Topic: Obama

first published 2014; updated 2018; updated Aug. 2021.

Why I Burning my last bridge with Obama. Carey Wedler. Mar. 13, 2014.

Why I Burned My Obama Shirt. interview with Carey Wedler, via youtube. May 12, 2014.

Michelle Obama.. do me a favor, please! Nov. 7, 2013.

Obama Did NOT Kill Osama bin Laden. Paul Craig Roberts. Aug. 7, 2021.

The American People Live In a World of False Narratives

The Vanishing Legacy of Barack Obama. Matt Taibbi. Aug. 13, 2021.

On the road from stirring symbol of hope and change to the Fat Elvis of neoliberalism, birthday-partying Barack Obama sold us all out

...

There’s a glorious moment in the life of a certain kind of politician, when either because their careers are over, or because they’re so untouchable politically that it doesn’t matter anymore, that they finally get to remove the public mask, no pun intended. This Covid bash was Barack Obama’s “Fuck it!” moment.

He extended middle fingers in all directions: to his Vineyard neighbors, the rest of America, Biden, the hanger-on ex-staffers who’d stacked years of hundred-hour work weeks to build his ballyhooed career, the not quite A-listers bounced at the last minute for being not famous enough (sorry, Larry David and Conan O’Brien!), and so on. It’d be hard not to laugh imagining Axelrod reading that even “Real Housewife of Atlanta” Kim Fields got on the party list over him, except that Obama giving the shove-off to his most devoted (if also scummy and greedy) aides is also such a perfect metaphor for the way he slammed the door in the faces of the millions of ordinary voters who once so desperately believed in him.

Obviously, getting rich and not giving a shit anymore is the birthright of every American. But this wasn’t supposed to be in the script for Obama, whose remarkable heel turn has been obscured by the Trump years, which incidentally were at least partly his fault. The history books and the still-starstruck press will let him skate on this, but they shouldn’t.

Obama was set up to be the greatest of American heroes, but proved to be a common swindler and one of the great political liars of all time — he fooled us all. Moreover, his remarkably vacuous post-presidency is proving true everything Trump said in 2016 about the grasping Washington politicians whose only motives are personal enrichment, and who’d do anything, even attend his wedding, for a buck. Trump’s point was that he, Trump, was already swinishly rich, while politicians have only one thing to sell to get the upper class status they crave: us.

Obama did that. He sold us out, and it’s time to start talking about the role he played in bringing about the hopeless cynical mess that is modern America.

Why “Incremental Change” Is Worse Than No Change At All. CaitOz. July 15, 2019.

President Obama was elected on the platform of hope and change. He promised big, sweeping changes, and, at the end of eight years, had continued and expanded all the most depraved foreign and domestic policies of his predecessor while killing the push for universal healthcare and creating a climate initiative which was the equivalent of a band-aid on a sucking chest wound. He now defends his near-complete lack of progress by claiming that compromising with the plutocrats and achieving a small amount of change is better than not compromising and achieving no change at all.

The World According to Ben Rhodes: Hypocrisy in Obama’s Foreign Policy. As`ad AbuKhalil, Consortium News. July 23, 2018.

Ben Rhodes’ interesting new book, The World as It is: A Memoir of the Obama White House (Random House), should be widely read not because of the wisdom or moral message it contains but because it is an unintended, damning account of liberal imperialism.

The book suffers from an acute case of self-congratulation, sanctimoniousness and hubris. The author situates himself (along with Samantha Power and the young Foreign Service officers who worked in the Obama White House) among the liberal advocates of foreign policy. He does not include Obama in this group, and the latter comes across—despite perfunctory praise—as he really is: an unprincipled politician who unfailingly subordinates moral arguments to political calculations.

Obama Goes Full Clinton Foundation With Series Of $400,000 Wall Street Speeches. zero hedge. Sep. 18, 2017.

For a man who once criticized the Clinton Foundation for taking millions of dollars in 'donations' from Wall Street "Fat Cats," Obama seems to be in a rush to replicate the lucrative Clinton scam via his very own Obama Foundation. ... since leaving office in January, Obama has already collected millions in speaking fees from the same Wall Street banks that may have cost Hillary her shot at the White House. 

... 

Now all he needs to do is use his foundation to raise money for Hurricane Irma victims in Barbuda, use that money to hire his buddies to rebuild the island and then sit back and wait for the kickbacks to roll in... then the transition to the Clinton Foundation will be complete.

Obama’s Just the Enemy And Always Was. Ian Welsh. Sep 18, 2017.

Obama’s just an evil man. He has always been an evil man. He has spent his time since office hobknobbing with billionaires and getting rich off the very people he helped bail out as president, and whom he refused to prosecute despite their clear crimes. 

He’s just a bad man. He was never left wing in any sense, and he’d rather see vast amounts of cruelty than see any sort of socialist anywhere near power.

Ilhan Omar: Obama's just a prety face who got away with murder. NYPost. Mar. 8, 2019.

If Progressives Don’t Wake Up to How Awful Obama Was, Their Movement Will Fail. Caitlin Johnstone, Observer. May 2, 2017.

... the answer, of course, is America. That’s what America is now. The man who continued and expanded all of Bush’s most evil policies, created a failed state in Libya, exponentially expanded the civilian-slaughtering US drone program which Chomsky calls “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times” to unprecedented levels, facilitated the Orwellian expansion of the US surveillance state while prosecuting more whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined, and used charm and public sympathy to evade the drastic environmental policy changes we’ll need to avert climate disaster and lull the progressive movement into a dead sleep for eight years now gets paid nearly half a million dollars an hour to continue bolstering the exploitative corporatist nightmare he’s dedicated his life to. 

... 

I can understand why pro-establishment liberals are defending this man; he stands for everything they stand for. If all you stand for is vapid tribalism and vanity politics and you are willing to sacrifice integrity along with economic and social justice and the lives of other people’s kids in corporatist wars overseas in order to feel like you’re on the right team, Obama is your man. But if you’re an actual, real progressive and not just a latte-sipping NPR listener with a sense of self-righteousness and a pro-choice bumper sticker, you’ve got no business regarding Obama with anything but disgust.

... 

When you’re dealing with a government that in 2013 gave itself the legal right to use media psy-ops on its own citizens, you can’t afford to have any stray strands of sympathy laying around out there. The war we’re fighting against the oligarchy is first and foremost a media war, and we may be certain that any sympathies progressives maintain toward their establishment oppressors will be exploited. By letting ourselves really see Obama for the vicious ecocidal warmongering corporatist that he is and letting the resulting disgust wash through us, we are inoculating ourselves against sympathy for him and everyone like him. That disgust will serve as a kind of psychological gag reflex that rescues us from swallowing any more of their bullshit.

Obama Starts to Cash In. Ian Welsh. Mar. 1, 2017.

This is why I don’t get very worked up about Trump’s conflicts of interest. They are real, but the only difference is that he’s getting paid now as opposed to later. Politicians exist to do what rich people want, Trump is only cutting out the middle man and the partial delay. 

This is an important point, and I want to encourage you to read this longer article on how politicians are paid by rich people to fuck over ordinary people. It’s not about donations for elections. 

Obama continued the trend, which has gotten worse for decades, of the rich getting more and more of all the gains of the economy. He did not try, in any way, to reverse it. And that’s because he knew he was being paid to funnel money to the rich. That was his job, he did it, and now he is getting his reward.

Obama’s Department of Justice’s Prime Job Is to Immunize Rich Wrongdoers. Ian Welsh. Oct. 8, 2016.

This is deliberate government policy and, yes, it comes from the top, from Obama. 

Obama and his DOJ engage in what should be considered routine criminal behavior, as far as I’m concerned: Helping criminals get away with their actions is itself criminal and that’s even before we talk about his actions in Libya, and so on. 

Scum. Absolute scum. People die when lifesaving drugs are raised to high prices. This is is immunizing negligent homicide. 

I want to be real clear, corporate criminals generally do more actual harm than the worst serial killer. 

Meanwhile, “liberals” act like Obama’s the greatest president ever, even though he left the US economy far worse for most Americans, was a warmonger, and engaged in the largest immunization of corporate crime in at least 90 years. 

He talks pretty but the man is scum. Scum to the bone. He took Bush’s America and regularized most of it and made some parts worse: kicking out more Hispanics, being far worse on whistleblowers, continuing to sign continuations of the AUMF and so on. 

That Obama is scum does not mean, for the less bright, or more partisan, that he is not better than certain alternatives. Beelzebub being the lesser evil to Satan doesn’t mean you want to sup with him. 

Scum.

I Am So Happy About Gay Marriage Being Legal in the US. Ian Welsh. Jun 26, 2015.

Obama, as a rule, is happy to give you things that the oligarchy doesn’t mind. They don’t, overall, mind gay rights. A large chunk of the oligarchy wanted Obamacare (it was and is a huge subsidy to insurance and pharma companies, among others). There is a reason the public option was never seriously considered by Obama; it was a potential threat to insurance companies. 

None of this is to say Obama is all bad, he certainly isn’t. But he is not your friend if you want widespread economic prosperity, and he never has been. Nor will he ever be. Nor, to point out what should be obvious, is Hilary Clinton (also not always for marriage equality). 

You set yourself up for immense hurt when you trust the wrong people with political power and it is important not to engage in revisionism about what is, after all, very recent history.

The Obamacare Fiasco. Ian Welsh. Nov 14, 2013.

When you are dealing with bad people, you must assume bad faith; bad behavior. You must plan for it. The best option was always Medicare-for-all (and I was told by at least one House staffer that they could pass it if they really wanted to and were willing to go nuclear.) The problem with Obama has always been this sickening need to be one of the boys. He appears to genuinely like and genuinely admire the people who have “made it” in this society—people like Jamie Dimon and the people who run insurance and drug companies. He thinks you can make deals with these people, and make sure everyone wins. 

You can’t. These people are the most successful parasites ever produced by our nasty form of sociopathic capitalism. You can only give them what they want or you can rip them from the body politic, so they stop sucking the blood from the host they’re killing. 

So the insurance companies have bitten the hand that fed them. Obama gave them everything they wanted and made sure nothing of importance they didn’t want (like a public option) was in the bill. Now they’re chomping and chewing, destroying what remains of his presidency. 

He has reaped as he sowed.

If you’re pro-Obama you’re an idiot, on the payroll, or evil. Ian Welsh. Aug. 4, 2011.

Look folks, at this point, Obama has made possible what a Republican president like McCain couldn’t do. What a Republican president like Bush failed to do: he is gutting social security and Medicare. 

Americans would have been better off with McCain because the Democratic party would not have allowed what just happened, and the GOP would have just passed McCain’s debt limit increase. 

This doesn’t mean the next Republican president won’t be worse than Obama, he probably will. But he will be worse in large part because of Obama, because Obama has institutionalized Bush’s constitutional order and taken it even further, in creating the so-called Super Congress to end run the democratic process. He will be worse because Obama, by legitimizing “deficits are evil” and delegitimizing civilian Keynesian stimulus (by screwing it up, which I predicted the day he announced his botched stimulus bill) he has made the only possible Keynesian stimulus a military one. At some point President Teabag will realize that the only thing which will provide enough help to the economy to get him reelected is a new, even bigger war.

Obama isn’t about compromise. Ian Welsh. Dec. 3, 2010.

People, Obama is not and never has been a left winger. Nor is he a Nixonian or Eisenhower Republican, that would put him massively to the left of where he is and to the left of the majority of the Democratic party. Instead his a Reaganite, something he told people repeatedly. 

Until folks get it through their skulls that Obama is not and never was a liberal, a progressive or left wing in any way, shape or form they are going to continue misdiagnosing the problem. That isn’t to say Obama may or may not be a wimp, but he always compromises right, never left and his compromises are minor. He always wanted tax cuts. He gave away the public option in private negotiations near the beginning of the HCR fight, not the end. He never even proposed an adequate stimulus bill. He bent arms, hard, to get TARP through. 

He’s a Reaganite. It’s what he believes in, genuinely. 

... 

Let me put it even more baldly. Obama is, actually, a bad man. He didn’t do the right thing when he had a majority, and now that he has the excuse of a Republican House he’s going to let them do bad thing after bad thing. This isn’t about “compromise”, this is about doing what he wants to do anyway, like slashing social security.

Obama's Whitewash. Arthur Silber, Power of Narrative. March 19, 2008.

Obama states: "I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy." What Obama has "condemned, in unequivocal terms" is the truth -- the truth that is forbidden by the fictions that feed the myth of American exceptionalism. Obama has fully embraced the lies at the heart of mythologized America -- an embrace that is underscored by his inclusion of this phrase: "a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam." In this manner, Obama confirms that he will continue our policy of global interventionism including our endless interventions in the Middle East, which have been unceasing ever since World War I. Obama embraces all the lies that support that policy, and he will challenge none of them. (See "Songs of Death" for many more details concerning Obama's embrace of this murderous policy.) 

Almost every politician lies, and most politicians lie repeatedly. Yet in one sense, Obama's speech is exceptional, rare and unique -- but not for any of the reasons offered by Obama's uncritical, mindless adulators. It is exceptional for this reason: it is rare that a candidate will announce in such stark, comprehensive terms that he will lie about every fact of moment, about every aspect of our history that affects the crises of today and that has led to them, about everything that might challenge the mythological view of America. But that is what Obama achieved with this speech. It may be a remarkable achievement -- a remarkable and detestable one, and one that promises endless destruction in the future, both here and abroad. 

Is that what many Americans want? Tragically, the answer appears to be yes. Truth must be destroyed, no matter how many lives and how much suffering are required. Americans will accept anything else -- war, genocide, economic collapse, further terrorist attacks in the U.S. -- but the truth must be denied.

8 ways Obama sucks on climate. Ben Adler, grist. Feb 17, 2015.

The new conventional wisdom among the political class is that President Obama is doing everything he can without the cooperation of Congress to fight climate change. His administration set higher fuel-economy standards for cars and trucks. It has proposed the first-ever regulations on carbon emissions from power plants, and on methane leakage from oil and gas wells and pipelines. He got China on board with a plan to limit emissions, potentially paving the way for an international climate agreement later this year in Paris. Obama feeds this perception with his public statements, such as emphasizing the importance of climate change in his State of the Union address and musing to Vox.com about how the media fails to cover climate change with the urgency of other national security threats. But many of the administration’s moves, including a string of recent actions by federal agencies under Obama’s control, show this conventional wisdom to be false.

Why “Incremental Change” Is Worse Than No Change At All. CaitOz. July 15, 2019.

Another reason why the so-called “centrists” pose such a grave threat to our world is because their platform of slow, moderate, incremental change is actually worse than no change at all.

President Obama was elected on the platform of hope and change. He promised big, sweeping changes, and, at the end of eight years, had continued and expanded all the most depraved foreign and domestic policies of his predecessor while killing the push for universal healthcare and creating a climate initiative which was the equivalent of a band-aid on a sucking chest wound. He now defends his near-complete lack of progress by claiming that compromising with the plutocrats and achieving a small amount of change is better than not compromising and achieving no change at all.

...

In both the Obama and the Trump administrations, voters ordered a box of hope and change, received a package labeled “slow, incremental change”, then opened it up and found no meaningful change whatsoever.

This pattern has been repeating for years.

Liberalism's Final Capitulation

[MW: I was skeptical of Off-Guardian's skepticism of lockdowns; as a believer in the precautionary principle, I thought the risk-reward tradeoff was unambiguously in favor of lockdowns. Who knows? Maybe I and other lockdown proponents were wrong and Off-Guardian and other lockdown skeptics were right? Either way, they certainly raise lots of other points -- like disaster capitalists' penchant for seizing on any crisis to implement their nefarious greedy plans -- that I either agree with or at least agree need to be considered...]

They passed the USA PATRIOT Act – and I did nothing because I am a patriot.

They passed the USA Freedom Act – and I believe in freedom.

They nominated Hillary Clinton – and I voted for the lesser evil.

They declared medical martial law – and I didn’t want to kill grandma.

They said to wear a facemask – and I passively obeyed.

I believe Joe Biden – because I am a liberal.

Ode to a Liberal – DWP

Medical Martial Law: Liberalism’s Final Capitulation. David William Pear, Off-Guardian. June 5, 2020.

In 2010 Chris Hedges declared the liberal class as dead as a doornail. He was late. Liberalism had died decades earlier. All that remains now is the separate components of the body of liberalism. The stinking compounds have decomposed into identity politics.

The cause of death for the liberal class, as Chris Hedges tells us, was gullibility. Liberals were foolish enough to believe that they could moderate capitalism. They thought that they could change corporatism by elections, mass movements, whining and begging for incrementally.

The liberal class started their negotiations by compromising all of their ethics, beliefs, and powers. All they got in return were table-scraps to identity politics. The power elite did not give up anything it really cares about. The corporatists raped, pillaged and burned with abandon, while liberals wallowed in political correctness.

Taxes for the rich are the lowest in over 100 years. The military budget is the highest in history. The concentration of wealth and income is in the fewest hands. US wars have killed millions of people, and war profits are booming. Labor unions were neutered. Government is privatized. The economy has been deindustrialized. The police are militarized. The working class has been disenfranchised. The middle-class is being impoverished. The unemployed are idle. The poor are criminalized.

I could go on, but you get the point.

...

Liberals elected Barack Obama in 2008, laughed, cheered, cried, and then they went to sleep for eight years. They thought that Obama would do the heavy lifting for them. Instead he went from bombing three countries to bombing seven, after winning the Nobel Peace Prize for nothing. Obama looked the other way as the Police Occupied Zuccotti Park, Black Lives Didn’t Matter, and Dakota Pipelined. Obama imprisoned and tortured whistleblowers, and he became the deporter-in-chief. He bailed out the banks, while millions of families lost their homes. Obamacare enriched insurance companies and big-pharma. Gitmo stands as the legacy of Obama’s droning wedding parties and funerals, and for all his broken promises. His answer to climate change was Artic drilling, and fracking the USA.

Obama and the liberal class are the reason we have Trump. The rich do not care about any of the liberal class’s identity politics and correctness. It costs the rich nothing to make those concessions. The liberals are not willing to fight for anything of importance, and the corporatists know it. The corporatists don’t care if Trump or Biden is the next president. Bernie or bust! Fugget about it: Bernie Sanders is just a sheepdog, a foil, a professional wrestler, and Kabuki theater. Bernie is the Senator from Lockheed and Israel. He is a carnival huckster, herding the liberal suckers into the big tent. The DNC will be happy to keep Trump. They get to keep their jobs, their power, their influence, and the gravy train keeps on rolling.

Nancy Pelosi will still get her kicks from gourmet chocolate, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will keep making arm-waving rants to an empty House, Ilhan Omar will kowtow to the Zionist lobby, and the Congressional Black Caucus will vote against blacks. Liberals will grandstand politically correct platitudes, while the banks, corporations, military-industrial complex, Israel, and the well-connected get unlimited hand-outs. Lest I forget, fake liberal Rachel Maddow and her ilk in the media will still get paid $30 thousand a night for “Russia-Russia-Russia!”, and the New York Times will endorse every regime-change war, just as it has done for the past 150 years. And Liberals will commiserate with each other, preach to their dwindling choir, blame everybody except themselves, and waste another four years without organizing any opposition.

...

Since World War Two the U.S. has killed an estimated 30 million people, none of whom were ever a threat to the US American people. Ethically, morally and legally most US Americans are guilty of war crimes. The German people were not let off the hook after WW2. The US American people are just as guilty now.

Liberals know the U.S. government is a pathological liar. The past two decades have been especially rotten. George W. Bush winning the election in 2000 was a lie. The attacks of 9/11 were lies, the invasion of Afghanistan was based on a lie, Iraq weapons of mass destruction were a lie, Iran’s nuclear weapons program is a lie, the Katrina Hurricane response was a lie, the Russian invasion of Georgia was a lie, the 2009 bailout of Wall Street was based on lies, Haiti earthquake aid was a lie, the Ukraine coup was lied about, Gaddafi’s Viagra was a lie, the well-vetted moderate rebel was a lie, the lie that Venezuela is a threat to the US is a lie, the White Helmets are a propaganda lie, Russiagate is a lie, the Douma chemical attack was a lie, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons report was a lie, the torture of Chelsea Manning is lied about, the Julian Assange lie is a lie.

So now liberals believe that the government authorities are telling the truth about COVID-19?

Liberals say that we should believe that lie too, and we should obey the fascistic rules. The first clue that the authorities are lying is that the banks, corporations and the well-connected were bailed out again; first too. Six-trillion U.S. dollars disappeared overnight. The second clue was that the U.S. illegal wars of aggression did not stand-down. There was no break in the illegal U.S. blockades against socialist countries.

...

There is no bailout for the people. There has been no unified response to provide the people with adequate food, healthcare, housing, and financial relief during medical martial law. The physical, mental and emotional damages caused by isolation are being ignored.

The casualties caused by medical martial law and “the rules” go unreported, if the statistics are even being kept. The number of people who have become infected, ill, and died from COVID-19 is lied about.

What is happening under martial law is the permanent stripping away of our civil liberties. The economy is being restructured for the benefit of big-tech, and more concentration of income and wealth is going to the top. Yet, liberals meekly accept the assault on the people’s rights in silence. 

...

Liberals have made “liberal” a dirty word. They cannot hide behind the identity of progressive. There is nothing liberal or progressive about making bargains with the corporatists, fascists, and the corrupt power elites. It is time to bury the putrid body of the liberal class. It has already become a biohazard more dangerous than any virus.


Resist!

US Democratic Sham, 2020 version

#DemExit Now: How the Democratic Party Cheated Bernie Sanders Out of the Nomination. Anis Shivani, via naked capitalism. April 18, 2020.

Forcing the March 17 primaries in Florida, Arizona and Illinois to go forward, despite reports of exceedingly low turnout throughout the day (which miraculously and quite expectedly turned into higher turnouts than 2016 in both Florida and Arizona by the time the final reporting came in), was the last straw. This farce occurred despite the Ohio governor postponing their primary on the same day. This slap in the face of voters was then compounded by the even worse parody of the April 7 Wisconsin primary being allowed to go ahead at the peak of the pandemic, with polling stations vastly reduced (from 180 to just 5 in Milwaukee alone) and absentee ballots often not received or recorded, while maintaining the pretense that somehow all of this constituted a legitimate election.

In the middle of the pandemic, with the entire nation considering a de facto lockdown and many communities already there, the DNC was hell-bent on driving the final nail in the coffin of the youth movement, even though the Sanders campaign had suspended GOTV efforts, for obvious reasons, and even if Biden never really had a presence in any of the latest round of states.

In Maricopa County, Arizona, where many polling stations were shut down, in-person turnout was reportedly higher by 10,000 people than in 2016! And that’s just one representative example from the March 17 primary states. Furthermore, the DNC threatened the remaining primary states against postponing their elections for health reasons, preempting moves similar to those made by Louisiana, Georgia and others. The stage is being set for a virtual convention, followed by the possible resurgence of the illness in the fall to orchestrate a virtual general election. Social distancing has come in handily as the most convenient antidote to political solidarity. Biden has already made it clear that he’s not the least bit interested in making any real overtures toward bereft progressives, just as Hillary wasn’t after her forceful seizure of the nomination in 2016.

When they stopped counting the vote in Iowa, depriving the leading candidate of essential momentum, it was a clear indication that once again the party establishment would do everything to manipulate results in favor of yet another neoliberal avatar bound to lose to Trump in an ignominious landslide—which is actually what the Democratic party establishment wants, four more years of their demonized opponent rather than the tiniest return toward social decency. Nothing about the coronavirus changes this essential dynamic.

That’s how bad the Democratic party has become, blatantly tipping the scales toward their favored outcome in order to maintain oligarchic control, and they expect us to Vote Blue No Matter Who?

We’re asked to believe that the candidate who supported ordinary people at the grassroots level all across the country, by lending crucial support to strikes and direct action, spawning innumerable viable candidacies at the local and state levels, and regularly summoning many thousands of people to populist rallies calling for basic human decency, was easily defeated by a cognitively challenged Wall Street shill who has backed every economic and foreign policy barbarity of the last 50 years, and who cannot be put in a small gym with a few dozen people without descending into furious spittles of verbal aggression.

We’re supposed to trust that the candidate with a pervasive national presence for the last five years was suddenly, in a matter of 72 hours, annihilated by the geezer who had zero volunteers, staff or advertising in any of the states he miraculously turned around by 20, 30 or 40 points.

It’s time to put an end to this sham, because we can’t accede to this level of duplicity without ourselves becoming complicit in the madness. Trump essentially terminated the neoliberal Republican party in one election cycle, but because the Democratic party establishment is more entrenched and dangerous, the prime carrier of the neoliberal virus to which the Republicans are just accessories, it is the more difficult enemy to beat.

To recap some of what we have seen from the great minds trying to herd us all into submission toward Hillary 2.0, the dementia version:

· Herd 29 Trojan horses into the race, all pretending to be some version of or alternative to the clear ideological victor from 2016, and all of them unmasking themselves at appropriate stages of the race (three of them at the last moment before South Carolina) in order to maximize damage to one candidate alone.

· Insist on a series of parodic debates orchestrating various degrees of hostility toward the lone populist, and focusing outlandish attention on marginal candidates rather than giving the front-runner his due.

· Engineer the Iowa vote-counting catastrophe without anyone taking responsibility, and DNC chair Tom Perez not only not resigning but feeling empowered to engender further chaos.

· Repeat all the instances of voter suppression in close simulation of all the 2016 states, as if to thumb their noses at any semblance of voting integrity.

· Be part of closely coordinated media campaigns harping on electability, centrism and moderation, to the point where the liberal media (the Times, CNN, MSNBC) become indistinguishable from campaign opponents and the party apparatus. For the first three months of the year, the New York Times turned into a chorus of single-minded “Never Bernie” propaganda, exceeding even their “Never Trump” loathing of four years ago.

· Recruit Barack Obama to save Biden’s hide when he remained the last one standing, with the same ominous figures from 2016 (Jim “there will be no free education” Clyburn, Harry “get the culinary workers to caucus for Hillary” Reid, and others) reprising to the finest detail the same walk-on bits they played last time.

· Keep changing debate rules, by permitting entry to a last-minute white knight in the form of Michael Bloomberg, and the more recent rule change to prevent Tulsi Gabbard the opportunity of taking down Biden.

· Keep the option of cheating the delegate leader at the convention alive throughout the campaign, rather than stamping it out as a no-go in order to preserve the credibility of primary voting.

· Express no displeasure at clear voter suppression in Texas and California, or curiosity about strange exit poll versus final results in Virginia, Massachusetts, Maine and Minnesota, which showed unprecedented swings toward Biden.

Is this enough manipulation for you?

Sanders more than abided by party decorum for the last four years. Ever since he endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016, and later yielded to Chuck Schumer’s request to join the senate leadership, he has been the most faithful of team players, observing every nicety and going along with the party line to the extent that there is no direct contradiction with his principles. The least he could have expected in return was a token amount of fair play, to let his social welfare philosophy compete on equal grounds with neoliberalism, yet this was vehemently denied.

At this point, is he obligated to play by the rules? Are we, if we are to draw obvious conclusions from the evidence at hand?

The Democratic party would much rather see Trump reelected by nominating a flawed neoliberal candidate with as much baggage and who is as associated with the recent Clinton failure as is Biden. Think about it: the party we’re supposed to get behind actually prefers fascism over the mildest concessions to social democracy, in order that the entire power structure might persist unchanged. For the sake of denying the slightest help to poor, debt-burdened, sick and unemployed people, this party would rather have untrammeled white nationalism, immigrants in concentration camps, and accelerated income inequality, as though we could sustain any more of it than we already have.

To defeat a handful of broadly popular proposals to address economic inequality, the Democratic party facilitated the entry of a former Republican mayor who administered the harassment of Muslims and minorities after 9/11, who gave over his city to unaccountable developers and oligarchs, and who happens to be the world’s ninth-richest person—not just a billionaire, of the kind Sanders is railing against, but one 60 times over.

And when that didn’t fly, because of said plutocrat’s manifest misogyny, racism and class privilege, they went back to their original choice, the freewheeling politico Wall Street loves to love, the senator from MBNA, the secret manipulator behind every bad trade deal and Wall Street giveaway and incarceration mania and war of choice of the last 50 years. The party Sanders has chosen to be loyal to knows that either of those candidates, the Manhattan multi-billionaire or the Delaware political enabler, would handily lose to Trump, but the idea is to keep playing the game, to engage us all in a performance that pretends to be even-handed. We wait patiently for health care and public education and a living wage, while we die in the meantime.

The party of death has demonstrated again and again in this primary campaign that its sole objective is to discredit left populism, even if it means abetting the growing dominance of fascist populism. The party we’re supposed to fall behind is the real facilitator, not the Republican party, because it is actively preventing an electable alternative to Trump, as shown in all the polls of the last five years.

The “woke” wing of the Democratic party—which is identical to the neoliberal wing in acting all high-and-mighty toward working-class folks, otherwise known as deplorables—precisely duplicated its machinations from 2016, when Hillary Clinton was said to be the victim of the angry Bernie Bros, a more ridiculous myth than which was never heard in a presidential campaign.

The woke crowd, who universally refused to support Sanders (whose campaign is a sincere homage to the Poor People’s Campaign run by Martin Luther King, Jr., or FDR’s economic bill of rights, or Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program), got behind a series of identity politics-driven candidates, culminating in the last one to leave the race, who immediately got busy gaslighting the Sanders movement for its alleged misogyny. The woke wing was a fraud all along, they never did care to help actual working people with actual debilities. We knew it in 2016 and we know it even better now.

All the fallacies the Democratic party has exploited over five decades reached an extreme form of hypocrisy in the 2020 campaign. The least electable candidates were professionally sold as the most electable ones. Extremism on behalf of inequality and deprivation of basic human rights was packaged as moderate centrism. Sustained media campaigns were run against anyone questioning these straitjackets of thought, labeling us enemies of the people for wanting to help the people.

Emerging from his year-long sloth, Biden made it his mission to trash every element of Sanders’s “political revolution,” even in its most benign demands for a level playing field, which was the sum of the political gangsterism he so adeptly deployed at the March 15 debate, knowing he had the full backing of the party in shunning any move toward the kind of universal programs young voters demand.

Would Sanders supporters not be justified in abandoning this zombie party once and for all, if we do not end up with a fair electoral outcome, as it looks like we’re not going to while this primary fizzles out to an uncertain close? Are we not morally obligated to look for an alternative beyond, past and around this failed shell of a party?

In 2004 and again in 2016 they ran empty, fake, invisible campaigns once the primaries were over, with John Kerry and Hillary Clinton literally disappearing from the campaign trail for weeks at a time. They’d rather have Bush reelected then, and Trump reelected now, than raise the minimum wage to $15, make public college free again, or do something to save the planet from its runaway environmental crisis. While Sanders was responding like FDR II to address the public health emergency, Biden was nowhere to be seen.

We learned during this campaign that the all-time great woke candidate beloved of the wine cave class, namely the president upon whose nostalgic fumes we wish to resurrect a ghostly figure, is more willing than anyone else to stop the first stirrings of social democracy and do everything he can to maintain the chokehold of neoliberalism or neofascism.
The clarion call issued by the “Democratic” president of surveillance, wars, deportation and budget cuts appealed to the lowest instincts of career politicians in South Carolina and across the country as they forcefully jerked us back to where we were supposed to stay. This former president, like the recent troop of candidates, is explicitly against Medicare for All, and every other basic demand this moment of social distress cries out for. Biden and his cronies in the party are willing to go no further than trying to add a public option to the Affordable Care Act; even after the virus escalation, universal programs of the kind Sanders’s movement calls for are nowhere within range of their consideration.

The Democratic party wants to crush the joy and life out of youth, pretending that they don’t come out to vote, and that the entire machinery of politics should be aimed at keeping the country delicately balanced between one half meritocrats and one half deplorables, appealing to a minute number of antiquated voters in Ohio and Florida in order to maintain policy stasis. They gaslight us into thinking that actual social justice aspirants of diverse races and backgrounds, rather than the fake white woke influencers, are the real problem because of our hostility. They impose “party unity” and discipline in the service of continuing the very power structure that has given us unsustainable debt and unaffordability of basic human conveniences. When confronted by enthusiastic participation in Democratic primaries, mainly the responsibility of one Bernard Sanders of Vermont, they counter with the embodiment of the darkest hells of plutocracy, namely Michael Bloomberg. As expected, they have already used the coronavirus crisis to shut down any remaining trace of political idealism, because in this moment of emergency we cannot expect anything better than to bow down to the former president’s faithful old lapdog.

The Democratic party of 2020, after more than 50 years of succumbing to a murderous form of capitalism, is not just a flawed vehicle for any sort of political renaissance. Why should we legitimize them by leaping around their phantom carousel, wearing colorful costumes and clown hats on the fairgrounds, when they won’t give us a ticket, when they tear it up if we do have one, and when there’s always a guard hanging around to bash our skulls in case we utter a cry of joy at some little win?

They are all but compelling us to leave the party. Will we have the imagination to do so at last in a mass exodus?

War and Empire Links: December 2019 #2

The Art of Doublespeak: Bellingcat and Mind Control. Edward Curtin, off-Guardian. Dec. 15, 2019.

Today most people are, as is said, “wired,” and they get their information from the electronic media that is mostly controlled by giant corporations in cahoots with government propagandists. 

Ask yourself: Has the power of the oligarchic, permanent warfare state with its propaganda and spy networks increased or decreased over your lifetime?

The “Afghanistan Papers”: Deep State narrative management. Kit Knightly, off-Guardian. Dec. 15, 2019.

Let’s be honest, most modern “leaks” do nothing but prop-up the Establishment

The News Churn Memory Hole: How The MSM Lies Even When Telling The Truth. Caitlin Johnstone. Dec. 18, 2020.

“This goofy ass Trump letter is gonna get more outraged coverage than the bombshell report on the entire Afghanistan war being a lie and frankly I don’t know if I can handle that right now,” popular Youtube commentator Kyle Kulinski tweeted today. 

The post was just one of the many observations that Kulinski tosses into the Twitterverse every day, presented in his typical casual, offhand way without any self-significance. But if you actually pause and think about what he’s saying here, how true it is and what it says about the mass media institutions which people rely upon to form their worldviews, it’s actually a damning indictment of our entire society. 

It is a fact that far more news media energy is going into one trivial aspect of an impeachment agenda that will with absolute certainty fail to remove Trump from office than there is for the known fact that the US government fought to suppress indisputable proof that American officials have been consistently lying about an 18-year military occupation which continues to this day. This fact should, by itself, be sufficient to completely discredit the mainstream press. This one tiny piece of information, that there’s vastly more buzz about an irrelevant impeachment sideshow than there is over the Afghanistan Papers, should in and of itself cause everyone to regard the entire establishment media complex with the same amount of respect as it gives the Flat Earth Society.

The Bee Explains: Impeachment. Babylon Bee. Dec. 17 2019.

Impeachment can be confusing. But The Babylon Bee is here with an explainer so you will know how the process works and what it takes for Dems to snap their fingers together and make Trump disappear in a cloud of dust.

What is impeachment?
It's the official, constitutional method for screaming at the sky because Trump is president. 

Why is Trump being impeached?
Trump has committed some very serious offenses, from not being a Democrat to being a Republican. He also won the 2016 election, which rises to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors. He also restored the celebration of Christmas after eight years of winter with no Christmas under Obama. This drove Dems up a wall so they drummed up some charges against him. 

Why didn't Democrats include any criminal offenses in the articles of impeachment?
There were just so many of them, it was hard to pick one. So, instead of laying out actually impeachable offenses, the Democrats summarized it all with two main articles of impeachment: 1.) Trump is president. 2.) TRUMP IS PRESIDENT. 

What does it take to remove the president from office?
Faith, trust, and pixie dust. 

Will Trump be removed from office?
Lol. 

If we believe in ourselves and try hard, and Trump is removed, Hillary Clinton becomes president, right?
Actually, Mike Pence would become president, basically making the United States into a Handmaid's Tale-style dystopia. 

What happens if Trump is impeached in the House but acquitted in the Senate?
Democrats don't get the big prize, but they each get a complimentary copy of Impeachment: The Board Game. 

Once the House votes to officially impeach President Trump, what happens next?
Trump wins the 2020 election.

Obama And The War On Yemen. Daniel Larison. The American Conservative. Dec. 12, 2019.

War and Empire Links: November 2019 #2

“No No You Guys, THIS US-Backed Coup Is Perfectly Legitimate!” Caitlin Johnstone. Nov. 14, 2019.

... Which is just so crazy. That’s how low the bar has sunk for supporting the toppling of a government today. They don’t have to claim he’s starving his own people. They don’t have to claim that he’s using chemical weapons. They don’t have to claim that he’s governing without the consent of the voting populace. Just “Yeah well some of us don’t like him and there’s some paperwork we disagree on.”

... and now the US-approved interim president is an appalling racist and absolute dimwit who calls to mind a very low-budget Bolivian version of Sarah Palin.

Bolivia’s New Puppet Regime Wastes No Time Aligning With US Foreign Policy. CJ. Nov. 16, 2019.

... This news comes as no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention. US foreign policy is essentially an endless war on disobedience, in which governments that refuse to bow to US interests are toppled by any means necessary and replaced by governments who will.

International affairs are much easier to understand once you stop thinking in terms of separate, sovereign nations and start thinking in terms of alliances and empire. What we are witnessing can best be described as a slow-motion third world war between what amounts to an unofficial globe-spanning empire centralized around the United States and its military on one side, and all the nations which have refused to be absorbed into this empire on the other. Nations which allow themselves to be absorbed are rewarded with the carrot of military and economic alliance with the empire, and nations which refuse are punished with the stick of invasions, sanctions, trade wars, and coups, with the ultimate goal being total unipolar global domination. 

Nothing takes precedence over this agenda of unipolar hegemony. As long as a nation remains loyal to the empire, it can fund terrorists, butcher Washington Post columnists, and create the worst humanitarian crisis in the world without fear of any retribution of any kind from the US-centralized empire. As a leaked State Department memo explained in 2017, so far as the empire is concerned human rights violations are nothing more than a strategic narrative control weapon with which to attack unabsorbed nations, and to be ignored when they are perpetrated by absorbed nations.
It should therefore also surprise no one that this same Washington-recognized government installed via US-backed military coup is now murdering demonstrators who object to it.

... 

 “Supporters of the coup in Bolivia can’t call it a coup,” US politician Lee Carter recently noted. “The US has a law preventing us from sending foreign aid to a new government if it was installed by a coup. So they come up with absurd claims that the military forcing Evo out somehow isn’t a coup.”

And the western mass media are falling right in line with the government forces in refusing to use this word, despite the ousting of a government by the military being exactly the thing that a coup is. This is because in a plutocracy, plutocrat-owned media is functionally the same as state media.

US Needs To Occupy Syria Because Of Kurds Or Iran Or Chemical Weapons Or Oil Or Whatever. CJ. Nov. 3, 2019.

We were told that the US must intervene in Syria because the Syrian government was massacring its people. We were told that the US must intervene in Syria in order to promote freedom and democracy in the Middle East. We were told that the US must intervene in Syria because Assad used chemical weapons. We were told that the US must occupy Syria to fight ISIS. We were told that the US must continue to occupy Syria to counter Iranian influence. We were told the US must continue to occupy Syria to protect the Kurds. Now the US must continue to occupy Syria because of oil.

These wildly different reasons the public has been given for America’s need to forcibly insert a military presence into Syria all have only one thing in common, and that’s America forcibly inserting a military presence into Syria. This is because they are not reasons, but excuses. The US forcibly inserted a military presence into Syria with the full intention of keeping it there, and then started diddling a bunch of completely different narratives in order to justify the thing it already wanted to do long before any of those excuses arose.

For eight years we’ve been spoon-fed an assortment of radically different narratives explaining why the US needs to control Syria militarily, and it turns out that the US and its allies have been plotting to control Syria since long before then. This is because Syria occupies an extremely geostrategically valuable location that is in no way limited to its oil fields. In 2004 Assad launched his “Five Seas Vision“, a plan to use Syria’s supreme location to place itself at the center of a regional energy and transportation system and become an economic superpower. The nation was then plunged into chaos seven years later, but whoever manages to secure control over this location will be able to achieve the same lucrative energy and transportation control for themselves. The dispute over pipeline routes that many have highlighted is just one small example of this. There’s also the illegally occupied Golan Heights which the extremely shady Genie Energy corporation has a vested interest in, and which provides a third of Israel’s water supply, and which the US has decided to officially regard as Israeli property.

So it’s a geostrategically crucial region, and it happens to have no interest at all in allowing itself to be absorbed into the blob of the US-centralized power alliance, allying itself instead with the unabsorbed nations of Russia and Iran. This has made it the epicenter of a giant global imperialist struggle the implications of which stretch far beyond its borders to the rest of the world.

This is the real reason why half a million Syrians have died in an imperialist proxy war, and why many more Syrians continue to suffer under US-led sanctions and the deprivation of their nation’s valuable natural resources. Not because of humanitarianism, not because of democracy, not because of chemical weapons, not because of ISIS, not because of Iran, not because of Kurds, and not even really just because of oil, but because there’s a globe-spanning oligarchic empire to which Syria has refused to submit. Everything else is empty narrative.

Whenever you see anyone arguing for keeping troops in Syria that aren’t there with the permission of the Syrian government, this is all they’re really supporting: a campaign to annex a strategically valuable location into the US-centralized empire. This is true regardless of whatever reason they are offering for that support. And notice how all the different reasons we’ve been inundated with all appeal to different political sectors: the oil and Iran narratives appeal to rank-and-file Republicans, the humanitarian arguments appeal to liberals, and the Kurds narrative appeals to many leftists and anarchists like Noam Chomsky. But the end result is always the same: keeping military force in a location that the empire has long sought to absorb.

By providing many different narratives as to why the military presence must continue, the propagandists get us all arguing over which narratives are the correct ones rather than whether or not there should be an illegal military occupation of a sovereign nation at all. This is just one of many examples of how the incredibly shrinking Overton window of acceptable debate is used to keep us arguing not over whether the empire should be doing evil things, but how and why it should do them them.

Don’t fall for it. It is not legitimate for the US empire to occupy Syria for any reason. At all. “Because oil” is not a legitimate reason. “Because Kurds” is not a legitimate reason. “Because ISIS” is not a legitimate reason. “Because Iran” is not a legitimate reason. “Because Russia” is not a legitimate reason. “Because freedom and democracy” is not a legitimate reason. “Because chemical weapons” is not a legitimate reason. And those who are driving this illegal occupation know it, which is why they keep shifting to whatever’s the most convenient narrative in any given moment.

Advancing Propaganda For Evil Agendas Is The Same As Perpetrating Them Yourself. CJ. Nov. 22, 2019.

You see this dynamic at play all too often from outlets, organizations and individuals who portray themselves as liberal, progressive, or in some way oppositional to authoritarianism. They happily advance propaganda narratives against governments and individuals targeted by establishment power structures, whether that’s Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Assad, Maduro, Morales, Assange or whomever, but when it comes time for that establishment to actually implement the evil agenda it’s been pushing for, they wash their hands of it and decry what’s being done as though they’ve always opposed it.

But they haven’t opposed it. They’ve actively facilitated it. If you help promote smears and propaganda against a target of the empire, then you’re just as culpable for what happens to that target as the empire itself. Because you actively participated in making it happen.

The Real Barack Obama Has Finally Revealed Himself. Luke Savage, Jacobin. Nov. 27, 2019.

Barack Obama is using his post-presidency to attack the Left and protect the status quo. The historical myth believed by so many liberals that Obama was a progressive leader who was hemmed in by the presidency's political constraints is collapsing fast.

...

As for that initial question of what Obama wants, the answer is that he’s told anyone willing to listen from the very beginning. Since 2016, his major concern has been to preserve a legacy whose progressive bona fides are increasingly threatened by the genuine radicalism of those to his left – and to use the vast power and influence at his disposal to stand in their way.

from Distinguishing Capitalism from Growth, by James Magnus-Johnston.

Ian Welsh: Hope is B.S.

Hope is Bullshit. Ian Welsh. Nov. 18, 2019.

I am unintersted in “hope.”

Or as we called it in the Obama bullshit years, Hopium.

Hope is not a plan. Hope is bullshit.

Luck is real, but you don’t count on luck other than in the sense that the harder you work, and the more things you do, the more likely you are to “get lucky.” But luck is usually the odds coming in, and bad luck is as real as good.

In term of climate change there is no reason for hope. It’s going to be bad and in almost all cases, signature events are happening sooner than expected: we’re losing Greenland, Arctic and Antarctic ice sooner than expected. We’re getting artic methane releases 70 years ahead of schedule. Every time an even comes in, it’s sooner or worse than the models predicted.

Because of how systems work when they leave bounds: because they tend to accelerate, we can expect this sort of thing to continue. It’s going to be worse, sooner.

That’s the “luck” we’ve made. We’ve put half the greenhouse gases in human history into the atmosphere in the past 30 years, which is to say, after the time when we knew for a fact we were cutting our own throats.

Obama ran on hope in another sense, and created an economy which did nothing (and worse than nothing) for African Americans and which was shit for somewhere between 80% to 95% of the population. His signature health care plan was garbage and in his period the price of various drugs rose to historical heights. He tripled the rate of drone murders over Bush (Trump has ramped them up even further) and so on.

He was human garbage, a man who bailed out bankers and then helped them steal people’s houses with fraudulent paperwork, then had his attorney-general immunize them with fines worth less than what they stole.

But this man is worshiped by many Democrats, because hey, he was only human garbage, and Trump is a shambling mound of garbage (but has yet, note, to start any new wars, though he’s been happy to keep Obama and Bush’s wars going.)

Oh, and because he was black, and that mattered more, to many people, than the fact he was human garbage.

Obama’s done very well since he left office, making lots of speeches and millions of dollars. Bankers have been very grateful, and shown their gratitude, just as they did for Bill Clinton, another mound of garbage, who cut Welfare to hurt the weakest in America, killed Iraqis with his sanctions that hit medicine, and instituted justice “reforms” which swelled America’s prison population while ending financial regulations intended to avoid financial collapses.

None of these people ever intended to do the right thing, and if you listened carefully you knew that. The best you could hope is that they were the lesser evil: a smaller mound of garbage than their opponents.

In the Democratic primaries, there was always a better option and that option was never chosen, because most Democrats are bad people who want Reaganism with a side of “but we don’t really mean it.”

Nothing is going to get better until we, whichever we we belong to, start choosing better leaders, whether Presidential, or more local. Those leaders must want to actually do “good”. Yes, good. You know, taking care of the hungry and the sick, and not burying single payer and the public option like Obama did (yes, yes he did, and he wound up passing the OCA without Republicans. He made a choice, his choice was evil.)

Or perhaps taking care of poor people, including blacks. Or not allowing pirates in suits to gouge people on drug prices, or perhaps *gasp* not vastly expanding fracking, which is what Obama did and bragged about, even as he signed the Paris accords, knowing he had no intention of honoring them.

Nor did virtually anyone else who signed them, of course, and anyone who thought otherwise is a fool, or on the payroll.

Mounds of garbage. Merkel, Blair, Cameron, Trudeau, Harper, your country’s leader, odds are. People who have always wanted to do as much evil as they could, and as little good as they could get away with. (Remember nothing happened to Greece Angela Merkel was not OK with. All so German banks could be bailed out indirectly. It would have been embarassing to just bail them out obviously. So a lot of Greeks had to die and suffer.)

There is no “hope” as long as our leaders are people like this. None.

Don’t get hooked on hopium.

Elect leaders who want to do as much good as they can, and as little evil as possible. Sanders in the US, Corbyn in Britain.

But we don’t want those leaders, not as a whole, do we?

We’ve been offered them, we have a chance to elect them.

But will we?

Because they have plans, and those plans are to do good.

That’s the only hope you’ve got.