President Joe Biden on Friday delivered a defiant response to those within the Democratic Party urging him to drop out of the 2024 race, characterizing his abysmal debate performance against Donald Trump as a “bad episode” rather than validation of longstanding concerns about his age and cognitive health. At a rally in Wisconsin and in a later sit-down interview with ABC News anchor George…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Calls for President Joe Biden to withdraw from the presidential race are growing as the campaign fails to combat concerns of his mental fitness and polls are indicating that Democrats will lose the race badly to Donald Trump if they don’t allow a new candidate to step in. So far, three House Democrats have issued statements calling on Biden to step aside: Representatives Lloyd Doggett (Texas)…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Wherever he travels globally, President Biden has sought to project the United States as the rejuvenated leader of a broad coalition of democratic nations seeking to defend the “rules-based international order” against encroachments by hostile autocratic powers, especially China, Russia, and North Korea. “We established NATO, the greatest military alliance in the history of the world…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
When the clock strikes 10:00 pm, I’ll be sitting in the darkness gazing out a grimy, metal barred window. Miles away, the starlit sky will explode with cheerful colors. Two seconds after each rocket reaches its apex point, the blast will resonate through the walls. The city of Talladega, Alabama, will be celebrating, and in 10 minutes it will be all over. The illuminating colors will turn into an…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
When the clock strikes 10:00 pm, I’ll be sitting in the darkness gazing out a grimy, metal barred window. Miles away, the starlit sky will explode with cheerful colors. Two seconds after each rocket reaches its apex point, the blast will resonate through the walls. The city of Talladega, Alabama, will be celebrating, and in 10 minutes it will be all over. The illuminating colors will turn into an…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
— Lewis Carroll, Through The Looking-Glass, December 1871
Once you understand that profound poem, you are ready to fathom the great debate between our dumb and dumber candidates for the Highchair in the Oval Office.</
In light of Julian Assange’s release from an English prison and President Biden’s dementia-riddled debate performance against dumb-mouthed Donald Trump – Tweedledum and Tweedledee, whom Alice, when through the looking-glass, said looked exactly like a couple of schoolboys – I have been thinking about a famous proverb – “acta, non verba” (action, not words). Like most platitudes and effective propaganda, it contains both truths and contradictions and can therefore be spun in multiple ways depending on one’s intent.
Killing people is an action that needs no words to accompany it. It can be done silently. Even when it is the killing of millions of people, it can be carried out without fanfare or direct responsibility. Without a whisper, with plausible deniability, as if it were not happening. As if you were not responsible. The playwright Harold Pinter, in his Nobel Prize Address, wrote truthfully about U. S. war crimes:
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self-love. It’s a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, ‘the American people’, as in the sentence, ‘I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.’
Trust, of course, is a sick joke when it comes from the mouths of U.S. presidents, just as the two bloodthirsty debaters want the American people to trust them and agree with their support for the US/Israel genocide of Palestinians, as does Robert Kennedy, Jr., another aspirant for the position of Killer-in-Chief.
“I know what you’re thinking about,” said Tweedledum, “but it isn’t so nohow.”
“Contrariwise,” said Tweedledee. “if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”
And the boys continue to battle over Tweedledum’s “nice new rattle” that he accused Tweedledee of spoiling.
The spectacle of presidential politics and people’s addiction to it is a depressing commentary on people’s gullibility. To think that the candidates are not puppets manipulated by the same hidden powerful elite forces is a form of illiteracy that fails to grasp the nature of the fairy tale told through the looking-glass. The real rattle is not a toy, but the sound of the rattling of the marionettes’ chains. In the 2020 presidential election, more than 155 million Americans voted for Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the highest voter turnout by percentage since 1900. More so than the population at large, these voters are dumb and getting dumber by the day. They think they live in a democracy where to get into the Highchair candidates will spend 10 billion dollars or so.
“Ditto,” said Tweedledum.
“Ditto, ditto!” cried Tweedledee.
Like the voters in 2020, those this year will echo the boys in illusionary expectations of political change – “Ditto, ditto, ditto – as they look in the mirror of their cell phones and hope to take selfies with the candidates to mirror the narcissistic mendacious marionettes of their illusions.
Julian Assange killed no one, but he suffered greatly at the hands of the U.S. military-industrial-security state and its evil accomplices because he used words and images to reveal their atrocities. In other words, his words were his courageous actions to counteract the murderous actions of the U.S. government. He gave voice to the previously unspeakable, a void in confronting systematic evil that seems beyond imagining or words to convey. Assange’s words were his deeds and therefore reversed the proverb or turned it on its head or upside down. He showed that the words of denial from the U.S. government were lies, language used to obscure thought about its war crimes. That is why they tortured him for so many years.
Despite such treatment, he never bowed to their violence, remaining steadfastly true to his conscience. A true individual. He was betrayed by the corporate mainstream media such as The New York Times, The Guardian, and others who published what Julian published, then trashed him and ignored him, and finally hypocritically supported him to save their own asses after he suffered for fourteen years. It is a very typical tale of elite betrayal.
Those who serve and wish to serve as American presidents are so lacking in Assange’s moral conscience that one should never expect truth from them, neither in words nor actions. Assange stands head and shoulders above these craven creeps. Here, as recounted by Marjorie Cohn, are some of their atrocities that journalist Assange, a free man, published for all the world to read and see.
The relationship between words and actions is very complex. Even Shakespeare compounds the complexity by having a character say that words are not deeds. But they are.
Neither Biden nor Trump ever personally killed a Syrian or Palestinian, but they gave orders to do so. They made sure as young men that they would never serve in the military and kill with their own hands, having received between them nearly ten deferments. What’s the term for such Commanders-in-Chief? Pusillanimous armchair warriors? Jackals with polished faces who know ten thousand ways to order others to kill and torture while keeping their hands clean but their souls sordid?
Obama had his Tuesday kill list that included American citizens whom he chose for death; Trump gave the orders to “terminate” Iranian General Qasem Soleimani; we can only imagine what orders Biden (or his handlers) has given, while Ukraine, Russia, and Gaza have suffered terribly from them. Now Tweedledum, desperate to retain his rattle, pushes the world closed to nuclear war.
But notice the expensive suits these boys wear, the crisp white shirts and pocket handkerchiefs, the elegant watches and shiny shoes. But they are killers whose orders to kill are whispered, action words, passed down the line. With a smile, a grin, a shrug, or completely indifferently, as if they were ordering a bagel with cream cheese to go.
Yet true it is, as the forgotten but great American poet Keneth Rexroth wrote in his 1955 poem Thou Shall Not Kill: “You killed him! You killed him./ In your God damned Brooks Brothers suit,/ You son of a bitch.”
Like many writers, I am politically powerless. My words are my only weapon. Are they actions? I believe they are. They are deeds. I move my pen across the paper and try to write something meaningful. Sometimes I succeed in this action; at others, I fail. Who can say? I surely can’t. As my father used to always remind me, “Quien sabe?” (Who knows?)
There are those who claim that wordsmiths are all full of shit. Why don’t they just shut up and do something, is what they say. They fail to grasp the paradoxical relationship between action and words. For writers who write to defend humanity from the predations of the ruthless ruling classes, their words are not orders to kill. Just the opposite.
Our words are reminders that killing is wrong, that waging wars are wrong, that genocide is wrong, that assassinating people is wrong – simple truths that almost everyone knows but forgets when they get caught up in the antics of the Tweedledums and Tweedledees who come and go with the breezes as the system that creates them rolls merrily along.
So if words, contrary to the famous proverb – action, not words – are a form of action, we are caught in a paradox of our own making. This is not uncommon. For there are silent and wordy acts as well as words as actions, some noisy, others sotto voce. There are violent deeds and violent words; and there are peaceful words meant to encourage peaceful deeds.
Tweedledum Biden and Tweedledee Trump are prime examples of how far my country (I write that with a lump in my throat), the United States of America, has descended into illiteracy, evil, and delusion.
The philosopher Frederick Nietzsche once wrote that the “Greeks were superficial out of profundity.” Too many Americans have become superficial out of stupidity by believing the words and deeds of con men battling over a rattle.
The post Biden and Trump Battle over a Rattle first appeared on Dissident Voice.No Way! We landed on the moon!
– Jim Carrey, playing Lloyd in Dumb and Dumber, 1994
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
With momentum seemingly building against President Joe Biden in the past week following his disastrous debate performance last Thursday, the Donald Trump campaign is reportedly hoping that Biden stays in the race, believing he is a uniquely weak candidate who they could easily beat in the general election. The Washington Post reported Wednesday that the Trump campaign thinks it would be extremely…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
After a televised debate performance last week that left Democrats horrified, President Joe Biden wants voters to know that his administration is taking the climate crisis seriously as summer 2024 brings record-breaking heat waves and extreme weather. Speaking at an emergency operations center near the Capitol on Tuesday, Biden touted investments in clean energy and resilient infrastructure made…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
As Democrats appear to be distancing themselves from the campaign to reelect Joe Biden and opening the door to other possibilities, the president has reportedly told a close ally that he is reconsidering whether he should stay in the race — the strongest indicator yet that he may drop out after his disastrous debate performance last week. The New York Times reported Wednesday that Biden told the…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The US Supreme Court has much to answer for. In the genius of republican government, it operates as overseer and balancer to the executive and legislature. Of late, the judges have seemingly confused that role.
In contrast to its other Anglophone counterparts, the highest tribunal in the US professes an open brand of politics, with its occupants blatantly expressing views that openly conform to one side of the political aisle or the other. Not that the idea of a conservative or liberal judge necessarily translates into opposite rulings. Agreement and common ground can be reached, however difficult the exercise might be. Justice should, at the very least, be seen to be done.
The current crop, however, shows little in the way of identifying, let alone reaching common ground. Firm lines, even yawning chasms, have grown. The latest decision on presidential immunity from criminal prosecution is one such case. On July 1, the majority of the court held by six to three that a US president, including former occupants of the office, “may not be prosecuted for exercising his core constitutional powers, and he is entitled, to a minimum, to a presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts.”
Throughout the sequence of decisions, which began before the trial judge, Tanya Chutkan, Donald Trump has argued that he should be immune from prosecution, notably regarding federal charges of subverting the results of the 2020 election. Those actions, he claims, formed part of his official duties. Furthermore, as he suffered no conviction or either impeachment, he could not be tried in a criminal court.
The decision offers a grocery basket of elastic terms that will delight future litigants. The total immunity, the decision states, covers “core constitutional powers”. The president, former or sitting, further had “presumptive immunity from criminal prosecution” regarding all discharged official acts as a function of the separation of powers. Falling for giddying circularity, the majority opinion goes on to remark that the immunity “extends to the outer perimeter of the President’s official responsibilities, covering actions so long as they are not manifestly or palpably beyond his authority.” It does not, however, extend to “unofficial acts” or “unofficial conduct”.
The majority was also of the view that no court should inquire into the President’s motives when distinguishing official from official conduct. “Such an enquiry would risk exposing even the most obvious instances of official conduct to judicial examination on the mere allegation of improper purpose, thereby intruding on the Article II interests that immunity seeks to protect.” This shielding does have a remarkable effect, granting the president uncomfortably wide powers regarding decisions that can involve breaching the very laws the office is intended to protect.
The decision magnifies the scope of presidential power. One might say it invests that power with imperial, distinctly anti-republican attributes. For decades, it had been assumed that presidents would be spared civil suits to, in the words of the majority, “undertake his constitutionally designated functions effectively, free from undue pressures or distortions.” To take the immunity to cover breaches of laws the executive is bound to be faithful in executing is a quite different creature. To suggest that would be to echo, as indeed US District Court Judge Chutkan opined in December 2023, of a “divine right of kings to evade criminal responsibility.”
The three liberal justices violently disagreed with the majority in a judgment authored by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency. It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law.” The dissent excoriates, not merely the reasoning of the court but the man whose actions it will benefit. “Because our Constitution does not shield a former President from answering for criminal and treasonous acts, I dissent.”
According to the lashing words of Sotomayor, the majority had invented “an atextual, ahistorical, and unjustifiable immunity that puts the President above the law.” From the outset, it was unnecessary to make any finding on absolute immunity on the exercise of “core constitutional powers” given the facts outlined in the indictment. This was further “eclipsed” by the decision “to create expansive immunity for all ‘official act[s]’.” Whatever the terminology used – presumptive or absolute – “under the majority’s rule, a President’s use of any official power for any purpose, even the most corrupt, is immune from prosecution.”
With withering ire, Sotomayor also thought it “nonsensical” that “evidence concerning acts for which the President is immune can play no role in any criminal prosecution against him”. It would make it impossible for the government to use the President’s official acts to prove knowledge or show intent in prosecuting private offences.
Despite the broad sweep of the judgment regarding immunity, there are pressing questions on whether Trump’s own conduct regarding claims of election subversion would fall within the ambit of the ruling. The multiple lawsuits filed challenging the 2020 election result were peppered with admissions on his part that he was doing so in the personal capacity of a candidate rather than that of an office holder performing official functions. Since then, he has had a change of heart, taking the rather primitive view articulated by that other advocate of an imperial executive, President Richard Nixon, who claimed that, “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
The Supreme Court has remanded the questions on whether absolute immunity applies to such acts as pressuring state election officials and conduct around the events of January 6 to the lower courts. But the consequences of the decision have been immediate in the context of the hush money case, for which Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. His lawyers have already asked that the July 11 sentencing be delayed while also applying to set aside the conviction. Thus, do shadowy motives, personal conduct and the official blur.
Much ink, resources and litigation, is bound to be expended over the next few years over what falls within official, as opposed to unofficial acts, that attach to the office of the US president. Along the way, a few laws may well be broken. With a delicious sense of irony, the Supreme Court ruling will also shield President Joe Biden from vengeful prosecutions planned by Trump and his courtiers. The law can, every so often, be fantastically double-edged.
The post The US Supreme Court Outs the Imperial Presidency first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Joe Biden and other Democrat politicians portray the 2024 Presidential election as a choice between fascism and democracy. Many avowed “socialists” echo that assertion. Are they correct; or, are they misguided (given that the Party, which they back, is dominated by politicians who primarily serve capital and monstrous empire)?
Palestine. Biden and most Congress people of both parties evade the facts of Israeli persecution of Palestinians. For them: Israeli lives (seen as worthy) matter, Palestinian lives (seen as other) don’t. In fact, the Zionist colonial-settler state (which Biden and nearly all of Congress supports) entitles Jewish Israelis to liberal civil rights such that they generally cannot be imprisoned without a fair hearing in a court of law. Meanwhile, although Biden et al will not acknowledge it, any Palestinian in the West Bank or Gaza can be imprisoned and routinely tortured by Israel: for any, or no, reason with no court hearing whatsoever; or, if they do receive a hearing, it is in a kangaroo-style military court where the conviction rate is over 99%. In fact, Palestinians imprisoned by Israel numbered nearly 10,000 at last report. Israelis elect their government; Palestinians are not permitted to do likewise. Moreover, the Palestinian Presidential governing regime in the occupied West Bank (which actually governs only a fifth of that territory, the remainder being under mainly or exclusively Israeli military rule) has not stood for election since 2005 and has become largely a subservient client regime (agent) of the Zionist state. Gaza has been under an increasingly suffocating Israeli economic siege ever since Hamas (defining itself as a Palestinian resistance organization) became its governing authority after fairly winning the last-permitted Palestinian legislative election in 2006. Israel has periodically subjected Gaza to murderous bombardments (sometimes with huge death tolls: 1,400 in 2008 and 2,300 in 2012) in response to rocket attacks which were provoked by preceding ceasefire-breaking Israeli violence (including assassinations of Palestinian resistance leaders). Zionist Israelis can and do rob Palestinians of their homes and properties and/or murder them with impunity. Previously, the Zionist state had used terrorist violence (in 1947—49) to expel 60% of the Palestinian population, bar their return, and confiscate their property.
The US and allied governments have consistently evaded the foregoing reality; and the US has consistently vetoed UN Security Council resolutions seeking to hold Israel accountable for its crimes against Palestinian humanity. It is only the massive public outrage over the current genocidal Israeli mass murder of the overwhelmingly unarmed population of Gaza (only about 2% [40,000] being armed resistance fighters) which has compelled Biden and other liberal Israel-apologists to respond. That response: lip-service concern for the suffering Gazans and token action to provide grossly inadequate humanitarian relief for Gazans dying from lack of food, clean water, proper sanitation, medical supplies, and other essentials for life. While Israel deliberately deprives Gazans of those necessities, the US (President and Congress) and its imperial allies abet the mass killing by providing billions in military aid to Israel. As a staunch defender of the Jewish-supremacist state, Biden (along with most Congress people of both Parties) obviously believes that democracy and rule of law are good for some people and that fascist-like apartheid and genocidal mass murder (until abetting it becomes an electoral liability) are acceptable for others. Biden and most Congressional Democrats, like most Congressional Republicans, operate with an unadmitted racist mindset. (For relevant background facts regarding Zionism, Hamas, and the current war in Gaza, see here!)
Immigration. Whereas Trump panders to xenophobic racism, Biden pretends to oppose it.
Evidently, Biden’s humanitarian sympathies are no more than minimally, if at all, better than Trump’s when it comes to Cubans, Venezuelans, Haitians, and desperate immigrant people of color.
Biden’s antiracism? Let us not forget:
Voting rights. Red-state Republicans impose restrictions to discourage voter participation by Democrat-favoring segments of the electorate, to marginal effect. Far more consequential, both Democrats and Republicans act to rig elections for partisan advantage: gerrymanders to obtain disproportionate representation in legislative elections, and ballot access rules to exclude third parties and independent candidates from the ballot. Most politicians in both establishment parties rely heavily upon big-money campaign funding, the result (which neither Trump nor Biden will change) being policy largely dictated by capital.
Human rights. Trump panders to bigoted reaction. In red states, Republicans respond by abrogating some human rights: abortion access, LGBTQ+ equality, secular government, diversity-equity-inclusion policies, et cetera. Blue states have responded by enacting laws to protect those rights (which capital often supports as so doing curries favor with much of its workforce and customer base and does not adversely impact its profits). Biden and Congressional Democrats, when they had both houses of Congress, could have precluded most of those bigoted reactionary red-state measures. However, they lacked the will to take decisive action on crucial rights legislation: police accountability, gun regulation, abortion rights, voting rights, removal of rogue Supreme Court Justices, et cetera.
Labor rights.
Environment. Biden pretends to be pro-environment; but he prioritizes those projects (renewable energy projects, electric vehicles) from which capitalists can profit, and he avoids actions to which powerful capitalists object. Moreover, Biden defied the environmental community by acquiesced to pressure from the fossil fuel industry with his approvals of:
Biden also demands massive military spending plus weapons deliveries to fuel ongoing US-backed wars, both of which add considerably to global warming as well as being extremely wasteful and destructive. Trump’s record and rhetoric are obstructive of calls for transition to climate-friendly energy; but he is opposed: to continued fueling of the Ukraine War, and to US financing of foreign development projects. One must question whether Biden is actually much, if at all, better for the climate than Trump.
Abuse of power. Trump, odious demagogue that he is, nevertheless surprised the Democrats by fairly winning the 2016 Presidential election. Disappointed Democrat leaders then acted to discredit Trump’s victory with grossly overblown claims of Russian meddling.
Moreover, in a scheme to discredit his Presidency, Congressional Democrats followed with a purely partisan (and failed) impeachment. They alleged that Trump’s temporary holdup of military aid to Ukraine in order to obtain Ukraine’s investigation of possible corruption involving Hunter Biden (son of the then-VP during the Obama Presidency) was a violation of national security. In fact, temporary holds on Congressionally budgeted military aid had occurred in that prior (Democrat) administration, without anyone calling it criminal. Moreover, Hunter Biden had no special qualification for being on the Board of the Ukrainian Burisma Gas Company, and his appointment thereto was obviously intended to shield said company from being investigated for its corrupt acts. Even though Trump evidently acted from partisan motivations, and even though no evidence of criminality by either Biden was ever discovered; Trump’s request for said investigation was entirely legitimate, and only partisan Democrats would say otherwise.
That abuse by Congressional Democrats provoked Trump (already habituated to violating inconvenient laws as long as he thinks his elite status will grant impunity) to respond in kind. He did so by attempting to subvert the 2020 Presidential election with a scheme to falsify the electoral count, ultimately backed by a seditious riot. [For that act, Trump incurred a second and justified impeachment plus a number of criminal indictments.] Nevertheless, the Democrats, having forgotten the adage “as you sow, so shall you reap”, set the example with their own abuse of power.
Repression. Trump has advocated repression of peaceful Black-lives-matter and other leftist protest. But now liberal power-holders have joined those on the right in using police repression to suppress pro-Palestine campus protests. Politicians of both parties support legislation to criminalize boycott of the Zionist state. They enact laws defining advocacy, of replacing that racist genocidal apartheid state, as “antisemitic” and cause for punitive action. Biden et al, while purporting to defend the right to free speech and peaceful protest, vilify speech and peaceful protest in defense of Palestinian humanity as “disruptive” and “threatening” and therefore criminal. Biden, like Trump, is hardly a real defender of civil liberties when used for causes with which he disagrees.
Dictatorship? Trump evidently wishes that he could be an autocrat; but, narcissist and opportunist demagogue that he is, Trump is no Hitlerian fanatic. In pursuit of votes, he panders to Zionist Jews and also to Judeophobe racists. He makes campaign appeals to Black or Hispanic audiences one day and to white supremacists the next. He panders to bigotry for political gain, not to create a thousand-year Reich. Trump wants another 4 years in the Presidency so that he can: personally profit from it, boost his ego, and escape accountability for his past and future business and political crimes. It is not his proclivity for abuse of office, but the shameless blatancy with which he does so, which sets him apart.
Despite Trump’s extreme campaign talk, there is no basis for concluding that he would be able to abrogate elections or disband the Congress or abolish the courts, in order to rule by decree. He and his doctrinaire reactionary allies (Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation with its Project 2025 wish list) are seeking control of the 3 branches of the federal government in order, in the name of “freedom”, to “legally” effectuate:
They seek to reinterpret the Constitution in accordance with a corruptly inconsistent and reactionary so-called “originalism”, not to abrogate it.
Fascism? Centrist Democrats are asserting that a 2nd Trump Presidency would result in a fascist autocracy with: extraordinary nullification of Americans’ civil and human rights, and/or all-out repression of the progressive left. In support of this prediction: they erroneously equate MAGA populist reaction to a Hitlerite fascist movement, and they assert that Trump will have learned from the fiasco of his failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election of Joe Biden and be able to seize absolute power. However, for reasons as follows, the factual evidence does not support said prediction.
Centrist Democrats and their liberal “socialist” apologists are promoting a grossly exaggerated fear (fantasizing fascist autocracy and extraordinary repression) as a scare tactic to seduce progressive voters into voting for Biden (or his substitute).
Imperialism.
[For a comprehensive analysis of contemporary imperialism, see: Charles Pierce: Conflicting “left” views of capitalist imperialism.]
Credit where due.
Centrist Biden and demagogue Trump may tell themselves, as well as their prospective voters, that their beneficial actions and proposals are out of concern for the public welfare. We should not be deceived. In fact, such actions and promises (increasingly as election nears) are to win votes, without unduly offending capitalist campaign funders.
America first leftism. The regress which Americans would experience under another 4 years of Trump in the Oval Office is nowhere near the total deprivation of civil and human rights which Israel and the US (continuing under Biden) have imposed upon the Palestinians. And there are hundreds of millions of other victims whose lives have been taken or ruined by the Biden-backed imperial US foreign policy. Meanwhile, Trump has opposed continued US funding for the US-NATO proxy war in Ukraine. Although Trump and his isolationist America-first MAGA Republicans are certainly not consistently anti-imperialist; they, unlike Biden and his centrist Democrats, take some positions which are objectively antiwar and anti-imperialist. Sadly, with avowed “socialists” shelving anti-imperialism to back Biden for the sake of purely domestic political concerns; said “socialists” thereby embrace an “America-first” policy of their own, one which is objectively racist and imperialist. Moreover, the abusive rule of capital cannot be ended in a major power as long as it rules a belligerent empire, oppressing vulnerable other states and their peoples, and striving to subjugate insubordinate states.
Bigoted reaction. After decades of center-left parties (Labour in Britain, Socialist in France, Social-democrat in Germany, Democrat in US, et cetera) embracing antisocial neoliberal policy; economic conditions for most working people have stagnated or worsened (housing unaffordability and increased homelessness, employment precarity and persistence of poverty, inflation exceeding wage increases, et cetera). Said parties have effectively abandoned their previous popular constituencies. Consequently, antisocial reactionary parties, led by demagogues pandering to latent bigoted prejudices and scapegoating immigrants and othered minorities, have increasingly seduced much of the now discontented populace. Meanwhile, instead of demanding return to popular Keynesian policies which actually served working people to some extent (at some tolerable cost to capital), centrist politicians cry “fascist” and assert that they will save “democracy” from an alleged threat of impending autocracy. As that anti-fascist appeal increasingly loses traction, they defensively embrace some of the inhumane policy demands of the reaction, especially against politically powerless victim groups such as immigrants.
Lesser-evil-ism. Liberal “socialists” are habituated to giving electoral allegiance to the thoroughly imperialist center-left party in hopes of saving domestic reforms, previously extracted (by popular pressure) from capital. They embrace a policy of electoral lesser-evil-ism. As a means for stopping the rise of bigoted reaction, this policy has been an absolute failure. It results in the center-left becoming ever weaker while antisocial bigoted reaction grows ever more potent, and progressive reforms previously conceded by capital are increasingly nullified. As the adage goes: repeating the same failed action, and expecting a different outcome, is an insanity. With avowed “socialists” and avowed “anti-imperialists” having backed capital-serving imperialist center-left parties for decades, their “left” has sunk ever deeper into the sinkhole of lesser-evil-ism. And in every succeeding election, it becomes yet more painful, and more urgent, for the progressive left to climb out of that sinkhole.
What to do. Whether Trump again or another 4 years of Biden, neither is an acceptable choice. Reliance upon centrist Democrat politicians is a recipe for failure. It enables said Democrats to mislead and cynically use social-justice voters while persisting with their policies of militarism, imperialism, supremacy of capital, and political perfidy, and yet remain largely ineffective against MAGA-Republican abuses and obstructions.
The popular front against fascism (then the most vicious oppressor and most dangerous threat against the left) was appropriate in the 1930s. Replicating it in the very different current conditions would be allying with the world’s current principal enemy of social justice, namely US-led Western imperialism. Our real need is not for a “broad popular front against MAGA fascism” (which would mean campaigning for “Genocide Joe” and US imperialism). Our real need is to build our indivisible social-justice activist movement for: economic justice, environmental justice, human rights, civil rights, and international justice. Said movement must be one which is truly independent of both major US Parties:
Biden, at least as much as Trump, is a racist promoter of mass murder. Neither is capable of actually earning the votes of people seeking comprehensive social justice. Unless we (like Biden and most Congressional Democrats) devalue the humanity and lives of Palestinians, Haitians, Venezuelans, et cetera; how can we accept liberal “left” assertions, that Biden (or his substitute) is any savior of humanity and democracy and must therefore be reelected?
The post “Genocide Joe” and “fascist” Trump: what to do! first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
A House Democrat has called on President Joe Biden to withdraw from the presidential race, becoming the first congressional Democrat to do so as politicians and insiders are criticizing the Biden campaign for sweeping aside concerns over the president’s mental acuity. Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) released a statement harshly criticizing the Democratic campaign for continuing to run Biden even as…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Fresh off the weekend following his disastrous presidential debate performance against GOP nominee former President Donald Trump, President Joe Biden’s family is encouraging him to remain in the contest despite increasingly loud calls for him to drop out. According to a report from The New York Times, which cited individuals familiar with the conversations, Biden’s family — led by his son…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The two old men worried to their very cores about Trump came to opposite decisions: Mitt Romney quit, and Joe Biden is running again. Both may have chosen wrong.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!— Emma Lazarus’s inscription on the Statue of Liberty
The contestants squared off in the first of the US presidential debates of 2024. Both wore identical white shirts and navy suits with American flag lapel pins. One wore a red tie; the other a blue one. There were other differences, but none quite so substantive.
The immigration issue dominated the debate. The challenger claimed that the country was being menaced by immigrants – marauding hordes of rapists, murders, and mentally ill. They were the ruination of the nation. Social Security and Medicare were jeopardized by the alien element. Immigrants endangered the jobs of blacks and Hispanics. There was nothing good and a lot bad about the threat of the foreign-born, who should be deported in large numbers according to Mr. Trump.
According to the US Census Bureau, the percent foreign-born in the US increased 15.6% from 2010 to 2022, comprising 13.9% of the total population. A significant one in seven people in the US were not born here.
Some of our past presidents celebrated that we are a “nation of immigrants”:
+ Ronald Reagan said, “If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”
+ George H.W. Bush said, “Immigration is not just a link to America’s past; it’s also a bridge to America’s future.”
+ George W. Bush said, “People around the world…come to America. Their talent and hard work and love of freedom have helped make America the leader of the world.”
And incumbent President Biden said…well, nothing to counter Trump’s chauvinistic slander. Not a peep could be heard in defense of immigrants. There was no contesting of the calumny heaped upon immigrants nor was there any recognition of their humanity from Mr. Biden. Rather, his silence – his failure to confront Trump’s pandering to nimby nativism – was complicity by default.
Trump-Biden immigration policy and practice compared
On the issue of immigration, there was no substantive debate on June 27. Drilling deeper, the political practice of the former president and the current president bear more similarities than differences.
Earlier in June, Biden made what the press characterized as a “drastic crackdown” on immigration “closing” the southern border by issuing an executive order to partially ban asylum proceedings. Under Biden, NPR observed, the southern border has been further reinforced, with more military operations and “expedited removals,” than ever before. NPR concluded, “Biden’s asylum restrictions mirror those implemented by Trump.”
While president, Trump had used the excuse of the Covid pandemic to invoke the controversial Title 42 public health measure to allow the expulsion of some 400,000 from the border and deny asylum appeals. Despite his campaign promise for a more humane immigration policy, Biden continued Title 42 until May 2023, when the Covid emergency was officially ended. Two million people were ejected under Biden’s watch.
Thus Biden expelled five times as many migrants as Trump, although that partially reflects more migrants on the border. Overall, Biden has been slightly less draconian than Trump, allowing greater use of humanitarian parole and ending holding families in ICE detention. Biden also reinstated an older version of the citizenship exam after Trump had made the test more difficult.
In the debate, Biden defended his immigration policies, claiming that the Republicans had his hands tied. But as researcher Laura Carlson observed from Mexico, Biden has adopted the Republican framework of immigration as a threat to national security. Neither candidate offered anywhere near a humane solution for the “huddled masses” on the border. Neither did they address why so many risk so much and endure such hardship to mass on the border. (Spoiler alert: it’s not because they crave “our democracy.”)
Alternative views on immigration excluded
Presumptive Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein presented a different perspective on immigration. Barred from the CNN debate, she appeared in a Zoom meeting following the main event. Stein certainly qualified to be included in the nationally-televised debate, because she would be on the ballot in enough states to theoretically win the presidency. But her stances on global warming, peace in Ukraine, no war on China, and against genocide in Palestine would have been against the grain of the two major parties and the corporate media.
Stein was not only excluded from the debate, but the Democrats are trying to keep her from contending in the election. Per a recent Green Party post: “The dirty trick Dems slapped us with legal action to try to keep Jill off the ballot. They’re making good on their threats to sue us off the ballot everywhere and keep our time and resources tied up in frivolous litigation.”
Had Stein been in the debate, she would have implicated US foreign policy as a significant driver of migration to the US. Washington’s promotion and in some cases imposition of a neoliberal economic model, which fails to meet people’s material needs, pushes immigration. Export of the “war on drugs” and sanctioning some one third of humanity are related push factors fueling immigration.
Among the Latin American source countries, immigration has spiked from Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua precisely because these states, striving for socialism, have been targeted for regime change by Washington. US-imposed unilateral coercive measures punish citizens with the misfortune to have leaders not to Washington’s liking.
These measures, euphemistically called sanctions, are designed to make life miserable. According to Switzerland-based international human rights lawyer Alfred de Zayas, sanctions are used by the US “to blackmail, bully and intimidate states that do not readily accept US hegemony.” He adds, “the US has no legal or moral right to sanction or ‘punish’ other states.”
From Nicaragua, journalist John Perry observes, “blaming migration on ‘repressive dictatorships’ allows Washington to pretend that its policies are helping Nicaraguans, when in fact they are impoverishing them.”
Ending the illegal US sanctions would not stop all migration from the impacted countries, but it would be a step in reducing the pressure on the US border. Although Trump and Biden bickered over addressing the symptoms, they remained seemingly clueless about what causes immigration.
Future of US immigration policy
For partisan US politics, the immigration issue is a political football. For a different perspective, a recent Chinese report on human rights in the US is instructive: “Political strife has become a defining feature of US immigration policy. Politicians have forsaken the rights and welfare of immigrants, engaging in divisive attacks on each other over immigration issues…The immigration issue has thus fallen into a vicious circle without a solution.”
Jill Stein’s presence at the debate would surely have elevated it. Toward the end of the two-man slime fest, Biden mumbled – but with great conviction – something about his “handicap.” One would have thought that the incumbent would not have broached the question of his competence. But it turned out to be a golf thing. Trump immediately claimed greater prowess on the links. On the positive side, the debate did not get into pickleball. Nor did they get into immigration causes or solutions, demonstrating the vacuousness of the debate and the impoverished choices offered by the two-party system come November.
The post Trump/Biden Debate Immigration: US Foreign Policy as a Driver Is Ignored first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!— Emma Lazarus’s inscription on the Statue of Liberty
The contestants squared off in the first of the US presidential debates of 2024. Both wore identical white shirts and navy suits with American flag lapel pins. One wore a red tie; the other a blue one. There were other differences, but none quite so substantive.
The immigration issue dominated the debate. The challenger claimed that the country was being menaced by immigrants – marauding hordes of rapists, murders, and mentally ill. They were the ruination of the nation. Social Security and Medicare were jeopardized by the alien element. Immigrants endangered the jobs of blacks and Hispanics. There was nothing good and a lot bad about the threat of the foreign-born, who should be deported in large numbers according to Mr. Trump.
According to the US Census Bureau, the percent foreign-born in the US increased 15.6% from 2010 to 2022, comprising 13.9% of the total population. A significant one in seven people in the US were not born here.
Some of our past presidents celebrated that we are a “nation of immigrants”:
+ Ronald Reagan said, “If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”
+ George H.W. Bush said, “Immigration is not just a link to America’s past; it’s also a bridge to America’s future.”
+ George W. Bush said, “People around the world…come to America. Their talent and hard work and love of freedom have helped make America the leader of the world.”
And incumbent President Biden said…well, nothing to counter Trump’s chauvinistic slander. Not a peep could be heard in defense of immigrants. There was no contesting of the calumny heaped upon immigrants nor was there any recognition of their humanity from Mr. Biden. Rather, his silence – his failure to confront Trump’s pandering to nimby nativism – was complicity by default.
Trump-Biden immigration policy and practice compared
On the issue of immigration, there was no substantive debate on June 27. Drilling deeper, the political practice of the former president and the current president bear more similarities than differences.
Earlier in June, Biden made what the press characterized as a “drastic crackdown” on immigration “closing” the southern border by issuing an executive order to partially ban asylum proceedings. Under Biden, NPR observed, the southern border has been further reinforced, with more military operations and “expedited removals,” than ever before. NPR concluded, “Biden’s asylum restrictions mirror those implemented by Trump.”
While president, Trump had used the excuse of the Covid pandemic to invoke the controversial Title 42 public health measure to allow the expulsion of some 400,000 from the border and deny asylum appeals. Despite his campaign promise for a more humane immigration policy, Biden continued Title 42 until May 2023, when the Covid emergency was officially ended. Two million people were ejected under Biden’s watch.
Thus Biden expelled five times as many migrants as Trump, although that partially reflects more migrants on the border. Overall, Biden has been slightly less draconian than Trump, allowing greater use of humanitarian parole and ending holding families in ICE detention. Biden also reinstated an older version of the citizenship exam after Trump had made the test more difficult.
In the debate, Biden defended his immigration policies, claiming that the Republicans had his hands tied. But as researcher Laura Carlson observed from Mexico, Biden has adopted the Republican framework of immigration as a threat to national security. Neither candidate offered anywhere near a humane solution for the “huddled masses” on the border. Neither did they address why so many risk so much and endure such hardship to mass on the border. (Spoiler alert: it’s not because they crave “our democracy.”)
Alternative views on immigration excluded
Presumptive Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein presented a different perspective on immigration. Barred from the CNN debate, she appeared in a Zoom meeting following the main event. Stein certainly qualified to be included in the nationally-televised debate, because she would be on the ballot in enough states to theoretically win the presidency. But her stances on global warming, peace in Ukraine, no war on China, and against genocide in Palestine would have been against the grain of the two major parties and the corporate media.
Stein was not only excluded from the debate, but the Democrats are trying to keep her from contending in the election. Per a recent Green Party post: “The dirty trick Dems slapped us with legal action to try to keep Jill off the ballot. They’re making good on their threats to sue us off the ballot everywhere and keep our time and resources tied up in frivolous litigation.”
Had Stein been in the debate, she would have implicated US foreign policy as a significant driver of migration to the US. Washington’s promotion and in some cases imposition of a neoliberal economic model, which fails to meet people’s material needs, pushes immigration. Export of the “war on drugs” and sanctioning some one third of humanity are related push factors fueling immigration.
Among the Latin American source countries, immigration has spiked from Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua precisely because these states, striving for socialism, have been targeted for regime change by Washington. US-imposed unilateral coercive measures punish citizens with the misfortune to have leaders not to Washington’s liking.
These measures, euphemistically called sanctions, are designed to make life miserable. According to Switzerland-based international human rights lawyer Alfred de Zayas, sanctions are used by the US “to blackmail, bully and intimidate states that do not readily accept US hegemony.” He adds, “the US has no legal or moral right to sanction or ‘punish’ other states.”
From Nicaragua, journalist John Perry observes, “blaming migration on ‘repressive dictatorships’ allows Washington to pretend that its policies are helping Nicaraguans, when in fact they are impoverishing them.”
Ending the illegal US sanctions would not stop all migration from the impacted countries, but it would be a step in reducing the pressure on the US border. Although Trump and Biden bickered over addressing the symptoms, they remained seemingly clueless about what causes immigration.
Future of US immigration policy
For partisan US politics, the immigration issue is a political football. For a different perspective, a recent Chinese report on human rights in the US is instructive: “Political strife has become a defining feature of US immigration policy. Politicians have forsaken the rights and welfare of immigrants, engaging in divisive attacks on each other over immigration issues…The immigration issue has thus fallen into a vicious circle without a solution.”
Jill Stein’s presence at the debate would surely have elevated it. Toward the end of the two-man slime fest, Biden mumbled – but with great conviction – something about his “handicap.” One would have thought that the incumbent would not have broached the question of his competence. But it turned out to be a golf thing. Trump immediately claimed greater prowess on the links. On the positive side, the debate did not get into pickleball. Nor did they get into immigration causes or solutions, demonstrating the vacuousness of the debate and the impoverished choices offered by the two-party system come November.
The post Trump/Biden Debate Immigration: US Foreign Policy as a Driver Is Ignored first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
It was cruel. Sinister cruel. While Donald Trump was always going to relish the chance to be not only economical with the truth but simply inventive about it, Joe Biden, current Commander in Chief of the United States, leader of the self-described Free World, seemed a vanishing shadow, longing for soft slippers and the fireplace with cocoa, a case of comfort rather than the battling rage of politics.
It need never have happened, and certainly not so early. But the earliest-ever US Presidential election debate, held even before both candidates had been formally confirmed at their party conventions, did much to puncture Biden and hold Trump afloat in odd boosts of credibility. The media were at hand to glory in the matter and taste the morsels of slaughter. NBC News was aghast at the president, who “seemingly struggled even to talk, mostly summing a weak, raspy voice. In the opening minutes, he repeatedly tripped over his words, misspoke and lost his train of thought.”
There was much in the way of stumbling, incoherence, and immaturity – just the sort of thing we need for a White House occupant. Biden mumbled nonsensically at several points, trawling his shattered memory for some reference to Covid before claiming that, “We finally beat Medicare.” It soon became routine to expect mangled figures and fantasy mathematics. (The claim that the Biden administration had created 15,000 jobs, for instance; or the number of trillionaires in the United States.) At some point, it became clear that the fetishised fact checkers were out of a job, if for no reason that both candidates were proving loose with their figures.
At stages, this left Trump, his predatory instinct aroused by a limping animal, able to land a stinging jab or two. “I don’t know if he knows what he said either.” At intervals, as Trump spoke, Biden seemed to vanish into a canyon of stricken vacancy, possibly struggling to recall the talking points his aides had stocked him with over the last few days along with the necessary medications to fuel him. This was elder abuse as a gladiatorial sport, your grandfather abused on live television.
The only time when some balance was restored was the issue of the respective golf handicaps of the debaters. Biden’s claim that he had a handicap of 6 in golf received the predictable sneer from his opponent: “I’ve seen your swing.” Here, the world’s most prominent superpower could be reduced to two elderly men talking about a sport described as being a good walk spoilt. Priorities were confired.
An army of the delusional and deluded have come out with the “truthful” defence on Biden’s part. Forget the competence of the leader, focus on the inner gold of a supposedly good character. Regrettably for those who believe veracity is important in politics, except when it isn’t, this is unlikely to go far. Debates are shows of tedious pomp, displays, projecting a false sense of hot air authority. Biden failed on all counts; Trump could at least muster a semblance of it, his lies embroidered by a passable confidence.
This is not to say that the physically and mentally feeble have evaded White House occupancy. Presidential history is marked by cerebral infirmity and physical enervation. What matters is election, the great electoral con. John F. Kennedy, despite being murderously cut down at the age of 46, was ruined in body. These are the less than flattering words from Christopher Hitchens in a scathing review of Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life in the Times Literary Supplement (Aug 22, 2003): “In addition to being a moral defective and a political disaster, John Kennedy was a physical and probably mental also-ran for most of his presidency.” He was a walking pharmacopeia in office, mortality always more than a threatening suggestion.
Another disaster is also proof than the infirm can still find their way through campaign, ballot box and office. Ronald Reagan may have been celebrated as the master communicator during his presidency, saddled with the grave responsibility of bringing the Cold War to its eventual end. He also tolerated the superstitious interventions of his wafer thin wife on policy, curated through the medium of the astrologer Joan Quigley even as his own mind was taking a lengthy, eventually permanent sabbatical in the realm of dementia. Biden, to put it simply, may still have some room to survive. The question is: can he?
Democratic strategists, at least those reeling from the tingling shock of a cold bath, understood the implications. Others preferred an elaborate ostrich act crowned by sycophantic reassurance. Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina was admirably spineless in telling Biden to “Stay the course.” That said, the sages had already given ample warnings before the debate.
The enchantingly shrill James Carville (mad, bad and dangerous to ignore) had warned about the risk posed by Biden’s age to electoral hopes. Julian Epstein, former Chief Counsel to the US House Judiciary Committee and Staff Director to the House Oversight Committee Democrats, excoriated his party for revealing “their own kind of cowardice in refusing to say that President Biden shouldn’t run for re-election.” The party faithful and apparatchiks were defiant: such criticism was ageist. They had their man.
The choice, as things stand, is for a person weak of mind insisting that he is safer for the US and the world while “knowing how to tell the truth” over a man who remains estranged from the truth, guilty of 34 felony counts for falsifying business accounts, and trumpets the winding back of US global commitments. It left such admirers as Alastair Campbell, former communications chief for British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, mournful: Russia’s Vladimir Putin; China’s Xi Jinping, and the Islamic Republic of Iran would be stifling sobs of joy.
It’s a striking nightmare, throwing the Republic’s politics into sharp relief, taking the shine off a system Americans regard as sacred, exportable and relevant to the globe. A more sober reading is that political reality has bitten, leaving Hunted Biden to barely escape the slaughter, permitting an alternative to be selected before it’s too late. The question for the Democrats will involve allowing Biden to gracefully withdraw or take himself and his entire entourage to the electoral grave.
The post Hunted Biden: The First Presidential Debate Disaster first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
There’s no mincing words—the first presidential debate was a travesty of the highest order. The leading story is President Biden’s horrendous performance and the political crisis it’s sparked among the Democrats. But the failure of the media, not to mention former President Trump’s antics, should also be called out. TRNN contributor Adam H. Johnson joins Mel Buer and Marc Steiner for a postmortem on the debate, and, from the way it’s looking, American democracy itself.
Production: David Hebden
Post-Production: David Hebden
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Mel Buer:
Welcome back, my friends, to the Real News Network podcast. I’m your host, Mel Buer. Before we dive into today’s analysis of the first 2024 presidential debate, I would like to make an important ask of you, our listeners. Whether you’ve got our shows on while you’re making coffee in the morning, put on our podcast during your commute to and from work, or give us a listen throughout the workday, the Real News Network is committed to bringing you ad-free independent journalism that you can count on. We care a lot about what we do and it’s through donations from dedicated listeners like you that we can keep on doing it. Please consider becoming a monthly sustainer of The Real News Network by heading over to therealnews.com/donate. And if you want to stay in touch and get updates about our work, then sign up for our free newsletter at therealnews.com/sign-up. As always, we appreciate your support in whatever form it takes.
Today we’re talking about last night’s first presidential debate, an event that was billed as a historical, momentous occasion for all involved, where former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden squared off against one another for the first time since 2020. It was quite a watch.
With us today to discuss last night’s debate is Adam Johnson In These Times and Real News Network columnist and co-host of the podcast Citations Needed, and our very own Mark Steiner host of the Mark Steiner Show on the Real News Network.
Welcome, guys. Let’s dive in.
Mark Steiner:
Let’s do it.
Adam Johnson:
Thank you for having me on.
Mel Buer:
Yeah, I think probably a good place to start is to discuss the immediate reaction that filtered through the internet after the sort of disastrous performance by President Joe Biden last night. Democratic Party officials were texting reporters at CNN and MSNBC talking about the aggressive panic that was filtering through the ranks and potentially talking about pushing Biden to drop off the ticket ahead of the DNC in August.
Where do we want to start with this? Quite a, I would say, sudden change based on what’s been filtering out as the Democratic Party for the last year. Wouldn’t you say, Adam?
Adam Johnson:
Yeah, if I can play pundit here for a second, rather the media critic, there’s obviously been grumblings about Biden’s very, I think it’s fair to say if we’re going to be in the reality-based community, his very obvious, manifest cognitive problems. I think to put it gently. You look at video even from 2020, God forbid one looks at video from 2016, he’s obviously completely different. It’s very clear there’s some kind of decline going on. This is, I think, manifest to any intellectually honest person.
But the idea I think was that they could sort of stave it off and that regardless of that he was a fundamentally good person who sort of had the working man’s interest at heart, which I’ll dispute. But he certainly was, and I think it’s probably fair to say, at least on the domestic front, assuming which most of our media doesn’t view Palestinians as human beings, but assuming one accepts that they’re not, that he was fundamentally a decent guy, and was better than Trump on pretty much everything. And assuming Gaza, let’s say, is a wash. And that that calculation would kind of push him over the edge, kind of burn Weekend At Bernie’s style.
But there had been grumblings for obviously a while. I mean, you had in 2020 even some people kind of gently touch the issue, because you don’t want to be too explicit because then of course you, one worries, or these Democratic pundits worry about fueling Republican attack ads. But David Ignatius a few months ago at the Washington Post, whose kind of a CIA mouthpiece, was like, “Hey, buddy, it’s time to wrap it up.” Obviously Jon Stewart got a lot of flak for when he stated the obvious, when he said the Emperor was only wearing a G-string. But everyone sort of hand wave it away, because again, there was this sort of threat of Trump. Biden had beaten Trump before, so there was a sense that he had a very long leash because of the fact that, unlike Hillary Clinton, he actually did beat Trump and that he was sort of broadly popular amongst key demos.
But then he began tanking in the polls. And then of course last night, I think where he clearly failed, he fails to sort of maintain a thought for longer than 10 seconds, 15 seconds. If it’s a quick little punchy 10 or 15 second sound bite, he can make it. But it’s very much a struggle to watch him sort of try to do anything over that. I think that, again, that much is obvious.
Now, that isn’t to say Trump doesn’t also have cognitive decline. He’s only three years younger. And I think it’s clear that he does, but it’s just not as profound. And also, I’m pretty sure Trump’s, maybe I’m being, bordering on libelous here, but I think he’s probably on some kind of amphetamine cocktail that for whatever reason Biden is not on. And this is obvious to everybody. Right?
And so today we had a full-blown media, well last night and this morning you had a full-blown media kind of acknowledgement. This is just the front page of the New York Times. Frank Bruni: “Biden cannot go on this.” Nicholas Kristof: “President Biden, it’s time to drop out.” Thomas Friedman: “Joe Biden is a good man and a good president. He must bow out of the race.” Paul Krugman: “The best president of my adult life, needs to withdraw.” And of course, Ezra Klein has been one of the early advocates of him dropping out.
So this is now, from my opinion, and again, I’m curious what you all think, it seems like a Rubicon has been crossed. It seems like the way that coups work, whether it’s a coup in 2014 in Turkey or in Bolivia in 2019, or in this case, a kind of very soft and media coup, you sort of passed the point of no return where you can’t really play it off. And what all these articles just did and what last night even Claire McCaskill, who’s a kind of very loyal, centrist partisan, even some MSNBC panelists, John King at CNN, these are not sort of, none of this is ideological, none of these people are like left-wing or hate Biden for his support of genocide or whatever, what you’ve done is you’ve just cut Trump’s ad campaign for him. He’s just going to say, “Here’s what the liberal media and Democrats think about Biden.”
I don’t see how you come back from that, even if Biden decides to kind of power through. Because I think, and just in terms of practical legal reasons, he’s kind of the only one who can really make that decision, that his nomination is more or less a done deal, and the mechanisms to sort of undo that would require a degree of coordination that simply just doesn’t exist within the Democratic Party, unless of course they’re trying to stop Bernie Sanders, but that’s a separate sort of grievance just with me, more or less. I’m one of those Japanese soldiers who’s still fighting in 1953. I’m not letting that go.
But in this case, it seemed like there was a line that was crossed. And again, I’m curious what you all think. But I just optically, I don’t see how you come back from that; because if I’m the RNC, I’m just cutting an ad with Paul Krugman and Claire McCaskill and all these sort of top Dems saying, “Yeah, this guy’s brain is not working.” More or less is what they said. I mean, they were obviously more gentle about it. And it seems like the only people not acknowledging that reality are those who are playing to the kind of diehard blue wave crowd who view everything as a team sport and view everything as kind of locked in. That Dear Leader has made his decision to stay in.
Mel Buer:
Right.
Adam Johnson:
And we all have to kind of play our respective roles. And there just comes a point where reality becomes too obvious.
Obviously he’s tanking in the polls, he’s tanking in the betting markets, for whatever merit one puts onto that. And more importantly, I think this is really the thing that’s kind of pushed it over the edge in addition to the fact that last night there was two questions where he just genuinely struggled to make a coherent thought and it looked bad, objectively, was that he’s beginning to really pull down other Democrats down ballot, in terms of the Senate races, House races. Everybody, dogcatcher. And there is a kind of bottom-up revolt against that because the splits between how Democrats are polling versus how he’s polling are enormous. In some states, they’re as much as 10 points. So my guess is this is kind of the moment where it’s like, “Okay, let’s…”
And it seems like from a media perspective, they’ve definitely crossed. It’s like the line from The Wire: “If you come at the king, you best not miss.” That’s how coups work. And they’ve come after the king, and if they do miss and he sort of powers through or his team decides to power through, I don’t know how Biden even comes back from that because the narrative is now a bipartisan consensus.
Mel Buer:
Right. Well, I want to throw this to you, but before I throw this to you, Mark, I just want to really draw attention to the fact that if you look at Biden’s debate performance in 2020 to what we saw last night, it really is night and day. There’s some videos circulating on social media of some of the responses that he had in 2020. He sounds far more coherent. He has a strong grasp of policy. He knows what he’s talking about. He’s able to spar with Trump in a meaningful way that is bringing his base together and encouraging the sort of voters that may be on the fence that he’s got a handle on what’s going on. Right? And again, the Biden campaign has put a lot of money and time into presenting Biden as this natural choice, this good challenger to a second Trump term. Mark, you didn’t really come away from last night’s debate feeling very confident in that anymore. Would you say that’s a fair assessment?
Mark Steiner:
Yep. I mean, I came away from watching that debate last night absolutely depressed and angry. The choices that America faces at this moment are really dangerous because Biden clearly is not up to the task and Trump is a racist neo-fascist. And that’s what we’re stuck with at the moment. I don’t see his, Biden’s ego allowing him to be pushed out of the race. It’ll take a lot to make him move over. I have a difficult time seeing that happen.
Look, I was saying this to friends this morning about this, thinking about Real News and how this place is run and how you run institutions, how you run governments. People my age, I’m their age. People my age have had their day to run organizations, to run a country, to run the government. And your role is different as you get older, and they have to be aware of that. And neither one of them want to be aware of that. And I think that we’re facing an utter disaster because the momentum against Biden because of his performance could turn the country over to the right wing and in Senate, House and the White House. And I think we have to really think about that.
And I think that, I talked to two people really early this morning, two Congressional representatives who are on the left, who are really respect a lot, and they’re terrified that the Democrats are going to lose everything. And since there’s no left wing party, there’s no left that can actually kind of fill the vacuum, that would mean that we are facing really frightening next four years and it could be a disaster for this democracy in total. So I think I can’t overemphasize what a dangerous moment we’re facing. The people on the inside have to convince Biden not to run, and I don’t see that happening.
Mel Buer:
Just as a sort of thought experiment, because these conversations have really kind of opened up debate about what an open convention would look like, in the off chance that Jill Biden can convince, if she even wants to, convince her husband to step aside and open the doors for a potentially younger, a different nominee, what’s the sort of process? What does an open convention look like at the DNC in August? Mark, you’ve spent a lot of time covering Democratic conventions. What does that process look like for anyone in our audience who isn’t quite aware or doesn’t know what that might entail?
Mark Steiner:
An open convention without any agenda about where you’re going and what you think is going to happen, is a disaster, I mean, because the infighting will just erupt and it could implode. The Democrats could absolutely implode in an open convention. It sounds horrendously anti-democratic, but they better get their shit together before that.
Adam Johnson:
I mean, I tend to agree. I mean, I think, look, if they can coordinate like they did in March of 2020 to rally around Biden to prevent Sanders, it seems like they can rally around someone.
Mark Steiner:
Right.
Adam Johnson:
And those names are pretty obvious, their ideologically, in the case of Newsom, sort of demographically aligned with Biden. You’re just kind of plugging and playing. Look, if one’s goal is to beat Trump, I think that’s a no-brainer. Because people say, “Oh, well, they have their own problems.” Like a Gavin Newsom or what have you. And it’s like, yeah, whatever, but they’re not dying on stage. I don’t want to sound cruel about it. But the people like Paul Krugman and Frank Bruni and David Ignatius do not intervene here unless this is a level DEFCON Two critical situation. These are not frivolous people. These are not p-
Adam Johnson:
… situation. These are not frivolous people. These are not people who don’t have their fingers on the pulse of what the elites in the party, and frankly, like Wall Street or people who fear Trump [inaudible 00:14:14] thinking. This is not ideological, this is purely a process criticism. And if Biden was 20 years younger, obviously we would not even be having this conversation, and he would probably be up 10, 15 points.
But 74% of Americans have said they have issues with his sort of cognitive issues. And I actually think the framing of age is actually the wrong framing. Maybe I’m being a bit of a precious left-winger here in terms of ageism, but I actually think there are plenty of 80-plus year olds who… Ridley Scott and Martin Scorsese are still pumping out bangers. Just the other day, Dick Van Dyke was tap dancing on the red carpet, he’s 98 years old. Bernie Sanders is perfectly cognitively fine.
The issue is not age. It’s the fact that he has manifest problems answering basic questions. And I think in many ways, the age discourse has permitted people to dance around that fact and abstract it out into this generational discourse. And I actually think that’s not the issue. The issue is he can’t complete a fucking sentence without meandering off. Whether he’s 55 or whether he’s 95 doing that, that’s a fucking problem.
Mark Steiner:
Two things here, man. A. When we talk about age. I interviewed Studs Terkel a dozen times over the course of his life, we got to know each other pretty well. He was really brilliant, could speak, and talk, and think up until the moment he died, almost. Some people can. Some people can’t. Biden can’t. And the greatest danger here is that we are facing a right-wing, neo-fascist tide in this country, and it’s huge.
If you study reconstruction in our history, you can see the roots of it, you can see where it comes from, and you can see its power. And it’s been building, it’s been building since 1970, since ’72, I should say. They’ve been building this movement, and they’re on the verge of seizing power in our country because Biden is going to run, and Biden can’t handle the race. That’s the danger we face. And so that’s why the liberal capitalists in this country are so frightened at the moment because they don’t want the right wing of their class to take power.
Adam Johnson:
Yeah. No, it’s definitely it. Yeah, I think that’s absolutely correct.
Mark Steiner:
And we are in a really, really scary spot. It’s so scary on a personal level, I want my kids to get foreign passports.
Adam Johnson:
That’s why all these leftists being like, “Oh, you should have listened to the left about Biden’s age.” And it’s like, yeah, okay, a lot of leftists did say that, but this is absolutely me coming from the center too. This is not a leftist versus right issue. David Ignatius is not a left-winger, and he said it nine months ago, and obviously, in 2020 people had sort of broached it on CNN in a very gentle way.
So it’s like this is very much a process criticism, it is not an ideological proxy battle, as much as I’d love it to be one. I’d love somehow Biden’s inability to speak to be somehow validating my leftist priors. It isn’t really the issue. The issue is they just committed… Well, you could argue that they backed him in 2020 for ideological reasons, knowing these risks. I think that’s a fair assessment. I think that’s true because this was obvious on the campaign trail in Iowa when he would sort of mutter off, and even in February and January of 2020.
So that’s true. But I think really it is just not a sexy ideological issue, it is fundamentally about his ability to look like he can complete sentences, which is as it turns out, pretty much the most important part about being a president, it’s fundamentally a speech-giving job.
Mark Steiner:
It is. And when you look at him physically though as well, people watch… Deal with the reality here, that people do not want to put a doddering old man in office. It’s a huge part of people who don’t want that. He can barely walk his ass off the stage. The folks like Obama and other people in the Democratic Party need to sit down and talk with this man. They need to say, “It’s time. You’ve got to back off. We’ll use a medical excuse, anything, to back off, to give it to somebody else so that you can stop the right wing from coming into power.”
Mel Buer:
Before we move on to sort of the Adam’s bread and butter, which is CNN’s handling of moderating the debate.
Mark Steiner:
Oh my god [inaudible 00:18:20].
Mel Buer:
I do want to draw attention to some of the conversation. I know this is not necessarily just an age thing, but there is something to be said for the way that power is consolidated in politics in American society, and that it really comes down to tenure and seniority, rather than the merits of younger individuals. And unfortunately, in both sides of our political system, younger folks who have the ability to inject energy into the parties, or the ability to really understand what the vast majority of working people are going through, really it gets kind of shunted aside in favor of what we have now, which is the sort of geriatric gerontocracy that is currently running this country.
Individuals who may be able to put their finger better on the pulse in United States politics, specifically just the material conditions that many people are living under, do not get a foothold in these parties. And so what we end up with is elder statesmen who prioritize things that are important to them, so social security, and pension funds, and Medicaid are big ticket items in a way that doesn’t affect very many individuals writ large.
So there is something to be said about just drawing attention to this issue, and to say that if we are looking for a solution to what is a cyclical problem, at this point, election after election where we are continuing to elect individuals who are increasingly older… Again, this is not an ageist argument, it’s simply just-
Adam Johnson:
I have somewhat of an unpopular opinion about that discourse. And we did a whole episode on it, so I’ll sort of rehash my thesis, and you can take it or leave it, which is that I think that that’s not the way, I think, it’s good to look at it. I think to the extent to which those who are much older have a tendency to be much more conservative, I think the causality is a little backwards. I think that those who survive in politics, it’s an evolutionary selection, they survive because they’re conservative.
Jamal Bowman’s career was just cut short after a mere four years because he took a controversial opinion on Israel. I could tell you countless amount of liberals and leftists who were run out of Congress because they got outspent five to 110 to 121 because they took controversial or left-wing opinions. So, conservatives simply last longer. So the causality is not that they’re old, therefore they’re conservative. The reason why they’re there, and why they remain until their 70s and 80s, is because they took the conservative route.
And so I think for every single Biden we replace with some Pete Buttigieg clone, who’s 40 years old, but has more or less the same shitty politics… In the primary in 2020, Buttigieg ran on against single payer. He had more billionaire donors at one point than Biden did. And Kamala Harris is, of course, a little bit younger, also had a ton of billionaire donors.
So I worry too much about orienting this as a generational thing only because there are so many 25-year-olds working their way through Georgetown, and volunteering for these campaigns with very similar politics that I feel like… And of course, you have Bernie Sanders who’s 80 million years old, and obviously has better politics. And so it’s like the idea that we can somehow tap some sort of Pepsi generation Z, I’m a little cynical, especially when you look at all the psycho-fascists coming up in the Republican ranks.
They had about a dozen like Trump clones who were 35 years old that they elected in 2020 and 2022. So it’s like, yeah, it matters. I guess it matters. I think once one qualifies for things like ideology, class, things of that… race, I think as a sort of fourth and fifth thing, I think it sort of does matter. But ultimately, I don’t know. Because, again, I know so many of these people, I’ve seen them with their dead eyes in DC, that I don’t really… I think one can fall into a trap thinking that somehow the youths are going to save us when there is these ideological neoliberal schools where they pump these fucking people out. And so I’m a little dubious about that. But that’s my personal orientation on this.
Mel Buer:
Any thoughts, Mark?
Mark Steiner:
Well, one of the big failures here for the Democrats at this moment, no matter where they fit on the ideological spectrum from progressive left to moderately conservative, they’re strategically blowing it, and that’s really… A. In my time, I’ve run a lot of campaigns. There are certain aspects of the campaign you’ve got to get right. One is getting people excited and getting out to vote. They’ve forgotten how to organize.
The roots of the Democratic Party are the civil rights movement and the labor movement. Organizing was key to those two movements. And whether it was my time as a labor organizer, or in the civil rights down South when I was young, that’s what moved the ball. You get down with the people, you organize, you pull people out, and you make a fight, and you win strategically. They’re not doing that at all.
Adam Johnson:
Well, in many ways, it’s because they pissed off all the young voters by supporting a genocide in Gaza, and by going hard right on immigration, and doubling down on more cops in cages. Look, in 2020, Biden, for cynical reasons maybe, but he rode the coattails of the George Floyd protests and the kids in cages stuff, and even some of the anti-war movement latched on to him because of what he said about Saudi Arabia and the war in Yemen. And then he just told them all to go fuck off. And so they wonder why they have no enthusiasm in terms of not…
I know young people don’t vote, but like you said, they do organize, and there’s a kind of evangelical wing of any campaign to some extent. And he told them all to go to hell. So it’s like, yeah, of course, that he’s not going to have that kind of following. He built some left-wing goodwill in 2020. Now it may have been pure rhetoric, but he did. And then he alienated a lot of those people. So even that part is… Even setting aside the cognitive issues, he basically just said, “We’re going to try to win over conservative white swing voters in Fairfax County, Virginia,” and that was it, and everyone else can go jump in a lake.
Mark Steiner:
And what they could be doing or should be doing is focusing in on working class voters. There was some really interesting articles that just came out this morning, one in The Nation, and one I think I saw in Common Dreams, talking about what it would take to win over a percentage of white working class voters to ensure that the right wing can’t win. And they’ve got to be able to run a campaign with that in mind, and they’re not doing it. And I-
Adam Johnson:
Well, yeah… Sorry, go ahead.
Mark Steiner:
Go ahead. No, go ahead [inaudible 00:25:20] going to say, Adam.
Adam Johnson:
I was going to say they have done a little bit better than in the past, but it’s not nearly sufficient. Obviously, they picketed with UAW, things like that, and supported some NLRB stuff. But you’re right in the sense that it’s not central to their message, by their own admission. And Axios, they said they were going to focus on preserving democracy. And that’s fine and good, but ultimately that’s not like… How does that put food on my table? Right?
Mel Buer:
We’ll definitely touch on what the Biden campaign has decided not to prioritize, especially in the context of last night’s debate. But I do want to move forward, Adam, and talk about this column that you have coming out soon for In These Times about the performance of Jake Tapper, Dana Bash, and just generally CNN’s handling of, and moderation of the debate. And you had some key points that I want to give you some time to touch on in the context of this conversation.
Adam Johnson:
Yeah. So I had basically four criticisms, and we can drill down from there. The first one was that… and this is one that everybody pointed out, so this is not an original observation, but they did zero fact-checking at all of Trump’s obvious manifest lies. He just sort of said, “The sky was magenta,” and they went, “All right,” and moved on. And even by normal standards…
So according to The New York Times, Reid Epstein says that the Democrats agreed to that format, but I’m not sure that that’s totally accurate, and maybe you can enlighten me on this a little more. I’m pretty sure that Tapper could have pushed back on at least one of the lies. When Trump started talking about liberal doctors murdering newborn babies in cold blood, I feel like that could have been like, “Hey, what’s your evidence on that?” It would have been nice. So that was the first thing, I think, that was obviously… and again, something that Biden partisans have been pointing out, I think, correctly.
I have others, but we could talk about the total lack of any fact-checking. And I don’t mean fact-checking in some kind of nerdy hall monitor sense after the fact. In real time, he was saying things that were clearly not true, they should have confronted him. The thing is, there’s a whole cottage industry [inaudible 00:27:24] Trump fact-checking since 2016, but rarely do you get an opportunity to actually confront him with it since he mostly avoids contentious interviews. But here was a chance where they could have done it, even gently, and they just didn’t do it at all, I mean, at all, not once. He had dozens of falsehoods, dozens of not even debatable… I know sometimes these things exist in the area of the gray subjective, but they’re not even debatable.
Mel Buer:
Right. Well, and in the hours, days leading up to this debate, there was a lot of concern and conversation in the media, and just amongst individuals on social media about how they were going to handle Trump’s falsehoods. We’ve been-
Mel Buer:
They were going to handle Trump’s falsehoods. I mean, we’ve been dealing with Trump just talking out of his ass for 10 years now. 10 years. And I wonder at what point are we going to stop seeing this hindsight, “We should have said something nonsense that usually comes out of mainstream media,” and actually have the ability to kind of check him on these statements? What sucks about this when we’re talking about Trump’s performance versus Biden’s performance is we are focusing on Biden’s complete inability to hang on to a thought when Trump is just talking out of his ass, right? He’s absolutely lying as he’s standing there, but he sounds a little bit more lucid, so people are more willing to hear what he has to say in comparison to Biden’s very abysmal performance, but it’s total nonsense the whole way through.
It was 90 minutes of absolute nonsense that devolved into incoherent shit-slinging, you know what I mean? And I’m frustrated by it. A lot of this could have been very slam dunk sort of pushback and rebuttal on Biden’s part. And I’m equally as frustrated that we have specifically Dana Bash and Jake Tapper who have been like CNN’s best propagandists against the Palestinian cause essentially, and screaming about protesters on their shows, being the ones who are supposed to be moderating what is very consequential conversation, debate between these two candidates.
Mark Steiner:
One of the biggest failures in this debate were the moderators. They didn’t do their job. I mean, when you moderate a debate between candidates and you know one of the candidates has lied and stated falsehoods, you stop and you confront that and you confront them with the facts and say, “Explain yourself.” They didn’t do it at all. They just sat there like a lump on a log and allow lies to happen. That’s not how you run a debate. That’s not how you run a discussion.
Mel Buer:
It’s particularly frustrating because they had the ability to cut off the mics. There’s no live audience that causes disruptions, right? The actual space that they created in order to have this debate is kind of purpose built to be able to take a moment, fact check, ask these questions, turn off the mics, be able to inject that sort of rebuttals that need to be made in order to challenge them on these statements. And instead we get… I don’t know what their reasoning was. Did they think that if they gave Trump enough rope to hang himself with that, it would actually-
Adam Johnson:
My guess is that was-
Mel Buer:
He’d be clear.
Adam Johnson:
It was clearly an editorial decision. I suspect that that was the terms they agreed to with the Trump campaign to get him to show up. The question then becomes… Well, again, CNN forfeiting any kind of journalistic for the purpose of having a debate is its own discussion. But then the question becomes why would Biden agree to that knowing that he can’t really rebut things because he can’t form a thought longer than 15 seconds, which he didn’t do at all? I mean, he sort of did towards the end a little bit, but it was kind of flailing and it was more of the less complicated stuff, like, “On January 6th, I was out fly-fishing, what are you talking about?” Kind of stuff. But the lack of any kind of plan for that from the Biden White House… Again, clearly they didn’t think they were going to do it, and they supposedly agreed to terms that were going to just let Trump say whatever he wanted regardless of its fidelity to reality.
So I don’t know. It’s incompetence on the Biden’s White House either way. But ultimately, again, this is CNN’s… It’s 50% CNN’s responsibility too. As an extensive news organization, their job is to delineate between things that are obviously false. I mean, again, I know there’s a lot of gray area, but these things he said about governors murdering babies and immigrant rapists by the millions… And I mean, all this stuff mean he said, lie after lie after lie. You can go read it at NPR or CNN. I mean, these fact checks are pretty straightforward. They didn’t do anything. And even I, the most jaded, sort of black-hearted media critic in the world was a little taken aback that they didn’t even bother doing any kind… I mean, sometimes they’ll do sort of a token one here and there. They did that in 2020, but they didn’t even do that. So my assumption is it was actually an editorial choice from the beginning that they were not going to push back on anything was on a factual basis that we were. This is a purely postmodern debate.
Mel Buer:
In the context of these moderations and potential future debates… There are supposed to be future debates between Trump and Biden and the Biden campaign this week today has already put out statements saying that they are planning to do an additional debate in September after the DNC closes, which to me seems… I mean, first off, Mark or Adam, do you think the Trump campaign will agree to it? Is that even up in the air? Because it seems like this was already kind of a nightmare scenario, trying to get him to agree to this current debate.
And secondly, is this advisable given Biden’s performance? Do we really think that in the next couple of months there’s going to be a chance to turn this around? Are we hope…? I mean, it seems to me like if the Biden campaign is saying, “We’re committed to September,” not only is that signaling like the DNC will go the way that we think it will go and will not be an open convention, which we already think is unlikely, and two folks are kind of closing the wagons around the idea where it was just one bad debate performance. What happens if his performance is the same or worse? I mean, thoughts, Adam, Mark?
Adam Johnson:
Unless he has a secret cure for cognitive decline, I don’t know what that even means.
Mark Steiner:
The issue here is that between now and September, in order to stop Trump and the right wing Democrats have to take everything they have with massive media campaigns and doing stuff on the grassroots level to turn it around. They can make a mockery of everything Trump said and what he’s done. And I think that they’ve got to play hardball. They got to go out and fight. It’s the only way they’re going to stop this. And Biden, let him have his sound bites. Let him take a rest over the summer, let him make his speeches and walk off the stage, and hopefully they can prep him and have even ready for September. But the Democratic Party itself, if it’s worth anything, has to be out there, gloves off, fighting in the street, on the airwaves, organizing. It’s the only way they stop this, and I don’t know if they have the wherewithal to do it. I just don’t know.
Adam Johnson:
Yeah, I mean, the fish rots from the head. It’s clear that… I mean, look at… Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, and Anthony Blinken, the Secretary of State, even on the topic of Gaza, which I follow very closely, they contradict each other all the time. I mean, one person says one thing and another person says another thing. So even on foreign policy, the CIA is negotiating one thing, meanwhile the state department’s negotiating something else. There is clearly not really anyone in charge other than maybe the chief of staff. And even that gets convoluted. So as far as the campaign goes, what you appear to have is a lot of people… Now, I’ll be generous and say some of them genuinely feel like they have the best shot of beating Trump and they think Biden’s fundamentally a decent guy, even if he’s not all there, but they have a lot of people want to keep their jobs, keep their status, who have every incentive to live in denial.
They live in a media bubble. They read Matt Yglesias, they’d be watching MSNBC, which is why yesterday was so significant because Matt Yglesias and MSNBC came out and said, “This guy’s got to drop out.” I mean, Morning Joe, who Biden watches religiously said it. So there’s a real threshold that was broken. Whether or not it works, who knows, but this is not like it was a few months ago or a year ago or four years ago. And there’s not really any incentive for them to sort of stop. And what you’ve needed is you’ve needed this kind of crescendo again. Like all coups, whether it be a hard coup or a soft coup, it’s kind of in the air and people formulate and pick a side and you hope to God you’re on the winning side. Now, obviously Biden’s not going to go around summarily executing people who criticize him in the New York Times, although that would be pretty cool, but it’s sort of same dynamic and I don’t know, there’s just no way he comes back from this.
And I have a rule when I go into pundit mode, which I’ve mostly been in this episode or this show, I don’t make predictive… I don’t like to be predictive because I’m never right. I’m bad… I’m a horrible gambler. I’m never right about guessing the future. But I will say that I just can’t foresee… I’ll phrase it in a more conservative way. I don’t know how you come back from the entire liberal media apparatus calling you a doddering old fool. I don’t know what that even looks like. And to the extent to which he was already down three or four points on average, models had him a 2-1 underdog, I don’t know what you build from that, especially since you’ve told your base, your progressive base to go jump on a bike with no seat. So I don’t even know where this energy is supposed to come from.
Are we supposed to assume that the Wall Street people running his campaign suddenly develop a backbone or some ideological commitments? It’s not even clear what they’re fighting for. Yeah, it’s basically status quo maintenance. There’s no vision. It’s like, “We’ve just got to fend off Trump. We’ve got to maintain what we have.” And I get that, and there’s value to that and Trump’s Supreme Court Justices’ being dispositive in destroying the liberal state in the last 24 hours is evidence of why that’s important. But nevertheless, I don’t know where that comes from. So I don’t even know what that looks like. I don’t see any other out here but for him to sort of come up with some face-saving narrative about wanting to be close to his son or some bullshit and something… Maybe some other-
Mark Steiner:
Even the CNN poll found that… I think it was 57% of the people who watched that debate said Biden lost, and they don’t have any confidence in Biden of the people who watched that debate.
Mel Buer:
On the flip side though, that flash poll also said that 81% of individuals did not have their voting commitment changed by watching the debate. So that’s also something to look at. I don’t want to dive too heavily into polling because as we know, those numbers are famously difficult to parse, and we really don’t know how this is going to change the electorate’s opinions just one day after. But I think, Adam, you bring up a point that I think is really kind of a good way for us to move into the next sort of section of this conversation before we wind it down, is really substantive policy issues that were brought up.
And I put that in air quotes because really so much of this was incoherent shit-slinging against each other, right? There really wasn’t the ability to have what we would normally see from a debate. It felt more like two old men arguing over the last backgammon game in the nursing home, unfortunately. But there are things that we really kind of want to draw out here. One, and I think this is a good place to start, Adam and Mark, if you have thoughts about this, is really the sort of severity of Trump’s xenophobic, racist statements that he made that over the course of the debate got even more brutal as he realized that Biden was not going to substantively push back against what comments he was making.
Adam Johnson:
Well, they’ve embraced the Republican playbook on immigration, so there’s not a lot of leg to stand on. His surrogates last February literally called it the GOP plan in terms of when he went hard right on immigration. So it’s hard to substantively… I agree with this. Was he going to say, “I agree with your substance. I agree we should further militarize the border and undermine decades of asylum law and carry on all your agenda, but do so less racistly?” I mean what’s he really going to say, even if he was… It involves-
Mel Buer:
Fair point, yeah.
Adam Johnson:
Even if his marbles were all there in terms of Palestine, Gaza… Trump used Palestinian as a pejorative. He said, “You’re acting like a Palestinian,” and it sort of… Of course, Tapper didn’t push back and Bash didn’t push back, and Biden just shrugged and said, “Yeah, whatever. They’re not human. They don’t matter.” So again, this is kind a microcosm of our political environment. The fascists say something extreme and racist, and the Democrat’s sort of maybe hemming a little bit, but mostly just kind of move on and there’s not really any sense that anyone’s worth fighting for, that any vulnerable community can be thrown under the bus that any minute if it’s seen as slightly electorally advantageous to the Democrats. So there’s no real sense of solidarity, there’s no sense of racial justice.
They’ve just gone from kneeling in kente cloth to just embracing Latimer and punitive sort of right-wing policies at the border, and of course, in Gaza. So there’s no sort of counter vision. It’s mostly just kinder, gentler machine gun hand type stuff. So I am not even sure how he would push back, and this is why, of course, Tapper and Bash indulged these kind of racist framings, which I wrote they did around immigration, right? They just framed them as kind of criminals and they’re burden on society. They weren’t even seen as humans worthy of any kind of… That have any constituency in this race or any kind of stake in what the so-called border security is because both parties have embraced that premise. And when something’s bipartisan, that’s it. That’s the end of the conversation. The worst place to be in the world is on the business end of a bipartisan consensus because you have no… You’re not… You’re fringe, you don’t…
Adam Johnson:
… because you’re fringe. You don’t matter. Whether you’re an immigrant or whether you’re in Palestine, if you’re on the business end of a bipartisan consensus, there’s no pushback. And so this is the world with which Bash and Tapper, sounds like a TNT show, Bash and Tapper operate in, which is like once it’s decided that Republicans and Democrats are going to embrace this sort of militant border militarization, border security framework, then that’s it. So that’s why all the questions are just going to be super glib and racist, and then they just kind of move on.
Mel Buer:
Marc, do you want to talk about what wasn’t discussed? There were no questions about labor, which I shouldn’t be surprised by, but a big part of Biden’s administration and what he ran on in 2020, and in some circles what Trump tries to position himself as, is this friend of labor. And as we discussed earlier in our conversation, a huge part of grassroots organizing is the labor movement. And the labor movement has been experiencing a really encouraging uptick in new organizing, in labor wins, electoral wins, contract wins, won strikes in the last 18 months, and I was frankly a little surprised that we didn’t even get to that point where we could… That seemed like, in terms of rhetoric, that seemed like a really no-brainer place to go, and we didn’t hear anything about that at all last night.
Mark Steiner:
No, nothing. I think that the whole debate, the way it was structured sucked, from top to bottom, and I just can’t say enough about how I really dislike the moderators. It’s not how you moderate a debate, not a political debate in this country for the future of the country, or if it’s a mayor’s debate. You push. You don’t just sit there. And I think that the labor aspect of this is that if they had been given time for real strong opening and closing statements, he could have pushed the labor issue. He could have pushed it into Trump’s face as being only there for the billionaires, only there for the wealthy, not caring about the working man in America. They’re making no effort to appeal to that at all. And there is, because there’s a rising labor movement. We cover it here at The Real News. Things are happening out there, the class is moving, and they have to address that. And they’re not going to address it.
Mel Buer:
Unfortunately, it’s just a real missed opportunity. As you know, I cover the labor movement pretty extensively, and some of the largest labor unions in the country and organizations like the AFLCIO have really put their weight behind endorsements for Biden. As a union journalist, as an individual part of a union, it is a bit of a sting to not see anyone in the administration prioritize that in such a high-profile event like the debate last night.
Adam Johnson:
Yeah, we can talk about that, too, because in my piece I write about how the fact that the words poverty, union, poor, labor, or homelessness weren’t mentioned at all. Labor wasn’t mentioned at all. So the poor and the working class, of course, are invisibleized. They did kind of touch on inflation, they touched on racial wealth gap a little bit and the rising cost of childcare, but that was it. But poverty, and certainly not organized labor, especially given the rise in organized labor since the last debate, just a non-issue. And of course, it’s an issue that would ultimately arm Trump despite his superficial rhetoric.
Mark Steiner:
Can you imagine if someone actually said, if Biden actually said something like, “We’re supporting the rise in labor unions in America. We want to make sure the working man has everything that he deserve, working people, everything they deserve,” if he had pushed that idea? He could have bridged the racial divide talking about class and labor. He could have done many things that would’ve excited voters and brought them in. He didn’t do a thing.
Mel Buer:
It’s a night and day difference, too, between Trump’s handling of the labor movement during his tenure and his administration and what Biden has done in the last four years.
Adam Johnson:
And the thing is, we also have to measure it in relative terms. This is someone who has been convicted of 34 felonies a few weeks ago, someone who’s under 91 different indictments, someone who is, again, cheated on his pregnant wife in a public way, someone who habitually lies, someone who’s… Again, Biden pointed this out, somewhat sheepishly, but 40 of his 44 former cabinet officials won’t endorse him. This is someone who’s just a vile fucking human being, and he’s up in the polls by 5%. That is a testament to the utter collapse and failure of the democratic establishment. We’re not talking about fucking Mitt Romney. We’re not talking about some plug-and-play Republican. We’re talking about someone who has unfavorables as high as herpes, and they’re still losing.
Mark Steiner:
I’m going to go back to the moderators again for a minute.
Mel Buer:
Yeah. Go for it.
Mark Steiner:
They should have pushed those issues specifically at Trump. Ask Trump the question, “You’re under X amount of indictments. You’ve been accused of rape. We need you to respond to that for American people.”
Adam Johnson:
Yeah, they didn’t do any that.
Mark Steiner:
They didn’t do that. How could you not do that? If you are a journalist, if you’re in front of a person running for office, you ask those kinds of questions. You don’t just let it sit there.
Adam Johnson:
We’re just so desensitized to all the evil shit he’s done. It’s just taken for granted, like, “Oh, it’s just given. It’s a given.” It’s like, I don’t know. We should still talk about it. We should still talk about, again, the multiple rape charges, the campaign fraud, the multiple crimes. Again, all this stuff just gets washed away, and we’re asking… They have to treat him like he’s some sort of esteemed statesman.
Mel Buer:
Well, and even the important questions, I know Dana Bash pushed back at least once on getting him to answer about honoring the results of the election, he gave a non-answer both times, and she just lets that second non-answer go-
Mark Steiner:
Right. She should have said, “You didn’t answer the question.”
Mel Buer:
Yes or no.
Mark Steiner:
This is what I asked you.
Mel Buer:
Right. And-
Adam Johnson:
Well, he did the if/then. He was like, “If it’s legal,” and it’s like, well, clearly you’re never going to think it’s legal because you live in an alternate fucking universe.
Mel Buer:
Yeah, so all in all, ridiculous evening. Before we close it out here, I do just want to kind of take a moment, perhaps in absurd levity… I don’t know how to really handle… My brain is still trying to handle exactly what the hell happened last night. But I do want to touch on just the fact that it was an absurd debate, surreal levels of absurd. It still blows my mind that these two men derailed the entire conversation for at least five minutes to have a dick-swinging contest about golf. Are you kidding? Why? Why is this our political reality right now?
Adam Johnson:
Because they’re old white guys who play golf. I think it might be one of the things they have in common. Trump owns golf courses. I think it was a reference to him lying about his weight on his arrest record. I think that was what he was referencing. He said he was 235. I think he was trying to-
Mel Buer:
Oh, that was in response [inaudible 00:49:09] to the question about their age, actually.
Adam Johnson:
Oh, was it? There was some point where he tried to fat-bait him, and I was like, “Jesus Christ.” And it wasn’t done well, so it was just kind of awkward.
Mel Buer:
If we want to talk about final questions, that was a question that was posed to both of them. And Biden’s answer was to say, “You know, back in my day, I was considered the youngest member of the Senate,” or whatever, and then he goes, “And now I’m considered the oldest and I have a lot of experience,” and then he mumbled off and lost the plot there. And Trump’s answer was about his vitality and brings up golf as the sort of marker of his vitality as a 78-year-old man, and it led to the two of them ribbing each other about their golf swings and who would win on a back nine. I find that to be so absurd. I find it absurd that we even have to ask this question in the first place, really. If your physical fitness for office is called into question because you are 80 years old, I don’t know, man. I’m frustrated.
Mark Steiner:
As a 78-year-old guy myself, I don’t play golf, but people in power love playing golf. They can’t get enough of it. The absurdity of last night’s debate was profound. I don’t care if they were 78, 81, or 36 and 47. The debate was absurd. These two men should not be vying for leadership of the United States of America. Period. They’re incompetent, and I think that’s what came out of last night was total incompetence. Again, I’ll go back to what I said in the very beginning, last night’s debate, in my going back and forth online with people, is painting a very frightening picture of the future of the United States and the planet, and we have to be on top of it, and we have to be resisting it and standing up to it and organizing in the face of it because we’re facing a shit-show.
Mel Buer:
Well said, Marc. Any final thoughts, Adam? We’re coming to the close [inaudible 00:51:17]-
Adam Johnson:
Yeah, it’s a popular rhetoric, people say, “Well, people want to obsess over Biden, his cognitive this and cognitive of that, but what about Trump’s scandals and this and that?” It’s like the Republicans, they just fall in line. And it’s like, well, yeah, they’re Republicans. They’re kind of [inaudible 00:51:30] evil. That’s the point. They’re authoritarians. Democrats are supposed to be the sober, responsible party, and the centrists revolt against Biden because, again, I think it’s very clearly he looks bad and is declining and his poll numbers are in the garbage.
These are people who want to be Trump. Hanging on to a bad hand does not make you a more passionate poker player. It makes you an idiot. This idea that somehow abandoning Trump is a pro, or rather abandoning Biden is a pro-Trump position, I think at this point, again, for things to get this bad, for these people to do this… Again, these are not frivolous people. These are people who have a lot to lose to step out on a limb and who are partisan hacks. I don’t even mean that pejoratively; it’s just their job… they wouldn’t do it unless it was a really bad emergency. And I think that this idea that you’re doing the party a favor by being a blind loyalist I think is bizarre to me because the Democrats are supposed to be the responsible party. They’re supposed to be the party that thinks about the world outside of their own little media bubbles.
Mel Buer:
Yeah. I would say my final thought is along those lines, Adam, that if we are faced with this very real existential threat to our democracy in the form of Trump’s Christofascism, then it would behoove the opposing party to furnish a candidate who can be challenger to that. It is distressing that this was not recognized or willfully ignored at the first sign of trouble. And now we’ve reached a point where millions of people watched that debate last night and are rethinking their choice, and that is unfortunate. I guess it remains to be seen how it’ll be handled and what’s going to happen over the next couple of years.
But thank you to both of you for coming on and talking about this and offering some really good analysis of the incoherence that we witnessed last night, and I look forward to having further conversations about what’s going on with our… as we get closer to the general election. So thanks for coming on, both of you, and I really appreciate it.
Mark Steiner:
Thank you. It was great. Good to meet you, Adam.
Adam Johnson:
Good to meet you.
Mel Buer:
That’s it for us here at The Real News Network podcast. Once again, I am your host, Mel Buer. If you liked today’s episode, be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get notified when the next one drops. You can find us on most platforms, including Spotify and YouTube. Thank you so much for sticking around, and we’ll see you next time.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
The Biden administration is releasing part of a shipment of bombs that was suspended due to supposed concerns over Israel’s invasion of Rafah — nearly two months into Israeli forces’ Rafah raid that U.S. officials once said they sought to prevent. Axios reported on Thursday, citing an Israeli official, that the administration is expected to deliver 1,700 500 pound-bombs to Israel in two weeks when…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Over more than an hour and a half of back-and-forth, climate change got just a couple minutes of airtime during a CNN-hosted debate between President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump on Thursday. It was the first time the men had faced each other on the debate stage since October 2020. Both candidates were reportedly eager for the confrontation, with Biden’s team seeking to warn voters…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Last night’s presidential debate was an indication of how little both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump understand the truth of the Israeli occupation and genocide in Palestine, and how unwilling and incapable either administration would be of supporting an end to U.S.-enabled wars in the Middle East and achieving lasting peace and stability in the region.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Thursday’s CNN debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump was “a really, really rough night for those who are fighting for immigrant rights,” says Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network. “Trump repeatedly was stoking a moral panic on immigration, and Biden had very little in response.” Both candidates boasted about restricting immigration and…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance Thursday evening against presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump — an unhinged, would-be authoritarian whose lies were glaring and constant — sent much of the Democratic Party establishment into a spiral of panic and ignited calls for the incumbent to step aside to allow another Democratic candidate to take on the former president in November.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In the first presidential debate of 2024, former President Donald Trump defended abortion restrictions levied by Republican-led states across the country and falsely accused Democrats of supporting the murder of babies after they are born. President Joe Biden, who has staked his reelection campaign on reproductive rights, called the end of federal abortion protections “a terrible thing” but did…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Erik Bulatov (USSR), People in the Landscape, 1976.
There was a time when calls for a nuclear-free Europe rang across the continent. It began with the Stockholm Appeal (1950), which opened with the powerful words ‘We demand the outlawing of atomic weapons as instruments of intimidation and mass murder of peoples’ and then deepened with the Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament (1980), which issued the chilling warning ‘We are entering the most dangerous decade in human history’. Roughly 274 million people signed the Stockholm Appeal, including – as is often reported – the entire adult population of the Soviet Union. Yet, since the European appeal of 1980, it feels as if each decade has been more and more dangerous than the previous one. ‘It is still 90 seconds to midnight’, the editors at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (the keepers of the Doomsday Clock) wrote in January. Midnight is Armageddon. In 1949, the clock sat at three minutes to midnight, and in 1980 it had retreated slightly from the precipice, back to seven minutes to midnight. By 2023, however, the clock’s hand had moved all the way up to ninety seconds to midnight, where it remains, the closest we have ever been to full-scale annihilation.
This precarious situation is threatening to reach a tipping point in Europe today. To understand the dangerous possibilities that could be unleashed by the intensified provocations around Ukraine, we collaborated with No Cold War to produce briefing no. 14, NATO’s Actions in Ukraine Are More Dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis. Please read this text carefully and circulate it as widely as possible.
For the past two years, Europe’s largest war since 1945 has been raging in Ukraine. The root cause of this war is the US-driven attempt to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) into Ukraine. This violates the promises the West made to the Soviet Union during the end of the Cold War, such as that NATO would move ‘not one inch eastward’, as US Secretary of State James Baker assured Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990. Over the past decade, the Global North has repeatedly snubbed Russian requests for security guarantees. It was this disregard for Russian concerns that led to the outbreak of the conflict in 2014 and the war in 2022.
Today, a nuclear-armed NATO and a nuclear-armed Russia are in direct conflict in Ukraine. Instead of taking steps to bring this war to an end, NATO has made several new announcements in recent months that threaten to escalate the situation into a still more serious conflict with the potential to spill beyond Ukraine’s borders. It is no exaggeration to say that this conflict has created the greatest threat to world peace since the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962).
This extremely dangerous escalation confirms the correctness of the majority of US experts on Russia and Eastern Europe, who have long warned against the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe. In 1997, George Kennan, the principal architect of US policy in the Cold War, said that this strategy is ‘the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era’. The Ukraine war and the dangers of further escalation fully affirm the seriousness of his warning.
Elif Uras (Turkey), Kapital, 2009.
How Is NATO Escalating the Conflict in Ukraine?
The most dangerous recent developments in this conflict are the decisions by the US and Britain in May to authorise Ukraine to use weapons supplied by the two countries to conduct military attacks inside Russia. Ukraine’s government immediately used this in the most provocative way by attacking Russia’s ballistic missile early warning system. This warning system plays no role in the Ukraine war but is a central part of Russia’s defence system against strategic nuclear attack. In addition, the British government supplied Ukraine with Storm Shadow missiles that have a range of over 250 km (155 miles) and can hit targets not only on the battleground but far inside Russia. The use of NATO weapons to attack Russia risks an equivalent Russian counter-response, threatening to spread the war beyond Ukraine.
This was followed by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s June announcement that a NATO headquarter for operations in the Ukraine war had been created at the US military base in Wiesbaden, Germany, with 700 initial staff. On 7 June, French President Emmanuel Macron said that his government was working to ‘finalise a coalition’ of NATO countries willing to send troops to Ukraine to ‘train’ Ukrainian forces. This would place NATO forces directly in the war. As the Vietnam War and other conflicts have shown, such ‘trainers’ organise and direct fighting, thus becoming targets for attacks.
Nadia Abu-Aitah (Switzerland), Breaking Free, 2021.
Why Is Escalation in Ukraine More Dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis?
The Cuban Missile Crisis was the product of an adventurist miscalculation by Soviet leadership that the US would tolerate the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles only 144 km from the nearest US shore and roughly 1,800 km from Washington. Such a deployment would have made it impossible for the US to defend against a nuclear strike and would have ‘levelled the playing field’, since the US already had such capabilities vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. The US, predictably, made it clear that this would not be tolerated and that it would prevent it by any means necessary, including nuclear war. With the Doomsday Clock at 12 minutes to midnight, the Soviet leadership realised its miscalculation and, after a few days of intense crisis, withdrew the missiles. This was followed by a relaxation of US-Soviet tensions, leading to the first Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (1963).
No bullets flew between the US and the USSR in 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis was an extremely dangerous short-term incident that could have ignited large-scale – including nuclear – war. However, unlike the Ukraine war, it did not flow from an already existing and intensifying dynamic of war by either the US or the USSR. Thus, while extremely dangerous, the situation could also be, and was, rapidly resolved.
The situation in Ukraine, as well as the growing conflict around China, are more structurally dangerous. Direct confrontation is taking place between NATO and Russia, where the US just authorised direct military strikes (imagine if, during the 1962 crisis, Cuban forces armed and trained by the Soviet Union had carried out major military strikes in Florida). Meanwhile, the US is directly raising military tensions with China around Taiwan and the South China Sea, as well as in the Korean Peninsula. The US government understands that it cannot withstand erosion to its position of global primacy and rightly believes that it may lose its economic dominance to China. That is why it increasingly moves issues onto the military terrain, where it still maintains an advantage. The US position on Gaza is significantly determined by its understanding that it cannot afford a blow to its military supremacy, embodied in the regime that it controls in Israel.
The US and its NATO partners are responsible for 74.3% of global military spending. Within the context of the US’s increasing drive for war and use of military means, the situation in Ukraine, and potentially around China, are, in reality, as dangerous, and potentially more dangerous, than the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Tatiana Grinevich (Belarus), The River of Wishes, 2012.
How Are the Warring Parties to Negotiate?
Hours after Russian troops entered Ukraine, both sides began to talk about a drawdown of tensions. These negotiations developed in Belarus and Turkey before they were scuttled by NATO’s assurances to Ukraine of endless and bottomless support to ‘weaken’ Russia. If those early negotiations had developed, thousands of lives would have been spared. All such wars end in negotiations, which is why the sooner they could have happened, the better. This is a view that is now openly acknowledged by Ukrainians. Vadym Skibitsky, deputy head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, told The Economist that negotiations are on the horizon.
For a long time now, the Russia-Ukraine frontline has not moved dramatically. In February 2024, the Chinese government released a twelve-point set of principles to guide a peace process. These points – including ‘abandoning the Cold War mentality’ – should have been seriously considered by the belligerent sides. But the NATO states simply ignored them. Several months later, a Ukraine-driven conference was held in Switzerland from 15–16 June, to which Russia was not invited and which ended with a communiqué that borrowed many of the Chinese proposals about nuclear safety, food security, and prisoner exchanges.
Velislava Gecheva (Bulgaria), Homo photographicus, 2014.
While a number of states – from Albania to Uruguay – signed the document, other countries that attended the meeting refused to sign on for a range of reasons, including their sense that the text did not take Russia’s security concerns seriously. Among the countries that did not sign are Armenia, Bahrain, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Libya, Mauritius, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates. A few days before the Switzerland conference, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin stated his conditions for peace, which include a guarantee that Ukraine will not join NATO. This view is shared by those countries of the Global South that did not join the Switzerland statement.
Both Russia and Ukraine are willing to negotiate. Why should the NATO states be allowed to prolong a war that threatens world peace? The upcoming NATO summit in Washington from 9–11 July must hear, loudly and clearly, that the world does not want its dangerous war or decadent militarism. The world’s peoples want to build bridges, not blow them up.
Maxim Kantor (Russia), Two Versions of History, 1993.
Briefing no. 14, a clear assessment of current dangers around the escalation in and around Ukraine, underscores the need, as Abdullah El Harif of the Workers’ Democratic Way party in Morocco and I wrote in the Bouficha Appeal Against the Preparations for War in 2020, for the peoples of the world to:
Sensitive people around the world must make their voices heard on the streets and in the corridors of power to end this dangerous war, and indeed to set us on a path beyond capitalism’s world of unending wars.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Erik Bulatov (USSR), People in the Landscape, 1976.
There was a time when calls for a nuclear-free Europe rang across the continent. It began with the Stockholm Appeal (1950), which opened with the powerful words ‘We demand the outlawing of atomic weapons as instruments of intimidation and mass murder of peoples’ and then deepened with the Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament (1980), which issued the chilling warning ‘We are entering the most dangerous decade in human history’. Roughly 274 million people signed the Stockholm Appeal, including – as is often reported – the entire adult population of the Soviet Union. Yet, since the European appeal of 1980, it feels as if each decade has been more and more dangerous than the previous one. ‘It is still 90 seconds to midnight’, the editors at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (the keepers of the Doomsday Clock) wrote in January. Midnight is Armageddon. In 1949, the clock sat at three minutes to midnight, and in 1980 it had retreated slightly from the precipice, back to seven minutes to midnight. By 2023, however, the clock’s hand had moved all the way up to ninety seconds to midnight, where it remains, the closest we have ever been to full-scale annihilation.
This precarious situation is threatening to reach a tipping point in Europe today. To understand the dangerous possibilities that could be unleashed by the intensified provocations around Ukraine, we collaborated with No Cold War to produce briefing no. 14, NATO’s Actions in Ukraine Are More Dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis. Please read this text carefully and circulate it as widely as possible.
For the past two years, Europe’s largest war since 1945 has been raging in Ukraine. The root cause of this war is the US-driven attempt to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) into Ukraine. This violates the promises the West made to the Soviet Union during the end of the Cold War, such as that NATO would move ‘not one inch eastward’, as US Secretary of State James Baker assured Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990. Over the past decade, the Global North has repeatedly snubbed Russian requests for security guarantees. It was this disregard for Russian concerns that led to the outbreak of the conflict in 2014 and the war in 2022.
Today, a nuclear-armed NATO and a nuclear-armed Russia are in direct conflict in Ukraine. Instead of taking steps to bring this war to an end, NATO has made several new announcements in recent months that threaten to escalate the situation into a still more serious conflict with the potential to spill beyond Ukraine’s borders. It is no exaggeration to say that this conflict has created the greatest threat to world peace since the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962).
This extremely dangerous escalation confirms the correctness of the majority of US experts on Russia and Eastern Europe, who have long warned against the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe. In 1997, George Kennan, the principal architect of US policy in the Cold War, said that this strategy is ‘the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era’. The Ukraine war and the dangers of further escalation fully affirm the seriousness of his warning.
Elif Uras (Turkey), Kapital, 2009.
How Is NATO Escalating the Conflict in Ukraine?
The most dangerous recent developments in this conflict are the decisions by the US and Britain in May to authorise Ukraine to use weapons supplied by the two countries to conduct military attacks inside Russia. Ukraine’s government immediately used this in the most provocative way by attacking Russia’s ballistic missile early warning system. This warning system plays no role in the Ukraine war but is a central part of Russia’s defence system against strategic nuclear attack. In addition, the British government supplied Ukraine with Storm Shadow missiles that have a range of over 250 km (155 miles) and can hit targets not only on the battleground but far inside Russia. The use of NATO weapons to attack Russia risks an equivalent Russian counter-response, threatening to spread the war beyond Ukraine.
This was followed by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s June announcement that a NATO headquarter for operations in the Ukraine war had been created at the US military base in Wiesbaden, Germany, with 700 initial staff. On 7 June, French President Emmanuel Macron said that his government was working to ‘finalise a coalition’ of NATO countries willing to send troops to Ukraine to ‘train’ Ukrainian forces. This would place NATO forces directly in the war. As the Vietnam War and other conflicts have shown, such ‘trainers’ organise and direct fighting, thus becoming targets for attacks.
Nadia Abu-Aitah (Switzerland), Breaking Free, 2021.
Why Is Escalation in Ukraine More Dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis?
The Cuban Missile Crisis was the product of an adventurist miscalculation by Soviet leadership that the US would tolerate the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles only 144 km from the nearest US shore and roughly 1,800 km from Washington. Such a deployment would have made it impossible for the US to defend against a nuclear strike and would have ‘levelled the playing field’, since the US already had such capabilities vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. The US, predictably, made it clear that this would not be tolerated and that it would prevent it by any means necessary, including nuclear war. With the Doomsday Clock at 12 minutes to midnight, the Soviet leadership realised its miscalculation and, after a few days of intense crisis, withdrew the missiles. This was followed by a relaxation of US-Soviet tensions, leading to the first Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (1963).
No bullets flew between the US and the USSR in 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis was an extremely dangerous short-term incident that could have ignited large-scale – including nuclear – war. However, unlike the Ukraine war, it did not flow from an already existing and intensifying dynamic of war by either the US or the USSR. Thus, while extremely dangerous, the situation could also be, and was, rapidly resolved.
The situation in Ukraine, as well as the growing conflict around China, are more structurally dangerous. Direct confrontation is taking place between NATO and Russia, where the US just authorised direct military strikes (imagine if, during the 1962 crisis, Cuban forces armed and trained by the Soviet Union had carried out major military strikes in Florida). Meanwhile, the US is directly raising military tensions with China around Taiwan and the South China Sea, as well as in the Korean Peninsula. The US government understands that it cannot withstand erosion to its position of global primacy and rightly believes that it may lose its economic dominance to China. That is why it increasingly moves issues onto the military terrain, where it still maintains an advantage. The US position on Gaza is significantly determined by its understanding that it cannot afford a blow to its military supremacy, embodied in the regime that it controls in Israel.
The US and its NATO partners are responsible for 74.3% of global military spending. Within the context of the US’s increasing drive for war and use of military means, the situation in Ukraine, and potentially around China, are, in reality, as dangerous, and potentially more dangerous, than the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Tatiana Grinevich (Belarus), The River of Wishes, 2012.
How Are the Warring Parties to Negotiate?
Hours after Russian troops entered Ukraine, both sides began to talk about a drawdown of tensions. These negotiations developed in Belarus and Turkey before they were scuttled by NATO’s assurances to Ukraine of endless and bottomless support to ‘weaken’ Russia. If those early negotiations had developed, thousands of lives would have been spared. All such wars end in negotiations, which is why the sooner they could have happened, the better. This is a view that is now openly acknowledged by Ukrainians. Vadym Skibitsky, deputy head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, told The Economist that negotiations are on the horizon.
For a long time now, the Russia-Ukraine frontline has not moved dramatically. In February 2024, the Chinese government released a twelve-point set of principles to guide a peace process. These points – including ‘abandoning the Cold War mentality’ – should have been seriously considered by the belligerent sides. But the NATO states simply ignored them. Several months later, a Ukraine-driven conference was held in Switzerland from 15–16 June, to which Russia was not invited and which ended with a communiqué that borrowed many of the Chinese proposals about nuclear safety, food security, and prisoner exchanges.
Velislava Gecheva (Bulgaria), Homo photographicus, 2014.
While a number of states – from Albania to Uruguay – signed the document, other countries that attended the meeting refused to sign on for a range of reasons, including their sense that the text did not take Russia’s security concerns seriously. Among the countries that did not sign are Armenia, Bahrain, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Libya, Mauritius, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates. A few days before the Switzerland conference, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin stated his conditions for peace, which include a guarantee that Ukraine will not join NATO. This view is shared by those countries of the Global South that did not join the Switzerland statement.
Both Russia and Ukraine are willing to negotiate. Why should the NATO states be allowed to prolong a war that threatens world peace? The upcoming NATO summit in Washington from 9–11 July must hear, loudly and clearly, that the world does not want its dangerous war or decadent militarism. The world’s peoples want to build bridges, not blow them up.
Maxim Kantor (Russia), Two Versions of History, 1993.
Briefing no. 14, a clear assessment of current dangers around the escalation in and around Ukraine, underscores the need, as Abdullah El Harif of the Workers’ Democratic Way party in Morocco and I wrote in the Bouficha Appeal Against the Preparations for War in 2020, for the peoples of the world to:
Sensitive people around the world must make their voices heard on the streets and in the corridors of power to end this dangerous war, and indeed to set us on a path beyond capitalism’s world of unending wars.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
New reporting finds that the U.S. has sent $6.5 billion in military assistance to Israel since October — an enormous, previously undisclosed sum underscoring how the U.S. is nearly single handedly allowing Israel to carry out its ongoing extermination campaign against Palestinians in Gaza. According to an anonymous senior Biden administration official, who spoke to The Washington Post, nearly $3…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Read Part 1.
Someone, whose cousin was friendly with White House (WH) correspondent, Helen Thomas, related to me the anguish that the dean of WH correspondents suffered after being accused of anti-Semitism. Helen was born in Lebanon and consistently favored the Palestinian cause. Having been the first female officer of the National Press Club, the first female member and president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, and the first female member of the Gridiron Club, the pro-Israel contingent found it difficult to silence her. When she was at the advanced age of 90, they leaped to the jugular. In an impromptu question concerning Israel, her reply that “Jews should get the hell out of Palestine and go home to Poland, Germany, America, and everywhere else,” provoked the usual spurious charge of anti-Semitism against the American idol. Harassed and bothered, Helen Thomas quit her post with Hearst newspapers and died two years later.
Helen Thomas was decades ahead of her time. Today, her comment is prescient and is the best advice for the Jewish community that needs to shed the conditioned attachment to Zionism and the cruelty it has visited upon the peoples of the Middle East. Through clever manipulation of minds, the Zionists convinced Jews and many non-Jews that their victory in the 1967 six-day war established a nation of invincible and superior people. Jews, and only Jews, are welcome to join the unique assembly. After receiving a driver’s license, each new Israeli receives another license, a license to steal, kill, and plunder ─ whatever property a Palestinian owns is rightfully Israeli. Jews should recognize that their life in Israel depends upon the deaths of Palestinians. These Jews can find life without initiating deaths. These Jews should get out of Israel.
Part 1 of this two-part article delineated the reason Jews allied with a militarist, nationalist, xenophobic, racist, and apartheid nation ─ conditioning. The principle elements of the conditioning, repeatedly drilled into every Jewish person — Jews are a nation, they have a shared ancient history that claims biblical lands, they are subjected to harassment by an anti-Semitic world, and they are only safe in their own nation —were shown to be fabricated, hysterical, and not historical. No deep intellectual awareness is needed to prove the fallacies and historical nonsense perpetrated by the Zionists. Only those who are disoriented or gain something from subscribing to the distortions adhere to the Zionist philosophy. But many do, and not only Jews and the captured and raptured evangelists; government officials and every day streaming TV watchers eagerly swoon at the mention of Israel, as if their lives depended upon Israel’s success.
In dealing with Israel’s brutal invasion of Gaza, Joseph Biden, president of the United States of America (US), behaves as if the US is a partner in the invasion, coordinating its activities with those of Israel and obligingly supplying Israel with the necessities for accomplishing the horrifying task. Why is the US involved in Israel’s genocidal tactics? Of what benefit to the US people is aiding Israel in its destructive actions? Why did Joe Biden, the US president, read from script, and say that the October 7, 2023 attack “was the worst atrocity committed against the Jewish people in a single day since the Holocaust?”
The attack was only against Israelis, those who Hamas accuses of oppressing the Palestinians. It did not differentiate between Jews and others; Bedouins, Arabs, and many foreign workers were killed. Hearing Biden’s words showed the conditioned manner in which even the president of one of the world’s most significant nations follows the Zionist supremacist position, ignoring the deaths of others than Jews, making believe that this is one of continuous atrocities against Jews, and relating it to the Holocaust ─ when you can, mention the World War II Holocaust.
Texas Senator, Ted Cruz, is another Israel admirer, who goes ballistic, shouting and screaming at anyone who offends his beloved Israel. Why does a Texan, immersed in border politics, in immigration, and relations with the Mexican community get overly excited with a foreign nation that has no attachment to his duties for his constituents? Why do Americans care about Israel more than Armenia?
Does the Mossad have derogatory information on US representatives that sways congressional commitments to the American people and has them favor Israel? Could be. If so, then another good reason for Israeli Jews to leave the Levant and make Israel a democratic nation like other democratic nations. A nation built on White nationalism is not acceptable anywhere. Why is it acceptable in Israel?
Look at in another way. Many nations have committed atrocities against people in their midst but no citizens of these nations have seen the atrocities up close. Great Britain, in its days of glorious imperialism, ravaged the world, but the British, on their isolated island, did not observe the deadly occurrences. The Germans had their abhorrent ways but not at home, during a war that fogged the killings, and not yet in the era of the ubiquitous internet. Americans are aware of misbehavior of their armed forces, but the happenings are so far away they cannot emotionally connect with the oppressed. No Israeli is more than 20 miles from the repression, whether in Israel, the West Bank, or Gaza. They see it day after day after day. Maybe, they become inured to the oppression or just accept it as someone else’s problem. In either case, humanity has been lost, and when the environment degrades humanity and the environment cannot be changed, it’s time to leave the environment and regain humanity.
The inhumanity expressed by Israelis, who adore victimhood and challenging inhumane activities by others, is not a one-time thing of a small collection of the society, it is a continuous operation by almost every functioning and living person in the Israel community. I knew a Jewish refugee who had a home he left in a town in the Czech Republic, east of Brno. I visited the town and saw the home standing vacant at the corner of the Main Square, still empty and, at that time, legally owned by the heirs who were involved in litigation with the authorities concerning unpaid taxes. During the 1948-1949 war, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled from their homes and sought safety in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, and the West Bank. Some walked back after one week to find new locks on the doors and Iraqi and other Jews occupying their homes. Nobody let them in; none of the recent arrivals returned a stolen home to the legal towner. Two of thousands of heartbreaking stories.
Twenty years since I had seen Northern Galilee, I was finally given a permit by the Israeli military authorities to visit. I decided to take two of my daughters with me. It took less than three hours to reach Safed, renamed Tsvat by Israel after 1948. The van stopped in front of the white stone home that held childhood memories. I proceeded to the familiar metal door, where I knocked. A large eastern European woman opened the door. We argued. I returned to the van, my hardened face wet with tears. “She wouldn’t let me in! She still has the same curtains I made with my mother.”
We proceeded in silence, as I wept discretely, to lunch at a hotel on Lake Tiberias, where my youngest child grew hyper. Instead of imposing my usual military-style discipline on the child, I encouraged her “splatter water,” “make more noise” – a shock to the rest of the family. The Israeli waiter hurriedly came to the table demanding, in Hebrew, they stop the raucous behavior. It was then that my defiance exploded into cursing the waiter in Arabic. “We can do whatever we please! This is my father’s hotel!” Until that moment, my children had been sheltered from knowing anything about my dear loss.
Rasmiya Barghout
We finally settled in Ramle, in a big stone house that had belonged to an Arab family…In the back of the house was a lemon tree, which almost collapsed each year under its fruit… One morning, right after the Six-Day War, an Arab man turned up at the front door. He said: ‘My name is Bashir el-Kheiri. This house belonged to my family.’
One day – I shall never forget it – Bashir’s brother came to Ramle with his father. The old man was blind. After entering the gate, he caressed the rugged stones of the house. Then he asked if the lemon tree was still there. He was led to the backyard. When he put his hands on the trunk of the tree he had planted, he did not utter a word. Tears rolled down his cheeks. My father then gave him a lemon. He was clutching it in his hands when he left. Bashir’s mother told me, years later, that when her husband couldn’t sleep, he used to pace up and down their apartment holding in his hand an old, shriveled lemon.
— Dalia Landau, The Lemon Tree
A controlled media daily demonstrates the twists and callous insensitivity and inattention to the tragedies and rights of others and gives aggravated consideration to tragedies inflicted upon Jews.
Grayson Beare, son of Julian Beare, chairperson of the South African Holocaust and Genocide Foundation, stabbed Halima Hoosen-Preston, her husband Shaun Preston, and her son in their Durban, South African home. The mother died and the others are fighting for their lives. Grayson Beare has been charged with murder and attempted murder.
The Mail & Guardian, a South African weekly newspaper and website, headlined the attack as “Estranged son of SA Holocaust and Genocide Foundation chairperson in court for alleged Islamophobic murder.”
…the assault allegedly occurred after an altercation Beare had with Hoosen-Preston during which she laughed upon hearing that his cousins had been killed in Israel. He said this in a video that went viral on social media, in which he identified himself as a former Zionist who has rejected the Jewish religion. The Beare family has distanced itself from Grayson, who has previously been treated for psychological problems and substance abuse, saying they stand with Hoosen-Preston’s family.
I cannot find any coverage of this horrendous incident of Islamophobia in the American media, which usually reports significant happenings in South Africa. If anyone knows of a report, please let me know. Another bother — what is the purpose of these Holocaust and Genocide Foundations and Museums (There are three in South Africa.) if they have not prevented genocide, have the parties in the foundations attached to those committing genocide, have not rallied the world against other genocides, and have the son of the Holocaust and Genocide Foundations chairperson, who has been raised in the Holocaust and Genocide Foundation environment, apparently not learning about genocide, and involved in a violent racial act?
A shocking rape of a young girl in Paris, France, and the use of the victim’s tragedy to highlight an alleged and unproven anti-Semitic act shows the discrepancy in American media reporting. The Washington Post headline read: “Reported rape of Jewish girl linked to rising antisemitism in France.”
The reported rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl in a suburb of Paris has brought protesters into the streets and drawn condemnations from top politicians, who have linked the episode to rampant antisemitism. French authorities indicted two 13-year-old boys on charges of aggravated rape, making religious insults and death threats, and recording or sharing images of a sexual nature, among other crimes, prosecutors said in a Wednesday statement. A third boy, age 12, was charged with being an assisting witness to a rape, as well for making religious insults and death threats. According to the media, the girl’s ex-boyfriend was angry that the victim had not told him she was Jewish.
This gruesome act in a foreign nation received front-page attention from most American media while no American media reported the South African murder. The latter murder was due to hatred of Muslims while the former violation has a loose and unverified attachment to hatred of Jews.
No charge of anti-Semitism has been made by the victim or her family, and are only being made by the media, using a prosecutor statement of “religious insults” by juveniles as defining an anti-Semitic act. The Washington Post report completely ignores a description of the victim and her mental and physical state, identifying her only as a “Jewish girl,” and concentrates on the perpetration of an unproven and subordinate anti-Semitism. The perverted use of this vicious attack, which ignores the damage to the young girl and serves the anti-Semitic industry, whose purpose is to gain sympathy for the Zionist Jews, is an obscenity, as low as a human being can become.
As long as Israeli Jews control Palestinian life, there will be no meaningful life for anyone in the Middle East. They should either relinquish control or leave. Because the Israeli Jews cannot find existence without controlling the Palestinians, they must leave. What point is there in having endless strife that punishes everyone when all can live in peace and harmony by simply doing what is correct ─ Israeli Jews allowing Palestinians to live in peace and harmony by leaving Israel and finding peace and harmony with millions of other Jews in the Western world? With this remark, we can discern the reason for the contrived and false charges of anti-Semitism, which are mainly anti-Zionist demonstrations. The Zionists want everyone to believe that the Western world is a conspiracy of anti-Semites. They proclaim that only Israel, where Jews from one ethnicity despise Jews from other ethnicities, where all Jews are threatened daily, and where Jewish behavior manufactures antipathy toward Jews is the safest place for Jews to live.
Dual citizenship is a major stumbling block for Jews to permanently leave Israel. By allowing dual citizenship in Western nations, Israeli Jews maintain Israel citizenship and live in foreign nations. Through a network of contacts, Israelis gain employment and enjoy the more highly developed and interesting social and cultural life Europe and America. They reside in the West and have first allegiance to Israel, many serving in the Israel armed forces, few, if any, in their primary country. Their feet and body are in the West, their mind is in Israel. Although I have no documented proof, I suspect that many serve Israel as foreign agents.
Contemporary statistics on dual US/Israeli citizenship are not readily apparent. Some clues:
Israeli government ministries and the Los Angeles-based Israeli American Council, which represents Israelis nationwide, estimate between 500,000 and 800,000 Israelis lived in the United States in the year 2014. Since 1948, 112,000 US-born citizens have arrived in Israel and by 2021, 50,000 – 300,000 Israelis held dual citizenship with the US.
From 2009 to 2023 the United States’ population grew from 308.5M to 340M or 10.2%. Jewish population grew from 6.5M to 7.5M or 15.3%. The 50 percent faster growth rate of the Jewish population indicates an influx of Jews into the American mainland from the only ports these immigrants could have departed, those in Israel.
As long as these Israelis benefit from retaining their Israeli citizenship — vote in Israeli elections, gain protection from foreign legal action by returning to Israel, and add to Israeli population statistics, they will retain the Israel passport and Israel citizenship. Denying dual citizenship and penalizing those who surreptitiously practice dual citizenship (Israel will still allow the dual citizenship) is a top priority for inviting Israeli Jews to permanently leave Israel.
Much is written about the Middle East crisis, its past, its present, its future. The falsifications, obfuscations, miscalculations, misinterpretations, and calculations are difficult to answer and the reality difficult to present. Two renditions give a clue to the verisimilitude.
The Haram al-Sharif is one of the world’s treasures, a sanctity of peace, serenity, and replenishment, where people are able to wander free and enjoy splendid views of Jerusalem and the surrounding areas. From observation, the Islamic Waqif has maintained the site in the tradition and atmosphere for which it was intended. Any changes in control, administration, operation, and present arrangements would be a catastrophe for Jerusalem and for all peoples of the world. Protecting the Haram al-Sharif against arbitrary intrusions should be high on the agenda of the world’s governments.
The Zionist portray themselves as turning a destitute and neglected area into a thriving and productive region. Survey the differences in countries between the year 1900 and year 2024 and you find almost all the world has changed in the same manner. No miracle by Zionism. Go to Chile and other places where Palestinians have settled and see what Palestinians have done and how they have achieved the highest education in the world. The Zionists have turned a peaceful area into a battleground. Protecting Palestine against the arbitrary intrusions by the Zionists should be high on the agenda of the world’s governments.
“For us, it’s a ‘never again’ war,” said Avner Golov, the vice president of research and alliances at the Tel Aviv-based think tank MIND Israel. “My generation now faces a question that I never thought I [would] face, and this is whether a Jewish state can exist in the hostile Middle East,” he added. “We need to make sure the answer is yes.”
After 75 years of establishment of the Zionist state, we still hear “war, war, war,” and never learn why it is necessary to have a Jewish state in the Middle East. Oh, yes, there are people in the Western nations who do not like Jews (the wealthiest community), Catholics (plenty), Asians, Mormons, Evangelists (plenty), Hispanics, Muslims (plenty), and almost everyone who walks.
So, we have yesterday repeated today and ready to repeat tomorrow, Israel is ready for ‘all-out war’ in Lebanon. The Israeli military says its Northern Command has approved operational plans for war with Lebanon.
Zionism, let our people go.
The post Preventing the Genocide Part 2 first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The economy is a top issue for many voters ahead of the 2024 presidential election. In a lengthy interview ahead of the first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, world-renowned progressive economist Robert Pollin offers a detailed and thorough assessment of the actual state of the U.S. economy and the effects of Biden’s economic policies. Pollin is a distinguished university…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
