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JOHN KIRIAKAOU: What Would Biden’s Foreign Policy Look Like? Just Look at His Supporters – Consortiumnews

Posted by M. C. on October 12, 2020

Negroponte made a point in the interview of saying that he had disagreed with Biden on important (unspecified) issues over the years, but that Biden was “an experienced politician,” “a middle of the road kind of person,” and “a wise gentleman.” He said, for example, that he supported warrantless wiretapping of American citizens after the 9/11 attacks.

https://consortiumnews.com/2020/10/06/john-kiriakaou-what-would-bidens-foreign-policy-look-like-just-look-at-his-supporters/

By John Kiriakou
Special to Consortium News

Many of us are counting down the days until we can throw President Donald Trump out of office, out of Washington, out of our lives, and out of the daily news cycle.  With the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, there’s even more immediacy to replacing Trump.  But what would we get with a “President” Joe Biden? What would a Biden foreign policy look like?

Earlier this month, a group of Republican former senators and congressmen endorsed Biden for president, saying that he was better equipped that Trump to run the country.  At around the same time, a large group of intelligence and foreign policy professionals, most of whom had worked for Republican presidents, also endorsed the former vice president.  That sounds pretty impressive.  But let’s look at what it really means.  It means that they believe Biden will continue an interventionist, neoliberal, pro-war foreign policy.

John Negroponte 

John Negroponte, on right, as former Secretary of State Colin Powell displays anthrax vial at UN Security Council, Feb. 5, 2003. Former CIA Director George Tenet on left. (Wikimedia Commons)

Former Ambassador John Negroponte is one of those intelligence professionals who endorsed Biden. Negroponte is the Darth Vader of American foreign policy of the past half-century. 

Negroponte was ambassador to Honduras during the Iran-Contra affair, through which covert funds from the CIA made their way to the contra rebels; ambassador to Mexico as the drug cartels consolidated their power against a corrupt government there; ambassador to the United Nations as the U.S. sought to go to war with a knowingly false narrative of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction; ambassador to Iraq during the U.S. occupation of that country; and director of national intelligence during President George W. Bush’s torture program. 

Nobody has ever accused Negroponte of being a progressive in any sense of the word.  He loves war and has proven happy to jump into it with both feet.  And he happily and publicly endorsed Biden.

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Negroponte recently told the Daily Beast what was behind his endorsement.  The interview says as much about Biden as it does about Negroponte.  At the outset, Negroponte said, “All roads lead to Trump, and I’m just not sure the country can withstand another four years with a man who has shown such disregard for the office.”  I agree. Just about every Democrat does.  Donald Trump is a bad guy.  But it’s not as simple as that.

Warrantless Wiretapping

Negroponte made a point in the interview of saying that he had disagreed with Biden on important (unspecified) issues over the years, but that Biden was “an experienced politician,” “a middle of the road kind of person,” and “a wise gentleman.”  He said, for example, that he supported warrantless wiretapping of American citizens after the 9/11 attacks. 

Presidential candidate Joe Biden in Henderson, Nevada, February 2020. (Gage Skidmore, Wikimedia Commons)

The statement was incomplete, however. Biden also supported warrantless wiretapping, voting for the Patriot Act while a senator in 2001, voting repeatedly for its subsequent reauthorizations and then opposing weakening the measure while he was vice president in the Obama administration.

There are other reasons that Negroponte and a bevy of Republican former intelligence and foreign policy big-shots have moved to Biden. 

The former VP opposes a troop drawdown in Europe, saying that such a move would embolden the Russians, for example.  He supports a more engaged military policy against China in the South China Sea.  He supports an extension of President Barack Obama’s policy of maintaining military bases in more than 100 countries, including Forward Operating Bases across Africa.

Literally the last thing I would do is to urge anybody to vote for Donald Trump.  The president has been a disaster in every sense of the word and in both foreign and domestic policy.  The country can’t take four more years of a Trump presidency.  But Biden is no panacea. He’s a center-right placeholder.  Negroponte confirmed that.

If you think things will change in foreign policy under a President Biden, think again.  It’ll be the same old expansionist, militarist policy that we had under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.  So go into the voting booth with your eyes open.

John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act—a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration’s torture program.

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The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity : Trump and Biden Squabble While America Burns

Posted by M. C. on October 6, 2020

Jo Jorgensen

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2020/october/05/trump-and-biden-squabble-while-america-burns/?mc_cid=a154d3db1b&mc_eid=4e0de347c8

Written by Ron Paul

President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden spent most of last week’s first Presidential debate trading insults and interrupting each other. The result was a debate with very little discussion of actual issues or policies.

In one of the evening’s few substantive exchanges, President Trump rightly criticized Vice President Biden for saying he would listen to the “scientists” in determining whether to lock down the country. President Trump also acknowledged that the lockdowns were a harmful over-reaction that needs to end.

Unfortunately, President Trump once again pledged that Covid vaccines would soon be available. This raises the specter of a repeat of the swine flu debacle where a vaccine rushed into production for political purposes caused more deaths than the swine flu itself. President Trump also raised concerns about mandatory Covid vaccinations by suggesting the military would be in charge of vaccine distribution.

Vice President Biden vehemently denied he was a socialist, while championing increased spending, taxes, regulations, expanded Obamacare, and a modified “Green New Deal.” Biden may not consider himself a socialist, but if his economic plans were implemented it would take America further down the road to socialism — and serfdom.

President Trump also denounced socialism, while bragging about his own big government policies such as tariffs, massive spending increases, and plans to maintain the “popular” provisions of Obamacare.

One topic that did not come up was gun control. This may have been because both candidates support infringements on the Second Amendment. Joe Biden was chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee when it passed gun control measures like the assault weapons ban and the “Brady Bill.” President Trump has not only banned bump stocks by executive order, which President Obama refused to do because his Attorney General correctly determined that the President lacks the authority to do so, but has enthusiastically endorsed “red flag” laws. These laws allow law enforcement to, as President Trump put it, “take the guns first worry about due process later.”

The Congressional Budget Office has projected that the federal debt will exceed the gross domestic product next year and reach 195 percent of GDP by 2050! This report was issued before this week’s revelation that the federal debt reached record levels of $27 trillion.

This is the biggest threat to our national security, but it was unmentioned during the debate. This is not surprising since few in the political or media elite understand the debt crisis well enough to give it the attention it deserves. Although if Biden wins and Democrats seize control of the Senate, Republicans will likely remember they are supposed to be against big spending and debt.

One critical area that could have led to an interesting exchange was monetary policy. Biden has called Trump’s tweets attacking the Fed as an assault on Fed’s independence, as if the Fed were ever free from political pressure. President Trump has gone from supporting a fed audit, criticizing low interest rates, and supporting the gold standard, to pushing the Fed to adopt the insane policy of zero interest rates

The debate is the latest evidence the two major parties will not on their own restore our lost liberties. Those who want to roll back the welfare-warfare state should avoid focusing on political parties or personalities. Instead we must focus on spreading the ideas of liberty among our fellow citizens and building a liberty movement that puts principles of liberty above partisanship.

Copyright © 2020 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.
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Is Kamala Harris a 21st-Century Woodrow Wilson? | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on September 6, 2020

To pander to the socialists, Harris supports the profligate Green New Deal and a universal basic income, funded by new taxes that will “only” be levied on the wealthy. Harris exerts enormous influence over the extremely malleable (and increasingly senile) Biden, jubilantly telling Trevor Noah on The Daily Show that “as soon as we get him in the White House, and even before with these task forces that we had, we were able to significantly push Joe Biden to do things that he hadn’t signed on to before.”

Clearly, Harris plans to run the show.

https://mises.org/wire/kamala-harris-21st-century-woodrow-wilson?utm_source=Mises+Institute+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=078d03d63e-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_09_04_06_24&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8b52b2e1c0-078d03d63e-228343965

Although the draconian lockdowns punished the economy, a partial recovery occurred after governments allowed businesses to reopen. However, continued economic growth depends on the outcome of the presidential election. The crisis opened the door for a surge in regulations, subsidies, and other special interest privileges under the guise of promoting the “public health.”

This progressivism—a code word for cronyism—presents a serious threat to America.

As Murray Rothbard explains, the original Progressive Era witnessed corporate and safety regulations, environmental laws, welfare and labor compensation, and new taxes that benefited favored corporations, bureaucrats, academics, and labor activists at the expense of the taxpayer. If trends continue, modern politicians will pass similar policies to benefit themselves and favored supporters, crippling economic activity. To properly understand this progressivist threat, one must recognize the motives, background, and ideological orientation of the original progressives. They were mostly Yankees, the descendants of the Puritans who stayed in New England or emigrated to New York and the Midwest. They grew up in evangelical households that urged a remaking of society by coercively stamping out sin, particularly alcohol consumption. After earning PhDs in Germany, progressives preached their interventionism under the secularized guise of science and the public welfare. Furthermore, these social engineers supported eugenics, the science of controlling the labor supply to improve its overall quality. Lastly, progressives strove to revolutionize the world through foreign policy adventures.

In their struggle for economic privileges, progressives split into two groups. The corporatists championed protecting trusts and cartels from the vicissitudes of the free market. These big business advocates wanted to create trade commissions and other regulatory agencies to cripple competition and impose onerous compliance costs on small businesses. On the other hand, the socialists desired an overhaul of the capitalist system, blaring the trumpets for stringent antitrust regulation, radical labor laws, and redistributive taxes. President Woodrow Wilson embodied both strands, working with the two groups to enact the income tax, the Federal Reserve System, and the Federal Trade Commission.

In many ways, modern progressives are carbon copies. They congregate in New England and live in coastal New York City, Washington, DC, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. While eschewing traditional religion, modern progressives are zealots for egalitarianism and social justice. They attended the Ivy League and other elite American universities, empowering them with government-funded research. Although modern progressives disregard eugenics, they still advocate social engineering, championing egalitarianism for everybody except themselves while dictating what is morally acceptable. Finally, they are thoroughgoing foreign interventionists. Neoconservatism is actually a variant of progressivism, for as Angelo Codevilla explains, George W. Bush’s wars were “but an extrapolation of the sentiments of America’s progressive class, first articulated by people such as Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson.”

The progressive movement still splits along corporatist and socialist lines. The former support a cozy relationship with Wall Street and “Big Tech,” welcoming various internet and safety regulations that would hurt smaller businesses without the appropriate ecommerce infrastructure. The latter advocate radically anticapitalist measures, particularly the dismantling of Big Tech, the Green New Deal, a universal basic income, and wealth taxes. With the exception of hostile antitrust lawsuits, big business corporatists are not against these measures per se, provided they can acquire environmental subsidies and offload the cost of new entitlements and taxes onto the less wealthy (accomplished with the progressivist income tax and Social Security).

If Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden embody the corporatist mindset and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren the socialist mentality, then surely Kamala Harris is the modern Wilsonian.

Big Tech has funded Harris in various California elections in exchange for favorable regulatory oversight. Many former personnel now work for the large companies: a senior counsel left in 2018 to lobby on behalf of Amazon, Harris’s first campaign manager works for Google, and her brother-in-law is the chief legal officer for Uber.

To pander to the socialists, Harris supports the profligate Green New Deal and a universal basic income, funded by new taxes that will “only” be levied on the wealthy. Harris exerts enormous influence over the extremely malleable (and increasingly senile) Biden, jubilantly telling Trevor Noah on The Daily Show that “as soon as we get him in the White House, and even before with these task forces that we had, we were able to significantly push Joe Biden to do things that he hadn’t signed on to before.”

Clearly, Harris plans to run the show.

Similar to the legislation of one hundred years ago, the new progressive juggernaut presents an incredible threat to the United States. Its policies will impoverish the public to enrich elite businesses, politicians, intellectuals, and unions. This future looks bleak, and it must be stopped.

[Adapted from “America 2021: The Threat of Progressivism,” a talk delivered on August 29 in Orlando, FL.]

Author:

Contact Patrick Newman

Patrick is Assistant Professor of Economics at Florida Southern College. He completed his PhD in the Department of Economics at George Mason University. He is a 2018 Mises Institute Research Fellow.

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Biden: “I Would Shut Country Down Again If Recommended By Scientists” | Zero Hedge

Posted by M. C. on August 22, 2020

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/biden-i-would-shut-country-down-again-if-recommended-scientists

by Tyler Durden

Throughout the Democratic National Convention there was a common, if contradictory, theme: on one hand, the Democrats bashed Trump for his response to the covid pandemic while at the same time they lamented the dismal state of the economy, where millions have lost their jobs and countless corporations have gone bankrupt. Well, which one is it, because you can’t have both: if Trump had enacted a more forceful response to the pandemic, the US economy would have been shut down for longer (as Neel Kashkari now urges, seeking another 6 weeks of shutdowns and setting the stage for the next crisis); alternatively the economy would be firing on all cylinders but the fallout from covid would be much more widespread.

On Friday afternoon, in an exclusive interview with ABC “World News Tonight”, Biden revealed on which side of the fence he is saying that as president, he would shut the country down to stop the spread of COVID-19 if the move was recommended to him by scientists.

“I would shut it down; I would listen to the scientists,” Biden told Muir Friday, alongside his running mate, Kamala Harris, during their first joint interview since officially becoming the Democratic Party’s presidential and vice presidential nominees.

Biden also criticized what he argued is the “fundamental flaw” of the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, that the nation cannot begin to recover economically until the virus and public health emergency is under control, which is strange considering that in isolated cases such as Sweden which did not succumb to the media panic and did not enforce a uniform shutdown – while at the same time not forcing the population to take draconian measures to limit the spread of covid – the economy hit was far less than most of its European counterparts, while the Covid breakout has almost completely faded.

“I will be prepared to do whatever it takes to save lives because we cannot get the country moving, until we control the virus,” Biden added. “That is the fundamental flaw of this administration’s thinking to begin with. In order to keep the country running and moving and the economy growing, and people employed, you have to fix the virus, you have to deal with the virus.”

Biden’s statement brings up one immediate question: which scientists would he listen to? The WHO which, under heavy influence from China, pretended for well over a month that covid was innocuous as the following Feb 23 soundbite from WHO Director Tedros Ghebreyesus confirms:

I have spoken consistently about the need for facts, not fear. Using the word pandemic now does not fit the facts, but it may certainly cause fear. This is not the time to focus on what word we use. That will not prevent a single infection today or save a single life today.

… and only on March 11 – just days before the US announced economic shutdowns – declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic (apparently succumbing to “causing fear”). Or perhaps Biden should have listened to scientists like the US Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who on February 29 tweeted “Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus.”

Or perhaps he meant listening to scientists like Anthony Fauci who on June 12 said “we know that you don’t need an N95 [mask] if you’re an ordinary person in the street” adding that “masks are not 100% protective.” When confronted with this contradiction in the government’s public-health advice, Fauci said “actually the circumstances have changed,” he said. “That’s the reason why.”

So will Biden shutdown the entire economy, leading to tens of millions more in job losses, just because it is the prevailing opinion circumstance at the time that he should do so?

Or perhaps what Biden meant to say is that as a leader it is his job to weigh costs and benefits of all policy options, as the catastrophic consequences of another economic shutdown could and likely would outweigh the benefits from a draconian response to a disease which as we showed recently has led to virtually no outsized under-40 fatalities, and yet as Jim Reid said in July, it is the “younger people will be suffering most from the economic impact of Covid-19 for many years to come, we wonder how history will judge the global response.”

We wonder too, especially now that we know that if there is another wave of covid in the US – whether domestic, or imported from China again or some other country – the US will have another full-blown economic shutdown, just as Minneapolis Fed president Neel Kashkari has been urging (we also know who Fed chair would be in a Biden administration).

One final point about science, best laid out on twitter, is that “Science is NOT a magic wand. Especially “science” as it’s practiced today. Bureaucratic science is ALL about consensus. What gets funded is political. What gets published is political.”

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Neither Trump Nor Biden Really Matter to China or Russia — Strategic Culture

Posted by M. C. on August 1, 2020

At the end of day, can either of these presidential candidates be trusted to pursue principled U.S.-China relations going forward? The toxic anti-China campaigning by both indicates a level of puerile treachery which foreshadows no possible return to any kind of normalcy.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/07/30/neither-trump-nor-biden-really-matter-to-china-or-russia/

Finian Cunningham

Well, according to the Trump campaign, Democrat rival Joe Biden is the candidate whom Chinese leaders are rooting for to win the presidential election in November. “Beijing Biden” or “Sleepy Joe” would be a gift to China, so it goes.

In turn, trying to out-hawk the Republican incumbent, the Biden campaign paints Trump as being “soft” on China and having been “played” by Chinese counterparts over trade, the corona pandemic and allegations about human rights.

Biden, the former vice president in the previous Obama administrations, has vowed to impose more sanctions on China over allegations of rights violations. He claims to be the one who will “stand up” to Beijing if he is elected to the White House in three months’ time.

Last week, Biden declared he was “giving notice to the Kremlin and others [China]” that if elected to the presidency he would impose “substantial and lasting costs” on those who allegedly interfere in U.S. politics. That’s war talk based on worthless intel propaganda.

Trump meanwhile asserts that no-one is tougher than him when it comes to dealing with China (and Russia for that matter).

Given the Trump administration’s reckless policy of ramping up hostility towards China in recent months, that begs the question: how could a future Biden administration begin to be even more aggressive – short of going to war?

Relations between Washington and Beijing have plummeted to their worst levels since the historic detente initiated by President Richard Nixon in the early 1970s. The precipitous downward spiral has occurred under President Trump’s watch. So, how exactly could a prospective President Biden make the relationship more adversarial?

The truth is both Trump and Biden are equally vulnerable to domestic partisan criticism about their respective dealings with China. The belated high-handed approach that both are trying to project is pockmarked with risible hypocrisy.

The Trump campaign scores a valid point when it recalls how former Vice President Biden smooched and feted Chinese leaders with economic opportunities in the American economy.

Likewise, Trump stands accused of lavishing praise on Chinese President Xi Jinping while ignoring the impending coronavirus pandemic because Trump’s top priority was getting a trade deal with China.

The fact that both American politicians have U-turned with regard to China in such nasty terms must leave the authorities in Beijing with a deep sense of distrust in either of the would-be presidents.

Biden at one time waxed lyrical about his close relationship with Xi, but as his bid for the presidency heated up, Biden stuck the proverbial knife in the Chinese leader calling him a “thug”.

For his part, Trump previously referred to Xi as a “dear friend” while dining him with “beautiful chocolate cake” at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, but his administration has since slammed the Chinese leader as “authoritarian”. Trump’s racist slurs over the pandemic being “Kung Flu” and “Chinese plague” must give President Xi pause for disgust with the falseness.

At the end of day, can either of these presidential candidates be trusted to pursue principled U.S.-China relations going forward? The toxic anti-China campaigning by both indicates a level of puerile treachery which foreshadows no possible return to any kind of normalcy.

One distinction perhaps between Trump and Biden is the latter is promising to repair relations with Western allies to form a united front against China. To that end, a hawkish confrontational policy under Biden may have more impact on U.S.-China relations than under Trump. Trump has managed to alienate European allies with his broadsides over trade tariffs and NATO spending commitments. Although Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has recently urged “an alliance of democracies” to confront China, that rallying call is likely to fall on deaf ears with European allies irked by Trump’s brash style. Biden on the other hand could bring a more unified Western policy of hostility towards Beijing (and Moscow) by affecting a more appeasing attitude towards Europe. In that way, Biden would be more preferred by the Pentagon and foreign policy establishment than Trump, just as Hillary Clinton was in 2016.

However, it is doubtful that Beijing is paying too much attention to what either candidate is saying or posturing at. If both of them can flip so much from talking softly to shouting loud anti-China profanities then their individual characters may be deemed malleable and unscrupulous. Both have shown a shameless streak in stoking anti-China bashing for electioneering gain. Trump pulled that trick last time out in 2016 when he railed against China for “raping America” only for him to discover “deep friendship” with Xi following that election. Now he has reverted to hostility out of self-serving calculation to whip up anti-China sentiment among voters. And Biden is apt to do the very same.

Forget about such fickle personalities when it comes to reading U.S. policy towards China. Beijing will be looking at the longer trajectory of how U.S. policy turned towards a more militarized approach with the “Pivot to Asia” under the Obama-Biden administration in 2011. Indicating how Deep State continuity transcends Democrat or Republican occupants of the White House, the next major indicator was in the Pentagon planning documents of 2017 and 2018 under Trump which labelled China and Russia as “great power rivals”. The American “ship of state”, it may be concluded, is therefore set on a collision course with both Beijing and Moscow in terms of ramping up a confrontational agenda. Who sits in the White House scarcely matters.

For Trump and Biden to trade barbs about which one is “softer” on China or Russia is irrelevant in the bigger picture of U.S. imperialist ambitions for global dominance. The logic of a waning American empire and the concomitant inherent belligerence to compensate for the perceived loss of U.S. global power are the issues to follow, not whether Trump or Biden clinch the dog-and-pony race to the White House.

© 2010 – 2020 | Strategic Culture Foundation | Republishing is welcomed with reference to Strategic Culture online journal www.strategic-culture.org.

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Biden vs. Trump on Foreign Policy – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on May 9, 2020

We won’t know what’s in them until the election has passed.

https://original.antiwar.com/Reese_Erlich/2020/05/08/biden-vs-trump-on-foreign-policy/

by

We all know that President Donald Trump’s foreign policy has been a disaster. But is Joe Biden’s any better?

Trump promised to stop America’s endless wars but has stationed some 80,000 troops in the Middle East. He pulled out of the Iran nuclear accord, and imposed harsh sanctions and even sent drones to assassinate a top Iranian Revolutionary Guard. But Iran still has more political influence in Iraq than the United States. His administration negotiated an agreement with the Taliban, only to see it rejected by the US-installed Afghan government.

Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee, sharply criticizes Trump but, unfortunately, continues to defend many of the failed policies of the Obama Administration.

During Biden’s time as Vice President, the White House went from fighting two active wars (Afghanistan and Iraq) to seven (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, drone war in Pakistan, and escalation in Somalia).

Biden now says he disagreed with some of Obama’s interventionist policies, most notably in Libya. Today Biden calls for easing Iran sanctions, returning to the Iran nuclear accord, and reestablishing relations with Cuba.

“Biden represents the return of the classical foreign policy establishment,” Alan Minsky, executive director of Progressive Democrats of America, tells me. “Biden is running a campaign as a restoration candidate.”

But given significant changes in the world’s balance of power, it’s not all that clear what Biden could restore.

A changing world

Many corporate, State Department, military, and intelligence officials – otherwise known as the Deep State – hate Trump for his nationalist, America First policies.

The President imposed tariffs on allies around the world. He’s questioned the need for NATO. China and Russia have grown stronger economically and politically on the world stage, even after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Even card-carrying members of the Deep State acknowledge Washington has no reason to keep fighting in the Middle East. Martin Indyk, a former US ambassador to Israel, says what’s “been hard for many in the American foreign-policy establishment, including me, to accept: Few vital interests of the US continue to be at stake in the Middle East.”

In a major mea culpa in The Wall Street Journal, Indyk admits, “[A]fter the sacrifice of so many American lives, the waste of so much energy and money in quixotic efforts that ended up doing more harm than good, it is time for the US to find a way to escape the costly, demoralizing cycle of crusades and retreats.”

Whoever wins the election in November will face an economy wracked by recession, an electorate wary of more long-term military interventions, and other countries determined to go their own way.

What kind of foreign policy will that produce?

Biden boasts

Biden boasts of his foreign policy credentials. He chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 2001-2003 and 2007-2009. While generally hewing to interventionist Democratic Party policies, he has taken some independent stands, for example, by voting against the 1991 Gulf War.

By far Biden’s most reprehensible stand was his strong support for the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. As documented by Professor Stephen Zunes in The Progressive, Biden forcefully supported the war, but later claimed he opposed it. (Of course, Trump lied about his support for the war as well.)

When the Iraqi occupation failed in the mid-2000s, Biden infamously called for splitting Iraq into three parts along sectarian lines, so the United States could continue imperial control at least in Kurdistan.

Even today, Biden favors maintaining some troops in the region, using the excuse of fighting ISIS. “I think it’s a mistake to pull out the small number of troops that are there now to deal with ISIS,” he’s said.

Biden hasn’t learned the lessons of the Afghan war either. After nineteen years of failed war and occupation, he still wants to maintain some troops in the country.

“I would bring American combat troops in Afghanistan home during my first term,” Biden tells the Council on Foreign Relations. “Any residual US military presence in Afghanistan would be focused only on counterterrorism operations.”

But whoever wins in November will have to face the new reality: People in Afghanistan and the United States are fed up with the war. All foreign troops will have to withdraw.

Venezuela

Besides his bad record in the Middle East, Biden continues to support US domination in Latin America. Both Trump and Biden call for the removal of Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro, for example. Last year they supported efforts by Juan Guaido, the former head of the National Assembly, to anoint himself president.

The Venezuelan government accuses Washington and Guaido of trying to overthrow Maduro by armed force. Rightwing, former military officers tried to assassinate Maduro with a drone strike last year. Then on May 4, a group of mercenaries – including two US Army vets – landed on the Venezuelan coast intending to overthrow Maduro and install Guaido in power. The coup plot was organized by a Florida private security company. It has the earmarks of a US intelligence operation, although not surprisingly, Trump denies it.

While Biden has not formally called for regime change in Venezuela, neither has he criticized the armed coup attempts. And he favors economic sanctions to cripple the economy, saying: “The US should push for stronger multilateral sanctions so that supporters of the regime cannot live, study, shop, or hide their assets in the United States, Europe, or Latin America.”

In my opinion and that of many others, Bernie Sanders offered a far better foreign policy program than Biden. But Biden may at least restore the Iran nuclear accord, normalize relations with Cuba, and take steps to end the Yemen War.

But one thing is for sure. Those who oppose America’s wars of aggression should take to the streets in peaceful protests no matter who wins.

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Prepare To Have Your Worldview Obliterated – Caitlin Johnstone

Posted by M. C. on April 8, 2020

Right now that’s the primary piece of advice I have to offer: stay skeptical, stay intellectually honest, and keep your perspectives malleable. If we are more interested in the truth than we are in being proven right or in feeling smug, then we are likely on a collision course with future revelations that will change our ideas about how the world is functioning in some pretty significant ways.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/04/07/prepare-to-have-your-worldview-obliterated/

author: Caitlin Johnstone

The first draft of the civil rights-eroding USA PATRIOT Act was magically introduced one week after the 9/11 attacks. Legislators later admitted that they hadn’t even had time to read through the hundreds of pages of the history-shaping bill before passing it the next month, yet somehow its authors were able to gather all the necessary information and write the whole entire thing in a week.

This was because most of the work had already been done. CNET reported the following back in 2008:

“Months before the Oklahoma City bombing took place, [then-Senator Joe] Biden introduced another bill called the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995. It previewed the 2001 Patriot Act by allowing secret evidence to be used in prosecutions, expanding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and wiretap laws, creating a new federal crime of ‘terrorism’ that could be invoked based on political beliefs, permitting the U.S. military to be used in civilian law enforcement, and allowing permanent detention of non-U.S. citizens without judicial review. The Center for National Security Studies said the bill would erode ‘constitutional and statutory due process protections’ and would ‘authorize the Justice Department to pick and choose crimes to investigate and prosecute based on political beliefs and associations.’

Biden’s bill was never put to a vote, but after 9/11 then-Attorney General John Ashcroft reportedly credited his bill with the foundations of the USA PATRIOT Act.

“Civil libertarians were opposed to it,” Biden said in 2002 of his bill. “Right after 1994, and you can ask the attorney general this, because I got a call when he introduced the Patriot Act. He said, ‘Joe, I’m introducing the act basically as you wrote it in 1994.’”

I point this out because it is now more important than ever to be aware that power structures (and their goons like Biden) can and will seize on opportunities to roll out pre-existing authoritarian agendas. We know it happened after 9/11, and we may be absolutely certain that it is happening now.

Commentator and satirist CJ Hopkins has a long, long, long, long ongoing thread on Twitter right now compiling dozens and dozens of creepy Orwellian steps that have been taken by governments around the world and by Silicon Valley tech giants in response to the virus over the last three weeks. I emphasize how long the thread is because if you think you’ve finished scrolling through it you probably haven’t; make sure you keep clicking “more replies” until you get to the current entries.

I strongly encourage everyone to scroll through the thread when you get a chance to get a sense of the scale and scope of the drastic measures that are being implemented around the world, and maybe bookmark it and keep checking back now and then for updates. The entire thread is comprised of mainstream media articles with excerpts; some entries are more jarring than others, but taken as a whole it becomes clear that we’re looking at a whole lot of power being handed over to the kinds of institutions which historically don’t do good things when given a lot more power.

And these are just the steps we know about.

To what extent are these drastic, intrusive, authoritarian measures justified? The answer, in my estimation, isn’t clear yet. There are too many unknowns about the virus, too many unknowns about the responses to it, and too many unknowns about exactly what is going on behind the veil of secrecy in opaque government agencies around the world. There’s an argument expert epidemiologists are making that there’s no time to get perfectly certain of these things before dealing with a pandemic, that speed is of the essence and hesitating due to fear of maybe getting something wrong can cost millions of lives. Maybe that’s true; I’m not an epidemiologist and I do not know.

What I do know is that enormous changes are happening, and that powerful people are definitely conspiring to advance their own interests as this unfolds. There are many theories about who specifically is conspiring with whom and the specific manner in which they are doing so, and they’re being dismissed by establishment loyalists as “conspiracy theories” as though that in and of itself constitutes some sort of argument. That conspiracies are happening is actually just a fact that is obvious to any adult with a mature understanding of the world, and it can be useful to come up with theories about how that might be occurring; calling theories about conspiracies the thing that they are in a disparaging tone does not actually invalidate them.

There are a ton of theories about what’s going on behind the scenes with this pandemic and the policies that are being put in place to respond to it. Some are smart and relatively well-founded, some are stupid and rooted in generalized paranoia or partisan idiocy, many contradict each other, and many could potentially fit together in some way. I personally haven’t seen enough evidence for any one theory to throw my weight behind it, but I am watching carefully, and I am glad that the hive mind is chewing on this riddle.

One thing I will put my weight behind right now is the prediction that those of us who are dedicated to truth are going to have to drastically revise our worldviews in the coming months. There are such large-scale shifts happening in such an unclear information environment that the only thing we should expect is the unexpected; this virus is shaking things up (and being used to shake things up) in ways we don’t really understand yet, and even before the virus the world’s dominant power structures were acting very weird. This means our ideas about what’s going on in the world will likely have to undergo some revising in the relatively near future; the bigger the revelations, the more revision will be necessary.

Right now that’s the primary piece of advice I have to offer: stay skeptical, stay intellectually honest, and keep your perspectives malleable. If we are more interested in the truth than we are in being proven right or in feeling smug, then we are likely on a collision course with future revelations that will change our ideas about how the world is functioning in some pretty significant ways. If this doesn’t sound possible to you, it’s only because you currently lack the humility, intellectual honesty and cognitive flexibility to understand that you may not be seeing the full picture yet.

Things are shifting; all we can do is keep our minds agile enough to shift with them. Prepare to have your worldview obliterated.

_________________________________

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Bloomberg Flunks Acting School – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on February 22, 2020

But barely any mention of this in the debates.  Trump and his big money men from New York and Las Vegas are trying to push Iran into an air war.  The US is seeking to overthrow the governments of Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, and Iran.  Clashes between China and the US are a major danger.  Former defense chief Sam Nunn warns the US and Russia are closer to a nuclear conflict than any time since the 1960’s Cuban missile crisis.  No matter.

Americans want entertainers for their made-for-TV politicians.  Poor, dignified Mr. Bloomberg didn’t know he would face professional actors, not legislators.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/02/eric-margolis/bloomberg-flunks-acting-school/

By

Special for LewRockwell.com

Good work, Democrats!  In the Las Vegas debate, you blasted every target but Donald Trump.  Instead of quivering in his Gucci loafers, the man who would be king was left dancing on air.

The man who should have been king, newcomer Mike Bloomberg, was left looking like a beaten-up cigar store Indian.  He had not prepped for the debate and failed to dodge the obvious incoming missile attacks on him launched by a hissing Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg.

Many veteran Republicans fear that TV promoter Trump will steamroll Warren, Buttigieg, Biden and Amy Klobuchar.  They may be right.  Trump had to be delighted by the no-prisoners Democratic debate that bloodied his opponents before he could even get to them.  Bloomberg was totally unprepared for the savage attacks launched against him.  He looked like a neophyte suffering from camera fright.

I got a good read on Bloomberg when I had an intimate dinner with him some years ago.  Rather than the stiff, unsmiling man we saw on TV in Las Vegas, in real life Bloomberg is clearly brilliant yet understated, charming, and endowed with a sharp sense of humor and quick wit.

Bernie Sanders, who has three homes, blasted Bloomberg for being ‘rich.’  This is a big sin to the Democrats who, like Hillary Clinton, pocketed millions  in political support from big banks, unions and businesses under the cover of night or via bogus speaking fees and her fake foundation – a scam emulated by Trump.

The deeply corrupt Democratic National Committee, controlled by Hillary Clinton, rigged the vote that blocked Bernie Sanders during the last election.  When news of this scandal emerged, Hillary kicked off the anti-Russian hysteria to divert attention from her chicanery.

Yes, Bloomberg may be the 9th or 10th richest man in the world.  But his net worth comes from ownership of one of our most successful and reliable financial news organizations that he built up from nothing, and that employs important numbers of men and women.  The use of Bloomberg terminals saves forests of trees.

Ignore Elizabeth Warren’s cheap shots about women being called names like ‘horse-faced lesbians’ or ‘fat’ at his firm.  Many men speak this way to one-another in casual talk.  Women often do the same regarding men.  The answer to this is to totally segregate the sexes, as in Saudi Arabia.  Trying to whip up a war of the sexes is not going to make angry Elizabeth Warren president. She should stick to her commendable work with banking and voting rights.

It’s pretty clear after the shootout in Vegas that Joe Biden has used up his last chance.  Black voters and unions won’t save him.  He looked old and very tired.  But not as tired or off the mark as Mike Bloomberg.  By contrast Bernie looked old, to be sure, but was full of beans.

As a foreign affairs specialist, what really dismayed me was that there was only one significant mention of international policy.  That’s when the abrasive, loud-mouthed Sen. Amy Klobuchar could not remember the name of the president of Mexico.  For God’s sake, she on a senate committee that deals with Mexico.

While our presidential debate focuses on overweight women and health care, the US and Russia have come terrifyingly close to open war in the Mideast.

But barely any mention of this in the debates.  Trump and his big money men from New York and Las Vegas are trying to push Iran into an air war.  The US is seeking to overthrow the governments of Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, and Iran.  Clashes between China and the US are a major danger.  Former defense chief Sam Nunn warns the US and Russia are closer to a nuclear conflict than any time since the 1960’s Cuban missile crisis.  No matter.

Americans want entertainers for their made-for-TV politicians.  Poor, dignified Mr. Bloomberg didn’t know he would face professional actors, not legislators.

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Making Sense of the Impeachment Charges – PaulCraigRoberts.org

Posted by M. C. on January 23, 2020

An unapproved President is simply not reelected.  He does not need to be impeached.  Obviousy, it is Trump’s reelection that Democrats fear, and they are using impeachment to try to prevent Trump’s reelection.  This is not the function of a political party.

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/01/21/making-sense-of-the-impeachment-charges/

Paul Craig Roberts

Prior to the impeachment of Trump, not by Congress as presstitutes report but by self-interested House Democrats, during the entirety of US history there have been only two attempts to impeach a president—Andrew Johnson in 1868 and 130 years later Bill Clinton in 1998.

Clinton was impeached by House Republicans when he clearly lied under oath by denying his sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern.  The Senate refused to convict him.  Enough Senators had enough sense to know that lying about a sexual affair, even under oath, did not rise to a “high crime.”  Moreover, Senators understood that few men would be inclined to embarrass their wife and daughter, or few women their husband and daughter, by admitting publicly to a sexual affair.

Andrew Johnson, a Tennessee Democrat, stood with the Republican Union of Abe Lincoln. Consequently, Lincoln chose Johnson as his Vice President in his 1864 reelection campaign.  When Lincoln was assassinated, Johnson became president.

President Johnson took to heart Lincoln’s emphasis on restoring comity between North and South. Consequently, Johnson opposed the harsh, exploitative, and demeaning policies of the Republican Congress during Reconstruction.  He didn’t see how the Union could be restored on the basis of dispossession of Southerners, rape of Southern women, and the infliction of general humiliation on a conquered people.

The fanatical Republican Congress, however, was set on punishment and humiliation of the South. By blocking some of the most extreme Reconstruction measures, Johnson aroused the same enmity against himself as the Republicans had toward the South.  A series of disputes between the President and the Republican Congress led to a resolution of impeachment drafted by the Congressional Joint Committee on Reconstruction.

The charges against Johnson were contrived, a product of emotion, like the ones against Trump, and Johnson’s conviction failed by one vote in the Senate.  After his term ended in 1869, Johnson ran for the US Senate and won.

Bill Clinton is the only one of the three to be impeached by the House for cause, but enough Senators realized that the cause was not a high crime and refused to convict.

The three presidents who have been impeached are much less guilty of impeachable offences than many who have not been impeached.  For example, George W. Bush took America to war based on lies—for example, Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. These lies are much more serious than Clinton’s denial of a sexual affair.  Bush failed to uphold his duties and violated the US Constitution by suspending habeas corpus and detaining citizens indefinitely without evidence and due process of law.  Obama intended to invade Syria on the basis of a lie, for example, Assad’s use of chemical weapons, but was prevented by Russia. Obama escalated Bush’s attack on Constitutionally protected civil liberty by declaring his right to execute US citizens without due process of law.  Franklin D. Roosevelt kept knowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor from the US Navy in order to have an infamous event that would allow him to enter the war against Germany. Even Lincoln was guilty of destroying states’ rights set out in the Constitution and launching a war of aggression in order to preserve the empire. There are more examples.

It is paradoxical that real crimes provide less inclination  for impeachment than orchestrated fake crimes.

There were 11 contrived articles of impeachment against Johnson.  Against Trump there are two.  One is that he abused his power as president by asking the president of Ukraine to reopen the investigation of the energy company, on which Obama’s Vice President Biden had placed his son as a very highly paid director.  Vice President Biden had forced the previous president of Ukraine to shut down the investigation by firing the prosecutor or otherwise forfeit $1 billion in US aid. 

The Democrats have no evidence that Trump offered the Ukrainian president US aid in exchange for political dirt against Biden, and the president of Ukraine said there was no such offer. What would be the point of Trump asking for dirt against Biden when Biden himself boasted before the Council on Foreign Relations that he had forced the Ukrainian President to fire the prosecutor or forfeit $1 billion. https://www.nysun.com/editorials/well-son-of-a-bitch-ukraine-scandal-is-about-biden/90846/  This is common knowledge.  Why should Trump have to pay Ukraine for it?

Vice President Biden’s clear, open admission that he did what Democrats falsely accuse Trump of doing is total proof of the utter corruption of the Democratic Party.

Now, let’s suppose the Democrats are correct in order to see how inconsequential and commonplace the charge against Trump would be even if true.  The United States government has historically, has always, and is forever telling foreign governments to do this or that or you won’t get any money.  This is the commonplace behavior of the United States in its foreign policy, which is not based on normal diplomacy but on bribes, sanctions, threats, and, if the country does not comply, bombings and invasions.

Trump did not tell Ukraine that he was going to sanction, bomb, or invade if Ukraine did not reopen an investigation that was closed entirely on the basis of Biden’s threat to withhold US aid money.  If anyone should be facing a charge, it is Biden.

The second charge in Trump’s impeachment is “obstruction of Congress.”  The US Constitution gives the President the power to obstruct Congress. Every time a President vetoes a bill, he obstructs Congress.  The idea that obstructing Congress is an impeachable offense is insane nonsense.  It works only because Americans are ignorant. They do not know what the Constitution says or anything about the balance of powers the Constitution establishes between executive, legislature, and Judiciary.

Similarly, Congress has the power to obstruct a President by refusing to ratify his treaties, by rejecting his budget and spending priorities and by refusing to confirm his appointees in office.

What is the real basis of the obstruction charge?  I will tell you.  It means that the House Democrats could not find anything on Trump, so they charge that Trump obstructed them by hiding the evidence and not letting executive branch officials testify who would have ratted him out.  That is all the charge means. The charge is that the exercise of executive privilege, which every president has used, is an obstruction of Congress.  That is all the charge means. How did such an absurd charge become an impeachable offense?

In the Senate the fight over “the rules” is a fight over whether Democrats will be able to reproduce in the Senate, in place of what is supposed to be a trial based on the evidence that led to the House’s impeachment charge, a continuation of the House circus with more witnessess, more charges, more orchestrated “evidence.”  In other words, the Democrats intend to use the trial as a continuation of the soap opera hoping to extend it long enough that some of the mud will stick to Trump and defeat his reelection.

We must ask ourselves how American politics has degenerated to such a comical level.  How can the US be taken seriously as a world leader when for the entirety of a presidential term one of the two political parties has done nothing but to try to destroy the President of the other political party? Is the US going to have its own Hutu-Tutsi genocide?

This question is unrelated to whether or not we approve of Trump or think that he is a good President. An unapproved President is simply not reelected.  He does not need to be impeached.  Obviousy, it is Trump’s reelection that Democrats fear, and they are using impeachment to try to prevent Trump’s reelection.  This is not the function of a political party.

A political party is supposed to represent the interests of its constituents.  At one time, the Democrats’ constituents were the working class.  The Republicans represented business interests.  There was countervailing power bewteen the two.  Sometimes business interests got the upper hand.  Sometimes the working class got the upper hand.  But the system worked and served both parties.

What, who, does the system serve today?

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A Weak Whistleblower, a Ridiculous Impeachment | The American Conservative

Posted by M. C. on October 3, 2019

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/a-weak-whistleblower-a-ridiculous-impeachment/

By Peter Van Buren

Disregard all the dramatic accusations in and around the whistleblower’s complaint; they’re just guff. This entire impeachment brouhaha hinges on Donald Trump’s own words in the transcript of his call with the Ukrainian president. Is he demanding foreign interference in the 2020 election? Or is he asking an ally to run down unethical actions by a man who might become president (here’s a 2018 letter from the Dems asking Ukraine to help them investigate Trump to compare it to)? Or is it mostly just Trump running his mouth off in a rambling, often disconnected, stream-of-consciousness phone call that means very little?

If you read Trump’s words as impeachable, you are asking to impeach on something that was talked about but never happened. Ukraine never handed over dirt on Biden. Trump never even asked Attorney General Bob Barr to contact Ukraine. Rudy Giuliani may or may not have had meetings with someone but no one is claiming that anything of substance happened in them. There is no evidence military aid was withheld in return for anything. If nothing happened, then nothing happened. You need a body on the ground for a smoking gun to matter.

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice had already adjudicated the whistleblower complaint before the thing was leaked to the Washington Post. The original complaint was passed from the Intelligence Community Inspector General to the DOJ, which determined there was no crime and closed the case. Officials found that the transcript did not show that Trump had violated campaign finance laws by soliciting a thing of value, such as the investigation, from a foreign national. Even as Democrats bleat about how corrupt the DOJ is, at some point during any impeachment, they will need to make clear what evidence they have that finds crime where DOJ did not. No one is above the law, sure, but which law exactly are we talking about here?

Trump is apparently no better at cover-ups than he is at extortion. He got no dirt on Biden even as Ukraine pocketed its aid money (Ukraine, in fact, knew nothing about the aid being frozen while Trump supposedly was shaking them down), and his so-called cover-up concluded with him releasing in unprecedented fashion both the complaint and the transcript. For a cover-up to even begin, you have to have something to cover, and a phone call that led nowhere doesn’t need to be covered up. In fact, it’s on the internet right now.

But the complaint says that the transcript was moved from one secure computer server inside the White House to an even more secure server. That’s a cover-up! Not discussed is that Congress had no more access to the first server than the second. Exactly who was blocked from seeing the transcript when it was on the more secure system who would have had access to it otherwise? It seems the main person who suddenly couldn’t grab the transcript was the whistleblower. To make all this work, Democrats either have to argue for less cybersecurity or impeach for over-classification. And of course, the Obama administration also stored records of select presidential phone calls on the exact same server.

Bottom line: Trump asked the Ukrainian president to take calls from Bill Barr and Rudy Giuliani to talk about corruption, a bilateral issue since the Obama administration with or without Hunter Biden. There was no quid pro quo. Maybe a good scolding is deserved, but sloppy statesmanship is not high crimes and misdemeanors.

Something else is wrong. The whistleblower is a member of the intel community (the New York Times says CIA), but the text does not read the way government people write. It sounds instead like an op-ed, a mediocre journalist “connecting the dots,” a Maddow exclusive combining anonymous sources with dramatic conclusions…

Pity Nancy Pelosi, who tried to hold back her colleagues. Now instead of answering the needs of constituents, Democrats will instead exploit their majority in the House to hold hearings that will likely lead to a show vote that would have embarrassed Stalin. History will remember Pelosi as the mom who, after putting up with the kids’ tantrums for hours, finally gave in only a few blocks from home. She’ll regret spoiling dinner over a hefty glass of white wine, but what could she do: they just wouldn’t shut up and her nerves were shot. Have you had to listen to AOC complain from the back seat for two hours in traffic?…

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