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Category: United States

  • Some Thoughts on THE ELECTION

    In the wake of the election — THE ELECTION, in capital letters and with strong emphasis — I have read many insightful and thoughtful assessments of how we have arrived at the point where Donald Trump was re-elected. I highly recommend the recent scathing essay by my colleague at Marxism-Leninism Today, Chris Townsend, on the crying need for an alternative to the two-party charade and the bankruptcy of the Democratic Party as a representative for working people.

    But for every good analysis, there are a dozen awful commentaries that ultimately blame the voters’ judgment or endorse their worst fears.

    However, if pressed for a simple explanation of the election results, one might consider the following:

    Once again, offered the odious, devil’s choice between two candidates who are rich, elitist, and completely detached from “ordinary” people, the US voter chose a candidate who was rich, elitist, and completely detached from the lives and interests of most people. 

    Of course, people want to know why the voters chose this particular rich elitist at this particular time. That question calls forth both a specific, practical response and a far deeper, concerning answer.

    Polls and disregarded economic data show that most voters have a profoundly negative and often painful relationship with their economic status– they are not doing well. They typically punish incumbents when under economic distress. This should come as no surprise. But the highly paid consultants of both parties– with approaching two billion dollars to spend– chose to press many other issues as well and deal with the economy only superficially.

    But in the end, exit polls show that economic distress played a decisive role in shaping voters’ choices. Apparently, the pundits forgot how persistent, value-sucking inflation led to the election of Ronald Reagan forty-four years ago.

    Again, like today, the 1970s were a period of realignment. The Democrats had lost the South to the Republicans over desegregation and the Civil Rights legislation. After the Nixonian scandals associated with the Watergate burglaries and other dirty tricks, the Democrats won over suburbanites disgusted with Republican chicaneries– a demographic thought by many functionaries to be the needed replacement for the lost South.

    In 1976, the Democrats swept in with a squeaky-clean, untarnished candidate, James Carter. With the decade-long stagflation coming to a climax, the Carter regime was short-lived; despite a rightward turn on his part, Carter was beaten by an ultra-right movie star turned politician, Ronald Reagan. Reagan was the default choice for voters wanting change after a lost decade.

    For those who like their history repeating from tragedy to farce, consider the transition from the self-righteous old red-baiter, Ronald Reagan, to the pompous, supercilious windbag, Donald Trump. History has a wicked sense of humor.

    Few pundits acknowledge that Democratic Party strategists decided in the 1980s that the future of the party would be determined by the interests and concerns of metropolitan voters, especially those in the suburban upper-middle stratum who were “super voters,” economically secure, and attuned to lifestyle and identity liberalism. While they represented the legacy of “white flight,” the suburbanites contradictorily espoused the urbanity of tolerance and personal choice.

    Coincident with the embrace of the suburban vote, Democratic Party strategists saw no need to attend to past central components of their coalition: the working class and multi-class Blacks. Loyal union leaders would corral the working-class vote and ascendant Black leaders would rally African Americans of all classes.

    Besides, it was believed that neither had any other place to go besides the Democratic Party.

    Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, revealed this thinking in 2016, when he said: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” Even before that careless remark, both Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama– in moments of candor– revealed their contempt for working people outside of the metropolis.

    This election stamped “paid” on this program, with nearly all the assumed components of the Democratic coalition drifting towards the Republicans.

    The always insightful Adam Tooze, writing in The London Review of Books, concludes that the Democratic Party failings demonstrate “the high-achieving, insincere, vacuous incoherence that thrives at the top of the American political class.”

    There is, however, a far deeper explanation of the Trump phenomenon seldom mentioned by mainstream commentators. Those who cite the specific issues of abortion rights, immigration, trans rights, crime, racism, etc.– issues that indeed played a role in the November election– neglect the fact that Trumpism is part of an international trend that infects the politics of such far-flung countries as India, Japan, and Argentina, as well as many European countries for often vastly different reasons. The rise of right populism in virtually all European countries– Orban’s Hungary, Meloni’s Italy, RN in France, AfD in Germany, Vox in Spain, Chega in Portugal, and similar parties in virtually every other European country– share one defining feature with the politics of India’s Modi and Argentina’s Milei: a rejection of centrist, traditional parties. 

    Right populism rises as a response to the ineffectiveness of the politics of normality. It reflects the dissatisfaction with business as usual.

    For hundreds of millions throughout the world, the twenty-first century has brought a series of crises eroding, even destroying their quality of life. Ruling classes have stubbornly refused to address these crises through the indifference of traditional bourgeois political parties. Voters have punished these parties by turning to opportunist right-populist formations that promise to give voice to their anger. Of course, this often takes the form of ugly, reprehensible claims and slogans– appealing to the basest of motives.

    But it is not enough to denounce these backward policies without addressing the desperation that unfortunately popularizes those policies. It is not helpful to righteously raise the alarm of “fascism” if we fail to offer an alternative that will answer the hopelessness and misery that serves as the fertile soil for reaction.

    From the tragedy of the Reagan election to the farce of the Trump re-election, we have suffered from two sham parties taking turns representing the “people,” while neither did. Isn’t it time for an independent people’s party– a party of the working class majority– that addresses the twenty-first century economic crises and their aftermath, the acute environmental crisis, the broken public health and health care systems, the insidious impoverishment of inflation, the crumbling infrastructure, and a host of other urgent demands, a party dedicated to serving the working people of the US and not its wealthy and powerful?

    The post Some Thoughts on THE ELECTION first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Who Control’s Afghanistan’s Stolen Assets: A Factsheet

    In August 2021, following the withdrawal of major U.S./NATO military forces from Afghanistan after two decades of occupation, Taliban forces took effective control over the country. In response, the United States seized the assets of Afghanistan’s central bank totaling around $7 billion. Half of that amount was transferred to the misleadingly named “Afghan Fund” in September 2022, a Swiss-based “charitable foundation” whose only role thus far has been to privately conceal and invest the funds without any concrete plans to return them, as confirmed by U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan Thomas West. This runs contrary to popular demands by experts and humanitarian organizations who argue that a return of the funds is desperately needed now more than ever to help everyday Afghans.

    Afghan women do not have any representation on the board of the “Afghan Fund,” nor do they have any official say over whether the assets should be returned. The board of trustees includes: two men selected by the U.S. State Department, Anwar ul-Haq Ahady and Shah Mehrabi, the U.S. Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs Jay Shambaugh, and Swiss government official Ambassador Alexandra Baumann.

    According to a July 2024 press statement from the board of the “Afghan Fund,” some of the stolen assets may also be disbursed to the Asian Development Bank, an institution controlled by the United States, Japan, and Australia via majority shareholder status. While the funds are not returning to the Afghan people, this move shows that a process to return the funds to Afghanistan can begin immediately if the board members agree to do so. Regardless of whether the funds are in fact disbursed elsewhere over time, board members Ahady, Mehrabi, Shambaugh, and Baumann are all culpable in the forced starvation and impoverishment of tens of millions of Afghans – tantamount to the collective punishment of the Afghan people.

    According to a January 2024 written testimony by the U.S. Congress-established Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), the remaining $3.5 billion in sovereign funds held in the United States may eventually be transferred to the “Afghan Fund” depending on litigation filed by the families of 9/11 victims and other plaintiffs, while other funds held in Europe and the United Arab Emirates may also be added to the “Afghan Fund.” SIGAR found that none of the funds in the “Afghan Fund” as of early 2024 have been spent, are planned to be spent, or will ever be used to provide humanitarian or development assistance. Notably, while no disbursements have been made for the benefit of the Afghan people, portions of the over $340 million in interest that have been accrued from the stolen assets are being used to pay for the “Afghan Funds” operational and administrative costs.

    The sudden deprivation of access to its sovereign assets led to a sharp economic and financial crisis in Afghanistan in 2021, which a recent United Nations Development Program (UNDP) study found is disproportionately affecting women and children. The seizure of assets combined with both U.S. and UN sanctions – ostensibly only targeting the Taliban – have hurt ordinary Afghans and aid organizations, affirmed by US-aligned rights groups and media outlets. The same UNDP report found that 69% of Afghans “do not have adequate resources for basic subsistence living,” while an estimated 15.8 million Afghans – including nearly 8 million children – are expected to experience “acute food insecurity” throughout 2024.

    Clearly, the “Afghan Fund” – controlled by Western officials and Afghan compradors – has deliberately withheld billions from the suffering Afghan populace. It should be reiterated that a process to return these stolen funds, and in turn mitigate the U.S.-enabled humanitarian and economic crises plaguing Afghanistan, can and must begin right away. The following individuals have full power or influence over the release of the illegally stolen assets back to its rightful owners: the Afghan people.

    Jay Shambaugh

    Under Secretary of the U.S. Treasury for International Affairs

    • Visiting Associate Professor at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University
    • Former Consultant to the International Monetary Fund (2005, 2008, 2011-2013)
    • Former Director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution (2017-2020)
    • Former Member of the White House Council of Economic Advisors (2015-2017)
    • Former Chief Economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers (2009-2011)

    Alexandra Baumann

    Head of the Prosperity and Sustainability Division at the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs

    • Former Diplomatic Advisor of the Head of the Swiss Federal
    • Department of Finance
    • Previously worked in the Swiss Embassies in Chile and
    • Germany, and the Swiss Mission to the UN in New York

    Anwar ul-Haq Ahady

    Former government official, economic advisor and central banker to the U.S./NATO occupied Afghanistan

    • Former Minister of Commerce and Industry (2010-2013) and Minister of Agriculture (2020-2021)
    • Former Minister of Finance and Advisor of National Economy to the U.S./NATO-backed President of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai (2004-2009)
    • Previously responsible for overseeing Afghanistan’s central bank, Da Afghanistan Bank (2002-2004)

    Shah Mehrabi

    Member of the Supreme Council of Da Afghanistan Bank

    • Professor of Economics at Montgomery College in Maryland
    • Former Senior Economic Advisor to previous Ministers of Finance under U.S./NATO occupied Afghanistan

    Thomas West

    U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Deputy Assistant Secretary

    • Former Vice President at a private global strategic advisory firm, the Cohen Group (2016-2021)
    • Former Special Advisor at the UN National Security Council to the U.S. Vice President for South Asia and the U.S. Director for Afghanistan and Pakistan (2012-2015)
    • Former U.S. State Department senior diplomat in Kunar Province, Afghanistan (2011-2012)
    • Former Special Assistant for South and Central Asia to the U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs (2008-2010)
    The post Who Control’s Afghanistan’s Stolen Assets: A Factsheet first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Reaganland 2

    Rick Perlstein’s 2020 bestseller Reaganland is a must read for many reasons. First and foremost this 900 or so pages book reads like a novel. Perlstein is that great a storyteller. He covers the rise of the right wing in our nation, focusing from Jimmy Carter’s 1976-1980 presidency to Ronald Reagan’s nomination in 1980. As one reads on it is apparent that Donald Trump copied more than just Reagan’s Make America Great Again campaign slogan. Amazing how after almost 50 years nothing has really changed in Amerika. This writer never realized, for instance, that the 1980 Republican platform almost took on making abortion illegal … period. The candid and somewhat humorous point here is that before the Roe  vs. Wade Supreme Court ruling in 1973, a woman who had the money and connections could get a private abortion. It was just that the lower income women in our nation most likely did not have the sources or the financial resources to have it done. Roe leveled that field.

    Carter’s administration behaved much like most of the Democratic presidencies to follow him. Translated: sucking up to Wall Street and the War Cabal to the detriment to working stiffs. If you wanted progressive politics, then get on HG Well’s time machine and go back to FDR’s presidency. Clinton and Obama, and now Biden could not cut the cord from the Military Industrial Empire. Factoring out the indigent, which Democrats always bandage a bit, the Two Parties remain closer than ever. In the 1950s, one third of private sector workers belonged to unions. Since that time it has declined to the 6.3 % it was as of 2023. Sadly, the Democrats, whenever in power, did squat to strengthen that. What both parties have done is to continue to increase military spending to the kazoo. Thus, phony wars like Korea, Vietnam, Iraq 1 and 2 and Afghanistan just took away the safety net and gave it to the War Economy.

    Having said all of this, I sadly saw so many of my working stiff fellow citizens either not voting at all or pulling  the lever for Trump and his reactionaries. I  voted for and stood by the utterly flawed Democrats and watched their ship sink. Clinton’s support for the Welfare Reform Bill and Telecommunications Act, Obama’s life support for the Subprime bandit banks and insurance companies, and Biden’s handouts of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to Israel and Ukraine, while working stiffs get stiffed. So, beginning in January of 2025 Welcome to Reaganland 2!

    The post Reaganland 2 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • AUKUS hypersonics pact to boost ‘collective ability’

    Australia will conduct a series of hypersonic vehicle tests with its AUKUS partners under a new agreement designed to accelerate the development of the dual-use technology. The agreement, announced on Tuesday, will see Australia work with the United State and United Kingdom on as many as six “trilateral flight test campaigns” at a cost of…

    The post AUKUS hypersonics pact to boost ‘collective ability’ appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

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  • As Biden Leaves Office, the US Empire is Desperate to Maintain Its Hegemony

    This November, US president Joe Biden will leave office with the world in turmoil and US fingerprints on the bodies of untold thousands across the globe: in Gaza and Lebanon, Yemen and Syria, Cuba and Venezuela, Pakistan and Haiti, and elsewhere.

    While Biden attempted to cast his foreign policy actions as defending “democracy” against “authoritarianism,” this framing is a lie. The real motive force behind the Biden administration’s bloody foreign policy is a fear of waning hegemony – of losing the benefits the US economy derives from political and economic domination of the global majority.

    In that vein, the US is still trying to suffocate the model of socialist Latin American integration forwarded by Cuba and Venezuela. Washington is still arming the Israeli genocide in Palestine, the invasion of Lebanon, and other Israeli aggressions against “Axis of Resistance” forces in the region, namely Iran. On top of this, the US is still supporting or carrying out airstrikes against Yemen and Syria, still hoping to bleed Russia dry in Ukraine, still backing a Pakistani military dictatorship imposed with US backing, still engineering the re-invasion of Haiti, and still plotting an economic war (and perhaps a hot one) against China.

    The Biden administration genuinely believed it could remake the world in its vision, and particularly the Middle East à la the neoconservatives of the George W. Bush administration. A Nation article by Aída Chávez laid out Biden’s disturbing plan for the Middle East and wider world, a plan that relies on Israel successfully carrying out the ethnic cleansing of Palestine:

    One goal of the “Biden doctrine,” as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman called it, is to achieve the “global legitimacy” necessary to “take on Iran in a more aggressive manner.” With Hamas out of the picture and a demilitarized Palestinian state under the influence of the Gulf regimes, the thinking goes, the US will have Arab cover in the region to be able to counter Iran – and the cheap drones they’re worried about – and then put all of its energy toward a confrontation with China.

    Following Israel’s killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, US officials jumped at the chance to push “a much wider agenda – including an opening for the next stage of America’s geopolitical ambitions.” This “next stage” includes the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the signing of a US-Saudi defence treaty, and the Gulf monarchies leading Gaza’s so-called “reconstruction” as a pro-US “emirate,” in the words of Republican Senator Lindsey Graham.

    Following the killing of Sinwar, Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal stated, “After recent conversations w/leaders of Israel, Saudi Arabia & UAE, I have real hope that Sinwar’s death creates truly historic opportunities for Israel’s security, cessation of fighting & regional peace & stability through normalization of relations. The moment must be seized.” Lindsey Graham elaborated on the “historic opportunities” of which Washington hopes to take advantage. “MBS and MBZ at the UAE will come in and rebuild Gaza,” he said in a recent interview. “[They will] create an enclave in the Palestine.”

    According to Bob Woodward’s new book War, Graham reportedly told Biden, “It’s going to take a Democratic president to convince Democrats to vote to go to war for Saudi Arabia.” To which Biden responded, “Let’s do it.”

    While Washington aims to violently remake the Middle East to serve its geopolitical aims – a stark contrast to China’s recent peacemaking between Saudi Arabia and Iran – other targets of imperialism continue to suffer as well.

    In April 2022, the Biden administration helped engineer the removal of popular Pakistani president Imran Khan from office. The US wanted Khan ousted because he entertained positive relations with China and Russia, two powers that Washington views as a threat to its hegemony. As Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu stated in a now infamous cypher to the Pakistani military, “if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington.”

    Since the US-backed coup against Khan, the Pakistani military has taken extreme measures to prevent the ousted president’s return to power, including legal onslaughts, the arrest of thousands of supporters, crackdowns on social media activists, the imprisonment and torture of independent journalists such as Imran Riaz Khan, the decimation of Khan’s party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), and the rigging of an election earlier this year.

    In other words, a de facto military junta has seized total power in Pakistan, and Washington backs them because they have reversed Khan’s non-aligned position and returned the country to the US orbit.

    Meanwhile, Haiti has become a target of Washington once more. Earlier this year, the Biden administration courted Kenya’s President William Ruto to lead a US-funded invasion force into Haiti, which is wracked by violence after over a century of exploitation and underdevelopment by the US and allies, including Canada. The mission’s ostensible goal is to free Haiti from warring paramilitary gangs – however, the invasion force and its backers ignore the reality that the paramilitaries are a consequence of the brutally unequal political, economic, and social hierarchies imposed on Haiti by Global North powers. In reality, Haiti requires sovereignty and respect, not a new spiral of bloodshed and misery.

    Haiti’s Caribbean neighbours, Cuba and Venezuela, have also endured immense suffering due to Biden’s imperialist policies. Cuba and Venezuela have long been targets of US imperialism – Cuba for over sixty years, Venezuela for twenty-five – and the Biden era continued this brutal interventionism. In the case of Cuba, Biden kept in place the hundreds of additional sanctions and the egregious “state sponsor of terrorism” designation imposed by Donald Trump. The Trump-Biden sanctions are harsher than any previous president’s, depriving the small Caribbean nation of billions of dollars per year. “The sanctions today,” says political scientist William LeoGrande, “have a greater impact on the Cuban people than ever before.” People are going hungry, hundreds of thousands hope to migrate, and most recently, the country’s power grid collapsed under the weight of Biden’s coercive measures.

    As Drop Site news contributor Ed Augustin wrote in early October:

    Government food rations [in Cuba] – a lifeline for the country’s poor – are fraying. Domestic agriculture, which has always been weak, has cratered in recent years for lack of seeds, fertilizer, and petrol, forcing the state to import 100 percent of the basic subsidized goods. But there’s not enough money to do that. Last year the government eliminated chicken from the basic food basket most adults receive. Last month, the daily ration of bread available to all Cubans was cut by a quarter. Even vital staples like rice and beans now arrive late. Food insecurity on the island is rising, according to a recent report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Vulnerable groups – older people, pregnant women, children and people with chronic illnesses – are most affected by the knock-on effects of US policy.

    In all the cases described above, the Biden administration has taken extreme measures to snuff out challenges to its imperialist hegemony – measures that manifest first and foremost in the physical destruction of Palestinians and Lebanese by US-made weapons, the imposition of hunger, desperation, and migration crises on Cuba and Venezuela, the US-backed occupation of Haiti, the violent repression of Pakistanis’ desire for sovereignty and non-alignment, and more. Meanwhile, one-third of the world’s nations – and 60 percent of poor countries – face some type of US sanctions for having displeased the imperial hegemon.

    The prevailing world system, a system defined by US imperialism and the imposition of the neoliberal Washington Consensus around the globe, is facing an array of challenges, from Latin America and the Caribbean to Palestine to East Asia.

    How is Washington responding? Through the economic strangulation of countries like Cuba and Venezuela that present an alternative model; through a “day after” plan in the Middle East that would reduce Gaza to a neocolony of Washington and the Gulf monarchies; through coups against popular non-aligned leaders like Imran Khan; through the re-invasion of Haiti, a nation whose sovereignty has long been subverted by imperialism; through pressuring the Ukrainian government to lower the draft age so Kyiv can continue sending its young people into the meat grinder on behalf of Washington’s geopolitical aims; and through continuing to trudge the path toward war with China.

    Ironically, the US empire’s violent response to its waning hegemony is expediting the emergence of an alternative world order, one marked by the de-dollarization and South-South cooperation of the BRICS group. As Biden leaves office and Trump returns to the White House, we can safely assume that the violence of imperialism will continue, perhaps intensify, and at the same time, the global majority will continue its efforts to forge new relationships outside the umbrella of US unilateralism.

    The post As Biden Leaves Office, the US Empire is Desperate to Maintain Its Hegemony first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Eight Reasons Why Marco Rubio Would Be a Disastrous Secretary of State

    Rubio and Trump during a break in the 2016 presidential debate. AP photo.

    Of all Trump’s choices for his foreign policy team, Marco Rubio is the least controversial to the neoconservative foreign policy establishment in Washington, and the most certain to provide continuity with all that is wrong with U.S. foreign policy, from Cuba to the Middle East to China.

    The only area where there might be some hope for ending a war is Ukraine, where Rubio has come close to Donald Trump’s position, praising Ukraine for standing up to Russia, but recognizing that the U.S. is funding a deadly “stalemate war” that needs to be “brought to a conclusion.”

    But in all the other hot spots around the world, Rubio is likely to make conflicts even hotter, or start new ones.

    1. His obsession with regime change in Cuba will sink any chance of better relations with the island.

    Like other Cuban-American politicians, Marco Rubio has built his career on vilifying the Cuban Revolution and trying to economically strangle and starve into submission the people of his parents’ homeland.

    It is ironic, therefore, that his parents left Cuba before the Revolution, during the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, whose executioners, secret police and death squads killed an estimated 20,000 people, according to the CIA, leading to a wildly popular revolution in 1959.

    When President Obama began to restore relations with Cuba in 2014, Rubio swore to do “everything possible” to obstruct and reverse that policy. In May 2024, Rubio reiterated his zero tolerance for any kind of social or economic contacts between the U.S. and Cuba, claiming that any easing of the U.S. blockade will only “strengthen the oppressive regime and undermine the opposition… Until there is freedom in Cuba, the United States must maintain a firm stance.”

    In 2024 Rubio also introduced legislation to ensure that Cuba would remain on the U.S. “State Sponsor of Terrorism List,” imposing sanctions that cut Cuba off from the U.S.-dominated Western banking system.

    These measures to destroy the Cuban economy have led to a massive wave of migration in the past two years. But when the U.S. Coast Guard tried to coordinate with their Cuban counterparts, Rubio introduced legislation to prohibit such interaction. While Trump has vowed to stem immigration, his Secretary of State wants to crush Cuba’s economy, forcing people to abandon the island and set sail for the United States.

    2. Applying his anti-Cuba template to the rest of Latin America will make enemies of more of our neighbors.

    Rubio’s disdain for his ancestral home in Cuba has served him so well as an American politician that he has extended it to the rest of Latin America. He has sided with extreme right-wing politicians like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Javier Milei in Argentina, and rails against progressive ones, from Brazil’s Ignacio Lula da Silva to Mexico’s popular former President Lopez Obrador, whom he called “an apologist for tyranny” for supporting other leftist governments.

    In Venezuela, he has promoted brutal sanctions and regime change plots to topple the government of Nicolas Maduro. In 2019 he was one of the architects of Trump’s failed policy of recognizing opposition figure Juan Guaido as president. He has also advocated for sanctions and regime change in Nicaragua.

    In March 2023, Rubio urged President Biden to impose sanctions on Bolivia for prosecuting  leaders of a 2019 U.S.-backed coup that led to massacres that killed at least 21 people.

    Rubio also condemned the government of Honduras for withdrawing from an extradition treaty with the United States this past August, in response to decades of U.S. interference that had turned Honduras into a narco-state riven by poverty, gang violence and mass emigration, until the election of democratic socialist President Xiomara Castro in 2022.

    Rubio’s major concern about Latin America now seems to be the influence of China, which has become the leading trade partner of most Latin American countries. Unlike the U.S., China focuses on economic benefits and not internal politics, while American politicians like Marco Rubio still see Latin America as the U.S. “backyard.”

    While Rubio’s virulent anti-leftist stands have served him well in climbing to senior positions in the U.S. government, and now into Trump’s inner circle, his disdain for Latin American sovereignty bodes ill for U.S. relations with the region.

    3. He believes the US and Israel can do no wrong, and that God has given Palestine to Israel.

    Despite the massive death toll in Gaza and global condemnation of Israel’s genocide, Rubio still perpetuates the myth that “Israel takes extraordinary steps to avoid civilian losses” and that innocent people die in Gaza because Hamas has deliberated placed them in the way and used them as human shields. The problem, he says, is “an enemy that doesn’t value human life.”

    When asked by CODEPINK in November 2024 if he would support a ceasefire, Rubio replied, “On the contrary. I want them to destroy every element of Hamas they can get their hands on. These people are vicious animals.”

    There are few times in this past year that the Biden administration has tried to restrain Israel, but when Biden begged Israel not to send troops into the southern city of Rafah, Rubio said that was like telling the Allied forces in World War II not to attack Berlin to get Hitler.

    In a letter to Secretary of State Blinken in August 2024, Rubio criticized the Biden administration’s decision to sanction Israeli settlers linked to anti-Palestinian violence in the occupied West Bank.

    “Israel has consistently sought peace with the Palestinians. It is unfortunate that the Palestinians, whether it be the Palestinian Authority or FTOs [Foreign Terrorist Organisations] such as Hamas, have rejected such overtures,” Rubio wrote. “Israelis rightfully living in their historic homeland are not the impediment to peace; the Palestinians are,” he added.

    No country besides Israel subscribes to the idea that its borders should be based on 2,000-year-old religious scriptures, and that it has a God-given right to displace or exterminate people who have lived there since then to reconquer its ancient homeland. The United States will find itself  extraordinarily isolated from the rest of the world if Rubio tries to assert that as a matter of U.S. policy.

    4. His deep-seated enmity toward Iran will fuel Israel’s war on its neighbors, and may lead to a U.S. war with Iran.

    Rubio is obsessed with Iran. He claims that the central cause of violence and suffering in the Middle East is not Israeli policy but “Iran’s ambition to be a regional hegemonic power.” He says that Iran’s goal in the Middle East is to “seek to drive America out of the region and then destroy Israel.”

    He has been a proponent of maximum pressure on Iran, including a call for more and more sanctions. He believes the U.S. should not re-enter the Iran nuclear deal, saying: “We must not trade away U.S. and Israeli security for vague commitments from a terrorist-sponsoring regime that has killed Americans and threatens to annihilate Israel.”

    Rubio calls Lebanon’s Hezbollah a “full blown agent of Iran right on Israel’s border” and that wiping out Hezbollah’s leadership, along with entire neighborhoods full of civilians, is a “service to humanity.” He alleges that Iran has control over Iraq, Syria, the Houthis in Yemen and is a threat to Jordan. He claims that “Iran has put a noose around Israel,” and says that the goal of U.S. policy should be regime change in Iran, which would set the stage for war.

    While there will hopefully be leaders in the Pentagon who will caution Donald Trump about the perils of a war with Iran, Rubio will not be a voice of reason.

    5.  He is beholden to big money, from the weapons industry to the Israel lobby.

    Open Secrets reports that Rubio has received over a million dollars in campaign contributions from pro-Israel groups during his career. The Pro-Israel America PAC was his single largest campaign contributor over the last 5 years. When he last ran for reelection in 2022, he was the third largest recipient of funding by pro-Israel groups in the Senate, taking in $367,000 from them for that campaign.

    Rubio was also the fourth largest recipient of funding from the “defense” industry in the Senate for the 2022 cycle, receiving $196,000. Altogether, the weapons industry has invested $663,000 in his Congressional career.

    Rubio is clearly beholden to the US arms industry, and even more so to the Israel lobby, which has been one of his largest sources of campaign funding. This has placed him in the vanguard of Congress’s blind, unconditional support for Israel and subservience to Israeli narratives and propaganda, making it unlikely that he will ever challenge the ongoing extermination of the Palestinian people or their expulsion from their homeland.

    6. He’s so antagonistic towards China that China has sanctioned him–twice!

    Speaking at the Heritage Foundation in 2022, Rubio said: “The gravest threat facing America today, the challenge that will define this century and every generation represented here, is not climate change, the pandemic, or the left’s version of social justice. The threat that will define this century is China.”

    It will be hard for our nation’s “top diplomat” to ease tensions with a country he has so maligned. He antagonized China by co-sponsoring the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which allows the U.S. to bar  Chinese imports over alleged Uyghur rights abuses, abuses that China denies and independent researchers question. In fact, Rubio has gone so far as to accuse China of a “grotesque campaign of genocide” against the Uyghurs.

    On Taiwan, he has not only introduced legislation to increase military aid to the island, but actually supports Taiwanese independence — a dangerous deviation from the US government’s long-standing One China approach.

    The Chinese responded to Rubio by sanctioning him, not once but twice–once regarding the Uyghurs and once for his support of Hong Kong protests. Unless China lifts the sanctions, he would be the first U.S. secretary of state to be banned from even visiting China.

    Analysts expect China to try to sidestep Rubio and engage directly with Trump and other senior officials. Steve Tsang, the director of the China Institute at the U.K.’s School of Oriental and African Studies, told Reuters, “If that doesn’t work, then I think we’re going to get into a much more regular escalation of a bad relationship.”

    7. Rubio knows sanctions are a trap, but he doesn’t know how to escape.

    Rubio is a leading advocate of unilateral economic sanctions, which are illegal under international law, and which the UN and other countries refer to as “unilateral economic coercive measures.”

    The United States has used these measures so widely and wildly that they now impact a third of the world’s population. U.S. officials, from Treasury Secretary Yellen to Rubio himself, have warned that using the U.S. financial system and the dollar’s reserve currency status as weapons against other countries is driving the rest of the world to conduct trade in other currencies and develop alternative financial systems.

    In March 2023, Rubio complained on Fox News, “We won’t have to talk sanctions in five years, because there will be so many countries transacting in currencies other than the dollar, that we won’t have the ability to sanction them.”

    And yet Rubio has continued to be a leading sponsor of sanctions bills in the Senate, including new sanctions on Iran in January 2024 and a bill in July to sanction foreign banks that participate in alternative financial systems.

    So, while other countries develop new financial and trading systems to escape abusive, illegal U.S. sanctions, the nominee for Secretary of State remains caught in the same sanctions trap that he complained about on Fox.

    8. He wants to crack down on U.S. free speech.

    Rubio wants to curtail the right to free speech enshrined in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In May, he described campus protests against Israel as a “complete breakdown of law and order.”

    Rubio claimed to be speaking up for other students at American universities. “[They] paid a lot of money to go to these schools, [but are being disrupted by] a few thousand antisemitic zombies who have been brainwashed by two decades of indoctrination in the belief that the world is divided between victimizers and victims, and that the victimizers in this particular case, the ones that are oppressing people, are Jews in Israel,” said Rubio.

    The Florida senator has said he supports Trump’s plan to deport foreign students who engage in pro-Palestinian campus protests. In April, he called for punishing supporters of the Israel boycott movement as part of efforts to counter antisemitism, falsely equating any attempt to respond to Israel’s international crimes with antisemitism.

    And what about those crimes, which the students are protesting? After visiting Israel in May, Rubio wrote an article for National Review, in which he never mentioned the thousands of civilians Israel has killed, and instead blamed Iran, Biden and “morally corrupt international institutions” for the crisis.

    Marco Rubio expects Americans to believe that it is not genocide itself, but protests against genocide, that are a complete breakdown of law and order. He couldn’t be more wrong if he tried.

    Students are not Rubio’s only target. In August 2023, he alleged that certain “far-left and antisemitic entities” may have violated the Foreign Assistance Registration Act by their ties to China. He called for a Justice Department investigation into 18 groups, starting with CODEPINK. These unfounded claims of China connections are only meant to intimidate legitimate groups that are exercising their free speech rights.

    Conclusion

    On each of these issues, Rubio has shown no sign of understanding the difference between domestic politics and diplomacy. Whether he’s talking about Cuba, Palestine, Iran or China, or even about CODEPINK, all his supposedly tough positions are based on cynically mischaracterizing the actions and motivations of his enemies and then attacking the “straw man” he has falsely set up.

    Unscrupulous politicians often get away with that, and Rubio has made it his signature tactic because it works so well for him in American politics. But that will not work if and when he sits down to negotiate with other world leaders as U.S. secretary of state.

    His underlying attitude to foreign relations is, like Trump’s, that the United States must get its way or else, and that other countries who won’t submit must be coerced, threatened, couped, bombed or invaded. This makes Rubio just as ill-equipped as Antony Blinken to conduct diplomacy, improve U.S. relations with other countries or resolve disputes and conflicts peacefully, as the UN Charter requires.

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  • The Dying — and Constantly Lying — U.S. Empire

    On 25 July 1945, U.S. President Harry Truman accepted the advices from both his personal hero General Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill, to 100% reverse his predecessor Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s carefully designed plan to prevent a WW3 by creating a fully armed democratic federal government of the world to create adjudicate and enforce international laws and NO national laws, and to outlaw and end the cause that had produced both World Wars, which was imperialism and the contests between them, and so he created the basis for what he named “the United Nations” to do that, but his immediate successor Truman’s version of the U.N. was/is instead a mere talking forum, with no such powers. This would allow him and Eisenhower to create the military-industrial complex to take over the entire world starting with Russia and all of its neighbors. His plan failed, but nonetheless then the Soviet Union itself failed, because of its Marxian economics and dictatorship; and, on 24 February 1990, Truman’s successor President GHW Bush started secretly to inform America’s European colonies that though the Soviet Union and its communism and its military alliance against America’s NATO, the Warsaw Pact, would likely all soon end, the U.S. side of the Cold War would secretly continue on until Russia itself will be defeated, because, as Bush said to Helmut Kohl, “We prevailed, they didn’t!” In other words, he was telling them to continue on until Russia itself becomes just another U.S. colony like they were, because “we” can do it. He was telling them that “we” will do it, because we can. And none of them objected, because they all would be cut in on the take. But all of this was in blatant violation of repeatedly made verbal promises that the U.S. regime and its agents had made to the Soviet leader Gorbachev that NATO wouldn’t be expanded and take in Warsaw Pact nations if the Soviet Union would break up.

    Fast-forward a few more decades, and the U.S. regime invaded a nation that was friendly toward Russia, Iraq, on 20 March 2003, and destroyed it.

    On 5 January 2020, Iraq’s Government ordered the U.S. out of Iraq. The Trump regime refused. A reporter for CNN, Manu Raju, tweeted from the Air Force 1 press pool, “Trump … tells pool he will slap Iraq with ‘very big sanctions’ if they force US troops to leave. ‘We have a very extraordinarily expensive air base that’s there. It cost billions of dollars to build. Long before my time. We’re not leaving unless they pay us back for it.’ Trump added: ‘If they do ask us to leave, if we don’t do it in a very friendly basis, we will charge them sanctions like they’ve never seen before ever. It’ll make Iranian sanctions look somewhat tame.’”

    The next day, on January 6, Sajad Jiyad of The Century Foundation blogged from Baghdad, “On the issue of US bases, Iraqi sovereignty and sanctions” and reported and presented the legal documents proving that (quoting now from the contract that both Iraq and U.S. had signed) “Iraq owns all the buildings and installations, the nontransferable structures on the ground that are located in the areas and installations agreed upon, including those the U.S. utilizes, constructs, changes or improves.” Furthermore, he noted that, “The US troops that are currently in Iraq are part of a request for assistance to combat ISIS that was sent in 2014. These troops are meant to advise, train and assist Iraqi troops. This request was sent by the Iraqi government and can be revoked at any time.”

    On 7 January 2020, Time magazine headlined “Iraq’s Outgoing Prime Minister Says U.S. Troops Must Leave.” Trump responded that only the U.S. Government will decide when to leave Iraq.

    On January 24, “The Chief of Police in Baghdad just estimated the number of Iraqis protesting against the US’ presence in Iraq today to be in excess of one million people.” The march in Baghdad was 5 miles long.

    On 17 February 2020, I headlined “Trump plans to keep US troops permanently in Iraq under NATO command.” On 24 November 2020, NATO headlined “Denmark assumes command of NATO Mission Iraq.” But Iraqis don’t want any alien military force occupying their country. On 24 February 2021, NATO headlined “NATO Mission in Iraq” and reported, based only upon Iraq’s having requested and received in October 2018 additional training so as to defeat ISIS — that temporary request for training became NATO’s excuse to extend permanently America’s occupation. That NATO report ignored the demand by Iraq’s parliament in January 2020 for all U.S. troops to leave Iraq immediately and ignored the millions of Iraqis who subsequently demonstrated against the U.S. and who demanded the U.S. to leave immediately. (Trump responded to that Iraqi demand by threatening to destroy Iraq if Iraq’s Government would continue its demand.)

    And, of course, America’s invasion of Iraq on 20 March 2023 was based totally on lies which the U.S.-and-allied press refused to expose at the time — or even now — to be lies, but instead trumpeted those lies to the public stenographically from the regime’s mouthpieces as being ‘news’. And, likewise, the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media hide from their public that the overthrow of Ukraine’s Government during 20-27 February 2014 was a U.S. coup intead of the ‘democratic’ ‘revolution’ they all trumpeted it as being. On 3 July 2023, I headlined “Comparing Two U.S.-Government Catastrophes: Bush’s 2003 Invasion of Iraq, and Obama’s 2014 Coup in Ukraine.”

    So: all of this is old news, which is never reported in the U.S.-and-allied press, which instead starts from assumptions that are false about both the Iraq and the Ukraine matters. And the U.S.-and-allied media never apologize to the public about their having lied, because they say that they make only mistakes, no lies. That’s a lie about their lying.

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  • Blinken Atrocious in a Dangerous World

    It is hard to credit one of the least impressive Secretary of States the United States has ever produced with any merit other than being a plasterwork that, from time to time, moved with caution on the world stage for fear of cracking.  On the stage, Antony Blinken’s brittle performances have been nothing short of unimpressive, notably in pursuing such projects comically titled “Peace in the Middle East.”  Each time he has ventured to various regions of the world, the combatants seem keener than ever to continue taking up arms or indulging in slaughter.

    A sense of Blinken’s detachment from the world can be gathered from his Foreign Affairs piece published on October 1, intended as something of a report on the diplomatic achievements of the Biden administration.  It starts off with the sermonising treacle that is all a bit much – the naughty states on the world stage, albeit small in number (Russia, Iran, North Korea and China), “determined to alter the foundational principles of the international system.”

    The Biden administration had, in response, “pursued a strategy of renewal, pairing historic investments in competitiveness at home with an intensive diplomatic campaign to revitalize partnerships abroad.”  This served to counter those challengers wishing to “undermine the free, open, secure, and prosperous world that the United States and most countries seek.”  Then comes the remark that should prompt readers to pinch themselves. “The Biden administration’s strategy has put the United States in a much stronger geopolitical position today than it was four years ago.”

    An odd assessment for various reasons.  There is the continued war in Ukraine and Washington’s refusal to encourage any meaningful talks between Kiev and Moscow, preferring, instead, the continued supply of weapons to an attritive conflict of slaughter and such acts of industrial terrorism as the attack on the Nord Stream pipeline.

    There has been the relentless watering down of the “One China” understanding over the status of Taiwan, along with continued provocations against Beijing through the offensive pact of AUKUS with Australia and the UK.  That particularly odious pact has served to turn Australia into a US military garrison without the consent of its citizens, an outcome sold to the dunces in Canberra as utterly necessary to arrest the rise of China.  Along the way, an arms buildup in the Indo- and Asia-Pacific has been encouraged.

    With such a view of the world, it’s little wonder how blind Blinken, and other members of the Biden administration, have been to Israel’s own rogue efforts at breaking and altering the international system, committing, along the way, a goodly number of atrocities that have seen it taken to the International Court of Justice by South Africa for committing alleged acts of genocide.

    Through his various sojourns, the point was always clear.  Israel was to be mildly rebuked, if at all, while Hamas was to be given the full chastising treatment as killers without a cause.  When the barbarians revolt against their imperial governors, they are to be both feared and reviled.  In June this year, for instance, Blinken stated on one of his countless missions for a non-existent peace that Hamas was “the only obstacle” to a ceasefire, a markedly jaundiced explanation given the broader programs and objects being pursued by the Israeli Defence Forces.  Hamas has been accused of being absolutist in its goals, but one can hardly exempt Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from the charge.  Not for Blinken: “I think it is clear to everyone around the world, that it’s on them [Hamas] and that they will have made a choice to continue a war that they started.”

    On the issue of aid to Gaza’s strangled, dying population, Blinken has been, along with his equally ineffectual colleague in the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, cringingly ineffective.  Their October 13 letter sent to their Israeli counterparts made mention of several demands, including the entry of some 350 aid trucks into Gaza on a daily basis, and refraining from adopting laws, now in place, banning the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA).  Each demand has been swatted back with a school child’s snotty petulance, and aid continues being blocked to various parts of Gaza.

    On October 24, Americans for Justice in Palestine Action (AJP Action) “urgently” called on the Secretary of State “to stop wasting his time with failed diplomatic visits and to demand an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon.”  Those at AJP Action must surely have realised by now that Blinken would be utterly rudderless without those failed visits.  Indeed, Osama Abu Irshaid, Executive Director of the organisation, went so far as to say that “Blinken’s diplomatic theatre is enabling Netanyahu’s war crimes.”  To arm and fund Israel “while requesting a ceasefire” was a policy both “hypocritical and ineffective.”  Such is the nature of that sort of theatre.

    In the meantime, the tectonic plates of international relations are moving in other directions, a point that has been aided, not hindered, by the policy of this administration.  Through BRICS and other satellite fora, the United States is finding itself gradually outpaced and isolated, even as it continues to hide behind the slogan of an international rules-based order it did so much to create.  This is not to say that the US imperium has quite reached its terminus.  If anything, the Biden administration, through the good offices of Blinken, continues to insist on its vitality.  But US hegemony long left unchallenged is, most certainly, at an end.

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  • BluGlass doubles value of US CHIPS contracts

    Sydney-based laser diode manufacturer BluGlass has doubled the value of contracts signed through a United States military semiconductor innovation hub, to develop its technology for quantum computing and artificial intelligence applications. On Thursday, BluGlass announced to the ASX that it had signed a $2.9 million contract with North Carolina University for visible laser development under…

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  • The End of Liberalism

    Newsweek forecasted Donald Trump’s eventual victory. Its Nov 05, 2024 at 12:06 PM EST headline, “Kamala Harris Predicted to Win By Nearly Every Major Forecaster,” told the story.

    As polls open, Vice President Kamala Harris is predicted to win the election by almost every major forecaster. Nate Silver’s latest forecast now gives Harris a slight edge in the Electoral College, projecting her with a 50 percent chance of victory compared to former President Donald Trump’s 49.6 percent. The model shows Harris securing 271 Electoral College votes to Trump’s 267.

    Other aggregators echo the close race but similarly give Harris a small advantage. FiveThirtyEight currently projects her with a 50 percent chance of winning, forecasting 270 Electoral College votes for Harris to Trump’s 268.

    Meanwhile, U.K. newspaper The Economist predicts that Harris will win 276 votes to Trump’s 262—a scenario also reflected by forecaster Larry Sabato, whose Race to the White House predicts she will win 275 electoral votes.

    Just factor in that the polls, which also showed the race would be one of the closest in modern history, have been consistently wrong. After two previous elections, those reading the tea leaves should know that a portion of Trump supporters will not publicly admit they are goings to vote for the once convicted, twice impeached, and three times remaining defendant?

    Plenty of afterthoughts of why Harris lost the election. Blame Biden for leaving the race too late. Blame inflation. Blame Harris remaining attached to Biden. Blame Harris remaining unknown. There is nobody to blame, and it’s best to look elsewhere. Caring, clean living, and people loving Vice President Harris had no chance against an electorate disillusioned with an outdated liberalism, and to the rough and tumble campaign of a notorious truth disabler.

    The resurrected President of the United States (POTUS), Donald Trump, was the perfect candidate for a new Republican Party. The GOP drew voters who felt the Democrats had given excessive attention to  identity politics and issues that did not favor the white working class — welfare state, international trade agreements, foreign interventions,  human rights, minority rights, LGBT rights, immigration rights, gun rights, climate change, export of democracy, and diverse civil society. The caring programs of the Democrat Party no longer sat well with a non-caring public. Programs had become a repetitious sounding for attracting identity politics constituents, while offering no solutions to the problems. Despite the promises and the rhetoric, Fentanyl distribution, gun proliferation, and climate change continue and remain killers. African-American rights, LJBT rights and immigrant rights remain significant problems. The contrast between Democratic Party strong rhetoric and weak accomplishment bothered voters and left them with an impression of Democrats being hypocrites. Candidate Harris’ flipping on several issues, especially fracking, strengthened the hypocrisy charge.

    The Republicans combined the marginal and disaffected voters with a candidate who favored Republican agendas of low taxes, deregulation, corporate protection, and increased isolation from foreign interventions. Mostly, they had a candidate who knew the American pulse and knew how to win.  Together with Trump and his cohorts, Republicans established a political arrangement that was poised for victory.  Salivating and exhilarating, they needed to find a few more votes to assure triumph ─ ballots signed by an uncommitted electorate that usually voted Democrat. The solution came from the Democrat strategists who championed Kamala Harris for Vice President in the 2020 election. By not considering the probability that Joe Biden would be unable to finish his term or stand for reelection, the Democrats failed to recognize they needed a vice-president who had more credentials and name recognition than Kamala Harris, and had the ability to serve as an heir to Joe Biden. Nor is it a coincidence that Trump defeated women candidates and not male candidates in his three election experiences. The sexist electorate is still not willing to have a female defeat a New York cowboy.

    Remaining for all to ponder is, “How much did administration subservience to Israel and its military assistance that enabled the genocide contribute to the Democrat defeat? Accompanying the hypocrisy of liberal policies that promised everything and never fulfilled their purposes were larger hypocrisies that infuriated a part of the electorate.

    • While urging gun control, the Democratic administration sent deadly military equipment to Israel to enhance the killings of Palestinians.
    • While posing peace, the Democratic administration supported Israel’s war against the Palestinians.
    • While preaching democracy, the Democratic administration did not oppose Israel’s silencing of its protesting citizens and murder of reporters who exposed Israel’s crimes.
    • While clamoring for human rights, the Democratic administration made certain the Israelis denied Gazans the most human right ─ the right to live.
    • While proclaiming guardianship of a universal “rules based order,” the Democratic administration brought disorder to the Middle East and subsidized violations of all rules in its “rules based order.”

    The United States faces a political system in which its major political Party has lost much of its reason to exist and much of its constituency to maintain its existence. U.S. citizens face a government that is poised to operate from personal directives and eschew the trappings of government. The American people are faced with larger challenges, — demonstrating humanity and remaining human while their government protects the inhuman Israelis and allows them to destroy human existence in Gaza. How much longer will nationalist Americans permit a foreign Zionist lobby to control the mechanisms of their government?  How much longer will humane Americans permit its government to sponsor genocide?

    Chillingly, the 2024 Democratic Party resembles the Social Democratic Party of the Weimar Republic, which clung to government power until replaced by the Nazi Party in 1933.

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  • The Very Definition of Tyranny: A Dictatorship Disguised as Democracy

    The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

    —James Madison

    Power corrupts.

    Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

    Unadulterated power in any branch of government is a menace to freedom, but concentrated power across all three branches is the very definition of tyranny: a dictatorship disguised as democracy.

    When one party dominates all three branches of government—the executive, the legislative, and the judicial—there is even more reason to worry.

    There’s no point debating which political party would be more dangerous with these powers.

    This is true no matter which party is in power.

    This is particularly true in the wake of the 2024 election.

    Already, Donald Trump, who promised to be a dictator on “day one,” is advancing plans to further undermine the nation’s already vulnerable system of checks and balances.

    To be fair, this is not a state of affairs that can be blamed exclusively on Trump.

    America’s founders intended our system of checks and balances to serve as a bulwark against centralized power being abused.

    As constitutional scholar Linda Monk explains, “Within the separation of powers, each of the three branches of government has ‘checks and balances’ over the other two. For instance, Congress makes the laws, but the President can veto them, and the Supreme Court can declare them unconstitutional. The President enforces the law, but Congress must approve executive appointments and the Supreme Court rules whether executive action is constitutional. The Supreme Court can strike down actions by both the legislative and executive branches, but the President nominates Supreme Court justices, and the Senate confirms or denies their nominations.”

    Unfortunately, our system of checks and balances has been strained to the breaking point for years now, helped along by those across the political spectrum who, in marching in lockstep with the Deep State, have conspired to advance the government’s agenda at the expense of the citizenry’s constitutional rights.

    By “government,” I’m not referring to the farce that is the highly partisan, two-party, bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

    This is exactly the kind of concentrated, absolute power the founders attempted to guard against by establishing a system of checks of balances that separate and shares power between three co-equal branches.

    Yet as law professor William P. Marshall concludes, “The system of checks and balances that the Framers envisioned now lacks effective checks and is no longer in balance. The implications of this are serious. The Framers designed a system of separation of powers to combat government excess and abuse and to curb incompetence. They also believed that, in the absence of an effective separation-of-powers structure, such ills would inevitably follow. Unfortunately, however, power once taken is not easily surrendered.”

    The outcome of the 2024 elections is not a revolutionary bid to recalibrate a government run amok. Rather, this is a Deep State coup to stay in power, and Donald Trump is the vehicle by which it will do so.

    Watch and see.

    Remember, it was the Trump Administration that asked Congress to allow it to suspend parts of the Constitution whenever it deemed it necessary during the COVID-19 pandemic and “other” emergencies.

    In fact, during Trump’s first term, the Department of Justice quietly trotted out and tested a long laundry list of terrifying powers to override the Constitution. We’re talking about lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level): the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, “stop and seize any plane, train or automobile to stymie the spread of contagious disease,” reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die…

    Bear in mind, however, that these powers the Trump Administration, acting on orders from the police state, officially asked Congress to recognize and authorize barely scratch the surface of the far-reaching powers the government has unilaterally claimed for itself.

    Unofficially, the police state has been riding roughshod over the rule of law for years now without any pretense of being reined in or restricted in its power grabs by Congress, the courts, the president, or the citizenry.

    This is why the Constitution’s system of checks and balances is so critical.

    Those who wrote our Constitution sought to ensure our freedoms by creating a document that protects our God-given rights at all times, even when we are engaged in war, whether that is a so-called war on terrorism, a so-called war on drugs, a so-called war on illegal immigration, or a so-called war on disease.

    The attempts by each successive presidential administration to rule by fiat merely plays into the hands of those who would distort the government’s system of checks and balances and its constitutional separation of powers beyond all recognition.

    In this way, we have arrived at the dystopian future depicted in the film V for Vendetta, which is no future at all.

    Set in the year 2020, V for Vendetta (written and produced by the Wachowskis) provides an eerie glimpse into a parallel universe in which a totalitarian government that knows all, sees all, controls everything, and promises safety and security above all comes to power by capitalizing on the people’s fear.

    Concentration camps (jails, private prisons and detention facilities) are established to house political prisoners and others deemed to be enemies of the state. Executions of undesirables (extremists, troublemakers and the like) are common, while other enemies of the state are made to “disappear.” Populist uprisings and protests are met with extreme force. The television networks are controlled by the government with the purpose of perpetuating the regime. And most of the population is hooked into an entertainment mode and are clueless.

    In V for Vendetta, as in my novel The Erik Blair Diaries, the subtext is that authoritarian regimes—through a vicious cycle of manipulation, oppression and fear-mongering—foment violence, manufacture crises, and breed terrorists, thereby giving rise to a recurring cycle of blowback and violence.

    Only when the government itself becomes synonymous with the terrorism wreaking havoc in their lives do the people to finally mobilize and stand up to the government’s tyranny.

    V, a bold, charismatic freedom fighter, urges the British people to rise up and resist the government. In Vendetta, V the film’s masked crusader blows up the seat of government on November 5, Guy Fawkes Day, ironically enough the same day that Trump won his landslide return to the White House.

    Yet there the comparison ends.

    So, while we are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs, this year’s electoral victory for Republicans was no win for the Constitution.

    Rather, it was a win for the very entrenched, hawkish, establishment power structure that has exhibited no regard for the Constitution or the rights of the citizenry.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the Deep State works best through imperial presidents—empowered to indulge their authoritarian tendencies by legalistic courts, corrupt legislatures and a disinterested, distracted populace—who rule by fiat rather than by the rule of law.

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  • Will Trump End or Escalate Biden’s Wars?


    A boy sits in rubble in Gaza. Photo Credit: UNICEF

    When Donald Trump takes office on January 20, all his campaign promises to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours and almost as quickly end Israel’s war on its neighbors will be put to the test. The choices he has made for his incoming administration so far, from Marco Rubio as Secretary of State to Mike Waltz as National Security Advisor, Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense and Elise Stefanik as UN Ambassador make for a rogues gallery of saber-rattlers.

    The only conflict where peace negotiations seem to be on the agenda is Ukraine. In April, both Vice President-elect JD Vance and Senator Marco Rubio voted against a $95 billion military aid bill that included $61 billion for Ukraine.

    Rubio recently appeared on NBC’s Today Show saying, “I think the Ukrainians have been incredibly brave and strong when standing up to Russia. But at the end of the day, what we’re funding here is a stalemate war, and it needs to be brought to a conclusion… I think there has to be some common sense here.”

    On the campaign trail, Vance made a controversial suggestion that the best way to end the war was for Ukraine to cede the land Russia has seized, for a demilitarized zone to be established, and for Ukraine to become neutral, i.e. not enter NATO. He was roundly criticized by both Republicans and Democrats who argue that backing Ukraine is vitally important to U.S. security since it weakens Russia, which is closely allied with China.

    Any attempt by Trump to stop U.S. military support for Ukraine will undoubtedly face fierce opposition from the pro-war forces in his own party, particularly in Congress, as well as perhaps the entirety of the Democratic party. Two years ago, 30 progressive Democrats in Congress wrote a letter to President Biden asking him to consider promoting negotiations. The party higher ups were so incensed by their lack of party discipline that they came down on the progressives like a ton of bricks. Within 24 hours, the group had cried uncle and rescinded the letter. They have since all voted for money for Ukraine and have not uttered another word about negotiations.

    So a Trump effort to cut funds to Ukraine could run up against a bipartisan congressional effort to keep the war going. And let’s not forget the efforts by European countries, and NATO, to keep the U.S. in the fight. Still, Trump could stand up to all these forces and push for a rational policy that would restart the talking and stop the killing.

    The Middle East, however, is a more difficult situation. In his first term, Trump showed his pro-Israel cards when he brokered the Abraham accords between several Arab countries and Israel; moved the U.S. embassy to a location in Jerusalem that is partly on occupied land outside Israel’s internationally recognized borders; and recognized the occupied Golan Heights in Syria as part of Israel. Such unprecedented signals of unconditional U.S. support for Israel’s illegal occupation and settlements helped set the stage for the current crisis.

    Trump seems as unlikely as Biden to cut U.S. weapons to Israel, despite public opinion polls favoring such a halt and a recent UN human rights report showing that 70% of the people killed by those U.S. weapons are women and children.

    Meanwhile, the wily Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is already busy getting ready for a second Trump presidency. On the very day of the U.S. election, Netanyahu fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, who opposed a lasting Israeli military occupation of Gaza and had at times argued for prioritizing the lives of the Israeli hostages over killing more Palestinians.

    Israel Katz, the new defense minister and former foreign minister, is more hawkish than Gallant, and has led a campaign to falsely blame Iran for the smuggling of weapons from Jordan into the West Bank.

    Other powerful voices, national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is also a “minister in the Defense Ministry,” represent extreme Zionist parties that are publicly committed to territorial expansion, annexation and ethnic cleansing. They both live in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

    So Netanyahu has deliberately surrounded himself with allies who back his ever-escalating war. They are surely developing a war plan to exploit Trump’s support for Israel, but will first use the unique opportunity of the U.S. transition of power to create facts on the ground that will limit Trump’s options when he takes office.

    The Israelis will doubtless redouble their efforts to drive Palestinians out of as much of Gaza as possible, confronting President Trump with a catastrophic humanitarian crisis in which Gaza’s surviving population is crammed into an impossibly small area, with next to no food, no shelter for many, disease running rampant, and no access to needed medical care for tens of thousands of horribly wounded and dying people.

    The Israelis will count on Trump to accept whatever final solution they propose, most likely to drive Palestinians out of Gaza, into the West Bank, Jordan, Egypt and farther afield.

    Israel threatened all along to do to Lebanon the same as they have done to Gaza. Israeli forces have met fierce resistance, taken heavy casualties, and have not advanced far into Lebanon. But, as in Gaza, they are using bombing and artillery to destroy villages and towns, kill or drive people north and hope to effectively annex the part of Lebanon south of the Litani river as a so-called “buffer zone.” When Trump takes office, they may ask for greater U.S. involvement to help them “finish the job.”

    The big wild card is Iran. Trump’s first term in office was marked by a policy of “maximum pressure” against Tehran. He unilaterally withdrew America from the Iran nuclear deal, imposed severe sanctions that devastated the economy, and ordered the killing of the country’s top general. Trump did not support a war on Iran in his first term, but had to be talked out of attacking Iran in his final days in office by General Mark Milley and the Pentagon.

    Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, recently described to Chris Hedges just how catastrophic a war with Iran would be, based on U.S.military wargames he was involved in.

    Wilkerson predicts that a U.S. war on Iran could last for ten years, cost $10 trillion and still fail to conquer Iran. Airstrikes alone would not destroy all of Iran’s civilian nuclear program and ballistic missile stockpiles. So, once unleashed, the war would very likely escalate into a regime change war involving U.S. ground forces, in a country with three or four times the territory and population of Iraq, more mountainous terrain and a thousand mile long coastline bristling with missiles that can sink U.S. warships.

    But Netanyahu and his extreme Zionist allies believe that they must sooner or later fight an existential war with Iran if they are to realize their vision of a dominant Greater Israel. And they believe that the destruction they have wreaked on the Palestinians in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, including the assassination of their senior leaders, has given them a military advantage and a favorable opportunity for a showdown with Iran.

    By November 10, Trump and Netanyahu had reportedly spoken on the phone three times since the election, and Netanyahu said that they see “eye to eye on the Iranian threat.” Trump has already hired Iran hawk Brian Hook, who helped him sabotage the JCPOA nuclear agreement with Iran in 2018, to coordinate the formation of his foreign policy team.

    So far, the team that Trump and Hook have assembled seems to offer hope for peace in Ukraine, but little to none for peace in the Middle East and a rising danger of a U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.

    Trump’s expected National Security Advisor Mike Waltz is best known as a China hawk. He has voted against military aid to Ukraine in Congress, but he recently tweeted that Israel should bomb Iran’s nuclear and oil facilities, the most certain path to a full-scale war.

    Trump’s new UN ambassador, Elise Stefanik, has led moves in Congress to equate criticism of Israel with anti-semitism, and she led the aggressive questioning of American university presidents at an anti-semitism hearing in Congress, after which the presidents of Harvard and Penn resigned.

    So, while Trump will have some advisors who support his desire to end the war in Ukraine, there will be few voices in his inner circle urging caution over Netanyahu’s genocidal ambitions in Palestine and his determination to cripple Iran.

    If he wanted to, President Biden could use his final two months in office to de-escalate the conflicts in the Middle East. He could impose an embargo on offensive weapons for Israel, push for serious ceasefire negotiations in both Gaza and Lebanon, and work through U.S. partners in the Gulf to de-escalate tensions with Iran.

    But Biden is unlikely to do any of that. When his own administration sent a letter to Israel last month, threatening a cut in military aid if Israel did not allow a surge of humanitarian aid into Gaza in the next 30 days, Israel responded by doing just the opposite–actually cutting the number of trucks allowed in. The State Department claimed Israel was taking “steps in the right direction” and Biden refused to take any action.

    We will soon see if Trump is able to make progress in moving the Ukraine war towards negotiations, potentially saving the lives of many thousands of Ukrainians and Russians. But between the catastrophe that Trump will inherit and the warhawks he is picking for his cabinet, peace in the Middle East seems more distant than ever.

    The post Will Trump End or Escalate Biden’s Wars? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • They Were There First: Election Denialism, the Democratic Way

    The scene is memorable enough.  November 2016.  The Twin Peaks Tavern, Castro District.  Men gathered, beside themselves.  “It’s shocking how those people voted him in,” splutters one over a Martini.  “Yes,” says a companion, bristling in anger at the election of Donald J. Trump, sex pest, dubious businessman, orange haired monster and reality television star. “Why were they ever given the vote?”  History had come full circle, the claim now being that tens of millions of voters in the 2016 US presidential election should have been disenfranchised.  In their mind, this bloc was to be abominated as Hillary Clinton’s designated “deplorables”, a monstrous collective needing to be pushed into the sea.

    In November 2024, we see similar tremors of doubt and consternation, though the official stance, as expressed by President Joe Biden, is to “accept the choice the country made.”  In the vast, noisy hinterland of social media speculation lie unproven claims that some 20 million votes have gone missing, necessitating a recount.  Ditto problems with failing voting machines.  In a statement of cool dismissive confidence, Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, is adamant: “we have no evidence of any malicious activity that had a material impact on the security and integrity of our election infrastructure.”

    2016 might have given the Democrats meditative pause as to why Trump was elected.  Even more significantly, why Trump’s election was more apotheosis rather than gnarly distortion.  Instead of vanishing as aberrant over the Biden years, Trumpism has come home to roost in winning, not only the Electoral College but the majority vote by convincing margins.

    Much is made of Trump’s pathological campaign against the legitimacy of his loss in 2020, as well as it might.  Less is made, certainly from the centre left and Democratic quarters, of the conspiratorial webbing that served to excuse an appalling electoral performance on behalf of the donkey party and their chosen candidate, Hillary Clinton.  Doing so shifted any coherent analysis about loss and misjudgement to plot and the sorcery of disruption – the very sorts of things that Trump would use to such effect after 2020.  Indeed, the seeds of election denialism were already sown in 2016 by the Democrats.  Trump would draw on this shoddy model with vengeful enthusiasm in 2020.

    In Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes make the point that the Clinton team took a matter of hours to concoct “the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up… Already, Russian hacking was the centrepiece of the argument.”

    In declassified notes provided in September 2020 by the then Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the picture of pre-emptive delegitimization becomes vivid.  Clinton, in late July 2016, “had approved a campaign plan to stir a scandal against US Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee.”  Then Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan “subsequently briefed President Obama and other senior national security officials on the intelligence, including the ‘alleged approval by Hillary Clinton July 26, 2016 of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.’”

    Since her loss, Clinton has been impervious to the notion that she lacked sufficient appeal in the electoral race.  Trump was, she has continued to insist, never a legitimate president to begin with.

    Other Democrat worthies never deviated from the narrative.  The late Californian Senator Dianne Feinstein was certain in January 2017 that the change in fortunes in the Clinton camp had much to do with the announcement the previous October that the FBI would be investigating Clinton’s private email server.  Typically, the issue of what was exposed was less relevant than the fact of exposure.  The former was irrelevant; the latter, Russian, unpardonable, causal and fundamental.

    In June 2019, former President Jimmy Carter went even further, showing that the Democrats would remain indifferent to Trump as a serious electoral phenomenon.  “I think a full investigation would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016,” he stated on a panel hosted by the Carter Center at Leesburg, Virginia.  “He lost the election, and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.”  This execrable nonsense was fanned, fed and nurtured by media servitors, to such a degree as to prompt Gerard Baker, currently editor-at-large for the Wall Street Journal, to remark that it was mostly “among the most disturbing, dishonest, and tendentious I’ve ever seen.”

    An odd analysis in Politico by David Faris about the latest election suggests that Democrats “have the advantage of introspection” while the Republicans, after losing in 2020, “chose not to look inward and instead descended into a conspiratorial morass of denial and rage that prevented them, at least publicly, from addressing the sources of their defeat.”

    Faris misses the mark in one fundamental respect.  The Democrats were, fascinatingly enough, the proto-election denialists.  They did not storm the Capitol in patriotic, costumed moodiness, but they did try to eliminate Trump as an electoral force.  In doing so, they failed to see Trumpland take root under their noses.  His stunning and conclusive return to office demands something far more substantive in response than the amateurish, foamy undergraduate rage that has become the hallmark of a distinct monomania.

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  • The Military-Industrial Complex Is Fueling Climate Catastrophe

    As we write, New York City is an unsettling 70 degrees in November. Meanwhile, a cohort of war profiteers, their pockets lined by the very industries destroying our climate, are flying to COP, the annual U.N. climate summit hosted by a petrostate, no less. They’re gathering to “discuss climate solutions”—but one of the world’s biggest contributors to the climate crisis will be entirely overlooked: the U.S. military-industrial complex.

    The world’s largest institutional emitter, the U.S. military, sits beyond the reach of the metrics meant to hold countries accountable for climate pollution. Exempt from transparency requirements at the COP or within U.N. climate agreements, the military sector is, in fact, the leading institutional driver of the climate crisis. It burns through fossil fuels on a scale that surpasses entire nations while waging wars that destroy lives, communities, and the land itself. It’s a deliberate omission, one meant to hide the environmental and social costs of militarism from view.

    Leading the U.S. delegation to COP is John Podesta — a career defender of militarism, a lobbyist who has worked to fortify the very military establishment poisoning our air, water, and land. Now, he arrives in the conference halls of COP wrapped in a cloak of environmentalism. Yet, as long as he skirts around the elephant in the room, no amount of recycled paper or energy-efficient lighting at COP will address the core driver of the climate crisis. If Podesta ignores the environmental impact of U.S. militarism, he’ll be dooming us.

    For those of us directly feeling the crisis, there’s no question that the U.S. Empire’s military machine is central to our climate emergency. Appalachians living through floods and those of us in New York watching temperatures soar out of season are witnesses to the toll. And yet we watch as our leaders, claiming to care about climate, push forward with policies and budgets that only deepen our climate emergency.

    In the past year alone, the war on Gaza has been a horrifying example of militarism’s environmental toll. Entire communities were leveled under the firepower of U.S.-funded bombs. In just two months, emissions from these military activities equaled the yearly carbon output of 26 countries. This violence bleeds beyond borders. U.S. police forces train with the Israeli military, and they’ll soon bring their war tactics to Atlanta’s Cop City, where a training center is planned on sacred Indigenous land. Militarism is woven into every facet of our society — taking lives, razing homes, and desecrating land — all while stoking climate disaster.

    This crisis can’t be solved by those who are its architects. It can’t be fixed by Podesta’s well-crafted speeches or the administration’s empty pledges. The Biden administration just passed one of the largest military budgets in history, pumping more dollars — and more carbon emissions — into the climate catastrophe. Each weapon shipped, each tank deployed, is an environmental crime in the making, one funded by American tax dollars. We can’t ignore this fact as COP progresses and climate talks fall short yet again.

    It’s easy to despair in the face of such unaccountable power. But in times of crisis, clarity can become a weapon. We must expose the truth that militarism is antithetical to climate justice. True climate solutions don’t come from polite panel discussions led by those who wield the tools of destruction. They come from radical honesty and demands for accountability. They come from a commitment to ending the empire choking our planet and communities. And they come from a shared goal of mutual liberation that doesn’t ignore the plight of the many to serve the few.

    The cost of militarism is clear, and its environmental toll demands our fiercest opposition. This COP, let’s not let the elephant in the room fade into the background. It’s time for those responsible for our climate crisis—the war machines, the lobbyists, and the industries that back them—to be held accountable. For our survival and for each other, we must demand climate justice that tells the truth.

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  • Why Cuba Hasn’t Adjusted to US Sanctions after Six Decades

    For the thirty-second time in so many years, the US blockade of Cuba was globally condemned at the UN General Assembly’s annual vote in October. Only Tel Aviv joined Washington in defending the collective punishment, which is illegal under international law.

    For the vast majority of Cubans, who were born after the first unilateral coercive measures were imposed, life under these conditions is the only normalcy they have known. Even friends sympathetic to socialism and supporters of Cuba may question why the Cubans have not simply learned to live under these circumstances after 64 years.

    The explanation, explored below, is that the relatively mild embargo of 1960 has been periodically intensified and made ever more devastatingly effective. The other major factor is that the geopolitical context has changed to Cuba’s disadvantage. These factors in turn have had cumulatively detrimental effects.

    Cuba in the new world order

     The Cuban Revolution achieved remarkable initial successes for a small, resource-poor island with a history of colonial exploitation.

    After the 1959 revolution, the population quickly attained 100% literacy. Life expectancy and infant mortality rates soon rivaled far richer countries, through the application of socialized medicine, prioritizing primary care. Cuba also became a world sports powerhouse and made noteworthy advances in biotechnology. At the same time, Cuban troops aided in the overthrow of apartheid in South Africa, among many other exercises of internationalism.

    Cuba did not make those advances alone but benefitted from the solidarity of the Soviet Union and other members of the Socialist Bloc. From the beginning of the revolution, the USSR helped stabilize the economy, particularly in the areas of agriculture and manufacturing. Notably, Cuba exported sugar to the Soviets at above-market prices.

    The USSR’s military assistance in the form of training and equipment contributed to the Cuban’s successfully repelling the US’s Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. In addition, the Socialist Bloc backed Cuba diplomatically in the United Nations and other international fora. East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, for example, also assisted with economic aid, investment, and trade to help develop the Cuban economy.

    The implosion of the Socialist Bloc in the late 1980s and early 1990s severely impacted Cuba.

    No longer buffered by these allies, the full weight of the US-led regime-change campaign sent Cuba reeling into what became known as the “Special Period.” After an initial GDP contraction of about 35% between 1989 and 1993, the Cubans somewhat recovered by the 2000s. But, now, conditions on the island are again increasingly problematic.

    A new multipolar world may be in birth, but it has not been able to sufficiently aid Cuba in this time of need. China and Vietnam along with post-Soviet Russia, remnants of the earlier Socialist Bloc, still maintain friendly commercial and diplomatic relations with Cuban but nowhere the former levels of cooperation.

    Ratcheting up of the US regime-change campaign

     The ever-tightening US blockade is designed to ensure that socialism does not succeed; to strangle in the cradle all possible alternatives to the established imperial order.

    The initial restrictions imposed by Dwight Eisenhower in 1960 banned US exports to Cuba, except for food and medicine, and reduced Cuba’s sugar export quota to the US. Shortly before the end of his term in 1961, the US president broke diplomatic relations.

    He also initiated covert operations against Cuba, which would be significantly strengthened by his successor, John Kennedy, and subsequent US administrations. Since then, Cuba has endured countless acts of terrorism as well as attempts to assassinate the revolution’s political leadership.

    John Kennedy had campaigned in 1960, accusing the Eisenhower-Nixon administration of failing to sufficiently combat the spread of communism. Kennedy was determined to prevent communism from gaining a foothold in America’s “backyard.” He made deposing the “Castro regime” a national priority and imposed a comprehensive economic embargo.

    After Kennedy’s failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis the following year, he initiated Operation Mongoose. The president put his brother Robert Kennedy in charge of attempting to overthrow the revolution by covert means. This CIA operation of sabotage and other destabilization methods was meant to bring to Cuba “the terrors of the earth.”

    Post-Soviet era

    Subsequent US administrations continued the policy of blockade, occupation of Guantánamo, and overt and covert destabilization efforts.

    Former CIA director and then-US President George H.W. Bush seized the opportunity in 1992 posed by the implosion of the Socialist Bloc. The bipartisan Cuban Democracy Act passed under his watch. Popularly called the Torricelli Act after a Democratic Party congressional sponsor, it codified the embargo into law, which could only be reversed by an act of congress.

    The act strengthened the embargo into a blockade by prohibiting US subsidiaries of companies operating in third countries from trading with Cuba. Ships that had traded with Cuba were banned from entering the US for 180 days. The economic stranglehold on Cuba was tightened by obstructing sources of foreign currency, which further limited Cuba’s ability to engage in international trade.

    The screws were again tightened in 1996 under US President Bill Clinton with the Helms-Burton Act. Existing unilateral coercive economic measures were reinforced and expanded.

    The act also added restrictions to discourage foreign investment in Cuba, particularly in US-owned properties that had been expropriated after the Cuban Revolution. The infamous Title III of the act allowed US citizens to file lawsuits in US courts against foreign companies “trafficking” in such confiscated properties.

    Title III generated substantial blowback and some countermeasures from US allies, such as the European Union and Canada, because of its extraterritorial application in violation of international trade agreements and sovereignty. As a result, Title III was temporarily waived.

    Later, US President Barack Obama modified US tactics during his watch by reopening diplomatic relations with Cuba and easing some restrictions, in order to unapologetically achieve the imperial strategy of regime change more effectively.

    But even that mild relief was reversed by his successor’s “maximum pressure” campaign. In 2019, US President Donald Trump revived Title III. By that time, the snowballing effects of the blockade had generated a progressively calamitous economic situation in Cuba.

    Just days before the end of his term, Trump reinstated Cuba onto the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism (SSOT) after Obama had lifted it in 2015. The designation has had a huge impact on Cuba by reducing trade with third countries fearful of secondary sanctions by the US, by cutting off most international finance, and by further discouraging tourism.

    President Joe Biden continued most of the Trump “maximum pressure” measures, including the SSOT designation, while adding some of this own. This came at a time when the island was especially hard hit by the Covid pandemic, which halted tourism, one of Cuba’s few sources of foreign currency.

    In the prescient words of Lester D. Mallory, US deputy assistant secretary of state back in 1960, the imperialists saw the opportunity to “bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

    US siege on Cuba perfected

    In addition to the broad history outlined above of incessant regime-change measures by every US administration since the inception of the Cuban Revolution, some collateral factors are worthy of mention.

    Major technological advances associated with computer technology and AI have been applied by the US to more effectively track and enforce its coercive measures. In addition, the fear of US fines for violation of its extraterritorial prohibitions on third-country actors has led to overcompliance.

    Uncle Sam has also become ever more inventive. Visa-free entry (VWP) into the US is no longer available to most European and some other nationals if they stopped in Cuba, thereby significantly discouraging tourism to the island.

    The internal political climate in the US has also shifted with the neoconservative takeover of both major parties. Especially now with the second Trump presidency, Cuba has fewer friends in Washington, and its enemies now have even less constraints on their regime-change campaigns. This is coupled by a generally more aggressive international US force projection.

    Under the blockade, certain advances of the revolution were turned into liabilities. The revolution with its universal education, mechanization of agriculture, and collective or cooperative organization of work freed campesinos from the 24/7 drudgery of peasant agriculture. Today, fields remain idle because, among other factors, the fuel and spare parts for the tractors are embargoed.

    Cuba’s allies, especially Venezuela, itself a victim of a US blockade, have been trying to supply Cuba with desperately needed oil. Construction of 14 oil tankers commissioned abroad by Venezuela, which could transport that oil, has been blocked. Direct proscriptions by the US on shipping companies and insurance underwriters have also limited the oil lifeline.

    Without the fuel, electrical power, which run pumps to supply basic drinking water, cannot be generated. As a consequence, Cuba has recently experienced island-wide blackouts along with food and water shortages. This highlights how the blockade is essentially an economic dirty war against the civilian population.

    Cumulative effects on Cuban society

    Life is simply hard in Cuba under the US siege and is getting harder. This has led to recently unprecedented levels of out migration. The consequent brain-drain and labor shortages exacerbate the situation. Moreover, the relentless scarcity and the associated compromised quality of life under such conditions has had a corrosive effect over time.

    Under the pressure of the siege, Cuba has been forced to adopt measures that undermine socialist equality but which generate needed revenue. For example, Obama and subsequent US presidents have encouraged the formation of a small business strata, expanding on the limited “reforms” instituted during Raúl Castro’s time as Cuba’s president.

     The Cubans will surely persevere as they have in the past. “The country’s resilience is striking,” according to a longtime Cuba observer writing from Havana.

    Besides, the imperialists leave them little other choice. A surrender and soft landing is not an option being offered. The deliberately failed state of Haiti, less than 50 miles to the east, serves as a cautionary tale of what transpires for a people under the beneficence of the US.

    Now is an historical moment for recognition of not what Cuba has failed to do, but for appreciation of how much it has achieved with so little and under such adverse circumstances not of its making.

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  • WaPo Putin-Trump Call Claim “Pure Fiction” – Kremlin

    WaPo Putin-Trump call claim ‘pure fiction’ – KremlinU.S. President-elect Donald Trump (L) and Russian President Vladimir Putin. ©  Chris McGrath/Getty Images

    US President-elect Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin did not have a phone conversation about the Ukraine conflict, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said.

    The Washington Post claimed on Sunday that Trump called Putin after winning a new term as US president to discuss his vision regarding how the Ukrainian crisis could be deflated. Peskov said on Monday that the article was a “vivid example of the quality of information published by even some respectable outlets.”

    “This absolutely does not correspond to reality. This is pure fiction. This information is simply false,” he told the press.

    Kiev previously denied the claim made by the Washington Post in its piece that the Ukrainian government was informed about the phone call beforehand and gave its consent to the US-Russian engagement.

    “Reports that the Ukrainian side was informed in advance of the alleged call are false,” the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman told Reuters on Sunday.

    Trump had claimed while on the campaign trail that he could end the Ukraine conflict “in 24 hours,” if US voters grant him a second term in office. He reportedly intends to leverage US military and financial aid to Ukraine to pressure both Moscow and Kiev to achieve a compromise.

    Russia, which currently has the advantage on the battlefield, has said that it will only accept an outcome that addresses the core causes of the Ukraine conflict. Those include NATO’s enlargement in Europe and Kiev’s discriminatory policies against ethnic Russians, according to Moscow.

    The Washington Post reported a phone call between Trump and Putin based on accounts by sources “familiar with the matter,” who spoke on condition of anonymity.

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  • Drone Captures Haitian Police Execution of an Innocent Man

    From Uncaptured Media:

    The video provides a stunning and emblematic example of on-going police massacres of civilians as the U.S. government pushes for a UN intervention….

    Go to Uncaptured Media.

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  • Cuba, Buckle up! Trump Elected US President

    The people of the United States and most of the rest of the world woke up this week to the last news they wanted to hear.

    Not only had Donald J Trump presiding over a proto-fascist Maga mass movement been elected president of the United States, he will enjoy a comfortable Republican majority in the Senate, and he also may have a Republican majority in the House of Representatives.

    He obtained about the same number of votes as in 2020, 74 million, and he scored an electoral victory because the Democrat candidate, Kamala Harris, got well over 10 million votes less than Joe Biden in 2020.

    If one adds the strong political identification of the US Supreme Court with Trump’s overall political views, he will enjoy few obstacles from the key institutional structures of the United States to implement his cherished aim, the establishment of a strongly authoritarian government that would endeavour to turn all existing institutions into instruments of his political movement, his ideology and his government plans.

    Throughout the election campaign and since he lost the 2020 election, Trump has projected a government programme of wholesale retribution against his political opponents including what he perceives as a hostile media, which he has labelled “the enemy within.”

    He also intends to expel millions of — principally Latino — immigrants, who he accuses of “poisoning the blood of the country.”

    His strategic plan for the US has been systematised in a 900-page document by the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025, which, if fully implemented, will erase most of the existing mechanisms and practices that, despite its gross imperfections, broadly qualify the US as a democracy.

    Many have exhaled a premature sigh of relief when Trump in his victory speech promised “no more wars” in his coming administration. However, during his 2016-20 government he conducted a mutually damaging “trade war” against China, a country he harbours a deep hostility to.

    Hostility to China is likely to become the centre of his concerns on foreign policy, for which he can escalate the intense cold war and the massive military build-up around the South China Sea, including arming Taiwan, already developed by Biden.

    Open US hostility to China began with president Barack Obama’s “Pivot to East Asia” in 2011, which prepared the militarisation of US policy towards the Asian giant. US military build-up 8,000 miles away from the US is stirring trouble in the region.

    There ought to be little progress to be expected from the coming Trump government on the Middle East and on Palestine-Gaza. In December 2017, less than a year in office, reversing nearly seven decades of US policy on this sensitive issue, Trump formally recognised Jerusalem as the capital city of Israel and moved the US embassy to Jerusalem. There was worldwide dismay, including in substantial sections of the US Establishment, because it “shattered decades of unwavering US neutrality on Jerusalem.”

    About Latin America, the 2016-20 Trump government specifically targeted what his national security adviser, John Bolton, called the “troika of tyranny” — namely, Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua — which he also referred to as “a triangle of terror.”

    Bolton in outlining Trump’s policy accused the three governments of being “the cause of immense suffering, the impetus of enormous regional instability and the genesis of a sordid cradle of communism.”

    In 2018, Trump’s state secretary, Rex Tillerson, affirmed the Monroe Doctrine because it had asserted US “authority” in the western hemisphere, stating that the doctrine is “as relevant today as it was when it was written.” Tillerson’s was a strong message to Latin America that the US would not allow the region to entertain building links with emerging world powers such as China.

    It was during Trump’s 2016-20 administration that, after several years of careful and methodical preparations, the US orchestrated and financed the 2018 coup attempt against Nicaragua. It convulsed the small Central American nation for more than six months of vicious levels of violence, leading to wanton destruction of property, massive economic losses, and nearly 200 innocent people killed. The Biden administration, under pressure from cold warriors in the US, has continued its policy of aggression against Nicaragua by applying an array of sanctions.

    Trump inflicted hundreds of sanctions on Venezuela with horrible human consequences, since in 2017-18 about 40,000 vulnerable people died unnecessarily. Venezuela’s economy was blockaded to near asphyxiation. Its oil industry was crippled with the double purpose of denying the country’s main revenue earner and preventing oil supplies to Cuba. Trump repeatedly threatened Venezuela with military aggression; Venezuela (2017) was subjected to six months of opposition street violence; an assassination attempt against President Nicolas Maduro (August 2018); Juan Guaido proclaimed himself Venezuela’s “interim president” (January 2019, and he was recognised by the US); the opposition tried to force food through the Venezuela border by military means (February 2019); the State Department offered a reward of $15 million for “information leading to the arrest of President Maduro” (March 2020); a failed coup attempt (May 2019); a mercenary raid (May 2020); and in 2023 Trump publicly admitted that he wanted to overthrow Maduro to have control over Venezuela’s large oil deposits.

    Although Cuba has endured the longest comprehensive blockade of a nation in peace time (over six decades, so far), under Trump the pressure was substantially ratcheted up. In 2019 Trump accused the government of Cuba of “controlling Venezuela” and demanded that, on the threat of implementing a “full and complete” blockade, the 20,000 Cuban specialists on health, sports culture, education, communications, agriculture, food, industry, science, energy and transport, who Trump falsely depicted as soldiers, leave.

    Due to the tightening of the US blockade, between April 2019 and March 2020, for the first time its annual cost to the island surpassed $5 billion (a 20 per cent increase on the year before).

    Furthermore, Trump’s policy of “maximum pressure” against Cuba meant, among other things, that lawsuits under Title III of the Helms-Burton Act, were allowed; increased persecution of Cuba’s financial and commercial transactions; a ban on flights from the US to all Cuban provinces (except Havana); persecution and intimidation of companies that send fuel supplies; an intense campaign to discredit Cuban medical co-operation programmes; USAid issued a $97,321 grant to a Florida-based body aimed at depicting Cuban tourism as exploitative; Trump also drastically reduced remittances to the island and severely limited the ability of US citizens to travel to Cuba, deliberately making companies and third countries think twice before doing business with Cuba; and 54 groups received $40 million in US grants to promote unrest in Cuba. Besides, Cuba has had to contend with serious unrest in July 2021 and more recently in March 2024, stoked by US-funded groups in as many cities as they could. The model of unrest is based on what has been perpetrated against Nicaragua and Venezuela.

    Trump’s final act of sabotage, just days before Biden’s inauguration, was to return Cuba to the State Sponsors of Terrorism (SSOT) list by falsely charging it with having ties to international terrorism. The consequences have been devastating: between March 2022 and February 2023, 130 companies, including 75 from Europe, stopped any dealings with Cuba, affecting transfers for the purchase of food, medicines, fuel, materials, parts and other goods.

    Trump, despite being so intemperate and substantially discredited worldwide due to his rhetorical excesses, threats and vulgarities, leads a mass extremist movement, has the presidency, the Senate and counts on the Supreme Court’s explicit complicity, and is, therefore, in a particularly strong position to go wacko about the “troika of tyranny,” especially on Cuba. In short, Trump’s election as president has a historic significance in the worst possible sense of the term.

    From his speeches one can surmise he would like to make history and he may entertain the idea of doing so by “finishing the job” on Cuba (but also on Venezuela and Nicaragua). If he does undertake that route, he has already a raft of aggressive policies he implemented during 2016-20. Furthermore, he will enjoy right-wing Republican control over the Senate foreign affairs committee.

    Worse, pro-blockade hard-line senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are leading members of this committee and have a fixation with Cuba. Trump got stronger support in Florida, where the anti-Cuban Republicans in Florida bolstered his support and election victory. He also has a global network of communications owned by his ally, billionaire Elon Musk. Furthermore, no matter who the tenant in the White House, the “regime change” machinery is always plotting something nasty on Cuba.

    So, buckle up! Turbulent times are coming to Latin America. Our solidarity work must be substantially intensified by explaining the increased threat that a second Trump term represents for all Latin America, but especially for Cuba.

    The post Cuba, Buckle up! Trump Elected US President first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How & Why the Washington Post‘s Former Owner Now Pushes Biden to Go Nuclear Against Russia

    Ever since the November 5 defeat of the so-called ‘Democratic’ Party and of its unanimous neoconservative obsession to defeat Russia with the help of Ukrainians (claiming all the time that doing this is necessary in order to protect Americans and America’s ‘democracy’), the Bilderburg member Donald Graham, who at the 2013 Bilderburg meeting met privately with Jeff Bezos and agreed to sell him the Washington Post, has been instead using his Foreign Policy magazine in order to increase the pressure upon President Joe Biden to escalate the U.S. Government’s proxy-war in Ukraine against Russia up to and including World War Three (WW3).

    On November 5, the magazine headlined “The Biden Administration Now Has an Expiration Date — and a To-Do List,” and reported:

    As of late October, the Biden administration still had $5.5 billion it could throw into Ukraine’s war chest. In the past, that has come in the form of air-defense batteries, battle tanks, and long-rage U.S. firepower that can help Ukraine balance the playing field against a larger neighbor with seemingly inexhaustible manpower and ample assistance from allies in Asia. …

    With no reason to worry about spiking oil and gasoline prices, the United States may be more amenable not only to Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil infrastructure, but also to the unsheathing of additional sanctions on miscreant oil producers such as Iran and Venezuela, which skated clear of sanctions all year thanks to U.S. worries about the domestic impact of an energy war.

    On November 7, it headlined “Ukraine Now Faces a Nuclear Decision: Under a new Trump administration, Ukraine’s government can’t avoid considering a nuclear weapon,” and reported:

    Last month, with little fanfare, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made the stakes of the ongoing war in Ukraine as clear as possible…. “Either Ukraine will have nuclear weapons and that will be our protection or we should have some sort of alliance,” he said. “Apart from NATO, today we do not know any effective alliances.”

    It was the first time the Ukrainian president had revealed an outcome that has become, for the war’s observers, increasingly inescapable. In this war for Ukraine’s survival, with Kyiv facing both declining men and materiel, the only surefire way of preventing Ukraine’s ongoing destruction is NATO membership—a reality that has gained more supporters since the war’s beginning but still remains years away. Barring such an outcome, as Zelensky outlined, only one option remains: developing Ukraine’s own nuclear arsenal and returning it to the role of a nuclear power that it gave up some three decades ago. …

    Putin, after all, has only grown increasingly messianic and monomaniacal in his efforts to shatter Ukraine. Previous designs on simply toppling Kyiv have given way to outright efforts to “destroy Ukrainian statehood,” especially following Ukraine’s successful occupation in Russia’s Kursk region [“Kyiv has secured a substantial political victory in Kursk whether it stays or decides to withdraw from this territory in the coming months. It has called Putin’s bluff and made a mockery of his stated “red lines” and nuclear bluster.”], as the Moscow Times recently reported. With Ukrainian statehood — and even Ukrainian identity, given Russia’s genocidal efforts — at stake, any nation would understandably pursue any option available for survival. …

    This reality has been made blindingly clear by recent archival work from a number of scholars, poring through overlooked U.S. and Ukrainian documents. For instance, Columbia University’s George Bogden has recently published extensively on the internal debates in both the United States and Ukraine surrounding Kyiv’s post-Soviet arsenal…

    In both the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations, U.S. officials placed continued emphasis on reassuring Russia that Moscow could have regional primacy — and that the United States was not trying to take advantage of the power vacuum emerging in the Soviet rubble…

    The reason why the GHW Bush Administration agreed to this demand by Gorbachev was that during WW2, many Ukrainians in western Ukraine sided with Germany against Russia and participated eagerly not only in wiping out Jews but in assisting the Germans and Nazi-supporters such as the anti-Russian FInns to kill Russian troops. If Bush would have gone along with what Graham’s propaganda-magazine says he should have done, then Gorbachev would never have allowed the break-up of the Soviet Union, because it would quickly have meant war against Ukraine.

    Basically, Graham is propagandizing for Biden to cross all of Russia’s (or ‘Putin’s’ — as-if Putin doesn’t really represent the Russian people) national-security red lines. Graham’s basic argument is that though the U.S. and its colonies (‘allies’) have their national security to protect, Russia (China, and other countries that America’s billionaires demand to control) don’t. This gives the U.S. regime carte blanche to subterfuge, coup, sanction, and/or outright invade, wherever and whenever they want to; or like Elon Musk famously said, “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”  (Britain’s Guardian featured an article on 25 November 2023, “‘We will coup whoever we want!’: the unbearable hubris of Musk and the billionaire tech bros. Challenging each other to cage fights, building apocalypse bunkers – the behaviour of today’s mega-moguls is becoming increasingly outlandish and imperial”. However, it’s not ONLY “the billionaire tech bros.” but ALL of U.S.-and-allied billionaires who control the U.S. Government and tolerate, if not outright demand, further expansion of the U.S. empire, regardless of the national-security needs of other countries.)

    On 4 June 2024, the internationally well-known geostategic analyst Pepe Escobar headlined at youtube “Putin and China Issue a GRAVE Warning: Tensions Near Breaking Point”, and he reported that WW3 is wanted by Bilderberg=NATO because the billionaires who control Western Governments want to nullify Governments’ debts (such as America’s $36 trillion); they’re now desperate, and EU/NATO breakup will likely come soon. So: these post-Kamala-Harris articles from Donald Graham’s propaganda-mill Foreign Policy are clearly in line with that scenario by Escobar on June 4th, not because they are truthful or even realistic, but because they clearly display this desperation by the billionaires, to retain control over international institutions, and even their willingness to risk destroying the world in order to achieve it.

    I don’t know whether Escobar is correct that cancellation of debts is an objective — much less a main objective — in this, but the reality of the rest of his analysis is hard to refute; and, on 18 October 2024, I headlined an article documenting this, “The Collapsing U.S. Empire.” It opened:

    The neoconservative dream, ever since neoconservatism started on 25 July 1945, has been for the U.S. Government to take over the entire world, but this 79-year-old dream for them (nightmare for everyone else) has now practically ended, because after having played nuclear chicken against Russia ever since that date, the U.S. Government has finally — as-of 9 October 2024 (Biden’s cancellation then of his planned October 12th Ukraine-war victory summit at America’s Rammstein Air Force Base in Germany) — come to the painful realization that their plan (ever since at least 2006) to win a nuclear war against Russia, is unrealistic, and would only leave this planet virtually uninhabitable, a lose-lose war for both sides, instead of to produce the neocons’ ardently hoped-for win-lose war (in which, of course — as the neocons have imagined — the U.S. regime emerges victorious) against Russia.

    The neoconservative chorus (singing to the music of America’s billionaires) are trying to persuade the U.S. public to support what is, effectively, all-out U.S.-and-‘allied’ aggression against Russia. All of this is based upon the lie that Russia started Ukraine’s war on 24 February 2022, America didn’t start it on 20 February 2014.

    On October 10, I headlined “Biden’s plan calls for WW3 to start after Election Day.” People such as Donald Graham evidently want it to turn out to be true — notwithstanding that America’s Government — NOT Russia’s, had started this war. I still have some hope that it won’t. But if it won’t, then Biden will lose his most ardent supporters, neocons (which include virtually all U.S. billionaires — even the ones who prefer Trump). They will feel that he betrayed them. And, in that case, it will have been so — he did.

    However, in either case, a deluge will come soon. Because the collapse of the American empire will not be able to go smoothly. I agree with Escobar on that.

    The post How & Why the Washington Post‘s Former Owner Now Pushes Biden to Go Nuclear Against Russia first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • If Trump Can Be Believed, His Return to the White House Could be a Good Thing…at least Internationally

    TRUMP VOTER IN New Hampshire

    Cambridge, UK — As the voting results started coming in here from Virginia at 4 am (GMT, which is five hours later than Eastern Time in the US), I went to bed, having seen enough to know that Kamala Harris’s  crash campaign for the White House was failing.

    I knew what was coming.  I’d experienced it four times already. In 1968 I watched Richard Nixon, the notorious House version of Commie-hunter Sen. Joe McCarthy rouse what he dubbed  the “Silent Majority” of right-wing white bigots and pro-Vietnam War super-patriots and defeated Hubert Humphrey (an earlier VP who the Democratic party chose as their nominee when their incumbent president after, Lyndon Johnson decided not to seek re-election).

    There was a sense of hopelessness on the left the morning after Nixon’a election.

    It happened again in 1980, with the surprise win by Republican Ronald Reagan, who defeated incumbent Jimmy Carter.  That morning, I got up early and went down to Broadway from my 11th-floor apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Walking down the largely empty sidewalk like a zombie, I passed a few people headed the other way, their faces looking similarly shell-shell shocked, until a neighborhood friend, John Hess, a spritely, gray-bearded retiree N.Y. Times staffer, bounded up to me cheerfully. “Isn’t it great?” He said with a smile. “The Republicans also took the Senate!”

    “What’s so great about that?” I asked, astonished that this radical leftist journalist would say such a thing.

    “Because,” he explained, “If the Democrats control Congress, Reagan can’t blame all his disasters on them. Now he won’t have the ability to blame anyone but himself!”

    Actually, in the event, Reagan managed to serve out two terms, and even accomplished some positive things including negotiating with House Majority Leader Democrat Tip O’Neill a rescue of the underfunded Social Security program and ending the Cold War and (at least temporarily) the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union.

    Then, of course, there was the Supreme Court which in 2000 stole the election for George W Bush by halting the vote counting in Florida, where it was clear that Democratic Vice President Al Gore, who had already won the popular vote, would also have won the state and its Electoral College total. Instead, the feckless top court gave the White House to Bush and Dick Cheney.

    And finally there was the night Donald Trump stunned the pundits and himself by winning the White House and defeating Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016.

    So waking up Wednesday morning to see that Trump would be president for another nightmare four-term had for me a definite “Groundhog Da” feel to it — but without the guy-gets-girl happy ending to it).

    Actually, this time Trump 2.0 is worse than those four earlier Republican wins. This time the Republican president will have solid control of both houses of Congress, with a Senate so overwhelmingly Republican that it will be able to pass almost any piece of legislation without Democrats blocking it, and will likely remain in Republican hands for Trump’s full term.  This time around, the Supreme Court too is solidly controlled 6-3 by hard-right justices, and Trump has made it clear that every cabinet office and every government agency will be run  by “loyal’ lackeys of his choosing, with even civil service employees either replaced or cowed into submission — including at such normally independent agencies as the Pentagon, CIA, Justice Department and EPA.  Even the late irrepressible John Hess would have  had a hard time finding a bright side to this Election Day outcome.

    Nonetheless I’m going to give it a try.

    First a reality check:  What we see in the 2024 election result is that a majority of Americans — men and women, rich and poor, white and people of color, educated and uneducated,  religious and atheist —  are either ready to gamble on a self-involved sociopathic, racist and misogynist criminal billionaire with anger issues or are too concerned with just getting by with their daily lives  to to worry about elections that never seem to change their lives for the better or that even make them harder. Analysis of the voting shows that a huge percentage of late voting younger people went for Trump. And a tidal wave of women voting for Harris didn’t materialize. More women voted than men, as usual, but plenty of them went for the pussy-grabbing rapist Trump. Trump also did better with Black men than he did in 2016 and 2024 and significantly improved his tally among Latinos (or as he calls them “Hispanics”). In the end Harris’s larger share of women voters was the same as Trump’s larger share of  men, making the predicted gender war a wash-out.

    Here in the UK, where I am living for the next nine months, I can see what the results of such so-called populist voting trends can be. British voters in 1979 elected a hard-right Prime Minister named Margaret Thatcher and allowed her and her Conservative Party to set off a seismic shift of the country’s politics away from social democracy and a rather classical conservatism into a two-party Neo-liberal dystopia where both parties accepted the notion that capitalism, unfettered markets, and a coddled business elite managing things was the best option for society.

    This  narrowed political playing field has led over the ensuing decades to a long period British economic doldrums, and to a turning away by Brits from the rest of Europe, as resentment and hostility towards outsiders, including eastern Europeans, and especially people from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean — all of them willing to work for less and to leave countries that had it even worse — availed themselves of the lack of borders across Europe  to flock to the UK. This latter phenomenon led to the narrow victory of a referendum that resulted inBritain’s removing itself from the European Union. Called Brexit, this abrupt anti-immigrant “secession” has wreaked havoc on the nation’s economy and living standards, as well as the operation of key services like the country’s once vaunted National Health System.

    Just this past July, British voters, frustrated  with a country and government where “nothing works anymore,” turned out the Conservatives after 15 straight years of Tory rule and handed a landslide win to the Labour Party and its new Prime Minister Keir Starmer.  How that new government will fare in its effort to right the ship of state and its stagnating economy, given the incredible decades-long disinvestment and privatization it is hoping to reverse, remains to be seen.

    I suspect the US, under a second Trump administration, this time emboldened by a political realignment at least as profound as was Thatcher’s 1979 win in the UK, will soon be similarly strip-mined and privatized.

    The one bright spot, however, if President-re-elect Trump, a shameless liar, can be taken at his word, would be if he actually were to brings an end to the decade of US military aid political  brinksmanship in pushing Ukraine to break away from neighboring Russia’s sphere of influence and to join NATO, the US-led anti-Russian alliance created way back at the start of the Cold War of he 1950s. Trump says, quite logically, that US efforts to pull Ukraine into NATO, a mutual protection pact whose very existence is an existential threat to Russia, and the Ukraine government’s now ten-year old armed conflict with first its ethic Russian minority and then, when Russia responded by invading Ukraine, with Russia, a leading nuclear power,  has led to a war in which Ukraine’s military is largely underwritten by US arms and financial banking interests. It is a war that the US knows poses a high risk of provoking a devastating and potentially world-ending nuclear conflict between ther world’s two nuclear superpowers.

    During the just concluded election campaign, Trump promised to bring an end to that bloody military conflict immediately before even waiting for his second inauguration in January.  He has also promised to end the one-sided slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, though without specifying how.

    I am no fan of Trump, but I have to say should he successfully cut short those two bloody conflicts, or even ends the Ukraine war while at least not making things worse in Gaza, his new presidency would be off to a great start. He should follow that up by returning the US to the treaty relationship on nuclear weapons that his Republican predecessor Ronald  Reagan worked out with former Soviet and Russia leader Mikhail Gorbachev, which effectively, if all too briefly,  ended the two countries’ nuclear standoff and raised humanity’s hopes for an end to nuclear weapons altogether. Trump should also follow through with his prior effort to pull the US out of NATO, which long ago morphed into a cover for and participant in US global military actions around the world and simply serves as an excuse for ploughing over a trillion dollars a year into the coffers of the US arms industry.

    Martin Luther King, a year to the day before the day in 1968 that he was assassinated (my birthday) he gave a speech at the Riverside Church in New York titled Beyond Vietnam:A Time to End the Silence.” In it he correctly identified the US, at that time conducting a bloody aggressive war in Indochina, as being “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”  It has remained so, Indeed its endless wars and “interventions,” have reportedly killed well over 6 million people, mostly civilians, around the world in the eight decades since WWII.

    Trump knows this and has talked of pulling US forces back from the hundreds of places they are based in foreign lands (though that idea was at one point linked by him to the idea of using them against American dissidents here at home — NOT a Great idea!).

    He should pull them back and decommission them.

    Trump has said on a number of occasions that he does not want wars — that as a businessman, he wants the US to do business with other nations, on a level playing field.  That is a great sentiment, and it’s one that his base, those MAGA voters, some of whom I know and have had conversations with,. Trump should be held to that promise, and should downsize the US military to a size appropriate to a country that is not facing any threat of invasion and that stops meddling militarily in other countries and maintaining bases around the globe. That is a position a lot of Trump’s MAGA backers agree with.

    For now though, all we have from President-elect Trump are promises like  “I’m not going to start wars, I’m going to stop wars,” and unless acted upon these cannot be taken seriously. But that said, I have to say the words themselves are welcome, and it’w a promise that I’ve never heard the likes of coming from any other president-elect of either party.. (Okay, Richard Nixon claimed during his first presidential race that he had a “secret plan’ for ending the war in Vietnam, but that “plan” turned out to be to massively carpet-bomb North Vietnam using B-52s. expand the war  into Laos and Cambodia and to ship more US combat troops into the country. Once elected, he kept the war going until he resigned from office in disgrace.)

    We on the left are facing an existential crisis with Trump’s election victory but also an opportunity

    Supporting the Democrats and their chosen candidate Kamala Harris as a tactical move to preserve freedom to organize and to protest was clearly unsuccessful as her poorly performed campaign did worse than Hillary Clinton did against Trump eight years before. Indeed, she lost not just in the Electoral College tally but in the popular vote, which Clinton at least won.  The Democratic Party has been shown once again to be a pathetic joke as a political opponent. Sen. Bernie Sanders,  who won a resounding re-election to the Senate in Vermont, identified right before Harris’s concession speech on Thursday, the party’s problem:  It is owned by billionaires and moneyed consultants wedded to corporate interests, and is  dismissive or even hostile to the interests of the working class.

    But the pathetic showing of third party candidates in this,  as in prior elections,  has shown that building a third party is also a fool’s errand in a country where the political system is structured to prevent them.

    That leaves us with the option of building a large movement outside of political parties focussed around broad popular issues that would bring working-class people together common goals like peace and demilitarization, significantly raising the minimum wage, improving and protecting Social Security, making Medicare universal for all ages, passing the Equal Rights Amendment and protecting every women’s right to control her own body and health and seriously addressing the climate crisis.

    Trump has made it clear that he wants unrestrained power, without the hindrances of a Constitution or a Congress composed of members who might think for themselves and perform their intended constitutional role as a check and balance on the Executive Branch. Trump’s history of lying, criminality, racism and misogyny and his willingness to appeal to American citizens’ basest instincts are well known. But we are stuck with him. He cannot be defeated in the courts because he has a bunch of sycophants packing the Supreme Court and in the lower level federal courts.  Impeachment cannot happen and is a waste of time and effort. The weakened Congressional Democrats can no longer even put on a impeachment committee hearing this time.

    With a mass movement we can pressure Trump and his Congressional supporters to do what they promised. If they go back on those promises, we can work to peel away those people who just voted for him as a “change disrupter,” especially as they begin to discover he really doesn’t give a damn about them.

    Meanwhile we need to do the hard work of organize]ing wide support for resisting Trump’s worst ideas — the ones that will harm the defenseless and that will grievously contribute to climate change. For example, we need to support a campaign to protect undocumented people living in the USA from brutal arrest, detention and forced deportation, especially in cases that break up families.  We clearly need to build a mass movement to protect programs like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare.  A key here is that most of Trump’s own voting base depend on those programs and on the Affordable Care Act. Trump and his advisers know this. This is why Trump vowed during his campaign not to cut them. He needs to be held to that promise. And we need to call out every Trump effort to worsen climate change by the reversal of what climate saving measures have been introduced, and by trying to sack or silence those civil service employees responsible for measuring or ameliorating climate change.

    Trump, by making this false promises he won’t keep in order to win the election has handed us what we need to organize this same people.

    The post If Trump Can Be Believed, His Return to the White House Could be a Good Thing…at least Internationally first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • We Don’t Want Our Islands to Be Used to Kill People

    Ōriwa Tahupōtiki Haddon (Ngāti Ruanui), Reconstruction of the Signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, c. 1940.

    For the past few weeks I have been on the road in Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Australia at the invitation of groups such as Te Kuaka, Red Ant, and the Communist Party of Australia. Both countries were shaped by British colonialism, marked by the violent displacement of native communities and theft of their lands. Today, as they become part of the US-led militarisation of the Pacific, their native populations have fought to defend their lands and way of life.

    On 6 February 1840, Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi) was signed by representatives of the British Crown and the Māori groups of Aotearoa. The treaty (which has no point of comparison in Australia) claimed that it would ‘actively protect Māori in the use of their lands, fisheries, forests, and other treasured possessions’ and ‘ensure that both parties to [the treaty] would live together peacefully and develop New Zealand together in partnership’. While I was in Aotearoa, I learned that the new coalition government seeks to ‘reinterpret’ the Treaty of Waitangi in order to roll back protections for Māori families. This includes shrinking initiatives such as the Māori Health Authority (Te Aka Whai Ora) and programmes that promote the use of the Māori language (Te Reo Maori) in public institutions. The fight against these cutbacks has galvanised not only the Māori communities, but large sections of the population who do not want to live in a society that violates its treaties. When Aboriginal Australian Senator Lidia Thorpe disrupted the British monarch Charles’s visit to the country’s parliament last month, she echoed a sentiment that spreads across the Pacific, yelling, as she was dragged out by security: ‘You committed genocide against our people. Give us our land back! Give us what you stole from us – our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people. … We want a treaty in this country. … You are not my king. You are not our king’.

    Walangkura Napanangka (Pintupi), Johnny Yungut’s Wife, Tjintjintjin, 2007.

    With or without a treaty, both Aotearoa and Australia have seen a groundswell of sentiment for increased sovereignty across the islands of the Pacific, building on a centuries-long legacy. This wave of sovereignty has now begun to turn towards the shores of the massive US military build-up in the Pacific Ocean, which has its sights set on an illusionary threat from China. US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall, speaking at a September 2024 Air & Space Forces Association convention on China and the Indo-Pacific, represented this position well when he said ‘China is not a future threat. China is a threat today’. The evidence for this, Kendall said, is that China is building up its operational capacities to prevent the United States from projecting its power into the western Pacific Ocean region. For Kendall, the problem is not that China was a threat to other countries in East Asia and the South Pacific, but that it is preventing the US from playing a leading role in the region and surrounding waters – including those just outside of China’s territorial limits, where the US has conducted joint ‘freedom of navigation’ exercises with its allies. ‘I am not saying war in the Pacific is imminent or inevitable’, Kendall continued. ‘It is not. But I am saying that the likelihood is increasing and will continue to do so’.

    George Parata Kiwara (Ngāti Porou and Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki), Jacinda’s Plan, 2021.

    In 1951, in the midst of the Chinese Revolution (1949) and the US war on Korea (1950–1953), senior US foreign policy advisor and later Secretary of State John Foster Dulles helped formulate several key treaties, such as the 1951 Australia, New Zealand, and United States Security (ANZUS) Treaty, which brought Australia and New Zealand firmly out of British influence and into the US’s war plans, and the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty, which ended the formal US occupation of Japan. These deals – part of the US’s aggressive strategy in the region – came alongside the US occupation of several island nations in the Pacific where the US had already established military facilities, including ports and airfields: Hawaii (since 1898), Guam (since 1898), and Samoa (since 1900). Out of this reality, which swept from Japan to Aotearoa, Dulles developed the ‘island chain strategy’, a so-called containment strategy that would establish a military presence on three ‘island chains’ extending outward from China to act as an aggressive perimeter and prevent any power other than the US from commanding the Pacific Ocean.

    Over time, these three island chains became hardened strongholds for the projection of US power, with about four hundred bases in the region established to maintain US military assets from Alaska to southern Australia. Despite signing various treaties to demilitarise the region (such as the South Pacific Nuclear Free Treaty, also known as the Treaty of Rarotonga in 1986), the US has moved lethal military assets, including nuclear weapons, through the region for threat projection against China, North Korea, Russia, and Vietnam (at different times and with different intensity). This ‘island chain strategy’ includes military installations in French colonial outposts such as Wallis and Futuna, New Caledonia, and French Polynesia. The US also has military arrangements with the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and Palau.


    Christine Napanangka Michaels (Nyirripi), Lappi Lappi Jukurrpa (Lappi Lappi Dreaming), 2019.

    While some of these Pacific Island nations are used as bases for US and French power projection against China, others have been used as nuclear test sites. Between 1946 and 1958, the US conducted sixty-seven nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands. One of them, conducted in Bikini Atoll, detonated a thermonuclear weapon a thousand times more powerful than the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Darlene Keju Johnson, who was only three years old at the time of the Bikini Atoll detonation and was one of the first Marshallese women to speak publicly about the nuclear testing in the islands, encapsulated the sentiment of the islanders in one of her speeches: ‘We don’t want our islands to be used to kill people. The bottom line is we want to live in peace’.

    Jef Cablog (Cordillera), Stern II, 2021.

    Yet, despite the resistance of people like Keju Johnson (who went on to become a director in the Marshall Islands Ministry of Health), the US has been ramping up its military activity in the Pacific over the past fifteen years, such as by refusing to close bases, opening new ones, and expanding others to increase their military capacity. In Australia – without any real public debate – the government decided to supplement US funding to expand the runway on Tindal Air Base in Darwin so that it could house US B-52 and B-1 bombers with nuclear capacity. It also decided to expand submarine facilities from Garden Island to Rockingham and build a new high-tech radar facility for deep-space communications in Exmouth. These expansions came on the heels of the Australia-United Kingdom-United States (AUKUS) partnership in 2021, which has allowed the US and the UK to fully coordinate their strategies. The partnership also sidelined the French manufacturers that until then had supplied Australia with diesel-powered submarines and ensured that it would instead buy nuclear-powered submarines from the UK and US. Eventually, Australia will provide its own submarines for the missions the US and UK are conducting in the waters around China.

    Over the past few years, the US has also sought to draw Canada, France, and Germany into the US Pacific project through the US Pacific Partnership Strategy for the Pacific Islands (2022) and the Partnership for the Blue Pacific (2022). In 2021, at the France-Oceania Summit, there was a commitment to reengage with the Pacific, with France bringing new military assets into New Caledonia and French Polynesia. The US and France have also opened a dialogue about coordinating their military activities against China in the Pacific.

    Yvette Bouquet (Kanak), Profil art, 1996.

    Yet these partnerships are only part of the US ambitions in the region. The US is also opening new bases in the northern islands of the Philippines – the first such expansion in the country since the early 1990s – while intensifying its arm sales with Taiwan, to whom it is providing lethal military technology (including missile defence and tank systems intended to deter a Chinese military assault). Meanwhile the US has improved its coordination with Japan’s military by deciding to establish joint force headquarters, which means that the command structure for US troops in Japan and South Korea will be autonomously controlled by the US command structure in these two Asian countries (not by orders from Washington).

    However, the US-European war project is not going as smoothly as anticipated. Protest movements in the Solomon Islands (2021) and New Caledonia (2024), led by communities who are no longer willing to be subjected to neocolonialism, have come as a shock to the US and its allies. It will not be easy for them to build their island chain in the Pacific.

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    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A Third Party Perspective on the Rightward Lurch of the US Body Politic

    The chickens that the Democrats hatched in 2016 came home to roost in 2024. Back then, the Democratic National Committee (DNC), representing the party’s establishment, promoted Donald Trump as the Republican nominee. They thought him to be an easy mark who would be opposed by both the Republican Party establishment and most US voters.

    That stratagem turned out to be correct about the Republican establishment but wrong about the electorate. In any case, Trump went on to not only capture the GOP but the archaic Electoral College as well.

    The DNC reprised that strategy with the same suicidal results this year, putting all their deplorable eggs into the one basket of running on a platform of “not-Trump.”

    Trump campaigned on the gambit of asking whether Americans felt they were better off now after four years of Joe Biden. The populace roared back a resounding “NO.” Pitching to a disaffected and dispossessed citizenry, he threw them reactionary red meat, scapegoating immigrants and others.

    Kamala Harris flew the blue banner but her woke message that she was “not Trump” was less convincing. A red tsunami has swept the Democrats not only out of the White House but congress and many governorships. Trump is on track to win the popular vote.

    This “triumph of the swill,” borrowing from the Dead Kennedys, will have consequences for the Supreme Court and the larger makeup of the US politics going into the future. MAGA has now firmly infected the body politic and threatens to metastasize. Hillary Clinton’s smug words in 2016, “Trump is the gift that keeps on giving,” turned out to be unintentionally prescient.

    Would it have been any different had the DNC not rigged the 2016 presidential nomination for establishment candidate Clinton by sabotaging Bernie Sanders, who campaigned on issues of empowerment and economic benefit that also appealed to Trump voters? For them, the fear that Sanders could activate and organize genuine grassroots discontent into a social movement was greater than the risk of a Trump presidency.

    But the faux independent senator from Vermont had a fatal flaw – “though shalt not do anything that harms the Democratic Party.” This was all the DNC needed to crush his campaign. His “Our Revolution” was domesticated, while Bernie shepherded progressives into the big blue tent.

    Green Party campaign manager Jason Call, speaking personally on election night, said it was better to vote for a third party candidate who was opposed to the genocide in Palestine. Even if one accepts the bogus argument that doing so throws the election to Trump, in the larger picture, that would still be preferable to telling the Democrats, who are the party in power, that their conduct is acceptable.

    Democratic Party supporters, of course, disagree. They claim that Trump is even more pro-Zionist than their candidate, which may be true. Although today the Democratic Party is arguably the leading war party, we will have cold comfort with the Republicans in power. And domestically the Democrats spout a better line on some social wedge issues that don’t threaten elite rule, such as women’s reproductive rights, although their walk is not as good as their talk.

    Yes, things will get worse under Trump. But things would also get worse under Harris. This is because the entire political discourse has been staggering to the right regardless of which wing of the duopoly is in power.

    In contrast, the voting public is well to the left of them on almost every issue, from universal public healthcare to opposition to endless war. By any objective measure, Jill Stein’s Green Party campaign was middle of the road compared to her corporate party competitors.

    The lesser-evil voting strategy itself bears some degree of responsibility for this reactionary tide. By unconditionally supporting the Democrats, progressive-leaning voters become a captured constituency to be ignored. They incentivize the Democrats to scurry even further to the right to try to pick up the votes of the undecided and to further cater to the class interests of their corporate funders.

    Wednesday morning quarterbacks (election day is on Tuesday) are saying that the Democrats should have given more emphasis in their campaign messaging to economic issues affecting working people. This ignores the fact that Harris, and Biden before her, had claimed that they had turned the economy around.

    The debate on how much better the post-Covid economy is and who benefited leads to a deeper question. The current incarnation of capitalism, what is popularly called “neoliberalism,” has failed to meet the material needs of working people. This structural problem, not simply a question of policy, begs for another economic model.

    The now manifest failure of the Democrats to offer a platform beyond “not Trump” exposes their bankruptcy. They do not even pretend to have an agenda to address the underlying economic distress, because the limits of the economic system that they embrace provides no succor.

    In fact, neither of the major parties offer an alternative to neoliberalism. Both duopoly wings tend to campaign on cultural rather than substantive economic issues precisely because neither have solutions to the erosion of the quality of life for most citizens.

    The Republican’s capitalized on popular discontent with the incumbents. But come the mid-term elections in two years, the tables will be turned. This drama is being played out abroad with social democrats getting the boot in places like Argentina and Austria, part of a larger blowback filling the sails of an international far-right insurgence.

    A major left-liberal concern is the supposed imminent threat of fascism. Their fear is focused on Trump’s dysfunctionality and his “deplorable” working class minions; not on the security apparatus of the state, which they have learned to love. However, fascism is not a personality disorder. The ruling class – whether its nominal head wears a red or blue hat – has no reason to impose a fascist dictatorship as long as people embrace rather than oppose the security state.

    The New York Times reported: “US stocks, the value of the dollar, and yields on Treasury bonds all recorded gains as Mr. Trump’s victory became clear.” That is good for the ruling class but not so much for the rest of us.

    Lesser-evil voting contributes to the rightward trajectory of US politics at this time when structural change is needed. Absent a third-party alternative, the two-party duopoly doesn’t even recognize existential threats, such as global warming or nuclear annihilation, let alone address them.

    Meanwhile, the US military launched a test hypersonic nuclear missile right after the polls closed on November 5. The scariest thing about their “reassurance” to the American public regarding this practice run for World War III was that it was “routine.”

  • Roger D. Harris is on the state central committee of the Peace and Freedom Party, the only ballot-qualified socialist party in California. The views expressed here are his own.
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  • The Price of Eggs: Why Harris Lost to Trump

    It takes some skill to make Donald J. Trump look good. Two Democrats have succeeded in doing so: Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Kamala Harris in 2024. The conceit of both presidential campaigns, and the belief that attacking a staggeringly grotesque moral character for being such, was laughable. (When a Clinton mocks groping philanderers and creepy molesters, one must reach for, well, the Starr Report?)  In certain countries, abominating and execrating your political adversary for being a moral defective might work.  In the United States, such figures can draw benefit from being outside the constraints of law-abiding society. They are quite literally outlaw spirits that still speak of that nebulous notion called the American Dream while encouraging everyone else to come for the ride. Realising it involves treading on toes and breaking a few skulls on the way, but that’s the expectation.

    From the start, the Democrats had tied themselves in knots by convincing President Joe Biden that he could not only last the tenure of his office but run against Trump. Doing so, and deriding those wishing to see a change in the guard, created a needless handicap. Throughout late 2023 and early 2024, it became clear that the party worthies were doing their best to shield Biden’s cognitive decline.  The sham was cruelly exposed in the June 27 debate with Trump.

    Panic struck the ranks. With little time to regroup, Vice President Harris was close at hand, selected by Biden as the appropriate choice. But Harris landed with a punctured parachute weighed down by the crown of presumptive nomination.  There were to be no opponents (the 2016 challenge of Bernie Sanders against Hillary Clinton which annoyed the party mandarins would not be repeated), no primaries, no effective airing of any challenge. It was easy to forget – at least for many Democrats – that Harris’s 2019 bid for the nomination had been spectacularly poor and costly. An ailing president would also keep his occupancy in the White House, rather than resigning and giving Harris some seat warming preparation.

    While the change caused the inevitable rush of optimism, it soon became clear that the ghost of Hillary’s past had been working its demonic magic.  The Harris campaign was unadventurous and safe. All too often, the vice president hoped that messages would reach the outer reaches of the electorate from cocooned comfort, helped by a war chest of fundraising that broke records ($1 billion in less than three months), and a battalion of cheerleading celebrities that suggested electoral estrangement rather than connection.

    Then there was the problem as to what those messages were. These, in the end, did not veer much beyond attacking Trump as a threat to democracy, women’s rights and reproductive freedoms. They tended to remain unclear on the issue of economics. From foreign to domestic policy, Harris failed to distinguish herself as one able to depart from the Biden program in her own right. Instead, it was hoped that some organic coalition of anti-Trump Republicans, independents, Black voters, women and American youth would somehow materialise at the ballot box.

    In a September 16 meeting with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, longtime allies of the Democratic Party, Harris failed to convince its leaders that she would protect the livelihood and jobs of workers better than Trump. Within a matter of days, the union publicly revealed that it would not be endorsing Harris as Democratic presidential candidate, the first since 1996.

    Her interviews were minimal, her exposure to the outside treated with utmost delicacy. The Republicans, on the other hand, were willing to get their hands dirty with an extensive ground campaign that yielded electoral rewards in such battleground states as Pennsylvania. The Early Vote Action effort of conservative activist Scott Presler proved impressive in encouraging voter registration and increasing absentee and early vote counts. His efforts in securing votes for Trump from Pennsylvania’s Amish community were strikingly successful.

    Trump, in sharp contrast to his opponent, was so exposed to the point of being a potential assassination target on two occasions.  He showed the electorate he was worth the tag. He personalised with moronic panache. He babbled and raged, and made sure he, as he always does, dominated the narrative. Alternative media outlets were courted. Most of all, he focused on the breadbasket issues: the cost of groceries, housing and fuel; the perceived terrors of having a lax border policy. He also appealed to voters content with reining in the war making instincts so natural to Harris and neoconservatives on both sides of the aisle.

    Fundamentally, the Democrats fell for the old trick of attacking Trump’s demagogy rather than teasing out their own policies. The Fascist cometh. The inner Nazi rises. Misogyny rampant. Racism throbbing. This came with the inevitable belittling of voters. You cast your ballot for him, you are either an idiot, a fascist, or both. Oh, and he was just weird, said the unknown and already forgotten ear-scratching Democrat vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, whatever that means in a land where weird is so frequent as to make it its most endearing quality.

    It is remarkable that Trump, a convicted felon, twice impeached in office, a person so detached from the empirical, the logical, and the half-decent, would be electable in the first place. Even more remarkable is that such a figure has won both the Electoral College and the popular vote. The glorious Republic likes its show and treats elections like marketing exercises.  Its defenders often pretend that those reaching its highest office are not mirrors but transcendent figures to emulate.  Trump – in all his cocksure hustling and slipshod approach to regulation and convention – shows many in the electorate that the defect and the defective can go far.

    A few final lessons. The Democrats would do best to listen to those who would otherwise vote for them.  Focus on the economy. Talk about the price of eggs and milk. Ditch the lexicon on ill-defined terms of supposedly useful criticism such as fascism, a word the users almost always misunderstand. And always be careful about pundits and pollsters who predict razor small margins in elections.  Polls, and people, lie.

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  • Let Us Eat Cake!

    They attribute the famous quote ‘Let them eat cake’ to Marie Antoinette, Queen Consort of King Louis XIV of France. Apparently, she was told that the peasants did not have enough bread to eat. Her retort Let them eat cake, famous for all the Super Rich throughout history (and right smack dab into our present USA), shows the utter arrogance, indifference and lack of empathy for most of our low and middle income working stiffs. Last night’s disgraceful vote results to allow Trump back into power reveal just how far down the rabbit hole of immorality our nation has fallen! Why did this happen? The orchestrators of this scam called a ‘Two Party System’ have done a deed of no return towards our republic. Notice how I refuse to call what we have a democracy. To this writer a true democracy is when state power is vested in the people or the general population of that state. Sadly, what we have here in Amerika is moneyed interests AKA The Super Rich that control the  ‘What and How’ people think.

    One part of this scam calls itself Republicans or recently MAGA. They flood the media with half truths and outright lies to frighten the suckers… sorry, the voters. Fentanyl carrying illegal aliens AKA Brown skinned Latinos who wish to rob and rape our beautiful lily white women. Schools that groom little boys into becoming little girls. Librarians who stack those shelves with books promoting such behavior,  along with anti white anger about not too important things like, duh, slavery. The other party, to these wonderful patriots, is nothing more than a bunch of Marxists and out and out Communists. Wow!

    The equally reprehensible other half of the scam is the Democratic Party, once the party of FDR and progressive ideas. Not anymore. They have their own sponsors AKA donors who keep them on track to be  ‘not so terrible’ as the other party. They say how terrible they feel for the low income and middle class as the Military Industrial Empire they too serve turns the screws. When it comes to issues like abortion rights and gay rights the Democrats are spot on. When it comes to workers and renters becoming Serfs in this new feudal miss mush they remain silent. Many times they actually agree on the basic crime of privatization of public means and services along with the party opposite. Isn’t democracy great?

    Trump won because of a few main factors. Factor one is that most of the whites who voted for him just don’t like having blacks and browns living near them or attending school with their kids. Let’s just call a spade a spade, if you get my humor? Factor two is that his populist rhetoric received a warm reception, especially with so many working class whites who don’t have a pot to piss in. Imagine how he sold the illusion that HE was against the evil DEEP STATE, a place that he has made his home for his entire career! As this corporate empire keeps swallowing working stiffs up, one wonders how many MAGA non union workers  (less than 10% of the private sector) will go to bed still thanking the Lord for Trump. Factor three are the millions of evangelical types (you know, the ones who think they own Jesus) who see abortion and LBGTQ as the first and second deadliest sins.

    My query to all those seniors who voted for Trump and his party: When and If you become feeble and infirmed and need a nursing home, after the consistent cuts to Medicaid, will you have the $20k per MONTH to cover that cost? What if this new  ‘Trump will fix it’ government decides to cut your Social Security and adds to your Medicare contribution? How about my query to those women who follow the leader Trump and his party: As abortion becomes either difficult or actually outlawed, what if you or your daughter or granddaughter goes out with a guy, has too many drinks and winds up becoming pregnant and he’s a  ‘No show’? Now, as in the pre Rowe period, we know that a woman who had the money could always find a doctor who did the deed secretly. What if you are not that well off to afford such a fee, and it would be a pretty high one, because the doc has to be very very discreet? These are questions that need to be answered by you Trump  (and Republican Party) supporters.

    Finally, remember dear MAGA neighbors of mine, the old biblical saying: ” For they sow the wind and they will reap the whirlwind.”

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  • Who Won?

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  • Our Fragile Infrastructure: Lessons From Hurricane Helene

    Asheville, North Carolina, is known for its historic architecture, vibrant arts scene and as a gateway to the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was a favorite escape for “climate migrants” moving from California, Arizona, and other climate-challenged vicinities, until a “500 year flood” ravaged the city this fall.

    Hurricane Helene was a wakeup call not just for stricken North Carolina residents but for people across the country following their tragic stories in the media and in the podcasts now favored by young voters for news. “Preppers” well equipped with supplies watched in helpless disbelief as homes washed away in a wall of water and mud, taking emergency supplies in the storm. Streets turned into rivers, and many businesses and homes suffered extensive water damage if they were not lost altogether.

    The raging floods were triggered by unprecedented rainfall and winds, but a network of fragile dams also played a role. On Sept 27, when the floods hit, evacuation orders were issued to residents near a number of critical dams due to their reported “imminent failure” or “catastrophic collapse.” Flood waters were overtopping the dams to the point that in some cases the top of the dam structure could not be seen.

    The dams did not collapse, but to avoid that catastrophe, floodgates and spillways had to be opened, releasing huge amounts of water over a number of days. Spokesmen said the dams had “performed as designed,” but they were designed for an earlier era with more stable, predictable climates and no population buildup below the dams.

    Five days after the floods hit in East Tennessee, half a million gallons of water were still being released per second from Douglas Dam, northwest of Asheville and upstream from Knoxville on the French Broad River. (Video clip of opened floodgates.) The Watauga Dam in Tennessee was also releasing record flows, surrounding nearby homes in water. WTVC NewsChannel 9 Chattanooga reported that Chickamauga Dam, upstream from Chattanooga, released approximately 566,118 gallons of water per second.

    The Nolichucky Dam, in Tennessee near the North Carolina border, was reported to have “withstood nearly twice the water flow of Niagara Falls.” (See dramatic videos on Fox Weather showing the overflow and the floodgate release continuing three weeks later, a similar clip from 11Alive adding the damage downstream, and overflow footage on WKYC Charlotte.) Other major dams in which the floodgates were opened included Cowans Ford Dam, north of Charlotte (see video clip of the floodgate release); and Waterville Dam (also called Walters Dam), upstream from Newport in Tennessee  (video). Homeowners accused Duke Energy of sacrificing poor neighborhoods for wealthier properties, but as one official said, the excess water had to go somewhere. It had to go downstream. They did what they had to do to avoid outright collapse of the dams, a much worse disaster.

    Upriver from Asheville, the auxiliary spillway of the North Forks Dam was activated. It too is said to have “performed as designed,” but the result was again significant flooding. Mandatory evacuation orders were put in place from the dam to Biltmore Village in Asheville, which suffered major damage. North Forks Dam is classified as a ”high-hazard potential dam,” meaning its failure could result in potential loss of life and serious property damage.

    One concerned Asheville podcaster complained that the city had known for 20 years that the North Forks Dam was inadequate and a lethal danger under flood conditions, but it hadn’t been repaired. The dam was put to the test in September, when residents were told there was no choice but for the flood gates to be opened to prevent the dam from breaking. The result was a 30 foot wall of water that swept homes and lives away, rushing so fast that people were found in the tops of trees. The podcaster’s suspicions were aroused because lithium worth billions of dollars is located in Western North Carolina, where a mining company has been trying to restart operations since 2021, over community protests.

    That was also true of the nearby town of Spruce Pine, downstream from the North Toe Dam, which was submerged under eight feet of water from the combination of torrential rain and the release of the dam’s floodgates. Spruce Pine is a major producer of high-quality quartz, a rare but necessary resource for many tech products. Mining companies have been attempting to double their operations in Spruce Pine, but they too have met resistance from local landowners. For some controversial details, see here.

    Asheville is also downstream from Lake Lure Dam, which was reported on Sept. 27 to be “at risk of imminent failure” as the river was overtopping the dam. Most heavily affected was Chimney Rock, the town immediately downstream from Lake Lure, known for both its rustic scenery and its lithium mines. The damage was extensive.

    According to an Oct. 2 broadcast on WBTV News in Charlotte titled “Lake Lure Dam ‘high hazard’ and needed repairs at time Helene hit,” the dam, completed in 1926, does not meet current state safety requirements. Repairs were ongoing but unfinished. Lake Lure Dam is one of 1,581 dams across the state considered “high hazard,” and according to a 2022 report, North Carolina has 194 high-hazard dams in poor or unsatisfactory condition, meaning they “may require immediate or emergency remedial action.”

    The High Cost of Repair

    The catastrophic flooding and destruction in western North Carolina has caused a record $53 billion or more in damages and recovery needs, according to North Carolina  Gov. Roy Cooper’s administration. The storm and its aftermath caused 1,400 landslides and damaged over 160 water and sewer systems, at least 6,000 miles of roads, more than a thousand bridges and culverts, and an estimated 126,000 homes. Some 220,000 households are expected to apply for federal assistance.

    Whether the federal government will have the funds, and how long it will take residents and businesses to get assistance, are yet to be determined. On Oct. 2, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) did not have enough funding to make it through the hurricane season, which runs to Nov. 30. President Biden said that the more urgent problem now is the Small Business Administration, which provides low interest loans to homeowners (up to $500,000) and businesses (up to $2 million) for rebuilding after disasters. The SBA announced on Oct. 15 that its funds would soon run out and that it was pausing its loan offers to disaster survivors until Congress appropriates additional funds.

    Applications for those funds are complicated, and reimbursement can take years — too late for demolished businesses to get back on their feet, or displaced homeowners living in tents on their properties to rebuild.

    Failing Dams Are a Nationwide Problem

    Dams in poor condition are found not just in Appalachia but across the country. A May 5, 2022 NPR report cites an Associated Press analysis of dams needing repair:

    More than 2,200 dams built upstream from homes or communities are in poor condition across the U.S., likely endangering lives if they were to fail. The number of high-hazard dams in need of repairs is up substantially from a similar AP review conducted just three years ago.

    There are several reasons for the increased risk. Long-deferred maintenance has added more dams to the troubled list. A changing climate has subjected some dams to greater strain from intense rainstorms. Homes, businesses and highways also have cropped up below dams that were originally built in remote locations. …

    The nation’s dams are on average over a half-​century old. They have come under renewed focus following extreme floods, such as the one that caused the failure of two Michigan dams and the evacuation of 10,000 people in 2020.

    The $1 trillion infrastructure bill signed last year by President Joe Biden will pump about $3 billion into dam-​related projects, including hundreds of millions for state dam safety programs and repairs….

    Yet it’s still just a fraction of the nearly $76 billion needed to fix the tens of thousands of dams owned by individuals, companies, community associations, state and local governments, and other entities besides the federal government, according to a report by the Association of State Dam Safety Officials [ASDSO].

    Less than a year later, the ASDSO announced the release of a new report dated February 2023, stating that the current cost of rehabilitating all non-federal U.S. dams is an estimated $157.5 billion, more than double ASDSO’s estimate from 2022.

    Our Neglected National Infrastructure

    Repairing dams is only one of a litany of infrastructure needs across the country, including roads, highways and bridges; public transportation; ports, harbors and other maritime facilities; intercity passenger and freight railroads; freight and intermodal facilities; airports; and telecommunication networks. National spending on infrastructure has fallen to its lowest level in 70 years, to 2.5% of the nation’s GDP. That’s half the comparable level in Europe and one-third the level in China. As a result, productivity, investment and manufacturing have collapsed; and we are losing our worldwide competitive edge.

    The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimated in its 2021 report that $6.1 trillion is needed just to repair our nation’s infrastructure, of which $2.6 trillion is currently unfunded. The gap, which increases the longer the work is put off, is now $2.9 trillion according to the latest ASCE update. Meanwhile, the federal debt is over $34.8 trillion, with the interest tab alone topping $1 trillion annually.

    How can infrastructure requirements be met without driving the federal government $3 trillion further into debt? We need some form of off-budget financing. We have done it before, notably when Congress was heavily in debt right after the American Revolution, and when the banking structure had completely collapsed in the Great Depression of the 1930s.

    Alexander Hamilton, our first U.S. Treasury secretary, developed the national infrastructure bank model used by many other countries today. Winning our freedom from Great Britain left the country with what appeared to be an unpayable debt. Hamilton traded the debt along with a percentage of gold for shares in the First U.S. Bank, paying a 6% dividend. This capital was then leveraged many times over into credit to be used specifically for infrastructure and development. The Second U.S. Bank, based on the same model, funded the vibrant economic activity of the first decades of the new country.

    Today, virtually our entire circulating money supply is created by banks in this way when they make loans. The new money is not inflationary so long as it creates new goods and services, allowing supply to rise with demand and keeping prices stable. The new money is liquidated when the loans are paid off with profits from sales.

    In the 1930s, Roosevelt’s government pulled the country out of the Great Depression by repurposing an agency created under President Hoover into a lending machine for development on the Hamiltonian model. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation was an off-budget source of revenue, allowing the government to build infrastructure all across the country and fund a world war while actually turning a profit. Many of today’s dams were built with that credit, but they are nearly a century old. They need an upgrade, which can be financed by a national infrastructure bank on the same model. A fuller discussion is here.

    HR 4052 (formerly HR 3339), titled “The National Infrastructure Bank Act of 2023,” is currently before Congress and has 40 sponsors. It has been endorsed by dozens of legislatures, city and county councils, and many organizations. Like the First and Second U.S. Banks, it will be a depository bank capitalized with existing federal securities held by the private sector, for which the bank will pay an additional 2% over the interest paid by the government. The bank will then leverage this capital into roughly 10 times its value in loans, as all depository banks are entitled to do. The bill proposes to fund $5 trillion in infrastructure capitalized over a 10-year period with $500 billion in federal securities exchanged for preferred stock in the bank. Like the RFC, the bank will be a source of off-budget financing, adding no new costs to the federal budget. For more information, see https://www.nibcoalition.com/.

    State-owned Banks

    Leveraging available funds into new credit-dollars for disaster relief can also be done locally at the state level. The possibilities are illustrated by the century-old Bank of North Dakota, currently our only state- owned bank. The BND’s emergency capabilities were demonstrated in 1997, when record flooding and fires devastated Grand Forks, North Dakota. The town and its sister city, East Grand Forks on the Minnesota side of the river, lay in ruins. Floodwaters covered virtually the entire city and took weeks to fully recede. Property losses topped $3.5 billion.

    In North Carolina, FEMA was criticized for still being absent from recovery efforts a week after the Helene emergency was declared, too late for people trapped in rivers or under debris who could be reached only by helicopter. In North Dakota by contrast, the response of the state-owned bank was immediate and comprehensive.

    Soon after the floodwaters swept through Grand Forks, the BND was helping families and businesses recover.  The bank quickly established nearly $70 million in credit lines – to the city, the state National Guard, the state Division of Emergency Management, the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, and for individuals, businesses and farms. It also launched a Grand Forks disaster relief loan program and allocated $5 million to help other areas affected by the spring floods. Local financial institutions matched these funds, making a total of more than $70 million available.

    Besides property damage, flooding swept away many jobs, leaving families without livelihoods. The BND coordinated with the U.S. Department of Education to ensure forbearance on student loans; worked closely with the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration to gain forbearance on federally backed home loans; established a center where people could apply for federal/state housing assistance; and worked with the North Dakota Community Foundation to coordinate a disaster relief fund, for which the bank served as the deposit base. The bank also reduced interest rates on existing Family Farm and Farm Operating programs. Families used these low-interest loans to restructure debt and cover operating losses caused by wet conditions in their fields.

    The city was quickly rebuilt and restored. Remarkably, no lives were lost, vs. an official death toll to date in North Carolina of 98, thought to actually be much higher. Grand Forks lost only 3% of its population to emigration between the 1997 floods and 2000, while East Grand Forks, right across the river in Minnesota, lost 17% of its population.

    Small businesses  are now failing across the country at increasingly high rates. That means layoffs, need for more government assistance, lower productivity, and higher taxes. But that’s not true in North Dakota, which was rated by Forbes Magazine the best state in which to start a business in 2024. On Oct. 2, Truth in Accounting’s annual Financial State of the States report rated North Dakota ND #1 in fiscal health, with a budget surplus per taxpayer of $55,600.

    Meanwhile in Helene-ravaged Appalachia

    Publicly-owned state and federal banks are possibilities for future disasters, but they will be too late for the flood victims of Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee. Survivors’ moods have been lifted in the meantime by the extraordinary generosity of local and out-of-state volunteers, who were on the ground immediately with supplies, equipment and labor.

    But it has been a month, supplies are falling off, and the need is still great. According to a podcast titled “Helene VICTIMS need THESE 5 things One Month Later!,” 98% of businesses are still open; but they are largely based on tourism, and tourists have been scarce because the news media have featured the disaster areas to the exclusion of the small surrounding towns that are still functional, beautiful and welcoming visitors.  First on the podcaster’s list of needs was prayer.

    People whose houses have been lost are camping on their land, trying to hang onto properties that in some cases have been in their families for generations. With winter coming, they need heavy duty camping equipment— winter tents, winter sleeping bags, small propane tanks. Other supplies for which there is particular need are food and water, cold and flu medicines, and first aid kits.

    Though the situation is still dire for many, an Oct. 31 wrapup from Gov. Roy Cooper and country music star Eric Church, following a visit to the state’s mountain area, was hopeful. So, too, is this story told with soul: HURRICANE HELENE — A Love Letter To Appalachia ♡.

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  • Last Minute “Closing Argument” to Vote Against the Genocidaire Harris

    It has become a commonplace among disillusioned radicals and independents that today’s choice of Harris/Trump fails to pose any of the most pressing issues facing the human race: climate change, potential world war, resource poisoning/depletion, and so on. But the most critical issue of all is indeed on the ballot: the genocide in Gaza, which has become nothing short of a watershed in defining human consciousness in our time. Conservative estimates place the death toll in that calamity at some 43,000 (perhaps as high as 186,000, according to one study), more than half of them women and children.

    We are all by now inured to liberals’ adaptability to the most alarming evils of the US polity: wars of aggression abroad, mushrooming homelessness, tens of millions with little or no healthcare coverage, failing schools, social/cultural dysfunction and despair—all just part of a day’s work in the standard, narrow lane of establishment conservative/liberal discourse, but shocking and disorienting to anyone outside that Beltway of complacency and business as usual. As ghastly as those injustices are, none of them comes close to the staggering evil of this genocide recorded in real time, in the gruesome literality of daily and ever more sickening social media videos.

    Yet … the liberal class of this country has now surpassed itself in depravity and callousness by fielding a candidate for president who has funded and presided over this horror: Kamala Harris, mass murderer of children. Seemingly sane if smug urban hipsters and academics urge us, with their customarily curled lips of condescension, to vote to ratify this monstrosity by casting a ballot for this unspeakable genocidaire. People who could not imagine campaigning for school shooter for mayor are unruffled in their flacking for a child murderer to the hundredth power of that—and for the presidency of the United States.

    Even the habitual liberal tolerance for everyday injustice and suffering has reached its limit with the maimed, starved, and blasted children of Gaza. Even if the chronic hypocrites and double talkers of the liberal class can cross that red line, the rest of us must stand up, once and for all, and say as one: not for us—not one step further into the greatest of human evils: the mass slaughter of the innocents.

    Every other issue and pseudo-issue that arises in this campaign recedes into insignificance before this unimaginable horror. Although tens of millions of Americans will cross that red line today, if we as a species are to preserve even the frailest hope of redemption, the slenderest reed of conscience or decency, at least some of us cannot follow. We must draw and re-draw that line, brightly and firmly, and challenge others to follow us in declining to cross over it—to cross over irrevocably into complicity in that “wasteland of garbage, rubble, and human remains” (Francesca Albanese, UN Rapporteur for Palestine) that final graveyard of the human spirit, of any last hope of speaking of humanity and civilization in the same breath.

    We must then, follow the brave lead of Kshama Sawant (long-time socialist Seattle City Council member) and the Michigan Abandon Harris founder Hassan Abdel Salam in declaring: Here we stand—we refuse to cross that line—we can do no other. Kamala Harris and the Democrats must be punished at the polls on Tuesday—they cannot, must not, be rewarded for their genocidal assault on the desperate, destitute refugees of Gaza. The slogans of the human among us must be: Defeat Harris! Vote No on Genocide!

    That no vote could take any form: leaving the presidential ballot blank, voting for or writing in the name of Jill Stein or Cornel West, or any vote except a vote for Harris.

    The cries of the children of Gaza should be ringing around the world as a caution and a call—a call to return from the brink of irreversible savagery, a call to salvage a last best hope for “one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos.” (E. M. Forster). Today you can answer that call by voting against Kamala Harris and never looking back. 

    The post Last Minute “Closing Argument” to Vote Against the Genocidaire Harris first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Who Should be the Next Emperor of the Violent Global Imperium?

    As US voters go to the polls on November 5, they need to remind themselves that when the US elects its next domestic president, it is also selecting the emperor of a violent, global imperium.  Choices made over sundry domestic issues have far reaching effects, far beyond local pocketbook or civil rights issues.  They determine who lives and dies across the planet, and how much pain, harm and suffering the rest of the world will have to bear.

    In this context, it’s fair to ask, who is the lesser evil?  Trump or Harris?

    The answer, of course, is “neither”.  Like infinity, when it comes to evil, there’s not much use in finger-counting which is greater or lesser.  They are cardinal equivalents. Third party is the moral choice.

    However, between two terrible choices, President Kamala Harris–to the extent that she has institutional continuity with the Biden/CNAS administration and retains key advisors–is likely to wage more wars: in Ukraine and most certainly with China.

    This is not because Trump is less hawkish or more prudent, but because he is likely to be less effective.  These have to do with the following:

    Distraction, Obstruction, and Opprobrium

    Trump is likely to be focused on attacking/settling scores with domestic enemies, who have harassed, belittled, betrayed, tattled, audited, impeached, sued, indicted, prosecuted him, and possibly attempted his assassination.  He is also more likely to be thwarted or obstructed by institutional forces as he implements his agenda, even if it is similar to Joe Biden’s, and more likely to attract opprobrium and opposition, including if he wages war.

    Bean-counting vs Seoul force

    Trump has contempt for South Korea’s Yoon administration and wants to multiply the cost of stationing US troops in Korea nine-fold to $10 Billion/year.  That could be a deal breaker. He openly refers to South Korea as a “money machine“. This mercantile transactionalism is likely to put sand into the gears of the US war machine that is preparing Korea as the easiest and first place to start an omnicidal war with China.

    South Koreans are already furious with President Yoon Sok Yeol for subordinating South Korea’s political and economic interests to US foreign policy, and they are likely to impeach Yoon if he submits to such flagrant extortion.  On the other hand, If he doesn’t pay up, and the US administration weakens its support of Yoon, the Korean people will rise up and overthrow him as they have other US-quisling presidents like Syngman Rhee, Chun Doo Hwan, Park Geun Hye.  This will strategically diminish the prospects of the Empire. The canard of North Korean troops fighting in Ukraine is an attempt to stave off this bad end by heightening the stakes, promoting South Korea (and Yoon’s) status as a global “pivot state”, and enmeshing Korea into the Ukraine-NATO-Empire trainwreck.

    Compassionate rape indulgences

    Trump was openly contemptuous of “Shinzo” (Abe), but he has even less relationship with Japanese Prime Minister Ishida (or any future potential Japanese PM).  However, as with South Korea, his uncouth transactionalism around the omoiyari yosan (Japan’s “empathy contribution budget”) for US troops in Japan, is likely to disorient and vex the Japanese leadership, and outrage the populace who are already livid to be paying reverse indulgences for occupation and rape.  JAKUS, the Japan-Korea-US alliance is already brittle, due to the current political weakness of Japan’s ruling LDP and South Korea’s hatred for Yoon’s pro-collaborationist position. Prime Minister Ishida has lost the lower house and the LDP, which has governed Japan as a virtual one-party state, is at its weakest in decades.  Simultaneously, Yoon’s military collaboration with Japan, Korea’s former colonizer, is sending Yoon into crisis territory, as his approval rating plummets down to 17%.

    Deadly Insurance policy

    Trump has said that the Taiwan authorities need to pay the US for protection because the US is “no different from an insurance company”.  But Trump’s insurance company is a corporation that has no intention of paying out if Taiwan becomes the next Ukraine. He has also stated that Taiwan should spend 10% of its shrinking GDP on the military, a coded demand to buy more marked up US weapons systems.  Again, the ruling DPP will be bewildered and rattled by Trump’s demand—an offer they can’t refuse: being asked to pony up for an extortionary “insurance” policy that guarantees almost certain denial of services while bankrupting the country: Trump has refused to state if he will commit troops to Taiwan to support US-prompted secessionism.

    Currently Vice President Louise Hsiao, a former US citizen and deep state denizen, serves as President’s William Lai’s US minder.  A prissy preacher’s daughter from New Jersey, it’s a pretty good bet that neither Trump nor Vance will get along with the self-proclaimed “cat warrior” princess. Hsiao, for her part, has bet all her chips on Ukraine–stating that “the Ukraine war sends a powerful message to China”–the de-knickered message of a person squatting in an outhouse hit by a tornado. Trump’s potential Ukraine pullout could heighten the mortification.

    Disdain for the McCain Stain

    Certainly, Trump is hawkish and belligerent on Iran and could greenlight war. He will also support Israel in continuing to wage its horrific genocide and ethnic cleansing, just as the Biden administration ministers to, indulges, and excuses every genocidal whim and action of Israel.

    But Trump is likely to force some kind of settlement on Ukraine, because he hates losing and losers, and Ukraine is a losing war, which he can blame on Biden.

    Trump’s language is extremely belligerent and hawkish, and he is rash and impulsive, but his narcissism traps him into trying to make himself look like a winner at all times.  Like the over-validated child, who will avoid any challenge that might reveal the limits of his competence, Trump is less likely to test the outer limits of US power with peer competitors.   That means he could be less likely to start conventional wars he cannot win, and be more likely to try to get out of losing wars.  This could even be true for the genocidal war on Gaza, which despite its stream of atrocities, is Israel’s John McCain moment: a strategic and political loss for a colonizer that has been taken hostage by its own insanity.

    Catastrophic Reboot Risk

    The catastrophic geopolitical risk with Trump is he may not understand the real risks of nuclear war—he has asked “Why have nukes if they can’t be used?”—and could be recklessly tempted or prompted to use them.  This is in contradistinction to the CNAS neocons who will control Harris’ foreign policy and her nuclear threat posture: they understand the risks  and costs, and they still seek to use them deliberately.  They believe in integrating nuclear war seamlessly into conventional doctrine, exercises, signaling, and operations.

    This is true also for climate change.  Trump denies global warming and has stated that it is a Chinese conspiracy to undermine the US economy.  The Harris-Biden administration understands global warming but sees sustainable transition as unacceptable because it would boost China’s development and global status. They see doubling down on burning fossil fuels as in the core strategic interests of the US in maintaining hegemony.  They would rather burn up the planet than let China shine.

    In fact, they would rather destroy the planet than give up an ounce of privilege to the burgeoning multipolar world.  Wonk-speaking necropolitical ideologues from their first cakewalk to the final funeral march of mankind, they would rather be dead rather than be led into a better world of sovereign independence, equality, non-interference, and peace.

    If Trump is elected, the global south will pray that he never abandons his neo-mercantilist transactionalism and his petty narcissistic fraudulence. Until the dismantling of Empire and Capital, and until the West stops using wars to reboot the economy, this may be about the only thing that saves the world.

    The post Who Should be the Next Emperor of the Violent Global Imperium? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Numbing Election

    Before radio waves vibrated in Calvin Coolidge’s 1924 campaign, voters had scarce knowledge of candidates in presidential elections. Despite the limited communications, only a few presidents of the United States (POTUS) were disasters and most were more acceptable. The rapid growth of communications brought the faces and words of candidates into everyone’s living rooms; it did not improve the selection of chief executives who moved into the White House living room. The assortment remained the same — a few great, most acceptable, and some sub-standard presidents.

    Donald trump is the only elected president who never held public office or any office, including a military post, that served the American public. The only offices where Trump sat comfortably were in offices that served Donald Trump. Usually, if someone seeks guidance and authority, whether it is for medical, legal, educational, or money matters, the sought authority has experience, expertise, education, and works in the particular field. Because POTUS handles almost all our problems, it seems logical for the public to demand he/she has the background to guide us. Choosing someone with nil qualifications is dangerous, but not unique. Many people believe going to a doctor makes them sicker and putting life in the hands of a lawyer increases emptying the wallet and complicating legal problems. Evidently, a great portion of the American public neither trusts the education system that prepares graduates for government service nor the institutions in which they operate.

    Trump’s lack of government service before seeking the highest position is an incomplete story. In fairness to Donald Trump, he has engaged in politics for decades, several times making official runs for the presidency, and has knowledge and opinions on domestic and foreign issues and policies. He has extensive experience and accomplishments in business, finance, legal issues, and entertainment; knows how to “wheel and deal,” how to “lead and bleed,” how to “hire and fire,” how to “lie and mystify,“ and how to “hustle and muscle,” all characteristics of a smooth politician. Trump is not smooth, his politics are described by one adjective, an overused word that has made headlines and may decide the election ─ garbage ─ Trump is a master of “garbage politics.”

    It is a mystery how an inexperienced political person of Trump’s indecent, lying, demagogic, and contemptuous character could obtain the nomination over a host of dedicated, recognized and well-established Republicans. Could it be that Trump arrived upon the scene at an opportune moment? After the dismal performance and multitude of failures of the George W. Bush administration and the inability of conventional Republicans, John McCain and Mitt Romney, to regain the presidency, the Party faithful recognized that the Party that began with Abraham Lincoln, had faded with George W. Bush, and saw its last gasp with Mitt Romney. In 2016, their Republican Party could no longer win elections. Those who disdained the neoliberalism of the Democratic Party, those who saw godliness in the Democratic Party, those who felt the Democratic Party had pandered to non-white minorities and marginalized white majorities, and Republican leaders who believed, “winning was not everything, it was the only thing,” sought elsewhere. They scorned the leadership. Trump’s degradations, insults, and rants pleased them ─ the previous leaders had it coming.

    Maybe winning the Republican nomination over disciplined, dedicated, accepted, and performing Republicans, who had recognition, such as John Kasich, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, George Pataki, Mike Huckabee, and Bobby Jindall is explained by, “Failure has no redemption.” How did Trump then go on and win the election? He didn’t; Hillary Clinton ran an insulting and dismal campaign and lost an election most any recognized Democrat would have won.

    By normal political measures, a healthy President Joe Biden could have easily defeated former President Donald Trump in the coming election. A healthy Biden already beat Trump in the previous election and had an administration featuring low unemployment, a decent economy, no catastrophes, and foreign policy initiatives, which may have disturbed a portion of the electorate but were acceptable to the masses. The inflation was a hand-me-down from the excessive spending and Federal Reserve easy money policies during Trump’s administration. Besides, the president has little control of inflation and reality is that it has subsided. Many positives and few negatives for a previously chosen Biden.

    By normal political measures, Trump would have lost heavily to a healthy Biden. He had already lost once, had nothing new to show that improved his image, and had January 6, 2021 and a number of legal cases to dampen enthusiasm for him. His rhetoric has become more vile, more disturbing, and more mendacious. Continuous references to the “stolen election,” are effectively challenged, so why does Trump continue with the blasphemy? This author has previously shown that it is impossible to manipulate many votes in a national election. Can’t understand why the articulation of electoral security has never been used to stop Trump’s implausible claim of having won the election? Many negatives and no positives for a previously rejected Trump.

    Historians have added an exclamation to a healthy Biden’s superiority to a disturbing Trump. In a survey of 154 members of the American Political Science Association, in which respondents graded U.S. presidents on 10 characteristics — administrative skills, moral authority, economic management, and others — President Joe Biden was ranked a high 14th, and former President Donald Trump was ranked 45th, placing him as the worst president in U.S. history. What more is needed to steer voters away from Trump? Aren’t historian opinions worth something in shaping minds and decisions?

    Despite the large discrepancy between a successful Joe Biden and a failed Donald Trump, the ex-president managed to remain in contention, even when Biden still had his faculties. After Biden retired, Trump suffered a temporary setback to Kamala Harris, the new face on the block. A few days before election, “Harris and Trump are tied at 48% in the latest nationwide TIPP Tracking Poll.” How can this be? Kamala Harris may not be all the voters want as president, but she is heir to a successful presidency and has not exhibited any deep negatives. Two suggested reasons for this anomaly.

    Harris has a nervous laugh and lacks charisma. Trump, with all his bloating and gloating, has charisma; the charisma of a demagogue. Americans are attracted to the sensational, to the charismatic, no matter the types of sensation and charisma. All publicity, good or bad, leads to product identification, and is helpful. Product Trump knows how to make the front page and generate publicity.

    Elon Musk has been a crucial factor in reenergizing the Trump campaign. Musk has huge success, not only as a successful entrepreneur, but as a man of vision. He is admired by the American public. If he sees Trump as a viable candidate to whom he is willing to give his attachment, then Trump must have more to his persona than is apparent. If Elon Musk is going to be a part of a Trump administration, which does not seem possible when considering the magnitude of the efforts he must give to his precarious commercial endeavors, Trump deserves a vote.

    As we enter the final days of a close presidential campaign, it is foolish to predict the outcome. Polls, pundits, and momentums indicate it will be tough sledding for Kamala Harris.

    The post The Numbing Election first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Post-Election Truths: The Things That Won’t Change (No Matter Who Wins)

    If voting could ever really change anything, it’d be illegal.

    — Thorne, Land of the Blind (2006)

    After months of handwringing and mud-slinging and fear-mongering, the votes have finally been cast and the outcome has been decided: the Deep State has won.

    Despite the billions spent to create the illusion of choice culminating in the reassurance ritual of voting for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, when it comes to most of the big issues that keep us in bondage to authoritarian overlords, not much will change.

    Despite all of the work that has been done to persuade us to buy into the fantasy that things will change if we just elect the “right” political savior, the day after a new president is sworn in, it will be business as usual for the unelected bureaucracy that actually runs the government.

    War will continue. Drone killings will continue. Surveillance will continue. Censorship of anyone who criticizes the government will continue. The government’s efforts to label dissidents as extremists and terrorists will continue. Police shootings will continue. SWAT team raids will continue. Highway robbery meted out by government officials will continue. Corrupt government will continue. Profit-driven prisons will continue. And the militarization of the police will continue.

    These problems have persisted—and in many cases flourished—under both Republican and Democratic administrations in recent years.

    The outcome of this year’s election changes none of that.

    Indeed, take a look at the programs and policies that will not be affected by the 2024 presidential election, and you’ll get a clearer sense of the government’s priorities, which have little to do with representing the taxpayers and everything to do with amassing money, power and control.

    The undermining of the Constitution will continue unabated. America’s so-called war on terror, which it has relentlessly pursued since 9/11, has chipped away at our freedoms, unraveled our Constitution and transformed our nation into a battlefield, thanks in large part to such subversive legislation as the USA Patriot Act and National Defense Authorization Act. These laws—which completely circumvent the rule of law and the constitutional rights of American citizens, re-orienting our legal landscape in such a way as to ensure that martial law, rather than the rule of law, our U.S. Constitution, becomes the map by which we navigate life in the United States—will continue to be enforced.

    The government’s war on the American people will continue unabated.  “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. Consequently, you no longer have to be poor, black or guilty to be treated like a criminal in America. All that is required is that you belong to the suspect class—that is, the citizenry—of the American police state. As a de facto member of this so-called criminal class, every U.S. citizen is now guilty until proven innocent. The oppression and injustice—be it in the form of shootings, surveillance, fines, asset forfeiture, prison terms, roadside searches, and so on—will come to all of us eventually unless we do something to stop it now.

    The shadow government— a.k.a. the Deep State, a.k.a. the police state, a.k.a. the military industrial complex, a.k.a. the surveillance state complex—will continue unabated. The corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials will continue to call the shots in Washington DC, no matter who sits in the White House or controls Congress. By “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

    The government’s manipulation of national crises in order to expand its powers will continue unabated. “We the people” have been subjected to an “emergency state” that justifies all manner of government tyranny and power grabs in the so-called name of national security. Whatever the so-called threat to the nation, the government has a tendency to capitalize on the nation’s heightened emotions, confusion and fear as a means of extending the reach of the police state. Indeed, the government’s answer to every problem continues to be more government—at taxpayer expense—and less individual liberty.

    Endless wars that enrich the military industrial complex will continue unabated. America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $93 million an hour (that adds up to $920 billion annually). Incredibly, although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 40% of the world’s total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 9 biggest spending nations combined.

    Government corruption will continue unabated.  The government is not our friend. Nor does it work for “we the people.” Americans instinctively understand this. When asked to name the greatest problem facing the nation, Americans of all political stripes ranked the government as the number one concern. In fact, almost three-quarters of Americans surveyed believe the government is corrupt. Our so-called government representatives do not actually represent us, the citizenry. We are now ruled by an oligarchic elite of governmental and corporate interests whose main interest is in perpetuating power and control.

    Government tyranny under the reign of an Imperial President will continue unabated. The Constitution invests the President with very specific, limited powers. In recent years, however, American presidents have anointed themselves with the power to wage war, unilaterally kill Americans, torture prisoners, strip citizens of their rights, arrest and detain citizens indefinitely, carry out warrantless spying on Americans, and erect their own secretive, shadow government. The powers amassed by each past president and inherited by each successive president—powers which add up to a toolbox of terror for an imperial ruler—empower whoever occupies the Oval Office to act as a dictator, above the law and beyond any real accountability.

    The grim reality we must come to terms with is the fact that 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.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this state of affairs has become the status quo, no matter which party is in power.

    The post Post-Election Truths: The Things That Won’t Change (No Matter Who Wins) first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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