two years later at the first opportunity. And there will be no repeat of FDR's opportunistic apostasy, recent election cycles have made it plain the Dems ain't going near what they and their serious backers consider a slippery slope. Sanders, with his moderate leftish programs ain't never been anything but a sheepdog, as he's made clear in the past two election. The 'Squad' and the like are junior sheepdogs to take his place when the wretch finally chokes on his own hypocrisy. Fuck those people.

'There can be no progress in the US until the Democratic Party is utterly discredited in the eyes of the working class.
Ford and some at BAR publish articles thinking if they put “third party” out into the universe then it will magically manifest. I don’t blame them; the Democratic stranglehold on the left is like a purgatory with no heaven, hell, or earth to crossover.

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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Fri Oct 09, 2020 1:24 pm

Kamala Harris debates Mike Pence
BY OAKLANDSOCIALIST ON OCTOBER 8, 2020 • ( LEAVE A COMMENT )

Here’s my talking heads, political junkie analysis of last night’s debate between Pence and Harris:

I think the Democrats’ strategy during last night’s debate was simply “don’t screw up.” In other words, since their lead is in double digits and may well widen even further, avoid saying anything to prevent that from happening. Harris seemed to follow that strategy, which left her with a number of missed opportunities:

She could have pointed out that the same way that Pence was flouting the debate rules that he had in effect agreed to, in that same way his team is threatening to flout the rules of the US elections and refusing to recognize the outcome.
She was okay on the issue of Covid 19, but how could she miss? She was handed the opportunity of knocking it out of the ballpark when Pence ducked the question of why the US death rate is so much higher than all other wealthy nations, including Canada. She failed to hammer at that question.
She also failed to stress that by their actions they have misled millions through refusing to wear a mask in public. She ignored the Republicans’ killing of any new stimulus package and raise the $600/week supplemental unemployment. I suspect that’s because the Democrats are getting a lot of pressure from their corporate sponsors to let that question die.
Same on the issue of global climate change. She missed the opportunity to point out that Trump has called it a “hoax”. Also, while Pence talked about science, he also said something to the effect that it’s an open question. On Breonna Taylor, Harris failed to point out that several of the grand jurors are now speaking out about how the prosecutor didn’t really try. As part of the system itself, though, Harris didn’t want to really throw too much doubt into it.
She also failed to hammer Pence on the issue of abortion, not pointing out that while he and the Republicans talk about “freedom”, they want the government to regulate the most personal decisions a woman can make about her own body. I suspect that failure was due to the Democrats’ attempt to win over some of the right wing Christian voters. But she could have also really hammered them on that issue because the antibody medicine Trump took was developed through testing it on fetal tissue!
The most vulnerable issue for Biden/Harris is that of “packing” the Supreme Court. My suspicion is that, given Biden’s history of compromising with the Republicans he doesn’t plan to do so but wants to leave that open as a means of threatening the (in)Justices.
The Democrats should insist that the moderators have a “mute” button. But, again, they have a long history of not going for the jugular.

So, overall, I’d say it was maybe 55-45 for Harris. Given the opportunities, that’s pretty pitiful. (I wrote this before looking at the polls. A CNN poll says that people thought Harris won by about a 60-40 margin. Unsurprisingly, women thought so by 70-30. Do you think any women reacted to the scene of a man talking over not one but two women – Harris PLUS the debate moderator?)

I also have to wonder whether the Democrats don’t want to really wipe out the Republicans. If they did so, who would they use as a foil in the case that they win the presidency plus a majority in the Senate? Who could they blame for not doing even a fraction of what’s needed?

https://oaklandsocialist.com/2020/10/08 ... ike-pence/
bolding added

Missed opportunities? Hardly, her performance was, from the Democratic Party pov, rather astute. First, leave the Rs no opening for claiming the Dems 'hate America'. And so a comparison with other nations is out. Ditto Breonna Taylor. And she wasn't gonna talk trash about 'anti-maskers'(shades of 'Deplorables!) as those are the votes they want to draw, not the disaffected that a Sanders platform might have attracted. Ditto abortion. Harris aimed at mediocrity and achieved it.

With the statements bolded the author of this piece proves themselves an amateur. 'The Democratic Party is the piss that sets the Republican dye in the national fabric.'
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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