By Ian DOWBIGGIN

American Democrats’ love affair with Justin Trudeau’s Canada is cause for concern.

If the Democratic party of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden gets its way, America may soon look a lot like Justin Trudeau’s Canada. American conservatives, don’t say you weren’t warned.

On September 16, amidst a closely contested Canadian federal election, former president Barack Obama tweeted his endorsement of Liberal Party of Canada leader Justin Trudeau, calling him “an effective leader and strong voice for democratic values.” The next day, former presidential nominee Hillary Clinton followed with her own tweet, applauding her “friend” Trudeau for his “leadership in the fight for accessible child care, protected reproductive rights, and ambitious climate action.”

On a slightly less effusive note, Secretary of State Antony Blinken later congratulated the Liberal leader on his slim election victory, praising Trudeau’s “ongoing cooperation… on issues including human rights, global health and climate change.” Trudeau’s Liberal Party won more seats than any other party, and though it fell short of the seat total necessary to form a majority government and lost the popular vote to the opposition Conservatives, it will head a minority government with the help of the smaller, left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP).

The Obama-Trudeau “bromance” is nothing new. Back in 2016, Obama borrowed an expression from rock singer Bono and announced that the 2015 election of Trudeau’s government was a sign that “the world needs more Canada.” In 2019, as Trudeau faced a tough reelection fight, Obama hailed him for tackling “big issues like climate change,” adding: “The world needs his progressive leadership now, and I hope our neighbors to the north support him for another term.”

Whether or not Obama’s and Clinton’s endorsements were “foreign meddling” and helped Trudeau’s Liberals on September 20 is something that Canadian pundits appear curiously reluctant to discuss. The bigger point, however, is that the Obama and Clinton tweets tellingly reveal their hopes and expectations for a future America.

In some respects, Trudeau’s image has been like political porn for numerous Democrats. The reasons for their fascination are legion. There are hints of political royalty in his pedigree. Trudeau is the son of the celebrated Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister on and off from 1968 to 1984. In the cringe-worthy terminology of the day, the New York Times in 1974 dubbed Pierre Elliott Trudeau a “swinger bachelor” who dated celebrities including Barbra Streisand and Kim Cattrall. Margaret Trudeau, Pierre’s ex-wife and Justin’s mother, is routinely lionized in the international media as a “mental health advocate” and the star of a one-woman stage show she launched in 2019.

Margaret’s son Justin is telegenic, tall and athletic, with “great hair,” as New York magazine remarked in 2015. He looks younger than his 49 years. He has a way of speaking that the New York Times called “almost theatrical,” befitting his earlier stint teaching drama at a rich kids’ high school between 1999 and 2001.

But, it is Trudeau’s policies and ideals that warrant close attention from Americans who might otherwise dismiss Obama’s comments as typical politician’s rhetoric. Above all, Trudeau is a globalist. After his election victory in 2015, he announced that Canada was the world’s first “post-national” country. In words few other world leaders would dare to utter, Trudeau declared that Canada has “no core identity, no mainstream.” The New York Times breathlessly declared that Trudeau was poised to “redefine what it means to be Canadian.”

Trudeau’s remarks about Canadian identity were highly similar to what Canadian novelist Yann Martel had called his homeland in 2002: “the greatest hotel on earth.” As Canada’s Maclean’s magazine observed, it was hard to know if Martel was saying Canada was a peaceful and accommodating “rooming house” or “a soulless railway terminus, a place that demands little of its citizens and stands for nothing in international affairs.”

Trudeau’s globalist vision of a borderless world predictably informs his full-throated pledges to fight climate change. In 2016, Trudeau signed the Paris Climate Agreement promising to reduce Canada’s carbon emissions to 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. Although the NDP claims Trudeau’s government will never meet these goals, the New York Times in April this year called him a “global climate hero.”

As for Hillary Clinton’s reference to Trudeau’s defense of “reproductive rights,” what Trudeau means by “pro-choice” may startle millions of Americans. As early as 2014, he told his own political party that no anti-abortion candidates could run as Liberals in federal elections. Canada is the only democratic, industrialized nation in the world without any federal or provincial abortion laws (the country’s Supreme Court struck down the old national law in 1988 as unconstitutional and no federal government since has dared to pass one). Trudeau regularly accuses the Conservative Party of Canada of secretly wanting to end abortion access, although Conservatives tirelessly protest they aren’t interested in any such legislation. Doubling down during the 2021 election, Trudeau announced that a Liberal government would not protect the “conscience rights” of health care providers who object to performing either abortions or medically assisted death under Canada’s medicare system.

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Well, one reason his “sunny ways” have evaporated is due to scandals. Several photos have emerged from Trudeau’s teaching days of him in blackface or brownface, which would have banished any other Canadian elected official to political oblivion. In 2016, he was accused of “manhandling” an opposition Member of Parliament and “elbowing” another on the floor of the House of Commons. Canada’s conflict of interest watchdog has investigated Trudeau four times for violating federal ethics rules. The second time, he was found guilty of pressuring his attorney-general to spare one of Canada’s biggest companies from federal prosecution. The fallout from the scandal saw Trudeau, a self-proclaimed feminist, lose two star female cabinet ministers, including the first Indigenous woman to become Minister of Justice, whom Trudeau expelled from caucus for refusing to bow to his pressure. In 2018, Trudeau was forced to apologize for groping a reporter at a 2000 music festival—though he insists that he did not act “inappropriately.”

The fading of Trudeau’s personal star has coincided with troubling national trends that suggest the last thing the world needs is “more Canada.” Trudeau has dubbed Canada a “genocidal” nation for its shabby treatment of its Indigenous peoples down through history. But not just historically. Trudeau insists that murders and disappearances of Indigenous women today amount to an ongoing genocide— despite data that show that Indigenous family members are responsible for most of these crimes. Naturally, none of this talk has led anyone to suggest that Trudeau personally is complicit in genocide and should hand himself over to the International Criminal Court in the Hague.

Canada’s relationship with its Indigenous peoples became even more fraught, if that were possible, in late May of 2021, when ground-penetrating radar discovered what were believed to be the remains of more than 200 children at the site of the former Indian Residential School in Kamloops, British Columbia. Trudeau’s government quickly ordered that all Canadian flags at all federal buildings and establishments across the country, including Ottawa’s Parliament Hill, fly at half-mast and remain at half-mast on July 1, Canada’s national holiday. During the election campaign, Trudeau announced that the flags would stay at half-mast until Indigenous leaders agreed to raise them.

Would Joe Biden, in his wildest dreams, ever agree to fly the American flag at half-mast for months because of America’s historical sins—even on the Fourth of July?

The coronavirus pandemic has also dented what’s left of Canada’s national self-esteem. On April 17, 2021, the Toronto Star reported that Canada’s per capita infection rate had surpassed the U.S. rate. This followed a year of Canadian self-congratulation on avoiding the “carnage” of America’s Covid-19 death toll. As the Star itself admitted, the Canadian “declarations of (relative) victory were premature.”

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Canada’s peculiar holiday from history could be coming to an end. The country may be heading towards a Trump-like reckoning. Just as the Republican and Democratic establishments watched in dismay as Donald Trump exploded onto the political scene in 2016, the Peoples Party of Canada (PPC), formed in 2018 under the flamboyant leadership of former Conservative cabinet minister Maxime Bernier, increased its vote total from 300,000 in 2019 to 800,000 in 2021, though it failed to win a single riding. The PPC opposes mass immigration and the restrictions placed on Canadians by governments during the coronavirus pandemic. Predictably, this has prompted the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to call the PPC “extremist,” “exclusionary,” and the equivalent of Hungary’s and Poland’s “nationalist” parties.

But that is not the viewpoint of many Canadian voters who, disenchanted by the electoral results of the insipid, middle-of-the-road campaign run by the Conservative leader Erin O’Toole, may be more willing to park their votes in the next federal election with a political party that at least pulls no punches about the everyday issues that truly matter to most Canadians.

The indifferent 2021 election results have left Canada “poorer, angrier and more divided,” as Howard Anglin, deputy chief of staff to former prime minister Stephen Harper, remarked after the results came in. Post-election polls revealed that most Canadians thought Trudeau never should have called the election in the first place. Barely 23 percent said the country was more unified under Trudeau, and a full 55 percent said Trudeau should resign. A National Post headline called Canada’s growing divide “worrisome,” which is typically understated Canadian parlance for terrifying.

Whatever the future holds for Canada, the sequence of events since the heady days of 2015 suggests that U.S. Democrats’ ringing endorsements of Trudeau are silly at best and irresponsible at worst. They may also be out of step with America’s demographic trends. For example, the possibility of America becoming more like Canada has to be compared with what Helen Andrews, in an earlier issue of TAC, called the U.S.’s “Latin American Future.” The country’s growing Hispanic population may change everything from “taxes to traffic,” in her words, to say nothing of politics.

Still, there is no denying the symmetry between Trudeau’s Canada and the political tastes of America’s Democratic elites. American conservatives should pay close attention to the misfortunes of the post-national experiment north of the border. Canada is less a global hotel than a slow-motion train wreck. The recent trajectory of Canadian history suggests that, if Democrats get their way, “more Canada” in America’s future will only leave her “angrier and more divided” than ever.

theamericanconservative.com

Former President Trump, President Biden and their partisans are rushing to blame each other for the debacle unfolding now in Afghanistan. The “National Unity Government” and its military and police forces have completely evaporated in the face of the Taliban’s rapid takeover of the entire country in the last few weeks. This culminated in President Ashraf Ghani’s fleeing the capital of Kabul on Sunday as the Taliban walked right in and Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar seemed to have assumed power.

But Trump and Biden shouldn’t blame one another. It was George W. Bush who refused to negotiate al Qaeda’s extradition. Bush then let Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri escape to Pakistan while he chose instead to focus on regime change in Kabul and later Baghdad. It was Bush who decided on the strategy of building and training up an Afghan National Army to secure the new regime in power and take the fight to its rivals. American officers, with no one to fight, found and made enemies where there were none before. By 2004, the Taliban, whose surrender Bush had refused to accept, returned to insurgency against the occupation. Of course, the more the U.S. built up a new government and army, the more the people hated and resisted it. As they say about their enemies, the Americans only understand one thing, force, and when confronted with this resistance they only escalated again and again, killing more innocents and combatants alike, and driving even more people into the insurgency.

The CIA, military and their proxies tortured people by the thousands for years.

They routinely slaughtered civilians and wrote it off as “collateral damage.”

They essentially built a government and army of the northern Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara tribes against the plurality population of the country, the Pashtuns. Where Pashtuns did have power in the government, it in no way enhanced the representation of the people. It just meant the people had to deal with the same old corrupt drug dealer, child rapist, murderer warlords, like Pacha Khan Zardari (“PKZ”), President Hamid Karzai’s half-brother Wali Karzai, and Abdul Razik, only now empowered by the corrupt central government in Kabul and U.S. military and intelligence forces. This was never a sustainable project. Even the Great American Fraud, Gen. David Petraeus, admitted that the Taliban’s process for civil and criminal disputes among the people was far preferable to the local population compared to the corrupt court and police systems the Americans had set up to replace them.

Early in the occupation, Bush spurned repeated offers of surrender from former CIA favorite Jalaluddin Haqqani and former Taliban leader Mullah Omar, only to send American GIs off to get blown up by their men for years afterwards.

Our allies the Pakistanis, with Saudi money, have backed the Afghan Taliban since at least 2005, giving them safe-haven and helping to pay their way. This has been to further Pakistan’s goal of limiting Indian influence in Afghanistan. The Americans’ solution? Ask the Indians to intervene even more in support of anti-Taliban efforts there. This of course has only motivated increased Pakistani support for the Afghan Taliban in turn.

When Obama ran for president in 2007 and 2008, he called Afghanistan the “right” war in contrast to the massive error of Iraq War II. But he really only promised a small escalation of a couple brigades. The military, however, had other plans. His Bush-holdover secretary of defense, Robert Gates, and Central Command Chief, Gen. Petraeus, demanded that Obama send the general in charge of the Afghan war, Gen. David McKiernan home and replace him with the supposed strategic genius and push-up and jogging super-hero Gen. Stanley McChrystal. The trio then spent the better part of 2009 teaming up with hawkish senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, the think tanks, especially the Democrats’ new Center for a New American Security, and the news media to pressure Obama into sending a total of 70,000 reinforcements in a so-called “surge.” The added troops were to implement Petraeus and marine General James Mattis’s rewritten counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN) which they sold as a magic potion that would guarantee “success” at winning over the hearts and minds of the good people of the southern Helmand and Kandahar provinces.

Though Vice President Joe Biden urged Obama to go with a much smaller escalation and a narrowing of the strategy to counterterrorism, that is, hunting down the last mythical Arab terrorists still hiding in Afghanistan, while abandoning the fight against the Taliban, Obama gave in to the generals and tripled forces there. Not that Biden resigned over it or anything.

Gen. Petraeus swore he would have the Taliban bleeding from the nose and ready to sign whatever he demanded of them by July 2011. That never happened. McChrystal abandoned COIN after its very first test case in the town of Marjah in the Helmand Province. After the heroic independent journalist Michael Hastings’ journalism got McChrystal removed, Obama insisted that the man himself, Gen. Supposed Bigshot, David Petraeus take command of the war himself. They would lose the war together. And they did. But not before getting more than another thousand Americans killed, tens of thousands of Afghans with them, and sending over all those trucks, rifles and helicopters to the Afghan National Security and Defense Forces that the Taliban have seized in the last few weeks.

As predicted, Obama’s Afghan “surge” only drove more people into supporting and joining the insurgency. McChrystal’s “insurgent math” explained why: for everyone they killed, they were recruiting 10 more into the ranks of the enemy.

By the time Petraeus got there, he’d forgotten all about his own counterinsurgency doctrine and simply escalated special operations night raids and air strikes instead. As the great Gareth Porter proved, they were mostly killing and imprisoning innocent people. The Drone Papers leaked by Daniel Hale further confirmed Porter’s reporting.

The Taliban figured out very quickly that if the U.S. strategy was centered on training up the Afghan National Army, they could thwart that by sending in sleeper agents to commit “insider” or “green on blue” attacks against their American trainers. That was it. The game was over. The distance created between the U.S. soldiers and the local charges by these attacks amounted to the ultimate sabotage of their plans to create an effective force—if that were ever possible.

The ANA was mostly a bunch of “ghost soldiers,” who existed only on paper for the financial gain of the officers in charge. The actual men who showed up were mostly looking for a pair of boots, a rifle and a decent meal. At no time did the largely Tajik and Uzbek army have the Taliban’s sense of morale in fighting for their country. They were fighting at the behest of a foreign power to try to subjugate the population of part of their country, not really in self-defense at all.

Former marine captain-turned State Department official Matthew Hoh broke ranks to blow the whistle and try to stop Obama’s “surge” in the summer of 2009. Army Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis did much the same in 2012 to tell the people that Gen. Petraeus and the rest of the military were lying and that the “surge” was a counter-productive disaster. Not enough listened to these honest men.

Obama had tried to overthrow the corrupt Hamid Karzai in 2009, but Karzai was able to stuff enough ballot boxes to remain in power for another term. In the farcical election of 2014, Ashraf Ghani and his major competitor Abdullah Abdullah fought it out for weeks until Secretary of State John Kerry came to town to force them to concede to a completely ad-hoc and unconstitutional “co-presidency” instead. The same spectacle took place last year with both refusing to concede and even holding competing, simultaneous swearing in ceremonies.

Obama pretended to end the war in 2014, but he actually did no such thing. He left office with about 8,000 troops still there, mostly fighting Afghan ISIS, so-called ISIS-K for “Khorasan Province,” at its core a group of Pakistani Taliban refugees from America’s war there in the early Obama years.

According to Gen. Mattis, Trump’s first Secretary of Defense, President Donald Trump ordered the troops out of Afghanistan in March of 2017. But then he apparently just forgot about it. Subjected to a season-long pressure campaign by his generals, Trump eventually gave in, just as Obama had done before him, though to a lesser extent, ordering another 5,000 troops to the country and a massive escalation of the air war there. “My original instinct was to pull out, and historically I like to follow my instincts. I heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk of the Oval Office,” he explained.

It was four days after I published my first book, Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan, which was four years ago Monday. In it I wrote:

“The major question seems to be when, not if, the ‘National Unity Government’ will unravel, which leaves them in a very weak position from which to negotiate, if they ever get the chance. If the ‘co-presidents’ cannot figure out how to get along, how can they be expected to negotiate peace with a broad-based insurgency?

“American hawks argue that since the Taliban-led insurgency will not negotiate, and especially considering they currently control more of the countryside than at any time since the turn of the century, the only option is to escalate militarily again, and forever. There is another choice: just forget the whole thing. If the United States withdraws the last fifteen thousand troops, airmen, spies and mercenaries, there is little doubt the insurgency could seize control of at least the predominantly Pashtun areas in the south and east of the country along the border with Pakistan in relatively short order. It is even possible, perhaps likely, that the capital city of Kabul could be lost soon thereafter. The Taliban’s shadow government — the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” — already has the run of much of the Pashtun tribal lands as it is. The National Unity Government can meet in their parliament all day long, but without the U.S. there to fund their entire operation, it would cease to exist in no time.

“Yes, the next phase of the Afghan civil war will probably be a bloody disaster, but that is in great measure due to the distortions of power the U.S. has created. Whether the U.S. government throws in the towel now or years from now, the result will be the same: the Pashtun population will throw off whatever degree of rule the national government attempts to maintain over them, and then, in all probability, they will be right back where they were in the 1990s, with a bloody civil war, possibly leading to Taliban dominance in all but the far north of the country.”

If we had left back then, the Kabul government would have at least been in a somewhat stronger position to defend itself, and the Taliban would have had a bigger incentive to negotiate with them. By taking so long to leave, the U.S. allowed the Taliban to make further gains in usurping government authority across the country, preparing for their current successful coup de main.

Trump also continued to allow the Pentagon to send military equipment to the ANA, most of which is falling into the hands of the Taliban now. Really, the Taliban have been buying American weapons from the ANA all along with American cash paid directly to them in the form of protection fees, or taxes, for allowing U.S. convoys through their territory and “reconstruction” money given to them by the duffle bag full. So it makes little difference.

To Trump’s great credit, he never believed in the mission of building a modern, democratic, centralized state in Afghanistan. He consistently railed against such a project for years before ever taking office. In 2018, he finally appointed neoconservative policy adviser Zalmay Khalilzad to make a withdrawal deal with the Taliban, and unbelievably, Khalilzad did so. On February 29, 2020, they signed the Doha Agreement to leave by May 1, 2021.

In fact, as of a year ago, during the cease-fire, U.S. JSOC forces were fighting with the Taliban against ISIS in Nangarhar Province, referring to themselves as the “Taliban Airforce.” Call it the Afghan Awakening.

At the start of this war the U.S. could have negotiated extradition. Or they could have focused on bin Laden and the guilty al Qaeda members there. Or they could have launched punitive air raids against the Taliban but not driven them completely out of power. Or they could have settled for seeing them overthrown and then simply left the country to its own people to sort out. But no. The Bush government wrote themselves a writ for a massive campaign to remake another society on the other side of the globe. The Obama government cashed that check and massively expanded the war and the nature of its failure. Trump initially gave in to the military but later pushed for a real bilateral withdrawal deal with the Taliban.

If it was not for the pathetic CIA stenographer Charlie Savage, whose ridiculous lies in the New York Times about Vladimir Putin paying bounties for Taliban murders of American soldiers in Afghanistan, which was debunked by the NSA, some CIA analysts, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the commander of CENTCOM and the general in charge of the war — but too late — Trump may have been able to follow through on his plan to pull them all out before last year’s election. Even after the election, he balked after initially approving plans for a full withdrawal by the new year.

Fortunately, Biden has long since given up on believing the generals that they know what they’re doing in Afghanistan or that the war to keep the Taliban out of power is one worth fighting. Though they have announced plans to try to leave CIA, JSOC and mercenary “counter-terrorism” forces in the region to continue to hunt down international terrorists there, that seems unlikely to continue very long or in very large measure, barring a new major and embarrassing al Qaeda presence there. The whole concept of Afghanistan as a safe haven is a myth. They don’t seem to mind fighting on the side of AQAP in Yemen against the Houthis or helping the Turks protect Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in Syria’s Idlib Province.

Biden did the right thing by resisting the hawks’ calls to drag this out one more day. (Now it is up to us to prevent the Biden government from allying with the Taliban and the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) against China in Xinjian like it was in old days.)

As embarrassing as the withdrawal is for the Americans, it could have been much worse. The Taliban took many military bases and provincial capitals while hardly firing a shot at all. Though there have been some brutal executions, the fighting has been kept to a minimum. As your author has suggested would be the case for years, when the day came, the Taliban just walked right into Kabul. The chances of a massive Black Hawk Down-type slaughter of U.S. personnel on the two-mile trip to the airport from the embassy seems slim, for the moment at least.

Much of the panic by the Americans and Afghan civilians attempting to flee from the airport may be based on fears that the Taliban would roll into town like the ISIS invasion of western Iraq in 2014 and start slaughtering people. The Taliban can of course be absolutely ruthless, but here they seem to have decided to allow foreign forces to leave in peace and have thus far announced no plans to bar civilians from leaving if they want. The final stages of the withdrawal have not been great, but the hype about the embarrassment is more likely cover for those who have failed us all along by perpetuating this war and want to pretend the failures started in this administration, or the last at the latest.

The ease of the Taliban’s victory over America’s installed puppet government in Afghanistan proves that the whole war was a fool’s errand all along. That regime never had the support of the population, and it never was going to. If all the hawks who already lost this war had their way, and the U.S. stayed another 20 years, that withdrawal would look much the same.

It’s 20 years late and not a moment too soon. Goodbye Afghanistan, sorry and good luck.

antiwar.com

In 2008 the American public was fed up with the disastrous status quo politics of George W Bush, so they came together and elected a progressive candidate who campaigned on hope and change to replace him.

But no progress happened; the hope and change never came. Barack Obama continued and expanded all of his predecessor’s most depraved policies at home and abroad, and it wasn’t long before the initial elation wore off and the illusion that things were looking up evaporated. It was as if Bush had never left office.

Worn out and disgusted by crushing neoliberal policies at home and murderous neoconservative policies abroad, Americans elected a political neophyte who ran on a populist platform which criticized both Bush and Obama. Trump promised to “drain the swamp”, end the wars, and fight the establishment in the interests of ordinary people. This time for sure there would be change.

But the wars kept going, and the swamp got even fuller, and the US empire kept chugging along on the same trajectory it had been on throughout the Bush administration and the Obama administration. Despite all this, the Democratic Party and its allied media institutions acted as though some drastic deviation from the norm had taken place, insisting that the United States had been plunged from a free democracy respected around the world into an isolationist fascist dystopia.

In order to stop fascism, the American people had yet another people’s uprising against the corrupt status quo and… elected Obama’s vice president. Lifelong corporate crony and empire lackey Joe Biden now sits in the White House, advancing all the same murderous, oppressive, exploitative, authoritarian policies as his predecessors, as a result of the latest fake, decoy revolution against tyranny.

And that’s all mainstream electoral politics ever is in the US empire: a fake, decoy revolution staged for the public every few years so that they don’t have a real one. A symbolic ceremony where the public pretends to cast the abusive status quo into the sea so they feel like the battle against their oppressors has been won. And then their oppressors just keep right on oppressing them.

Every few years the public gets to choose between two reliable lackeys of the oligarchic empire, and then all of the evils of that empire get pinned upon the winner. The public then directs their rage at the lackey rather than the actual power structure which has been oppressing them, after which they have another election to rid themselves of the scoundrel once and for all. They hug, they cry, they celebrate, and the oppression machine continues completely uninterrupted.

As Gore Vidal once said:

“It doesn’t actually make any difference whether the President is Republican or Democrat. The genius of the American ruling class is that it has been able to make the people think that they have had something to do with the electing of presidents for 200 years when they’ve had absolutely nothing to say about the candidates or the policies or the way the country is run. A very small group controls just about everything.”

That small group is the plutocratic class whose legalized bribery and propaganda machine has immense influence over US politics, as well as the imperial war machine and special interest groups with whom the plutocratic class is allied. It is necessary to form coalitions of support within that power cluster if one wants to become president in the managed democracy that is the United States, and no part of that power cluster is going to support a president who won’t reliably advance the interests of the oligarchic empire.

From this point of view, the oligarchic power cluster is essentially running its own employees against each other and having them promise to end the injustices which are inextricably baked in to the oligarchic empire. Americans live in a totalitarian state whose most important elections are rigged from top to bottom, and they’re fed news stories about Evil Dictators in other countries rigging their elections to remain in power.

Politicians cannot change the status quo to one which benefits ordinary people instead of their oligarchic owners, because the oligarchic empire is built upon the need for endless war, poverty, and oppression. You cannot have a unipolar global empire without using violent force (and the threat of it) to uphold that world order, and you cannot have a plutocracy without ensuring that a few rulers have far more wealth control than the rank-and-file citizenry.

For this reason, even politicians who run on relatively progressive-sounding platforms are themselves a part of the fake decoy revolution unless they demand a complete dismantling of oligarchy and empire. The politicians who present themselves as progressives in America today offer only light opposition to some aspects of empire and oligarchy, in effect merely supporting an oligarchic empire that gives Americans healthcare. Since keeping Americans poor, busy and propagandized is an essential dynamic in the hub of a globe-spanning oligarchic empire, this is a nonsensical position; the oligarchs don’t want ordinary Americans to have money to burn on campaign donations and free time to research what’s really going on in their world, because then they might meddle in the gears of empire. A power structure built upon economic injustice will never permit economic justice.

The door to meaningful change in America via electoral politics has been closed, locked, bolted, welded shut, and barricaded with a metric ton of solid steel. The only thing that can cause an end to the oppression and exploitation is an end to the oligarchic empire, and the only thing that can cause the end of the oligarchic empire is direct action by the American people: mass-scale activism, general strikes, and civil disobedience the likes of which the nation has never before seen, in sufficient numbers to bring down the plutocratic institutions which maintain the status quo.

The problem is that this will never happen as long as Americans are being successfully propagandized into being content with their fake decoy revolutions. There is a zero percent chance of electoral politics leading to an end of the empire, but a concerted effort to spread awareness by those who understand what’s going on just might.

All positive changes in human behavior are always preceded by an expansion of awareness, whether you’re talking about awareness of the consequences of one’s addiction leading to their getting sober or an expansion of awareness of the injustices of racism leading to racial justice laws. Making people aware that the mass media are lying to us about what’s real, aware of the horrors of war, aware of the underlying dynamics of the economic injustice which is grinding Americans into the dirt, that can lead to a chain reaction which sees the collective using the power of its numbers to shrug off the chains of oppression as easily as you remove a heavy coat on a warm day.

What’s needed is for the people to awaken to the truth. An entire empire is built upon a pair of closed eyelids.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

Two writers who explicitly present themselves as prominent advocates of the pro-Israel ‘Community’ in Washington, Tony Badran and Michael Doran, in a piece in The Tablet, condemn the Team Biden’s attempt to achieve a return to the JCPOA as a feint devised to undermine Israel’s ‘war between wars’ with Iran, and as a political Trojan Horse.

They warn that: “A consensus reigns inside the administration, not just on the JCPOA, but on every big question of Middle East strategy: Everyone from the president on down, agrees about the need ‘to complete what Obama started’ — which means that the worst is yet to come”: A hint that (for the ‘Community’), the end result effectively means the de-fanging of Israel, achieved by laying down a smoke cloud of ‘love’ for Israel, washed down with more of the latest U.S. weaponry.

“If the control that Obama’s project exercises over every mind in the Biden administration is not already obvious – It is because confusion still reigns about the true nature of the [Obama] project” … That nature, and “ultimate goal,” Malley has written, was “to help the [Middle East] find a more stable balance of power that would make it less dependent on direct U.S. interference or protection”. (Emphasis added.)

Malley’s description is a roundabout way, Badran and Doran argue, of saying that “Obama dreamed of a new Middle Eastern order—one that relies more on partnership with Iran”. Indeed, Jake Sullivan, a year ago seemly confirmed this analysis when he wrote: “The goal [in the Middle East] is to be “less ambitious” militarily, “but more ambitious in … [pressing] for a de-escalation in tensions and eventually a new modus vivendi [arriving] among the key regional actors … changing the U.S. role in a regional order – that it helped create”.

Obama’s ambition, the authors assert, was to work in partnership with Russia and Iran to stabilize not just Syria, but other regional trouble spots, too. After all, a tacit U.S. arrangement with Iran already had existed in Iraq, based on mutual hostility to Sunni jihadism. Couldn’t that model be expanded? Would not a partnership with Russia and Iran stabilize this vexed region?

The allegation of deceit – the evident ire – that this raised in the FDD and the pro-Israel ‘Community’, lay in the implicit corollary of Obama needing to hobble the “correlation of forces” – principally Israel and Saudi Arabia – that he, Obama, believed was boxing him in, preventing him “from towing Iran’s nuclear program out of the main lanes of U.S.-Iranian relations, and ‘parking it’ off to one side” – this being the necessary and sufficient condition for building a more stable balance of power, that would make the region less dependent on the U.S.

Ok, the ‘Community’ saw this as sinister; but equally, it could be argued that Obama was trying, also, to right the mis-match between U.S. resources and ballooning U.S. global commitments. What irks the authors so, however, is their belief that Obama’s policy is today’s Biden policy in its entirety. And that its ultimate aim is to drive a stake through the Iran containment policy which Trump and Netanyahu have pursued (with considerable success, according to the authors).

Here is the point: The authors almost certainly are correct when they argue that domestic U.S. politics explains “the hold that this empty theory exercises – over otherwise bright minds”. Realignment in the Middle East was the signature initiative of Barack Obama, who remains either the most powerful man in Democratic politics, or a very close second, and that “Malley, as the keeper of Obama’s Iran flame, reports to Blinken, in effect, through Obama”.

More pertinently, “the political heft of the Realignment derives not just from Obama’s personal support; but also from the support of progressives whose cosmology it affirms. The latter equate a policy of containing Iran with a path to ‘forever war’ – and transforms a policy of accommodating Iran into the path to peace”.

“It reduces the complexities of the Middle East to a Manichean morality tale that pits the progressives against their mythological foes—Evangelical Christians, “neoconservatives,” and Zionists. The Realignment depicts these foes as co-conspirators with Mohammed bin Salman and Benjamin Netanyahu, plotting to keep America mired in the Middle East”.

What is the point here? The Tablet piece is important, for it explains in a nutshell, a puzzling conundrum: Why is it that the DC Beltway has been so convinced that inevitably there would be a deal reached in Vienna on Iran’s return to the JCPOA? Trump was ousted, and with a huge sigh of relief, the world is able to revert to how matters stood four years earlier, and how could Iran possibly demur at Biden undoing for them, the fetters of containment? That would not be rational.

The Biden team probably did not even think to look at their JCPOA initiative from an Iranian current perspective. But perhaps Iran sees itself, through its own initiative, already having broken those fetters – through its outreach to China and Russia; through its embedding of an effective, swarm smart missile deterrence right across the region; and by the serendipitous unrolling of China’s new hard and digital economics all around and through Iran’s geography.

Team Biden however prevaricated initially, more intent on arguing about how to keep as much ‘leverage’ in situ as possible, over Iran (for their anticipated Part Two expanded JCPOA deal). They allowed whatever psychological impact there was to their project, to waste away. It became clear that a current in DC was more intent on being niggardly over the concessions on offer. And Iranian duly scepticism surged.

The salience to The Tablet article lies with its compelling argument that U.S. Iran politics was entirely focussed on a U.S. domestic wrangle; (Israel being integral to U.S. domestic politics.) All was an exercise in navel-gazing: Trump’s max-pressure had failed – and would be unceremoniously discarded. The Obama vision ‘was back’, thus allowing America to pivot away from West Asia towards its top priority of knocking-back China’s rise. How could Iran possibly refuse the renewal of the ‘Obama design’? Were the Iranians blind to the profound shift taking place in Washington politics as a result of 3 November?

No, Iran saw it, but events had moved on since Obama was in office. Iranians widely were doubtful. Why put themselves back into a regime of surveillance and intrusion, when their experience of it, even before May 2018, was pretty noxious?

A key point here – with the ‘Biden’ JCPOA approach, and its foreign policy, more generally – has been the ‘frozen time’ assumption. The Team just seemed to assume that the former Obama policies were still valid, virtually unaltered. The premise was of the world of four years ago, not the world as it is today. This is the clear underlying theme to The Tablet piece: that the two poles of the internal U.S. vision on Iran on 6 January inverted, and that now, the Obama vision inevitably would be fully unrolled. Possibly, Netanyahu – so deeply immersed in the U.S. bubble – saw things similarly.

So intent were the Democrats on their ‘war’ to oust Trump at any price, it seems, that they took their eyes off the radical changes taking place around the globe. They did not envisage the possibility of Iran sticking a spanner in their works. Belatedly the window for a deal – if there is to be one at all – is now understood to be narrow indeed.

This American lacuna however, is not confined to Iran alone. The world has changed – perhaps decisively – yet America seems to be pursuing its policies of yesteryear.

Across the Beltway, China is unanimously regarded as the premier U.S. national security threat. But policy seems still to be rooted in the profound western conviction that a one-party system is unsustainable because it is incapable of innovation, and therefore can easily be bested by a ‘can-do’ America.

This view rests however, on the flawed premise that the CPC should be equated with the Soviet Communist Party – an institution that crumbled under America’s tactic of forcing it into financial over-extension – in the U.S. narrative. But why has this understanding not been updated? It remains the common currency amongst those Americans who believe the U.S. will succeed in ‘out-competing’ China.

“Yet the two Parties have very little in common. Why should they? Russia could hardly be more different from China. The CPSU was a historical failure: in contrast, the CPC, over the last century, has arguably been the world’s most successful political party”, writes Martin Jacques. “It is impossible to understand the CPC in terms of traditional Marxism: from well before 1949, the CPC’s Marxism was highly nativized. The CPC, furthermore, is rooted in, and profoundly influenced, by Confucianism. It might be described as a hybrid of Chinese Marxism and Confucianism. The CPC is shaped by, and is as complex as Chinese civilization – of which, of course, it is a product”.

Similarly, U.S. thinking on Russia shows little or no innovation either: It seems set on repeating the old Afghanistan quagmire ploy from the Brzezinski era – of drawing Russia into a new Ukraine quagmire so as to drain Russia’s political focus and energy away from the China alliance – and, again, to crash the oil price, with Biden’s Green Revolution, re-setting the world into clean energy mode, and away from fossil fuels use, for ever.

The Chinese have an old wisdom which seems perfectly to encapsulate U.S. foreign policy at this time. It is called “watching the tree to catch a hare”. Once there was a boy who was told by his master to catch a hare. He went into the woods and looked around. Lo and behold, at that moment, he saw a hare running along at full speed. As he watched in astonishment, the hare ran smack into a tree and knocked itself unconscious. All he had to do was to pick it up. For the rest of his life the boy waited behind the same tree, in the hope that more hares would do the same thing.

The boy is like U.S. foreign policy: expecting the same conditions to be waiting for the new Washington team; ‘watching the tree’ hoping that another hare will just fall dead, and all that is required is to pick up the carcass – and away to lunch on it.

In his inimitably supercilious and churlish fashion, last week Obama endorsed slavery reparations, and blamed his inability to implement them during his administration on white racism:

“So if you ask me theoretically: ‘Are reparations justified?’ The answer is yes,” he said. “There’s not much question that the wealth of this country, the power of this country was built in significant part — not exclusively, maybe not even the majority of it — but a large portion of it was built on the backs of slaves.”

“What I saw during my presidency was the the politics of white resistance and resentment, the talk of welfare queens and the talk of the undeserving poor and the backlash against affirmative action,” Obama said on the podcast. “All that made the prospect of actually proposing any kind of coherent, meaningful reparations program struck me as, politically, not only a non-starter but potentially counter-productive.”

These statements are factually incorrect, bigoted, and extremely divisive, demonstrating exactly why race relations degraded more during Obama’s administration than in any other since Woodrow Wilson–a figure with whom Obama shares many similarities, none of them good. (I compared Obama and Wilson during the very early years of the former’s administration.)

Where to begin deconstructing this vicious farrago? I guess with the most vicious part–the claim that white racism doomed his high-minded dreams for reparations. Look at this part again:

the politics of white resistance and resentment, the talk of welfare queens and the talk of the undeserving poor and the backlash against affirmative action

Obama must have been having an acid flashback to the Reagan years when he said this. “Welfare queens”? Really? Who the hell has said that in the past 30 years?–that’s a trope from about 1982. Similarly “undeserving poor” and “backlash against affirmative action.” FFS–these are all anachronisms that had f-all to do with disputes over reparations in the 2010s.

Obama’s bigotry is also revealed by his failure even to countenance the possibility that resistance to reparations (not just among whites, but Asians, Hispanics, and even blacks) was and is rooted in a belief that the entire idea is monstrously unjust, and wildly impractical.

In terms of injustice, the argument for reparations is rooted in ideas of collective guilt. Not surprising from Obama and his ilk, but a profoundly unjust and anti-Western idea, and one which as wreaked untold miseries (including in the form of death camps and gulags and killing fields) wherever it has held sway.

Further, reparations impose no penalty on those responsible for slavery or who benefited from it, and pay no recompense to those who suffered from it directly, all of whom have been dead for at least decades, and most for centuries.

Think of any living white American. Not a single one is personally responsible for any sin committed by any dead white American prior to 1865. Moreover, virtually no living white Americans conceivably benefited in any material way from slavery.

Take me and my family for instance. The first of my father’s ancestors to arrive in the US did so in 1867. Most of the rest came here in the 1870s. How did they benefit from slavery? And if at all, by how much?

On my mother’s side, one great grandfather arrived in 1848–and settled in Ohio (and fought in the Civil War, including the March to the Sea, which freed numerous slaves). The remainder of her ancestors arrived to these shores between 1620 (yes, on the Mayflower) and the late-18th century. But every single one resided in a northern colony or state which were free states by the late-18th century; never held slaves; and were almost to a man and woman near subsistence farmers living on or near the frontier. So how did they benefit from slavery?

Pretty much every white American can to a considerable degree make a plausible claim that there is no plausible chain of causation between their current economic circumstances and slavery. The descendent of Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine. Italians or Jews or Slavs arriving at Ellis Island in the last quarter of the 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th. Even the descendants of poor whites in the South: there is some debate in the economic history literature that slavery might actually have made them poorer, not richer.

There is also the issue of the incredible cost paid by all Americans in the 1860s to end slavery. The Civil War resulted in the deaths of upwards of 400,000 men serving in Union armies: As Lincoln said, “every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn by the sword.” Shall be, and was. Hundreds of thousands more suffered horrific wounds, and debilitating diseases that scarred them for life: approximately 400,000 collected disability pensions, despite the fact that the government presented many obstacles to those making claims. Untold numbers suffered extreme emotional trauma–a subject only now receiving much attention (including in the drama Mercy Street). Even beyond the losses suffered by those who died or were maimed emotionally or physically, these casualties affected the economic circumstances of their families, and their descendants.

So how is it just to force those living now who did not benefit from slavery even indirectly, and who may well have suffered some loss from it or from the war fought to end it, to pay compensation? Should I get a credit for my Civil War veteran ancestors’ disabilities (a lost arm, lifelong rheumatism)? It cannot be rationalized even on the twisted logic of collective guilt, for this living collective is neither neither guilty of sins committed by some dead collective, nor the recipient of ill-gotten gains.

Obama tries to get around these issues thus:

“There’s not much question that the wealth of this country, the power of this country was built in significant part — not exclusively, maybe not even the majority of it — but a large portion of it was built on the backs of slaves.”

This is a monstrous untruth. In fact, the reverse is true. “Slavery made America rich” is a leftist mantra. It is also categorically false, as has been demonstrated by massive scholarship over the years.

The economic historical literature on the subject is vast, but Deirdre McCloskey summarizes it well:

Yet the economic idea implied—that exploitation made us rich—is mistaken. Slavery made a few Southerners rich; a few Northerners, too. But it was ingenuity and innovation that enriched Americans generally, including at last the descendants of the slaves.

It’s hard to dispel the idea embedded in Lincoln’s poetry. TeachUSHistory.org assumes “that northern finance made the Cotton Kingdom possible” because “northern factories required that cotton.” The idea underlies recent books of a new King Cotton school of history: Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams (Harvard University Press), Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History (Knopf), and Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books).

The rise of capitalism depended, the King Cottoners claim, on the making of cotton cloth in Manchester, England, and Manchester, New Hampshire. The raw cotton, they say, could come only from the South. The growing of cotton, in turn, is said to have depended on slavery. The conclusion—just as our good friends on the left have been saying all these years—is that capitalism was conceived in sin, the sin of slavery.

Yet each step in the logic of the King Cotton historians is mistaken. The enrichment of the modern world did not depend on cotton textiles. Cotton mills, true, were pioneers of some industrial techniques, techniques applied to wool and linen as well. And many other techniques, in iron making and engineering and mining and farming, had nothing to do with cotton. Britain in 1790 and the U.S. in 1860 were not nation-sized cotton mills. (Emphasis added.)

…

Economists have been thinking about such issues for half a century. You wouldn’t know it from the King Cottoners. [Or Obama.] They assert, for example, that a slave was “cheap labor.” Mistaken again. After all, slaves ate, and they didn’t produce until they grew up. Stanley Engerman and the late Nobel Prize winner Robert Fogel confirmed in 1974 what economic common sense would suggest: that productivity was incorporated into the market price of a slave. It’s how any capital market works. If you bought a slave, you faced the cost of alternative uses of the capital. No supernormal profits accrued from the purchase. Slave labor was not a free lunch. The wealth was not piled up.

The King Cotton school has been devastated recently in detail by two economic historians, Alan Olmstead of the University of California at Davis and Paul Rhode of the University of Michigan. [Obama apparently missed this.] They point out, for example, that the influential and leftish economist Thomas Piketty grossly exaggerated the share of slaves in U.S. wealth, yet Edward Baptist uses Piketty’s estimates to put slavery at the center of the country’s economic history. Olmstead and Rhode note, too, from their research on the cotton economy that the price of slaves increased from 1820 to 1860 not because of institutional change (more whippings) or the demand for cotton, but because of an astonishing rise in the productivity of the cotton plant, achieved by selective breeding. Ingenuity, not capital accumulation or exploitation, made cotton a little king.

One could go on and on. Critically, cotton production represented a relatively small fraction of US income and wealth. As McCloskey (and others) note, American economic growth derived from myriad factors, of which cotton and slavery represented a modest and arguably trivial part.

Further, to the extent that slavery did massively benefit a small Southern elite, well the Civil War pretty much took care of that, no? The war devastated the planter class. Yes, more millionaires lived in sugar plantations along the Mississippi River in Louisiana than anywhere else in the US in 1860, but in 1865 the grand houses were burned; the stables emptied; the animals slaughtered or seized–and the slaves gone. They sowed the wind, and reaped the whirlwind.

Take Braxton Bragg as an example. The much-hated Confederate general married into a wealthy Louisiana planter family, but his time in the slaveholding aristocracy was short lived: Union troops confiscated his plantation in 1862, and after the war Bragg scraped by selling insurance and working as an engineer for a struggling Texas railroad. And he was one of the fortunate.

Wars also consume resources that could have been invested in productive activities: the massive expenditure of wealth to fund the Civil War reduced future US income, rather than increased it.

All meaning that Obama’s argument that modern Americans have been been unjustly enriched by the past injustices of slavery, and thus should pay reparations, is a complete falsehood. (A falsehood propagated by the loathsome 1619 Project as well.)

There are also the practical questions of to whom reparations would be paid, and the justice of any formula for rewarding them.

Are payments to be made on the basis of the one drop rule? That would be mordantly ironic, no?

Most descendants of slaves in the US are also the descendants of non-slaves, mainly whites, some of whom were more likely beneficiaries of slavery than you or I. There is considerable variation in the ratio of slave ancestry among Americans who currently identify as black. How will a reparations scheme reflect such variation? (Depending on how it does so, it could lead to another irony–a replacement of a historical reluctance of some who identify as white (especially in the South–read some Faulkner) to admit African ancestry, with a rush to find a slave ancestor: maybe investing in a genetic testing company is a way to speculate on the prospects for reparations!)

However these knotty issues are resolved, the resolution will be highly arbitrary–and hence add yet another element of injustice to an already irretrievably unjust enterprise.

Then there is the question of what is the counterfactual against which harm can be calculated. It could even be said there is no plausible counterfactual: Person X, descended from slaves, would not exist in the counterfactual world in which slavery never existed. So how can you calculate the harm suffered by X? And maybe there is no harm. Some portion of Person X’s genetic material would exist in some other people, living in Africa in far worse conditions than Person X. Person X could therefore be said to be the beneficiary of the horrors his enslaved ancestors suffered. But, of course, said ancestors cannot be compensated for these horrors.

Any just system of compensation and taxation to pay it (for reparations is at root a massive redistributive scheme) should have at least some connection between the harm suffered and the compensation paid, and between the responsibility for inflicting the harm, or the benefit received therefrom, and the tax paid. For all of the reasons discussed herein, slavery reparations cannot be just. Indeed, they are guaranteed to be unjust.

And it is that fundamental injustice–which is an inherent feature of the entire concept of reparations–is what makes it extraordinarily divisive. Even people of good will will not voluntarily submit to such a fundamental injustice, and indeed, people of good will will resist the imposition of such an injustice.

Obama’s failure to recognize this, and his assertion that opposition to reparations is rooted in base, racist motives speaks volumes about the man–and about what he thinks about the majority of Americans. And it does not speak well. Pushing for reparations will inevitably and severely exacerbate racial tensions, and divide the nation. Claiming that opposition to reparations can only be due to racism will divide it even more. This is the last thing we need now. But Obama apparently decided he had inadequate time in office to accomplish his mission, so he is devoting his post-presidency to fan the flames of enmity in America.

*There are also issues of economic efficiency. Reparations are purely redistributive. It can have no effect on the behavior that caused the harm–because all those behaving thus are long dead. But redistributive programs impose deadweight costs. These include, inter alia, the deadweight costs of taxation required to pay reparations; the costs of administering the program, including the costs to detect and punish fraud; and the rent seeking costs incurred by those attempting to secure the transfer. These deadweight costs make everyone poorer. And this does not even consider the cost of the strife that a battle over reparations would engender.

streetwiseprofessor.com

The Pew surveys have found the same thing: In almost all countries surveyed, other than Poland, public approval of America’s leadership plunged when Trump replaced Obama, and that low approval stayed down throughout Trump’s Presidency.

However, also on December 17th, the great investigative journalist David Sirota headlined at his “The Daily Poster” blog, “End The Austerity Loop”, and he documented that President Obama’s response to George W. Bush’s policies that had crashed the U.S. economy (and actually the entire world’s economy) had actually been to institute a bailout of the megabanks (“broker-dealers”), and — as soon as it was passed by Congress — Obama’s Administration refused to help the people who had been evicted from their homes as a result of what Wall Street had done. Obama said instead that all of the federal money had already been spent and he wouldn’t authorize increasing the federal debt even more than he already had authorized in order to bail out Wall Street.

Of course, Congress was also culpable in all of these Robin-Hood-in-reverse policies (protecting Wall Street while abandoning Main Street), but the ultimate leadership was at the top, and it was a policy of sheer hypocrisy. Trump has merely been hypocritical in a different way, and espousing a different set of excuses for his failures.

The article in the Spring 2011 Review of Banking & Financial Law, by Tae Yeon Kim, “Pay It Back (TARP Developments)”, described the situation as follows:

The purpose of Title XIII (“Pay it Back Act”) of the DoddFrank Act, according to Senator Michael Bennett, was to “rebuild the credibility of our financial system, save taxpayers billions of dollars, and finally move to end the TARP”12 by “prevent[ing] further government spending, recaptur[ing] taxpayers’ investment in financial institutions, and ensur[ing] that repaid funds are used for deficit reduction.”13 Under Title XIII, TARP funding authorized under the EESA was reduced from $700 billion to $475 billion.14 Also, no additional TARP funds can be spent on any program initiated after June 25, 2010; any money repaid to the TARP fund must be used for deficit reduction only.15 Title XIII amends the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008. The Treasury must allocate the sale of obligations and securities, as well as fees paid by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Federal Home Loan Banks to the General Fund of the Treasury (“General Fund”).16 The funds must be “dedicated for the sole purpose of deficit reduction” and “prohibited from use as an offset for other spending increases or revenue reductions.”17 Similarly, TARP funds provided to a state under ARRA and rejected by the Governor or by the State legislature, or funds withdrawn or recaptured by the head of an executive agency not obligated by a State or local government, will be rescinded and deposited in the General Fund.18 Once in the General Fund, the money will be “dedicated for the sole purpose of deficit reduction” and “prohibited from use as an offset for other spending increases or revenue reductions.”19 Section 1306 further provides that discretionary ARRA appropriations that have not been obligated as of December 31, 2010 shall also be rescinded and deposited in the General Fund for the sole purpose of deficit reduction.

On 18 February 2011, National Public Radio headlined “TARP Watchdog Says Foreclosure Plan Is Failing” and reported that

Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for the massive federal bank bailout program, or TARP, is stepping down from his post in March. He says the Obama administration’s program to prevent foreclosures is broken, and that many of the people it’s supposed to be helping are now “in a far worse place than they would have been had this program not existed.”

The megabanks had gotten their federal help, but foreclosures and boarded-up windows and storefronts were appearing everywhere and were lowering the surrounding property-values, so that both lower and middle-class real estate were getting progressively worse and more run-down. The TARP Bailout Program saved the megabanks but not their victims; and here is why, as explained even by a conservative, pro-corporate, source:

The Problem With the TARP Program for Homeowners

Why didn’t more people take advantage of the HAMP and HARP programs? This would have pumped billions into the economy and helped millions of homeowners avoid foreclosure.

The problem was the banks. They cherry-picked applicants and refused to consider those with lower equity. Banks were too wary of risk to allow the programs to work.

These were the same banks, who just a few years before, were giving out loans to anyone because they were making money on the investments that were created from the loans.

There was no risk to the banks, as all these loans were guaranteed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. Banks didn’t want to be bothered with the paperwork involved with homeowners who had mortgage insurance.

On 25 July 2016, a mortgage-industry website headlined “Obama administration presents a look at life after HAMP” and acknowledged “that there’s more work to be done.” (That was putting it mildly.)

The Obama Administration did nothing whatsoever to reduce those foreclosures. In fact, there was even less prosecution of financial and other white-collar crimes than there had been under Bush.

The admirers of President Trump are equally deceived — no less deceived than the admirers of Obama had been. Trump promised to “drain the swamp” and did none of that.

In foreign policies, Trump continued Obama’s wars (including aggressive sanctions), such as against Syria, and against Russia, and against Iraq, and intensified Obama’s war against China and against Iran and against Venezuela — all of these being against countries that had never threatened to invade the U.S., and so all of them were (and are) actually wars of aggression, not of defense.

Americans are profoundly deceived to accept such people as leaders, instead of to reject them as liars and as traitors.

Most Americans — and many people throughout the world — prefer one or the other of those two American Presidents on the basis only of political prejudices, but the actual differences between Obama and Trump were more stylistic than substantive.

President Trump, at the end of his Presidency, is polling, among the American public, both as one of the worst Presidents ever and as one of the best Presidents ever, and this is a reflection of the astoundingly sharp partisan divide now between Democrats and Republicans. Pathetically few Americans recognize that both of the two Parties represent only the billionaires — not the American people. This pervasive miscomprehension, by the public, results because the billionaires control not only the Government, they also control the press — they shape the population’s perceptions, so as to make this aristocracy (America’s billionaires) acceptable to the public, directing the public’s rage to be against the opposite Party, instead of against the billionaires themselves, who actually control the country.

Consequently, Democratic Party voters think that that Party is their  Party, and Republican Party voters think that that Party is their  Party. However, in reality, both Parties are controlled by America’s hundreds of billionaires — not  by the Party’s voters. Obama represented the Democratic Party’s billionaires, and Trump represented the Republican Party’s billionaires (other than the ones who, in 2020, disliked Trump so much that they donated instead to the Biden campaign or to one of its PACs). This is a Government of the people, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires. It’s no democracy, whatsoever, and the U.S. Constitution has been covered-over, by the U.S. aristocracy’s Supreme Court’s rulings, to become, by now, merely a parchment document, which ‘means’ whatever the (majority of) the U.S. aristocracy’s Supreme Court say  that it means. Although those jurists are paid by the public, they don’t represent America’s Founders, and they don’t represent the American people. They represent — and protect the interests of — America’s billionaires. They were chosen because that is what they had been doing before they had been chosen. If they hadn’t been doing this, they wouldn’t have been chosen. That’s today’s American reality.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has run a fascinating long report this week offering a disturbing snapshot of the political climate rapidly emerging across Europe on the issue of antisemitism. The article documents a kind of cultural, political and intellectual reign of terror in Germany since the parliament passed a resolution last year equating support for non-violent boycotts of Israel – in solidarity with Palestinians oppressed by Israel – with antisemitism.

The article concerns Germany but anyone reading it will see very strong parallels with what is happening in other European countries, especially the UK and France.

The same European leaders who a few years ago marched in Paris shouting “Je suis Charlie” – upholding the inalienable free speech rights of white Europeans to offend Muslims by insulting and ridiculing their Prophet – are now queuing up to outlaw free speech when it is directed against Israel, a state that refuses to end its belligerent occupation of Palestinian land. European leaders have repeatedly shown they are all too ready to crush the free speech of Palestinians, and those in solidarity with them, to avoid offending sections of the Jewish community.

The situation reduces to this: European Muslims have no right to take offence at insults about a religion they identify with, but European Jews have every right to take offence at criticism of an aggressive Middle Eastern state they identify with. Seen another way, the perverse secular priorities of European mainstream culture now place the sanctity of a militarised state, Israel, above the sanctity of a religion with a billion followers.

Guilt by association

This isn’t even a double standard. I can’t find a word in the dictionary that conveys the scale and degree of hypocrisy and bad faith involved.

If the American Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein wrote a follow-up to his impassioned book The Holocaust Industry – on the cynical use of the Holocaust to enrich and empower a Jewish organisational establishment at the expense of the Holocaust’s actual survivors – he might be tempted to title it The Antisemitism Industry.

In the current climate in Europe, one that rejects any critical thinking in relation to broad areas of public life, that observation alone would enough to have one denounced as an antisemite. Which is why the Haaretz article – far braver than anything you will read in a UK or US newspaper – makes no bones about what is happening in Germany. It calls it a “witch-hunt”. That is Haaretz’s way of saying that antisemitism has been politicised and weaponised – a self-evident conclusion that will currently get you expelled from the British Labour party, even if you are Jewish.

The Haaretz story highlights two important developments in the way antisemitism has been, in the words of intellectuals and cultural leaders cited by the newspaper, “instrumentalised” in Germany.

Jewish organisations and their allies in Germany, as Haaretz reports, are openly weaponising antisemitism not only to damage the reputation of Israel’s harsher critics, but also to force out of the public and cultural domain – through a kind of “antisemitism guilt by association” – anyone who dares to entertain criticism of Israel.

Cultural associations, festivals, universities, Jewish research centres, political think-tanks, museums and libraries are being forced to scrutinise the past of those they wish to invite in case some minor transgression against Israel can be exploited by local Jewish organisations. That has created a toxic, politically paranoid atmosphere that inevitably kills trust and creativity.

But the psychosis runs deeper still. Israel, and anything related to it, has become such a combustible subject – one that can ruin careers in an instant – that most political, academic and cultural figures in Germany now choose to avoid it entirely. Israel, as its supporters intended, is rapidly becoming untouchable.

A case study noted by Haaretz is Peter Schäfer, a respected professor of ancient Judaism and Christianity studies who was forced to resign as director of Berlin’s Jewish Museum last year. Schäfer’s crime, in the eyes of Germany’s Jewish establishment, was that he staged an exhibition on Jerusalem that recognised the city’s three religious traditions, including a Muslim one.

He was immediately accused of promoting “historical distortions” and denounced as “anti-Israel”. A reporter for Israel’s rightwing Jerusalem Post, which has been actively colluding with the Israeli government to smear critics of Israel, contacted Schäfer with a series of inciteful emails. The questions included “Did you learn the wrong lesson from the Holocaust?” and “Israeli experts told me you disseminate antisemitism – is that true?”

Schäfer observes:

The accusation of antisemitism is a club that allows one to deal a death blow, and political elements who have an interest in this are using it, without a doubt… The museum staff gradually entered a state of panic. Then of course we also started to do background checks. Increasingly it poisoned the atmosphere and our work.

Another prominent victim of these Jewish organisations tells Haaretz:

Sometimes one thinks, “To go to that conference?”, “To invite this colleague?” Afterward it means that for three weeks, I’ll have to cope with a shitstorm, whereas I need the time for other things that I get paid for as a lecturer. There is a type of “anticipatory obedience” or “prior self-censorship”.

Ringing off the hook

There is nothing unusual about what is happening in Germany. Jewish organisations are stirring up these “shitstorms” – designed to paralyse political and cultural life for anyone who engages in even the mildest criticism of Israel – at the highest levels of government. Don’t believe me? Here is Barack Obama explaining in his recent autobiography his efforts as US president to curb Israel’s expansion of its illegal settlements. Early on, he was warned to back off or face the wrath of the Israel lobby:

Members of both parties worried about crossing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Those who criticized Israeli policy too loudly risked being tagged as “anti-Israel” (and possibly anti-Semitic) and confronted with a well-funded opponent in the next election.

Corbyn, it seems, has found an unlikely ally in former US President Obama. In his new autobiography, he writes of the Israel lobby’s power: ‘Those who criticized Israeli policy too loudly risked being tagged as “anti-Israel” (and possibly anti-Semitic)’ https://t.co/tKmy8q3Cws

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) November 26, 2020

When Obama went ahead anyway in 2009 and proposed a modest freeze on Israel’s illegal settlements:

The White House phones started ringing off the hook, as members of my national security team fielded calls from reporters, leaders of American Jewish organizations, prominent supporters, and members of Congress, all wondering why we were picking on Israel … this sort of pressure continued for much of 2009.

He observes further:

The noise orchestrated by Netanyahu had the intended effect of gobbling up our time, putting us on the defensive, and reminding me that normal policy differences with an Israeli prime minister – even one who presided over a fragile coalition government – exacted a political cost that didn’t exist when I dealt with the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, or any of our other closest allies.

Doubtless, Obama dare not put down in writing his full thoughts about Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu or the US lobbyists who worked on his behalf. But Obama’s remarks do show that, even a US president, supposedly the single most powerful person on the planet, ended up blanching in the face of this kind of relentless assault. For lesser mortals, the price is likely to be far graver.

No free speech on Israel

It was this same mobilisation of Jewish organisational pressure – orchestrated, as Obama notes, by Israel and its partisans in the US and Europe – that ended up dominating Jeremy Corbyn’s five years as the leader of Britain’s leftwing Labour party, recasting a well-known anti-racism activist almost overnight as an antisemite.

It is the reason why his successor, Sir Keir Starmer, has outsourced part of Labour’s organisational oversight on Jewish and Israel-related matters to the very conservative Board of Deputies of British Jews, as given expression in Starmer’s signing up to the Board’s “10 Pledges”.

It is part of the reason why Starmer recently suspended Corbyn from the party, and then defied the membership’s demands that he be properly reinstated, after Corbyn expressed concerns about the way antisemitism allegations had been “overstated for political reasons” to damage him and Labour. (The rightwing Starmer, it should be noted, was also happy to use antisemitism as a pretext to eradicate the socialist agenda Corbyn had tried to revive in Labour.) It is why Starmer has imposed a blanket ban on constituency parties discussing Corbyn’s suspension. And it is why Labour’s shadow education secretary has joined the ruling Conservative party in threatening to strip universities of their funding if they allow free speech about Israel on campus.

Labour leaders, having crushed free speech in their own party and screwed over the Palestinians, now want to force British universities to follow suit, as the Kate Green, the shadow education secretary, explains in the Jewish Chronicle https://t.co/EnaKp5U0xz

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) December 8, 2020

Two types of Jews

But the Haaretz article raises another issue critical to understanding how Israel and the Jewish establishment in Europe are politicising antisemitism to protect Israel from criticism. The potential Achilles’ heel of their campaign are Jewish dissidents, those who break with the supposed “Jewish community” line and create a space for others – whether Palestinians or other non-Jews – to criticise Israel. These Jewish dissenters risk serving as a reminder that trenchant criticism of Israel should not result in one being tarred an antisemite.

Leading Palestinians warn: ‘The fight against antisemitism has been increasingly instrumentalised by the Israeli government and its supporters in an effort to delegitimise the Palestinian cause and silence defenders of Palestinian rights’ https://t.co/Shu1Z7XYM1

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) December 1, 2020

Israel and Jewish organisations, however, have made it their task to erode that idea by promoting a distinction – an antisemitic one, at that – between two types of Jews: good Jews (loyal to Israel), and bad Jews (disloyal to Israel).

Haaretz reports that officials in Germany, such as Felix Klein, the country’s antisemitism commissioner, and Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, are being allowed to define not only who is an antisemite, typically using support for Israel as the yardstick, but are also determining who are good Jews – those politically like them – and who are bad Jews – those who disagree with them.

Despite Germany’s horrific recent history of Jew hatred, the German government, local authorities, the media, universities and cultural institutions have been encouraged by figures like Klein and Schuster to hound German Jews, even Israeli Jews living and working in Germany, from the country’s public and cultural space.

When, for example, a group of Israeli Jewish academics in Berlin held a series of online discussions about Zionism last year on the website of their art school, an Israeli reporter soon broke the story of a “scandal” involving boycott supporters receiving funding from the German government. Hours later the art school had pulled down the site, while the German education ministry issued a statement clarifying that it had provided no funding. The Israeli embassy officially declared the discussions held by these Israelis as “antisemitic”, and a German foundation that documents antisemitism added the group to the list of antisemitic incidents it records.

Described as ‘kapos’

So repressive has the cultural and political atmosphere grown in Germany that there has been a small backlash among cultural leaders. Some have dared to publish a letter protesting against the role of Klein, the antisemitism commissioner. Haaretz reports:

The antisemitism czar, the letter charged, is working “in synergy with the Israeli government” in an effort “to discredit and silence opponents of Israel’s policies” and is abetting the “instrumentalization” that undermines the true struggle against antisemitism.

Figures like Klein have been so focused on tackling criticism of Israel from the left, including the Jewish left, that they have barely noted the “acute danger Jews in Germany face due to the surge in far-right antisemitism”, the letter argues.

Again, the same picture can be seen across Europe. In the UK, the opposition Labour party, which should be a safe space for those leading the anti-racism struggle, is purging itself of Jews critical of Israel and using anti-semitism smears against prominent anti-racists, especially from other oppressed minorities.

Extraordinarily, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, one of the founders of Jewish Voice for Labour, which supports Corbyn, recently found herself suspended by Starmer’s Labour. She had just appeared in a moving video in which she explained the ways antisemitism was being used by Jewish organisations to smear Jewish left-wingers like herself as “traitors” and “kapos” – an incendiary term of abuse, as Wimborne-Idrissi points out, that refers to “a Jewish inmate of a concentration camp who collaborated with the [Nazi] authorities, people who collaborated in the annihilation of their own people”.

In suspending her, Starmer effectively endorsed this campaign by the UK’s Jewish establishment of incitement against, and vilification of, leftwing Jews.

Earlier, Marc Wadsworth, a distinguished black anti-racism campaigner, found himself similarly suspended by Labour when he exposed the efforts of Ruth Smeeth, then a Labour MP and a former Jewish official in the Israel lobby group BICOM, to recruit the media to her campaign smearing political opponents on the left as antisemites.

In keeping with the rapid erosion of critical thinking in civil society organisations designed to uphold basic freedoms, Smeeth was recently appointed director of the prestigious free speech organisation Index on Censorship. There she can now work on suppressing criticism of Israel – and attack “bad Jews” – under cover of fighting censorship. In the new, inverted reality, censorship refers not to the smearing and silencing of a “bad Jew” like Wimborne-Idrissi, but to criticism of Israel over its human rights abuses, which supposedly “censors” the identification of “good Jews” with Israel – now often seen as the crime of “causing offence”.

Ok, we’ve now officially moved from Alice Through the Looking Glass into the Twilight Zone.

Ruth Smeeth, ex-Israel lobbyist for Bicom and a key player in outlawing solidarity for Palestinians in the Labour party, is the new CEO of free speech group Index on Censorship! https://t.co/UmHXbTQETS

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) June 15, 2020

Boy who cried wolf

The Haaretz article helps to contextualise Europe’s current antisemitism “witch-hunt”, which targets anyone who criticises Israel or stands in solidarity with oppressed Palestinians, or associates with such people. It is an expansion of the earlier campaign by the Jewish establishment against “the wrong kind of Jew”, as identified by Finkelstein in The Holocaust Industry. But this time Jewish organisations are playing a much higher-stakes, and more dangerous, political game.

Haaretz rightly fears that the Jewish leadership in Europe is not only silencing ordinary Jews but degrading the meaning – the shock value – of antisemitism through the very act of politicising it. Jewish organisations risk alienating the European left, which has historically stood with them against Jew hatred from the right. European anti-racists suddenly find themselves equated with, and smeared as, fledgling neo-Nazis.

If those who support human rights and demand an end to the oppression of Palestinians find themselves labelled antisemitic, it will become ever harder to distinguish between bogus (weaponised) “antisemitism” on the left and real Jew hatred from the right. The antisemitism smearers – and their fellow travellers like Keir Starmer – are likely to end up suffering their very own “boy who cried wolf” syndrome.

Or as Haaretz notes:

The issue that is bothering the critics of the Bundestag [German parliament] resolution is whether the extension of the concept of antisemitism to encompass criticism of Israel is not actually adversely affecting the battle against antisemitism. The argument is that the ease with which the accusation is leveled could have the effect of eroding the concept itself.

The Antisemitism Industry

It is worth noting the shared features of the new Antisemitism Industry and Finkelstein’s earlier discussions of the Holocaust Industry.

In his book, Finkelstein identifies the “wrong Jews” as people like his mother, who survived a Nazi death camp as the rest of her family perished. These surviving Jews, Finkelstein argues, were valued by the Holocaust Industry only in so far as they served as a promotional tool for the Jewish establishment to accumulate more wealth and cultural and political status. Otherwise, the victims were ignored because the actual Holocaust’s message – in contrast to the Jewish leadership’s representation of it – was universal: that we must oppose and fight all forms of racism because they lead to persecution and genocide.

Instead the Holocaust Industry promoted a particularist, self-interested lesson that the Holocaust proves Jews are uniquely oppressed and that they therefore deserve a unique solution: a state, Israel, that must be given unique leeway by western states to commit crimes in violation of international law. The Holocaust Industry – very much to be distinguished from the real events of the Holocaust – is deeply entwined in, and rationalised by, the perpetuation of the racialist, colonial project of Israel.

In the case of the Antisemitism Industry, the “wrong Jew” surfaces again. This time the witch-hunt targets Jewish leftwingers, Jews critical of Israel, Jews opposed to the occupation, and Jews who support a boycott of the illegal settlements or of Israel itself. Again, the problem with these “bad Jews” is that they allude to a universal lesson, one that says Palestinians have at least as much right to self-determination, to dignity and security, in their historic homeland as Jewish immigrants who fled European persecution.

Keir Starmer needs to listen to the ‘proudly pro-Israel’ Americans for Peace Now. They reject the IHRA definition for ‘weaponising’ antisemitism and allowing ‘McCarthyite witch hunts’ of Israel critics. Only those living in a ‘black hole’ could support it https://t.co/mNCj0LqCky

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) December 6, 2020

In contrast to the “bad Jews”, the Antisemitism Industry demands that a particularist conclusion be drawn about Israel – just as a particularist conclusion was earlier drawn by the Holocaust Industry. It says that to deny Jews a state is to leave them defenceless against the eternal virus of antisemitism. In this conception, the Holocaust may be uniquely abhorrent but it is far from unique. Non-Jews, given the right circumstances, are only too capable of carrying out another Holocaust. Jews must therefore always be protected, always on guard, always have their weapons (or in Israel’s case, its nuclear bombs) to hand.

‘Get out of jail’ card

This view, of course, seeks to ignore, or marginalise, other victims of the Holocaust – Romanies, communists, gays – and other kinds of racism. It needs to create a hierarchy of racisms, a competition between them, in which hatred of Jews is at the pinnacle. This is how we arrived at an absurdity: that anti-Zionism – misrepresented as the rejection of a refuge for Jews, rather than the reality that it rejects an ethnic, colonial state oppressing Palestinians – is the same as antisemitism.

Extraordinarily, as the Haaretz article clarifies, German officials are oppressing “bad Jews”, at the instigation of Jewish organisations, to prevent, as they see it, the re-emergence of the far-right and neo-Nazis. The criticisms of Israel made by the “bad Jew” are thereby not just dismissed as ideologically unsound or delusions but become proof that these Jews are colluding with, or at least nourishing, the Jew haters.

In this way, Germany, the UK and much of Europe have come to justify the exclusion of the “wrong Jew” – those who uphold universal principles for the benefit of all – from the public space. Which, of course, is exactly what Israel wants, because, rooted as it is in an ideology of ethnic exclusivity as a “Jewish state”, it necessarily rejects universal ethics.

What we see here is an illustration of a principle at the heart of Israel’s state ideology of Zionism: Israel needs antisemitism. Israel would quite literally have to invent antisemitism if it did not exist.

This is not hyperbole. The idea that the “virus of antisemitism” lies semi-dormant in every non-Jew waiting for a chance to overwhelm its host is the essential rationale for Israel. If the Holocaust was an exceptional historical event, if antisemitism was an ancient racism that in its modern incarnation followed the patterns of prejudice and hatred familiar in all racisms, from anti-black bigotry to Islamophobia, Israel would be not only redundant but an abomination – because it has been set up to dispossess and abuse another group, the Palestinians.

Antisemitism is Israel’s “get out of jail” card. Antisemitism serves to absolve Israel of the racism it structurally embodies and that would be impossible to overlook were Israel deprived of the misdirection weaponised antisemitism provides.

An empty space

The Haaretz article provides a genuine service by not only reminding us that “bad Jews” exist but in coming to their defence – something that European media is no longer willing to do. To defend “bad Jews” like Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi is to be contaminated with the same taint of antisemitism that justified the ejection of these Jews from the public space.

Haaretz records the effort of a few brave cultural institutions in Germany to protest, to hold the line, against this new McCarthyism. Their stand may fail. If it does, you may never become aware of it.

The fraudulent ‘Labour antisemitism’ controversy has empowered the most thuggish elements in the organised British Jewish community.

Case in point: the Campaign Against Antisemitism effectively calls for Professor David Feldman to keep quiet or be sacked. https://t.co/QWvNg84c2E

— JamieSW (@jsternweiner) December 4, 2020

Once, the “bad Jews” have been smeared into silence, as Palestinians and those who stand in solidarity with them largely have been already; when social media has de-platformed critics of Israel as Jew haters; when the media and political parties enforce this silence so absolutely they no longer need to smear anyone as an antisemite because these “antisemites” have been disappeared; when the Jewish “community” speaks with one voice because its other voices have been eliminated; when the censorship is complete, you will not know it.

There will be no record of what was lost. There will be simply an empty space, a blank slate, where discussions of Israel’s crimes against Palestinians once existed. What you will hear instead is only what Israel and its partisans want you to hear. Your ignorance will be blissfully complete.

jonathan-cook.net

The same “injustice” system that unlawfully locked up the Central Park Five will continue unabated with Biden and his “top cop” sidekick.

“The stimulus has been cut off since July, the eviction moratorium is about to end, and people are suffering, dreadfully.”

It feels like I’m raining on everybody’s parade.  CNN’s Van Jones emotionally declares after the “victory” that he believes in Joe Biden.  Does that mean he believes in Biden’s history of mass murder internationally, mass incarceration and surveillance domestically, and threatening to veto national health care during a pandemic?  People are happy they no longer need to see Trump’s face or hear his voice, but they can only be happy if they keep the pictures of starving Yemeni children  out of their mind.  As a Jew who grew up with pictures of the Holocaust revealing hell itself, pictures of Yemen bring me the same grief and despair.

Jones says “Being a good man matters.”  Biden probably sexually assaulted Tara Reade , he certainly likes being physically affectionate to young girls , and it is quite likely Biden won the election by a hair because the story of his son Hunter using his father’s VP position for business dealings  was shamelessly censored by mainstream media.  Trump was the perfect caricature of the norm in politics – crass and uncouth.  Caitlin Johnstone nails it; “Biden Will Have The Most Diverse, Intersectional Cabinet Of Mass Murderers  Ever Assembled.”  A good man?

“Trump was the perfect caricature.”

Trump laid bare how rotten to the core our sociopathic state is, but instead of the Democrats owning their blunders, their 2016 loss was blamed on Russia — very lucrative to the weapons industry — as a distraction.  The post mortem on the election says the moderate and right-wing of the Democratic Party won, and the progressives should back off.  Once again, the broad swath of Bernie folk are given the finger.  No single payer, no student debt forgiveness or free college… issues before COVID.  Now we have historic unemployment, shuttered schools and a looming housing crisis that is painful to imagine.  We are all hiding in fear behind masks.  Biden says he will support those who voted against him as well as those who voted for him.  But what has he offered to tackle our myriad, historic crises?  Will he be true to his promise to increase the minimum wage to $15?  Talk is cheap.

With the biggest voter turnout in history, Trump once again appeared the populist, sensitive to the working class, which as the reality show host famous for “You’re fired!” is beyond comprehension.  But the abject failure of the Democrats to address any of the continuing crises, from COVID to institutionalized racism, left the disenfranchised masses with only Trump to express their desperation.

“Now we have historic unemployment, shuttered schools and a looming housing crisis.”

As in 2016, the Democrats learned nothing from the Bernie and Trump phenomena.  After Bernie was cheated out of the 2016 primary, many of his supporters voted for Trump because the Democrats didn’t speak to them about bread and butter issues, and they still don’t.  If it’s not clear that Bernie would have beat Trump in 2016, it’s certainly clear that he would have swept Trump this year.  But the suits on Wall Street, who pull the strings, decided better Trump than Bernie because Bernie would have taken a slim section of their repulsive wealth.

That Biden’s win against the unstable racist was close is damning enough.  What is more damning is that he’s promised that “nothing will fundamentally change,” so the utter bankruptcy of the Democrats will be glaring.  And of course, anti-war is not on their agenda at all, as they voted even more money for the obscenely bloated military than Trump asked for.  Trump told his supporters to distrust the post office and vote only on election day, which any seasoned politician knows is a risky strategy, particularly under COVID.  In spite of that, Trump got more votes this year than Clinton did in 2016.

It is now clear that Trump was never part of the in-crowd, but an outlier.  He is “bleeding Republicans,” who are joining the Democrats in declaring him unfit.  Obama, early in his first term, said he didn’t realize how much of a “playbook there was.”  He obviously followed it, meticulously, and Trump didn’t, although Trump dropped the MOAB (Mother of All Bombs)  and others to show he would play cricket with the weapons manufacturers and their servants.  The NYT said he had “heart” when he bombed Syria .  Trump was surprised to see that “The top people in the Pentagon… want to do nothing but fight wars  so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes…stay happy, but we’re getting out of the endless wars…”  That was his death warrant just like JFK revealing his desire to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds” after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

“Anti-war is not on the Democrats’ agenda at all.”

Van Jones said the results didn’t provide the “moral victory”  that Democrats wanted after seeing children being taken away from their mothers at the border and Black children being called “the n-word” at school under Trump’s leadership. Children in cages at the border is of course a bone-chilling image, but the same “injustice” system that unlawfully locked up the Central Park Five , most of them minors, will continue unabated with Biden and his “top cop” sidekick.  Mass incarceration increasingly and repeatedly tears children from their parents and sends them back into poverty.  Bone chilling.

Prison Policy states, “The U.S. incarcerates more than any other country  and more than five times higher than most of the countries in the world…The growth in the U.S. prison population can be more closely attributed to ideological policy choices than actual crime rates…Mass incarceration has not managed to significantly enhance public safety, but instead has consistently and disproportionately stunted the social and economic wellbeing of poor communities and communities of color for generations.”

“The growth in the U.S. prison population can be more closely attributed to ideological policy choices than actual crime rates.”

Does anybody think Biden will come close to addressing those concerns?  He is more likely to increase the injustice, as he still brags about pushing the crime bill that exponentially increased the prison population  to over 2,000,000.

Does anybody think Biden will protect the environment, since he vowed to expand fracking?  He believes in science if it doesn’t offend his doners. Even re-signing the Paris Climate Accord is too little and too late.  And lest we forget, the US military is the biggest planetary polluter by far.  We have never been closer to midnight for climate catastrophe or nuclear war.  It is staggering that discussion, let alone formal debate, about peace is entirely missing from the conversation.

In August, Margaret Kimberley said, “We will hold their feet to the fire is one of the saddest or perhaps funniest of all quadrennial proclamations….Even if the people were sufficiently well organized to call anyone to account, they would be begging Biden and Harris to act in direct opposition to the interests of the donor class who put them in their positions…Of course there are sincere folks who swear they will speak up when the horrible Democrat foisted upon them gets into office and promptly carries out orders from the rulers.  But like clockwork, they are told that the congressional majority isn’t big enough to give the president any leeway.”

“Discussion about peace is entirely missing from the conversation.”

People are already saying Biden can’t accomplish anything because the Republicans control the Senate and that Mitch McConnell alone can prevent anything.  That’s a cop-out.  Obama had both houses of Congress during Sandy Hook and we didn’t even get gun control.  Celebrated Obamacare is such a failure that many who are forced to pay market rate premiums cannot bring their children to the doctor because the co-pay is hundreds of dollars.

A functioning democratic government requires debate and strategy to achieve its goals.  President Lincoln offered jobs to congressmen in exchange for their votes against slavery. Bernie was known as the “amendment king” because he was so good at crossing the aisle.  But Pelosi, the ultimate partisan, said Trump only sent $1,200 checks  because he likes to sign checks.  She obviously doesn’t worry about her bank balance.  The stimulus has been cut off since July, the eviction moratorium is about to end, and people are suffering, dreadfully.  What will the Democrats go to the mat on?  There must be something.

“Obama had both houses of Congress during Sandy Hook and we didn’t even get gun control.”

Any semblance of the “left” was neutered after Obama’s victory.  His two terms can brag of seven new wars of mass murder overseas, legalized kidnapping (extraordinary rendition),secret kill lists   on “Terror Tuesdays” when he agreed who a drone could kill, Guantanamo continuing,  increased surveillance and deportations, bailing out the banks, and prosecuting more whistleblowers and sources than all prior presidents combined.  If that’s what the first Black president delivered, I shudder to think what Biden will do.

Biden will be the first president in recent memory who promised to be more interventionist and attacked his opponent for being insufficiently hawkish.  Trump was seen as less warlike than both Clinton and Biden, which is why military families preferred him, as they suffer the losses from war.  Former State Department employee William Blum  asserts: “A terrorist is somebody with a bomb but no air force.’’  The US commits war crimes daily, as a global cop and occupier, with over 900 military bases overseas, and more than half of our discretionary taxes going to the military. Will Biden fix that?

“Biden attacked his opponent for being insufficiently hawkish.”

Biden said he’s against the Yemen War.  He can end it on his first day.  Can we hold his feet to the fire on that?  Will we hold his feet to the fire to de-escalate tensions with Russia, China, Iran, N. Korea or Venezuela?  How many decades, under many Democratic presidents, has Cuba — 90 miles from Miami — suffered under illegal sanctions?  During the Vietnam war, we held our Democratic president accountable, chanting “Hey, hey, LBJ.  How many kids did you kill today?”  We still must stop the killing.

It will be easier to see through Biden’s empty shell, filled only with loyalties to Wall Street and overseas business exploits, than Obama’s articulate, charming style.  But only those comfortable enough can now sit back and breathe a sigh of relief that we outlived the Trump era.  Those suffering on the streets, in poverty, unemployed and uninsured under COVID, will continue to resist.  They are beyond incremental change.  Joe “nothing will fundamentally change” Biden must fundamentally change his position, or we must make the change.  By any means necessary.

The danger is that Joe will put us all to sleep.  To show that we will continue to resist, let’s start with a demand that Trump as incumbent, or Biden as President-elect, agree to sign the new START treaty , which Putin has repeatedly agreed to sign if the US does, and which expires in February?  Imagine having an anti-war movement again.  Don’t celebrate, organize.  Basta!

blackagendareport.com

If Joe Biden wins the election, we face an unprecedented situation in U.S. and global affairs since the beginning of the Atomic Age in 1945-49:

The problem is far deeper and more dangerous than any personal problem with Biden or his apparently sleazy son (Hunter Biden’s business dealings with both Ukraine and China cry out for serious honest congressional inquiries in the interests of sane and disinterested U.S. future relations with China and Ukraine – as well as with Russia.)

The real problem is that for eight years the Obama administration, in which Joe Biden was the putative Number Two figure engaged on a Helter-Skelter, crazed descent towards mindless confrontation with Russia and also institutionalized a reckless and plain wicked policy of toppling governments around the world in straight defiance of international law.

The true architect of these policies was neither Obama nor Biden but their first secretary of state Hillary Clinton. It was she who ordered the CIA to collect DNA samples of Latin American national leaders, an unprecedented seven of whom contracted cancers, some of them exceptionally rare and virulent, including two democratically elected presidents of Brazil and the late democratically elected president of Venezuela Hugo Chavez who died of his.

Clinton also unleashed the dogs of chaos and war across the Middle East by approving the undermining and successful toppling of the government of Libya and the undermining although unsuccessful efforts to topple the government of Syria. This unleashed a ferocious civil war, the greatest catastrophe the Middle East has seen since Iraq’s attack on Iran in 1980, also at the time recklessly supported by an ignorant and incompetent president Jimmy Carter.

Carter, like Obama after him was ludicrously ignorant of international affairs. Both presidents allowed themselves to be led by the nose through the region by Zbigniew Brzezinski who served as Carter’s national security adviser. Brzezinski’s eagerness to embrace and support the very worst Islamist genocidal extremist groups was exceeded only by his lifelong, unwavering hatred of Russia and all Russians.

Clinton was succeeded as secretary of state in Obama’s second term starting in January 2013 by a far more experienced, restrained and responsible figure, Senator John Kerry. Kerry rightly worked hard and well with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to prevent the reckless and destructive policies of the rest of the administration from totally destroying constructive communications between Washington and Moscow.

But Kerry could not control even his own State Department. He proved utterly unable to rein in the neo-conservative and neo-liberal super-hawks with whom Clinton had seeded the State Department led by Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland. They joined forces with crazed right wing warmongers like the late Senator John McCain (now sanctified, but whose uncontrollable screaming rages were legendary in his days on Capitol Hill).

Together with ambitious plotters in the European Commission in Brussels they manipulated the toppling of the stable, democratically elected government of Ukraine in the 2014 violent Maidan coup in Kiev. McCain and Nuland actually addressed the violent revolutionaries and openly exhorted them to topple their own democratic and previously peaceful government.

The Kremlin moved – in reality with careful and considered restraint – to safeguard the democratically expressed wishes of the population of Crimea to rejoin Russia, and of the Russian ethnic majorities in the eastern provinces of Ukraine. But the Obama administration joined forces with the openly neo-Nazi movements that had seized undemocratic control in Kiev.

Over the following six years to the present, successive U.S. congresses have voted enormous sums of financial aid and sophisticated weapons systems to be sent to Ukraine with the express purpose of killing Russian soldiers and Russian-supported forces. It is no wonder that false and entirely undocumented reverse accusations have now been against Russia by the very same individuals who have supported the forces of violence, revolution and aggression for so long in Ukraine.

President Donald Trump, to his great credit, ran on for election in 2016 on a policy of reducing tensions with Russia and restoring a state of stable coexistence with the other main thermonuclear power on the planet. At no point did he advocate stripping the United States of its defenses.

On the contrary, Trump doubled up on Obama’s unprecedented more than $1 trillion nuclear weapons modernization program. He expanded spending on both conventional and strategic weapons on the biggest scale seen since the Reagan-Caspar Weinberger buildup 40 years before.

Nevertheless, Trump was then subjected to the most unfounded, ridiculous political witch hunt against a sitting national leader in U.S. history – at least since President John Kennedy was openly and repeatedly accused of treason for seeking to reduce the dangers of nuclear confrontation after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Through all of this, hatred and unreasoning accusations against Russia were accompanied by attempted efforts even to destroy the property and economic security of the Russian people. Congress imposed punitive sanctions (they failed completely) with Democrats taking the lead.

Why revisit all this history? It is because, as the great and wise American novelist William Faulkner understood, “The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.”

If the Democrats regain power in Washington, they will return with all the dire and insanely dangerous policies and obsessions they displayed for eight years under Obama and Biden. But those hatreds and prejudices will be superheated by four years of Russiagate fantasies and raving accusations against Russia unsupported by any serious evidence. Indeed, they have been coolly exposed and refuted indeed by many courageous and principled former senior U.S. officials and scholars.

Nevertheless, this Undead Past will rise up, more terrible and destructive than any fantasy of werewolves and zombies, to demolish our Present and horrifically curse our Future.

“I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the [fill in the country] voters to be left to decide for themselves.”

– Henry Kissinger, Nobel Peace prize winner and war criminal

Ever since the Nobel Peace prize-winning President Barack Obama had the audacity to hire as his press secretary someone with the forked-tongued name Josh Earnest (can you say, oxymoron?) back in 2014, I’ve given up on the hope that executive administrations will tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth ever again. Obama worked the Press. The uproarious Jonas Brothers drone joke, followed by the knee-slapping drive-by shootings of American citizens overseas a year later, turning Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16 year old son, into drone meat. Or the drone double taps: first their weddings, then their funerals. Get it? “They hate us more than they love life,” whistleblower John Kiriakou once said. But keep pushing, and they’ll write poetry to us, he continued.

Obama played Hollywood, bringing in the makers of Zero Dark Thirty, showing them ‘classified’ documents supporting the Administration’s narrative describing what happened the night they took bin Laden out in Abbottabad, so that Kathryn Bigelow exclaimed after the meetings that ZDT would be a “journalistic” movie. No mention of the raid narrative’s multiple versions (I counted at least 9). No consideration of what Abbottabad neighbors witnessed that night. No mention that the classified documents Bigelow’s team were shown, aside from legal questions such showing raised, were overclassified, or that her movie had superstition triggers — a black cat crossing, and omen birds flying off, as terrorists arrive. WTF?

Scheduled to be Obama’s October Surprise lift before the 2012 election, journalists, like Glenn Greenwald, criticized Bigelow’s easy access, comparing her work to Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi propaganda filmmaker, who directed Hitler’s Goy Pride flick, The Triumph of the Will“. ZDT was released in December instead. Obama didn’t get the raised limp fish treatment from the Lefties at any red-and-black rallies following his squeaky victory, but ZDT won Oscars, which is something Leni never did, and Barry probably saw with rolling eyes his name in the movie’s rolling credits.

Obama played his basket of implorables — those who hoped and prayed for change in a country they saw free-fallin in its own democratic footprints: the hypnotic illusion that they owned a government for and by the People was wearing off. But for a little extra gangsta bounce in his step, he paid back all the Lefties who had barracked for his presidency by bitch slappin’ them, like a Billy Dee Williams blaxploitation pimp, until even Black Agenda Report pundits shook their heads, noting, “in 2008, it was Obama who opposed any moratorium on home foreclosures,” and he who helped “shield corporations from class action suits, and voting against caps on credit card Interest.” BAR threw up their hands and called him “The More Effective Evil.” Read it and weep. O my aching heart.

Josh Earnest’s arrival was a punchline appointment that even Karl Rove, who GW Bush affectionately nicknamed Turd Blossom, would have guffawed at.

The Bush advisor and dirty trickster, who famously went to war with “reality-based thinking,” (and then denied it, coyly) almost torpedoed Obama’s reelection in 2012, according to Greg Palast, who writes in How Trump Stole the 2020, that had Palast and a law professor not filed a midnight suit in Ohio, the votes of thousands of early Black voters were set to be “disqualified”:

Turdblossom Rove knew…that if Husted disqualified about 20% of the early-voting “absentee” Black ballots on technical grounds, Rove would realize his last, best hope of defeating Obama (and defeating the voters). Fritakis went to court, I went on air, and the mass disqualification of Ohio votes—which worked the trick in 2004—failed in 2012. Barely.

As Palast asks: Who needs Russians to interfere in our processes?

Even Trump has gotten in on the narrative game, seemingly making fun of the Obama Administration’s setup of the bin Laden take down narrative. Raise your hand, like a man, if you think the al Baghdadi-Idlib ISIS takedown narrative was a tweak at the Obama administration. There’s plausibility out there that Obama was sitting on bin Laden, and had the raid lined up many months in advance as a cash-in for the October before the 2012 election. Trump’s hasty, impromptu gathering of growls and grumps for a photo-op after Idlib looked like a lampoon of that now-iconic shot of the Obama cartel concerned in the situation room. Helmet cameras suddenly malfunctioned, coincidentally around the time an Apache raid-copter was said to have crashed and exploded.

John Brennan, despite having claimed to have been present for live updates of the raid, came out of that situation room and lied with his bald face to the Press, claiming bin Laden had been in a fire fight with SEALs and, when they broke down his door, he was clutching at least one of his wives and held a gun, “like a coward.” Brennan had to walk and talk it back the next day, and was none too happy about it. It didn’t mesh with the C-in-C’s narrative.

Compare that to Trump’s description of al-Baghdadi as “whimpering and crying,” clutching kids, “and dying like a dog.” The President laughing his ass off when, much to the ISIS head’s chagrin, no escape tunnel was there after all, said Trump with glee. Even the chopper footage looked like a vague tweak of the Wikileaks Collateral Murder posting. Trump wasn’t there, and nobody described the scene that way. Brennan’s the guy, if you’ll recall, who’s security clearance Trump had snatched after the ex-CIA head kept snarking at Trump on TV — as a paid consultant. It’s like someone had sat Trump down with Turd Blossom’s Reality Bashing for Dummies, and DJ went to town with the concept.

Trump, a one-man wrecking ball, who comes at us shaking his leather-panted toosh like Smiley Silage; we know it’s wrong to watch him twerk, but we can’t look away; that’s some bum. Trump even brings his own rally pole with him. Wall Street keeps tucking in dollar bills. And we fear this clown; he’s not a polly; he’s unpredictable in certain important ways. Too many of us believe what he says, when it’s clear he’s speaking Truth to bowels not power. He could pull a coup out of whimsy, for all we know. He may not be sane — or worse, we may be insane. There’s a vaccine we’ll never see before 2030, the date scientists are telling us that Climate Change will be taking off the gloves.

So what the christ am I on about? Well, for one thing, Turd Blossom is back in the mix of the 2020 election cycle, working as an unpaid consultant for the Trump campaign. The Times piece even has Turd Blossom chiding Trump about his failure to dirty up Joe Biden sufficiently. But no above the fold play, where such news belongs. If Business Insider, a reliable alternative to the MSM dailies, hadn’t featured that information, we might never have seen it deeply buried in the gassy vowels of a NYT piece. Well, to quote Trump, “What the hell is going on?” You might know what The Truth is by trusting the MSM. That’s what I’m going on about.

Just the other day, over at the Democracy Dies in Darkness Daily, columnist Josh Rogan had a go at empty blather with his piece, “Secret CIA assessment: Putin ‘probably directing’ influence operation to denigrate Biden.” Probably? More unnamed sources high in the IC community, supposedly. Check out what Rogan offers up:

“We assess that President Vladimir Putin and the senior most Russian officials are aware of and probably directing Russia’s influence operations aimed at denigrating the former U.S. Vice President, supporting the U.S. president and fueling public discord ahead of the U.S. election in November,” the first line of the document says, according to the sources.

This is a near-repeat of the 2016 IC assessment that blossomed after the DNC “hack,” but that ass-essment had pushers — Clapper and Brennan, members of the “deep state” Liars Club.

The Rogan piece seems to have been ‘developed’ out of an August assessment reported by WaPo, “Russia is trying to ‘denigrate’ Biden while China prefers ‘unpredictable’ Trump not be reelected, senior U.S. intelligence official says.” Note the repeat of ‘denigrate’, but this time we are treated to the source of the qualified opinion: by William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center. Again, despite the surveillance state clamp on global data streams, a meek assessment without evidence is offered up to the public — just references to

“Pro-Russia Ukrainian parliamentarian Andriy Derkach … spreading claims about corruption — including through publicizing leaked phone calls — to undermine” Biden and Democrats, Evanina said.

Underwhelming evidence of anything. Specific denigrating comments that might have undermined American confidence in Biden would have been helpful.

One wonders why WaPO didn’t confer with a former director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, Cofer Black, the guy who gave Bush the head’s up about an impending al Qaeda attack on American soil, we’re told. Black joined the Board of Directors of Burisma Holdings just after Trump’s 2017 inauguration (he would have conferred with Hunter Biden before the latter left a couple of months later). He probably has deep insight into what the pro-Russian Ukrainians were up to, just as he did al Qaeda in the lead up to 9/11.

In fact, one wonders why WaPo didn’t chase after the Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin that Joe Biden crowed about having got shit-canned, who in February, around the time Rudy Guliani was in Ukraine probing for dirt on Biden, attempted to file a criminal complaint against Biden in Ukrainain courts for interfering in the internal affairs of Ukraine. The first question might be, did Trump put Shokin up to the filing? That would be more impeachable than the quid pro quo phone call that brought about the January circus. WaPo doesn’t say, because they didn’t check out Black or Shokin. We have to take their authoritarian word for it. Voice of God journalism in the Age of Relativism. Go figure.

While we’re at it, even the Evanina report seems to have been derived from another sorry ass source, from the Guardian, asserting in January 2020, around the time Guliani was in Ukraine, “Russians Hacked Ukrainian Gas Company at Center of Impeachment.” No ‘alleged’ — headline statement of fact. Again, Cofer Black’s expert input on this might have been helpful. But the kicker-in-the-head is the source of the allegation is another cybersecurity company, Area 1, that is owned and operated by two ex-NSA hackers. Given what Edward Snowden says is happening, it seems fair to ask if these ex-NSA hackers are homo contractuses, doing US government work in no-accountability private guise. It’s almost like our democracy has been privatized. Neither WaPo nor the NYT nor the Guardian, the self-described papers of record, give a shit.

And while we’re knocking the Guardian in its paper teeth, after knuckledusting the Times and the Daily Darkness, awhile back another Guardian piece stuck in my craw — “Fresh Cambridge Analytica leak ‘shows global manipulation is out of control,’” Duh! might be one response. But the thing here is, the author, Carole Cadwalladr, who broke the Cambridge Anal-ytica story, here brings together two main miscreants of the 2016 election manipulations: CA’s “whistleblower” Brittany Kaiser and the one, the only “ex” British spy, Christopher Steele. Both were now concerned about American democracy. Brittany, with a just-released memoir, promised to dish more as the months passed. Nothing yet, October just ahead. Kaiser and Steele, who worked sleeze Left and Right during the 2016 cycle, now seem to be offering up their services as consultants in the new electoral cycle. Contrite, and to the right.

What the hell is going on?

I actually got some clarity when, while following the Julian Assange Extradition event — live from the Old Barnum and Bailey — I took the time to watch a short film — The War on Journalism: The Case of Julian Assange — that sums up what Assange and Wikileaks stand for, and why they’re so goddamned important to any semblance of understanding current events. Instead of listening to all the quack-quack of Bush and Turd Blossom and Obama and Brennan and Clapper and Josh and the claptrap machine that surrounds the loudmouthed Trump, Wikileaks assumes you are intelligent and provides you with primary documentation that no fibbing federale can deny. It’s a well-produced short film whose value becomes self-evident. You might want to find the time to watch it.

We are not only amidst a War on Terror, a war that is the terror, but a war on public narratives, cries of “conspiracy theory” from one corner, “Fake News” from the other — the net effect is aural chaos and maybe even auditory hallucinations (did I just hear that?) that keep us from understanding what’s actually happening in the world — or, at least, America, which is the world for most Americans.

In Counterpunch the other day the estimable Jonathan Cook discussed the letdown lack of support at the trial by Guardian writers Assange collaborated with in the past to tell important public interest stories. He cites investigative journalist Iain Overton’s tweet that wonders, “I do not know where those who worked with him at the Guardian are…And frankly, some of them should be ashamed of themselves for that.” Worse, Cook shows how some of these past collaborations are being used against Assange, including an unauthorized biography that wants to reveal his thinking during the Wikileaks publication process. Such thinking is important to establish in a future political trial in the US.

I have already seen publications referring to Wikileaks in the past tense. This is not just sad, as we like to say on the Left, but unacceptable. Losing Wikileaks would be a great loss, especially if it is not to be replaced because its practices have been outlawed. In an excellent recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review, Harry Stopes immediately reminds us all of the Wikileaks value:

WE LIVE IN AN ERA DEFINED BY INFORMATION. Few organizations have done more to identify, and accelerate, this state of affairs than WikiLeaks. With its central idea, that transparency is a weapon to be brandished online, WikiLeaks has created a model of political action as it has become a cultural archetype.

We need more magazines like CJR and other media watchdogs to keep all the bastards all around us honest — or, at least, partially accountable.

And now comes the Master Debate between a plagiarist and a dunderhead. All eyes glued on, all ears pitched, popcorn and beer on the coffee table.

Turn the lights out when the party’s over.

counterpunch.org