Conservatives have done the United States a huge favor by explaining in detail what they’ll try to do if Donald Trump is reelected. Project 2025, a “presidential transition project” of the Heritage Foundation, helpfully lays out how a group of former Trump officials would like to transform the country into a right-wing dystopia where the rich thrive and the rest of us die aspiring to be rich.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Contestations over the Republican National Committee’s efforts to foreclose avenues for lawful protest outside this week’s Republican National Convention (RNC) were already heated months before GOP delegates started booking their flights to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for the convention. So it was something of a victory for free speech that, after months of mobilizing and negotiations — and in the…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In the leadup to this week’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the Republican National Committee met behind closed doors with unusually strict security to finalize the wording of their party platform. For the first time in decades, the platform approved at the secret meeting omitted any specific reference to a national abortion ban. Corporate media outlets have reported…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Whenever any American’s life is taken by another American unnecessarily—whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence—whenever we tear at the fabric of life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.
— Robert F. Kennedy on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (1968)
There’s a subtext to this assassination attempt on former President Trump that must not be ignored, and it is simply this: America is being pushed to the brink of a national nervous breakdown.
More than 50 years after John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated, America has become a ticking time bomb of political violence in words and deeds.
We are imploding on multiple fronts, all at once.
This is what happens when ego, greed and power are allowed to take precedence over liberty, equality and justice.
This is the psychopathic mindset adopted by the architects of the Deep State, and it applies equally whether you’re talking about Democrats or Republicans.
Beware, because this kind of psychopathology can spread like a virus among the populace.
As an academic study into pathocracy concluded, “[T]yranny does not flourish because perpetuators are helpless and ignorant of their actions. It flourishes because they actively identify with those who promote vicious acts as virtuous.”
People don’t simply line up and salute. It is through one’s own personal identification with a given leader, party or social order that they become agents of good or evil. To this end, “we the people” have become “we the police state.”
By failing to actively take a stand for good, we become agents of evil. It’s not the person in charge who is solely to blame for the carnage. It’s the populace that looks away from the injustice, that empowers the totalitarian regime, that welcomes the building blocks of tyranny.
This realization hit me full-force a few years ago. I had stopped into a bookstore and was struck by all of the books on Hitler, everywhere I turned. Yet had there been no Hitler, there still would have been a Nazi regime. There still would have been gas chambers and concentration camps and a Holocaust.
Hitler wasn’t the architect of the Holocaust. He was merely the figurehead. Same goes for the American police state: had there been no Trump or Obama or Bush, there still would have been a police state. There still would have been police shootings and private prisons and endless wars and government pathocracy.
Why? Because “we the people” have paved the way for this tyranny to prevail.
By turning Hitler into a super-villain who singlehandedly terrorized the world—not so different from how Trump is often depicted—historians have given Hitler’s accomplices (the German government, the citizens that opted for security and order over liberty, the religious institutions that failed to speak out against evil, the individuals who followed orders even when it meant a death sentence for their fellow citizens) a free pass.
This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.
None of us who remain silent and impassive in the face of evil, racism, extreme materialism, meanness, intolerance, cruelty, injustice and ignorance get a free pass.
Those among us who follow figureheads without question, who turn a blind eye to injustice and turn their backs on need, who march in lockstep with tyrants and bigots, who allow politics to trump principle, who give in to meanness and greed, and who fail to be outraged by the many wrongs being perpetrated in our midst, it is these individuals who must shoulder the blame when the darkness wins.
We are on the wrong side of the revolution.
“If we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution,” advised King, “we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.“
Freedom demands responsibility.
Freedom demands that we stop thinking as Democrats and Republicans and start thinking like human beings, or at the very least, Americans.
JFK was killed in 1963 for daring to challenge the Deep State.
King was killed in 1968 for daring to challenge the military industrial complex.
Robert F. Kennedy offered these remarks to a polarized nation in the wake of King’s assassination:
In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. [Y]ou can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization…filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort … to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love… What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.
Two months later, RFK was also killed by an assassin’s bullet.
Fifty-plus years later, we’re still being terrorized by assassins’ bullets, but what these madmen are really trying to kill is that dream of a world in which all Americans “would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
We haven’t dared to dream that dream in such a long time.
But imagine…
Imagine what this country would be like if Americans put aside their differences and dared to stand up—united—for freedom.
Imagine what this country would be like if Americans put aside their differences and dared to speak out—with one voice—against injustice.
Imagine what this country would be like if Americans put aside their differences and dared to push back—with the full force of our collective numbers—against government corruption and despotism.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, tyranny wouldn’t stand a chance.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Donald Trump announced on Monday that he has chosen J.D. Vance as his running mate for the 2024 election — an opportunistic Republican senator from Ohio with a history of criticizing Trump and promoting white supremacist ideas. Trump made the announcement ahead of the Republican National Conference in Milwaukee, where he is slated to accept the Republican presidential nomination.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The outpouring of opinions on the attempted assassination of Donald Trump mostly offers little insight or honesty – apart from the all-too-obvious concern that the shooting of the former president is likely to make the United States even more of a tinderbox than it is already.
There’s a reason for this. The responses – whether from Trump supporters or Trump opponents – are all embedded in the same ideology of political tribalism that provoked the gunman. Neither side is capable of self-reflection because the US system is designed to avoid such self-reflection.
Despite what the political class wants you to believe, “political violence” is as American as apple pie. The US global empire was built on political violence, or the threat of it, most especially after the Second World War. Just ask the people of Vietnam, Serbia, Latin America, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine and Gaza.
The difference now is that Washington’s imperial grip is all too clearly weakening.
President Joe Biden is not alone in refusing to recognise this fact. He recently told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos: “I’m running the world.”
But US elites are rapidly finding that the world is no longer prepared to submit.
Washington’s international military arm, Nato, is being run into the ground by Russia in a proxy war in Ukraine.
Washington’s key military client state in the oil-rich Middle East, Israel, is being flooded with US weaponry to destroy Gaza. But in the midst of a genocide, Israel is exposing how weak it is. Hamas has not been defeated. In fact, it has been strengthened. And greater cooperation is being encouraged among those opposed to Israel’s regional hegemony.
Current domestic US politics can only be properly understood through the prism of the gradual decline of US influence abroad. The building of alternative international power formations, such as BRICS, is weakening Washington’s military and economic reach.
Adding to its woes, Washington’s ideological hegemony is crumbling too. Transnational capitalism – headquartered in the US – has no answers to the environmental fall-out from the endless resource extraction required to feed the appetite for wasteful, mass consumption it has to cultivate to generate greater profits for a corporate elite.
As the plundering of the planet’s finite resources gets harder, especially as corporations continue to stoke our hunger for material excess, other states are less willing to sit back and let the US take its pound of flesh.
The result is a growing political and economic instability that is hard to miss.
Muddled posturing
In the US, there have been two political impulses in response.
The first – illustrated by the Biden camp, backed by most of the US establishment media and three-letter agencies such as the CIA and NSA – is to double down on a failed strategy and continue seeking “global full-spectrum dominance”.
That means raising the stakes by showing uppity rivals, most especially Russia and China, that any defiance will be punished. It means endlessly expanding wars, with the inherent risk of increasing the chances of triggering a nuclear confrontation.
The other, more muddled response is illustrated by the Trump camp. If the US can no longer effectively impose its will abroad, rather than risk repeated humiliation, it should withdraw into a more isolationist posture, even while stepping up the imperial rhetoric.
Part of the reason for Trump’s muddled posturing, of course, is down to his narcissistic personality. He bigs himself up, even as he prefers to be master of the small domain he knows best. Caesar Trump has an instinctive aversion to global structures like Nato and the United Nations where he must share the limelight.
And part of the reason is that Trump can’t truly control the domestic terrain either. He depends on deeper power structures – such as the three-letter agencies – that would become pale shadows of themselves were they to agree to shrink US influence on the world stage. They need to push him out of his comfort zone.
Outrage machine
The US political system – whether Democrat or Republican – all too obviously has no answers to the deepening crises faced at home or abroad. Which is why the choice for US voters is between Biden and Trump, two rotten figureheads of a rotting imperial system of power.
And because the US system has no solutions, it has to redirect ordinary people’s attention to internal wars. Voters – or those who still trust the system enough to vote – must be persuaded to invest their energies in tribal feuding. The rhetoric of division grows, one in which the other candidate poses an existential threat and has to be stopped at all costs.
The truth is that each candidate – and the camps that stand behind them – is feeding this outrage machine. Biden is responsible for the assassination attempt on Trump, says one camp. Trump is guilty of inflaming the January 6 riots at the Congress, says the other.
At least it would be consistent to conclude either that both are responsible, or that neither is, rather than apply one standard to your tribe’s preferred presidential candidate and a different standard to the opposition tribe’s candidate. That is hypocrisy.
But the most useful conclusion we can draw is to understand that Biden and Trump are symptoms, not causes, of a diseased body politic. Neither Biden nor Trump pose an existential threat by themselves. But a declining US economic power, backed up by the largest military machine the world has ever known, determined to stop its decline at all costs, does pose just such a threat.
Biden and Trump are symbols. One, a lifelong creature of the billionaire donor class, is now deep in the grip of Parkinson’s. The other, a rapacious businessman committed only to his own aggrandisement, can’t distinguish between reality and reality TV.
No one should take seriously the claim that either is capable of running the world.
What they are is symbols – of a US in crisis. Which, given the US addiction to its imperial pretensions, is a crisis for all of humanity. Trump got a bloodied ear. The rest of us have far more at stake
The post Trump got a bloodied ear: US “political violence” poses a far bigger danger to the rest of us first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
According to Brady United, the nation’s oldest gun violence prevention group, 327 people are shot with guns every day in the United States. Over one million have been shot in the last decade. There are more civilian-owned firearms than there are people in this country. Gun violence is so ubiquitous that we only raise our heads once in a great while when the body count is shockingly high or the…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Congressional Republicans and prominent right wing figures immediately leapt to action to incite violence against President Joe Biden and the left shortly after a shooting during a Donald Trump rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday. Many congressional Republicans began laying blame on their political opponents just minutes after the shooting, without any evidence, and while it was unclear who…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
I opposed the invasion of Iraq by Bush in 2003 — which destroyed that country — even before it was perpetrated. George Clooney, Peter Welch, the New York Times, and other liars or fools of liars, did not.
I opposed the bombing of Libya by Obama in 2011 — which destroyed that country — even before it was perpetrated. George Clooney, Peter Welch, the New York Times, and other liars or fools of liars, did not.
I opposed the U.S. arming of Al Qaeda in Syria in order to overthrow Assad in 2012 by Obama — which destroyed that country — even before it was perpetrated. George Clooney, Peter Welch, the New York Times, and other liars or fools of liars, did not.
I opposed the U.S. coup that was perpetrated in 2014 by Obama, Clinton, and Biden, against Ukraine in order to place U.S. missiles there to blitz-nuke The Kremlin — which destroyed Ukraine — even before it was perpetrated. George Clooney, Peter Welch, the New York Times, and other liars or fools of liars, did not.
The Democratic Party is as flamingly neoconservative, pro-MIC, hawkish and pro-U.S.-imperialism, as is the Republican Party; and, so, only a Second American Revolution that recognizes all Americans’ enemy as being right here at home — the super-rich who control all of the major ‘news’-media and the Government (both of its Parties) — and which Revolution removes them from the power they have to deceive the majority of the public and destroy nation after nation while the MIC-owners grow ever fatter feasting upon the blood and misery of others in other lands and upon the despair of the poor in our own, can be constructive in the present era when the U.S. behemoth is craving feverishly to control the entire world and to increase the annual aggression(‘defense’)-budget so high it will leave nothing left to spend for the public.
George Clooney says of our present neoconservative-in-chief, “I love Joe Biden. As a senator. As a vice president and as president. I consider him a friend, and I believe in him. Believe in his character. Believe in his morals.” I do not, and I would never sink so low as to say such a thing as that.
Peter Welch says of our present neoconservative-in-chief, “I have great respect for President Biden. He saved our country from a tyrant. He is a man of uncommon decency. He cares deeply about our democracy. He has been one of the best presidents of our time.” (He thinks that Obama was the best.) I do not, and I would never sink so low as to say such a thing as that.
The New York Times says that we must vote for Biden because Trump is supposedly even worse: “HE IS DANGEROUS IN WORD, DEED AND ACTION: DONALD TRUMP IS UNFIT TO LEAD”. Instead, they want us to vote for the most corrupt President in all of U.S. history.
But the candidate who is chosen by representatives of Democratic Party billionaires, is no less evil than and no better than the candidate who is chosen by representatives of Republican Party billionaires; and to allege to the contrary is not only to be ludicrous but to be vile, because it’s by now obvious that both sides of the U.S. aristocracy are equally evil and equally dangerous to the entire world. Only a Second American Revolution can now save us all.
The post Why George Clooney, Peter Welch, and the New York Times, Are Dangerous first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
As the evening of June 27, 2024 approached, I wondered if the debate was really going to happen. For months now, we’d been seeing videos of President Joe Biden spacing out, drifting off into a fog at official events. At the G7, he’d wandered off and Italian PM Meloni had to gently guide him back; that was only two weeks before this debate, and the video of it went viral. Donald Trump would demolish him, some predicted, a spectacle Democratic Party power brokers could not allow; they’d cancel the debate with some face-saving excuse, and gracefully usher Biden off into retirement. His replacement would be another apologist for Palestinian mass-slaughter, somebody just as vicious as Genocide Joe, but clear-headed.
If the debate did actually take place, it would be an historical event. My friends and I wanted to watch it together with an audience and see the responses of people around us. The day came, and we headed off to the New Parkway Theater in Oakland.
People were lining up at the snack bar for popcorn and drinks as we went in to take our seats. Within minutes two CNN moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, appeared on the screen and explained the format. There was no studio audience, they told us. So in effect, we and the whole world in dozens of countries around the globe had virtual ringside seats to this event, now being broadcast live.
Seconds later candidates President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump appeared on the screen in front of us. Okay, so it was really happening.
Biden took the first question, one about the economy. He started off well, far better than I had ever expected.. I was impressed at how he could rattle off (alleged) facts, figures, and policies at such amazing speed that I could barely follow.
Wow! I thought to myself. He’s really cranking that stuff out!
Another round of questions. A moderator had asked Trump about the national debt, and after his response, turned to Biden.
“He (Trump) had the largest national debt of any president’s four-year period,” Biden said, and reminded us of Trump’s tax cut which “benefited the very wealthy. What I’m going to do is fix the taxes.”
Great! I thought, but he’d already had nearly four years without doing much about it. Well, that’s Biden. Promises, promises. He went on, promising to correct the tax inequalities and do “all those things we need to do, childcare, elder care, . . . strengthen our healthcare system. . .”
There he seemed to skip a beat, then picked up again. “With dealing with everything we have to do with –.” Having gotten that far, he froze up went silent.
He stood there, zombie-like, a vertical cadaver; he seemed to be struggling, agonizing to come back to the studio, back to the audience. Seconds ticked by, seeming like hours.
“See there!” came a voice from the audience. It was a guy sitting in the row in front of me, off to the right. “He’s zoning out!” Some others were also saying, “Biden’s lost it!”
Till then he’d been soaring through the sky as though on automatic pilot — but woops, a device made by Boeing, perhaps. Now he was stalling out. This lasted only about two or three seconds, but long enough for us in the theater — along with the rest of the worldwide audience — to see and know that the guy who nominally runs the U.S. empire might be non compos mentis. It was an eternal moment that few of us will ever forget.
It got even worse as he partially reconnected and gasped out the words:
“We finally beat Medicare!”
“Thank you, President Biden,” said the moderator, and turned to Trump who gleefully pounced on Biden’s misspoken words, saying:
“Well, he’s right! He did beat Medicaid. He beat it to death. And he’s destroying Medicare.”
Poor Biden had pulled himself out of a nosedive, only to crash into a mountainside.
This was only about ten minutes into the event. There was almost another hour and a half yet to go. Biden did not attempt to correct his “beat Medicare” slip; whether he was even aware of having said it is not certain. He seemed to come out of it and went on for the rest of the debate as though nothing strange had happened, though he continued to have a slightly cadaver-like appearance. Nevertheless, at times he did quite well, and drew occasional loud applause from about a third of the New Parkway audience.
I’m guessing that most of the people here were Democrats, though not necessarily Biden supporters. It isn’t only Biden’s senility which causes people to consider him unfit; there was also his role in the Iraq invasion, and now his policy of supplying arms to the Israelis, which has earned him the epithet “Genocide Joe.” (Trump promises to be even worse on that issue. “Let [Israel] finish the job,” he said.)
Biden’s not the first president who became senile, Ronald Reagan did too, but that didn’t seem to disturb anyone. Perhaps Journalist Caitlin Johnstone was right when she said: “A dementia patient can be president because it doesn’t matter who the president is.” The government is run by unelected empire managers who are chosen undemocratically by the power elite. “Biden is just the official face on the operation,” she wrote. Well it sure does look that way, though I do think there have been some exceptional presidents who took the reins of power into their hands — JFK for one, and we saw what happened to him when he refused to carry out the wishes of the power elite.
The debate went on. Both Biden and Trump both scored some points, though not many. Mostly they were regurgitating stuff we’ve been hearing for years. Biden boasted his achievements, and Trump told us what a great job he did and is going to do again after he’s elected. “I’m going to make America great again!”
Among the New Parkway audience, nobody cheered for Donald Trump, or booed him either. To the contrary, Trump’s preposterous lies occasionally drew explosions of laughter.
This non-support for Trump was to be expected since Oakland, and the San Francisco Bay Area in general, is generally progressive. We can assume that in other parts of the country, there would’ve been many screen-viewing gatherings where Donald Trump was being applauded as hero of the evening.
Trump’s default talking point was to hammer on immigrants, and accuse Joe Biden of letting them in. “He allowed millions of people to come in here from prisons, jails and mental institutions to come into our country and destroy our country,” Trump asserted. He repeated that several times in the course of this debate.
I wonder how anybody can forget that except for Native Americans we’re all immigrants in this country. But when Trump says “immigrants,” it sounds like he’s really using that as a code word meaning non-white.
Nevertheless, Biden has continued some of Trump’s policies that abuse immigrants. And this spring Biden supported a Border Act which he said would be “the toughest, most efficient, most effective border security bill this country’s ever seen.” When Republicans come up with some odious thing that seems to gain them popularity, Biden seems all too ready to borrow it.
For about an hour and a half, they each got their turns, blasting away at each other, trading insults. Biden called Trump a criminal, “The only person on this stage that is a convicted felon is the man I’m looking at right now!” Biden said. Trump countered with reminding Biden of the criminal activities of his son Hunter Biden, and of Joe Biden’s role in supporting his son’s Burisma affair.
“You have the morals of an alley cat!” Biden said, mentioning Trump’s affair with a porn star. Throughout the event the called each other liars and other names. “You are a child,” Biden declared. He also called Trump a “whiner,” and even hinted that Trump was too fat.
People in the audience around me were munching popcorn and sipping soft drinks, beer and wine. My friends and I ordered a pizza.
Some of this was funny. Some was not. On the topic of the Middle East, Trump used ‘Palestinian’ as a pejorative, and said, “He’s become like a Palestinian. But they don’t like him, because he’s a very bad Palestinian. He’s a weak one.”
“I’ve never heard so much foolishness!” Biden shot back.
And that was foolishness. After all, Joe Biden has been supporting the Israeli genocide with weapons and diplomatic cover. We need to give discredit where discredit is due.
Regarding Gaza Biden said:
“Hamas cannot be allowed to be continued. We continue to send our experts and our intelligence people to how they can get Hamas like we did Bin Laden.”
Was Biden referring to our 20-year-long adventure in Afghanistan? The empire lost that war, and the Taliban is back in charge. Or maybe he meant that the U.S. and Israel working together can achieve anything they set out to do and all will turn out well? In reality Israel is now in the ninth month of its war on a rag-tag militia, and though it has massacred some 40,000 civilians, it doesn’t seem to be winning. Does Biden know that? Haaretz is available in English, but maybe he doesn’t read it.
Biden didn’t really explain exactly what he meant, but further on he told us:
“We are the most admired country in the world. We’re the United States of America. There’s nothing beyond our capacity. We have the finest military in the history of the world.
Nobody cheered. Nobody laughed either.
“We’re the strongest country in the world,” he reiterated a few minutes later.
Really? Looking at declining U.S. fortunes in the forever-wars and proxy-wars — eastern Europe, the Middle East, and above all in Palestine — we gotta wonder if those glory days aren’t about over.
“We’re a country in the world who keeps our word and everybody trusts us.” Biden went on. “. . . Right now, we’re needed. We’re needed to protect the world.”
Was Biden debating Trump? — or was he fending off some ghostly voices of doom?
Our pizza arrived. But what were we watching? — an end-of-empire drama? We were sitting in a movie theater, but this was not a movie. It was history being played out, presented live, on the screen in front of us.
For these 90 minutes, Biden continued on at full speed except for that one blackout. Some of what he said was a bit scrambled and out of sequence, but in general I felt he did much, much better than I had ever expected, though I do hope they’ll revoke his driver’s license.
The debate ended, and the moderator announced, “Stay with us because we have full analysis of this debate.”
A panel of pundits came up on the screen, and immediately they laid into Biden’s performance, mercilessly ripping the poor guy to shreds. Their evaluation was so instantaneous, so unanimous, I was totally caught by surprise. I could hardy believe what I was hearing. Was the pundits’ response pre-planned? My first thought was to suspect that Biden had stumbled into an ambush. Although Biden had called for this debate, it was strange that his Democratic Party handlers had let him go through with it. Maybe they’d decided this was the only way they could get rid of their candidate who was unlikely to win the upcoming election.
I almost felt sorry for Joe Biden — even though he’s not some kindly old gentleman who deserves a lot of sympathy. “Don’t feel sorry for him,” a friend chided me. “He’ll be remembered as ‘the genocide president,’ and not only that, he makes elderly people look incompetent.”
• Virginia Browning and Steve Gilmartin contributed to this article
The post Popcorn, Pizza and the Theater of Debate first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
In less than a year, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has been able to capture over $1 billion in unpaid taxes, the agency announced on Thursday, due to its new campaign targeting wealthy tax cheats. As part of new funding provided by Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act, the agency has targeted 1,600 people with incomes over $1 million who owed more than $250,000 in taxes, the agency said.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Planned Parenthood is preparing a seven-figure campaign blitz to oust GOP incumbents from California congressional seats, part of a larger national effort by the reproductive rights group to prevent a Republican majority from passing abortion restrictions, including a national ban. Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California is targeting eight districts where voters largely backed Republicans in…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
One of the more obvious signs that the Republican Party had devolved into a cult of personality came in 2020 when the party decided to abandon writing a platform in advance of the election. GOP officials said that whatever Donald Trump wanted to do was fine with them. I don’t think that’s ever happened before but in the MAGA-fied GOP that sort of thing certainly isn’t unusual. This year, however…
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.
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.
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.
North Carolina Republicans are smooth operators. They often manage to insert a far right agenda into legislation, without exhibiting the same theatrics as many of their Deep South neighbors. The state’s Republicans haven’t proposed siccing bounty hunters on drag shows, for instance, nor have they passed laws that display a hostility for the Constitution as blatant or gleeful as Louisiana’s new…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
No matter what carefully crafted sound bites and political spin get trotted out by Joe Biden and Donald Trump in advance of the 2024 presidential election, you can rest assured that none of the problems that continue to undermine our freedoms will be addressed in any credible, helpful way by either candidate, despite the dire state of our nation.
Indeed, the 2024 elections will not do much to alter our present course towards a police state.
Nor will the popularity contest for the new occupant of the White House significantly alter the day-to-day life of the average American greatly at all. Those life-changing decisions are made elsewhere, by nameless, unelected government officials who have turned bureaucracy into a full-time and profitable business.
In the interest of liberty and truth, here are a few uncomfortable truths about life in the American police state that we will not be hearing from either of the two leading presidential candidates.
1. The government is not our friend. Nor does it work for “we the people.”
2. By gradually whittling away at our freedoms—free speech, assembly, due process, privacy, etc.—the government has, in effect, liberated itself from its contractual agreement to respect our constitutional rights while resetting the calendar back to a time when we had no Bill of Rights to protect us from the long arm of the government.
3. Republicans and Democrats like to act as if there’s a huge difference between them and their policies. However, they are not sworn enemies so much as they are partners in crime, united in a common goal, which is to maintain the status quo.
4. Presidential elections merely serve to maintain the status quo. Once elected president, that person becomes part of the dictatorial continuum that is the American imperial presidency today.
5. The U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on foreign aid programs it can’t afford, all the while the national debt continues to grow, our domestic infrastructure continues to deteriorate, and our borders continue to be breached. What is going on? It’s obvious that a corporatized, militarized, entrenched global bureaucracy is running the country.
6. 1984 has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state.
7. When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals. In the current governmental climate, obeying one’s conscience and speaking truth to the power of the police state can easily render you an “enemy of the state.”
8. If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it. Americans only think they’re choosing the next president. In truth, however, they’re engaging in the illusion of participation culminating in the reassurance ritual of voting. It’s just another manufactured illusion conjured up in order to keep the populace compliant and convinced that their vote counts and that they still have some influence over the political process.
9. More than terrorism, more than domestic extremism, more than gun violence and organized crime, the U.S. government has become a greater menace to the life, liberty and property of its citizens than any of the so-called dangers from which the government claims to protect us.
10. The government knows exactly which buttons to push in order to manipulate the populace and gain the public’s cooperation and compliance. This draconian exercise in how to divide, conquer and subdue a nation is succeeding. This is how you use the politics of fear to persuade a freedom-endowed people to shackle themselves to a dictatorship.
11. The government long ago sold us out to the highest bidder. The highest bidder, by the way, has always been the Deep State.
12. Every U.S. citizen is now guilty until proven innocent.
13. “We the people” are no longer shielded by the rule of law. While the First Amendment—which gives us a voice—is being muzzled, the Fourth Amendment—which protects us from being bullied, badgered, beaten, broken and spied on by government agents—is being disemboweled.
14. Privacy, as we have known it, is dead. Every second of every day, the American people are being spied on by the U.S. government’s vast network of digital Peeping Toms, electronic eavesdroppers and robotic snoops.
15. Private property means nothing if the government can take your home, car or money under the flimsiest of pretexts, whether it be asset forfeiture schemes, eminent domain or overdue property taxes.
16. If there is an absolute maxim by which the federal government seems to operate, it is that the American taxpayer always gets ripped off.
17. From the moment they are born to the time they legally come of age, young people are now wards of the state.
18. All you need to do in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal is use certain trigger words, surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, drive a car, stay at a hotel, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, question government authority, or generally live in the United States.
19. The government is pushing us ever closer to a constitutional crisis.
20. Our freedoms—especially the Fourth Amendment—continue to be choked out by a prevailing view among government bureaucrats that they have the right to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.
These are not problems that can be glibly dismissed with a few well-chosen words, as most politicians are inclined to do.
No matter which candidate wins this election, the citizenry and those who represent us need to own up to the fact that there can be no police state—no tyranny—no routine violations of our rights without our complicity and collusion—without our turning a blind eye, shrugging our shoulders, allowing ourselves to be distracted and our civic awareness diluted.
Likewise, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, these problems will continue to plague our nation unless and until Americans wake up to the fact that we’re the only ones who can change things for the better and then do something about it. After all, the Constitution opens with those three vital words, “We the people.”
There is no government without us—our sheer numbers, our muscle, our economy, our physical presence in this land.
We are the government.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
I recently found an unpublished essay written in 1979 by a comrade from Western Pennsylvania who argued passionately for the urgent necessity of independent political action. In The Time is Now: A Position Paper on Independent Political Action, Bob Bonner challenged the left to begin the process of building independent political organizations and to convince the people to support them.
Bob is not a starry-eyed academic or a know-it-all armchair socialist, but a keen observer of local politics, its limitations, and its possibilities.
He was then a worker, a founding leader of the Clairton Coalition, a leader in a local independent political party that scored some notable electoral victories, and a founder of the Pittsburgh Coalition for Independent Politics. He grew up in Clairton, PA breathing the foul air of the country’s largest cokeworks, a virtual company town that knew every corporate injustice that one found in the industrial heartland. It has become fashionable to refer to people like Bob as community organizers; I prefer to see him simply as a peoples’ leader.
There are many parallels today with the world that Bonner wrote about in 1979. Jimmy Carter had run and won in 1976 on the most progressive party program that the Democrats had offered since the New Deal; but by 1978, he had jettisoned the program and turned to policies that presaged the policies of the soon-to-be-president, FBI snitch and B-actor, Ronald Reagan. By the midterm elections of 1978, Carter had reneged on virtually every progressive campaign promise and was saddled with brutal inflation.
Bonner wrote at the time: “America’s two-party system has reached an all-time low in the eyes of the voters… rendering the concepts of majority parties and representative government meaningless and, to some, a laughing stock… 62.1% of American voters, or 90 million people, stayed home last election day, an increase of another one and a half percent from 1974… Millions more can’t be motivated enough to even register [to vote].”
Citing a New York Times-CBS poll, Bonner notes that “fully half of those who participated in the two-party charade felt that the outcome would have no appreciable effect on their lives.”
Bonner goes on to show that despite dire media assessments of a rightward trend, where progressives or independents offered voters a real choice, they were met with enthusiasm, often victory.
The then-left-oriented Congressional Black Caucus picked up three new members in the interim election, and arch-reactionary Frank Rizzo was denied a third term in Philadelphia. “The massive monopoly effort in Missouri to pass an anti-union ‘right to work (for less)’ law through a referendum failed, and in some states liberal to progressive tax initiatives won,” Bonner reminds. Communist Party candidates, running as Communists, received vote totals unprecedented since the 1940s. There was a sense that inroads were possible for independent politics.
With regard to the then-emerging danger of the so-called “new right” of Reagan and his ilk, Bonner had this to say: “The high visibility of the ‘new’ right is made possible by the huge gap that exists between the direction of the two main parties and the urgent pressing needs of the people as a whole. The ruling class has recognized this gap and has smartly and opportunistically shoved reactionary one-issue groups into this vacuum in order to confuse and misdirect the voting public.”
Ironically, today’s corporate Democrats have followed this Republican strategy by placing single issues front and center at the expense of a popular program meant to resonate with all working people.
Bonner believes that “[t]he electorate is searching for meaningful alternatives. That is why they vote for ‘mavericks’; that is why Black people voted for Republicans in the last election…”
Forty-five years later, this obvious point is missed by the elite pundits who denounce working-class “deplorables” turning to unlikely “mavericks” like Donald Trump and Robert Kennedy Jr. They are surprised and alarmed that polls show many Black and Latino/Latina voters– ignored by Democratic Party leaders– leaning toward Trump’s false promises of change.
Today, one-issue groups abound, with foundations doling out financial support, designer NGOs staffing causes, academics offering studies, and consultants mapping strategies. Talk of “intersections” are just that, with more and more divisions denying any basis for common cause, as our common plight grows more desperate.
And when the two parties’ thinkers offer even a hint of prospective benefits in exchange for their votes, it is not a vision, but a reminiscence. The Republicans promise a return to the land of milk and honey before “freedom”-restricting laws on civil rights, the environment, workplace safety, and unions.
The Democrats, on the other hand, offer an idyllic time before the Reagan revolution– the so-called Neoliberal era ushered in with the 1980 election– conveniently forgetting the long, painful, previous decade of stagflation. In essence, we are given two different versions of “Make America Great Again.” Neither promise works for the twenty-first century.
Sounding eerily prescient, Bonner cites the opposition to the unbearable weight of the military budget and the threat of war, actions against the energy monopolies, a militant women’s movement for women’s rights, the fight against police brutality, the miners’ strike, and the struggle for the Dellums National Health Service Act as a basis for bringing together a united, independent movement escaping the political inertia of 1979. “There is absolutely no reason and no excuse for not pulling several of these forces together and entering the political arena…,” Bonner asserts.
Forty-five years later, we have yet to create this needed movement, and the battles of 1979 are yet to be won.
We must recognize that a mere declaration of independence is not enough, as our own US Revolution shows. Achieving independence is an arduous process. In our time, it is a battle against the dependency that comes from taking the money offered from corporations, foundations, non-profits, NGOs, and governments, and from uncritically accepting the influence of think tanks, universities, academic “authorities,” and consultants.
Most importantly, political independence only begins with a concerted effort to fight capture by the two parties. Far too many left initiatives have been absorbed and suffocated by the Democratic Party. In its essence, independence is always independence from some external force that doesn’t share our values and goals.
We must also judge independence by acts and not rhetoric or posture. The fallacy of celebrity, the fetishism of personality, is a sure barrier to independence. Instead, the steps away from wealth and power should be our measuring stick of independent political action. Where independence exists, we must nurture it; where it doesn’t, we should sow it.
In the forthcoming election, how will we express our political independence?
The post What is Independent Political Action? first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
With the U.S. presidential election only four months away, the incumbent Joe Biden White House and the Democrat Party are getting desperate. They can’t seem to close the gap in poll numbers showing Republican rival Donald Trump having a strong chance of regaining the presidency.
Such is the political crisis in the United States from voter indifference to both candidates that anything could happen. With Trump threatening a “bloodbath” if he loses in November, the prospect of national chaos either way is looming.
An increasingly frail Biden is calling on Hollywood A-listers to boost his flagging campaign. A recent $30 million fundraiser by Tinseltown big names including Julia Roberts and George Clooney warned of the “scariest” outcome if Trump were returned to the White House.
What’s of concern to the political and media establishment – which largely votes Democrat – is that Trump’s popularity seems immune to damage from scandal and legal prosecutions for financial corruption. His fundraising is also set to grow more robustly after the Republican Congressional leaders put aside any misgivings to bless his campaign.
The high stakes may explain the “big news” crackdown on alleged corruption by the chief financial executive at the conservative news outlet, The Epoch Times.
Its Chief Financial Officer Weidong “Bill” Guan is in court this week facing federal charges for money laundering and bank fraud to the tune of $67 million. Guan denies the charges but if convicted he is facing a 20-30 year stretch in jail.
The Epoch Times is a major supporter of “The Donald”. The weekly newspaper is published in 35 countries and 22 languages. It was founded 25 years ago and is affiliated with the Falun Gong movement, a secretive quasi-Buddhist religion that claims to have millions of followers in the U.S. and worldwide. The spiritual leader is China-born multimillionaire Li Hongzhi who lives in exile. Falun Gong is banned in China by the Chinese government which accuses it of cult practices and extortion of followers.
Following the arrest of Bill Guan by U.S. authorities earlier this month, the Falun Gong leader wrote two articles for Epoch Times, denouncing shady practices and partisan politics. The newspaper has denied any wrongdoing and has suspended its chief financial officer pending the outcome of the fraud trial.
The New York-based Epoch Times has been a useful proxy for U.S. governments since its foundation in 2000 following the exile of Li Hongzhi from China to the United States where “he found his American Dream”, according to the Wall Street Journal. Apart from its zany content which borders on superstition and sensationalism, the upside for the U.S. establishment is the publication is vehemently hostile towards the People’s Republic of China in its editorial line. It reflects the “anti-communist” views of the Falun Gong leader and in that way can be seen as a useful propaganda tool for Washington to drum up “anti-China” sentiments.
However, during the last Trump administration, The Epoch Times adopted a stridently pro-Trump line. It ran stories popular among the MAGA movement such as the Covid-19 virus being a plot by the Chinese Communist Party to destroy the United States, as well as QAnon conspiracy claims about Satanic corruption among the U.S. establishment.
When Trump lost in 2020 to Biden, the paper promoted the false claims that the election was “stolen” by Democrat-orchestrated voter fraud. Many Republican voters still believe that their man was cheated out of a second consecutive term by the deep state.
Nailing its editorial colors to the Trump electoral mast was a profitable move for The Epoch Times. Under the stewardship of Bill Guan – a protégé of Falun Gong guru Li Hongzhi – the media group’s revenues skyrocketed from $4 million a year to over $120 million. The Department of Justice indictment alleges that Guan raked in the proceeds through fundraising online scams using cryptocurrency and personal identity theft.
The association of Trump’s campaign with an alleged massive fraud operation run by a media group that can be easily painted as a weird cultist whack job seems to be the latest effort by the Democrat-supporting political establishment to tip the scales in favor of Biden.
There has been widespread American corporate media coverage of the fraud scandal implicating The Epoch Times and its Falun Gong network. The Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, and CNBC, among others, have been having a field day on the subject.
It appears odd that the U.S. establishment, which has indulged the Falun Gong movement and its anti-China news outlet for so many years, should abruptly ramp up negative coverage.
But bear in mind that Biden’s campaign is in deep trouble. His administration’s embroilment in the Gaza genocide perpetrated by the Israeli regime has earned bitter recrimination from Democrat voters and students who would have normally voted for Biden.
Another worry for the Democrat Party is Biden’s increasingly obvious physical and mental frailty. Even pro-Democrat media are openly commenting on how Biden’s mental health is failing as he stumbles from one public gaff or misstep to another. There is a sense of dread that when Trump and Biden go head to head in a live TV debate later this month, the incumbent president will be made look decrepit and unfit for office.
The Democrat campaign is amplifying attention on Trump’s conviction for fraud over hush payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels and his other forthcoming court trial over abuse of classified documents. It’s also talking up Trump’s dodgy financial accounts and business dealings as a former real estate magnate.
The scandal at The Epoch Times and allegations of defrauding millions of Americans through money laundering comes at a time when the Biden campaign needs all the help it can get to pile the dirt on Trump.
A legal crackdown on the newspaper’s financial dealings seems long overdue. Banks and tax authorities were flagging suspicious accounts from at least 2021, according to reports. Former employers of The Epoch Times have also commented publicly on the surprising delay in investigating the media outlet and its fundraising operations.
It seems strange that federal indictments are being brought now with much-hyped media coverage if the case were assessed merely on legal concerns about finances.
If the intensity of politics is factored though and the U.S. establishment’s fears that Trump might just pull off a spectacular reelection – with all the chaos that such a return to the White House will elicit – then digging up dirt using a money-laundering scandal makes perfect sense. Muzzling a pro-Trump media outlet is a bonus too.
• First published in Strategic Culture Foundation
The post Scandal at Trump-backer Epoch Times: Biden and U.S. Establishment Getting Desperate Over Election? first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
With the U.S. presidential election only four months away, the incumbent Joe Biden White House and the Democrat Party are getting desperate. They can’t seem to close the gap in poll numbers showing Republican rival Donald Trump having a strong chance of regaining the presidency.
Such is the political crisis in the United States from voter indifference to both candidates that anything could happen. With Trump threatening a “bloodbath” if he loses in November, the prospect of national chaos either way is looming.
An increasingly frail Biden is calling on Hollywood A-listers to boost his flagging campaign. A recent $30 million fundraiser by Tinseltown big names including Julia Roberts and George Clooney warned of the “scariest” outcome if Trump were returned to the White House.
What’s of concern to the political and media establishment – which largely votes Democrat – is that Trump’s popularity seems immune to damage from scandal and legal prosecutions for financial corruption. His fundraising is also set to grow more robustly after the Republican Congressional leaders put aside any misgivings to bless his campaign.
The high stakes may explain the “big news” crackdown on alleged corruption by the chief financial executive at the conservative news outlet, The Epoch Times.
Its Chief Financial Officer Weidong “Bill” Guan is in court this week facing federal charges for money laundering and bank fraud to the tune of $67 million. Guan denies the charges but if convicted he is facing a 20-30 year stretch in jail.
The Epoch Times is a major supporter of “The Donald”. The weekly newspaper is published in 35 countries and 22 languages. It was founded 25 years ago and is affiliated with the Falun Gong movement, a secretive quasi-Buddhist religion that claims to have millions of followers in the U.S. and worldwide. The spiritual leader is China-born multimillionaire Li Hongzhi who lives in exile. Falun Gong is banned in China by the Chinese government which accuses it of cult practices and extortion of followers.
Following the arrest of Bill Guan by U.S. authorities earlier this month, the Falun Gong leader wrote two articles for Epoch Times, denouncing shady practices and partisan politics. The newspaper has denied any wrongdoing and has suspended its chief financial officer pending the outcome of the fraud trial.
The New York-based Epoch Times has been a useful proxy for U.S. governments since its foundation in 2000 following the exile of Li Hongzhi from China to the United States where “he found his American Dream”, according to the Wall Street Journal. Apart from its zany content which borders on superstition and sensationalism, the upside for the U.S. establishment is the publication is vehemently hostile towards the People’s Republic of China in its editorial line. It reflects the “anti-communist” views of the Falun Gong leader and in that way can be seen as a useful propaganda tool for Washington to drum up “anti-China” sentiments.
However, during the last Trump administration, The Epoch Times adopted a stridently pro-Trump line. It ran stories popular among the MAGA movement such as the Covid-19 virus being a plot by the Chinese Communist Party to destroy the United States, as well as QAnon conspiracy claims about Satanic corruption among the U.S. establishment.
When Trump lost in 2020 to Biden, the paper promoted the false claims that the election was “stolen” by Democrat-orchestrated voter fraud. Many Republican voters still believe that their man was cheated out of a second consecutive term by the deep state.
Nailing its editorial colors to the Trump electoral mast was a profitable move for The Epoch Times. Under the stewardship of Bill Guan – a protégé of Falun Gong guru Li Hongzhi – the media group’s revenues skyrocketed from $4 million a year to over $120 million. The Department of Justice indictment alleges that Guan raked in the proceeds through fundraising online scams using cryptocurrency and personal identity theft.
The association of Trump’s campaign with an alleged massive fraud operation run by a media group that can be easily painted as a weird cultist whack job seems to be the latest effort by the Democrat-supporting political establishment to tip the scales in favor of Biden.
There has been widespread American corporate media coverage of the fraud scandal implicating The Epoch Times and its Falun Gong network. The Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, and CNBC, among others, have been having a field day on the subject.
It appears odd that the U.S. establishment, which has indulged the Falun Gong movement and its anti-China news outlet for so many years, should abruptly ramp up negative coverage.
But bear in mind that Biden’s campaign is in deep trouble. His administration’s embroilment in the Gaza genocide perpetrated by the Israeli regime has earned bitter recrimination from Democrat voters and students who would have normally voted for Biden.
Another worry for the Democrat Party is Biden’s increasingly obvious physical and mental frailty. Even pro-Democrat media are openly commenting on how Biden’s mental health is failing as he stumbles from one public gaff or misstep to another. There is a sense of dread that when Trump and Biden go head to head in a live TV debate later this month, the incumbent president will be made look decrepit and unfit for office.
The Democrat campaign is amplifying attention on Trump’s conviction for fraud over hush payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels and his other forthcoming court trial over abuse of classified documents. It’s also talking up Trump’s dodgy financial accounts and business dealings as a former real estate magnate.
The scandal at The Epoch Times and allegations of defrauding millions of Americans through money laundering comes at a time when the Biden campaign needs all the help it can get to pile the dirt on Trump.
A legal crackdown on the newspaper’s financial dealings seems long overdue. Banks and tax authorities were flagging suspicious accounts from at least 2021, according to reports. Former employers of The Epoch Times have also commented publicly on the surprising delay in investigating the media outlet and its fundraising operations.
It seems strange that federal indictments are being brought now with much-hyped media coverage if the case were assessed merely on legal concerns about finances.
If the intensity of politics is factored though and the U.S. establishment’s fears that Trump might just pull off a spectacular reelection – with all the chaos that such a return to the White House will elicit – then digging up dirt using a money-laundering scandal makes perfect sense. Muzzling a pro-Trump media outlet is a bonus too.
• First published in Strategic Culture Foundation
The post Scandal at Trump-backer Epoch Times: Biden and U.S. Establishment Getting Desperate Over Election? first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The overturning of Roe v. Wade was the result of decades of relentless effort and strategic maneuvering by a determined religious and right wing coalition, and, the underestimation of the power of this movement by the liberal establishment. Recency bias puts Donald Trump and his appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court at the forefront of those responsible for taking down Roe v. Wade. However, reality is far more complex, with roots of the right’s organizing stretching back to the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling guaranteeing a constitutional right to abortion.
This landmark decision sparked one of the most enduring and contentious religious and political movements in American history, involving national and local anti-abortion organizations, violence-prone activists that didn’t stop at the murder of abortion providers and the bombing of health clinics, Religious Right leaders, conservative legal organizations, the Republican Party, and a coterie of deep-pocketed right-wing funders and foundations.
In their new book The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America, Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerner write: “For more than 40 years a passionate band of conservative and mostly Christian activists tried to find ways to undermine [Roe v. Wade]. … But they had been losing.” However, despite the losses the movement was marked by conviction and a perseverance that led to countless legal battles, demonstrations, vilification and attacks on abortion providers, political campaigns, and grassroots mobilizations, all aimed at overturning Roe.
“The Fall of Roe unfolds like a horror story,” New York magazine’s Sarah Jones recently noted. “Danger lurked outside the cabin door, but the threat was never fully perceived by those who lived within. Dias and Lerer depict a liberal Establishment that behaved as though it had permanently won. ‘Roe loomed so large in American life that it was almost impossible to imagine that it could disappear,’ they write. ‘Every election Democrats and their allies in the abortion rights movement warned voters about the potential consequences to abortion rights, should they vote Republican,’ but they didn’t really believe that Roe would one day fall.
“Yet as institutions like Planned Parenthood grew flush with cash, activists closer to the ground and who were more exposed to danger warned of trouble. A constellation of ‘smaller, largely Black and Hispanic abortion-rights organizations’ knew that restrictions had already eroded the right to abortion. Though the big abortion-rights groups considered the Affordable Care Act a major success, the law reaffirmed the Hyde Amendment, which banned federal funding for abortion care and mostly affected poor women.”
In the early years, conservative activists faced an uphill battle. The 1973 ruling was seen as a settled issue, and early attempts to challenge it in court and through legislation were met with failure. Yet, this did not deter them. They understood that to achieve their goal, they needed to play the long game, embedding their cause within the fabric of American politics and culture. Reproductive rights became one of the right’s foremost culture war issues.
Throughout the late 20th century, anti-abortion activists formed alliances with influential religious leaders, who began to preach the sanctity of life from their pulpits, galvanizing their congregations. Local and national organizations, such as the National Right to Life Committee, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, and Operation Rescue, organized protests and lobbying efforts, ensuring that the issue remained in the public eye and on the political agenda.
Conservative legal organizations, such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, Liberty Counsel, the Thomas More Society, and the Federalist Society, played a crucial role in this effort. They worked tirelessly to promote a judicial philosophy that favored a narrow interpretation of the Constitution, which they believed could lead to the overturning of Roe. This involved meticulously vetting and supporting judicial candidates who shared their views, to ensure that when the opportunity arose, they would have allies on the bench.
The Republican Party also became a key player in this movement. Starting in the 1980s, the party increasingly adopted anti-abortion stances as part of its platform, recognizing the issue’s power to mobilize a small yet highly motivated portion of the electorate. Republican presidents, from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, appointed conservative judges who were sympathetic to the anti-abortion cause, slowly shifting the balance of the judiciary.
Right-wing funders and foundations provided the financial backing necessary to sustain this long-term effort. Wealthy donors and organizations, such as the Koch brothers and the Heritage Foundation, funded advocacy groups, think tanks, and political campaigns, ensuring that the anti-abortion movement had the resources it needed to continue its fight.
For decades, these efforts seemed to be in vain. The courts upheld Roe, and public opinion largely supported – and still does — a woman’s right to choose. But then, along came Donald Trump. His promise to name “pro-life judges” during his 2016 presidential campaign was the opening the anti-abortion movement had been waiting for. With Trump in the White House, the movement saw its chance to finally achieve its goal.
Trump’s presidency marked a turning point. He appointed three Supreme Court justices—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—who were seen as likely to overturn Roe. These appointments shifted the balance of the Court, creating a solid conservative majority.
In June 2022, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, effectively overturning Roe v. Wade. The ruling was the culmination of nearly 50 years of relentless effort by the anti-abortion movement, a testament to their persistence and strategic acumen.
The fall of Roe has awakened reproductive rights advocates and is ushering in a new era in American politics and society. As Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerner detail in their book, this victory for the anti-abortion movement is not just a legal milestone but a transformative moment that will shape the future of the country. The rise of this new America, forged through decades of struggle and sacrifice, is a story of how deeply held beliefs and determined activism can eventually reshape the landscape of a nation.
There is no question that the anti abortion movement will continue campaigning to outlaw abortion in all fifty states. And now, in the flush of victory right wing coalitions are seeking to broaden the attack on abortion to attacking the right to contraception. The upcoming presidential election will go a long way to seeing whether that scenario prevails.
Whether the American people will allow that to happen remains to be seen. According to the Pew Research Center, support for abortion access has remained steady, with 63% of the population favoring access in almost all cases.
And, women and their allies are fighting back. According to Ballotpedia, “In 2022, there were six ballot measures addressing abortion — the most on record for a single year. Measures were approved in California, Michigan and Vermont. Measures were defeated (that would have eliminated abortions) in Kansas, Kentucky and Montana. ” In 2023, Ohio passed a constitutional amendment establishing the right to abortion. There will be a ballot initiative in Florida in 2024 election to establish abortion rights following State’s recent highly restrictive anti-abortion legislation.
The anti-abortion movement’s playing the long game has redefined America’s political landscape. Now, the question remains, whether reproductive rights advocates and activists can sustain and build upon its recent victories. If pro-choice organizations and activists have learned anything from this 50-plus year battle, it is that fundamental rights cannot be taken for granted.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
At the recent Detroit convention of Turning Point USA, led by Christian nationalist Charlie Kirk, a flag in the colors of the MAGA movement declared from the stage “White Boy Summer.” MAGA is a race war against America. So why are Black people, especially Brooklyn-born Byron Donalds, supporting a white supremacist movement?
This week on Gaslit Nation, Terrell Starr of the essential Black Diplomats Podcast & Substack joins Andrea to discuss the curious case of Black Republicans like Donalds and their support for Trump. Andrea and Terrell also discuss the recent Switzerland peace summit for Ukraine, Vice President Kamala Harris’s remarks there, and the long list of African nations standing up to Russia’s aggression, and many across Africa which have been infiltrated by Russian mercenaries and Chinese imperialism.
This week’s bonus show, available Saturday for Patreon subscribers at the Truth-tell level and higher, looks at the Caitlin Clark phenomenon, as well as the racism and misogyny targeting this golden age of women’s basketball. Thank you to everyone who supports the show – we could not make Gaslit Nation without you!
Reminder! Gaslit Nation’s first phone bank of the season is this Thursday at 7pm ET, in collaboration with our friends at Indivisible. If you haven’t already, make sure to RSVP using the link in the show notes! See you Thursday!
A very special shout-out to Gaslit Nation listener Leslie Nuss, who’s running for state senate in Indiana! Learn more about her campaign here.
Here are some of the exciting events we have coming up for our Patreon community:
Investigative Journalist Craig Unger Live-Taping – June 25th 12pm ET:
June 25th is George Orwell’s birthday! Come celebrate with us at a live taping of Gaslit Nation, featuring another fearless journalist, Craig Unger, the author of several bestselling books: House of Trump, House of Putin; House of Bush, House of Saud; and American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery (which features his reporting on Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophile global crime syndicate). Joining the live-taping will be Russian mafia expert Olga Lautman and European analyst Monique Camarra of Kremlin File. Drop your questions in the chat! Be sure to subscribe at Patreon.com/Gaslit at the Truth-teller tier ($5/month) or higher to get your ticket. A zoom link will be sent out the morning of the event. Thank you to everyone who supports the show!
Cult Expert Dr. Janja Lalich Live-Taping – July 15 8pm ET
July 15th kicks off the Republican National Convention/Hitler rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. To help us cope with the mainstream media, especially the New York Times, continuing to normalize Trump and his MAGA cult, we’re producing a live taping with cult expert Dr. Janja Lalich. Bring your questions about how to navitage this perilous time of rampant disinformation and manipulation, learn the signs of cult grooming, and how to help loved ones who have fallen victim. This will be Dr. Lalich’s second time on the show. You can listen to the interview with her from April 2022 here.
In the Shadow of Stalin Book Launch – September
Gaslit Nation will host a live taping at a book launch in New York City for In the Shadow of Stalin, the graphic novel adaptation of Mr. Jones. It includes scenes that didn’t make it into the final cut of the film, or it would have been three hours long! The evening will include a special meet-up just for Patreon supporters. We look forward to sharing more details as we get closer. If you want a book event/live taping of Gaslit Nation in your town or city, let us know!
Indivisible x Gaslit Nation Phonebank Party! – June 20th 7pm ET
Open to all, Gaslit Nation and Indivisible are kicking things off early this year, really early! When there’s such a thing as Project 2025, there’s no time to waste. Come join us for our first phone bank party of the season, as we make calls to our fellow citizens in Republican hostage states, to refuse to abandon those on the frontlines of American authoritarianism, and to plant seeds of change. We’re going in! RSVP here to join us! https://www.mobilize.us/indivisible/event/628701/
Thank you to everyone who supports the show – we could not make Gaslit Nation without you!
Show Notes:
CNN Data Reporter ‘Speechless’ By New Donald Trump-Joe Biden Poll: ‘Holy Cow, Folks!’ https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cnn-data-stunned-donald-trump-poll_n_6671266be4b08889dbe60168
This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation and was authored by Andrea Chalupa.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) is calling on federal investigators to open a probe into insurance companies that are denying coverage for contraception despite a federal mandate that contraception be free of cost to patients. In a letter sent to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on Monday, Sanders, the chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The Democratic-Republicans at prayer
Those who may recall, if only vaguely, the early chapters of their secondary school history books, may recognize- if not remember- that the original name of the “party of Jefferson” was the Democratic-Republicans. In the first years of the American Empire, the government was in the hands of the Federalist Party, led by the Boston Adams dynasty and the New York mercantile-adventurers for whom Alexander Hamilton had become spokesman. The Federalists became extinct in the term of Thomas Jefferson, the Democratic-Republican POTUS from Virginia. The party base was essentially the Southern landowning oligarchy which opposed its creditors in New York and Boston. The westward extermination of the indigenous and expansion of the empire gave rise to the Whig party. Imperial politics and finance was fought until 1860 by the mercantile – colonizers of what was then the Northwest Territories (a region now considered part of the “mid-West”, basically extending from the River Ohio to the Mississippi and the Great Lakes).
The determination of the mercantile oligarchy from Boston to Chicago to extract from the Southern oligarchy the costs of the 1857 economic crash intensified the divisions within the settler republic. Those textbooks to which reference is made above also erroneously simplify the conflicts that led to the only serious war ever fought on US territory– the civil war from 1860 to 1865. School pupils are taught that this fraternal war was fought for the liberation of African slaves or for the preservation of constitutionally enshrined “states’ rights”– depending on which side of the Mason-Dixon line one went to school. I recall terms like “the war of Northern Aggression” and “the war between the States” prevailing in the American South while Northern schools taught the “Civil War” and the fight to abolish slavery. The past decade of attacks on memorials to the Confederate States of America and thus the distractive erasure of a complex period in US history by the congenitally ignorant (aka the awakened “Woke”) has been aggravated by other systemic language perversion. It is beyond the scope of such modest essays as this to remedy the institutionalized dementia which passes for social justice activism in the US. However just like sewage treatment is an ongoing process, responsible users of public language ought to regularly skim at least the upper layers of mendacious slime from the reservoirs that supply potable thought.
In this sense it might be helpful to restore some clarity of definition to the political topography.
What I have called elsewhere the Fourth Awakening (“Awakenings” are the Protestant equivalent of the Latin Crusades– both of which are directed toward the extermination of dissidents and “brown people”) has become the moral equivalent of the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth). The Establishment, constituted in the Democratic Party (with its Republican component- hence Democratic-Republicans), has created, since the early 1980s, a domestic armed propaganda movement, drawing conceptually on elements of the NSDAP Sturmabteilung (SA) and the counter-insurgency organization created by the CIA in what would be called the Phoenix Program. Since ideological consistency is not essential in a society controlled entirely by daily marketing and advertising campaigns, the combination of anti-racist and egalitarian rhetoric with support of the most violently imperialist and anti-humanist government policies should not surprise. An accurate understanding of the German NSDAP would include the fact that “national socialism” absorbed strong anti-capitalist and petty bourgeois democratic tendencies in the service of cartel capitalism (and surreptitiously the Anglo-American Empire). The original fascist party, was created by the faux socialist Benito Mussolini while on the payroll of British secret intelligence services. Just like it was never necessary for everyone in the Manhattan Project or the NASA Space Program to know what the real objectives of their work was, there is no need to impugn the motives of thousands of young people who have been recruited directly or indirectly into today’s “Children’s Crusade”.
While it is helpful to examine and understand the underlying ideology, that is insufficient. All ideologies are inherently incoherent by themselves. It is really impossible to enforce, short of death, uniform responses to ideological instructions even among those who consider themselves true and loyal believers. Hence it is essential, while giving weight to ideological analysis, to examine the organizational mechanisms by which ideology is transformed into action and action is absorbed within ideology. Although the claims by the wokie-dokies to be latent or active social justice warriors cannot be taken at face value, the behavioral consequences of such explanations must be taken seriously. In fact it is possible to believe in racial equality and act in ways that exacerbate inequality. Does one judge the attribute of belief or the results of the act? Hypocrisy is a natural condition of language in part because it is impossible to act in a way which is utterly and absolutely consistent with any verbal explanation of the act in question. There is always a statement which can be uttered that qua statement is consistent with other statements of the same type and yet inconsistent with the nonverbal actions attributed to it. We judge statements to be appropriate or not as statements (verbal acts) and as instructions for how to respond to other statements or non-verbal acts. Philosophy and ethics are largely concerned with the generation of statements that ought to be used as explanations for assessing other statements or nonverbal behavior.
The question can be restated. Based on assumptions and values as to what behavior is appropriate for maintaining social relations governed by “democracy”, “equality”, or even the DIE criteria or “diversity, inclusion and equity”, is it the language or the results that count? The answer to that question requires that one include language as action and results of actions at the empirical frontier as distinct categories. Moreover language in its passive sense, contemplation and scholarship, ought to be considered in relation to the actions generated rather that as some quasi-mathematical equation on the blackboard.
So let us return to the party terminology with which we began. The Democratic Party is the lineal descendant of the Democratic-Republican Party. It was historically the party of the North American slavocracy and landed oligarchy. After the “war of Northern Aggression” it became the party of resistance to the Republican Party (aka GOP or the party of Lincoln) which replaced the Whigs and for strategic reasons absorbed the third awakening (abolitionism) in an alliance with Northern creditor interests. Whatever one may have thought of chattel slavery in the 19th century, the Republican Party was not the anti-slavery party but the party of the slave merchants and usurers whose abolition of the slave system and much of the agricultural asset base of the latifundistas would render the South the poorest part of the United States to this day. African-Americans– Negroes in the 19th century– were admitted to political power during the so-called Reconstruction period as Republicans, not as Democrats. These Reconstruction governments created the first wide-ranging free public primary and secondary education for the poor agricultural workforce, whites as well as freed slaves. In other words Black Reconstruction was an attempt to remedy the class inequalities inherited from the Anglo-American antebellum regime. It was ultimately torpedoed by the reconciliation of creditor and debtor, whereby the Southern elite agreed to industrialize in the textile industry for example in return for power-sharing again. This reconstitution of the Anglo-American elite in 1865 also gave birth to the industrial and financial trusts associated with the so-called Robber Barons (Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan, et al.) and the prison-industrial complex, whereby freed slaves and poor whites were sent to prison to perform “involuntary servitude” pursuant to the loophole in the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution. Unlike Britain that used Australia and other colonies for labor discipline, the Americans had space to incarcerate bonded labor at home.
The Fourth Awakening/ Crusade is identified by its opponents as a Democratic Party project. Per corollary the Democratic Party is condemned for its “leftist” or “socialist” policies based on the largely unchallenged assumptions that the ideology and the actions are consistent and that both have some vague root in “socialism” or even “communism”. Absurdly the more reasonable assessment is that they are a product of covert Zionist psychological warfare strategy, one which is only being admitted as police bludgeon students on elite universities for protesting the mass murder perpetrated by the settler-colonial state occupying Palestine. The absurdity is that adherents to a traditional oligarchy identified as “white” and “nativist” attack or defend themselves from crusaders they claim to be foreign in every sense of the word. However the Democratic Party has always been tightly controlled by an anti-communist/ anti-socialist elite. Even its “immigrant” party machines were ultimately “nativist”. However the Democratic Party in the North managed the immigrant labor just like its brethren in the South managed the former slaves and sharecroppers. The paragon of “left” Democratic politics, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, would have been unelectable without the Southern vote. The moral degenerate who dropped the first atomic bombs, Harry S. Truman, and his 1993 Arkansas successor, were products of Southern Democratic machine politics.
The bipolarity produced by American politics leads opponents of the Democratic Party machine, actually the result of a merger between the Bush Republicans and the Clinton Democrats, brokered by the principals of the national security state, to huddle behind the mast and sails of the Goodship Ronald Wilson Reagan, slinging insults like broadsides of grapeshot– whereby the shot is only made of grapes rather than something more deadly. Thus the wholly transitional hordes of Wokism and the Democratic faithful are incited to ever escalating violations of what formal democratic practices and procedures survived the hundred-year corporatist onslaught– marketed as “public-private partnerships”. The most recent travesty are the quasi-autistic orgasms and Vitus dances performed by solipsistic Trump haters after his bureaucratic lynching before a New York Superior Court. (What would Joseph E. Davies have said about that, one can only imagine?) Clearly it is impossible for those engaged in the destruction of the United States of America, as an inhabited nation rather than a special purpose entity of its finance capitalist oligarchy, to articulate themselves in terms both empirically verifiable and linguistically/ ideologically coherent. The party of Lincoln, the party of Kennedy, the party of peace, the party of the New Deal, the anti-slavery party, the party of civil rights (was there ever such a party?), the party of Reagan, the party of Clintons, chose your epigraph. Since 2020 it is even impossible to say that these are the parties of electoral representative democracy. For better or worse, if a woman’s beauty pageant can be won by a man dressed in woman’s clothes, then why not an election decided in favor of someone who is not even alive? Voting dead has a long tradition in US electoral politics.
Were these all merely anecdotes from Tierra del Fuego or Fiji, it would be comic. However these are the conditions prevailing in the most belligerent and homicidal state on the planet. A minority consensus is emerging in the United States and among its vassals that the West is managed by the insane. Intuitively the vast majority of ordinary people throughout the world have known this for decades. That majority of ordinary humans, who have been kept in senseless poverty since the US helped crush the revolution in Haiti with financial warfare in 1803, understand that the only way to escape the US was under its shadow by immigrating there. The American Dream was to escape the Anglo-American nightmare. Yet the armed propaganda units of the Fourth Awakening (the latest corporatist crusade) are simply too ignorant to grasp these details. That is also what makes them unwitting instruments of Democratic Party– in reality Democratic-Republican– terror. After the real socialists and revolutionaries were exiled or killed (by the end of the 1970s) and replaced by academic androids, who produced a similarly chimeric ideology– combining e.g. postmodernism, transgenderism and CRT, there were no alternatives for the justifiably dissatisfied. This has been an established strategy for recruiting terrorists, whether in Vietnam to neutralize the NLF or in Iraq– destroy real opposition and then recruit the unwitting into synthetics run by opportunists.
The language of US American politics is powerful. It has been crafted by the best psychological warfare (propaganda) experts corporate money can buy. Edward Bernays was merely the most self-important of the lot. There are also squadrons of academics like the late Dr Heinz Kissinger and his Democratic counterpart, Zbigniew Brezinski. Then there is the Hollywood regiment of congenital propagandists who expand their operations beyond the silver screen to share the stage of misanthro-capitalism e.g. by promoting covert operations throughout Africa for “humanitarian” reasons. Underlying it all is the religion of Business by which the population is constantly told that some clown in the Executive Mansion makes decisions– while all his bills are paid by his corporate donors, a euphemism for masters. Because Business is the measure of all virtue, anything the State does which benefits Business is good. Moreover Business virtue is enhanced by the degree to which government serves it. Since corporations (and offshore trusts in secrecy jurisdictions) are “persons” in terms of the law and upper class persons too, they deserve the full protection and promotion of the State. Therefore neither a Republican partisan nor a Democrat– especially a bought-and-paid-for wokie dokie— will dispute the right and dignity of oligarchs who buy state, national and intergovernmental legislatures and executives for their “personal” benefit. They will all agree that if the business plan, like they learned to produce at Wharton, Harvard or LSE, is realistic and the income projections are plausible, then killing a billion or two with genetic engineering or atomic weapons, is just an unavoidable expense on the liabilities side of the balance sheet.
While those who are doing their best to find solutions to this insanity and evil try to sort the language and the behavior, there are confronting even greater forces whose conviction is beyond rational argument. These legions are armed not only by the State with its democidal mission. These legions are also irradiated with the toxins of nearly 80 years. They believe that the atomic bomb was created for liberation. They are the crusaders for death as freedom. When in they go marching, with their saints, then the number to which we are to belong is nil. When the Democratic-Republican saints go marching in, oh when those saints go marching in– it will be over the billions of corpses without number– oh when those saints go marching in.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
