Tag: Democrats

  • Photo credit:  ICAN (International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons)

    Imagine this scenario:

    A month before the vote on the federal budget, progressives in Congress declared, “We’ve studied President Biden’s proposed $753 billion military budget, an increase of $13 billion from Trump’s already inflated budget, and we can’t, in good conscience, support this.”

    Now that would be a show stopper, particularly if they added, “So we have decided to stand united, arm in arm, as a block of NO votes on any federal budget resolution that fails to reduce military spending by 10-30 percent. We stand united against a federal budget resolution that includes upwards of $30 billion for new nuclear weapons slated to ultimately cost nearly $2 trillion. We stand united in demanding the $50 billion earmarked to maintain all 800 overseas bases, including the new one under construction in Henoko, Okinawa, be reduced by a third because it’s time we scaled back on plans for global domination.”

    “Ditto,” they say, “for the billions the President wants for the arms-escalating US Space Force, one of Trump’s worst ideas, right up there with hydroxychloroquine to cure COVID-19, and, no, we don’t want to escalate our troop deployments for a military confrontation with China in the South China Sea. It’s time to ‘right-size’ the military budget and demilitarize our foreign policy.”

    Progressives uniting as a block to resist out-of-control military spending would be a no-nonsense exercise of raw power reminiscent of how the right-wing Freedom Caucus challenged the traditional Republicans in the House in 2015. Without progressives on board, President Biden may not be able to secure enough votes to pass a federal budget that would then green light the reconciliation process needed for his broad domestic agenda.

    For years, progressives in Congress have complained about the bloated military budget. In 2020, 93 members in the House and 23 in the Senate voted to cut the Pentagon budget by 10% and invest those funds instead in critical human needs. A House Spending Reduction Caucus, co-chaired by Representatives Barbara Lee and Mark Pocan, emerged with 22 members on board.

    Meet the members of the House Defense Spending Reduction Caucus:

    Barbara Lee (CA-13); Mark Pocan (WI-2); Bonnie Watson Coleman (NJ-12); Ilhan Omar (MN-5); Raùl Grijalva (AZ-3); Mark DeSaulnier (CA-11); Jan Schakowsky(IL-9); Pramila Jayapal (WA-7); Jared Huffman (CA-2); Alan Lowenthal (CA-47); James P. McGovern (MA-2); Peter Welch (VT-at large); Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14); Frank Pallone, Jr (NJ-6).;  Rashida Tlaib (MI-13); Ro Khanna (CA-17); Lori Trahan (MA-3); Steve Cohen (TN-9); Ayanna Pressley (MA-7), Anna Eshoo (CA-18).

    We also have the Progressive Caucus, the largest Caucus in Congress with almost 100 members in the House and Senate. Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal is all for cutting military spending. “We’re in the midst of a crisis that has left millions of families unable to afford food, rent, and bills. But at the same time, we’re dumping billions of dollars into a bloated Pentagon budget,” she said. “Don’t increase defense spending. Cut it—and invest that money into our communities.”

    Now is the time for these congresspeople to turn their talk into action.

    Consider the context. President Biden urgently wants to move forward on his American Families Plan rolled out in his recent State of the Union address. The plan would tax the rich to invest $1.8 trillion over the next ten years in universal preschool, two years of tuition-free community college, expanded healthcare coverage and paid family medical leave.

    President Biden, in the spirit of FDR, also wants to put America back to work in a $2-trillion infrastructure program that will begin to fix our decades-old broken bridges, crumbling sewer systems and rusting water pipes. This could be his legacy, a light Green New Deal to transition workers out of the dying fossil fuel industry.

    But Biden won’t get his infrastructure program and American Families Plan with higher taxes on the rich, almost 40% on income for corporations and those earning $400,000 or more a year, without Congress first passing a budget resolution that includes a top line for military and non-military spending. Both the budget resolution and reconciliation bill that would follow are filibuster proof and only require a simple majority in the House and Senate to pass.

    Easy.

    Maybe not.

    To flex their muscles, Republicans may refuse to vote for a budget resolution crafted by the Democratic Party that would open the door to big spending on public goods, such as pre-kindergarten and expanded health care coverage. That means Biden would need every Democrat in the House and Senate on board to approve his budget resolution for military and non-military spending.

    So how’s it looking?

    In the Senate, Democrat Joe Manchin from West VA, a state that went for Trump over Biden more than two-to-one, wants to scale back Biden’s infrastructure proposal, but hasn’t sworn to vote down a budget resolution. As for Senator Bernie Sanders, the much-loved progressive, ordinarily he might balk at a record high military budget, but if the budget resolution ushers in a reconciliation bill that lowers the age of Medicare eligibility to 60 or 55, the Chair of the Senate Budget Committee may hold his fire.

    That leaves anti-war activists wondering if Senator Elizabeth Warren, a critic of the Pentagon budget and “nuclear modernization,” would consider stepping up as the lone holdout in the Senate, refusing to vote for a budget that includes billions for new nuclear weapons. Perhaps with a push from outraged constituents in Massachusetts, Warren could be convinced to take this bold stand. Another potential hold out could be California Senator Dianne Feinstein, who co-chairs the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, the committee that oversees the budgeting for nuclear weapons. In 2014, Feinstein described the US nuclear arsenal program as “unnecessarily and unsustainably large“.

    Over in the House, Biden needs at least 218 of the 222 Democrats to vote for the budget resolution expected to hit the floor in June or July, but what if he couldn’t get to 218? What if at least five members of the House voted no—or even just threatened to vote no—because the top line for military spending was too high and the budget included new “money pit” nuclear land-based missiles to replace 450 Minute Man missiles.

    The polls show most Democrats oppose “nuclear modernization”—a euphemism for a plan that is anything but modern given that 50 countries have signed on to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons making nuclear weapons illegal and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) requires the US pursue nuclear disarmament to avoid a catastrophic accident or intentional atomic holocaust.

    Now is the time for progressive congressional luminaries such as the Squad’s AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Presley to unite with Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal, as well as Barbara Lee, Mark Pocan and others in the House Spending Reduction Caucus to put their feet down and stand as a block against a bloated military budget.

    Will they have the courage to unite behind such a cause? Would they be willing to play hardball and gum up the works on the way to Biden’s progressive domestic agenda?

    Odds improve if constituents barrage them with phone calls, emails, and visible protests. Tell them that in the time of a pandemic, it makes no sense to approve a military budget that is 90 times the budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Tell them that the billions saved from “right sizing” the Pentagon could provide critical funds for addressing the climate crisis. Tell them that just as we support putting an end to our endless wars, so, too, we support putting an end to our endless cycle of exponential military spending.

    Call your representative, especially If you live in a congressional district represented by one of the members of the Progressive Caucus or the House Spending Reduction Caucus. Don’t wait for marching orders from someone else. No time to wait.  In the quiet of the COVID hour, our Congress toils away on appropriations bills and a budget resolution. The showdown is coming soon.

    Get organized. Ask for meetings with your representatives or their foreign policy staffers. Be fierce; be relentless. Channel the grit of a Pentagon lobbyist.

    This is the moment to demand a substantial cut in military spending that defunds new nuclear weapons.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • At a recent virtual J Street Conference, US Senators, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren broke yet another political taboo when they expressed willingness to leverage US military aid as a way to pressure Israel to respect Palestinian human rights.

    Sanders believes that the US “must be willing to bring real pressure to bear, including restricting US aid, in response to moves by either side that undermine the chances for peace,” while Warren showed a willingness to restrict military aid as a “tool” to push Israel to “adjust course”.

    Generally, Sanders’ increasingly Pro-Palestinian stances are more progressive than those of Warren, although both are still hovering within the mainstream Democratic discourse – willingness to criticize Israel as long as that criticism is coupled with equal – if not even more pointed – criticism of the Palestinians.

    Seraj Assi explained this dichotomy in an article published in Jacobin Magazine: “Sanders’ stance on Israel-Palestine could undoubtedly be more progressive. He has consistently voted in favor of US military aid to Israel, which subsidizes occupation, settlement expansion, and systematic violence against Palestinians. He still opposes the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) campaign, signing onto an anti-BDS letter to the UN Secretary-General in 2017 and reiterating his opposition to BDS”, years later.

    However, as Assi himself indicated, Sanders’ position on Palestine and Israel cannot be judged simply based on some imagined ideal, but within the context of the US’ own political culture, one in which any criticism of Israel is viewed as ‘heretical’, if not outright anti-Semitic.

    Sanders’ influence on the overall Democratic political discourse is also palpable, as he has paved the way for more radical, younger voices in the US Congress who now openly criticize Israel, while remaining largely unscathed by the wrath of the pro-Israel lobby, mainly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

    Gone are the days when AIPAC and other pro-Israel pressure groups shaped domestic American political discourse on Israel and Palestine. Nothing indicates that the tide has completely turned against Israel, as this is nowhere close, yet. However, a decisive US public opinion shift must also not be ignored. It is this popular shift that is empowering voices within the Democratic Party to speak out more freely without jeopardizing their political careers, as was often the case in the past.

    In order to decipher the roots of the anti-Israeli occupation, pro-Palestinian sentiments among Democrats, these numbers could be helpful. While Sanders, Warren and other Democratic officials who are willing to criticize Israel but vehemently reject BDS, the public within the Democratic Party does not hold the same view. An early 2020 Brookings Institute poll found that, among Democrats who had heard about BDS, “a plurality, 48%, said they supported the Movement, while only 15% said they opposed it.”

    This indicates that grassroots activism, which directly engages with ordinary Americans, is largely shaping their views on the Movement to boycott Israel. Ordinary Democrats are leading the way, while their representatives are merely trying to catch up.

    Other numbers are also indicative of the fact that the vast majority of Americans oppose pro-Israeli efforts to promote laws and legislations that criminalize boycotts as a political tool, as such laws, they rightly believe, infringe on the constitutional rights to free speech. Expectedly, 80% Democrats lead the way in opposing such measures, followed by 76% independents, then 62% among Republicans.

    Such news must be disturbing for Tel Aviv as it has heavily invested, through AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups, in branding BDS or any other movement that criticizes Israel’s military occupation and systematic apartheid in Palestine, as anti-Semitic.

    Israelis find this new phenomenon quite confounding. Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been repeatedly criticized in the past, even by mainstream Israeli officials and media pundits, for turning Democrats against Israel by unabashedly siding with former President Donald Trump and his Republican Party against their domestic rivals. Hence, Netanyahu has turned the support of Israel from being a bipartisan issue into a Republican-only cause.

    A February 2020 Gallup poll perfectly reflected that reality as it found that a majority of Democrats, 70%, support the establishment of a Palestinian State, in comparison with 44% Republicans.

    The rooted support for Israel among establishment Democrats is too deep – and well-funded – to be erased in a few years, but the pro-Palestine, anti-Israeli-occupation trend continues unabated, even after the defeat of Trump at the hands of Democratic candidate, now President, Joe Biden.

    The last year, in particular, was possibly difficult for the Israel lobby, which is unaccustomed to electoral disappointments. Last June, for example, the lobby painted itself into a corner when it rallied behind one of the most faithful Israel supporters, Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, depicting his opponent, Jamaal Bowman, as ‘anti-Israel’.

    Bowman was hardly anti-Israel, though his position is relatively more moderate than the extremist one-sided views of Engel. In fact, Bowman had made it clear that he continues to support US aid to Israel and openly opposed BDS. However, unlike Engel, Bowman was not the perfect candidate whose love for Israel is blind, unconditional and ever-lasting. To the embarrassment of the lobby, Engel lost his seat in the US Congress, one which he had held for more than 30 years.

    Unlike Bowman, Cori Bush, a grassroots activist from Missouri who has ousted the pro-Israel candidate, Congressman William Lacy Clay, has defended the Palestine boycott Movement as being a matter of freedom of speech, despite a relentless smear campaign describing her as ‘anti-Semitic’ for merely appearing in photos with pro-Palestinian activists. Last August, Bush – a black woman from a humble background – became US Representative for Missouri’s 1st congressional district, despite all pro-Israeli efforts to deny her such a position.

    Indeed, it is important to acknowledge the role played by individuals in the undeniable shift within the American political discourse on Palestine and Israel. However, it is ordinary people who are making the real difference. While the Israel lobby still wields the dual weapon of money and propaganda, politically engaged grassroots activism is proving decisive in garnering American solidarity with Palestine, while slowly translating this solidarity into actual political gains.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies / April 22nd, 2021

    Biden with NATO’s Stoltenberg (Photo credit: haramjedder.blogspot.com)

    President Biden took office promising a new era of American international leadership and diplomacy. But with a few exceptions, he has so far allowed self-serving foreign allies, hawkish U.S. interest groups and his own imperial delusions to undermine diplomacy and stoke the fires of war.

    Biden’s failure to quickly recommit to the Iran nuclear deal, or JCPOA, as Senator Sanders promised to do on his first day as president, provided a critical delay that has been used by opponents to undermine the difficult shuttle diplomacy taking place in Vienna to restore the agreement.

    The attempts to derail talks range from the introduction of the Maximum Pressure Act on April 21 to codify the Trump administration’s sanctions against Iran to Israel’s cyberattack on Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility. Biden’s procrastination has only strengthened the influence of the hawkish Washington foreign policy “blob,” Republicans and Democratic hawks in Congress and foreign allies like Netanyahu in Israel.

    In Afghanistan, Biden has won praise for his decision to withdraw U.S. troops by September 11, but his refusal to abide by the May 1 deadline for withdrawal as negotiated under the Trump administration has led the Taliban to back out of the planned UN-led peace conference in Istanbul. A member of the Taliban military commission told the Daily Beast that “the U.S. has shattered the Taliban’s trust.”

    Now active and retired Pentagon officials are regaling the New York Times with accounts of how they plan to prolong the U.S. war without “boots on the ground” after September, undoubtedly further infuriating the Taliban and making a ceasefire and peace talks all the more difficult.

    In Ukraine, the government has launched a new offensive in its civil war against the ethnically Russian provinces in the eastern Donbass region, which declared unilateral independence after the U.S.-backed coup in 2014. On April 1, Ukraine’s military chief of staff said publicly that “the participation of NATO allies is envisaged” in the government offensive, prompting warnings from Moscow that Russia could intervene to protect Russians in Donbass.

    Sticking to their usual tired script, U.S. and NATO officials are pretending that Russia is the aggressor for conducting military exercises and troop movements within its own borders in response to Kiev’s escalation. But even the BBC is challenging this false narrative, explaining that Russia is acting competently and effectively to deter an escalation of the Ukrainian offensive and U.S. and NATO threats. The U.S has turned around two U.S. guided-missile destroyers that were steaming toward the Black Sea, where they would only have been sitting ducks for Russia’s advanced missile defenses.

    Tensions have escalated with China, as the U.S. Navy and Marines stalk Chinese ships in the South China Sea, well inside the island chains China uses for self defense. The Pentagon is hoping to drag NATO allies into participating in these operations, and the U.S. Air Force plans to shift more bombers to new bases in Asia and the Pacific, supported by existing larger bases in Guam, Japan, Australia and South Korea.

    Meanwhile, despite a promising initial pause and policy review, Biden has decided to keep selling tens of billion dollars worth of weapons to authoritarian regimes in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other Persian Gulf sheikdoms, even as they keep bombing and blockading famine-stricken Yemen. Biden’s unconditional support for the most brutal authoritarian dictators on Earth lays bare the bankruptcy of the Democrats’ attempts to frame America’s regurgitated Cold War on Russia and China as a struggle between “democracy” and “authoritarianism.”

    In all these international crises (along with Cuba, Haiti, Iraq, North Korea, Palestine, Syria and Venezuela, which are bedevilled by the same U.S. unilateralism), President Biden and the hawks egging him on are pursuing unilateral policies that ignore solemn commitments in international agreements and treaties, riding roughshod over the good faith of America’s allies and negotiating partners.

    As the Russian foreign ministry bluntly put it when it announced its countermeasures to the latest round of U.S. sanctions, “Washington is unwilling to accept that there is no room for unilateral dictates in the new geopolitical reality.”

    Chinese President Xi Jinping echoed the same multipolar perspective on April 20th at the annual Boao Asian international business forum. “The destiny and future of the world should be decided by all nations, and rules set up just by one or several countries should not be imposed on others,” Xi said. “The whole world should not be led by unilateralism of individual countries.”

    The near-universal failure of Biden’s diplomacy in his first months in office reflects how badly he and those who have his ear are failing to accurately read the limits of American power and predict the consequences of his unilateral decisions.

    Unilateral, irresponsible decision-making has been endemic in U.S. foreign policy for decades, but America’s economic and military dominance created an international environment that was extraordinarily forgiving of American “mistakes,” even as they ruined the lives of millions of people in the countries directly affected. Now America no longer dominates the world, and it is critical for U.S. officials to more accurately assess the relative power and positions of the United States and the countries and people it is confronting or negotiating with.

    Under Trump, Defense Secretary Mattis launched negotiations to persuade Vietnam to host U.S. missiles aimed at China. The negotiations went on for three years, but they were based entirely on wishful thinking and misreadings of Vietnam’s responses by U.S. officials and Rand Corp contractors. Experts agree that Vietnam would never violate a formal, declared policy of neutrality it has held and repeatedly reiterated since 1998.

    As Gareth Porter summarized this silly saga:

    The story of the Pentagon’s pursuit of Vietnam as a potential military partner against China reveals an extraordinary degree of self-deception surrounding the entire endeavor. And it adds further detail to the already well-established picture of a muddled and desperate bureaucracy seizing on any vehicle possible to enable it to claim that U.S. power in the Pacific can still prevail in a war with China.

    Unlike Trump, Biden has been at the heart of American politics and foreign policy since the 1970s. So the degree to which he too is out of touch with today’s international reality is a measure of how much and how quickly that reality has changed and continues to change. But the habits of empire die hard. The tragic irony of Biden’s ascent to power in 2020 is that his lifetime of service to a triumphalist American empire has left him ill-equipped to craft a more constructive and cooperative brand of American diplomacy for today’s multipolar world

    Amid the American triumphalism that followed the end of the Cold War, the neocons developed a simplistic ideology to persuade America’s leaders that they need no longer be constrained in their use of military power by domestic opposition, peer competitors or international law. They claimed that America had virtually unlimited military freedom of action and a responsibility to use it aggressively, because, as Biden parroted them recently, “the world doesn’t organize itself.”

    The international violence and chaos Biden has inherited in 2021 is a measure of the failure of the neocons’ ambitions. But there is one place that they conquered, occupied and still rule to this day, and that is Washington D.C.

    The dangerous disconnect at the heart of Biden’s foreign policy is the result of this dichotomy between the neocons’ conquest of Washington and their abject failure to conquer the rest of the world.

    For most of Biden’s career, the politically safe path on foreign policy for corporate Democrats has been to talk a good game about human rights and diplomacy, but not to deviate too far from hawkish, neoconservative policies on war, military spending, and support for often repressive and corrupt allies throughout America’s neocolonial empire.

    The tragedy of such compromises by Democratic Party leaders is that they perpetuate the suffering of millions of people affected by the real-world problems they fail to fix. But the Democrats’ subservience to simplistic neoconservative ideas also fails to satisfy the hawks they are trying to appease, who only smell more political blood in the water at every display of moral weakness by the Democrats.

    In his first three months in office, Biden’s weakness in resisting the bullying of hawks and neocons has led him to betray the most significant diplomatic achievements of each of his predecessors, Obama and Trump, in the JCPOA with Iran and the May 1 withdrawal agreement with the Taliban respectively, while perpetuating the violence and chaos the neocons unleashed on the world.

    For a president who promised a new era of American diplomacy, this has been a dreadful start. We hope he and his advisers are not too blinded by anachronistic imperial thinking or too intimidated by the neocons to make a fresh start and engage with the world as it actually exists in 2021.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.
    — Gore Vidal, Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia, 2004

    As Americans drown in debt and atomization, the liberal class applauds the arrival of a post-nation-state neo-feudal order which is devoid of checks and balances, integration, national cohesion, or collective memory, rendering any working class resistance to fascism a Herculean task. This has been made possible because of the demise of traditional American liberalism, rooted in the values of the civil rights movement and the New Deal, and its usurpation by the cult of neoliberalism which is anchored in unrestricted immigration, multiculturalism, identity politics, and the nakedly imperialistic policies embraced by the Democratic Party since Bill Clinton. This growing collaboration between neoliberals and the oligarchy has fomented an unprecedented degree of both tribalism and unfettered capitalism, and placed us on a runaway train racing to authoritarianism.

    Identity politics, supported by a cornucopia of faux-left elements since the ‘90s with a cult-like zealotry, has unleashed an apocalyptic counter-revolution that is disintegrating our national identity. The anti-working class has been created to facilitate this dissolution. Children are being indoctrinated in the multicultural curriculum, which is predicated on the idea that white people are the oppressor and people of color are the oppressed. This has made both class consciousness and any understanding of history impossible, while depriving Americans of color and immigrant youth with a proper grounding in American letters and classics of Western Civilization. Such a curriculum constitutes the quintessence of racism, yet has been sold to the masses as “fighting racism.”

    The multicultural society, essentially a Tower of Babel, has transformed the US into a hellscape of ghettoized enclaves which break down along lines of ethnicity, religion, and language. It has also facilitated the rise of the vocational community and the phenomenon of hyper-careerism. This, in turn, poses yet another threat to civil society, as fanatical careerists are generally indifferent to everything outside of their field.

    Indeed, it has become commonplace for Americans who are ensconced in excellent jobs to be so indifferent to life outside of their specialty that they would shrug apathetically if informed that US and Chinese warships had opened fire on one another in the South China Sea. As long as Weill Cornell, Sloan Kettering, Columbia University, or the Metropolitan Opera House don’t get incinerated, they would only feel a vague and abstract connection to such an event. This obsessive single-minded devotion to one’s career, an identity which has come to envelop one’s very soul, is inextricably linked to the multicultural society, as many Americans increasingly feel that no life exists outside of work. As our society disintegrates, the ability of our countrymen to think rationally unravels along with it.

    Since the inauguration of Bill Clinton on January 20, 1993, liberals have collaborated with every reactionary policy that has been promoted by the establishment: illegal wars of aggression, the privatization of the prisons, deindustrialization and offshoring, the oligarchy’s importation of tens of millions of undocumented workers and guest workers to depress wages and foment deunionization, the destruction of the public schools, the Patriot Act (which revoked habeas corpus), the Military Commissions Act, the National Defense Authorization Act, the return of Russophobia, the monopolization of the media into just a handful of corporations, the use of academia to generate student loan debt (now in excess of $1.5 trillion), the privatization of health care, the fomenting of unprecedented forms of tribalism and atomization; and more recently, the lockdown. Hitler, Franco, and Pinochet unleashed the dogs of war on the left. In the West today this is unnecessary, for the left has destroyed itself.

    The more liberals sell their souls to the forces of reaction, the more they delude themselves into thinking that they are on the left. This has led to a kind of political schizophrenia, as those who betray the legacies of FDR and Martin Luther King are pulled inexorably into a vortex of ignorance, dogmatism, and superstition. Neoliberals, who should really be called “illiberals,” fail to see the preposterousness of their claiming to combat “the far right,” even as deep state operatives like John Brennan are regurgitating the exact same identity politics language that multiculturalists have been churning out for decades. Furthermore, we have political commentators such as General Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of American forces in Afghanistan, comparing Trump supporters (i.e., the scourge of “white privilege”), to Al-Qaeda. Now replete with its own Green Zone, the Capitol is under martial law.

    Recall that “humanitarian interventions” resulted in civil wars in Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Iraq, Libya, Syria (granted, many jihadis have been foreigners), and Afghanistan. This pitting of identity politics acolytes against what remains of American society is reminiscent of the way in which Washington pitted Sunnis and Shiites against one another in Iraq.

    The anti-white jihadi is the offspring of ghettoization, the multicultural curriculum, and identity studies, and harbors a deep-seated hostility to Western Civilization. This anti-working class is being used by the establishment not unlike jihadis have been used by the Western elites in Syria: as a battering ram to degrade, destabilize, fragment, and if left unchecked, ultimately obliterate our national identity, thereby granting the oligarchy illimitable powers. Our jihadis are undoubtedly less violent than Syria’s (or even Sweden’s for that matter); and yet the two crusades are not dissimilar, as both are fanatically committed to the destruction of a particular civilization.

    Siccing a majority on a minority is irrefutably reactionary, but doing the inversion is no less so, especially when there are powerful forces at work attempting to transform the minority into a new majority. A significant swath of leftists in the West have been hoodwinked into believing that multiculturalism is diametrically opposed to Nazism, when they are, in fact, two sides to the same coin. The relentless demonization of Trump, coupled with the dubious nature of his removal, mirrors the demonization and removal of Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Noriega, and Milošević, where the vilification of a head of state served as a pretext for launching wars on the citizenry of these countries.

    The loathing of liberals for the Orange One, which they petulantly cling to despite his ouster, is tied to the fact that he made a mockery of the idea that liberals represent the lesser of two evils. While indubitably crass and bombastic at times, Trump had the temerity to take a principled stand on a number of key issues, such as pursuing detente with Russia, questioning the need for NATO following the breakup of the USSR, tirelessly ridiculing the lies of the presstitutes, condemning critical race theory, and denouncing the catastrophic offshoring of jobs. Trump’s support for hydroxychloroquine, and his warnings that the lockdowns were destroying New York City, have likewise proved prophetic. Meanwhile, liberals haven’t taken a principled stand on anything in thirty years.

    Don’t misconstrue my intentions: I am not attempting to equate Trump supporters with the supporters of Allende. Undoubtedly, some of his supporters hold certain reactionary beliefs. Yet unlike liberals, whose solution for every domestic problem is to carry out more witch hunts and outsource more jobs, millions of Trump voters have legitimate grievances, as their lives have been upended by deindustrialization and offshoring, the lockdown, the opioid epidemic, inadequate health care, and the systematic dismantling of public education.

    Liberal complicity in sustaining our unconscionable for-profit health care system, as evidenced by their enthusiastic support for Obamacare, has resulted in a demise of medical scientific integrity. Vioxx, the opioid epidemic, the psychotropic drug epidemic, and the anthrax vaccine constitute four of the most catastrophic drug regulatory failures in the history of medicine. The problem is that for the pharmaceutical industry, these aren’t failures at all, but successes, as these drugs have yielded staggering profits. The greatest danger posed by privatized health care is that medicines and procedures which represent the greatest threat to patient health are often extremely lucrative. This medical profiteering is so rampant that it is instigating a weaponization of health care and a restoration of Nazi bioethics, where informed consent and respect for patient dignity are completely jettisoned. Should Covid vaccines become mandatory – and keep in mind that drug companies are shielded from liability in the US should their vaccines cause harm – this would constitute an unequivocal violation of the Nuremberg Code. (A code, incidentally, written by white guys, hence ripe for burning). The SS physician credo, that any medical atrocity is justified as long as it is done “for the greater good,” is thriving under the lockdown.

    A considerable amount of evidence exists that effective and inexpensive Covid treatment options involving hydroxychloroquine, budesonide, and ivermectin were suppressed (see here, here, here, here and here), which could have negated the need for lockdowns altogether and saved many thousands of lives. Granted, these drugs would have torpedoed the pharmaceutical industry’s desire to profit off of the crisis with Remdesivir and mRNA vaccines, the latter of particularly dubious safety and efficacy. (The authorities have explicitly stated that the vaccines, which are experimental and have only been granted an Emergency Use Authorization, will not end social distancing and the mandatory wearing of masks). We have been told that half a million Americans have died from Covid, but how many of these patients were under the age of 70 and had no significant comorbidities?  PCR tests have churned out vast numbers of false positives which has also helped maintain the hysteria and relentless fearmongering, while the notion of asymptomatic spread remains mired in conjecture. According to Reuters, the US lost over 20 million jobs in April of 2020 alone. Nevertheless, the lockdown did what it was designed to do: further erode civil liberties, while exacerbating atomization and economic inequality.

    It is important to note that powerful tycoons that are not ensconced in the medical industrial complex, such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, have profited off of the pandemic, adding even more wealth to their already bloated fortunes. Consequently, lockdown profiteering is not confined to the robber barons within the health care oligarchy.

    Commenting on the draconian lockdown measures, Daniel Jeanmonod, MD, writes in “Lockdowns are a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy:”

    The following two examples confirm these results: a country with low lockdown stringency like Sweden has at the moment the same fatality rate per million inhabitants as France, but lower than Spain, Italy and UK, where severe lockdown measures were applied.

    In addition, Sweden has had for the second wave a much smaller excess mortality than France, Italy or Spain, an observation which allows one to suspect that lockdown measures are delaying the establishment of herd immunity. This is not desirable, as the time during which the old, sick and frail can be exposed to the virus gets longer.

    In “The Covid Pandemic Is the Result of Public Health Authorities Blocking Effective Treatment,” Paul Craig Roberts questions the motives behind the lockdown:

    Why are authorities enforcing ineffective measures while ignoring proven successful measures that greatly reduce the Covid threat and perhaps eliminate it altogether? Is it because the proven measures are inexpensive and offer no opportunity for large profits from vaccines?  Is it because the ‘Covid pandemic’ is useful for mandating control measures that curtail civil liberties?  Is it because the lockdowns decimate family businesses and enable further economic concentration?  The answer is ‘yes’ to all three questions.

    Dr. Simone Gold, founder of America’s Frontline Doctors (and recently arrested to the delight of MedPage), has reiterated these concerns, tweeting on February 3rd:

    What do lockdowns, masks, and panic all have in common?
    Their positive impact on hospitalization rates is ZERO.
    But their negative impact on life and liberty is severe and totally unnecessary.
    The science doesn’t lie. The ‘scientists’ do.

    Yet liberals continue to support the lockdowns, and in Germany Antifa have marched against their countrymen who have protested against the coercive measures, equating them with “the far right.” The degree to which Western societies have been tribalized by identity politics has made it very easy for the elites to impose what is essentially a collective house arrest on the entire Western world.

    Democracy fell into grave jeopardy when liberals abandoned liberty of thought in favor of genuflecting at the altar of the presstitute priesthood. Indeed, when The New York Times tells liberals to jump they jump, when The New York Times tells liberals to be indifferent they are indifferent, when The New York Times tells liberals to be outraged they are outraged, and when “The Newspaper of Record” tells liberals to be ecstatic they are ecstatic. Can a democracy survive if a vast swath of its inhabitants can no longer differentiate between right and left, journalism and propaganda, psychological operations and intellectual analysis, even day and night? No less worrisome, the majority of American doctors are blindly accepting whatever they are told by the mullahs of FDA, CDC, NIH, The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet. This is the inevitable result of physicians becoming increasingly specialized while often possessing the humanities education of a junior high school student. In many ways, we have become a nation of Adolf Eichmanns and Albert Speers.

    Those who stray from ideological “norms,” regardless of whether it be the lockdown or identity politics, are increasingly portrayed as either unhinged or guilty of incitement, and this language has become particularly vitriolic following “the riot” on January 6th. As Dmitry Babich pointed out on the January 11th Russia Today Cross Talk episode, the precise details of what transpired during the “storming of the United States Capitol” (to quote Wikipedia) are not of paramount importance. What matters is that the incident is being exploited by the establishment as a neoliberal Reichstag fire.

    When identity politics youth brigades were assaulting people and inflicting billions of dollars in property damage over a period of many months, in an orgy of violence that was clearly designed to pressure the Trump administration to resign, the media applauded enthusiastically, even referring to the rioters as “peaceful demonstrators.” Calls for revenge against Trump administration officials are likewise unprecedented. As the Democratic Party has thrown away the rule book and turned the country into a banana republic, what is to prevent leaders in the Christian Right from meeting with some like-minded generals and doing the same? The peculiar events of January 6th conveniently scuttled an ongoing congressional investigation into serious allegations of voter fraud, and succeeded in transforming the anti-constitutionalists into the constitutionalists in the minds of millions of people, both at home and around the world.

    Those who once sang “Kumbaya My Lord” and “We Shall Overcome” are now calling for dissenting voices to be silenced, either through deplatforming on social media, placing dissidents on a blacklist, or with the iron heel. Writing for The Atlantic, Graeme Wood, in addressing the problem of Americans who object to the dissolution of their national identity, prefers a more refined approach to CIA hit squads: “The proper response to these extremists isn’t counterterrorism. It is mental hygiene.” Having burned their own books, and sworn allegiance to the god of unreason, neoliberals have no other option than to relinquish ties to this death cult or pick up the truncheon of authoritarianism.

    The mindless faux-left support for the most barbaric foreign policies could only lead to their support for lawlessness, violence, and barbarism at home. Indeed, those who kill and torture abroad, if not held accountable, will inevitably seek to do so domestically. This fine line is embodied by the story of Sister Dianna Ortiz, an American nun who was brutally tortured by US-backed Guatemalan security forces in 1989, and who recently passed away, another soul lost to the cancer wards. That this totalitarianization is being supported in the name of protecting the country from imaginary neo-Nazis signifies the complete moral and intellectual collapse of the liberal class, a pitiable gaggle that will support any domestic policy, provided it is officially carried out in the name of fighting intolerance and bigotry. Such a tactic was glaringly on display when Biden, in condemning violence against women a couple of years ago, remarked that “This is English jurisprudential culture, a white man’s culture. It’s got to change.” Translation: let’s burn the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in the name of fighting racism and sexism.

    What are we to make of this strange country where lawyers are indifferent to the rule of law, doctors are contemptuous of informed consent, journalists regurgitate whatever they are told by establishment spokespersons, and leftists speak of the working class as “deplorables?” As conservatives typically associate privatization with democratization, and nationalization with tyranny, there are no longer any significant firewalls in place to protect the people from despotism. Moreover, due to multiculturalism’s antipathy to all things white and Western, the WASP right in turn has rejected all things foreign, even as this leads them to untenable and patently erroneous conclusions, such as the idea that Americans have the best health care system in the world, a canard parroted ad nauseam in online medical blogs.

    The multicultural society is an anarchic and atomized zone where solidarity, reason, morality, empathy, and any sense of a collective memory cease to exist. Unsurprisingly, this has turned workers into nothing more than plastic cutlery, to be used once and then discarded. Civilization is in grave danger due to the rise of the woke book burners who have declared classics of Western Civilization to be the quintessence of “white supremacy.” Thanks to their implementation of the anti-humanities, the overwhelming majority of New York City public high school graduates have never even heard of Ernest Hemingway, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Eugene Debs, Helen Keller, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, John Hersey, Theodore Dreiser, Norman Thomas, Carl Sandburg, John Dos Passos, Dalton Trumbo, Gore Vidal, Clarence Darrow and William Kunstler. (I could go on for an entire page, at least). For all their incessant whining about racism, American liberals, who enjoy total ideological hegemony over most urban public schools, look at children of color as less than animals, and take better care of their poodles and dachshunds. Inculcated with the song of anti-whiteness, the post-American, simultaneously ghettoized prisoner and settler, unleashes its rage on America, but in so doing, puts on the shackles of the oligarchy.

    The messianic crusade to eradicate whiteness is destabilizing the country and fomenting an inverted Manifest Destiny. Writing in “Whiteness Is a Pandemic,” Damon Young posits that “Whiteness is a public health crisis.” Continuing, he informs us that “White supremacy is a virus that, like other viruses, will not die until there are no bodies left for it to infect.” (Note how the author uses “whiteness” and “white supremacy” interchangeably). Indeed, this article epitomizes the pathological, anti-Western, and deeply divisive and sectarian dogma being pushed on impressionable young people, both by the media and by the multicultural curriculum.

    The Taliban recently came for Dr. Seuss, who we are now told is “offensive.” Teachers that challenge these pieties and attempt to introduce children of color and immigrant youth to the dreaded “dead white men” incur the wrath of the anti-literacy overseers, and if they continue to flout neoliberal pathologies, invariably face termination. Perhaps we can take comfort in knowing that instead of “liberté, égalité, fraternité,” the oligarchy has been kind enough to give us a snappy slogan for the counter-revolution: “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Just bear in mind that the anti-white jihadi isn’t interested in sending the aristocracy to the guillotine but the working class itself.

    Historically significant black writers and orators such as Martin Luther King, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Paul Robeson, all of whom were unwavering in their support for integration, are dismissed as Uncle Toms and Oreos (black on the outside, white on the inside). To quote Captain Beatty, the anti-intellectual pyromaniac of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451: “If you don’t want a house built, hide the nails and wood.”

    As transpires in Orwell’s 1984, the burning of the humanities has turned much of the population into automatons, who are not only illiterate, but who are also stripped of any sense of a cultural identity. Unlike many countries in the global south that have a history of weak democratic institutions, the oligarchy understands that in order to destroy democracy at home they have to sever the link between the American people and their past. Hence, if one were to show a World War II film such as Au Revoir les Enfants to a group of teenagers in an identity politics madrassa, it would be incomprehensible to them, as they aren’t taught anything about fascism, and they wouldn’t understand why on earth white people would be hunting down and murdering other white people. In many ways, both our civilization and our democracy were lost in the classroom.

    Liberal cultists (who are, in fact, doubly enslaved, both to the cult of identity politics and to the lockdown cult), rejoice in the dismantling of the nation-state which has ensued following offshoring, unrestricted immigration, and the rise of the multicultural curriculum and identity studies. What they fail to acknowledge are the devastating consequences, as these policies are inextricably linked with the annihilation of the middle class, the public schools, checks and balances, and any semblance of national cohesion. One could make the argument that in this post-nation-state neo-feudal America, the plutocracy has ceased to be a capitalist class in the Marxist sense and taken on the characteristics of a new baronage. Irregardless of whether the establishment’s endgame is tyranny under identity politics or tyranny under the Christian Right, once freedom of speech lies gelid and lifeless on the bloodstained ground it will be lost forever.

    There is a chilling passage in John Hersey’s epistolary novel The Conspiracy, which opens a window into life in imperial Rome under Nero, where Tigellinus sends a confidential letter to Faenus Rufus, both of whom are co-commanders of the Praetorian Guard. Addressing his fellow totalitarian, he writes, “We believe we are now on the threshold of uncovering certain crimes of opinion, the punishment of which, I am confident, will provide ample propitiation.”

    Aren’t Simone Gold and Julian Assange being prosecuted for “crimes of opinion?” The cruel treatment meted out to Julian serves as a particularly harrowing warning regarding the ongoing implosion of democracy in the West. What a pity that the righteous campaigners who once fought so valiantly for the New Deal and the civil rights movement now look upon those very ideals with sneering, ridicule, and contempt.

    David Penner has taught English and ESL within the City University of New York and at Fordham. His articles on politics and health care have appeared in CounterPunch, Dissident Voice, Dr. Linda and KevinMD; while his poetry has been published with Dissident Voice. Also a photographer, he is the author of three books: Faces of Manhattan Island, Faces of The New Economy, and Manhattan Pairs.
    He can be reached at: 321davidadam@gmail. Read other articles by David.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Do you remember the promises made by the Democratic Party’s presidential and Congressional candidates on universal health insurance? You can forget their pledges and somber convictions now that your votes put the Democrats in charge of the House and the Senate. The Democrats’ leaders are abandoning their promises and retreating into a cowardly corporatist future.

    Here is the present scene. Leading Democrats, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, have decided to spend tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize the giant health insurance companies like Aetna and United Healthcare to “cover recently laid-off workers and those who purchase their own coverage,” as the New York Times reported. There are no price restraints on the gouging insurance premiums or loophole-ridden policies. That is why giant corporate socialist insurers love the “American Rescue Plan,” which gives them socialist cash on the barrelhead. The law lets insurers decide how and whether they pay healthcare bills with co-pays, deductibles, or grant waivers. All these anti-consumer details are buried in the endless and inscrutable fine print.

    Whatever happened to the Democrats’ (Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pramila Jayapal, etc.) demand for single-payer – everybody in, nobody out – with free choice of doctors and hospitals instead of the existing cruel, and profiteering industry for which enough is never enough? Senator Sanders often mentioned a Yale study, published on February 15, 2020, that found:

    Although health care expenditure per capita is higher in the USA than in any other country, more than 37 million Americans do not have health insurance, and 41 million more have inadequate access to care. Efforts are ongoing to repeal the Affordable Care Act which would exacerbate health-care inequities. By contrast, a universal system, such as that proposed in the Medicare for All Act, has the potential to transform the availability and efficiency of American health-care services. Taking into account both the costs of coverage expansion and the savings that would be achieved through the Medicare for All Act, we calculate that a single-payer, universal health-care system is likely to lead to a 13% savings in national health-care expenditure, equivalent to more than $450 billion annually….” (See the study: Improving the Prognosis of Health Care in the USA, February 15, 2020).

    Well, House Speaker Pelosi is discouraging House Democrats from supporting Representative Pramila Jayapal’s H.R. 1384, Medicare for All Act of 2019, the gold standard for single-payer. News reports indicate that Representative Jayapal (D-WA) and Representative. Debbie Dingell (D-MI) will reintroduce their Medicare for All bill next week. Speaker Pelosi is telling Democrats in the House to focus instead on the modest expansion of Obamacare with its corporate welfare, utter complexity and seriously inadequate coverage. Almost eighty million Americans are presently uninsured or underinsured – a level that will not be significantly reduced for deprived workers by tweaking Obamacare during the Covid-19 pandemic.

    A modified Obamacare, with no price ceilings, will hardly reduce the tens of thousands of American deaths every year because people cannot afford health insurance to get diagnosed and treated in time to prevent fatalities. The Yale study also found that: “ensuring health-care access for all Americans would save more than 68,000 lives and 1.73 million life-years every year compared with the status quo.” Tweaking Obamacare does little to stem the relentless surge in healthcare prices and profits in our country, which is unique for not placing billing ceilings on medical procedures and drugs. This “get whatever you can” behavior by the vendors is so uncontrolled that healthcare billing fraud and abuse is costing people one billion dollars A DAY! Malcolm Sparrow, who is an applied mathematician at Harvard, estimates medical billing fraud amounts to at least ten percent of all healthcare expenses each year.

    Obamacare does nothing to limit the perverse incentives of a fee-for-service system that includes unnecessary operations, over-diagnosis, and over-prescribing all of which increase the risks of preventable casualties. A Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine peer-reviewed study in 2016 estimates that close to 5000 lives are lost weekly due to such “preventable problems” just in hospitals (see: Study Suggests Medical Errors Now Third Leading Cause of Death in the U.S., May 3, 2016).

    It gets worse. Year after year, the corporate Democrats, along with the Republicans, are facilitating expanding corporate takeovers of Medicare and Medicaid. The giant and widening attack on Medicare is called “Medicare Advantage,” which more accurately should be called “Medicare [Dis]advantage.” Our corporatized government, under both Parties, has been allowing deceptive promotional seductions of elderly people to take Medicare [Dis]advantage – now fully 40% of all Medicare beneficiaries – which is just a corporate insurance plan with multiple undisclosed tripwires.

    Former President Trump worsened what he inherited from the Democrats in outsourcing Medicare. He launched something called “direct contracting” that, “could fully turn Medicare over to private health insurers” declared Diane Archer, former chair of Consumer Reports, in her article on March 8, 2021. Medicare Advantage premiums can be pricey. According to Kay Tillow, Executive Director of the Nurses Professional Organization, “The Medicare Advantage Plans are smiling all the way to the bank. In 2019 each Medicare Advantage beneficiary cost taxpayers $11,822 while those in original Medicare cost $10,813 each – that’s over $1,000 more and over 9% more per person for the for-profit insurers!”

    Where is the outcry among Democratic politicians to reverse completely the corporate takeover of Medicare? Last year, many Democratic candidates pontificated about the need for single-payer health insurance, but now in Congress, we are scarcely hearing a peep about this vital human right. Their campaign rhetoric is just distant memory. Tragically, it is now harder than ever for the elderly to get out of Medicare [Dis]advantage and go back to traditional Medicare.

    Millions of elderly people are deceived by televised marketing lies and slick brochures.  The hapless Federal Trade Commission (FTC) should investigate and end the deceptions. Congressional investigations and hearings are long overdue. As the authoritative Dr. Fred Hyde says about the so-called Medicare Advantage: “It’s not what you pay, it’s what you get.” That is, the corporate health plan works until they get sick, until “they want their doctor and their hospital.” Dr. Hyde was referring to the narrow networks where these companies park their beneficiaries.

    More astonishing in this story of the rapacious corporate takeover of Medicare is that AARP promotes these flawed plans to their members, takes paid ads by big insurers in AARP publications, and derives income from this collaboration.

    Imagine, over 50,000 SEIU retirees are automatically placed by their unions in these Medicare [Dis]advantage traps without first being allowed to choose traditional Medicare.

    This whole sordid sabotage of the nineteen sixties Democrats’ dream, under President Lyndon Johnson, of taking the first step toward universal healthcare coverage for everyone, begs for more exposes. It begs for more clamor by the progressive Democrats in Congress who are strangely passive so far. I’m speaking of Representatives Jayapal, Raskin, Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), and the receding “Squad,” as well as Senators Warren and Sanders. If we can’t expect these stalwarts to start the counterattack that will save lives, save trillions of dollars over the years, focus on prevention not just treatment, and diminish the anxiety, dread, and fear, that the citizens of Canada and other western nations do not experience because they are insured from birth on, who is left to defend the American people against the arrogant health insurance corporate barons?

    I’m sending this column to these self-styled progressive Democrats along with a two-page specific critique of corporate Medicare from the Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) website. PNHP’s membership counts over 15,000 pro-single-payer physicians. In a comment on the PNHP site, Don McCanne, M.D., says, “Remember, the mission of private, for-profit Medicare Advantage insurers is to make money, whereas the mission of our traditional Medicare program is to provide health care. We are supporting a program that deferentially caters to the private insurers and their interests when we should be supporting a program that is designed to take care of patients. Those being deceived by the private Medicare Advantage marketing materials really do not realize the bad deal they may be getting until they face the private insurer barriers to needed care. Silver Sneakers won’t take care of that.” (See: https://pnhp.org/news/russell-mokhiber-explains-why-private-medicare-advantage-plans-are-a-bad-deal/)

    If you care about this issue, tell your Members of Congress it is time to pass Medicare for All represented by H.R. 1384.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Neoliberalism, at its heart, is class war waged from above under the guise of rational, technocratic management of an economy that must — as neoliberals claim —be shielded from the corrosive influence of democratic politics.
    — Chris Maisano, “Liberalism, Austerity, and the Global Crisis of Legitimacy,” The Activist, 7/19/2011.

    [W]hat’s becoming increasingly clear to many scholars and intellectuals is that there is a new morphology of fascism that is taking place in the United States, one that is integrated into, and supportive of, the political logic of neoliberalism.
    — Eric J. Wiener, “Neo-Fascism, Or The Political Logic of Neoliberalism3 Quarks Daily, November 9, 2020.

    The ideology of neoliberal capitalism was the promise of growth. But with neoliberal capitalism reaching a dead end, this promise disappears and so does this ideological prop. To sustain itself, neoliberalism starts looking for some other ideological prop and finds fascism.
    — Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, “Neoliberal Capitalism at a Dead End,” Monthly Review, July 1, 2019.

    In a recent, exceedingly instructive piece entitled,”This Crisis Has Exposed the Absurdities of Neoliberalism. That Doesn’t Mean It’ll Destroy It,” Greek political economist Costas Lapavitsus asserts that  state intervention in response to the COVID-19 public health crisis was both breathtaking in its magnitude and also in revealing the glaring hypocrisy of neoliberal ideology of “The market rules,”  as previously scorned Keynesian policies were temporarily rushed into service.

    Some of these measures included massive liquidity injections, lowering interest rates to zero, credit and loan guarantees, Federal Reserve purchase of government bonds and as pitifully small and delayed one-time direct payment to most Americans.  The fiscal stimulus packages already enacted are a quarter larger than those put in place during the Great Recession of 2008 and Biden recently proposed an additional $1.9 trillion coronavirus package in new federal spending.This episodic intervention in a crisis can be seen as another selective intervention by the state to ensure class rule. But the larger context includes the countless, irrefutable examples of the state’s welcome intervention to redistribute wealth upward and in prescribing critical market state functions in terms of policing, incarceration, surveillance, militarization and a host of other supportive services. U.S. interventions around the globe in support of the empire are so transparently obvious as to not warrant further elaboration.  Lapavitsus speculates on whether this massive state intervention in the economy could result “…in a more authoritarian form of controlled capitalism in which the interests of the corporate and the financial elite would remain paramount.” Unless there’s a mass mobilization from below there is no evidence suggesting that whatever is done will address the needs of working people.  Although Lapavitsus never explicitly suggests that neoliberalism will be transfigured into fascism, it’s not implausible to draw that conclusion.

    Neoliberalism (“neo” is a Greek prefix for new) is the ideology of modern capitalism that was resurrected from the original laissez-faire liberalism that had been thoroughly discredited by the Great Depression and a spurred mass movement intent on abolishing capitalism. Neoliberalism has now held sway for over four decades and is the state religion in the United States, the common sense belief that this is simply the only way to organize society.

    Neoliberalism was a repudiation of Keynesian economics under which the government intervenes to stabilize the economy, a theory that had a fundamental influence on the New Deal. It’s sometimes forgotten that both Keynesianism and neoliberalism are ideologies, flexible adjustments that capitalists made when a structural and political crisis undermined “enough” profitability. If Keynesian policy was an attempt to put a human face on capitalism on behalf of class survival, neoliberalism is, as economist Sam Gindlin has noted “capitalism with no face at all.”

    The celebrated social theorist and geographer David Harvey explains that neoliberal ideology serves the following principle:

    There shall be no serious challenge to the absolute power of money to rule absolutely. And that power is to be exercised with one objective:

    Those possessed of money shall not only be privileged to accumulate wealth endlessly at will, but they shall have the right to inherit the earth, taking either direct or indirect dominion, not only of the land and all the resources and productive capacities that reside therein, but also assume absolute command, directly or indirectly, over the labor and creative capacities of all those others it needs. The rest of humanity shall be deemed disposable.

    Neoliberalism was incubated in the thinking of neoliberal intellectuals like Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman. They, along with 35 other individuals, formed the Mont Pelerin Society at a gathering in Switzerland in 1947 and began the slow process of gaining public acceptance of their ideas. Fulsomely funded by wealthy individuals and corporations, neoliberalism was first imposed by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1975-1990) and by Ronald Reagan (1981-1989). Untold numbers of opportunistic politicians, academics, celebrities, journalists, public intellectuals and even artists, served as enthusiastic midwives.

    The disastrous economic effects of 40 years of neoliberalism on American workers have been repeatedly catalogued and are irrefutable. Perhaps less well known, is that neoliberalism has largely succeeded in destroying working class values like solidarity and collective aspirations and replaced them with dog-eat-dog rugged individualism. A deliberate goal of neoliberalism is to eradicate the notion from people’s heads that collective action can improve their lives. One astute critic identifies the resulting pathological culture as the political economy of narcissism where a perverse “rational calculus of self-interest,” where everything is commodified, including morals.  Empathic motives come to be seen as irrational, self-defeating, and existing beyond neutral, immutable market logic. Predictably, there has been a measurable diminution of empathy in U.S. society.

    Whither Fascism?

    Neoliberalism periodically creates its own crises, contradictions and tension-producing conditions. We know that the devastating effect of the pandemic further exacerbated already extreme social and economic inequality. Between 1975 and 2018, $47 trillion was transferred from the bottom 90 percent to the top 1%.  In addition, neoliberalism faced a host of seemingly insoluble problems of its own self-serving creation, including:   more low-wage workers falling behind, deindustrialization, endless wars, no single-payer health insurance, increased off-shoring, the “gig” economy, a militarized police state, massive underemployment, global overproduction, under-used capacity, a falling rate of profit, the looming threat of ecocide, a refugee crisis, glaring racial disparities across the board and the debilitating drain of 800+ military bases in 70 countries.

    Neoliberalism became ascendant in the 1980s and gained strength under Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. As their policies began to produce stress and public dissatisfaction, Trump’s campaign promised voters that his “America First” project would respond to their grievances. Abetted by race-baiting, xenophobia and religious chauvinism, he prevailed over the traditional neoliberal, Hillary Clinton.

    Whether Trump, a symbol of neoliberalism’s disease and not its cause, possessed any convictions behind his promises or, more likely, was simply hoodwinking the voters with his right-wing populist pandering is immaterial because he could never have succeeded in solving the system’s deep structural problems. After his narrow defeat in the electoral college in 2020, when he still garnered 74 million votes, the other party in the capitalist duopoly assumed control but it also has nothing to offer. Part of the reason is that state intervention under neoliberalism has built-in limitations relating to legitimacy issues that portend potential danger for the ruling class.  That is, if the state is directly involved, for instance, in creating employment, it prompts the question, “If the state can do the job here and on other pressing matters, why do we need capitalism at all?”

    Ironically, one unexpected consequences of neoliberalism was the January 6, at times, cartoonish spectacle of  a few hundred of Trump’s clueless, costumed and cult-like followers invading the “citadel of democracy” for a few hours, smashing stuff, taking selfies with cops and grabbing mementos. Whatever their motives, and surely they were mixed, if any of these intruders believed they were overthrowing the U.S. government, they were delusional. When the event fell risibly short of their hyperbolic Doomsday predictions, establishment narrators doubled down on them in the apparent belief that the public will believe anything if they hear it enough times. In retrospect, the riot proved to be a serendipitous gift to the establishment who then set about 24/7 scaremongering about an “insurrection” and “attempted coup.”

    While pontificating about the security threat posed by “white supremacist, violent extremists,” the  Kabuki theater of seemingly endless official investigations and serious prosecutions (a few which are warranted) proceeds apace. They are meant to scapegoat Trump, deflect blame from failed Democratic policies and soften up a frighted public for accepting necessary, “fighting fascism” national security measures. Stepping up censorship is one of the first.

    What follows won’t be Trump’s mendacious, crude and jingoistic neofascist rhetoric and tactics but a sophisticated, insidious, below the radar and hence infinitely more dangerous variant of fascism,  a “reset” promulgated from the top down by the Bidenadmin/nationalsecuritystate/MSM and their enablers. Although fascism follows when neoliberalism reaches a terminal point, this will be a hybrid, less apparent and hence more “acceptable,” crafted for American sensibilities.

    It will appeal to those who still believe that voting matters and who retain reverence for the country’s governing institutions. In other words, procedural democracy minus substance.  Further, as Eric Weiner’s adroitly explains, “North American fascism requires a degree of individual freedoms and rights in combination with the the perception that these rights and freedoms are inalienable by the state.”  This variant can even co-exist with a modicum of dissent, provided that it remains ineffectual.  Robert Urie labels this version, “fascism with better manners.” Given their track record of controlling the unfolding narrative, one hesitates to underestimate the state’s ability to shepherd this fascist hybrid into existence.  Whether the marginalized left makes use of the remaining but vanishing interstices of limited freedom to resist this outcome remains an open question.

    Where  neoliberalism becomes potentially vulnerable and open to scrutiny is when it becomes trapped in its own inevitable contradictions and linked to unvarnished political and economic realities, when its fraudulence as the means to attaining the vaunted American Dream becomes more apparent and the gross inequities of the system reveal themselves in ever starker terms. When this happened in the 1930s, some of capitalism’s most ingenious defenders found the means to stave off fundamental structural change by making the sufficient  temporary adjustments to save the capitalist system.  But, as noted earlier, after these stopgap measures neutered organized resistance, neoliberals proceeded to methodically undo them. The absence of resistance from below, makes this all the easier.

    The question is whether, if the second iteration of liberalism also becomes a discredited doctrinaire ideology and as many critics contend, has indeed reached a dead end, what’s next? The answer is uncertain and depends on several variables: whether the public concludes that society’s problems are intractable, permanent features of the capitalist economy; on the political savvy of elites and their two corporate parties;  on the willingness of the ruling class to employ the state’s punishment function and finally, whether the new iteration can be sold to people already irreparably harmed by neoliberal policies.

    When seen from this perspective, it’s a mistake — one that even some on the left are making — to view Biden’s election with a sigh of relief, a welcome breathing space. Rather, the  U.S state is using the so-called insurrection at the Capitol to distract the public while proceeding to further consolidate big capital and the state on behalf of the neoliberal project. In the aftermath of January 6, far-right groups are rapidly splintering, many adherents are leaving the movement and far-right disorganization prevails. In short, this  threat pales in significance when compared to the neoliberal fascists already in power. For now, Biden, the oligarch’s tool, is the front man, behind which the ruling class will decide how to proceed.

    We know the inexorable, capitalist imperative of exploitation and accumulation will continue and both parties are committed to maintaining and expanding U.S. global hegemony. Further, while neoliberalism in the United States and fascism are not yet identical, the former now has sufficient affinities with the latter to assert that an “immoral” equivalency exists and the distinction becomes an academic one.

    Ultimately, the answer doesn’t lie in voting or trying to pressure the Democratic Party but in new forms of collective agency from below, a movement  prepared to engage in sustained, nonviolent, massive civil disobedience. Given the foregoing analysis, one might be resigned to restating  Gramsci’s pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will and heart.  However, upon further consideration, knowing that the ruling class is unwilling to solve our problems tends to leaven the pessimism and lend cautious support to optimism.

    Not surprisingly, Macfarquhar concludes that this makes them “even more dangerous” and without evidence, claims that Russia is assisting them.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies / February 27th, 2021

    Photo: CODEPINK

    The February 25 U.S. bombing of Syria immediately puts the policies of the newly-formed Biden administration into sharp relief. Why is this administration bombing the sovereign nation of Syria? Why is it bombing “Iranian-backed militias” who pose absolutely no threat to the United States and are actually involved in fighting ISIS? If this is about getting more leverage vis-a-vis Iran, why hasn’t the Biden administration just done what it said it would do: rejoin the Iran nuclear deal and de-escalate the Middle East conflicts?

    According to the Pentagon, the U.S. strike was in response to the February 15 rocket attack in northern Iraq that killed a contractor working with the U.S. military and injured a U.S. service member. Accounts of the number killed in the U.S. attack vary from one to 22.

    The Pentagon made the incredible claim that this action “aims to de-escalate the overall situation in both Eastern Syria and Iraq.” This was countered by the Syrian government, which condemned the illegal attack on its territory and said the strikes “will lead to consequences that will escalate the situation in the region.” The strike was also condemned by the governments of China and Russia. A member of Russia’s Federation Council warned that such escalations in the area could lead to “a massive conflict.”

    Ironically, Jen Psaki, now Biden’s White House spokesperson, questioned the lawfulness of attacking Syria in 2017, when it was the Trump administration doing the bombing. Back then she asked: “What is the legal authority for strikes? Assad is a brutal dictator. But Syria is a sovereign country.”

    The airstrikes were supposedly authorized by the 20-year-old, post-9/11 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), legislation that Rep. Barbara Lee has been trying for years to repeal since it has been misused, according to the congresswoman, “to justify waging war in at least seven different countries, against a continuously expanding list of targetable adversaries.”

    The United States claims that its targeting of the militia in Syria was based on intelligence provided by the Iraqi government. Defense Secretary Austin told reporters: “We’re confident that target was being used by the same Shia militia that conducted the strike [against U.S. and coalition forces].”

    But a report by Middle East Eye (MEE) suggests that Iran has strongly urged the militias it supports in Iraq to refrain from such attacks, or any warlike actions that could derail its sensitive diplomacy to bring the U.S. and Iran back into compliance with the 2015 international nuclear agreement or JCPOA.

    “None of our known factions carried out this attack,” a senior Iraqi militia commander told MEE. “The Iranian orders have not changed regarding attacking the American forces, and the Iranians are still keen to maintain calm with the Americans until they see how the new administration will act.”

    The inflammatory nature of this U.S. attack on Iranian-backed Iraqi militias, who are an integral part of Iraq’s armed forces and have played a critical role in the war with ISIS, was implicitly acknowledged in the U.S. decision to attack them in Syria instead of in Iraq. Did Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi, a pro-Western British-Iraqi, who is trying to rein in the Iranian-backed Shiite militias, deny permission for a U.S. attack on Iraqi soil?

    At Kadhimi’s request, NATO is increasing its presence from 500 troops to 4,000 (from Denmark, the U.K. and Turkey, not the U.S.) to train the Iraqi military and reduce its dependence on the Iranian-backed militias. But Kadhimi risks losing his job in an election this October if he alienates Iraq’s Shiite majority. Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein is heading to Tehran to meet with Iranian officials over the weekend, and the world will be watching to see how Iraq and Iran will respond to the U.S. attack.

    Some analysts say the bombing may have been intended to strengthen the U.S. hand in its negotiations with Iran over the nuclear deal (JCPOA). “The strike, the way I see it, was meant to set the tone with Tehran and dent its inflated confidence ahead of negotiations,” said Bilal Saab, a former Pentagon official who is currently a senior fellow with the Middle East Institute.

    But this attack will make it more difficult to resume negotiations with Iran. It comes at a delicate moment when the Europeans are trying to orchestrate a “compliance for compliance” maneuver to revive the JCPOA. This strike will make the diplomatic process more difficult, as it gives more power to the Iranian factions who oppose the deal and any negotiations with the United States.

    Showing bipartisan support for attacking sovereign nations, key Republicans on the foreign affairs committees such as Senator Marco Rubio and Rep. Michael McCaul immediately welcomed the attacks. So did some Biden supporters, who crassly displayed their partiality to bombing by a Democratic president.

    Party organizer Amy Siskind tweeted: “So different having military action under Biden. No middle school level threats on Twitter. Trust Biden and his team’s competence.” Biden supporter Suzanne Lamminen tweeted: “Such a quiet attack. No drama, no TV coverage of bombs hitting targets, no comments on how presidential Biden is. What a difference.”

    Thankfully, though, some Members of Congress are speaking out against the strikes. “We cannot stand up for Congressional authorization before military strikes only when there is a Republican President,” Congressman Ro Khanna tweeted, “The Administration should have sought Congressional authorization here. We need to work to extricate from the Middle East, not escalate.” Peace groups around the country are echoing that call. Rep. Barbara Lee and Senators Bernie Sanders, Tim Kaine and Chris Murphy also released statements either questioning or condemning the strikes.

    Americans should remind President Biden that he promised to prioritize diplomacy over military action as the primary instrument of his foreign policy. Biden should recognize that the best way to protect U.S. personnel is to take them out of the Middle East. He should recall that the Iraqi Parliament voted a year ago for U.S. troops to leave their country. He should also recognize that U.S. troops have no right to be in Syria, still “protecting the oil,” on the orders of Donald Trump.

    After failing to prioritize diplomacy and rejoin the Iran nuclear agreement, Biden has now, barely a month into his presidency, reverted to the use of military force in a region already shattered by two decades of U.S. war-making. This is not what he promised in his campaign and it is not what the American people voted for.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Democrats’ second trial of Trump ends like the first: the outcome known in advance, the entire process designed to sell to the anti-Trump masses that the Democrats were leading some progressive counter-attack. Both impeachments enabled these politicians to present a national diversion to avoid addressing real issues the US people suffer from: the pandemic, lack of vaccines, no national health care program, increasing homelessness, closed schools.

    The Democrats’ first impeachment over Trump’s phone call to Ukraine aimed to sully his name for the benefit of the 2020 Democratic presidential campaign.  They purposely did not address Trump’s actual crimes: his cruelty to Latino immigrants on the border, his indifference to  police abuse of Blacks and Latinos, his racist attacks on non-white US citizens and residents, his neglect of the threat of global warming, funding the genocidal war against Yemen, bombing other countries, such as Syria, illegal and cruel sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela.

    The second impeachment, for the vague charge of “incitement of insurrection” sought to permanently ban Trump from “holding any office,” removing him as an election opponent in 2024. The Democrats reduced themselves to presenting as “evidence” of inciting insurrection Trump’s statement “’if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.” However, this insubstantial statement could easily be used to indict any progressive social change movement, much as the Smith Act of 1940 had been used against leftists. The Democrats conveniently avoided mention that Trump in his January 6 speech explicitly told protesters to “peacefully march to the Capitol.”

    The second impeachment also charged Trump with refusing to accept the November 2020 election results. However, the Constitution states Congress must officially certify the Electoral College votes and the presidential victor, giving Trump the constitutional right to challenge these votes in Congress. The articles of impeachment concluded “Donald John Trump, by such conduct, has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to national security, democracy, and the Constitution”. Whatever our opinion of the man, this only continues the Democratic Party-national security state McCarthyite campaign against Trump begun in earnest in 2016. Trump’s second acquittal marked a setback for this McCarthyism the Democrats have been pushing.

    Trump’s “coup” and the Democrats’ “coup”

    Trump’s attempt on January 6 pales in comparison to the Democrats’ well-orchestrated lawfare coup operation set in motion in 2016. As Consortium News, The Grayzone, Stephen Cohen, Glenn Greenwald have documented,  by late 2015 the Democrats were working with national security state officials to paint Trump as beholden to Putin – including stories of Putin’s alleged ownership of “pee tapes” of Trump with prostitutes in Moscow hotels. The Democrats funded the Steele Dossier fabrication, beginning a years-long fact-free story of Trump collusion with Russia to steal the election.

    While Democrats charge Trump with propagating his Stop the Steal story, they have not renounced their own fake Trump-Putin collusion story. In fact, it set the stage for their first impeachment. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi even tweeted – after Congress certified the 2016 Electoral College vote “Our election was hijacked. There is no question. Congress has a duty to #ProtectOurDemocracy & #FollowTheFacts.”

    The continuous Democratic Party double standard and hypocrisy in relation to Trump explains a great deal of his supporters’ anger. As Scott Ritter noted, “For the supporters of Donald Trump, the events of Jan. 6 did not occur in a vacuum but were rather the culmination of what they believed to be a four-year campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the president they voted for and, by doing so, disenfranchising not only their vote, but by extension their role as citizens.”

    The second impeachment show intended to divert the 81 million Biden voters from their expectations and demands for progressive change, given the Democrats have won the presidency and both houses of Congress. It stifled any budding movement demanding the Democrats take action for a national health care program, a bailout for the people, a jobs program, a Green New Deal, etc. Their impeachment spectacle sought to vilify Trump and his supporters, as well as solidify what Glenn Greenwald describes as the new alliance of the national security state, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Bush era neo-cons, and mainstream corporate media with the neoliberal Democratic Party.

    Who were the Trump voters

    Central to the Democratic Party – and even leftist – spin is that Trump supporters are racist, sexist white men, the “deplorables.” This prejudiced stereotype hardly explains why 9 million Obama voters switched to Trump in 2016. Nor explain why, after four years of hostile mainstream media coverage, he won 10.5 million more votes in 2020.  A look at the 2020 election voter breakdown contradicts their condescending stereotype.

    In 2016, Trump won the white women vote by a margin of 9%, even though his opponent would have been the first woman president. In 2020 this vote margin increased to an 11% margin. In 2016, Trump won 28% of the Latina vote; in 2020, 31%. In 2016, Trump won 5% of the Black women vote; in 2020, 9%, despite Kamala Harris being on the Democratic ticket.  In 2016, he won 13% of the Black male vote; in 2020 it rose to 19%. Overall, comparing 2016 and 2020, Trump’s vote share rose 4% with Blacks, 3% with Latinos, and 5% with Asian Americans. Of the LGBT community, Trump was said to have won 28% of the vote, double his 2016 percent. In sum, people of color, LGBTs  the very ones said to be central to the Democratic coalition, shifted toward Trump.

    The group where Trump lost vote share involved white men, even though he won 35% more of the white working class vote than Biden. In 2016, Trump won 65% of the white men vote; in 2020 it fell to 61%. This hardly squares with liberal and pro-Democrat mythology that a Trump supporter is a racist white man.

    The US leftist movement co-opted by the Democratic Party

    Despite the November election choice coming down to two corporate neoliberals disliked by the great majority of the US population, more than 159.6 million Americans turned out to vote. The corporate rulers’ effort to neutralize popular opposition to their two parties and lure in social movements was so successful that the election turnout marked the highest percent of  voter population in 120 years, 66.7%. Even leftist groups capitulated, dressing this up as “fighting fascism” as they climbed aboard the two corporate party bandwagon.

    Typically, every four years the liberal-left, in order to justify a vote for the corporate Democrat presidential candidate, tries to paint the Republican candidate as a herald of fascism. In Fascism? First Two Months in Power: Hitler vs. Trump, I wrote:

    Leftists recognize corporate America owns the two parties, yet many still vote Democrat. Every four years, we must first defeat the fascist, then build our movement. So is the story we are told. This has been an effective strategy to trap us in the Democratic Party. It has worked for generations. Not only does it reinforce our domination by corporate America, but it seriously miseducates people about fascism.

    Needless to say, so long as corporate America has the liberal-left tied to their two party system, they have no need for fascism. They need fascism only when their customary method of rule breaks down and they face a very direct threat of losing control to revolutionary forces. The historic function of fascism is to smash the radicalized working class and its allies, destroy their organizations, and shut down political liberties when the corporate rulers find themselves unable to govern through their charade of democracy.  No such problem here.

    This capitulation to the corporate Democrats, including by self-described leftist groups, was hard to imagine just earlier in 2020, with the massive Black Lives Matter protests and the anti-neoliberal Bernie Sanders movement.

    While the vast majority of voters for both parties voted for their version of the “lesser evil,” the record election turnout for this charade was a great victory for corporate America irrespective of who won.

    A successful Trump coup would be a worse outcome for the corporate rulers

    The Democratic Party, liberals and leftists claimed Trump was planning a coup, a fascist coup even, on January 6. We are supposed to be grateful this alleged fascist insurrection was put down. But to play along with this coup story, if it were successful, the result would ignite massive nationwide protests by anti-Trump voters. After Trump’s election in November 2016, there were large “Not My President” protests in over 20 cities and many universities around the country. In 2020 between 15-26 million are said to have mobilized in Black Lives Matter rallies. Between 3-5 million participated in the anti-Trump Women’s Marches in 2017. Trump and his supporters have also shown they can turn out their base not only in large rallies but in armed protests.

    Murders by individuals in both camps have already occurred in Charlottesville, Portland and Kenosha. Both anti-Trump and pro-Trump protesters firmly believe they are the ones defending US democracy and freedom against their opponents, that their own candidate legitimately won the presidential election. Right wing Trumpers fear socialists will take over the US, while the anti-Trump left fear fascists will.

    Nationwide confrontations and mobilizations by these opposing forces following a successful Trump coup could seriously damage the overall political stability of the US system for some time. This would weaken the US empire’s ability to sell its “freedom and democracy” image and political leadership role abroad. It would undermine US capacity to assert its military and world cop ideological power around the world.

    Consequently, the best result for the US empire would be for Trump to lose the election, his “coup” to fail, and he be banned from running for political office. The US rulers achieved almost all that agenda. US leftists, declared opponents of the empire, must ask themselves why this very agenda was also their own agenda.

    Stansfield Smith, Chicago ALBA Solidarity, is a long time Latin America solidarity activist, and presently puts out the AFGJ Venezuela Weekly. He is also the Senior Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs. Read other articles by Stansfield.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Motivated by their justifiable aversion to former US President Donald Trump, many analysts have rashly painted a rosy picture of how Democrats could quickly erase the bleak trajectory of the previous Republican administration. This naivety is particularly pronounced in the current spin on the Palestinian-Israeli discourse, which is promoting, again, the illusion that Democrats will succeed where their political rivals have failed.

    There are obvious differences in the Democrats’ approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but only in semantics and political jingoism, not policy. This assertion can be justified if the Democratic administration’s official language on Palestine and Israel is examined, and such language considered within the context of practical policies on the ground.

    Take recent remarks, made by the new US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, during a CNN interview on February 8. Blinken’s comments reminded us of the clever – albeit disingenuous – US foreign policy under previous Democratic administrations. His select words may seem as a complete departure from the belligerent, yet direct, approach of former US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo.

    “Look, leaving aside the legalities of that question (meaning the illegal Israeli occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights), as a practical matter, the Golan is very important to Israel’s security,” Blinken said. Later in the interview, he went on to, once again, acknowledge, yet, at the same time, sideline the question of ‘legalities’. “Legal questions are something else,” he said, before continuing to speak vaguely and non-committedly about the future of Syria.

    Juxtapose Blinken’s position on the illegal Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights with statements made by Pompeo in November, just before the end of Trump’s Presidency. “This is a part of Israel and central part of Israel,” Pompeo said, as he was accompanied by Israeli Foreign Minister, Gabi Ashkenazi, and speaking from the occupied Golan Heights.

    Pompeo’s position, which is a stark violation of international law, was duly condemned by Palestinians and Arabs and criticized by various governments and international bodies. Blinken’s position, however, generated little media attention and negligible, if any, serious reprimand regionally or internationally. This should not have been the case.

    By acknowledging the relevance of the issue of legality, then “leaving it aside”, in favor of the seemingly more pressing question of Israeli security, Blinken simply defended the status quo, that of perpetual Israeli military occupation, which is also championed enthusiastically by Republicans.

    Succinctly, this is the Democratic doctrine on Palestine and Israel, in effect largely since the Bill Clinton era. The current Administration of Joe Biden is, undoubtedly, following the same blueprint, which allows Washington to offer itself as a neutral party – an ‘honest peace-broker’ – while helping Israel achieve its strategic goals at the expense of the Palestinian and Arab peoples.

    The clear distinction between the Democratic and Republican discourses on Palestine and Israel is a relatively new phenomenon. Interestingly, it was the Republican George H. W. Bush Administration that, in 1991, established the current Democratic narrative on Palestine. At the end of the First Gulf War, Bush championed the multilateral talks between Israel and Arab States in Madrid, Spain. Within a few years, a whole new American discourse was formulated.

    The September 11, 2001 attacks on the US supplanted the peace process discourse in Republican foreign policy literature with a new one, which is avowedly dedicated to fighting ‘Islamic terror’. Israel cleverly used the new American language and conduct in the Middle East to present itself as a direct partner in the US-led global ‘war on terror’.

    To stave off the collapse of US global political leadership as a result of the Iraq invasion of 2003, the Barack Obama Administration quickly restored the traditional American position, once again offering US services as a benefactor of peace in the Middle East. True, Obama labored to restore America’s relevance as a ‘peacemaker’. His administration still utilized the disingenuous language of the past, one which constantly put the onus on the Palestinians, while gently reminding Israel of its responsibilities towards Palestine’s civilian population.

    Obama’s Cairo speech in April 2009 remains the most powerful, yet indicting document on the numerous moral lapses and legal blind spots of US foreign policy, particularly under Democratic administrations. The speech, which was meant to serve as a watershed moment in the US’ approach to the Middle East region, fully exposed the caveats of US bias towards Israel, predicated mostly on emotional manipulation and historical misrepresentations.

    Obama deliberately fluctuated between the persecution of Jewish communities throughout history and Israel’s ‘right’ to ensure its security at the expense of oppressed Palestinians, as if the systematic Israeli violence was carried out as genuine attempts to prevent further persecution of world’s Jewry.

    Contrastingly, Obama insisted, with little sympathy or context, that “Palestinians must abandon violence”, thus painting the Palestinians and their rightful resistance as the true obstacle to any just peace in Palestine. Concerning Palestine and Israel, blaming the victim has been a central pillar of US foreign policy, shared by Democrats and Republicans alike.

    Yet, while Republicans increasingly ignore the rights and, sometimes, the very existence of the Palestinians, Democrats, who continue to support Israel with equal passion, use more moderate – although inconsequential – language.

    For Democrats, Palestinians are the instigators of violence, although Israel may have, at times, used ‘disproportionate force’ in its response to Palestinian violence; for them, international law exists, but can easily be ‘left aside’ to accommodate Israeli security; for them, there is such a thing as internationally recognized borders, but these borders are flexible in order to accommodate Israel’s demographic fears, strategic interests and ‘military edge’.

    Hence, it is easier to discredit the foreign policy agenda of Trump, Pompeo and other Republicans as their aggressive, dismissive language and action are unmistakably objectionable. The Democratic discourse, however, cannot be as easily censured, as it utilizes a mix of superficial language, political platitudes and historical clichés, worded meticulously with the aim of placing the US back at the driving seat of whatever political process is underway.

    While the Democratic discourse remains committed to arming and defending Israel, it provides Palestinians and Arabs with no meaningful change, because substantive change can only occur when international law is respected. Unfortunately, according to Blinken’s logic, such seemingly trivial matters should, for now, be ‘left aside’.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / February 9th, 2021

    All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.

    — George Orwell, 1984

    Let’s be clear about one thing: the impeachment of Donald Trump is a waste of time and money.

    Impeaching Trump will accomplish very little, and it will not in any way improve the plight of the average American. It will only reinforce the spectacle and farce that have come to be synonymous with politics today.

    While the nation allows itself to be distracted by yet more bread-and-circus politics, the American kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians and corporate thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of the people) continues to suck the American people into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry are powerless to defend themselves against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.

    So here’s what I propose: let’s impeach the Deep State and its cabal of government operatives from every point along the political spectrum (right, left and center) for conspiring to expand the federal government’s powers at the expense of the citizenry.

    We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’re certainly on that downward trajectory now, and things are moving fast.

    Even now, we are being pushed and prodded towards a civil war, not because the American people are so divided but because that’s how corrupt governments control a populace (i.e., divide and conquer).

    These are dangerous times.

    These are indeed dangerous times but not because of violent crime, which remains at an all-time low, or because of terrorism, which is statistically rare, or because the borders are being invaded by foreign armies, which data reports from the Department of Homeland Security refute, or because a pandemic is spreading like a contagion, or even because raging mobs of so-called domestic terrorists are trying to overthrow elections.

    No, the real danger that we face comes from none other than the U.S. government and the powers it has granted to its standing armies to rob, steal, cheat, harass, detain, brutalize, terrorize, torture and kill American citizens with immunity.

    The danger “we the people” face comes from masked invaders on the government payroll who crash through our doors in the dark of night, shoot our dogs, and terrorize our families.

    This danger comes from militarized henchmen on the government payroll who demand absolute obedience, instill abject fear, and shoot first and ask questions later.

    This danger comes from greedy, power-hungry bureaucrats on the government payroll who have little to no understanding of their constitutional limits.

    This danger comes from greedy politicians and corporations for whom profit trumps principle.

    This danger comes from a surveillance state that grows more and more ominous.

    Consider, if you will, all of the dastardly, devious, diabolical, dangerous, debilitating, deceitful, dehumanizing, demonic, depraved, dishonorable, disillusioning, discriminatory, dictatorial schemes inflicted on “we the people” by a bureaucratic, totalitarian regime that has long since ceased to be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

    Americans have no protection against police abuse. It is no longer unusual to hear about incidents in which police shoot unarmed individuals first and ask questions later. What remains all-too-usual, however, is the news that the officers involved in these incidents get off with little more than a slap on the hands.

    Americans are little more than pocketbooks to fund the police state. If there is any absolute maxim by which the federal government seems to operate, it is that the American taxpayer always gets ripped off. This is true, whether you’re talking about taxpayers being forced to fund high-priced weaponry that will be used against us, endless wars that do little for our safety or our freedoms, bloated government agencies such as the National Security Agency with its secret budgets, covert agendas and clandestine activities.

    Americans are no longer innocent until proven guilty. We once operated under the assumption that you were innocent until proven guilty. Due in large part to rapid advances in technology and a heightened surveillance culture, the burden of proof has been shifted so that the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty has been usurped by a new norm in which all citizens are suspects. This is exemplified by police practices of stopping and frisking people who are merely walking down the street and where there is no evidence of wrongdoing. Likewise, by subjecting Americans to full-body scans and license-plate readers without their knowledge or compliance and then storing the scans for later use, the government—in cahoots with the corporate state—has erected the ultimate suspect society. In such an environment, we are all potentially guilty of some wrongdoing or other.

    Americans no longer have a right to self-defense. In the wake of various shootings in recent years, “gun control” has become a resounding theme. Those advocating gun reform see the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms as applying only to government officials. As a result, even Americans who legally own firearms are being treated with suspicion and, in some cases, undue violence. In one case, a Texas man had his home subjected to a no-knock raid and was shot in his bed after police, attempting to deliver a routine search warrant, learned that he was in legal possession of a firearm. In another incident, a Florida man who was licensed to carry a concealed firearm found himself detained for two hours during a routine traffic stop in Maryland while the arresting officer searched his vehicle in vain for the man’s gun, which he had left at home.

    Americans no longer have a right to private property. If government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family, your property is no longer private and secure—it belongs to the government. Likewise, if government officials can fine and arrest you for growing vegetables in your front yard, praying with friends in your living room, installing solar panels on your roof, and raising chickens in your backyard, you’re no longer the owner of your property.

    Americans are powerless in the face of militarized police. In early America, citizens were considered equals with law enforcement officials. Authorities were rarely permitted to enter one’s home without permission or in a deceitful manner. And it was not uncommon for police officers to be held personally liable for trespass when they wrongfully invaded a citizen’s home. Unlike today, early Americans could resist arrest when a police officer tried to restrain them without proper justification or a warrant—which the police had to allow citizens to read before arresting them. (Daring to dispute a warrant with a police official today who is armed with high-tech military weapons and tasers would be nothing short of suicidal.) As police forces across the country continue to be transformed into outposts of the military, with police agencies acquiring military-grade hardware in droves, Americans are finding their once-peaceful communities transformed into military outposts, complete with tanks, weaponry, and other equipment designed for the battlefield.

    Americans no longer have a right to bodily integrity. Court rulings undermining the Fourth Amendment and justifying invasive strip searches have left us powerless against police empowered to forcefully draw our blood, strip search us, and probe us intimately. It’s no longer unusual to hear accounts of men and women being subjected to what is essentially government-sanctioned rape by police in the course of “routine” traffic stops. What remains to be seen is how the emerging hypervigilance over COVID-19 vaccines will impact that right to bodily integrity.

    Americans no longer have a right to the expectation of privacy. Despite the staggering number of revelations about government spying on Americans’ phone calls, Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, Google searches, emails, bookstore and grocery purchases, bank statements, commuter toll records, etc., little to nothing has been done to counteract these abuses. Instead, we are daily being accustomed to life in this electronic concentration camp.

    Americans can no longer rely on the courts to mete out justice. The U.S. Supreme Court was intended to be an institution established to intervene and protect the people against the government and its agents when they overstep their bounds. Yet through their deference to police power, preference for security over freedom, and evisceration of our most basic rights for the sake of order and expediency, the justices of the Supreme Court have become the architects of the American police state in which we now live, while the lower courts have appointed themselves courts of order, concerned primarily with advancing the government’s agenda, no matter how unjust or illegal.

    Americans no longer have a representative government. We have moved beyond the era of representative government and entered a new age, let’s call it the age of authoritarianism. In fact, a study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups.

    It is not overstating matters to say that Congress, which has done its best to keep their unhappy constituents at a distance, may well be the most self-serving, semi-corrupt institution in America.

    In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism: a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.

    Rest assured that when and if fascism finally takes hold in America, the basic forms of government will remain: Fascism will appear to be friendly. The legislators will be in session. There will be elections, and the news media will continue to cover the entertainment and political trivia. Consent of the governed, however, will no longer apply. Actual control will have finally passed to the oligarchic elite controlling the government behind the scenes.

    Sound familiar?

    Clearly, we are now ruled by an oligarchic elite of governmental and corporate interests. We have moved into “corporatism” (favored by Benito Mussolini), which is a halfway point on the road to full-blown fascism. Corporatism is where the few moneyed interests—not elected by the citizenry—rule over the many.

    History may show that from this point forward, we will have left behind any semblance of constitutional government and entered into a totalitarian state where all citizens are suspects and security trumps freedom.

    Even with its constantly shifting terrain, this topsy-turvy travesty of law and government has become America’s new normal.

    From Clinton to Bush, Obama to Trump, and now Biden, it’s as if we’ve been caught in a time loop, forced to re-live the same thing over and over again: the same assaults on our freedoms, the same disregard for the rule of law, the same subservience to the Deep State, and the same corrupt, self-serving government that exists only to amass power, enrich its shareholders and ensure its continued domination.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the powers-that-be want us to remain distracted, divided, alienated from each other based on our politics, our bank accounts, our religion, our race and our value systems.

    Yet as George Orwell observed, “The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.”

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Americans were shocked to witness the assault on the capitol building on January 6, the day Congress was scheduled to ratify the presidential election.  Washington DC and the nation’s state capitals remained on high alert through the inauguration as right wing groups promised more violent attacks.

    It’s easy to trace the proximate cause of this assault, a president who has long cultivated the lie that the 2020 election was somehow stolen.  Prior to the capitol assault, he exhorted his “Save America” rally on the Mall to “stop the steal” and “fight much harder,” asserting “You have to show strength, you have to be strong.”

    Much has been made of the fascist overtones of Trump’s efforts, but it is important to understand how we got to such a place.  It goes well past Trump to forty years of dysfunctional, neoliberal American politics, and beyond that to the racism deeply embedded in this nation’s history.  Both political parties share responsibility for our current condition.

    Republicans

    The Republican Party role is the most obvious.

    In 1968, President Nixon rode a law and order campaign into the White House, appealing to a so-called “silent majority” frightened, if not alienated, by the images of antiwar protesters, inner-city “rioters,” and counterculture “freaks” during the 1960s.

    The corporate mass media, of course, fed this dynamic by refusing to take seriously the actual claims of black, antiwar, New Left and feminist activists, instead, making sure the public saw the most inflammatory examples of their behaviors and appearances.  In mass mediaspeak, “radical” was used to describe militancy, whereas any system-challenging argument vanished from mainstream discourse – sound familiar?  That’s a story I have documented elsewhere.

    Nixon’s racist “southern strategy” set in stone the future of the Republican Party, although it remained for Ronald Reagan to seal the deal.  Reagan’s rhetoric about basic “decency” and “family values,” effectively played on the feelings of those disaffected by the 60s.

    Yet Reagan’s actual policies focused on eliminating ways the government addresses public needs, cutting taxes on the wealthy, rebuilding a huge military complex, regenerating an aggressive foreign policy, and deregulating the economy.

    However, the people drawn to Reagan’s so-called “conservative” rhetoric and his tax-cut pitch – whether religious traditionalists, rural folks, or members of the white working class — actually lost more and more ground, economically, under Reagan’s and the Republicans’ neoliberalism.  They got symbolic gratification while their attention was diverted to the Democrats, liberals, and “Eastern elites” who allegedly caused their problems.

    That’s the Republican path that leads directly to Trump and his True Believers.  It also echoes the post-Reconstruction Democrats’ austerity pitch that reinforced white supremacy in the South.

    What, then, of the Democratic Party?

    Democrats

    Smarting from Reagan’s landslide victory in 1984, Democratic centrists – names like Dick Gephardt, Sam Nunn, and Bill Clinton — took steps to move the Party away from its more liberal wing, into the corporate-dependent center.  In its more liberal moments the Party voiced hopeful rhetoric about defending the rights of minorities, women, and LGBTQ people, defending the environment, etc.  The reality has consistently fallen far short of the rhetoric.

    Indeed, the two “liberal” Democratic presidents of the neoliberal era – Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — were responsible for a host of repressive and “free market” (e.g., neoliberal) policies.  Clinton’s contributions are perhaps better known: the “end of welfare as we know it,” NAFTA, financial and telecommunications deregulation, and the 1994 Crime Bill that accelerated mass incarceration, among others.

    Riding a campaign of “hope” and “change” into the White House, none of Obama’s “liberal” accomplishments – the Affordable Care Act, Supreme Court appointments, the negotiated settlement with Iran, and initial steps on climate — diverged from the neoliberal playbook.  At the same time, Obama pushed the Trans-Pacific Partnership and other so-called ‘free trade” agreements, escalated both domestic surveillance and drone killings abroad, supported the anti-democratic coup in Honduras, and withdrew the public option for health insurance, among others.

    The right-wing Republican attack machine kept its rank-and-file in line with attacks on Clinton’s “60s-style” licentiousness and Obama’s being of African descent.  For their part, the corporate media repeatedly turned the 60s era into a “good sixties” of a romanticized civil rights movement and a hopeful John Kennedy administration, and a “bad sixties” of violence and narcissistic rebelliousness  — the latter a useful hook for selling entertainment and commodities to younger generations.

    Dysfunctional Neoliberal Politics

    Republicans, in short, have been all about giveaways to the rich while manipulating the emotions of less well-off white Americans.  Democrats have ignored the latter populations, becoming increasingly dependent on corporate money while effectively manipulating the aspirations of marginalized communities.

    In their more liberal moments, what Nancy Fraser has called “progressive neoliberalism,” Democrats embrace what is often called “identity politics” – race, gender, and sexuality in particular.  Republicans use Democrats’ rhetoric to cement the emotional attachment of their rank and file supporters.  As Republican “reactionary neoliberalism” becomes more and more outrageous, Democrats gain popular support.  The corporate center, with all its sanctimonious rhetoric, is reinforced when something like the Capitol assault occurs.

    As Fraser has observed in The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born, “To reinstate progressive neoliberalism [e.g., Joe Biden and the Democratic mainstream] … is to recreate –indeed to exacerbate—the very conditions that created Trump.  And that means preparing the ground for future Trumps –ever more vicious and dangerous.”

    Thus the country remains stuck in a see-saw battle that utterly fails to address the deep crises we face.  Neither party speaks a word against a capitalist system that feeds inequality, threatens the planet’s ability to sustain life, and generates a foreign policy marked by militarism and war.  The “problem” is always the “other party.”  Such are the boundaries of what Noam Chomsky called “legitimate discourse.”

    And neither party dares to confront class inequality.  Unlike identity concerns about white supremacy, hate speech, harassment and abuse, and the like – all profound problems — class analysis reveals the systemic forces that keep both parties’ rank-and-file in their place at the margins of American politics.

    Ultimately, the only way out of this will occur when enough people become aware, not only of the seriousness of the crises facing us, but of the need to come together in a well-mobilized mass movement addressing systemic concerns.  We already can see where we’re heading if we don’t do this.

    Ted (Edward) Morgan is emeritus professor of Political Science at Lehigh University and the author of What Really Happened to the 1960: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy.  He can be reached at epm2@lehigh.edu. Read other articles by Ted.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Back in 2017, before WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange was silenced by Twitter, he used the platform to highlight an immutable truth:

    ‘The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security not national security.’

    Power hates being exposed. It hates having its inner machinations, its selfish priorities and ugly operations opened up to public scrutiny.

    The omission of inconvenient facts, and the silencing of inadmissible viewpoints, are core features of the so-called ‘mainstream’ news media. Thus, it should be obvious by now why we always put ‘mainstream’ in quotation marks. Because, as increasing numbers of the public surely now recognise, the major news media are not impartial, or fair, or balanced. Nor do they truly represent and reflect the concerns and priorities of the vast majority of the population. Instead, the major newspapers and broadcasters represent, defend and project the interests of powerful state and corporate elites. The state-corporate media will not, and cannot, undertake consistent and reliable public scrutiny of these elites. That would make no sense since the mass media is the propaganda operation of state-corporate power.

    Since we began Media Lens twenty years ago in 2001, we have amassed over 5,000 pages of media alerts detailing numerous examples of dangerous, power-friendly omissions, distortions and imbalances in UK state-corporate media. Rather than go for easy and obvious targets like the Sun, Express and Mail, we have focused on those media outlets the public is supposed to regard as the most fair, balanced, probing and challenging of governments and Big Business. ‘Thus far and no further’, as Noam Chomsky has described the most open or most liberal end of the narrow spectrum of establishment media.

    BBC News deserves particular scrutiny, not least because it regularly declares itself  ‘the world’s most trusted international news broadcaster’. That is not much of an accolade given that public trust in the media is crumbling; particularly in a country which has some of the worst ‘news’ media anywhere on the planet. The UK has an overwhelmingly right-wing and establishment press dominated by rich owners, and edited by compliant editors with the required ideologically-aligned views. As for the Guardian, which has always been a ‘liberal’ gatekeeper on behalf of power, investigative journalists Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis reported in 2019 that the paper has been:

    ‘successfully targeted by security agencies to neutralise its adversarial reporting of the “security state”, according to newly released documents and evidence from former and current Guardian journalists.’

    Moreover, other than a recent belated and mealy-mouthed defence, for many years the Guardian essentially abandoned and abused Julian Assange, along with the rest of the ‘mainstream’ media, after exploiting him and WikiLeaks.

    Couple all that with the fact that BBC News regularly follows the skewed, power-serving agenda set by UK press coverage, and it is no surprise that overall British public trust in the media is so low. As we noted last year, the extensive annual Eurobarometer survey across 33 countries revealed that the UK public’s trust in the press is rock bottom. Indeed, 2020 was the ninth year out of the past ten that the UK had come last.

    BBC Silence Over Israel As An Apartheid State

    One of the most egregious recent omissions by BBC News was last week’s groundbreaking report by leading Israeli human rights group B’Tselem naming Israel as ‘an apartheid state’ and ‘a regime of Jewish supremacy’:

    ‘In the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, the Israeli regime implements laws, practices and state violence designed to cement the supremacy of one group – Jews – over another – Palestinians.’

    Apartheid in the Palestinian Territories has long been recognised. For example, in 2004, a prominent South African professor of international law, John Dugard, then UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, wrote that there is ‘an apartheid regime’ in the territories ‘worse than the one that existed in South Africa.’

    Noam Chomsky concurred:

    ‘In the Occupied Territories, what Israel is doing is much worse than apartheid. To call it apartheid is a gift to Israel, at least if by “apartheid” you mean South African-style apartheid.

    ‘What is happening in the Occupied Territories is much worse. There is a crucial difference. The South African Nationalists needed the black population. That was their workforce…

    ‘The Israeli relationship to the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories is totally different. They just do not want them. They want them out, or at least in prison.’

    All this was damning enough. But the publication of the new B’Tselem report was the first time that Israeli human rights and legal experts had publicly stated that apartheid exists not just in the Occupied Territories, but throughout the whole region that Israel claims for itself.

    As the Israel-based British journalist Jonathan Cook observed:

    ‘By calling Israel an apartheid state and a “regime of Jewish supremacy”, B’Tselem has given the lie to the Israel lobby’s claim – bolstered by a new definition promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance – that it is antisemitic to suggest Israel is a “racist endeavour”.

    ‘B’Tselem, a veteran Israeli Jewish organisation with deep expertise in human rights and international law, has now explicitly declared that Israel is a racist state. Israel’s apologists will now face the much harder task of showing that B’Tselem is antisemitic, along with the Palestinian solidarity activists who cite its work.’

    As far as we are aware, there was no mention of the report on any of the flagship BBC News at 6 or 10 television programmes. Nor was there anything to be found on the BBC News website. Presumably, the BBC deemed it unworthy of the public’s attention. We challenged BBC foreign editor Andrew Roy, BBC world affairs editor John Simpson, BBC chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet and BBC digital news editor Stuart Millar for a response. Not one of them replied. It is perhaps significant that Millar moved to the BBC from the Guardian where, as deputy editor of Guardian US, he had scoffed at Julian Assange:

    ‘I like to think that #Assange chose the Ecuadorean embassy because it’s so convenient for Harrods’

    This is the archetypal sneering ‘mainstream’ journalist’s view of anyone who seriously exposes the truth and challenges power.

    As for B’Tselem’s landmark report detailing the reality of the Israeli state as an apartheid regime, it is possible that there were sporadic brief mentions in some outlying parts of the BBC. Longtime readers will recall that the BBC infamously buried revelations by Scott Ritter, a former chief UN weapons inspector, that Iraq had been fundamentally disarmed of any weapons of mass destruction, at 3am on the BBC World Service.

    In response to the B’Tselem report, John Pilger pointed out via Twitter:

    ‘Israel is top of the league for vaccinating its own people [against coronavirus]. The accolades say Israel is the “example”. False. Israel is denying the vaccine to Palestinians whose land and lives it controls. WHO has pleaded with Israel: to no avail. Apartheid in action.’

    Glossing Over Brutal Imperialism

    Here in the UK, the Tory government’s criminally incompetent response to the coronavirus pandemic has led to an appalling death toll – now the highest death rate of any country in the world – while ministers robotically repeat the mantra of ‘following the science’, with one U-turn after another. Meanwhile, many people are suffering tremendous hardship, losing their jobs or struggling to earn a living, or even unable to feed their children adequately.

    As Phil Miller, a staff writer for the excellent investigative journalism website Declassified UK, noted:

    ‘The UK now has over 100,000 covid deaths. That’s a result of government failure on a grand scale. The lack of calls for Johnson and ministers to resign is extraordinary’

    It is extraordinary. But, tragically, it is a natural consequence of how the state-corporate media represents and defends elite power, of which it is a key component. Any real dissent is smeared, swept to the margins or simply blanked. With the power of corporate media manifest in the demolition of Jeremy Corbyn’s prospects of becoming Prime Minister in 2019, it is entirely predictable that there is now no substantive political opposition to a destructive, elite-serving Tory government.

    Sir Keir Starmer, Labour’s lame Blairite successor, is a stalwart establishment figure who, at best, would only ever paper over a few cracks in the edifice of neoliberal economics. This is the corporate- and finance-driven system that is crushing the vast majority of the world’s population, destroying the natural environment and species at an alarming rate, and driving us all towards the precipice of climate breakdown. As we have noted before, and as we will see again below, no world leader anywhere is doing anything remotely sufficient to address this disaster.

    Starmer has actually called for the Labour party to emulate incoming US President Joe Biden’s ‘broad coalition’ to ‘see progressive values triumph over the forces of division and despair’. The stone-cold reality that Biden, set to be inaugurated today (20 January), represents huge financial interests and corporate power, and has an appalling record in supporting US imperialism and wars, appears to have escaped Starmer’s attention. But then, Starmer is also seemingly oblivious to the UK’s own imperial past and blood-soaked complicity in war crimes. How else could a Labour leader write:

    ‘We are at our best when the world knows we have the courage of our convictions and a clear moral purpose.’

    Wiping away the blood of countless US/UK atrocities across the globe, he continued:

    ‘For the United States of America and for Britain, this is the time to return to the world stage. This is the time for us to lead.’

    To gloss over Britain’s brutal past and present – to ignore the grievous crimes committed against Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, to name a few – is an insult to the UK’s many victims. For a supposed ‘progressive’ to do so is surely absurd. It can only result from being blind to the propaganda system so cogently explained by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in ‘Manufacturing Consent’ (Vintage, 1988). In this system, we are immersed in a brainwashing environment of mass media in which even the more ‘reputable’ news outlets such as Associated Press regurgitate doctrinal statements such as:

    ‘For decades, the U.S. has been an advocate for democracy abroad, using diplomatic pressure and even direct military intervention in the name of spreading the principles of a pluralistic system with a free and fair vote for political leaders. These tactics have generated both allies and enemies, and this year’s presidential vote perhaps more than any other is testing the strength of the values it promotes around the world.’

    A safe pair of hands like Sir Keir would never recognise, far less, criticise such assertions for the dangerous, ideological and ahistorical nonsense that they are. Instead, Starmer is locked into an elite-friendly mindset apparent whenever he proclaims his establishment credentials, as here via Twitter:

    ‘This is also an important moment for the world. It is a chance to reassert America’s place as a force for good on the world stage. A nation that will work with Britain and other allies to defeat this pandemic and fight climate change.’

    The reply from Media Lens reader Ryan Moon was apt:

    ‘When, specifically, has the US (& UK) been a “force for good in the world”? Supporting Suharto & Pinochet maybe? In Yemen & Libya? In the Chagos Islands? Nicaragua might have a few choice words about that description, too. Grow a spine.’

    Biologist and science writer Richard Dawkins, like so many other prominent members of the liberal commentariat, once again revealed his deep ignorance of history and world affairs:

    ‘With few exceptions like Putin & Farage, the entire world welcomes President Biden and Vice-President Harris. After four years of lies, venal hypocrisy and vicious hostility to decency and humane values, America has taken a major step towards making America great again.’

    Historian Mark Curtis, co-founder of Declassified UK, responded:

    ‘The thing is, @RichardDawkins, while you’re right to welcome the demise of the contemptible Trump, as I do, the “lies, venal hypocrisy and vicious hostility to decency and humane values” are just routine features of every US presidency, especially in foreign policy.’

    Meanwhile, it was no surprise to see a senior Guardian journalist unleashing purple prose in praise of Biden. David Smith, the Guardian’s Washington DC bureau chief, declared that ‘with empathy and humility, Biden sets out to make America sane again’. The ideological rhetoric continued to gush out across Guardian column inches:

    ‘After the mental and moral exhaustion of the past four years, Biden made America sane again in 15 minutes. It was an exorcism of sorts, from American carnage to American renewal.’

    Readers with long memories will recall similar Guardian effusions of liberal ordure when Barack Obama was elected in 2008 to ‘rebrand America’ and serve as the eloquent ‘cool’ figurehead of US corporate and imperial might. That is the Guardian worldview in a nutshell.

    The harsh truth is that the corporate media, including BBC News and the Guardian, has a stranglehold on any prospect for changing society. The transfer of US power from Trump to Biden provided the briefest permissible glimpse of mild scepticism being broadcast from corporate newsrooms. This was most notable with Trump vociferously contesting the US presidential elections results, claiming election fraud on a grand scale. The repeated buzz phrase from journalists reporting Trump’s claims was ‘without offering evidence’. Thus, BBC news presenter Mishal Husain told the nation’s television audience on 8 November last year:

    ‘President Trump has been out on the golf course and made further claims of election fraud without offering evidence.’

    The point was emphasised in a news piece by BBC North America correspondent Nick Bryant:

    ‘the president took to the golf course this morning continuing to make unsubstantiated claims that the election was rigged.’

    This narrative was repeated across the ‘mainstream’ media.

    But those important caveats – ‘without further evidence’ and ‘unsubstantiated claims’ – are routinely missing when propaganda declarations are, or were, made by the US/UK about Iraq’s mythical ‘WMD’; or when the public is told that the West’s ‘security’ and military forces need to counter the ‘threat’ from Russia, China, Iran, North Korea or whoever the latest ‘enemy’ happens to be;  or that ‘we’ need to keep Saudi Arabia as an ‘ally’; that Israel only ever ‘retaliates’ in the face of Palestinian ‘provocation’, that the US is a neutral ‘peace broker’ in the Middle East; or that the US/UK defend freedom and human rights around the world. On and on flow the propaganda assertions, without serious challenge from a compliant media. Suddenly, when it really matters, the media’s supposed enthusiasm for ‘fact checking’ dries up.

    Julian Assange And Guardian Hypocrisy

    We have seen the ugly truth in the brutal, inhumane treatment of Julian Assange, arguably the most important Western dissident, journalist and publisher in recent years, by western ‘democracies’, the major news media, and a cruel system of court ‘justice’ operating in London. During a recent online conversation, acclaimed film director Ken Loach nailed the despicable role of the Guardian, in particular, in persecuting and undermining Assange:

    ‘It’s one of those cases that clarifies the role of the media […] there’s a collusion of silence. There doesn’t need to be an active conspiracy; they all understand the steps of the dance. “We’re going to keep quiet about this”. The Guardian did publish some [WikiLeaks] material, but then turned on Julian. And typical with the liberal press, there’s a degree of hypocrisy. They want to have a foot in both camps. They want to be both seen as part of the responsible establishment; they also want to speak truth to power. But they’re compromised on both fronts. And their attacks on Julian Assange were critical in undermining his presence as a journalist, and being seen as a journalist. And the scurrilous attacks on him, for year after year; [and their] failure to really campaign against the torture for ten years.’

    He added:

    ‘There could not be a clearer case of shoot the messenger, and let the scoundrel go free. I mean, here you have people – Bush, Blair, propagandists like Alastair Campbell – wheeled out on the BBC, like Newsnight. They have season tickets to the current affairs programmes that tell us what to think. They are responsible for – what – up to a million deaths, four, five, million people made homeless, destruction of Iraq; the most atrocious war crimes, in an illegal war – an illegal war, so every activity is illegal on account of that, war crimes – they should be indicted. The man who told us about those crimes is condemned to rot, at the very least, and is in danger of never seeing the light of day again, or of being executed, and we know some politicians in the States have called for precisely that. There could not be a more outrageous, a more egregious example of the messenger being crucified and the scoundrels, the villains, the criminals getting away with this.’

    As musician Brian Eno said during the discussion:

    ‘Julian is a threat [to power] because he exposes an illusion that we are generally being told to support. And that illusion is that we live in a democracy. So, the fundamental concept of democracy is that people make decisions about their future, and about the state they live in. And the fundamental assumption of democracy is that people have the information on which to make those decisions. So, clearly, for democracy to work we have to have good information, otherwise we’ll make bad decisions.’

    ‘The Gravity Of The Situation Requires Fundamental Changes To Global Capitalism’

    The most compelling evidence that there is no functioning democracy in capitalist societies is all around us: global environmental collapse and climate breakdown.

    A new scientific report this month warns that the planet is facing a ‘ghastly future of mass extinction, declining health and climate-disruption upheavals’ that threaten human survival. The study, published in ‘Frontiers in Conservation Science’ by a group of 17 experts, observes that:

    ‘The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its lifeforms – including humanity – is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts.’

    Somewhat couched in academic language, the urgency and starkness of the warning are nevertheless clear:

    ‘The gravity of the situation requires fundamental changes to global capitalism, education, and equality, which include inter alia the abolition of perpetual economic growth, properly pricing externalities, a rapid exit from fossil-fuel use, strict regulation of markets and property acquisition, reigning in corporate lobbying, and the empowerment of women.’

    They added:

    ‘the mainstream [sic] is having difficulty grasping the magnitude of this loss, despite the steady erosion of the fabric of human civilization.’

    Meanwhile, the climate crisis has been worsening, with 2020 declared by scientists as the joint hottest year ever recorded, despite the pandemic lockdowns. There were record Arctic wildfires and Atlantic tropical storms.

    The European Commission’s Matthias Petschke said:

    ‘The extraordinary climate events of 2020 […] show us that we have no time to lose. We must come together as a global community, to ensure a just transition to a net zero future. It will be difficult, but the cost of inaction is too great…’

    In the wake of the US presidential election last November, the BBC’s John Simpson had tweeted:

    ‘According to the New York Times, exit polls showed that 84% of people who voted for Trump thought that global warming wasn’t an important issue.’

    But, of course, if political leaders everywhere believed that climate breakdown is an important issue – the overriding issue facing humanity – they would be tackling it with the urgency that it requires now.

    As climate campaigner Greta Thunberg pointed out last week:

    ‘In 2010 our leaders signed “ambitious goals to protect wildlife and ecosystems”. By 2021 they’d failed on every single one. Each day they choose not to act. Instead they sign more “ambitious” non-binding future goals while passing policy locking in destructive business as usual.’

    This was her acerbic summary of political discussions at the One Planet Summit in Paris on 11 January:

    LIVE from #OnePlanetSummit in Paris:

    Bla bla nature

    Bla bla important

    Bla bla ambitious

    Bla bla green investments

    Bla bla great opportunity

    Bla bla green growth

    Bla bla net zero

    Bla bla step up our game

    Bla bla hope

    Bla bla bla…*

    *locking in decades of further destruction

    We have arrived at this terminal stage of capitalism because we are being held in a death-grip by a system of economics and exploitation that is coated with a veneer of ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, ‘progress’ and other convenient ideological myths. The corporate media has sold the public those myths, perpetuating and deepening the various interlocking crises that threaten to wipe out homo sapiens, along with countless other species.

    We can still escape the worst if we face up to reality. As Gail Bradbrook and Jem Bendell, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and founder of Deep Adaptation respectively, explain:

    ‘Our power comes from acting without escape from our pain.’

    They continue:

    ‘Paying attention fully to what is around us and in front of us, even though it hurts, is to be fully alive. […] Once we accept that anxiety and grief will be constant companions in this struggle, we can stay fully present to what is happening and respond accordingly. It means we do not grasp desperately at the latest idea of what might fix the climate and ecological emergency. Instead, we can help each other stay fully present to the difficult mess, so that we can try to reduce harm, save what we can and plant some seeds for what might come next.’

    A good start would be to reject the corporate media.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.


  • NOTE: Margaret Flowers and Askia Muhammad will co-host an inaugural special on Pacifica Radio on Wednesday, January 20 from 6:30 to 8:00 pm Eastern. It can be heard on WBAI and WPFW. The theme will be Dr. King’s triple evils and what Biden’s cabinet picks tell us about what we can expect from this administration. Guests include Dr. Greg Carr, Abby Martin and Danny Sjursen.

    Also, on Tuesday, January 26 at 8:00 pm Eastern, Popular Resistance will co-host a webinar, “COVID-19: How Weaponizing Disease and Vaccine Wars are Failing Us.” The webinar will be co-hosted by Margaret Flowers and Sara Flounders and it will feature Vijay Prashad, Max Blumethal, Margaret Kimberley and Lee Siu Hin. All are editors or contributors of the new book “Capitalism on a Ventilator.” Register at bit.ly/WeaponizingCOVID.

    This week we celebrate the life of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and witness the inauguration of our next president, Joe Biden. This inauguration will be unique, first, for being held during a pandemic and, second, for its heightened security in fear of another attack by Trump supporters. Downtown Washington, DC is normally secured during an inauguration and people must pass through checkpoints to get into the Mall and parade route, but this time is different.

    There are 25,000 members of the National Guard on duty in the city to protect the President and Members of Congress. But even this does not guarantee security. The FBI is screening every national guard member for ties to right wing militias and groups responsible for the January 6 assault on the Capitol. The ruling class experienced what it is like when those who are supposed to protect you don’t.

    This insecurity is another facet of a society in break down. As Dr. King warned us over 50 years ago:

    I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin to shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-centered’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. . . . A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

    Migrants march from Honduras to the United States with the hope of a better reception under a Biden administration (Luis Echeverria)

    The pandemic and recession have exposed more widely what many communities have known for a long time, that corporate profits are more important than their lives and that lawmakers serve the wealthy class. During the pandemic, the rich have gotten richer, the Pentagon budget has ballooned with bi-partisan support and the people have not received what they need to survive. Unemployment, loss of health insurance, hunger and poverty are growing while the stock market ended the year with record highs.

    Many are hopeful that a Democratic majority in Congress and a Democratic President will turn this around, and it is reasonable to expect there will be some positive changes. The Biden administration claims it will take immediate action to raise the federal minimum wage to $15/hour, extend the break on student loan payments, provide a one-time $1,400 payment and invest more in testing and vaccine administration, among other actions.

    These actions are welcome, but they are a far cry from what is necessary. A family with two parents working full time for minimum wage will still live in poverty, even at $15/hour. The majority of people in the United States, 65%, support giving $2,000/month to every adult during the pandemic. This is supported by 54% of Republicans polled and 78% of Democrats. People with student loans are calling for them to be cancelled, not delayed. And, as I wrote in Truthout, Biden’s priority for managing the pandemic is on reopening businesses and schools, not on taking the public health measures that are called for such as shutting down with guarantees of housing and economic support and nationalizing the healthcare system, as other countries have done.

    What is required is massive public investment in systemic changes that get to the roots of the crises we face. In addition to the triple evils that Dr. King spoke about, racism, capitalism and militarism, we can add the climate crisis. An eco-socialist Green New Deal such as that promoted by Howie Hawkins would get at the roots of each of these crises.

    Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute argues that the economy can handle a massive investment of public dollars without fear of negative consequences, such as inflation, because for too long the economy has been starving the public while funneling wealth to the top. It is time for redistribution of that wealth to serve the public good.

    In fact, Sam Pizzigati of Inequality.org writes that throughout history, governments have fallen when they fail to address wealth inequality and meet the people’s needs. This is the finding of a recent study called “Moral Collapse and State Failure: A View From the Past.” They write that the fall of pre-modern governments “can be traced to a principal leadership that inexplicably abandoned core principles of state-building that were foundational to these polities, while also ignoring their expected roles as effective leaders and moral exemplars.”

    From Socialist Alternative

    So far, it looks like what we can expect from the Biden Administration is a few tweaks to the system to placate people and relieve some suffering but not the system changes we require. Biden is actively opposed to national improved Medicare for All and a Green New Deal, two proposals that a majority of people, especially Democrats, support. Mark Dunlea explains why the Biden climate plan is inadequate for the dire situation we face.

    Biden’s cabinet picks and language make it clear that the United States’ aggressive foreign policy of regime change and wars for resources and domination will continue. Samantha Power, a war hawk, has been chosen to head the USAID, an institution that invests in creating chaos and regime change efforts in other countries. Victoria Nuland, who was a major leader of the US’ successful coup in Ukraine that brought neo-Nazis to power, has been picked for Deputy Secretary of State for Political Affairs. Biden’s choices for CIA Director, Mike Morell, and Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, are both torture proponents. Abby Martin of Empire Files exposes the dark backgrounds of several other nominees for Biden’s cabinet, including Antony Blinken as Secretary of State, Jake Sullivan as National Security Adviser, Linda Thomas-Greenfield for United Nations Ambassador and Michael Flourney to head the Pentagon.

    It also doesn’t appear that Democrats in Congress will show the necessary courage to fight for what the people need. Danny Haiphong of Black Agenda Report writes about the “Obama-fication” of “The Squad” and how they serve to protect the status quo and weaken the progressive movement. It is important to understand how they are the “more effective evil,” or as Gabriel Rockhill explains, they are the arm of liberal democracies that convince people to consent to the neo-liberal capitalism that is destroying our lives and the planet. This is how Western fascism rises within legislative bodies. Already, we are seeing champions of national improved Medicare for All, Bernie Sanders and Pramila Jayapal, back down to a position of lowering the age of Medicare eligibility, which would not solve our healthcare crisis, only delay that solution.

    Chris Hedges often warns us that we need to know what we are up against if we are to effectively challenge it. Dr. King warned us that our nation was heading toward spiritual death if we did not get to the roots of the crises, the triple evils. He demonstrated that social movements should not align themselves with capitalist political parties because then the movement becomes subservient to their interests and compromises its own interests. And he told us what we must do. Prior to King’s death, he was organizing an occupation of Washington, DC to demand an end to poverty.

    During the Biden administration, many of the progressive forces will work to weaken those of us who make demands for bold changes. They will try to placate us with a diverse cabinet of women and people of color who were chosen because they support capitalism, imperialism and systemic racism despite their identities. Chris Hedges describes this as a form of “colonialism.”

    Our tasks are to maintain political independence from the capitalist parties, struggle for systemic changes and embrace a bold agenda that inspires people to take action. Through strategic and intentional action, we can achieve the changes we need. We have a key ingredient for success – widespread support for the changes we need. Now, we only need to mobilize in ways that inspire people and that have an impact – strikes, boycotts, occupations and more that are focused on improving the lives of everyone.

    We can turn things around and reduce the suffering that is driving the polarization and trend towards violence in our country. It’s time to embrace our radical Dr. King.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • To say that there’s a political disconnect in the fight for a national single payer health care delivery system is to state the obvious. The struggle for M4ALL has grown due to decades of grassroots organizing alongside the gradual worsening of Americans’ health insurance coverage, with support now reaching 70% in the general public as reported by FOX News after the November elections.

    Yet now in the middle of a pandemic, where the USA accounts for a quarter of the world’s infections, and a third of the deaths, the USA’s for-profit healthcare system has no national plan or coordinated response. Instead, since so few Americans are going to the doctor this year, there is resounding joy in the industry as profits mount simultaneously with the despair of millions. The NYT reported an “embarrassment of profits” for some of the largest health insurance companies, a doubling of profits in the second quarter of 2020 compared to 2019. These obscene profits are coupled with staggering increases in wealth for billionaires in the healthcare sector. Their wealth has increased by 36.3% from 402.3 billion to $548 billion between April 7 and July 31, 2020. All this stands in sharp contrast to failing rural and inner city hospitals, smaller medical practices and the hundreds of thousands of unnecessary COVID deaths.

    For journalists and talking heads in the mainstream media, this dysfunctional monstrosity is just the acceptable reality of our healthcare system. Discussing any responsibility or alternatives are disregarded.

    With millions losing their job-based health coverage, millions more stuck with high insurance costs and lower benefits, Medicare for All is once again deemed off-the-table by all major politicians, including even its biggest proponents.

    This disconnect comes on top of a worsening economic crisis threatening to push millions out of their homes while half the population is living paycheck to paycheck, poverty rising and food insecurity is growing. On the other side of the class divide, trillions of dollars have been showered on the wealthy and corporations via the misnamed CARES ACT, and the world’s billionaires have increased their wealth 10.2 trillion during the COVID pandemic. If there’s ever a perfect storm of economic, social, and public health crises, it is now.

    The Republican leadership has taken advantage of this crisis and assigned blame to the largely unpopular ACA and fixated on its destruction. It has spent its political energy focusing on the high costs and other weaknesses of the ACA while never offering anything as a credible replacement.

    On the other end of the aisle, President Biden has clearly stated his opposition to M4ALL, promising to veto the bill if passed. Democrat House leader Nancy Pelosi is equally opposed, making the chances of a vote remote under the current leadership. The current Democrat platform focuses on “strengthening” the ACA, an easy attack vector for Republicans who are able to exploit the real failures of the ACA and continue to disorient the public.

    With these pitiful responses, disillusionment with the system is prevalent, and Americans are looking for alternatives.

    Controlled Opposition or Bottom Up Independent Movement?

    Which brings us to the nub of the issue. The M4ALL movement has grown, support is high and the need greater than ever. Grassroots organizing, the COVID-19 death spiral, combined with the continued deterioration of coverages and rising insurance costs has moved public support to a higher level despite a blizzard of attacks by opponents ranging from the insurance industry, media talking heads, politicians of both parties, unions, and liberals.

    As it currently stands, the public overwhelmingly favors M4ALL, and the main legislation, HR 1384, has over 100 cosponsors. Yet there’s no clear strategy or energy emerging to push the bill forward in Congress or mobilize public support at this crucial time.

    Despite an even deeper crisis than the 2008 recession, we are headed for a repeat of 2009, when the late John Conyers sponsored SP bill had more co-signers than any other healthcare legislation at the time, but was ditched by Democrats in favor of the ACA, a bill written by the insurance industry.

    Once again, Democrats are poised to join with Republicans to scuttle the immensely popular bill in favor of the insurance industry again, all under the meek disguise of “getting something accomplished”.

    Clearly, the M4All movement needs to rise to the occasion — or else risk jeopardizing its own credibility. Not only has public opinion overwhelmingly shifted in favor of M4All, but large numbers of Americans are ready to fight for it as well. The Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign drew huge amounts of activists out week after week for canvassing racked up a record number of donations.

    Now with the Sanders movement gone, and the pandemic exposing the injustices within the healthcare system, M4All supporters are looking for answers.

    The recent proposal by Jimmy Dore, YouTube political comedian, to force a vote on M4ALL in the House galvanized supporters, drawing tens of thousands to virtual town halls, but was overwhelmingly refuted by the officaldom of the Medicare for All movement. This has brought light on all the weaknesses of the present approach — an insider strategy that gives Congressional Democrats and the organizations that align with them too much power to unilaterally determine the direction of the struggle, while stifling voices in the grassroots. At this crucial moment, the strengthening of a popular movement is pushed aside for the sake of maintaining favorability within subsets of the Democratic party. In reality, grassroots energy is the real source of power. Rather than hitch their horses to insiders, movement leaders must drive the car, act and work in a non-partisan fashion to actually build real power.

    Where some critics of Dore agree with building a mass organizing force, they scoff at his proposal and instead say work must be confined within select electoral races tied to the Democratic party and insist congressional supporters like Jayapal and Ocasio Cortez are “allies” and should not be subject to criticism. Besides the “Squad”, there are already over 100 co-signers of HB1384. What is their role in strengthening the grassroots movement? Will they hold town hall meetings and build public coalitions in their district?

    Movement leaders must realize that the members of Congress must be dealt with from positions of principle and independence. Otherwise, the insider compromises progressive reps are subject to trickle down to the movement. If AOC says Medicare for All is off the table, the movement is weakened if there’s not leadership elsewhere standing up and pushing it forward. Public support is strong but we are up against an industry that is prepared to spend whatever is necessary to fight us at every turn — leadership is crucial.

    In the period ahead, the peoples expectations will grow and the need for M4ALL will become clearer but so will the power of corporate Democrats who now control all branches of government. They will muzzle any grassroots mass actions and push the insider strategy and demand obedience.

    Movement leaders should be wise to exploit a house vote, which would help many to understand the huge disconnect between Congress and the public. Actions like this can aid in forming a diverse coalition of labor, racial justice, and public health organizations to push for large demonstrations, public hearings, and petition drives. This is what we need to build towards: a united bloc of grassroots organizations and unions to push legislators to act.

    Labor Needs to Step Up and Fight

    However, labor and other organizations that should rise to the occasion and provide resources and independent leadership at this critical juncture are simply not capable, largely due to their deep ties to the Democratic party.

    Organized labor has been in a steady state of decline for the past few decades. Rather than use popular struggles such as M4A to try to gain back some ground, it has largely doubled down on the business union model of operation, which treats employers as “partners”, abandons the role of membership education, mobilization, and community outreach to increase union strength and the labor movement at-large.

    The lack of an organized independent current inside labor challenging the dead-end strategy of cooperation holds labor back. Witness labor’s silence over the past months on demanding wages be paid and healthcare for all workers during the pandemic, something almost all other developed countries have done. Despite hundreds of resolutions over the past decade supporting M4ALL at all levels of labor, real support is weak and ultimately folds when the Democrats give the orders. It has no real life or energy outside of a small handful of unions, and much of labor officialdom is indifferent or simply hostile to M4A, seeing brokered insurance plans as one of their last few selling points of a union to many workers, despite the share of unionized workers dropping yearly. This puts most of the top labor leadership at odds with both the growing mass of unorganized workers without unions and public opinion who are sympathetic to M4ALL and need real healthcare.

    In order to win M4A, other popular programs, and stave off its own decline, labor needs a mass upsurge against the corporate domination of society and its political allies. History shows that when labor engages its rank and file into popular action, it can sweep away major hurdles that seemed impossible to overcome. The passage of Social Security in the 1930’s is one such example.

    It needs an internal revitalization that advocates a fighting alternative program that mobilizes and puts people first instead of taking cues from “corporate partners” and Democratic politicians as to what is on and off the table. Building this necessary independent movement will ultimately clash with the party, and this is why Dore’s proposal has struck such a nerve. The multiple unfolding crises have put the need for a fundamental change in plain sight and progressives need to rise to the occasion.

    If our only hope for Medicare for All is phone banking for intermediate legislation deemed “on the table” by the progressive caucus and working to elect more progressive Democrats to Congress, the movement will never actually move forward. With an independent movement that doesn’t take cues from “allies” in Congress, but instead uses them to help move the agenda forward, we can reach a stage where it isn’t an isolated YouTube personality making such a suggestion but membership-led organizations, backed with the participation of ordinary people, who see themselves playing a real role in this fight.

    Ed Grystar is Chair of the Western Pennsylvania Coalition for Single Payer Healthcare. He has over thirty years experience in labor and health justice movements. Served as President of Butler County (PA) United Labor Council, AFL-CIO from 1987-2002, Western PA Labor coordinator for Jesse Jackson for President in 1988, PA coordinator for Dennis Kucinich for President in 2004. He has worked for a number of healthcare unions. Read other articles by Ed.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • by Roger D. Harris / January 12th, 2021

    The right-wing demonstration turned violent riot at the US Capitol on January 6 was a spectacle, complete with Confederate flags and a QAnon shaman in red-white-and-blue face paint. The Venezuelan government stated: “With this unfortunate episode, the United States is experiencing what it has generated in other countries with its policies of aggression.”

    Some half of the active electorate voted for Trump, who believed the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent. The other half of the active electorate was abhorrent about what happened in Washington on January 6, speaking with semi-religious reverence about the desecration of sacred institutions. They believed, in contrast, that it was the 2016 presidential election that was stolen. The Russians were the culprits then and, for the last four years, they supported politicians ever vigilant against détente breaking out with the second most powerful nuclear state.

    The meme, “Due to travel restrictions this year, the US had to organize the coup at home,” went viral. Rather than a coup, as claimed by many in mainstream media, what happened in DC was a riot. “There is a huge difference,” observes Glenn Greenwald, “between, on the one hand, thousands of people shooting their way into the Capitol after a long-planned, coordinated plot with the goal of seizing permanent power, and, on the other, an impulsive and grievance-driven crowd more or less waltzing into the Capitol as the result of strength in numbers and then leaving a few hours later.”

    Whether Trump intended to stage a coup was secondary to whether he could do so. The institutions of state power were aligned against him, as indicated by the last ten secretaries of defense who admonished no go. Too much attention has been wasted obsessing about what was, at best, a delusion.

    The myriad maladies of the American body politic did not originate with Mr. Trump and will not terminate with his departure. He was unique, but not exceptional. His style was all his own, but the substance of the reign of 45 revealed a dreary continuity with his predecessors. And when Trump made feeble attempts to deviate, as with ending endless wars, the Democrats and the permanent state slapped him back into line.

    In fact, Trump may not go away. And for that he will have the liberals to thank. Just like some Trotskyists have made a career of exorcising the specter of Stalin, who died in 1953, liberals will be doing the same with Trump.

    Even if Trump wanted to gracefully bow out of public life – an unlikely outcome – liberals would keep on flogging his dead horse, for Trump has been their greatest asset. And well the liberals need to hold on to the ghost of Trump, as being “not-Trump” is their defining character now that liberalism is dead. Their agenda consists of simply carrying forward the same basic program of neoliberalism at home (but with diversity) and imperialism abroad (but with responsibility to protect) as Trump, only with more finesse.

    How unfathomable it is that a blowhard, paunchy, septuagenarian with a dyed hair combover could lead a right-wing cult movement. Far more bizarre is that person is also the president of the US, who in the 2020 election received more votes than any candidate in history except for his successful challenger. Arguably a white supremist, he garnered 58% of the white voters but also 18% of the black male voters and 36% of the Latino men. That 83% of those who felt the economy was a prime issue chose Trump is an insight into why someone so repugnant could attract so many votes.

    In short, the system has not been meeting the needs of its people, its naked dysfunctionality is bare for all to see, and the ruling circles are experiencing a crisis of legitimacy. The response of the rulers to mass discontent is not to address the root causes but to step up suppression as the trajectory of neoliberalism lurches toward fascism. The aftermath of the events of January 6 has precipitated blowbacks by the ruling elites, such as proposed anti-domestic terrorism measures, in anticipation of popular resistance to the intensifying contradictions of the US imperial project.

    The drama played out on January 6 reflected the distress generated by historical developments in late-stage capitalism: globalization and automation-induced job losses, accelerating wealth and income inequality, reduced access to educational opportunities and health care, food insecurity and hunger, and the threat of becoming homeless.

    The system’s unresolved contradictions are increasingly visible to its victims in both progressive (e.g., Black Lives Matter movement) and reactionary forms (e.g., the Trump phenomenon). Neither of these tendencies are likely to fade away because the conditions that precipitated them will only be exacerbated. Nativist and white-supremist elements – long an undercurrent in the American polity – have been given oxygen by Trump. The Democrats dismiss the right-wing insurgency as a “basket of deplorables.” The left needs to both resist the growing right-wing presence and neutralize them, if not win them over to understand the true source of their discontent.

    The Capitol building riot is being spun to distract from the failure of the neoliberal state to meet the needs of its citizens. Suddenly forgotten are urgently needed reforms like Medicare for All and a stimulus that benefits working people. Instead, the incoming administration of Joe Biden is pushing extensions of the authoritarian state under the guise of combatting domestic terrorism. But thanks to the Patriot Act, for which Biden takes credit as its prime writer, and other such repressive legislation already on the books, the state has already too much power over its citizens.

    These extensions of the coercive power of the state have been and will be used to suppress popular movements and need to be resisted. Beware, the mania for censoring so-called hate speech is a tool for silencing any dissent to the ruling powers. The price of cutting off Trump’s rants on Twitter and Facebook is the ascendence of monopoly corporations that are so powerful that they can even muzzle an elected president. Commonplace is the new normal of unchecked private corporations collecting data 24/7 on our most intimate activities.

    Because the ruling class cannot solve the maturing contradictions of global capitalism, their response to their crisis of legitimacy is to increasingly rely on repression. We cannot rely on the Democrats, who are now backed by the so-called moderate Republicans and underwritten by finance capital, because they are the ones cheerleading the descent into accelerating authoritarianism, as they champion censorship and the oppressive security state measures.

    Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad warn of three world existential crises: nuclear annihilation, climate catastrophe, and neoliberal destruction of the social contract. The ruling class is preparing for a real insurrection and, given the alternative, the people may not disappoint them.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • How strange it must have seemed for US lawmakers to be suddenly facing what was described as a “mob”, not so much storming as striding into the Capitol with angry purpose.  A terrified security force proved understaffed and overwhelmed.  Members of Congress hid.  Five people lost their lives.

    With the US imperium responsible for fostering numerous revolutions and coups across the globe during its history, spikes of schadenfreude could be found.  China’s state paper Global Times found it irresistible to use the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong as a point of comparison.  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s remark that the Hong Kong protests were “a beautiful sight to behold” was rubbed in the face of US lawmakers.  Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hua Chunying, remarking on the gloating reaction of Chinese netizens, also referred to remarks by US lawmakers on the Hong Kong protests.

    It did not take long for carelessly chosen words such as “coup” to find their way into the political stuttering, as if President Donald Trump had somehow been having beer hall meetings in an atmosphere thick with plotting.  Presidential historian Michael Beschloss was one.  “This is a coup d’état attempted by the president of the United States.”

    Many members of Congress concurred. “What happened at the US Capitol yesterday was an insurrection against the United States, incited by the president,” concluded Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer in a statement.  “This president should not hold office one day longer.” Republican Senator Mitt Romney also stated that “an insurrection, incited by the president of the United States,” had taken place.  Republican Rep. John Curtis went further, calling the move on the Capitol “an act of domestic terrorism inspired and encouraged by our president.”

    Meaty words for scenes more nastily absurd than politically planned or devised, despite assertions by Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming that “the president formed the mob, the president incited the mob, the president addressed the mob.”

    This summation is all too tidy.  It would have been far better to see the rioters much as the commander-and-chief himself: disposed to chaos, unrepentant in petulance.  There was the QAnon conspiracy theorist Jake Angeli, sans shirt but donning a fur hat with Viking horns and spear, treating the occasion like a Christmas panto.  There was Richard “Bigo” Barnett, who occupied, for a moment, the chair of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, leaving a note reading: “Nancy, Bigo was here, you bitch.”

    There is no denying that such protestors had been offered rich encouragement by the president to protest the certification of the election results by Congress.  “You’ll never take back our country with weakness,” he said coaxingly.  Preoccupied with his own version of the stab-in-the-back theory involving a “stolen” election, Trump is crafting a version of history that, should it stick, will propel him for a future campaign to retake the White House.

    The Capitol incident had tickled and teased out the prospects of a real coup, currently being hatched by a rerun of the impeachment narrative and suggestions that the 25th Amendment of the US constitution be invoked.  Section 4 of the amendment establishes a process by which the president can be declared “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” provided the vice president and a majority of “the principal officers of the executive departments” think so.  The prospect of a hazardous use of that amendment is in the offing.

    The wording of the amendment is broad and undefined, even though the original intent of it remains one of removing an executive who suffers true incapacity.  The idea of medical emergency lies at its core.  Even then, a letter has to be signed to the speakers of the House of Representatives and the Senate.  The president is also given a chance to offer a written response contesting the finding, leaving it to Congress to decide.  A supermajority of two-thirds in both congressional chambers would then be required.

    Press outlets such as the New York Times and Washington Post, and organisations such as the National Association of Manufacturers have not bothered themselves too much about the original nature of the provision and its purpose.  President and CEO of the latter, Jay Timmons, took the broadest interpretation for the sake of urgency.  “Vice President Pence, who was evacuated from the Capitol, should seriously consider working with the Cabinet to invoke the 25th amendment to preserve democracy.”

    Various lawmakers have also adopted an expansive, if cursory interpretation.  In the view of Vermont’s Republican Governor Phil Scott, “President Trump should resign or be removed from office by his Cabinet, or by the Congress.”

    Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee, in their note to Pence, urge him along with a majority of Cabinet secretaries, to find Trump unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.  They even go for a layman’s diagnosis of his mental wellbeing.  “Even his video announcement this afternoon, President Trump revealed that he was not mentally sound and is still unable to process and accept the results of the 2020 election.”

    When the Democrats refused to believe the results of the 2016 elections, showing a persistent inability to process and accept it, they could never be said to be mentally unwell.  Unhinged and delusional, maybe, but hardly a case of mental corrosion.

    Law academic Brian Kalt, a keen student of the 25th amendment, advances two scenarios where section 4 might be used.  The first involves “a president whose impairment is severe enough that the helm is, effectively, unmanned, even if he is still somehow able to claim that he is able to discharge his powers and duties.”  Examples might entail severe strokes, a psychotic break or moderate dementia.

    The second instance, which still suggests psychotic behaviour, would involve impairment “to the point of teeing up a disaster,” much like General Jack D. Ripper’s flight of murderous fancy in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove.  “Consider, for example, an unhinged president who orders a capricious nuclear strike against another county – the problem here is not that the president is ‘unable’ so much as all too able to wipe out millions of lives.”

    While Kalt was writing this in 2019, his views convinced Jack Goldsmith of Harvard Law School and David Priess, chief operating officer at Lawfare, that Trump had met the standard of removal set by the 25th Amendment.  He had shown an “inability or unwillingness for weeks to distinguish reality from fiction about the results of the election” and had shown a “detachment from exercising the basic responsibilities of the office”.

    Andrew C. McCarthy in the National Review prefers, with much justification, that this is simply pushing things too far, confusing delusion and character flaws with incapacity and inability.  He has pointed out, with some accuracy, that the amendment was “not applicable to a situation in which the president is alleged to be unfit for reasons of character, or due to the commission of political offences that may arise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanours.”  Trump might be delusional and self-interested, but these were not “competent diagnoses of mental instability.”

    Within the various disturbed readings of the 25th Amendment lie the same rages that caused Caliban to despair at seeing his own face.  Trump is the symptom, the agent of chaos, the disrupter making much of a bedridden Republic, a good deal of it the making of his opponents.  To use the language of constitutionalism masquerading as an insurrection is intended to finally entomb Trumpism.  What this risks doing is politically martyring a man who will leave office on January 20.

    So far, Pence is resolutely opposed to using the measure and has the support of various Trump cabinet officials.  According to the New York Times, “Those officials, a senior Republican said, viewed the effort as likely to add to the current chaos in Washington rather than deter it.”  Utilising it would add the most combustible fuel to the argument Trump has been making all along: that establishment forces, always keen to box him during his administration, are now intent on removing him.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The year 2020 is coming to an end, and that is cause for celebration, in COVID-19-safe ways, of course.

    The 2020s is the beginning of an era in which the roots of the crises we face are coming into clear focus. The Trump administration openly exposed these crises through its candid disdain for the well-being of people and the planet. But the systems that are bringing our demise – capitalism, white supremacy, racism, colonialism, patriarchy and imperialism – have been in place for a long time, since the founding of the United States on stolen land using forced labor.

    I interviewed Miko Peled, an author and activist for Palestinian rights, on Clearing the FOG this week about current affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and he described how the institutions within the Israeli state are falling apart. When I asked why, he said it was because it was founded as an illegal and corrupt state. That is not a foundation for a stable structure.

    Similarly, the United States was not built on a stable foundation. Now, it is falling as a world power and global empire. Change is coming. What that looks like is up to us to determine.

    Important lessons from 2020

    The first lesson from 2020 is that neoliberal capitalism perpetuated by both major political parties knows no limits. It will dismantle the US Postal Service, sacrifice healthcare workers, evict people from their homes, allow police to murder with impunity and continue to funnel obscene wealth to the top 1% while nearly half the people in the country live in poverty. This trajectory will not stop on its own. The corporatists have gotten away with it for too long. They don’t know how to stop.

    The second lesson is that we must rely on each other for survival, not only in a time of crisis, but always. The concept of rugged individualism is a myth. Our futures on this planet are bound together. What happens in one place doesn’t stay there, as the climate crisis and COVID-19 pandemic demonstrate. We need to solve our problems together.

    On a positive note, these crises have driven the rise of mutual aid networks. They are providing people with basic necessities and organizing eviction defense to keep people in their homes. They model what our path forward looks like. The future depends on restructuring our society through solidarity and cooperation.

    A third lesson is that we in the United States have a lot to learn from our brothers and sisters around the world, both in how to resist the destructive forces of capitalism and imperialism and how to build alternatives to them that empower people and are sustainable. The economic war the US is waging against one-third of the global population using illegal coercive measures (aka sanctions) is also being waged against the people at home. Countries like Cuba and Venezuela, which are under an economic blockade, are showing that you don’t have to be a wealthy county to provide for your people’s basic needs like healthcare, education, housing and food. We could have universal healthcare, free education, affordable housing for everyone and local organic food production too, but it will take a revolution.

    The path forward

    In 2021 and beyond, it is time to break with the notion that we can elect our way out of this. The current campaign to #ForceTheVote in Congress on Medicare for All is revealing what happens when “progressives” are elected into a capitalist, imperialist party. They are marginalized and/or become champions of that corrupt structure. This campaign is a critical test to determine whether the Democrats will fight for our interests or whether their words are empty rhetoric designed to placate us so they could regain power.

    We should attempt to hold elected officials accountable, but our success in winning the changes we need requires that we organize outside of electoral arenas. In our current system, the Democrats and Republicans control the electoral process. When we work within that realm, we are working in a system in which we have the disadvantage. It is an anti-democratic structure that distracts us from the long term community base-building work needed to establish real political power.

    This is another lesson we can learn from other countries. Liberal democracies are designed to support capitalism. We need systemic change in the way we govern our society. There are alternatives being developed that are based on participatory democracy so that people have the power to make decisions.

    Venezuela is one country that is struggling to build a participatory structure from the local to the national level. That is one reason why it is being targeted by the US and why we who live in the US need to work to stop our government’s illegal interference in its revolutionary process.

    Around the world, including in the US, people are experimenting with new systems. During the 2020s, we need to expand on that work. One way to start is locally by identifying needs in our communities and working collectively to meet them. If you need ideas on building alternatives, check out the “create” section of our website or the “new economy” tag. You might also want to check out the free Popular Resistance School on how social transformation occurs.

    In this decade, we can “stop the machine and create a new world.” We will need to resist the harmful policies and practices that exist through strategic campaigns and replace them with alternative systems rooted in the values we want to achieve. Within this framework, there is something for everyone to do. If we succeed, we will create a stable foundation for the country and decrease the harm the United States does to the rest of the world. That will truly be something to celebrate.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • by Gerald E. Scorse / December 30th, 2020

    A weary America is suffering through the worst public health crisis in more than a century. Covid-19 has taken over 300,000 lives. Parts of the economy have effectively shut down, throwing millions out of work and bankrupting businesses large and small. In the richest country in the world, Thanksgiving dinner for tens of thousands came from food banks at the end of traffic jams stretching for miles.

    Now for the good news. Vaccines have arrived sooner than anybody could have expected. The latest pandemic relief bill should keep a double-dip recession from setting in. Lastly—if a divided Congress can only come together—low-income Americans and their kids could get a boost from a policy guide that few people have ever heard of.

    It’s called MVPF, shorthand for Marginal Value of Public Funds. The lesson it holds for legislators is simple and powerful: Public monies should go where they deliver the highest return, to families on the lower end of the income scale. To tax expert and author Len Burman, the idea is a fiscal no-brainer:

    Instead of supply-side tax policy, try child-side tax policy. Investment in kids (especially in families with low incomes) pays huge returns. As adults, they are better educated, healthier, and pay more taxes.

    The MVPF concept comes from a scholarly paper by Harvard economist Nathaniel Hendren and doctoral candidate Ben Sprung-Keyser. They did a long-run cost/benefit analysis of “133 historical policy changes over the past half-century in the United States.” The numbers they arrived at show how much bang various tax policies deliver for the bucks they cost.

    Easily the biggest bang comes from programs directed at kids: “Our results suggest that direct investments in low-income children’s health and education has historically had the highest MVPFs…Many such policies have paid for themselves as the government recouped the cost of their initial expenditures through additional taxes collected” and less need for welfare in later years.

    Thanks to Democrats, Congress ultimately included a bit of MVPF thinking in the $900 billion stimulus.

    Beneficiaries of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) were in danger of taking a huge hit. The more the pandemic had already cost them, the more they stood to lose.

    Tax credits rise as income rises. For low-wage workers suddenly without jobs, their lower incomes in 2020 would have meant lower benefits come tax time in April.

    To take just one example, “A single mother with two children whose earnings fall from $15,000 in 2019 to $5,000 in 2020 [would have seen] her EITC fall from $5,920 to $2,010 and her Child Tax Credit fall from $1,875 to $375. That’s a loss of $5,410 in tax credits on top of her $10,000 loss in wages.”

    The relief bill skirted that disaster with a lookback, a provision that lets CTC and EITC recipients use either 2019 or 2020 incomes on their upcoming tax returns. (To get that provision, Democrats had to sign on to a much-derided business tax break for “three-martini lunches”.)

    Besides the lookback, there’s also a decent chance that other MVPF-type legislation could become law in the Biden years.

    His campaign tax plan included a proposal to make child care more affordable by upping the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit. He also wants to raise the CTC for at least the duration of the pandemic. As House Ways and Means chairman Richard Neal (D-MA) put it, “If you are talking about tax relief, let’s get tax relief to the lower end of the economic scale.”

    Numerous bills taking that direction are already on the Democratic agenda—so numerous that the Tax Policy Center collected them in a 22-page summary with the daunting title “Understanding the Maze of Recent Child and Work Incentive Proposals.” The summary’s opening sentence goes to the heart of everything that comes after: “Policymakers continue to grapple with the related issues of unequal incomes, relatively poor health, education, and economic outcomes for low-income children, and hardship among low- and moderate income families.”

    The proposals are all there for the enacting. Congress should take its cue from MVPF: Spend taxpayer money where it gets the highest return, on low-income families and kids.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • And Esau said to Jacob, Feed me, I pray thee, with that same red pottage; for I am faint;
    And Jacob said, Sell me this day thy birthright.
    And Esau said, Behold, I am at the point to die: and what profits shall this birthright do me?
    And Jacob said, Swear to me this day; and he sware unto him: and he sold his birthright unto Jacob.”

    — Genesis 25: 30-33

    Despite the bizarre fantasy by Trump supporters that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, there was, in fact, genuine electoral fraud in the US. This fraud was more intense and blatant than any unproven claims of election meddling by Russians, Chinese, Syrians or Iranians. It was an all-out attack on political rights not seen since Joseph McCarthy era. Yet, this time, it was inspired not by Republicans but by Democrats and their liberal allies.

    Despite the bizarre fantasy by Trump supporters that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, there was, in fact, genuine electoral fraud in the US.  This fraud was more intense and blatant than any unproven claims of election meddling by Russians, Chinese, Syrians or Iranians.  It was an all-out attack on political rights not seen since Joseph McCarthy era.  Yet, this time, it was inspired not by Republicans but by Democrats and their liberal allies.

    If manipulation of information from Russia via social networking is “vote tampering”, then how much more vote tampering is elimination of an entire party from news stories and even from the ballot so that many voters are not aware of its existence?  In all likelihood, efforts by the Democratic Party (DP) affected the mind-set of more voters than all the right-wing howls put together.

    Ballot Manipulation: Imagined and Real

    Attempts by the DP to destroy the Green Party (GP) date back to at least 2000 when it screamed that Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the election.  There are too many reasons that this was false to list, but clearly the DP created its own demise by losing massive numbers of black voters via the Clinton-Gore-Biden scheme of “mass incarceration.”  Rather telling is the fact that then vice-president Gore gaveled down House of Representative Democrats who raised objections to the supposed win of George W. Bush.

    The DP is infamous for the way it has openly collaborated with the Republican Party (RP) to eliminate small parties from nationally publicized debates.  Along with reports in the corporate press which only covers parties made “viable” by big money, the debates unambiguously manipulate elections by shielding voters from hearing candidates who often reflect their views more closely.

    Presidential debates demonstrate one of the many ways big money controls US elections. Critical for putting John Kennedy in the White House, the first televised debate in 1960 was followed by refusals of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to participate in debates.  Debates did not reappear until 1976 when the League of Women Voters (LWV) sponsored debates which Jimmy Carter used to oust president Gerald Ford.

    In 1980, the LWV announced that the debates would include independent candidate John Anderson along with Carter and Ronald Reagan.  Carter demanded LWV eliminate Anderson.  But the League held firm; the debates were between Reagan and Anderson; and Reagan won the election.

    The LWV hosted its last debate in 1984, between Reagan and Walter Mondale.  In 1987 the DP and RP created the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), with Democratic and Republican chairmen serving as the organization’s co-chairs.  Apparently, “the Democratic and Republican parties decided that the group [LWV] was a little too independent for their tastes.”

    The CPD next decided that the 1988 debates would be restricted to Republican George Bush and Democrat Michael Dukakis.  It threw a sop to LWV, offering it the opportunity to host the debates, but its president Nancy M. Neuman said that “the demands of the two campaign organizations would perpetrate a fraud on the American voter … The League has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public.”  CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite. added that the resulting debates were “phony, part of an unconscionable fraud,”  With the LWV out of the picture, that fraud has existed through 2020.  Though the LWV had stood its ground against the Democrats in 1980, it would reverse its own principles and participate in the hoodwinking that it scorned in 1987.  During the 2020 elections, the LWV Voters Guide which appeared on page V1 of the October 15, 2020 St. Louis Post-Dispatch refused to print the brief platforms of either the Green Party or Libertarian Party, falsely claiming that neither had satisfied its guidelines.

    Missouri Green Party treasurer and candidate for Missouri State Treasurer Joe Civettini called the local LWV, asking why it excluded the platform of Howie Hawkins from its listing.  Receiving a confused answer  from its St. Louis branch, he sent an email to the national LWV office, quoting their criteria for inclusion, explaining how Hawkins/Walker met the criteria, and requesting an explanation, apology and reprinting of the Voters Guide. The only possible bone of contention was the League’s requirement regarding qualification in sufficient states.

    So Civettini wrote “The candidate must qualify for the ballot in enough states to win a majority of electoral votes. Howie Hawkins/Angela Walker are on the ballot in 30 states or territories, and qualified as write-in on 17 others. Only LA, NV, OK, and SD will not be able to vote for, or write-in, Hawkins/Walker.”  Apparently contemptuous of small parties that it once defended, the LWV sent no reply.

    Green Party candidate for St. Louis County Executive Betsey Mitchell was similarly ignored in the Voters’ Guide of KSDK radio.  An interesting thing happened in the middle of writing this article.  I was clearing out old emails and ran across an exchange I had with KSDK radio during my 2016 campaign as Green Party candidate for the Governor of Missouri.  KSDK requested that I respond to questions for posting on their web.  Apparently, between 2016 and 2020 KSDK changed its policy from soliciting statements from all candidates who would appear on the ballot to focusing on only the corporate parties.  It makes one wonder: Did the Democratic Party have its finger in that pie?

    One of the most egregious omissions was in the website of St. Louis Public Radio (SLPR) where it featured candidates for Missouri state offices.  It provided names and statements of all Democrat and Republican candidates and excluded Missouri Green Party candidates whose names were on all election ballots: Jerome Bauer for Governor, Kelly Dragoo for Lieutenant Governor, Joe Civettini for Treasurer, and Paul Lehmann for Secretary of State.  It also excluded Libertarian Party candidates.

    On October 25, I wrote to SLPR that “It appears that SLPR is attempting to interfere in elections in ways that would have worse outcomes than efforts by the Republican Party to disenfranchise voters due to ethnicity, income or age.  The SLPR 2020 Voters Guide misrepresents and distorts choices to the St. Louis area which appear on ballots by intentionally presenting the only candidates as those of the Democratic Party and Republican Party.  This creates a bias among those who view the Voters Guide that they must chose between the two big-money parties.  By doing so, SLPR creates a predisposition among voters prior to casting their ballots and thereby distorts electoral outcomes.”

    It was not enough for allies of the Democrats to block information from appearing in print or on websites.  While allies of the RP went on a physical rampage to attack Black Lives Matter protesters, DP allies went on a legal rampage to wipe the Greens off the ballot.  The attack on the Green Party was not limited to presidential nominees in “swing” states where the race between Biden and Trump would be close.  As explained in Krystal Ball’s YouTube video Dem WAR On Green Party Exposes Voter Suppression Hypocrisy, “in Montana they successfully got five Green Party candidates kicked off the ballot. The GP got a sufficient number of signatures… but the DP actually went and contacted voters who had signed the GP petition and bullied them into recanting their signature … The Texas Democratic Party is suing to keep GP candidates off the ballot…At issue is requirement that third party candidates must pay a $5000 filing fee.”

    The Wisconsin Supreme Court decided that the Greens should be taken off the ballot because its Vice-Presidential candidate Angela Walker committed the horrendous crime of moving during the petitioning process.  In Pennsylvania, it was not Trump forces but the DP that delayed mail-in balloting with a court challenge against the Greens.  They justified this by whining that in 2016 Hillary Clinton lost by 44,000 votes and Jill Stein received 49,000 votes.  Aside from the absurd implication that everyone voting for Jill would have gone for Hillary if the GP was not there, there is a wee fact which Democrats skip over in their quest for obfuscation: the LibertarianParty (LP) got three times as many votes as did the Greens.  Thus, with the equally absurd fantasy that all LP votes would have gone to Trump if that party disappeared, then Trump would have won by over 100,000 votes had the DP been successful in purifying ballot choices to only corporate parties.

    It has been the goal of both corporate parties, but fanatically so for the DP, to totally annihilate the possibility of any independent party gaining widespread support not just for their appearance on the ballot, but any opportunity to present their perspectives.

    How Can Parties Affect Politics without Winning Elections? 

    Since the clear attempt of the two parties is to crowd every other party out of debates, out of the news and out of existence, it becomes important to ask if there is any value whatsoever in voting for candidates who do not have any chance of getting into office.  Although Missouri is not known for diverse and radical opinions, in addition to the two monied parties, between 1908 and 1928 its ballot included the following: Prohibition, Progressive, Socialist, Socialist Labor, Farm Workers and National Commonwealth Land.  Other states such as New York could probably find dozens or even hundreds of small parties that have appeared on the ballot during the last couple of centuries.

    The story of how small parties have affected US politics could fill an encyclopedia; but a few examples illustrate how they have altered political reality.  Perhaps the best-known small party was Free Soil, which was critically important for ending slavery.  “At a convention in Buffalo, New York on August 9, 1848, more than 10,000 men from all the northern states and three border states met in a huge tent in a city park. The resulting Free Soil Party was built on a coalition of four elements: the previous Liberty Party, Free-Soil Democrats, Barnburners, and Conscience Whigs.”

    Though the first plank in its platform was “opposition to the extension of slavery into the territories,” it also backed tariff reform and a homestead law.   Frustrated at not winning sufficient votes, many or most of its members switched to the Republican Party which nominated Abe Lincoln.  Had Free Soil not existed, there is no way of knowing how long slavery would have persisted in the US.

    The same year that Free Soil came into existence saw the birth of the Prohibition Party, which, though changing names multiple times, has run candidates through 2020.  The party stemmed from the “perfectionist” religious revivalism of the 1820s and 1830s which called for fundamental social changes such as abolishing slavery and alcohol sales.  By the end of the nineteenth century it embraced “women’s suffrage, equal racial and gender rights, bimetallism, equal pay, and an income tax” and was the first US party to accept women as members.

    Its enormous influence resulted in the eighteenth amendment prohibiting alcohol sales which was ratified by sufficient states in January 1919.  It was repealed in December 1933, showing conclusively that criminalizing drugs is an unworkable solution to a problem, no matter how serious that problems is.  Though the prohibitionists had a very bad idea, they brought many good ones to light.

    Union organizer Eugene Debs ran as the Socialist Party candidate for president in 1904, 1908, 1912 and 1920. Striking at the very heart of capitalism, Debs brought working people the opportunity to vote for a new society. The powerful threat of Debs’ socialist ideas were shown as the Democrat’s Woodrow Wilson threw him in prison for speaking out against the slaughter of World War I.

    Twelve years after Republican president Warren Harding let Debs out of jail Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced the New Deal during his 1933 inaugural address.  US history books often skip over the historical core of the New Deal, which was outlooks and organizing by the Socialist and Communist Parties.  Like later civil rights legislation and the end to the Viet Nam war, Roosevelt’s New Deal victories grew out of mass movements of the day.

    Skip forward almost half a century to the election of 1980.  Though conservative on most issues, Independent John Anderson introduced his signature campaign proposal of raising the gas tax while cutting social security taxes.  Anderson had strongly criticized the Viet Nam War as well as President Richard Nixon’s actions during the Watergate scandal.  Later, he endorsed instant run-off voting, backed Nader in 2000, and helped found the Justice Party in 2012.

    One of few small party efforts that seemed like it might hit the big time was the Reform Party of Ross Perot that brought him 18.9% of votes as an Independent in 1992 and 8.2% 1996.  When Perot first ran in 1992, George Bush was floundering in his efforts to ram the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) through congress.  The upstart Democrat Bill Clinton convinced US corporate bosses that he could usher in the trade deal and won the election.  Perot actually did a great service by pushing to the forefront of public awareness how awful NAFTA would be.

    Those who participated in anti-NAFTA actions should remember that congressman Dick Gephardt from St. Louis supposedly led efforts to block the trade deal.  Following a tip from a friend, I researched Gephardt’s traipsing through Mexico until I found the story in the Mexican newspaper Excelsior documenting the congressman’s promise that he would get NAFTA through the US congress.  The St. Louis Post-Dispatch published my op-ed piece on June 1, 1993 exposing him as a con artist.  Virtually all of the left liberals at the time ignored that Gephardt was merely telling them what they wanted to hear.  Even after Gephardt left congress for a lucrative position lobbying for Goldman Sachs, Boeing, Visa Inc and Waste Management Inc., liberal Democrats refused to acknowledge that their party had secured NAFTA while allowing anti-NAFTA votes by congresspeople from districts needing union financial support.

    Despite the virtue of the Reform Party in focusing on the vile nature of NAFTA, it imploded during the 2000 campaign over disagreements between wrestler Jesse Ventura, ultra-conservative Pat Buchanan and godfather-wannabe Ross Perot.  Less involved in the fray was a newcomer who began political life as a Democrat, switched to being a Republican and then changed again to offer himself as a moderately conservative Reform Party presidential candidate.

    The moderate of the day was Donald Trump, who denounced Buchanan for being “enamored” with Adolf Hitler, supported universal health care, proposed a “net worth” tax that would only apply to the richest 1%, advocated a tax cut for the 99%, praised Muhammad Ali, enjoyed dinner with Woody Harrelson, and declared that his ideal running mate would be the “wonderful woman” Oprah Winfrey.  One explanation for Trump’s transformation between 2000 and 2016 would be that he experienced an epiphany upon rebirth as a divine being.  Another explanation would be that he was not so different than Dick Gephardt and other corporate Democrats eternally searching for an audience gullible enough to believe them.

    For over 200 years, small parties have combined, split, recombined, dropped old perspectives and added new ones.  The theme that runs through the history of small parties is that they are consistently the origin of concepts that change the political trajectory.  Established parties are where worn out programs go to die.  The long sought for destruction of small parties would suck the life out of political discussion, leaving the US with ossified Siamese twins joined at their financial organs.

    Liberal Democrats are much like Trump when they proclaim that the “winner” of an election is the one who gets the most votes.  Another view, held vehemently by Free Soilers, Prohibitionists and Debs, is that the winners of elections are those who most successfully use them to inspire mass movements.  Many latter day leftists laud the life of Debs while omitting these words from praises of him: “It is better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don’t want and get it.”

    One of the most absurd yet widely held liberal claims is that if Greens were not on ballot then all of its supporters would vote for DP.  They know that this is not true, yet repeat it as if one tells a lie enough times then it becomes true.  As Howie Hawkins explains, “The 2016 exit poll showed that 61% of Stein voters would have stayed home if she was not on the ballot.”  The DP denies these exit poll results as vigorously as the RP denies climate change.

    How Do We Know that Democrats Were Not Interested in Preventing a Trump Power Grab?

    The corporate parties are determined that there will never again be a Free Soil Party, a Eugene Debs campaign, a John Anderson campaign, a Ross Perot campaign, or a Ralph Nader campaign.  Though the DP and RP share this commitment, it has been the Democrats that have been obsessed with gobbling up Hansel and Gretel’s last crumb leading to a path of voter liberation.  They have repeatedly prioritized destruction of the GP over prevention of a power grab by the Republicans.

    Recall the election of 2000, when George W. Bush got a minority of the votes and Al Gore refused to challenge the finagling of Florida returns.  For years, the Dems had been encouraged to support Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), which would have prevented a manipulated election.  But the Dems have always hated IRV.  Why?  Because in every election it would show that millions, if not tens of millions, of their “supporters” would chose the GP first and the DP second.  Vast numbers of people vote for a candidate they find somewhere between boring and despicable.  The DP is committed to ensuring that election returns never reveal the clothes the Emperor is wearing (or not wearing).  This is what caused the 2000 election of George W. Bush.  And what did the DP do during the subsequent 20 years to prevent it from happening again?  Absolutely nothing.

    There is another way the Dems could prevent a second-place Repub (like Trump in 2016) from entering the White House: Proportional Representation rather than Winner-Take-All of Electoral College votes.  This system would assign Electoral College votes in the proportion to the popular vote of each state.  For example, if a state with 7 electoral votes had Candidate A winning 52% of the popular vote and Candidate B winning 45% of the vote, then 4 electoral votes would go to A and 3 to B.  The Dems have no interest in either reform, even though they would increase the likelihood of a DP victory.

    During the time period after the 2020 election, many were worried that RP-dominated legislatures could select RP presidential electors even if their state voted for Biden.  We can safely predict that Dems will do nothing during the next 4, 8 or 12 years to prevent this from happening in future.  Why?  Because this would mean if there were a future unexpected surge in votes for Greens or Libertarians, a legislature dominated by the corporate parties would not be able to pull the same stunt to keep those parties out.

    The DP and RP could look internationally for ways to prevent the manipulation of elections.  According to Venezuelanalysis.com, “electronic voting machines are activated only when a fingerprint that corresponds to the voter’s ID number in the database is registered.  Additionally, the machines print a paper receipt that can be checked by the individual voter and allows for a full manual count to be made if any results are contested. A manual count of more than half of the votes automatically takes place to ensure that the results tally.”  Why would the DP prefer to lose elections to RP candidates over having fair elections that increased the number of Democrats put into office?  Because the DP stands solidly with the RP in applauding corrupt puppets like Juan Guaidó.

    Has the memory of senate Republicans manipulating the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the US Supreme Court already passed from the memory of the DP?  What about memory that Joe Biden promised that before the election he would announce if he would ask senate Democrats to exert their constitutional right to increase the number of Supreme Court justices by 3 or 4 members?  If the DP has a majority in the senate at any time during Joe Biden’s presidency, please do not hold your breath waiting for them to add court justices – you might pass out doing so.

    It is not as if no party has pushed to change the constitution.  Franklin Roosevelt angered many when he violated the long-standing tradition of a president running for only two terms.  After he was gone, those upset that he won a third and fourth term amended the constitution to limit a president to two terms.  It is tempting to explain this discrepancy as due to lack of backbone by the Dems.  This is not a likely reason, since they have abundant venom for Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and the Green Party.  The DP does not want to have a family feud with its RP twin because they share so much in common.

    State Department Liberals Support Suppression

    The evidence shows that (a) the Democratic Party has headed a relentless conspiracy to destroy small parties, (b) small parties are critical for introducing new outlooks into US politics, and (c) the DP has zero interest in preventing Republicans from stealing elections.  These cohere into a pattern of depriving the electorate of choosing any ideas outside those approved by corporate interests.

    The issue remains, however, if this destruction of left independence was justifiable as a tactic to replace the depraved Trump by a more reasonable Biden who, at least, offers some chance of being edged to the left.  Please keep in mind that a version of this refrain is re-sung every four years in the US.     The refrain always has the assumption that the Dem cannot possibly be as bad as the Repub.

    The unspoken faith is that political direction is determined solely by elections and mass movements can accomplish little without victory at the polls.  Conveniently left out is the fact that the longest string of progressive accomplishments won during the last half century was not when a Dem was in the White House but during the reign of the arch-degenerate Richard Nixon.  His presidency saw the formal end to the war against Viet Nam, beginning of the food stamp program, creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, recognition of China, passage of the Freedom of Information Act, dismantling of the secret police’s COINTEL program, decriminalization of abortion, creation of Earned Income Tax Credits, a ban on biological weapons and passage of the Clean Water Act.

    We can be certain that Biden’s election will embolden the DP to intensify its attack on independent parties.  Once the DP establishment is finished using the liberals to eliminate electoral opposition, it will expel them like a duck with diarrhea.  There is a serious concern that they will soon begin “focusing their crosshairs on” the left within their own party, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

    The flip side of purging of the left is telling those who remain in the DP that they can only influence it by proving their loyalty.  If they want to become more effective they will need to rise higher in the DP ranks, which means quacking more of the party line.

    More than one American leftist has entered the DP in hopes of creating a “left presence” within it.  During the Kennedy-Johnson presidential years, the DP was full of former leftists who sought to “change the system from within.”  In actually existing liberalism, the system changed them and they supported the US adventure into Viet Nam and turned on their former comrades.  They were called “State Department Liberals” and no one captured their essence better than Phil Ochs in the closing stanza of his most famous song:

    Once i was young and impulsive
    I wore every conceivable pin
    Even went to the socialist meetings
    Learned all the old union hymns
    But i’ve grown older and wiser
    And that’s why i’m turning you in
    So love me, love me, love me, i’m a liberal

    – Phil Ochs, Love Me, I’m a Liberal, 1966

    After DP aristocrats have denounced the anti-imperialism of their left opponents and gone on a legal rampage to remove the names of thought criminals from the ballot, it is only a hop, skip and jump to point them out to the secret police.  Lest this be judged as too harsh, please remember that the DP in power collaborates with secret police across the world and helps teach them their tactics.

    At some point in the march of unconditional surrender to corporate politics, many will say, “Can’t take this no more.  We must break with the Dems.  We must build a new party!”  They will then discover the grave that was dug in 2020.  It will be the grave of shutting off criticism, the grave of “unifying” to defeat Trump.  They will discover that the DP, with which many snuggled so sweetly, sought to unify with them much as the lion sought “unity” with the lamb.

    The great delusion of the left liberals has been that they could “first Dump Trump and then hold Biden accountable.”  How can anyone possibly “push Biden to the left” or “hold his feet to the fire” if they have already told him that they will cave in and support him during the next election if the RP nominates a horrible candidate?

    The DP is basically a vote-hustling corporation which seeks massive donations from bigger corporations in return for serving their financial interests upon election.  The only possible way the left can “influence” the DP is to NOT vote for it.  Once the left gives in and votes for it en masse, the left has gone far beyond accepting a mess of pottage for selling its birthright to bring forth a new world.  It has abandoned that birthright for a vague hint that it might get a tiny whiff of pottage decades after capitalism has made the Earth unlivable for humans.

    To be crassly honest, the liberals have already outlined to the Biden machine their best strategy to elect a DP president in 2024: Send a secret convoy to the RP puppet masters and beg them to renominate Trump.  After all, liberal leaders have promised the DP that that it NEVER has to keep any promise of progressive action because no matter how many wars, international coups, racist exterminations, destruction of medical systems and attacks on working people, they will always crawl back to it during the next election.

    The birthright of the left is to inspire people with our dreams – just as progressive visions have motivated mass movements for two centuries.  It is our birthright to bring people the right to vote for giving birth to a new world – and not merely to chose between the two repulsive nightmares of a dying world.  It is our birthright to gaze through the eyes of Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and countless others and say at the ballot box what we have seen.  It is our birthright to hear the cries of those in poor countries whose lives are ground down by the incessant urge of capital to accumulate more, more, more.  And, yes, though the corporate liberal may find it incomprehensible, it is our birthright to put these truths on the ballot so that others have the right to vote for what so many of us feel.

    Stalwarts of the DPs’ right wing manipulated whatever rules they could find to block the great hope of campaigns for Bernie Sanders known as “Our Revolution.”  Seeing themselves outmaneuvered, Bernie’s leaders refused to mount an independent campaign and shepherded their flock, feeding them to the Joe Biden Blob.  “Our Revolution” was thereby transformed into the “Esau Revolution.”

    So, exactly what does the Esau Revolution despise?  The answer appeared in the book of Genesis thousands of years ago:

    “Then Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentiles; and he did eat and drink, and rose up, and went his way: thus Esau despised his birthright.”

    — Genesis 25: 34

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.