Plan for decentralized, bioregional electricity generation and distribution.
Decentralized power systems are likely to be more resilient in the face of power disruptions and will cut transmission losses, assure citizens greater control of their power grids, and prevent the massive ecological and social destruction that accompanies production of electricity in mega-scale projects.
We support”smart grid”upgrades. The federal government must step in to set goals and standards and to provide capital. This effort must not favor commercial utilities over municipal power districts.
The Green Party supports net metering to make decentralized energy production economically viable.
Greens support tax-exempt bonds to finance public ownership of utilities and to allow publicly owned utilities to finance conservation and renewable energy projects.
Past elections have seen an abundance of initiatives that have been variously received by the voters.
Perhaps the most damaging elements of the California initiative process from a Green perspective are the cost and time constraints involved in ballot qualification. In order to qualify, supporters must gather the signatures of five percent of the registered voters within 150 days. In practice, considerable organizational talent and large sums of money are needed to qualify (at least 50 cents per signature). The professionals who gather such signatures are not interested in educating the voters about the issues. They have found that many Californians, when properly approached, will put an initiative on the ballot without knowing more about it than its title.
Currently, changes in the law are being planned that would make the process even less accessible to voters.
The Green Party advocates reforming the initiative process: Extend the period of time for gathering signatures to 180 days.
Require that at least 15% of all signatures be gathered by unpaid volunteers.
Require both proponents and opponents of an initiative to inform the voters about the issues, using government-sponsored means.
Require that organizational proponents of initiatives be prominently listed at the beginning of every initiative.
Dateline Washington — The Green Party today responded to Stephen Colbert’s repeat of the “Nader spoiled” accusation during the May 18 broadcast of “The Late Show” on CBS. They chided the talk-show host for parroting a baseless Democratic Party propaganda myth.
“When you look at the actual numbers in 2000,” said Green Party co-chair Paul Pipkin (http://www.newmenu.org/paulpipkin), “it becomes clear the spoiler allegation is the Democratic equivalent of the right-wing fringe belief that Barack Obama was born in Kenya.”
Greens corrected Mr. Colbert on his claim that Bernie Sanders “is being courted by the Green Party to join their ticket.” It would be nearly impossible, legally and logistically, for Mr. Sanders to launch a new campaign after the Democratic nomination, the party said. The Green Party has its own candidates (http://gpus.org/committees/presidential-campaign-support/2016-recognized-candidates).
Greens have, however, invited Mr. Sanders to help promote the Green Party as a permanent independent alternative to the two corporate-money parties. Mr. Sanders has not responded.
“We know why Al Gore lost to George W. Bush in 2000,” said Audrey Clement, the Greens’ other co-chair. “He lost because Florida GOP officials conspired with Choicepoint. Allegedly they obstructed between 50,000 and 90,000 voters, most of them black. Also:
“Mr. Gore demanded a recount in only three counties instead of the entire state.
“A biased Supreme Court decision handed Mr. Bush the White House, and
“Democrats in the U.S. Senate unanimously confirmed Mr. Bush’s questionable victory.
“But the biggest reason for Al Gore’s loss,” Ms. Clement said, “is that he ran a weak campaign. He failed to win even in Tennessee, his home state. Thirteen percent of Florida Democrats voted for Bush, far more than those who voted for Ralph Nader. Nearly half of the state’s Democrats stayed home on Election Day.”
Jim Hightower, writing on Nov. 27, 2000, noted that “[There are two] Florida constituencies that cost [Al Gore] more votes than Nader did.
“First, Democrats. Yes, Democrats! Nader only drew 24,000 Democrats to his cause, yet 308,000 Democrats voted for Bush. Hello. If Gore had taken even 1 percent of these Democrats from Bush, Nader’s votes wouldn’t have mattered.
“Second, liberals. Sheesh. Gore lost 191,000 self-described liberals to Bush, compared to less than 34,000 who voted for Nader.” (http://www.salon.com/2000/11/28/hightower)
Green Party leaders said that the Democratic Party and its defenders in the media have used “Blame Nader for Bush” to frighten voters away from alternative-party candidates ever since 2000.
Ralph Nader was the Green Party’s presidential nominee that year.
The spoiler myth has made it easy for Democrats to defend unfair ballot-access laws designed by Democratic and Republican lawmakers to hinder alternative-party and independent candidates and to deny qualified Green and Libertarian nominees a place on the stage during the fall presidential debates.
Greens said that voters deserve the right to vote for whichever candidates best represent their interests and ideals, without being told that only two parties are legitimate.
“Those who accuse Ralph Nader of spoiling in 2000 are like the Yankees fan who watches his team play lousy baseball for eight innings in the final game of the World Series and sees the other team cheat — and then he blames an umpire for sneezing during the ninth inning for the Yankees’ loss,” said Carl Romanelli. He was a Green candidate for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania in 2006. “Behind the spoiler accusation is a craven mindset. It says it’s okay for a major-party candidate to steal an election, but not okay for a third-party candidate to run fair and square.
“We know that a lot of Bernie supporters and independents have no intention of voting for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump,” Mr. Romanelli said. “You can’t accuse a Green candidate of siphoning votes from Ms. Clinton if the votes come from people who never intended to vote for her in the first place.”
“We invite Stephen Colbert to interview Green candidates on his show — as David Letterman did in 2000 when he had Green nominee Ralph Nader on the Late Show,” said Nancy Allen, who has served as press director for two Green gubernatorial campaigns in Maine. “Mr. Colbert has interviewed Republicans several times. Is he more afraid of Greens than Republicans?”
The Green Party will hold its presidential nominating convention Aug. 4-7 in Houston.
While Biden’s win owes its victory to many different groups of people including even many Green Party members in swing states, special thanks should go to the Libertarian Party.
In the absence of the Libertarian Party, Trump would probably have won Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona and a second term as President.
Also, of note, is that Biden won CA with a nearly a 4.5 Million vote margin. In other words, outside of CA, more people voted for Trump rather than Biden in the rest of the United States.
Against a crazy habitual liar, science denier and would be egotistic self-claimed dictator in Trump, a very badly managed Pandemic response, a depression era like economy and his intransigent Republican Party enablers, the results of this 2020 Election, despite Biden’s victory, should be viewed as quite an overwhelming failure of the corporate Democratic Party leadership!
These facts are for all those who keep bashing the Green Party as if their members should blindly join Democrats in supporting a corporate controlled Democratic Party.
Time will tell if Biden runs the nation as a President for the 99% people’s interests or for the 1%, corporate and Deep State interests! As this has been Biden’s political history and every President has worked for the 1% interests since Reagan and even earlier, don’t hold your breath as the bashing of progressives has only just begun!
2020-11-22 Biden to Name Longtime Aide Blinken as Secretary of State President-elect Joe Biden intends to name his longtime adviser Antony Blinken as secretary of state, according to three people familiar with the matter, setting out to assemble his cabinet even before Donald Trump concedes defeat.
*2020-11-20 New ‘No Corporate Cabinet’ Campaign Pushes Biden to Pick People Who Will Advance Public Good “Joe Biden should not let corporate interests run the government—and, if needed, senators must hold him accountable.”
2020-11-20 ELECTION 2020: Biden Will Fail to Bring Back ‘Normal’ Politics President Donald Trump improved his share of the overall vote compared to his 2016 win, and he surprised even his own team by increasing his share of minority voters and women. But most significantly, he almost held his own against Democratic challenger Joe Biden at a time when the U.S. economy – the incumbent’s “trump” card – was in dire straits after eight months of a pandemic. Had it not been for Covid-19, Trump – not Biden – would most likely be preparing for the next four years in the White House.
Of course, much of Trump’s appeal was that he is not Biden. The Democratic Party decided to run pretty much the worst candidate imaginable: an old-school machine politician, one emphatically beholden to the corporate donor class and unsuited to the new, more populist political climate. His campaigning – on the rare occasions he appeared – suggested significant cognitive decline. Biden often looked more suited to a luxury retirement home than heading the most powerful nation on earth.
But then again, if Trump could lead the world’s only superpower for four years, how hard can it really be? He showed that those tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorists might be right after all: maybe the president is largely a figurehead, while a permanent bureaucracy runs much of the show from behind the curtain. https://consortiumnews.com/2020/11/20/election-2020-biden-will-fail-to-bring-back-normal-politics/
2020-11-18 ELECTION 2020: Biden Appointee Advocated Using Propaganda Against Americans Richard Stengel, the top state media appointee for U.S. President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team, has enthusiastically defended the use of propaganda against Americans.
2020-11-17 Biden’s initial White House appointments prompt mixed reactions from progressives. (corporate media) After Mr. Biden named several White House aides on Tuesday, the response from the left — which has urged the president-elect not to name lobbyists and corporate executives to key positions in his administration — was somewhat less enthusiastic. Their disappointment centered on two people in particular: Steve Ricchetti, a close adviser to Mr. Biden, who will be a counselor to the president; and Representative Cedric L. Richmond of Louisiana, who will oversee public outreach.
2020-11-16 Ilhan Omar, Pramila Jayapal Lay Out Progressive Desires for Biden Administration (corporate media) Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) insisted the Democrats must show unity under Biden’s leadership—while also stating the election results showed a desire for “something different” as well as “social and economic justice.” “There was a movement that happened this summer. That movement delivered this victory. The rise of the amount of people that registered to vote. We owe it to the movement to make sure that the chaos they voted against does not follow us to our caucus and to make sure that the justice they seeked is implemented in the policies that we advocate for.” https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ilhan-omar-pramila-jayapal-lay-out-progressive-desires-for-biden-administration/ar-BB1b3krn?
2020-11-13 Julie Hollar on Moving Democrats to the Right, Josh Bivens on Pandemic Unemployment Trump presidency, it’s sad to see corporate Democrats leap to blame the left, including activists, for denying the party a landslide—and call for immediate, compensatory overtures to the right. Sad, but not surprising, as that’s been the practice of elite Democrats and their media abettors for decades. https://fair.org/home/julie-hollar-on-moving-democrats-to-the-right-josh-bivens-on-pandemic-unemployment/
2020-11-13 Biden Will Fail to Bring Back ‘Normal’ Politics. What’s Needed Now Is a Populism of the Left The neoliberal “normal” isn’t coming back because the economic circumstances that generated it—the post-war boom of seemingly endless growth—have disappeared. But most significantly, he almost held his own against Democratic challenger Joe Biden at a time when the US economy—the incumbent’s “trump” card—was in dire straits after eight months of a pandemic. Had it not been for Covid-19, Trump—not Biden—would most likely be preparing for the next four years in the White House.
Of course, much of Trump’s appeal was that he is not Biden. The Democratic party decided to run pretty much the worst candidate imaginable: an old-school machine politician, one emphatically beholden to the corporate donor class and unsuited to the new, more populist political climate. His campaigning—on the rare occasions he appeared—suggested significant cognitive decline. Biden often looked more suited to a luxury retirement home than heading the most powerful nation on earth.
Biden must avoid returning to the old “normal”, the one that existed before Trump, because that version of “normal” was exactly what delivered Trump in the first place.
Trump was right about the need for the US to stop interfering in the affairs of the rest of the world under the pretence of humanitarian concern and a supposed desire to spread democracy at the end of the barrel of a gun. In practice, however. Equally, Trump looked all too right in berating the establishment media for promoting “fake news”, especially as coverage of his presidency was dominated by an evidence-free narrative claiming he had colluded with Russia to steal the election. Trump’s appeal was further bolstered by styling himself a self-made man. Democratic party leaders like Clinton and Biden who gave every appearance of having abjectly sold their principles—and their souls—to the highest-bidding corporate “donors.”
Today’s globalised wealth elite prefer neoliberal, technocratic politics that keep borders open for trade; that treat the labouring poor as human chattel, to be moved around on a global chess board as a way to force wages down; and that ensure the elite can stash its ill-gotten gains away on island sanctuaries far from the tax man. If the corporate elite can no longer find a way to foist a neoliberal technocrat like Biden on the public, they will choose the populism of a Trump over the populism of a Sanders every time. And as they own the media, they can craft the stories we hear. https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/11/13/biden-will-fail-bring-back-normal-politics-whats-needed-now-populism-left
2020-11-13 Julie Hollar on Moving Democrats to the Right, Josh Bivens on Pandemic Unemployment Trump presidency, it’s sad to see corporate Democrats leap to blame the left, including activists, for denying the party a landslide—and call for immediate, compensatory overtures to the right. Sad, but not surprising, as that’s been the practice of elite Democrats and their media abettors for decades. https://fair.org/home/julie-hollar-on-moving-democrats-to-the-right-josh-bivens-on-pandemic-unemployment/
2020-11-13 Biden Given Roadmap to Revitalize Rural America The plan “lays a foundation for bringing economic vitality to rural communities in the face of racial injustice, economic decline, climate change, and a devastating pandemic.”
Family Farm Action, a coalition of farmers and workers fighting to reverse rural economic decline, on Thursday released a comprehensive plan that outlines how the Biden administration can revitalize rural communities throughout the United States. Along with 16 other organizations who endorsed the plan, Family Farm Action pointed out that “our food system is a key intervention point to bring about a more inclusive economy that addresses discrimination and respects our land, natural resources, and neighbors here and around the world.” The transition paper (pdf)—Build Back Better: Our Call to Action and Roadmap for Rural America—was co-signed by several progressive organizations including People’s Action, Food & Water Watch, Friends of the Earth, and National Housing Law Project.
“Today, a handful of corporations and their CEOs have the power to dictate who gets to farm, what they farm, and who gets to eat.” “Addressing increasing corporate consolidation in our food systems,” they said, “requires a robust federal response that revives rural communities and includes them in the decision-making process, letting them know they have not been forgotten.” https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/11/13/biden-given-roadmap-revitalize-rural-america
2020-11-13 47 Groups Back Rep. Joaquin Castro for House Committee Chair Post to ‘Build a More Restrained and Progressive Foreign Policy’ “Rep. Castro embodies a progressive vision for the U.S. in the world, one that prioritizes diplomacy and multilateralism over militarism.” Castro is competing with Reps. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) and Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) for the position, which is opening up because the current chair, Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), was defeated by progressive challenger Jamaal Bowman in a June primary race. Bowman easily won the seat last week.
As Black, indigenous, and other communities of color face increased militarism at home, and as U.S. militarism abroad has led to disastrous endless wars, we are impressed with Rep. Castro’s transparent and engaging campaign for HFAC chair, that focuses on the root causes of militarism. We hope to build with Rep. Castro towards a U.S. foreign policy that centers the perspectives and solutions of communities who have experienced harm as a result of U.S. policy, and that tackles the rise in right-wing authoritarianism around the world, which disproportionately impacts women, girls, the LGBTQ+ community, and communities of color.
2020-11-13 Biden’s free childcare plan is a worthy feminist reform According to the Biden-Harris transition website, the administration plans to make it “far easier to afford child care and to ensure aging relatives and people with disabilities have better access to home and community-based care.” The new administration also promises to “elevate the pay, benefits, and professional opportunities for caregivers and educators; to create millions of good-paying new jobs in these areas with a choice to join a union; and to free up millions of people to join the labor force and grow a stronger economy in return.”
Notably, the pandemic’s economic affects are seriously setting back gender equality, as I’ve previously written. Large swaths of women in America left the workforce or cut down their hours to be a stay at home caregiver during the pandemic. This is all to say that the Biden-Harris administration’s focus on reviving the economy will largely hinge on whether it prioritizes making it easier to get women back to work, and that means universal childcare.
The inclusiveness and intersectionality of the Biden-Harris plan makes it effectively a feminist reform. Three-fourths of American teachers are women, while over half of the country’s family or informal caregivers are women. Meanwhile, women are more likely to sacrifice their careers when a crisis hits home, as they generally make less money than men. https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/joe-biden-child/
2020-11-13 Who’s in Labor? potential candidates to become President-elect Biden’s labor secretary. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is lining up unions’ support for Boston Mayor Marty Walsh. Walsh is a solid liberal who previously headed the Boston AFL-CIO’s Building and Construction Trades Council.
Michigan Rep. Andy Levin, who’s heir to the Michigan Levin dynasty and positioned in the heart of what remains of unionized American manufacturing.
Bill Spriggs, an African American economist who’s the AFL-CIO’s chief economist and a professor at Howard University. (Bill is also a member of the Prospect board.)
Other potential candidates who would better personify labor’s new face include Julie Su, the stellar commissioner of labor in California, and Thea Lee, the AFL-CIO’s former trade economist and deputy chief of staff, and currently the president of the Economic Policy Institute. Should neither Su nor Lee be Biden’s labor pick, there are still important administration posts that each could fill supremely well.
If Biden is for some mysterious reason inclined to blow off the union movement, he could choose Seth Harris, who was deputy labor secretary in the Obama administration, for his top labor post. Harris’s writings arguing for a special, nonemployee status for Uber and Lyft drivers infuriated many worker rights advocates, not least organized labor.
It’s no secret that Bernie Sanders also wishes to become Biden’s labor secretary—probably more so now that any Sanders-authored legislation isn’t likely to make it through the next Congress, and any pro-worker initiatives are likely to be confined to the executive branch. Precisely because I love Bernie, however, I’m reluctant to see him lose his independence and capacity to keep building an explicit left, which he’d have to forfeit if he went into the administration. Moreover, with control of the Senate teetering on a knife’s edge, it may not be the better part of valor for Biden to appoint any sitting senators to administration posts. I love Elizabeth Warren, too, but the same logic applies to her bid to become Treasury secretary. https://prospect.org/blogs/tap/whos-in-labor-biden-options-for-labor-secretary/
2020-11-13 Why 2020 was the ‘precarity election’ “It wasn’t supposed to be this close. Against the backdrop of an ineptly managed pandemic, depression-like levels of unemployment, and a president whose approval rating never rose beyond 50 percent during his entire time in the White House, 2020 created what should have been the ideal conditions for a so-called ‘blue wave,’ both nationally and in the statehouses.” The disappointment to Democrats is rooted in a failure to accurately diagnose the nature of the working class and its grievances. “the coattail effect… [was] minimal (ironic, considering that this was one of the ostensible rationales for Democrats selecting a moderate like the former vice president, as opposed to a progressive, such as Bernie Sanders).
Today, the Democrats are losing a lot of what is left of what we understood to be the traditional working class. They are losing what remains of these voters, at the same time that this label is losing its meaning: The traditional working class is disappearing, having been eviscerated through a combination of automation, globalization, attacks on private-sector unions and cuts in public services. Until the party realizes that work is nothing like what it was, and increasingly won’t be, it will be hard for them to offer credible solutions.https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/economy-2020/
2020-11-13 Biden health adviser has a plan to get pandemic under control and revive economy: Pay people to stay home for 4-6 weeks The government “could pay for a package right now” to cover economic losses—making it possible to curb COVID-19 transmission without increasing the financial suffering associated with shutting down commerce, said epidemiologist Michael Osterholm.
The coronavirus crisis is entering an extremely dangerous phase that has some epidemiologists worried about whether the U.S. has a sufficient number of mobile morgues. Yet, at precisely the moment when the ongoing catastrophe warrants a stronger, more effective response, President Donald Trump is engaging in what journalist David Dayen on Wednesday called “the world’s worst coup attempt.”
By hampering Biden’s ability to get a head start on facilitating a well-coordinated response to the COVID-19 emergency and its economic fallout, Dayen explained, Trump is relegating even more Americans to “death and suffering.” “The next three to four months are going to be, by far, the darkest of the pandemic,” http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/31300
2020-11-12 Biden’s Mandate Is for Deep Solutions, Not Donor-Class Fetishism of Bipartisan Compromise Biden and the Democrats should put principles first and rally the nation around a serious vision: an agenda not simply to “restore the soul of America” but to expand that soul, make this country a true global leader as Planet Earth faces its treacherous future. The essence of the Biden agenda, as presented so far, seems to be pulling the good old USA back into what we never were: one united country, free of racism, hatred, fear of one another. And to cooperate with the Republicans.
I believe Biden’s actual mandate from the American people—at least the 77 million-plus who voted for him—is to undo Trumpica and pursue a deeply principled agenda. The one specific agenda item Biden addressed in his acceptance speech, complete with a plan of action, was getting Covid-19 under control. Biden’s actual mandate begins with the fact that most of the people who voted for him were primarily voting not for him but against Donald Trump.
The vision the Democrats should embrace includes eco-sanity and development of the Green New Deal. It includes Medicare for All. It includes a dismantling of the horrific prison-industrial complex and not so much a defunding of the police as a re-envisioning of what social order actually means and diverting funding away from hair-trigger, armed policing and a system based on punishment to one based on healing. The vision would also include compassion at the border rather than cruelty and absolutely no more separation of parents and children. And the vision would include demilitarization: a slashing of the trillion-dollar-plus annual military budget; an end to the country’s endless wars; nuclear disarmament and an embrace on the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, leading the way for other NATO nations to embrace it as well and begin a true global process of disarmament. https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/11/12/bidens-mandate-deep-solutions-not-donor-class-fetishism-bipartisan-compromise
2020-11-12 Democrats — and the U.S. — won’t have a future if Biden adopts a centrist agenda President-elect Joe Biden has called the November 2020 U.S. election a “battle for the soul of the nation.” In offering himself up as a contrast to President Donald Trump, Biden made a clear distinction between his political agenda and statesman-like behavior, and that of Trump.
Biden’s victory was possible in large part due to an alliance between Bernie Sanders–backing progressives and the centrist liberals who longed for a return to the Obama years. Now begins a battle for the soul of Joe Biden. In 2016, there were three blocs of eligible voters: those who voted for Trump, those who voted for Clinton, and those who didn’t vote. While Trump’s share was the smallest of the three, the latter was the largest grouping.
Democrats lost seats in the House of Representatives and failed to win an outright Senate majority as they had hoped. The centrists wasted no time in blaming progressives for those losses. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) countered with cold hard facts: “Every single candidate that co-sponsored Medicare for All in a swing district kept their seat. We also know that co-sponsoring the Green New Deal was not a sinker.” Indeed, the ranks of young progressives of color in Congress increased.
Biden needs to ensure that millions of Americans do not fall through the financial fissures wrought by the devastating pandemic, that climate catastrophe can be avoided, that the torture of immigrants can end, that devastating wars are terminated and more. He can protect both his party’s political future and his people’s well-being by moving decisively to the left, not to the right (which is often erroneously labeled “the center”). It is progressive policies like Medicare for All, raising the minimum wage, taxing the wealthy and corporations, adopting the Green New Deal, legalizing immigration, and ending wars that are actually popular. https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/joe-biden-agenda/
2020-11-12 “Shredding The Fabric Of Our Democracy”: Biden Aide Signals Push For Greater Censorship On The Internet We have been discussing the calls for top Democrats for increased private censorship on social media and the Internet. President-elect Joe Biden has himself called for such censorship, including blocking President Donald Trump’s criticism of mail-in voting. Now, shortly after the election, one of Biden’s top aides is ramping up calls for a crackdown on Facebook for allowing Facebook users to read views that he considers misleading — users who signed up to hear from these individuals. Bill Russo, a deputy communications director on Biden’s campaign press team, tweeted late Monday that Facebook “is shredding the fabric of our democracy” by allowing such views to be shared freely.
Russo tweeted that “If you thought disinformation on Facebook was a problem during our election, just wait until you see how it is shredding the fabric of our democracy in the days after.” Russo objected to the fact that, unlike Twitter, Facebook did not move against statements that he and the campaign viewed as “misleading.” He concluded. “We pleaded with Facebook for over a year to be serious about these problems. They have not. Our democracy is on the line. We need answers.” http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55857.htm
2020-11-11 Fighting for Socialism Under a Biden Administration: Join Us for Post Election Discussion Joe Biden is one of the architects of the neoliberal order that led to the rise of Donald Trump and Trumpism. Over his four decades in D.C., he’s built his record as a racist, imperialist war hawk. He wrote the 1994 crime bill and was a champion of the war on drugs, both of which disproportionately targeted and locked up Black and Brown people. Internationally, he supported both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and was Vice-President in an administration that droned and decimated the Middle East. He was a vocal supporter of NAFTA, supported and implemented corporate bail-outs while working people lost their jobs and homes, and continues to oppose Medicare for All in the midst of a global pandemic that has killed over 200,000 people in the U.S. alone.
2020-11-11 Webinar – Biden, Foreign Policy, and the Role of Feminists What Do Feminists Have to Say About Biden’s Foreign Policy? Watch a discussion with four leading feminists — Medea Benjamin (CODEPINK), Gloria Steinem, Diana Duarte (MADRE), and Cindy Wiesner (Grassroots Global Justice Alliance) moderated by Christine Ahn — on the role of feminist movements to advance a US foreign policy grounded in feminism, internationalism, and peace. https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=355432088887688&ref=watch_permalink
2020-11-11 QUESTIONS MOUNT ABOUT CONTROVERSIAL HUNTER BIDEN-CHINA DOSSIER
The provenance of the Typhoon Investigations report matters because of concerns that it was part of a coordinated right-wing campaign to tip the election to Donald Trump.
The 64-page document, which is styled as a confidential “intelligence report,” claims to reveal new links between the Chinese government and Hunter Biden, the son of then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. It also alleges Chinese influence operations aimed at “cultivating” Hunter Biden and, without giving concrete evidence, accuses the elder Biden of altering his stance on China as a result of his son’s work there. “BIDEN shifted his view from hawkish to dovish after HUNTER began receiving entrée into Chinese elite political and financial institutions,” the dossier alleges.
In late October, disinformation researcher Elise Thomas discovered that both the firm whose logo appears on the China dossier, Typhoon Investigations, and an associated analyst named Martin Aspen were fake. Martin Aspen is not the only invention in this strange saga, however, The Intercept has learned. Online bios describing the blogger who first published the dossier misrepresent significant aspects of his background.
The blogger, Albert Marko, has variously presented himself as a pollster, an international relations buff, and a U.S. congressional expert. Public records show that he is a Florida resident who has launched a variety of mostly inactive businesses, including in software, painting, and cosmetics.
Bannon, a former Trump adviser who is out on bail after being indicted for wire fraud and money laundering, told newspaper staff in September about the existence of the Hunter Biden-associated laptop; the paper ultimately published emails and other materials from a copy of the laptop’s hard drive provided by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. GTV Media Group, the company Bannon recently started with Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, has also promoted salacious stories about Hunter Biden. Bannon, who once said that the way to counteract the media is to “flood the zone with shit,”
On the first page of the report, the author is listed as “M A.” Thomas connected these initials with fake analyst Martin Aspen. The fake analyst’s Twitter photo turned out to have been computer-generated. Other parts of his identity, including a LinkedIn profile, also appear to have been fabricated. “That kind of deceptive behavior about the origins of a report which makes such significant allegations about the family of a presidential candidate, weeks before the presidential election, is completely unacceptable,” https://theintercept.com/2020/11/11/hunter-biden-china-dossier/
2020-11-11 Biden state media appointee advocated using propaganda against Americans and ‘rethinking’ First Amendment Richard Stengel, the top state media appointee for US President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team, has enthusiastically defended the use of propaganda against Americans.
“My old job at the State Department was what people used to joke as the chief propagandist,” Stengel said in 2018. “I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population. And I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful.”
Stengel has proposed “rethinking” the First Amendment that guarantees the freedom of speech and press. In 2018, he stated, “Having once been almost a First Amendment absolutist, I have really moved my position on it, because I just think for practical reasons in society, we have to kind of rethink some of those things.”
The Biden transition team’s selection of a censorial infowarrior for its top state media position comes as a concerted suppression campaign takes hold on social media. The wave of online censorship has been overseen by US intelligence agencies, the State Department, and Silicon Valley corporations that maintain multibillion-dollar contracts with the US government.
As the state-backed censorship dragnet expands, independent media outlets increasingly find themselves in the crosshairs. In the past year, social media platforms have purged hundreds of accounts of foreign news publications, journalists, activists, and government officials from countries targeted by the United States for regime change. https://thegrayzone.com/2020/11/11/richard-stengel-propaganda-usagm-biden/
2020-11-11 Progressive message to Joe Biden: Don’t you dare ‘cooperate’ with Mitch McConnell If Biden chooses to ‘cooperate’ with Mitch McConnell, that choice is likely to set off a political war between the new administration and the Democratic Party’s progressive base. Let’s be clear: The extent to which Biden goes along with such a scenario of craven capitulation will be the extent to which he has shafted progressives before his presidency has even begun.
And let’s be clear about something else: Biden doesn’t have to defer to Mitch McConnell on Cabinet appointees. Biden has powerful leverage—if he wants to use it. As outlined in a memo released days ago by Demand Progress and the Revolving Door Project, “President Biden will be under no obligation to hand Mitch McConnell the keys to his Cabinet.”
The memo explains that Biden could fill his Cabinet by using the Vacancies Act—which “provides an indisputably legal channel to fill Senate-confirmed positions on a temporary basis when confirmations are delayed.”
In addition, “Biden can adjourn Congress and make recess appointments”—since Article II Section 3 of the Constitution “gives the President the power to adjourn Congress ‘to such time as he shall think proper’ whenever the House and Senate disagree on adjournment”—and after 10 days of recess, Biden could appoint Cabinet members.
In other words, if there’s a political will, there would be ways to overcome the anti-democratic obstructionism of Mitch McConnell. But does Biden really have the political will? http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/31276
2020-11-11 Tell Joe Biden: Reject Heidi Heitkamp for the Next Secretary of Agriculture Heitkamp’s voting record demonstrates a solid allegiance to corporate agribusiness. In 2016, she voted in favor of the DARK Act, joining all the Republicans and just two other Democrats in the Senate Committee on Agriculture in an effort to drastically weaken GMO labeling requirements, a bill which was heavily supported by Big Food industry groups.
Heitkamp was also the first Democratic Senator to endorse Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Agriculture, Sonny Perdue. Perdue has deep ties to Big Food and Big Ag and has done the bidding for these pro-GMO, pro-pesticide and pro-industrial agriculture groups throughout his tenure.
In fact, before Perdue’s nomination for the position, Heitkamp herself had been one of Trump’s top picks for the position—a fact that couldn’t be more telling about what she truly stands for.
That’s just the beginning. Heitkamp has a long list of anti-environment votes as well. In 2015, she voted in favor of a bill that would overturn a key EPA clean water rule and thereby undermine the Clean Water Act. Heitkamp also voted in favor of the Keystone XL oil-sands pipeline.https://advocacy.organicconsumers.org/page/23107/petition/1?
2020-11-11 Will the Biden team be warmongers or peacemakers? For progressives everywhere, the knowledge that “another world is possible” has sustained us through decades of greed, extreme inequality and war, as U.S.-led neoliberalism has repackaged and force-fed 19th century laissez-faire capitalism to the people of the 21st century. The Trump experience has revealed, in stark relief, where these policies can lead.
Joe Biden has certainly paid his dues to and reaped rewards from the same corrupt political and economic system as Trump, as the latter delightedly trumpeted in every stump speech. But Biden must understand that the young voters who turned out in unprecedented numbers to put him in the White House have lived their whole lives under this neoliberal system, and did not vote for “more of the same.” Nor do they naively think that deeply-rooted problems of American society like racism, militarism and corrupt corporate politics began with Trump. http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/31278
2020-11-11 John Bolton accuses GOP of ‘coddling’ Trump while he ‘trashes the US electoral system’ Bolton wrote “But this coddling strategy is exactly backward. The more Republican leaders kowtow, the more Trump believes he is still in control and the less likely he will do what normal presidents do: make a gracious concession speech; fully cooperate with the president-elect in a smooth transition process; and validate the election process itself by joining his successor at the Jan. 20 inauguration,” https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/john-bolton-accuses-gop-of-coddling-trump-while-he-trashes-the-us-electoral-system/ar-BB1aVkXy?
2020-11-11 Joe Biden’s Victory is Still a Loss for Humanity The Biden-Harris administration is good news for corporations, cops, war profiteers and banks too big to fail, but offers nothing to save the people and planet from multiple rises. https://www.blackagendareport.com/joe-bidens-victory-still-loss-humanity
2020-11-11 Biden’s First Appointees Are a Mixed Bag The transition’s agency review teams look good for financial regulation; they look bad for the agency that controls practically all regulations. On Tuesday, the Biden presidential transition announced the formation of agency review teams. I don’t want to overemphasize the importance of these groups, sometimes known as “landing teams,” but I don’t want to underemphasize them either. They are intended to study the federal agencies, work with the existing officeholders on the transfer of power, and recommend policy changes for the Biden-Harris administration. The incoming Cabinet official, and Biden himself, can take them or leave them. You could see this as make-work for people who want a say in policy for the president-elect’s White House. https://prospect.org/economy/bidens-first-appointees-are-a-mixed-bag/
2020-11-11 Can Biden Heal America When Trump and His Allies Don’t Want It Healed? Republican leaders and right-leaning media must acknowledge the legitimacy of the election for the country to move forward. Sen. Lindsey Graham warned on Sunday that Trump shouldn’t concede because “if Republicans don’t challenge and change the U.S. election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again.”
In other words, despite zero evidence of voter fraud, the GOP should attack the outcome of the election because a Democrat was elected president. The nation was already divided when Trump became president. But Trump exploited our divisions to gain and try to keep power. He didn’t just pour salt into our wounds. He planted grenades in them. And now he and his enablers appear willing to pull the pins. https://prospect.org/politics/can-biden-heal-america-when-trump-and-his-allies-dont-want-it-healed/
2020-11-10 Ten Executive Actions Biden Can Make for the Climate on Day 1 Our job between now and Inauguration Day is clear: Put as much pressure on Biden to use the full power of the Presidency in his first 100 days to combat the climate crisis. If Congress remains divided, climate legislation will be difficult to pass. That’s why we’re focusing on the measures that Biden can take immediately to keep fossil fuels in the ground and build a just transition.
2020-11-10 Donald Trump’s Terrible Coup Attempt Is Killing Americans It’s pulling focus from the most dangerous moment of the crisis. This is The COVID-19 Daily Report for Veterans Day, 2020.
It’s now clear that Donald Trump is trying to pull off the world’s worst coup attempt. With Joe Biden in a small but measurable and likely insurmountable lead in multiple states, Trump’s lawyers are using bogus voter fraud claims with no evidence behind them to try to jump to a lead in the courts. He’s claiming that the sequence of the counting—something mandated by Republican legislatures and telegraphed by Trump before the election—proves the fraud. He’s relying on the testimony of convicted sex offenders and postal workers who recant their stories upon questioning. On multiple occasions, lawyers have admitted to judges that there’s no proof behind their claims.
The point is to muddy up the results just enough so they can carry out another telegraphed strategy: invalidating the certified results and having Republican legislatures deliver a slate of Trump electors, overturning the results.
Every moment Donald Trump tries to steal the election is a moment that he’s not paying any attention to the most harrowing moment of the coronavirus crisis. Cases are now completely out of control; we could easily hit 200,000 a day soon. Hospitalizations are at an all-time high, and we’re approaching triage conditions in several states. The medical profession has been able to save lives as they learn more about the disease, but if they cannot attend to all the patients, many people will die unnecessarily. https://prospect.org/coronavirus/unsanitized-donald-trump-coup-attempt-killing-americans/
2020-11-10 Give ’Em Hell, Joe What Joe Biden needs to learn from Harry Truman In 1948, Harry Truman was in an even worse fix. The Republicans had won control of both houses in the 1946 midterms, and Truman was being compared unflatteringly to his giant predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt. Republicans were obstructing everything Truman tried to do, and no serious person expected him to win re-election in November. So that summer, Truman discovered his inner FDR. He traveled the country by train, and his rhetoric became more potent as he went. His nemesis was the “Do Nothing” 80th Congress.
As the size of crowds increased, people would shout, “Give ’em hell, Harry.” Short of stature and ordinary looking, he became the emblem of the forgotten man and woman. In November, in defiance of all the predictions, Truman won. He took back Congress with him, an astonishing 54 to 42 in the Senate, and 262 to 171 in the House.
If McConnell sets himself up as obstructionist in chief, Biden needs to make McConnell the face of all that the American people need and are being denied. Adequate economic relief? It’s the do-nothing McConnell Senate. Reliable health coverage? Massive investment in modern infrastructure? McConnell and the do-nothing Senate. https://prospect.org/politics/give-em-hell-joe-biden/
2020-11-10 The Day One Agenda: Now More Than Ever The election result brings new prominence to executive actions. But in reality, it was always going to be a necessary facet of a Democratic presidency. Without signing a single new law, the next president can lower prescription drug prices, cancel student debt, break up the big banks, give everybody who wants one a bank account, counteract the dominance of monopoly power, protect farmers from price discrimination and unfair dealing, force divestment from fossil fuel projects, close a slew of tax loopholes, hold crooked CEOs accountable, mandate reductions of greenhouse gas emissions, allow the effective legalization of marijuana, make it easier for 800,000 workers to join a union, and much, much more.
The Day One Agenda, or the regulatory state if you prefer that name, explains why Donald Trump was such a consequential president, even though he really passed just one consequential law (the Trump tax cuts). Everything else was done through executive branch agencies, and yet he transformed America, on immigration and border policy, on climate and environmental law, on healthcare, on just about everything. Joe Biden can have just as much of an impact simply by using the laws on the books to reach his priorities and goals. https://prospect.org/day-one-agenda/election-executive-actions-democratic-presidency/
2020-11-09 Corporate Democrats Are Rural America’s Biggest Losers Recent defeats make clear that being close to Big Ag is no way to win elections. Tuesday marked an important turning point on the national political scene: the complete obliteration of corporate Democrats’ supposed “rural strategy.”
U.S. Rep. Collin Peterson (D-MN), the chair of the powerful House Agriculture Committee and a 30-year incumbent, lost by a large margin. This follows the 2018 loss by Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota. Even Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-IL), who chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, barely survived a nail-biter last week.
All these Democrats had something in common: the playbook of former Obama administration Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, Joe Biden’s so called “rural whisperer.” The strategy focuses on cozying up to corporate agribusiness, seeking endorsements from the Republican-aligned Farm Bureau, embracing Republican approaches to slashing environmental regulation, and supporting extractive rural industries. https://prospect.org/politics/corporate-democrats-are-rural-americas-biggest-losers/
2020-11-09 Biden Poised to Name Ron Klain, Janet Yellen to Key Positions Klain favored as White House chief of staff; Yellen as Treasury secretary
One qualification that gives Klain the edge is that he served as President Obama’s Ebola response coordinator in 2014–2015, not a bad qualification during the current pandemic. Another is that Klain is far more acceptable to progressives than Wall Street–afflicted members of Biden’s inner circle such as Steve Ricchetti or more conservative senior advisers like Jeff Zients, CEO of the Cranemere holding company, or former Democratic Leadership Council leader Bruce Reed.
Yellen would be an interesting choice on several grounds. She was nearly reappointed as Fed chair by Donald Trump, who liked her policy of very low interest rates. Yellen is just liberal enough for the liberals, just conservative enough for Wall Street; and as a former Fed chair, she would be hard for Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell to block. She came to the Fed chairmanship in 2014, appointed by Barack Obama after a successful struggle by Senate progressives to get Obama to choose Yellen over Larry Summers, to whom the president had all but promised the job. At the time, Yellen’s selection was a clear win for the party’s left. https://prospect.org/economy/biden-poised-to-name-ron-klain-janet-yellen-to-key-positions/
2020-11-09 Ro Khanna: Progressives Helped Biden Win. We Can’t Stop Push for Green New Deal & Medicare for All A debate is growing over the future of the Democratic Party as progressive lawmakers push back on Biden’s centrist policy proposals and consideration of Republicans for Cabinet positions. Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna of California says progressive policies, such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, have popular support. “The policies that we are advocating are not just for deeply blue districts,” Khanna says. “They are policies that will help people in the Midwest, in the South, across this country. https://www.democracynow.org/2020/11/9/ro_khanna_2020_election_progressives?
2020-11-08 What Can Progressives Accomplish in A Biden Administration Now that the election is over, we discuss why it was so close, why Trump did as well as he did, how Biden intends to govern and how progressives can best influence him and get our programs and policies passed. With Branko Marcetic, staff writer for Jacobin and author of “Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden, Ross Barkan, columnist for The Guardian and Jacobin and writer for The Nation and Jennifer Epps-Addison, President and Co-Director of The Center for Popular Democracy, a progressive advocacy organization . https://www.facebook.com/Lauren.Steiner.LA/videos/10224329778768926
2020-11-06 LIVE UPDATES: ELECTION 2020—Biden Lays Out Plans, While Trump Still Disputes Result Biden aides have revealed that he plans a series of executive orders upon assuming power that would reverse numerous Trump policies, The Washington Post reported. Biden will have the U.S. rejoin the World Health Organization and the Paris climate accord, lift the ban on travel from numerous Muslim countries and he’ll put back in place the Dreamers program, that allows children of undocumented aliens to remain in the United States.
2020-11-06 ELECTION 2020: ‘Sleepy Joe’s’ Task Is to Put Liberal America Back to Sleep Four years ago, however, they were forcibly roused from their languor to protest against Donald Trump. They grew enraged by the symptom of their corrupt political system rather than by the corrupt system itself. For them, “Sleepy Joe” was just what the doctor ordered.
2020-11-06 Did Media Spiking the Ukraine-Burisma Story Win Joe Biden the Election? Whatever one thinks about Biden or Trump, or the veracity of the Burisma story, the way in which corporate media and social media giants unilaterally decided that Americans would not be able to decide for themselves raises profound questions about the nature of power and freedom of speech in society.
It was the classic October Surprise. Just weeks before the presidential election, conservative newspaper the New York Post released a bombshell report claiming that Joe Biden’s son Hunter had introduced his then vice-president father to top executives at Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, just months before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor investigating the company. The report was allegedly based on information from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, who, despite not having any relevant qualifications, sat on Burisma’s board, earning $50,000 per month for doing so.
2020-11-06 The Black Nebraska Lawmaker Who May Have Delivered the Presidency to Joe Biden Biden has Ernie Chambers to thank for getting one electoral vote out of the Cornhusker State. The nation has a lot to thank Ernie Chambers for, in fact. If Biden falls short in the states where he’s trailing right now, but holds onto Nevada and Arizona, he will have 270 electoral votes in his corner—the bare minimum required to win the presidency. That would mean that the single electoral vote in NE-02 would provide the margin of victory, avoiding a 269-269 tie that would throw the election to the House of Representatives (where because of the peculiar rules for resolving such ties, Trump would likely be chosen president even though the House is in the hands of the Democrats). https://prospect.org/politics/nebraska-lawmaker-ernie-chambers-may-have-delivered-presidency-to-biden/
2020-11-04 Can Biden Govern With a Republican Senate? If Mitch McConnell is leader of a Republican majority again, what then? For starters, Biden will have to govern as a more centrist president. It will take some doing for him to get a Cabinet confirmed. The most important players will be the three Republican Senate moderates: Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, and Susan Collins of Maine. Biden will need to reach out to them and see if they will occasionally break Republican caucus discipline and vote to pass crucial legislation and confirm nominees.
2020-11-02 Political consultant predicts a blowout: ‘We’re going to know the winner of this election by 10pm tomorrow night’ Even when it comes to voter suppression efforts and legal challenges like the Texas Biden bus assault and the police pepper-spraying Black voters, Carville said that it’s only going to turn people away from Trump and motivate more Biden supporters to come to the polls.
“Look, that bus thing in Texas, yes, I’m mortified,” continued Carville. “I’m not mortified by the outcome of the election, I’m mortified by potential violence. Look at the early vote. People waiting in line for 11 hours to vote. 10,000 people in line in Harris County, Texas, in the middle of the night. When you tell people you can’t do something or you try to make it harder for them to do, it aggravates the dickens out of them and makes them want to do it more. https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/political-james-carville-predicts-a-blowout-were-going-to-know-the-winner-of-this-election-by-10pm-tomorrow-night/
2020-10-31 The Facebook Group That Could Flip Pennsylvania Boasting more than 120,000 members, it’s one of the largest pro-Biden online communities, and a source of camaraderie and support. “We are 124k in this group and I’m hoping that at least more than half of us (62k+) have voted! Please only respond if you have already voted! Let’s GO!!” posted Ernestine Epouhe in the Facebook group Pennsylvania Women for Biden/Harris on October 29. The question, pasted on a backdrop of swirling blue and red stars and stripes, received more than 25,000 comments and 13,000 reactions—almost all likes, loves, and Facebook’s “caring” reaction. https://prospect.org/politics/biden-facebook-group-that-could-flip-pennsylvania/
2020-10-30 Young voters backing Biden could shift gears soon after the election — here’s why The Sunrise Movement has been at the center of the progressive movement with a dominant focus on bringing the Green New Deal to fruition in an effort to combat climate change. Almost immediately after the election, they will be gearing up to present their proposals to Biden if he wins the election. The group’s first actions will likely be similar to their move to lobby Democratic lawmakers in 2018. Not even a week after Democrats regained control of the house, the group staged a sit-in at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) office in hopes of shifting her focus to climate control. https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/biden-climate-plan/
2020-10-30 Biden Doesn’t Have A Popularity Problem. That Might Help Him Win. But it is increasingly looking like Democractic primary voters might have been right about Biden’s electability argument. In the face of relentless attacks from the Trump campaign, Biden hasn’t dipped in the polls; in fact, he’s actually become better liked, and has built a formidable favorability advantage over Trump.https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/biden-doesnt-have-a-popularity-problem-that-might-help-him-win/
2020-10-29 Democrats Have Proven They Can Compete on Small-Dollar Donations Alone So why does Joe Biden keep doing big-money fundraisers? Going into the race’s final days, Democrats—and Joe Biden in particular—enjoy a massive cash advantage all over the map. For a presidential challenger to outraise an incumbent is almost unheard of; even unpopular incumbents like George W. Bush enjoyed monster war chests in re-election bids. Meanwhile, the campaign of President Trump, whose major legislative accomplishment has been a leviathan of a tax cut for the rich, is now being referred to in the race’s final week as “cash poor.”
But what makes Biden’s fundraising juggernaut historic is not just its eye-popping dollar amounts, but how he’s bringing those dollars in. According to a recently released quarterly report, Democratic candidates and left-leaning groups raised $1.5 billion through the online campaign donation site ActBlue over the last three months. Biden, predictably, is the beneficiary of a large chunk of that total, after announcing that $203 million of his $383 million haul in September was raised online. That’s by far the most money ever raised for an individual presidential candidate in a month in American history, rivaled only by the totals in October that we don’t have yet. Small-dollar donors, giving in minor installments, have, by themselves, put up enough money to keep pace with the entire Trump fundraising machine, which going into the year was thought to be a daunting and historically high-powered engine. https://prospect.org/politics/democrats-compete-on-small-dollar-donations-joe-biden/
2020-10-29 Note to Biden: A President Can Do a Lot Even Without the Senate What Trump has done inside the administrative state has been more critical than his public persona. For almost four years, the breathtaking cruelty, mismanagement, and corruption of the Trump administration have kept the pundits yapping, the printing presses running, angry congressional letters flying, and the Twittersphere ablaze. Depending on the results of next Tuesday’s election, however, Joe Biden may soon be in a position to actually do something about it all. As Biden and his advisers survey the rubble, it will be important that they not get distracted by the nonsense (“I will tweet less” is not a compelling administrative pillar), but rather home in on those features of the Trump administration that have made life worse for millions. https://prospect.org/politics/note-to-biden-a-president-can-do-a-lot-even-without-senate/
2020-10-28 Times Editorial Lets Slip Joe Biden’s Latin America Policy: More Obama-Style Coups Figures on both the right and the left are presenting Biden as a progressive champion, the reality though, is that he has always represented the right-wing of the Democratic Party, and his Latin America policy is no exception.
Yet buried deep in the article is perhaps the most eye-opening sentence: Mr. Biden’s advisers say they would seek to revive the anti-corruption campaign that set off political earthquakes across the Americas starting in 2014, but largely stalled in recent years.”
What the authors are referring to is a continent-wide campaign to unseat progressive leaders that ended in the jailing of Brazilian president Lula da Silva, the impeachment of his successor Dilma Rousseff, and the rise of the far-right authoritarian Jair Bolsonaro.
Yet since Lula’s election in 2002, Brazil had also been a thorn in the side of Washington, acting as a barrier to American regime change operations against leftist governments in the region. Lula, a self-described socialist and anti-imperialist, forged close ties with leaders like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Castro brothers, while also refusing to support a U.S.-backed right-wing secessionist movement in Eastern Bolivia aimed at undermining President Evo Morales.
Biden’s advisors have also laid out their plans for Central America, which include a $750 million package tied to privatization drives and austerity measures that might perpetuate the very economic and political conditions that led migrants to flee in the first place. His team also doubled down on his commitment to regime change in Venezuela https://www.mintpressnews.com/joe-biden-latin-america-policy-more-obama-style-coups/272720/
2020-10-23 Top 10 People to Blame if Joe Biden Loses (It’s Not The Left) Right now, even though the polling does not account for the millions of voters who have been unceremoniously booted from the voter rolls, many people believe Biden is going to become the next drunken pilot of the American Empire — a position which has less power than most people imagine as the Military Industrial Complex and Wall Street roll on undeterred due to their unimaginable inertial force like boulders in an avalanche.
But there are countless reasons Biden could still lose, and even though I generally think the two corporate parties consist of sham snake-oil salesmen dancing with their asses out, I just want to preemptively make it clear who Democrats should blame IF Joe Biden snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/23/top-10-people-to-blame-if-joe-biden-loses-its-not-the-left/
2020-09-29 Joe Biden, The Republican The last two Democratic presidencies provide a good indication of what a Biden Administration would look like. Like Biden, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama hail from the centrist party establishment. If personnel is policy, the three men hang out with many of the same advisors, businesspeople and elected officials. They’re not identical: Clinton is a charismatic retail politician, Obama is aloof and professorial, and Biden is an LBJ-style buttonholer minus Johnson’s secret idealism. But they’re ideologically and temperamentally similar to a remarkable extent.
I remembered Clinton and Obama as deeply disappointing to voters with traditional liberal Democratic values. I remembered that most of their major legislative accomplishments would not have been out of place under a Republican administration. https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/09/29/joe-biden-the-republican/
2020-09-18 Austerity at Home and Imperialism Abroad: What a Joe Biden Win Would Mean for America The only thing preventing Trump from self-destructing come November 3 is none other than the Democratic Party. Of all the potential candidates that could have walked over Trump – particularly Sanders with universal healthcare in a time of pandemic or even Warren with taxing corporations in a time of record profits amidst a recession – they chose the one candidate who could lose.
The former senator from Mastercard has already assured Wall Street that their privileged position will be protected on his watch. The warmongers have been assuaged with the promise that the military budget can only go up. The insurance parasites know that government-imposed private health policies are set in stone. The Zionists needn’t fret about the U.S. recognizing Palestinian rights or of reversing recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
Worse than the climate deniers, Biden believes in the science of global warming and knows its catastrophic consequences. Yet he will do little about it and has already opposed a fracking ban. Fossil fuel subsidies will continue under the Democrats.
Democrats, with the Obama-Biden administration and since, have leap-frogged Republicans to the right on foreign policy issues in important respects regarding Afghanistan, North Korea, Russia, Syria, Venezuela, etc. Democrats even oppose drawing down U.S. troops abroad. https://www.mintpressnews.com/austerity-wars-abroad-joe-biden-foreign-policy/271304/
2020-09-00 How Green Is Joe Biden’s Green New Deal? The Wall Street Journal editors and opinion columnists sure don’t like Joe Biden’s Green New Deal proposals. The editors teed off on Biden’s moderate proposal, released in June 2019 during the Democratic presidential primary, which would have made $1.7 trillion in clean energy investments over the next 10 years, calling it a “green free lunch”. But “good” and “green,” at least in the context of environmental policy, are relative terms
We will need to look closely at Biden’s expanded climate plan, which promises to build much-needed green infrastructure and ensure an equitable transition to renewable energy. The original Green New Deal resolution, which was introduced by Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Edward Markey back in February 2019, set the goal of the United States taking the lead in reducing global carbon emissions from human sources to 40% to 60% below 2010 levels by 2030 and reaching “net-zero global emissions by 2050.” Those goals are consistent with the recommendations of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The resolution also called for “high-quality health care” and a federal guarantee of “a job with a family-sustaining wage” for “all people in the United States.” The Biden proposal sets its goal as net-zero carbon emissions by no later than 2050. But there is no call for either universal health care or a federal jobs guarantee in the Biden plan. One might question the strategic wisdom of requiring universal health care in a plan to address climate change. But we know that Biden is no advocate of Medicare for All, whether as part of an environmental program or on its own. http://dollarsandsense.org/archives/2020/0920miller.html
2020-09-08 The Long-Term Dangers of Joe Biden’s Terrible Campaigning for President There are Republicans who quietly wouldn’t mind losing this election. Biden, unlike Obama, lacks the gravitas to twice repel them with relative ease. In the meantime, since American politics is dizzyingly cyclical, Republicans will have time to win back seats on the state and county levels, assuming Democrats repeat their mistakes of a decade ago.
The goal of the Democratic Party should be to erect, somehow, an unassailable FDR-style majority (yes, far harder in today’s polarized times) that is built on widely popular government programs that alter, for the better, the very fabric of society, as the New Deal programs and Social Security did in the 1930s, cementing a safety net that has endured more than eighty years of attacks.
If Democrats are the party of real universal health care, not the market-based Affordable Care Act, and introduce a plan to guarantee every American a job, they will have won universalist victories that do more than just shift the political paradigm — they will have made rare, material differences in the lives of the vast working class and poor.
But the worst may be yet to come, especially if Biden proves as insipid and docile a communicator as he is in candidate form. It will not be enough to be the anti-Trump party when Trump is returned to the private sector, frothing on Fox or starting his own network. Democrats will have to start thinking about wielding power again. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/09/joe-biden-democrats-election-donald-trump
2020-07-28 With His ‘Women’s Agenda,’ Joe Biden Acknowledges That Most Issues Are in Fact Women’s Issues [MEK Note author specifically fails to mention Bernie Sanders name in article while mentioning many of the other candidates with the closest reference to Bernie being “the race boiled down to two white, male frontrunners.” Author mentions a Symone Sanders, a senior advisor to Biden early in article and then finishes the article with quotes from “Sanders” that tends to make most casual readers associate statements with Bernie. Doesn’t bode well for the issues Bernie championed that Democratic supporters don’t even want to mention his name in neither a positive manner or at all!] https://www.glamour.com/story/joe-biden-women-agenda-plan
2020-05-11 Joe Biden is Ridin’ the Pandemic All the Way to the White House A ruling class consensus is coalescing that Trump will be the fall guy, blamed for the increasingly undeniable defects of the neoliberal model. The world is in the midst of a COVID-19 crisis and in our corner of the planet, a presidential campaign has been reduced to a single issue: Trump or not Trump. Pick your poison.
At a time that calls for national leadership, or least debate on the issues, Congress has unanimously passed the two-trillion-dollar Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act handing money to corporations so that they can, among other things, buy up the competition at pandemic prices. Let Trump take the hit for his obvious mismanagement of the crisis while leaving intact the underlying structural imperatives of the neoliberal state’s failure to provide for the public welfare. That is, their solution is to avoid addressing a solution. https://www.mintpressnews.com/opinion-joe-biden-ridin-covid-19-pandemic-to-the-white-house/267372/
2020-05-05 How The Media Has — And Hasn’t — Covered Tara Reade’s Allegation Of the three major cable news channels, Fox News has devoted the most attention to Reade so far.3 Through Friday, May 1, Fox News mentioned Reade in 371 clips collected by the TV News Archive — 344 of them on or after April 24. Many of these mentions were by the channel’s conservative commentators criticizing Democrats and the media for not giving Reade’s allegation more air time.
By contrast, CNN and MSNBC mostly covered the story with on-air interviews of reporters who had investigated the allegation — but these channels also covered Reade much less. Through May 1, CNN had only mentioned Reade in 35 clips, the first of which aired on April 25. And MSNBC barely mentioned her until last Friday, when Biden personally appeared on the network to deny Reade’s claims. (According to what Reade has told The New York Times, neither CNN nor MSNBC has asked to interview her on air, though they have spoken to her off camera.)
2020-05-04 How Democrats Are Responding To The Sexual Assault Allegation Against Biden On this week’s FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the team takes a look at how elected Democrats and voters are reacting to the sexual assault allegation against former Vice President Joe Biden. They also discuss what a likely third-party run by Rep. Justin Amash could mean for the 2020 election.https://fivethirtyeight.com/videos/how-democrats-are-responding-to-the-sexual-assault-allegation-against-biden/
2020-05-04 You can say the sex claim ain’t so, Joe, but it won’t work. Biden has lost his moral compass in his desperate bid to defeat Trump His supporters will tell you Biden might be a loquacious character – who can “blurt out pretty much anything,” according to the New York Times – but he certainly wouldn’t hurt a fly… blah… blah… blah.
But would it be really out of character, considering Biden himself apparently confessed to being filled with “rage” following the death of his beloved wife Neilia and their one-year-old child Naomi in a car accident in 1972? It’s understandable that Biden was devastated by the tragic loss – but equally, isn’t it deeply troubling how the teetotaller, who turned to booze to ease his pain, had“felt such rage he stalked seedy streets looking for trouble?”
He’s quoted as saying, “I liked to [walk around seedy neighborhoods] at night when I thought there was a better chance of finding a fight… I had not known I was capable of such rage.” Biden’s comments make me wonder if he ever went to anger management therapy – or did his rage fester? It’s not too much of a stretch of the imagination to think that someone who once roamed dangerous neighbourhoods looking for a fight could’ve also committed sexual assault… or is it? https://www.rt.com/op-ed/487759-biden-moral-compas-defeat-trump/
2020-05-04 Unsanitized: Biden and Warren Write an Op-Ed for One Person There’s an attempt made here to conflate Biden and Warren’s oversight experience, between Biden running the stimulus and Warren chairing the Congressional Oversight Panel that scrutinized the TARP bailout. This is amusing to anyone who knows the history of Warren’s fights with the Obama administration and with Biden himself. But this is undeniably true, and the reason oversight is needed: “Americans’ faith in government is undermined when the price of helping everyone else is more giveaways for those at the top.”https://prospect.org/coronavirus/unsanitized-biden-and-warren-write-an-op-ed-for-one-person/
2020-05-02 Law professor says response to Biden allegation could signal ‘end of MeToo’ movement Many activists, the Post reports, want to ensure President Trump, who is the subject of multiple allegations of sexual assault and harassment himself, is defeated in November, but there is also concern that a lack of scrupulous investigation into Reade’s claims against Biden — who has denied them — could be damaging to the movement overall. “I think that this could potentially be the end of MeToo,” said Michele Dauber, a Stanford University law professor who heads the Enough is Enough Voter Project. “The failure to investigate, and the failure to live by our principles, will become silencing.” https://news.yahoo.com/law-professor-says-response-biden-183759434.html
2020-05-02 The angst over Joe Biden’s assault allegation has an easy resolution But getting mad is not going to get Democrats out of their Biden fix. Only one thing can do that — pressuring Biden out of the race and replacing him with someone else.
As I have previously written, Reade’s story about Biden is credible. It would never meet the courtroom standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” but given that Reade is now known to have privately told at least five people what happened at the time or in the years following, it can’t be dismissed out of hand. Biden has a track record of behaving creepily around women and has a long history of ridiculous exaggeration and telling bald-faced lies. At bottom, it is quite similar to many other #MeToo stories.
The plain fact is that this accusation is going to dog Biden for the rest of the campaign. Trump has already started talking about it. The right-wing media will cover the story for purely political reasons. Fox News does not care about #MeToo, but the story damages Biden, demoralizes Democrats, and makes liberals look like egregious hypocrites. The sight of nearly every Democratic-aligned women’s rights group queasily keeping silent about the story is simply delicious for the likes of Sean Hannity (though a few have started speaking out). https://theweek.com/articles/912121/angst-over-joe-bidens-assault-allegation-easy-resolution
2020-05-01 If Trump is a Pathological Liar, What Type of Liar is Biden? When I began researching this piece, I knew that Joe Biden told lies, but my expectation was that I would be able to make a clear distinction between Biden and Trump with respect to the type of liar each is. With the exceptions of the staggering amount of Trump falsehoods, and the fact that Biden has admitted to some of his lies, I can’t find much difference between them. Sorry, Blue Team.
Biden’s well-publicized record of lying should be well-known to those who pull the strings of the Democratic National Committee (DNC)—those who have been orchestrating Biden’s nomination. This compels several questions: Is the DNC so stupid so as to not realize what a gift a Biden candidacy is to Trump, who can easily use the facts of Biden’s lying to suppress the Blue Team vote? Is it not obvious that many Blue Team voters will stay home rather than vote to replace one liar with another? Or is the DNC and its masters so evil that they really don’t mind having Trump win again? So evil that opting for an alternative to Biden who could beat Trump but who is slightly less oligarchy-friendly than Biden was out of the question for them?https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/05/01/if-trump-is-a-pathological-liar-what-type-of-liar-is-biden/
2020-04-30 Et tu? Progressive Boomers Are Now Preaching Pro-Biden Lesser-Evilism At a time when an independent progressive movement is needed more than ever, the sheepdogs of a bygone era are trying to herd a new generation of activists into the Democratic Party. https://www.mintpressnews.com/?s=Joe+Biden
2020-04-29 “We are so F****d”: Joe Biden Town Hall Sparks Fears of a Clinton Rerun Throughout the conversation, where Biden positioned himself as a champion of women and an ally to the #MeToo movement, neither Clinton or Biden addressed the multiple women who have accused the former vice-president of inappropriate touching, nor the newest allegations by his former staffer, Tara Reade, who claims he sexually assaulted her in the Capitol Building in 1993.
Biden has been adamant that he will select a woman as his running mate and that he will choose someone from the right of the party (even floating the idea of choosing a Republican VP). Yesterday’s event fueled speculation that Clinton is in the running to return to the White House. The former senator from New York famously blew an enormous lead over Donald Trump – enjoying a 15-point advantage over the businessman and TV show host as late as the last week of campaigning. In October, a Morning Consult poll found that continued apathy and ill will towards her meant that a Clinton endorsement would be a net negative for any of the candidates in the running. Thus, some described the latest announcement as a “kiss of death” for the Biden campaign. https://www.mintpressnews.com/we-are-so-fd-biden-town-hall-sparks-fears-of-a-clinton-rerun/267105/
2020-04-27 Trump and Biden Trade Hit Pieces: Distinctions without a Difference The US imperial ship of state is set on a collision course with China and both Democrats and Republicans are on board. Behind the blame game between the Democrats and the Republicans is a bedrock consensus, for example, on identifying China as not just a commercial rival but as a future enemy in a nuclear war. The U.S. imperial ship of state is set on a collision course with China. Democrat Obama “pivoted” to Asia; Republican Trump seamlessly followed course. The RAND Corporation, a quasi-governmental think tank created to provide intelligence to the U.S. Armed Forces, published a position paper that spells it out: War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable. The corporate media echo the meme of China as the sinister enemy.https://www.mintpressnews.com/trump-biden-trade-hit-pieces-china/266997/
2020-04-27 There’s Another Way for Joe Biden to Expand Health Care: Medicare for Kids A “Medicare for Kids” program would give automatic government-provided health insurance to all Americans from birth up until some defined age in early adulthood (perhaps 26, the current cutoff for young adults to remain on a parent’s health care plan). In fact, not only would this do more for Sanders’s core supporters than lowering the eligibility age incrementally, but it also enjoys broad public support, according to a new poll. https://prospect.org/health/another-way-for-joe-biden-to-expand-health-care/
2020-04-24 New Evidence Supporting Credibility of Tara Reade’s Allegation Against Joe Biden Emerges A new piece of evidence has emerged buttressing the credibility of Tara Reade’s claim that she told her mother about allegations of sexual harassment and assault related to her former boss, then-Sen. Joe Biden. Biden, through a spokesperson, has denied the allegations. Reade has claimed to various media outlets, including The Intercept, that she told her mother, a close friend, and her brother about both the harassment and, to varying degrees of detail, the assault at the time. Her brother, Collin Moulton, and her friend, who has asked to remain anonymous, both confirmed that they heard about the allegations from Reade at the time. Reade’s mother died in 2016, but both her brother and friend also confirmed Reade had told her mother, and that her mother, a longtime feminist and activist, urged her to go to the police. https://theintercept.com/2020/04/24/new-evidence-tara-reade-joe-biden/
2020-04-18 Joe Biden Is Not a Decent Man Joe Biden is the presumptive Democratic nominee to face off against Donald Trump in the general election. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and many other so-called ‘progressives’ have endorsed him. Sanders has even gone so far as to call him a “decent man” — but Joe Biden is anything but. https://www.leftvoice.org/joe-biden-is-not-a-decent-man
2020-04-17 Mehdi Hasan and Noam Chomsky on Biden vs. Trump The Intercept’s Mehdi Hasan speaks with world-renowned political dissident and linguist Noam Chomsky on the 2020 presidential election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Now that Bernie Sanders has dropped out and endorsed Biden, does the progressive left have a moral obligation to hold their noses and vote for the former vice president, despite his many sins? Chomsky thinks so! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39902cn5lX8
2020-04-14 System Update with Glenn Greenwald Special – Bernie, Biden and the Left In this special episode of The Intercept’s weekly show, host Glenn Greenwald talks to progressive activist and journalist Benjamin Dixon and former national press secretary for the Bernie Sanders campaign Briahna Joy Gray about the relationship between Sanders supporters, Joe Biden and the left. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Do0RxWNm6LA
2020-04-13 Not Me, Biden Joe Biden is repulsive: a racist, capitalist, imperialist. Today, Sanders papered over their many differences to give a full-throated endorsement. What does this mean? Biden saying (and Sanders nodding in agreement) that they “don’t disagree in any substantive ways.” And Joe Biden, a war criminal, a racist, and an accused sexual assaulter, is Bernie Sanders’s “good friend.”
Biden made only small concessions to Sanders’s base but he said nothing about Medicare for All — one of Sanders’s main campaign promises. In fact, Sanders didn’t even mention Medicare for All. This endorsement comes as an almost explicit betrayal of everything that Sanders had run on. This betrayal is particularly egregious in the midst of a horrible pandemic that has killed 23 thousand and left well over 16 million people unemployed — and that doesn’t even count undocumented people.
Sanders refused in the livestream to even denounce the billion dollar corporate bailout, opting for the it “wasn’t my first priority” approach. Of course, Sanders did vote for this bill a few weeks ago, but he made it clear at the time that he was holding his nose to vote because it didn’t do enough for working class people. Even that fiery rhetoric is entirely gone now, and Sanders espoused the Pelosi-Biden line that the primary issue with the massive corporate bailout is the lack of oversight.
To make the endorsement worse, Joe Biden is among the most repulsive candidates in the Democratic Party, if only because he’s had decades in Congress for us to know exactly who he is and what he is about. He wrote the 1994 Crime Bill that helped create mass incarceration, voted for the war in Iraq, pushed for Obama’s drone program, and to this day — even in the midst of a pandemic! — opposes Medicare for All. While the Supreme Court is often cited as a key part of the “lesser evil” argument, it was Biden that helped confirm Clarence Thomas and silenced Anita Hill. He also fought against integration, supported Obama’s immigration policies, and was a proponent of the corporate bailouts. Joe Biden is among the most right-wing figures in the Democratic Party. And Bernie Sanders just endorsed him, with no criticisms of Biden or of the Democratic Party establishment that put their thumbs on the scales to ensure Biden’s victory. https://www.leftvoice.org/not-me-biden
2020-04-13 I Literally Wrote the Case Against Joe Biden. But I’ve Got Some Free Advice for Him Pundits are panicking about whether the Left will help Joe Biden defeat Trump. The former vice president probably doesn’t want it, but here’s some advice for him from the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.
As exit polls attest, and as Biden’s own wife seems to understand, Democrats didn’t vote for Biden because they found his policy ideas or vision particularly compelling, but because they believed he was the most likely candidate to win over non-Democrats and beat Trump. Now that the primary’s over, the party needs to, at least privately, acknowledge that was a myth, given that in nearly every state, Sanders beat Biden among independents, the nation’s largest voting bloc, who also tend to be younger.
There are many things about Sanders’s appeal to independents that Biden can’t replicate. But he can adopt some of the policies he championed, first among which should be Medicare for All, which is surging in support as millions lose their employer-based health insurance with every week of lockdown. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/04/joe-biden-presidential-campaign-democratic-party
2020-04-08 The Media’s Loudest #MeToo Champions Are Ignoring Biden Sexual Assault Accuser Tara Reade The silence from the media’s loudest #MeToo champions has been deafening. There has been exactly zero coverage of sexual allegations against Joe Biden on CNBC, CNN, MSNBC, ABC or CBS. Likewise, The New York Times and USA Today and have failed to discuss it. https://www.mintpressnews.com/media-metoo-champions-ignoring-joe-biden-sexual-assault-accuser-tara-reade/266439/
2020-04-07 The Inconvenient Truth of Rape And, yes, allegations of sexual assault or rape against the current leader in the Democratic primaries are inconvenient. But rape is even more inconvenient. The recent allegations of rape against Joe Biden have created a firestorm online. The accuser, Tara Reade, spoke with Katie Halper on her podcast last month and described in grim detail how Joe Biden violated her when she was a staffer in his office in 1993. Her story was graphic, detailing how she was digitally penetrated by Mr. Biden as he pinned her up against a wall.
2020-04-05 Why Should Teachers Endorse Joe Biden? They shouldn’t. The National Education Association (NEA) has endorsed Joe Biden. The leadership of the teachers’ union says Biden has “a deep connection to the work of educators.” A young teacher and NEA member has ten questions about that. https://www.leftvoice.org/why-should-teachers-endorse-joe-biden
2020-03-27 Eight women have come forward against Biden making sexual harassment claims & at least one sexual assault. Say their names: -Lucy Flores -Amy Lappos -D.J Hill -Caitlyn Caruso -Ally Coll -Sofie Karasek -Vail Kohnert-Yount -Tara Reade https://twitter.com/PepperOceanna/status/1243552107430580224
2020-03-13 Joe Biden Isn’t the Safe Bet to Beat Donald Trump. Bernie Sanders Is. Joe Biden is a weak candidate who is more likely to lose to Donald Trump than Bernie Sanders. The best chance we have at ousting Trump is voting for Sanders in the rest of the primaries. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/03/joe-biden-donald-trump-bernie-sanders-electability
2020-03-11 The Corporate Media Celebrates After Handing Joe Biden Another Win Biden has deliberately refrained from public or media appearances due to his propensity for making egregious errors, but that hasn’t stopped the media from paving the way for a Biden vs Trump contest https://www.mintpressnews.com/media-bias-hands-joe-biden-another-win/265654/
2020-03-10 Joe Biden Is No Friend of Public Education We deserve a presidential candidate who will eradicate high-stakes testing, champion teachers and public schools, and help free students from the shackles of student debt. Joe Biden is not that candidate. https://portside.org/2020-03-10/joe-biden-no-friend-public-education
2020-03-04The Case Against Joe Biden: Former VP’s Long Career Shows a Recurring Theme of “Appeasing the Right” Following his Super Tuesday wins, we look closely at the record of former Vice President Joe Biden, from his central role in supporting the Iraq War to expanding the so-called war on drugs. We speak with Branko Marcetic, the author of “Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.” Biden’s approach to politics is based on “appeasing the right” and “taking the platform of his Republican opponent and trying to make it his own,” Marcetic say. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSiCycXx3MM
2020-02-27 Joe Biden Is the Forrest Gump of the Democratic Party’s Rightward Turn From crime to privatization to Wall Street, the story of Joe Biden’s career has been the story of the Democratic Party’s forty-year-long right turn. Every step of the way, he was there urging the party to push the rightward shift even further. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/02/joe-biden-bill-clinton-middle-class-triangulation
2020-02-26 Joe Biden Was a Leader in Building Up the Carceral State These days, Joe Biden likes to tout his civil rights credentials. But he was central to the racist drive to lock people up and throw the key. At first ambivalent about having to work with Thurmond, Biden would come to think of him as an “old buddy,” the two men brought together by their shared views on crime. Thurmond called crime “the number one threat to organized society” and believed the courts had “become laughing stocks in criminal circles because lawbreakers fully realize that the system is balanced in their behalf.” Biden and Thurmond dropped the drug-czar provision while reintroducing the controversial provisions of the earlier bill into what would become the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 (CCCA). Biden eulogized the 48-year Senate racist as a “brave man” whose “lasting impact” was a “gift to us all.”
Through the late 1970s to the 1990s, those racist lawmakers would become some of Biden’s most reliable allies in erecting today’s US carceral state, one whose prison population continues to dwarf the rest of the world’s, including even the dictatorship of Saudi Arabia and the one-party state of China. Those prisons would be filled disproportionately with the African Americans who bore the brunt of middle America’s increasing hysteria over crime — and who would often be forced to do backbreaking, dangerous work for no pay, the only version of slavery the Thirteenth Amendment still allowed.
The long-term triumph of the right-wing Reagan “revolution” lay not just in legislation and rhetoric but in the nation’s courts. For decades, conservatives had been grinding their teeth over the liberal direction of the Supreme Court, as its justices overturned long-standing local laws and “traditions,” appeared to invent new rights out of thin air, and seemed, in the eyes of conservatives, to generally be acting as a second legislative branch. Beginning in the 1970s, the Right walked the long road to take them back. As ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee and later its chairman, Biden would preside over the start of the right-wing takeover of the federal courts that continues today.
n 1991, Reagan’s vice president and successor George Bush picked appeals court judge Clarence Thomas to replace the legendary Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. Unbeknownst to Biden, the battle over Thomas’s nomination would become one of the defining moments of his career. Vowing to turn the hearings into a referendum on Thomas’s conservative ideology and the concept of “natural law,” Biden was ultimately deemed “one of the worst questioners” by the Washington Post’s Supreme Court reporter John MacKenzie.
“Unfortunately, I do not share the certainty of some who are voting against Judge Thomas that he will be as extreme as some of the statements could lead one to believe he might be,” Biden said after the deadlocked committee sent the nomination to the Senate with no recommendation. “As a matter of fact, my heart tells me he won’t. My heart tells me he’ll be a solid justice.” A little over a week later, 35-year-old law professor Anita Hill came forward to accuse Thomas of having sexually harassed her.
Biden’s legendary mishandling of these allegations would haunt him for the rest of his career. As Hill’s charges brought Washington to a standstill and focused the nation’s attention on an issue then rarely spoken about, Biden used his position as chairman to shield Thomas from their full brunt while undermining his accuser. It was not just a case of egregious insensitivity about a pernicious and all-too-common injustice suffered by women, but a grave tactical blunder: after voting against Thomas, Biden had warned that a “fervent minority” in the GOP was “engaged in an open campaign to shift the court dramatically to the right”; his failure to hold Thomas to account helped lead that campaign to victory.
Politics, and more specifically, the Republican Party, was rapidly changing. But Biden and many other Democrats wouldn’t notice this transformation until too late; their view of the US political system would remain frozen in time, rooted in the clubby, honor-bound and compromise-focused Senate culture of Biden’s early years. It would make them useful patsies for an ever-more ruthless and right-wing team of Republicans. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/02/joe-biden-yesterdays-man-racism-crime-prison
2020-02-26 Is Joe Biden Really More Electable? An examination of Biden’s record explains why he would have such strong appeal to racist white voters. From 1984 to 1988, Joe Biden partnered with segregationist Strom Thurmond on a series of ‘tough on crime’ legislation passing a law which created the disparity in penalties between those caught with crack cocaine (black people) and those caught with powder cocaine (white people). Additionally, Biden actually wrote the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, the largest crime bill ever passed. This legislation originated as the “Biden Crime Bill” before it became known as “Bill Clinton’s Crime Bill.” Cumulatively, these black-targeted and black community enforced laws led to the incarceration of a generation of black Americans, devastated black families and laid the groundwork for mass incarceration.
Biden’s record of anti-black legislation explains why he would also be appealing to Trump supporters. Voters who want to put an end to the relentless racist attacks on poor people of color, understand that this has been turbocharged by Trump — the textbook example of racism. The American people deserve a better leader whose record represents that they have foresight, understanding and compassion for the type of outcomes produced by legislation. Biden’s record demonstrates that he fails in that understanding and his so called electability panders to racist tendencies in white voters – – these are the very reasons not to support his candidacy. https://www.blackagendareport.com/joe-biden-really-more-electable
2020-02-23 Joe Biden Helped Pull the Democrats to the Right Ronald Reagan successfully dismantled the New Deal order and pulled liberals rightward. Reagan transformed the Democratic Party — and he was aided by Democrats like Joe Biden. Asked where Democrats should draw the line with Reagan’s cuts, Biden singled out agencies like NASA, Conrail, the Export-Import Bank, and energy research and development. “They’re finding new answers to old problems,” he said. “Instead of social programs, give the Northeast a rail system that works.”
Despite claiming that “the Reagan program will be economically disastrous for most of us in this country,” Biden voted for the new president’s first budget, one of thirty Democrats to do so. The budget was “a triumph for conservatives rivaling the liberal triumphs of” Roosevelt and Johnson, the New York Times wrote: scores of federal programs for health, education, and social services drastically cut back, weakened, or outright eliminated. The cuts threw countless lives into chaos, with 270,000 public service workers losing jobs, more than 400,000 families thrown off the welfare rolls, and more than one million workers ineligible for extended unemployment benefits, just to name a few. The Reagan onslaught marked “the reversal,” wrote the Washington Post, “of two great waves of government intervention, the New Deal and the Great Society,” a verdict shared by lawmakers on both sides of the issue.
Biden and the many other Democrats who began talking like Republicans were gently prodded into it by the 1981 tax cut, the other keystone measure in Reagan’s plan to overhaul Americans’ relationship to their government. Biden also voted for this measure, despite calling it “inequitable and inflationary.” The Reagan tax cut, the largest in postwar US history, was a lopsided giveaway to the very richest that led almost instantly to ballooning deficits and widening economic inequality. Over time, the super-rich would parlay their economic gains into growing political power by exploiting an ever-more corrupt political system — and use that power to roll back much of what had been built under New Deal presidents, creating a growing class of disillusioned, fed-up Americans. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/02/yesterdays-man-case-against-joe-biden-new-deal-reagan
2020-02-22 The Making of Joe Biden’s Conservative Democratic Politics It is no small irony that Joseph Robinette Biden Jr was born in the cradle of the New Deal order he would later help dismantle. Neither Biden nor the United States is unique in this respect. Look at just about any developed country’s generous postwar welfare state, and among its rich and powerful foes, you’ll find many who benefited most from its generosity, only to turn against the system that created them, convinced they had done it all on their own. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/02/yesterdays-man-case-against-joe-biden-busing
2020-01-21 Joe Biden’s Social Security Record Is Cause for Concern “Vice President Joe Biden recently claimed that the Bernie Sanders campaign ‘doctored’ a clip of a 2018 speech, to make it appear that he supports cutting Social Security. The truth is that the clip is in no way doctored. Indeed, the full speech is worse than the clip, because it includes Biden saying that Social Security ‘needs adjustments.’ That’s well known DC insider speak for ‘cut benefits.’ https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2020/01/21/joe-bidens-social-security-record-cause-concern
2020-01-20 Joe Biden Tried to Cut Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare for 40 Years Biden’s own freeze proposal in 1984. Acknowledging it would be labeled “draconian”, Biden’s plan [would] cut $239 billion from the deficit over three years, almost $100 billion more than even Reagan’s proposal, and proposed doing it partly by eliminating scheduled increases for Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries. It would, he said, “shock the living devil out of everyone in the US Senate.”
Biden’s antipathy to government spending and deficits found its most radical expression in the form of the balanced budget constitutional amendment, which he had viewed as laughable and dangerous in previous decades. But with the advent of the 1990s, he now warmed up to it. To the relief of progressives and hundreds of economists, the amendment never passed under Clinton. But with the help of a wavering Biden, it came perilously close. With the backing of Biden, its chairman, the Judiciary Committee started the decade by endorsing the amendment two years in a row. A 1991 report he issued warned that “the spree of deficit spending by our federal government must be curbed.” All the while, Biden acknowledged it would be a disaster.
The 1995 version of the amendment, which required the prohibitively high threshold of three-fifths of both chambers of Congress to either raise the debt limit or pass a non–balanced budget, was sponsored and championed by Illinois’s Paul Simon, one of the Senate’s stalwart liberals, and backed by prominent Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle and, of course, Biden. After several Democratic attempts to make it more forgiving failed, Biden and the rest of the committee, on a 15–3 vote, once more sent the amendment to the Senate. In the end, a sufficient number of Democrats were spooked by the threat posed to Social Security and other programs to defeat the amendment, including Daschle and even California’s conservative senator Dianne Feinstein, both of whom had been on board with the idea in 1994. But the decisions of Biden and two other Democrats to switch their votes in favor of the amendment brought it a mere two votes shy of the two-thirds majority needed for passage.
Whatever economic motivation Biden may have had to support the amendment was undercut when more than one thousand economists, including eleven Nobel Prize winners, signed a letter pleading with Congress not to adopt it. One economist, Nobel laureate James Tobin, cautioned it would “put the federal government into a fiscal straitjacket” during economic crises; another compared its insistence on keeping spending strictly below revenue to “telling the Atlantic Ocean not to cross a line in the sand.”
Despite dithering in the days leading up to the vote, Biden voted for the third straight year to approve the amendment that even he — along with just about everyone outside of antigovernment, right-wing circles, including his local newspaper — had warned would bring economic catastrophe. He joined all fifty-five of the Senate’s Republicans and just ten other Democrats. The amendment failed by just one vote. Against Biden’s best efforts, disaster had been averted. https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/60905-focus-joe-biden-tried-to-cut-social-security-medicaid-and-medicare-for-40-years
2020-01-17 Joe Biden has a disastrous history on Social Security that Democrats should fear Recently, a newsletter from the Bernie Sanders campaign laid out Joe Biden’s long record of supporting cuts to Social Security. In a 2018 speech, Biden says, “we need to do something about Social Security and Medicare” and that Social Security “needs adjustments.” Biden did not elaborate on what these “adjustments” were, but a look at his long history on Social Security is telling.
In the 1980s, Biden sponsored a plan to freeze all federal spending, including Social Security. In the 1990s, Biden was a leading supporter of a balanced budget amendment, considered a catastrophe for Social Security by two left-center think tanks. Biden led “grand bargain” negotiations with Republicans as vice president that” would have given Republicans structural, permanent cuts to Social Security in return for tax increases on the wealthy that would be rolled back as soon as a Republican president got elected to office.
When corporate-friendly politicians like Biden use those words “change,” “adjust,” or even “save” , they are trying to signal to elite media and billionaire donors that they are “very serious people” who are open to cutting Social Security benefits, without giving away the game to voters. That’s because cutting Social Security is incredibly unpopular with voters of all political stripes. https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/joe-biden-has-a-disastrous-history-on-social-security-that-democrats-should-fear/
A Bolton-Biden Witness Deal? It could be bad for Trump, and even worse for Biden. As more Republicans are open to calling witnesses, McConnell could demand for the sake of party unity that they go along with the Biden for Bolton deal, as Hawley has suggested. He’d probably prevail. And that would be bad for both Biden and President Trump. https://prospect.org/politics/a-bolton-biden-witness-deal-impeachment-trial/
2019-11-26 Betrayed by Joe Biden: a Personal History When President George H.W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to “replace” my idol, Thurgood Marshall, I was disgusted. To me, Thomas seemed unfit to even carry Thurgood Marshall’s briefcase.
Apparently, other lawyers agreed. The American Bar Association rated Clarence Thomas “unqualified,” the first time the ABA had rated any Supreme Court nominee unqualified. And the press quoted women recounting vulgar and persistent harassment they’d endured from Thomas when he’d served as Chair of the U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment Commission – the very agency charged with eliminating workplace discrimination.
I was encouraged when Biden convened the Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearing of Thomas. I expected Biden would fulfil the promises he’d made in numerous campaigns and speeches and at my high school two decades earlier. The Judiciary Committee seemed to have plenty of ammunition to stop Thomas and force Bush to nominate a more moderate, better-qualified judge who hadn’t abused his power by harassing women. At Biden’s urging, one of the complainants, Anita Hill, agreed to testify.
Well, the rest, as they say, is history. Biden didn’t bother to call witnesses from the ABA to explain their “unqualified” rating or other lawyers who’d worked with Thomas. He didn’t defend Anita Hill from vicious attacks by Republican Senators during the hearing and in the press. And he didn’t bother to call corroborating witnesses to support her. When Thomas (predictably) played the race card, describing the Senate hearing as a “high-tech lynching of an uppity black man,” Biden seemed to fold before the cameras.
The consequences of Biden’s ineptitude are profound and enduring. In case anyone has forgotten, in 2000, Clarence Thomas was one of the five Supreme Court justices who voted to halt the Florida recount. Arguably, if Biden had done his job, Bush might have been forced to nominate a moderate and more qualified judge who didn’t owe quite so much to the Republican Party. And maybe a President Gore would have managed to enact climate legislation. https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/11/26/betrayed-by-joe-biden-a-personal-history/
2019-11-07 ‘The Answer Is Not Joe Biden’: The Nation Magazine Issues Official Anti-Endorsement “Biden’s long record of poor judgment—on everything from the 1994 crime bill that fueled mass incarceration to his botched handling of Anita Hill’s testimony against Clarence Thomas to his defense of Bill Clinton’s brutal welfare cuts to his support for the Iraq War to his role as cheerleader for Wall Street deregulation,” argues The Nation editorial, make the candidate a uniquely weak opponent to put up against President Donald Trump, “whose reelection poses a clear and present danger to America’s survival as a constitutional republic.”
2019-10-16 DC’s Atlantic Council Raked In Funding From Hunter Biden’s Corruption-Stained Employer While Courting His VP Father In mainstream media reports about the Bidens, scarcely any attention is given to the critical role that Joe Biden and other Obama administration officials played in the 2013-2014 Maidan revolt that replaced a fairly elected, Russian-oriented government with a Western vassal. In a relatively sympathetic New Yorker profile of Hunter Biden, for example, the regime change operation was described by reporter Adam Entous as merely “public protests.”
During the height of the so-called “Revolution of Dignity” that played out in Kiev’s Maidan Square, then-Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland boasted that the US had “invested $5 billion” since 1991 into Ukrainian civil society. On a December 2013 tour of the Maidan, Nuland personally handed out cookies to protesters alongside then-US ay Feb. 2014, the Maidan revolt had succeeded in overthrowing Yanukovich with the help of far-right ultra-nationalist street muscle. With a new, US-approved government in power, Biden assumed a personal role in dictating Ukraine’s day-to-day affairs.
“No one in the U.S. government has wielded more influence over Ukraine than Vice President Joe Biden,” Foreign Policy noted. The Atlantic Council also described Biden as “the point person on Ukraine in the Obama administration.” Addressing the parliament in Kiev, Biden declared that “corruption can have no place in the new Ukraine,” stating that the “United States has also been a driving force behind the IMF, working to provide a multi-billion package to help Ukraine..” That same month, Hunter Biden was appointed to the board of Burisma.
Hunter Biden was no stranger to trading on his father’s name for influence. He had served on the board of Amtrak, the train line his father famously rode more than 8,000 times, earning himself the nickname “Amtrak Joe.” Somehow, he also rose to senior vice president at MBNA, the bank that was the top contributor to Joe Biden’s senate campaigns.
Moreover, the vice president’s son reaped a board position at the National Democratic Institute, a US-funded “democracy promotion” organization that was heavily involved in pushing regime change in Ukraine. And then there was Burisma, which handed him a position on its board despite his total lack of experience in the energy industry and in Ukrainian affairs.
2019-09-30 Solomon: These Once-Secret Memos Cast Doubt On Joe Biden’s Ukraine Story Former Vice President Joe Biden, now a 2020 Democratic presidential contender, has locked into a specific story about the controversy in Ukraine. He insists that, in spring 2016, he strong-armed Ukraine to fire its chief prosecutor solely because Biden believed that official was corrupt and inept, not because the Ukrainian was investigating a natural gas company, Burisma Holdings, that hired Biden’s son, Hunter, into a lucrative job.
2019-09-29 ‘Ukrainegate’ Teaches Us More About Ourselves Than Trump https://popularresistance.org/solomon-these-once-secret-memos-cast-doubt-on-joe-bidens-ukraine-story/ Or Biden While Trump is deservedly at serious risk for impeachment, the risk to Biden is also growing. Politico reports that Joe Biden is waging war on the Hunter Biden-Ukraine reporting. The risk to Biden is existential, he needs Democrats to remain silent and for the impeachment inquiry not to examine what Trump was investigating in Ukraine.
In January 2018, Biden bragged on video in his speech to the Council on Foreign Relations how he pressured Ukraine to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin saying he would not approve a $1 billion dollar IMF loan if Shokin was not fired before Biden left Ukraine during a six-hour visit. On April 1, The Hill published an article that reports: “The prosecutor [Biden] got fired was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings that employed Biden’s younger son, Hunter, as a board member.” They report Rosemont Seneca Partners received “regular transfers into one of its accounts — usually more than $166,000 a month — from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015,” confirmed by US banking records. Shokin’s file shows prosecutors identified Hunter Biden, business partner Devon Archer, and their firm, Rosemont Seneca, as potential recipients of the money.
The article further reports that Shokin wrote before he was fired that he had made “specific plans” for the investigation that “included interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden.” This is consistent with a sworn affidavit of Shokin (see shokin-ukraine-prosecutor-sworn-statement) where he said, “Poroshenko asked me to resign due to pressure from…Joe Biden…who was threatening to withhold USD $1 billion in subsidies to Ukraine until I was removed.” There were no complaints against Shokin at the time. He explains, “The truth is I was forced out because I was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe of Bursima Holdings.” Shokin describes how Poroshenko had asked him to end the probe multiple times and he had refused.
2019-09-11 Joe Biden – 17 Minutes Of Joe’s Melting Brain
2019-07-26 To Defeat Trump, ‘the Resistance’ Must Own Up to Its Own White Supremacy From immigration to climate, the white left’s blind spots have sullied even well intentioned efforts to combat Trump, the far right, and ecological collapse.
Under the Obama administration, the repressive institutional practices of border enforcement accelerated. Border agents destroyed and obstructed humanitarian supplies for migrants with impunity. And family detention was introduced as a cornerstone of Obama’s effort to contain what his administration described as a migrant “crisis.”
In 2014, in a horrifying precursor to Trump’s family separation policy, Hillary Clinton declared: “Just because your child gets across the border, that doesn’t mean your child gets to stay.” Living conditions in detention facilities were atrocious, and the authorities received over 5,000 sexual abuse complaints from migrants, including minors.
This July, when families of victims among the roughly 3 million immigrants deported under the Obama administration held a protest sit-in at Joe Biden’s campaign headquarters, six people were arrested by police — but no one from the Biden campaign could be bothered to respond to the group. This is nothing new. Biden previously worked with racist senators to oppose policies that would overturn racial segregation in schools. Make no mistake. Bigotry is bipartisan — and we need to root it out in our own movements if we want a hope of taking out the Trump administration.
No wonder Rep. Rashida Tlaib has said that “Islamophobia is very much among the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.” While the Republicans have an overt history of racism that has intensified under Trump, the Democrats have a long track record of institutional racism that goes largely unchallenged. https://fpif.org/to-defeat-trump-the-resistance-must-own-up-to-its-own-white-supremacy/
2019-07-14 Immigration Rights Demonstrators Sit-In At Biden’s Headquarters Movimiento Cosecha, an immigrant rights organization, organized a sit-in protest at Joe Biden’s campaign headquarters Wednesday in search of an apology for the deportation of 3 million immigrants during President Barack Obama’s presidency. https://popularresistance.org/immigration-rights-demonstrators-sit-in-at-bidens-headquarters/
2019-07-11 Joe Biden Was One of the Iraq War’s Most Enthusiastic Backers Joe Biden didn’t just vote to invade Iraq — he worked hard alongside George W. Bush to persuade the public to back it. Biden holds significant responsibility for the bloodshed that has engulfed Iraq and the surrounding region since the invasion. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/07/joe-biden-iraq-war-hawk-presidential-candidate
2019-07-10 Joe Biden: Protector of the Deep State During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Biden sat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which was established upon recommendation of the 1975/1976 Pike committee to provide “vigilant legislative oversight over the intelligence activities of the United States to assure that such activities are in conformity with the Constitution and laws of the United States.” Biden himself admitted that the Senate Intelligence Committee failed at this latter task.
By the 1980s, Biden was supporting increases in intelligence and counterintelligence funding after Jimmy Carter had tried to cut the CIA’s staff by a third. In 1980, he voted to approve as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) William Casey, a staunch anticommunist who ramped up covert arms supplies to the Afghan mujahidin, Nicaraguan Contras and Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA forces in Angola. Biden supported Reagan’s War on Terrorism, whose double-standards were significant, and was a staunch proponent of the War on Drugs, even though he reviewed DEA reports on the illicit drug trade which would have pointed to the corruption of CIA allies.
In 1978, Biden helped to write the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which permitted electronic surveillance by the President to acquire foreign intelligence information for a period of up to one year without a court order and sanctioned secret court proceedings.
Biden should be judged as part of a generation of lawmakers who failed to reign in the “deep state.” Joe’s conversion from an opponent to a protector of the CIA in the 1970s set the groundwork for his Vice Presidency – and would do so for his presidency.
In the 2009 debate over the “surge” in Afghanistan, Biden characteristically wanted a small troop increase and more air strikes and drone attacks – the approach favored by the CIA. Biden also supported the CIA’s operations in Libya, Ukraine, Honduras, Venezuela and Syria, and backed the expansion of the private military industry under Obama, which is heavily dominated by the CIA. https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/07/10/joe-biden-protector-of-the-deep-state/
2019-06-20 Joe Biden Out of Stonewall Democrats have not been friends or allies of the queer community historically and it is unrealistic to think that they will ever be. In 2012, Joe Biden—and the Democratic Party as a whole—began to rebrand as an ally of the LGBT community. Biden even preceded Obama in publicly supporting gay marriage, causing something of a stir. But, prior to 2012, Biden was anything but a supporter of LGBTQ+ people. Biden voted for both Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT) and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), “defending” heterosexual marriage and barring LGBTQ+ people from the military. Both of these discriminatory measures were signed by then President Bill Clinton and voted for by a plurality of Democrats.
Even recently Biden has made statements that caused outrage within the queer community, most notably calling Mike Pence—a man who literally supports the torture of queer youth through ‘conversion therapy’—“a decent man.” The few times where Joe Biden actually voted for nominally pro-LGBTQ+ bills typically involved hate crime legislation which is in-keeping with Biden’s consistent belief that you can solve social problems (domestic violence, bigotry, drug abuse) with the Prison-Industrial Complex. This prison industrial complex is used as a weapon against people of color, and particularly queer people of color. Given that the Stonewall Uprising began with queer people fighting with the police to resist legal oppression, a man who has fought for decades to put more police on the street has no business appropriating the legacy of Stonewall. https://www.leftvoice.org/joe-biden-out-of-stonewall
2019-05-08 Joe Biden Personifies a New “End of History,” This time for U.S. Imperial Rule After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, U.S. and Western oligarchs celebrated the “end of history.” The oligarchs assumed that unfettered imperial rule and capitalist exploitation would permanently dominate the globe. Biden is indeed a favorite among the oligarchs to continue this project, but his very essence represents quite the opposite development.
Large numbers of people in the United States desire policies that are anathema to the Biden-Clinton wing of the Democratic Party. A new “end of history” is emerging, but this time for the empire. Majorities of voters in both parties want Medicare for All . The same goes for the Green New Deal . There is little support among the population for U.S. military expansionism , which is why it’s been cleverly cloaked as “humanitarian intervention.”https://www.blackagendareport.com/joe-biden-personifies-new-end-history-time-us-imperial-rule
2019-04-26 Joe Biden: An Imperial Corporatist Wrapped in the Bloody Flag of Charlottesville Besides being a grabby old coot who needs to stop joking about complaints over his serially inappropriate touching of females, Joe Biden is a grinning neoliberal sell-out who stands well to the right of majority progressive public opinion.
The media trope that portrays “Lunch-Bucket Joe” Biden as a regular, down-to-earth guy who cares deeply about regular folks is pure, unadulterated bullshit. His real constituents wear pinstripe suits and works on Wall Street and in corporate headquarters. They fly around in fancy private jets. And the supposed “everyman liberal” Joe Biden is their loyal apparatchik. It’s not for nothing that Biden relies on big money backers, not small and working-class donors – and that he is an especially close ally and beneficiary of Washington lobbyists. He has spent decades ripping on progressive “special interests” while joining with Republicans to advance policies harmful to the working-class. https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/04/26/joe-biden-an-imperial-corporatist-wrapped-in-the-bloody-flag-of-charlottesville/
2019-01-18 The Biden Band-Aid: Will Democrats Contain the Insurgency? In all likelihood the Democratic establishment will seek a “safe” candidate like Biden, one who would not challenge political conventions like a “democratic socialist” or be an African-American, Hispanic or another woman. Biden is the perfect band-aid candidate, one well-tested in compromise or “bi-partisan” politics.
n 1990, Biden opposed the Gulf War but in 1998 switched positions and supported the Iraq invasion, calling Saddam Hussein a national-security threat. More troubling, he’s been a long-term backer of bank deregulation and – like Clinton and Obama — close to Wall Street financiers. He helped secure the passage of the “new Jim Crow” legislation, Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, that Clinton signed. And in 2001 he backed the USA PATRIOT Act – i.e., Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act – that institutionalized the national security state. Biden is an old-hand playing the political hand he’s dealt.
Perhaps most important, Biden’s run – and possible victory — can help the Democratic Party establishment contain the grassroots insurgency that spouted in the mid-term 2018 elections. The U.S. is in the midst of a great restructuring, with globalization superseding the American Century, inequality replacing the American Dream. One of the lessons of the 2018 midterm election was that Trump’s false policies of 2016 are not working, and more and more people, including among his supports, know it.
2018-08-17 Joe Biden, the Unreliable Pro-Choice Advocate Joe Biden’s political career is one of constantly waffling on women’s right to choose. He is an unreliable ally in the fight for abortion rights. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/08/joe-biden-abortion-president
2017-01-03 Joe Biden Is Running Out of Pickup Lines “What a beautiful smile,” Biden says to a younger woman with dark hair in Sen. Boozman’s family. “You have very good taste,” Biden says to a younger male family member of Sen. Murkowski, apparently about the man’s wife. “Mom I want to know what you’re drinkin’,” Biden says to Sen. Cortez-Masto’s mom. Says she looks more like her sister. https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/joe-biden-senate-swearing-in-chuck-grassley.html
2016-12-07 U.S. First Shields Its Torturers and War Criminals From Prosecution, Now Officially Honors Them President Obama made the decision in early 2009 to block the Justice Department from criminally investigating and prosecuting Cheney and his fellow torturers, as well as to protect them from foreign investigations and even civil liability sought by torture victims. Obama did that notwithstanding a campaign decree that even top Bush officials are subject to the rule of law and, more importantly, notwithstanding a treaty signed in 1984 by Ronald Reagan requiring that all signatory states criminally prosecute their own torturers. Obama’s immunizing Bush-era torturers converted torture from a global taboo and decades-old crime into a reasonable, debatable policy question, which is why so many GOP candidates are now openly suggesting its use.
2015-03-Continuing the Crackdown on Kids The “Biden Plan” for Central America treats refugee children as a national security threat. Tucked into the administration’s 2016 budget requestthe plan has been christened “Biden’s Billion” for its major promoter and the amount he expects U.S. taxpayers to put up to support it. It divides aid into three “lines of action”: security, economic development, and governance.
Yet in every one of these areas, the response repeats errors of the past. Rather than focusing on a response to the humanitarian crisis of child refugees, it serves as a vehicle for deepening the drug war and “free-trade” agendas that have contributed to the crisis.
The plan requests $300 million for security assistance, a considerable increase over previous regional collaborations like the Merida Initiative and the Central American Regional Security Initiative. The increase goes mainly to the region’s police forces. This essentially rewards known human rights violators.
The United Nations concluded that 58 percent of the child refugees it interviewed had international protection needs, including a staggering 72 percent of Salvadoran children.
Yet for all its fanfare, the Biden plan makes no attempt to respond to this urgent need to keep children safe. In fact, through its border security measures and the likelihood of increased deportations from the United States and Mexico, it exacerbates their plight. The plan actually transfers millions of dollars out of child and maternal health to fund the new security measures.
The policies to deport migrants from Mexico are creating greater perils for them en route and back home. Father Alejandro Solalinde, who runs a migrant shelter in southern Mexico, worries that “They’re sending them right into the arms of the cartels.” That’s just what the plan does.
2013-01-07 The Corruption of Joe Biden Biden is a would-be working-man-of-the-people was re-elected US senator from the Moneybags Corporate State of Delaware for over 36 years, a period known for the inexorable slow demise of labor unions. While Biden may scrap with Republicans, he is a classic Cold War Liberal in the Hubert Humphrey mode, pushing moderately progressive legislation while reinforcing the pillars of imperial militarism and the burgeoning police-state that is post-9/11 America.
I submit that that hell is what we’re living through today: Unquestioned, bi-partisan, fiscally irresponsible, mostly-secret militarism accompanied by a highly partisan struggle in congress for the left-over domestic scraps. Another aspect of that partisan struggle is over what is the cause of the nation’s grotesque deficit: Militarism or domestic so-called Entitlements?
The point is, anyone who says there is no bi-partisanship in Congress is wearing blinders. When it comes to military, intelligence, surveillance and police expenditures, bi-partisanship is impregnable. Consider how the recent FISA national surveillance legislation — ie., spying on the citizenry, something that should be controversial — breezed through Congress and the White House two weeks ago.
iden had been on the famous Church Committee in the late ‘70s that investigated intelligence excesses. “The experience convinced him that crime should be viewed as a form of domestic security,” writes Ted Gest inCrime & Politics: Big Government’s Erratic Campaign for Law and Order. Biden’s first effort in this vein was developing the National Security and Violent Crime Control Act. It was an “attempt to put crime in a defense context — getting the armed forces involved in drug interdiction, for example.”
making laws is not always a pretty business. But that doesn’t mean our laws have to be nasty-smelling things forged out of corrupt back-room deals designed to bamboozle tax payers. The only reason the current struggles are so vile is that there is so much secrecy and dishonesty focused on sustaining an American imperial militarism around the world. This militarism, as happens in all cases of declining empire, eats resources that might maintain the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, provide for the social needs of American citizens and the general welfare of the homeland. It’s that simple. https://www.counterpunch.org/2013/01/07/the-corruption-of-joe-biden/
2012-03-15 Honduras: When Engagement Becomes Complicity Honduran security forces are murdering, raping, beating, and detaining Hondurans — with U.S. aid. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden traveled to Honduras on March 6 with a double mission: to quell talk of drug legalization and reinforce the U.S.-sponsored drug war in Central America, and to bolster the presidency of Porfirio Lobo. In a March 1 press briefing, U.S. National Security Advisor Tony Blinken cited “the tremendous leadership President Lobo has displayed in advancing national reconciliation and democratic and constitutional order.”
You’d think they were talking about a different country from the one we visited just weeks before on a fact-finding mission on violence against women. What we found was a nation submerged in violence and lawlessness, a president incapable or unwilling to do much about it, and a justice system in shambles. https://fpif.org/honduras_when_engagement_becomes_complicity/
2011-12-11 Joe Biden Drafted the Core of the Patriot Act in 1995 … Before the Oklahoma City Bombing Months before the Oklahoma City bombing took place, 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.”
2010-09-07 Biden Embraces Myth That Surge Turned Iraq Into Good War In an interview on the PBS NewsHour last Wednesday, Joe Biden was unwilling to contradict the official narrative of the Iraq War that Gen. David Petraeus and the Bush surge had turned Iraq into a good war after all. That interview serves as a reminder of just how completely the Democratic Party foreign policy elite has adopted that narrative. https://fpif.org/biden_embraces_myth_that_surge_turned_iraq_into_good_war/
Alternative Media sources discuss Donald Trump as President and candidate!
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Trump Administration Needs to be Investigated and Punished for any Crimes they have committed
The first order of business for this new administration is to ensure that he appoints a good attorney general (how about Preet Bharara?) and have him/her go to town. Any trump administration official who has committed crimes should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. And these GOP cheaters in MN and elsewhere should receive the same treatment. There needs to be some real accountability for GOP misdeeds or they will continue to worsen and someday in the not too distant future they will succeed in creating a totalitarian state here. (as in 2020-11-06 RoadTripBoy comment) https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/11/6/1993438/-The-RNC-is-recruiting-Republican-activists-across-the-nation-to-make-false-claims-of-election-fraud#comment_79224403
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2020-11-21 In ‘Tremendous Rebuke’ of Trump Appointee, Federal Judge Bars US Media Agency Head From Interfering in News Coverage “Michael Pack has repeatedly and intentionally violated the First Amendment rights of VOA journalists.” President Donald Trump’s appointed head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media is barred from making any further editorial or personnel decisions following a series of injunctions issued by a federal court late Friday, in what journalists called a major rebuke of the Trump administration’s attempt to reshape government-funded news broadcasters. https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/11/21/tremendous-rebuke-trump-appointee-federal-judge-bars-us-media-agency-head
2020-11-21 A Disgrace’: Trump’s DOJ Schedules Three More Federal Executions in Days Before Anti-Death Penalty Biden Takes Office “We all should be paying more attention to the killing spree that the Justice Department is currently engaging in.” Two months before President-elect Joe Biden is set to take office and halt the use of the federal death penalty, President Donald Trump’s Justice Department on Friday evening announced it plans to execute three more death row inmates in addition to three whose state-sanctioned killings were already planned for the coming weeks. The announcement came a day after the execution of Orlando Hall—the first American to be put to death by the federal government by a lame-duck administration in more than a century. https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/11/21/disgrace-trumps-doj-schedules-three-more-federal-executions-days-anti-death-penalty
2020-11-20 ‘Certify the Results!’: GOP Michigan Lawmakers Blasted for ‘Legitimizing a Fascist Coup Attempt’ by Meeting With Trump Two Republican lawmakers in the Michigan legislature were reprimanded on Friday as they made their way to the White House for a meeting with President Donald Trump, who has endeavoured to overturn the election results in key battleground states won by President-elect Joe Biden. Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) called the meeting between State Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, Speaker of the State House of Representatives Lee Chatfield, and the president “an attempt to subvert our democracy and undermine the will of Michigan voters.” Bob Bauer, a legal adviser to the Biden campaign, described Trump’s invitation as “an open attempt to intimidate election officials,” which is “an abuse of office.”https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/11/20/certify-results-gop-michigan-lawmakers-blasted-legitimizing-fascist-coup-attempt
2020-11-20 Let Trump Off the Hook in the Name of Elusive Unity? Some Critics Say That Could Be a Big Mistake One observer stressed that the Justice Department must “keep its options open, and not prematurely foreclose on the possibility of criminal investigations.” In a nation that doesn’t punish—and often lionizes—its leaders who perpetrate or support genocide, nuclear war, mass murder, torture, and other crimes against humanity, Democrats calling for probes and prosecution of Trump have given what are arguably his worst offenses a pass. Democratic presidents, after all, also wage wars that kill thousands of civilians, support murderous regimes, and ignore refugee rights.
“In the end, the dilemma over what to do about Donald Trump may be less about Trump than it is about the structural problems his presidency exposed.” —Jonathan Mahler, New York Times Magazine. Absent any prospect of punishment for policies and actions critics call war crimes and crimes against humanity, those hoping to see Trump face some sort of justice must settle for more mundane misdeeds. The most realistic prospects—those openly discussed in the halls of power and the corporate mainstream media—would likely involve Trump’s alleged bribery, obstruction of justice, conspiracy to defraud the United States, campaign finance violations, Census improprieties, and Hatch Act violations. https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/11/20/let-trump-hook-name-elusive-unity-some-critics-say-could-be-big-mistake
2020-11-20 Trump Administration Accused of Trying to Bully Banks Into Financing Arctic Fossil Fuel Extraction “Contrary to the claims of oil-backed politicians, banks don’t want to finance more drilling in the Arctic not because of some vast liberal conspiracy, but because it’s bad business,” said a Sierra Club leader. Responding to grassroots pressure and shareholder activism, five of the six largest U.S. banks have decided they want no part of financing fossil fuel drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—but that isn’t stopping the Trump administration from what critics on Friday called bullying banks into funding oil and gas extraction.https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/11/20/trump-administration-accused-trying-bully-banks-financing-arctic-fossil-fuel
2020-11-18 Freedom Rider: The Real Trump Coup Trump is a political force, even as he leaves the White House. He is the true face of the Republican Party, even as “never Trumpers” claim otherwise. Not only do his supporters agree that he was cheated, but they protest in support of him as they did in the Million MAGA March in Washington. It is interesting to watch the hand wringing because Trump is once again blowing up the political system. His claims of fraudulent voting are no worse than the Democratic Party and their friends among the elite establishment pushing the Russiagate fraud. People and institutions deemed trustworthy, prestigious and eminent, all turned the system upside down and did lasting damage to electoral politics, the media, and to public trust in government.
The people undermining democracy are the establishment figures who gerrymander districts, the military industrial complex which buys off both parties, and the prosecutors who always find a way to keep black people behind bars.
Of course, Trump would have less success if the Democrats offered people what they need. The angry white racists will surely remain amongst us, but some of them would be peeled off if they saw a clear personal advantage in voting for Democrats. If that party were half as inclusive and as helpful to working people as it claims, there would never have been a Trump presidency at all. There is no coup, just the corruption we are told to accept. Trump will throw bombs on his way out the door. He changed politics forever but the way to beat him is simple. Just meet the people’s needs. https://www.blackagendareport.com/freedom-rider-real-trump-coup
2020-11-17 Trump’s New Toy: the Pentagon From the standpoint of government functionality, President Trump’s lame-duck seeding of the Department of Defense with inexpert loyalists—most of whom do not require Senate confirmation—seems conspicuously pointless and needlessly deleterious. Worries about national and international security and domestic political stability are understandable. But more dire reasons for alarm are readily dismissed, as cogently argued in The Atlantic by Kori Schake, who quite sensibly tallied it up to pure spite.
A predictable and hardly baseless suspicion is that Trump is planning some form of dramatic overseas military action—for instance, an attack on Iranian uranium reprocessing facilities—with an eye to vindicating his “maximum pressure” policy and to reducing President-elect Biden’s latitude for reviving the Iran nuclear deal, which he already did to some extent by ordering the assassination of Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps commander Qassem Soleimani in January. https://prospect.org/world/trump-new-toy-the-pentagon/
2020-11-17 Shocking Story out of Michigan Stunning turn of events tonight in Michigan. The Wayne County Board of Canvassers deadlocked and was unable to certify the county’s vote. Wayne County includes Detroit. The Board has two Republicans and two Democrats. The Republicans refused to certify. But tellingly the GOP Chair said they’d agree as long as Detroit was left out. Basically, they were trying to pull a power play in which they used their power to toss out the votes of the city of Detroit.
The state GOP jumped in and lauded the decision. Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis excitedly predicted it was the first step toward the GOP state legislature tossing out the results of the election and appointing Trump electors to the electoral college. Finally President Trump himself tweeted excitedly that it was a turning point.
2020-11-17 A vote to certify election results fails in a Michigan county, a rare victory for Trump. (corporate media) The two Republicans on the board said they had voted against certifying the results because many precincts in the county were out of balance by a few votes. Monica Palmer, one of the Republicans, suggested that the board would certify the county’s results without the totals from Detroit, where Mr. Biden won with 94 percent support.
UPDATE, 9:11 p.m. EST: After sparking nationwide outrage and a blistering rebuke from Benson about their not-so-subtle attempt to disenfranchise heavily pro-Biden African-American voters in Detroit, the two Republicans backed down. In an update just hours after the initial tie vote, the Wayne County Board of Canvassers reconvened and unanimously certified the vote, but asked Benson to audit the clerical errors found.
“Monica Palmer sat there and said she’s willing to approve the results of the lily-white city of Livonia, which had the second-highest number of out-of-balance precincts, but she won’t certify the city of Detroit,” “There is no reason to single out the city of Detroit for this racist treatment.” Detroit is 78 percent Black, while Livonia’s Black population is 4.4 percent.
The election results now move to Michigan’s Board of State Canvassers, which will complete the work that the Wayne County board could not finish. The state board also has a 2-2 Republican-Democratic split.
Jenna Ellis, a legal adviser to the Trump campaign, said explicitly on Tuesday that the goal was to enable Republican state legislators to choose Michigan’s electors even though Mr. Biden had clearly won the state — an extraordinary subversion of the democratic process.
The Republican members’ refusal to certify the results in Wayne County amounted to placing “partisan politics above their legal duty to certify the election results,” Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan said in a statement on Tuesday. “Today’s action is a blatant attempt to undermine the will of the voters. The process, however, will move forward.”
The Board of State Canvassers consists of two Democrats, Jeannette Bradshaw and Julie Matuzak, and two Republicans, Norman D. Shinkle and Aaron Van Langevelde. Mr. Shinkle’s wife, Mary Shinkle, filed an affidavit in support of the Trump campaign’s lawsuit claiming there were voting irregularities in Wayne County. Mr. Van Langevelde, the other Republican member of the Board of State Canvassers, is a former deputy legal counsel for the Michigan House’s Republican Policy office and a former prosecutor in Branch County. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/11/17/us/joe-biden-trump#a-vote-to-certify-election-results-fails-in-a-michigan-county-a-rare-victory-for-trump
2020-11-17 Presidential Transition Live Updates: Trump Fires Official Who Disputed Baseless Claims of Election Fraud (corporate media)Christopher Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, had called the election “the most secure in American history.” President Trump on Tuesday night fired his administration’s most senior cybersecurity official responsible for securing the presidential election, Christopher Krebs, who had systematically disputed Mr. Trump’s false declarations that the presidency was stolen from him through fraudulent ballots and software glitches that changed millions of votes. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/11/17/us/joe-biden-trump#trump-fires-christopher-krebs-official-who-disputed-his-election-fraud-claims
2020-11-17 Trump CORONAVIRUS VACCINE Donation Appeal to Supporters (Trump e-mail)Friend, Did you hear the latest update on Operation Warp Speed? ANOTHER Coronavirus Vaccine was just announced. This time, by Moderna. Studies show that it is almost 95% EFFECTIVE – this is excellent news.
For all of the great historians, remember that these unprecedented discoveries, which will END the China Plague, all took place on my watch. If Biden were President, this would have taken much longer – perhaps even years. The Fake News media will never report on our incredible progress. They don’t care about reporting the TRUTH, they only care about appeasing their partners, the Democrats. Remember, what we’ve accomplished is HISTORIC, Friend. Next year will be our BEST YEAR YET, but only if we continue putting America First for FOUR MORE YEARS. Defending the Election is critical – can I count on YOU to step up?
2020-11-16 Judges appear increasingly frustrated with Trump’s legal claims about election (corporate media) “At what point does this get ridiculous?” the exasperated judge, an appointee of President Barack Obama, asked before ruling against the Republicans. In court hearings and opinions around the country, judges are voicing similar frustrations with the Trump campaign’s legal filings to a degree rarely seen in venues where political rhetoric is generally unwelcome, experts and courthouse veterans said. “Judge after judge after judge has asked, in essence, ‘Where is the beef?'” said Karl Racine, the attorney general for the District of Columbia and a frequent Trump critic, in a call with reporters Friday. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/judges-appear-increasingly-frustrated-with-trump-s-legal-claims-about-election/ar-BB1b3cdT?
2020-11-16 CNN Reporter Details How Flailing Trump Team Has Devolved Into Circular Firing Squad: One Official Shouted at Giuliani He’s a ‘F-ing A-Hole’ CNN senior White House correspondent Pamela Brown portrayed a Trump campaign effort coming apart at the seams as its elections lawsuits continue to fail, with top officials angrily hurling claims of dishonesty and obscenities at each other in a highly charged Oval Office meeting with the president. During an appearance on Anderson Cooper 360 on Monday night, Brown offered shocking details in a behind-the-scenes account of the meeting, which Donald Trump himself had convened at the White House after he was apparently shocked by his legal team’s decision to abandon an election lawsuit in Arizona.https://www.mediaite.com/election-2020/cnn-reporter-details-how-flailing-trump-team-has-devolved-into-circular-firing-squad-one-official-shouted-at-giuliani-hes-a-f-ing-a-hole/
2020-11-16 Trump Has No Path to Win, Says Bush’s 2000 Florida Recount Team (corporate media) Several members of Bush’s team in 2000 predict this election won’t be overturned because of the size of Biden’s lead in multiple states and a lack of evidence on which to base any claims. “You can’t just say, ‘This election’s tainted, throw it out,’” said Benjamin Ginsberg, national counsel for Bush’s 2000 campaign. “You have to have some specificity, and so far, they’re sorely lacking in specificity. Their airplane crashed on takeoff because they forgot to add fuel.”
Ted Olson, the lead attorney for Bush in the U.S. Supreme Court case in 2000 that ended the recount in Florida and delivered the presidency for him, said there’s no doubt about the outcome. “I do believe the election is over,” Olson said at a Federalist Society event last week. “We do have a new president.” Even Karl Rove, Bush’s top strategist in 2000, said in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that Trump’s litigation to overturn Biden leads won’t succeed.
2020-11-16 Obama said he was surprised at top Republicans who did a ‘complete 180 on everything they claimed to believe’ to align with Trump (corporate media) Obama told The Atlantic he wasn’t surprised by the behavior of President Donald Trump during his time in office. But he said he was shocked to see Republicans position themselves as staunch Trump allies despite much of the president’s rhetoric and actions that break with the values of the party. “I did not believe how easily the Republican establishment, people who had been in Washington for a long time and had professed a belief in certain institutional values and norms, would just cave,” he said in the interview. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/obama-said-he-was-surprised-at-top-republicans-who-did-a-complete-180-on-everything-they-claimed-to-believe-to-align-with-trump/ar-BB1b3IeV?
2020-11-15 Tomgram: John Feffer, There’s No Returning to Normal After Trump Hillary Clinton would have faced challenges of every sort if she’d won the presidency in 2016. They nonetheless pale in comparison to what now awaits Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
The Republicans are already gunning for the new president. They’re blocking the transition process to handicap the incoming administration. President Trump has forbidden federal agencies from even cooperating with the Biden-Harris team. The 2020 presidential election forms part of the Republican Party’s denialism trifecta: the pandemic, climate change, and now Biden’s victory are all simply liberal “myths.” The Republican Party will either control the Senate — pending the outcome of two run-off races in Georgia — or, at least, be able to disrupt any major pieces of legislation.
The Biden administration will be hard-pressed to roll back the tax cuts the Republicans handed out to the wealthy in 2017, pass a major green infrastructure bill, or expand affordable health care. When Biden tries to implement a nationally cohesive program to combat Covid-19 through more testing, tracing, and investment in medical equipment, he’s guaranteed to face resistance from a number of Republican governors who have refused even to mandate the wearing of masks. And then there are all those Republican-appointed judges just itching to rule on any legal challenges to Biden’s executive orders, not to speak of a Supreme Court now located in the bleachers beyond right field that will serve as an even greater constraint on an activist agenda.
*2020-11-13 A look at 5 false or misleading Trump team claims of election fraud (corporate media) False claim: Ballots were counted, even though they arrived late. False claim: Military ballots went missing in Georgia? Unsupported claim: late ballots were backdated in an attempt to allow them to be counted. False claim: “Software glitch” caused ballots to switch from Trump to Biden in Michigan. Misleading claim: Observers were not granted access to see the vote counting process. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/false-misleading-trump-team-claims-election-fraud/story?
2020-11-13 NOW WE HAVE TO FIGHT TRUMP’S TIN-POT COUP — AND BIDEN’S WORST INSTINCTS Republicans keep finding new ways to tell us that they don’t believe in democracy, and we should believe them. To be clear, the reason a tin-pot coup attempt remains highly unlikely has nothing to do with the laughable idea that Republican lawmakers have too much respect for core democratic principles to engage is such a brazen power grab. These are people who owe their holds on state power, and in many cases their entire careers, to openly anti-democratic redistricting schemes and other wily tools of suppressing, at all costs, the terrifying prospect of majority rule. They keep finding new ways to tell us that they don’t actually believe in representative democracy, and we should believe them.
Moreover, the tactic of taking minor voting irregularities and outlandishly inflating them to the level of election-stealing, thereby justifying a very real coup d’etat, has been the go-to tactic in countless U.S.-backed “regime-change” operations around the world — schemes supported, it must be said, by Republicans and Democrats alike.
Do not tell yourself they are above bringing the tactic home. If the Republican Party refrains, and I believe it will, it won’t be out of fealty to democracy but rather out of loyalty to market and empire.
Given this reality, Joe Biden’s “Come on, man” approach of brushing off Republican election denialism as an “embarrassment,” rather than a serious threat, is probably a poor one. The Republican strategy, if they do go down this road, relies on state legislators appealing to a perception — not a reality — that the public has lost faith in the election results. That’s a lot easier to claim if the only people screaming outside your offices and bombarding you with phone calls and emails are Trump supporters shouting conspiracy theories about voter fraud, while the people who would see a challenge to certified results as a straight-up coup have already moved on, convinced that Republicans wouldn’t dare cross yet another democratic red line so they aren’t even bothering to make the point. https://theintercept.com/2020/11/13/trump-coup-republicans-biden/
2020-11-13 1,000 Legal Experts Sign Letter Condemning ‘Shameful Attack’ on Democracy as Trump Continues Baseless Election Lies “The president seeks an unconstitutional ‘restriction on the right to vote’… He is violating his duty to defend the Constitution.” A coalition of 1,000 legal experts and scholars Friday denounced as unconstitutional President Donald Trump’s ongoing refusal to accept the election results and called on his legal team to meet their “ethical obligations” by ending their support for the his false claims and assertions.
2020-11-13 Pompeo committed treacherous sedition with his announcement of Trump’s coup In answer to a Fox News’s reporter’s question about the transition, Pompeo relied, “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.”
That comment, by the senior Cabinet officer of the United States, sent foreign ministries around the world, as well as the diplomatic corps in the United States, into a bewildered frenzy. The U.S. Secretary of State position is far more than that of a foreign minister. The Secretary of State also acts as a type of notary and official document repository for the Executive Branch of government. The Secretary of State acknowledges and archives documents such as international treaties, instruments of surrender, and letters of resignation from the president and vice president of the United States. On three occasions in U.S. history the Secretary of State has received such letters:
Pompeo was misusing his position in an official capacity and to a degree never before seen in American history. “The world should have every confidence that the transition necessary to make sure that the State Department is function today, successful today, and successful with a president who’s in office on 20th January, a minute after noon, will also be successful.” That comment was a signal to the world that countries with which the United States has diplomatic relations had better not think about conferring recognition on Joe Biden as the president-elect of the United States. Pompeo’s seditious proclamation was ignored by the heads of state and government of Canada, Germany, France, Japan, Australia, Turkey, and over 200 other nations, all of whom had extended congratulations to Biden on being elected the 46th president of the United States. http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/31302
2020-11-13 ‘Pathetic’: Sanders, Khanna Slam Trump and GOP for Spreading Election Lies as Pandemic Surges “Every day without a new Covid relief bill is an outrage beyond words.” “Instead of fighting to defeat the Covid-19 pandemic that has killed over 242,000 Americans, the Trump administration is spending its final days in office fighting a bogus voter ‘fraud’ problem that does not exist,” said Sanders https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/11/13/pathetic-sanders-khanna-slam-trump-and-gop-spreading-election-lies-pandemic-surges
2020-11-13 White House official admits the administration is still pretending Biden didn’t win White House trade adviser Peter Navarro claimed on Friday that White House officials are still operating as if President Donald Trump will remain in office for a second term despite him losing the presidential election to President-elect Joe Biden.
“We are moving forward here at the White House under the assumption there will be a second Trump term,” Navarro said on Friday morning. Due to Trump’s refusal to concede, his staffers have followed suit. Navarro noted the uphill legal battle Trump is attempting to fight in hopes of having the election results overturned. He claimed the White House would not focus on any aspects of transferring power to the Biden administration. https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/biden-transition/
2020-11-13 US Federal Election Commission Chairman Says Voter Fraud Is Taking Place The US Federal Election Commission Chairman Trey Trainor believes voter fraud is taking place in states still counting ballots and that the 2020 US Presidential Elections may be illegitimate. He said the lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign are “very valid allegations” that need to be “fully vetted” by the court system. He predicts some of the legal challenges will likely end up in the Supreme Court. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55867.htm
2020-11-13 The 2020 Elections: A Roundtable Five Dissent editorial board members discuss what the elections tell us about the path ahead for the left, center, and right in American politics. Timothy Shenk, Sheri Berman, Adom Getachew, Michael Kazin, Aziz Rana and Matthew Sitman https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-2020-elections-a-roundtable
2020-11-13 ‘He Cares About No One. Not a Soul’: Ire for Trump After 130 Secret Service Agents Reportedly Infected or Under Covid-19 Quarantine As the U.S. continues to hit daily records in coronavirus cases—and with at least 40 people within the president’s inner circle having been infected. Friday more than 130 Secret Service officers are now in quarantine because they either tested positive for Covid-19 or had exposure to a co-worker who tested positive. “Trump was warned repeatedly that failure to take precautions could threaten the safety of those around him, but as he makes clear every day, he is only capable of thinking about himself.” The infections of Secret Serves staffers, according to the Post, are “believed to be partly linked to a series of campaign rallies that President Trump held in the weeks before the Nov. 3 election.
Trump’s total disregard for the lives of his protectors, supporters, and aides shows how dangerous his extreme selfishness has become,” Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) said in a statement. “The virus is spreading freely across the country, and Donald Trump has only made it worse by holding super-spreader rallies and events like the Election Night party, which appears to have infected several of his closest associates.” https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/11/13/he-cares-about-no-one-not-soul-ire-trump-after-130-secret-service-agents-reportedly
2020-11-13 Can Trump Pardon Himself? Jane Mayer on Trump’s Desperate Bid to Stay in Power & Avoid Prosecution I think you can see that he has many reasons to be concerned, at least, that if he leaves the White House, he’s going to lose the immunity that goes along with being president, for legal reasons. And I think, from what I understand, he’s quite concerned that he may face prosecution in New York, where a pardon from the White House wouldn’t be able to reach. https://www.democracynow.org/2020/11/13/jane_mayer_trump_2020_election
2020-11-13 Trump faces around two dozen legal threats leaving office — and he’s getting desperate Trump has many reasons to be concerned, at least, that if he leaves the White House, he’s going to lose the immunity that goes along with being president, for legal reasons. And I think, from what I understand, he’s quite concerned that he may face prosecution in New York, where a pardon from the White House wouldn’t be able to reach.
There are about two dozen different kinds of legal actions coming at him. By far, I think, the most serious is the investigation underway in New York City by the District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. It was a federal case against Michael Cohen, who had been Trump’s lawyer. Michael Cohen, as people remember, served a three-year — is still serving a three-year prison sentence. And when he was indicted, the indictment mentioned that there was an unindicted co-conspirator, who happened to have been — he wasn’t named by name, but it was clear that it was President Trump.
District Attorney’s Office has got an open criminal investigation into President Trump, looking at among all kinds of fraud in his business before he became president — bank fraud, insurance fraud, tax evasion and other kinds of fraud. So, that is ongoing. There is an open investigation, and it’s said to be quite a serious one.
Donald Trump has at least over $300 million of loans coming due in the next four years that he has personally backed, meaning he’s on the hook himself for these loans. He’s also got an IRS case that he appears to be losing. It’s an argument with the IRS about what he owes in taxes. It appears that if he loses it, he’s going to have to pay an additional $100 million. So he has tremendous liabilities hanging over his head.
If he’s out on the street, it’s going to be a lot harder. He’s going to be very hard up for where to find the cash to pay these things off. He could try to sell some of his assets, but because of the pandemic, some of those assets are worth a good bit less than they were before, because commercial real estate and resorts are in the tank right now. And so, he’s in a hard, hard spot, and as he is with facing these criminal investigations. And so, there are a lot of reasons he’s fighting so hard to stay inside the White House, according to people who know what’s going on inside. https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump-prosecution/
2020-11-13 Can Book Publishers Afford to Publish Donald Trump? When (if?) Donald Trump leaves office, he will be deeply in debt and starved of the bully pulpit that has made him an inescapable focus of attention. Ever since he lost the presidential election, many have already begun to tune him out. Once he has left the White House, he will be just another guy tweeting all-caps conspiracy theories about voting machines.
Deprived of the only two things he actually cares about—money and attention—Trump will look to get them back as quickly as possible. He may immediately embark on a campaign for the Republican nomination in 2024. He may launch a television network (or license his name to an existing one, like One America News or Newsmax) and go toe to toe with Fox News for right-wing TV supremacy.
But the most straightforward path to money and attention is the most traditional one for ex-presidents: a memoir, much like the one Barack Obama will publish about his first term next week.
A Trump post-presidency memoir would be a mega-bestseller. But is the industry prepared to deal with the fallout? For publishers, however, a Trump presidential memoir is hardly straightforward. Putting out a book by the president—particularly if it were ghostwritten by someone like regular speechwriter Stephen Miller—could lead to an enormous backlash, including revolts from staffers, authors, agents, and indie bookstores, even if it were published by a dedicated conservative imprint. https://newrepublic.com/article/160190/can-book-publishers-afford-publish-donald-trump
2020-11-13 A Letter to My Students on the Election The president’s refusal to concede lays groundwork for the narrative of a new “Lost Cause.” The fears so many of us had that Trump would get a second term are over. But neither Trump nor his enablers were repudiated in a way that suggests we won’t have Trumpism around for years to come, or that he doesn’t speak for today’s Republican Party. The bipartisan congressional majorities that in the 1960s allowed Lyndon Johnson to pass Medicare and successfully champion the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 are no longer present.
The president’s refusal to concede the election is not mere petulance. It is the groundwork for the narrative of a new “Lost Cause.” South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham has encouraged Trump to take to heart the example of Grover Cleveland, who won the presidency in 1884, lost it in 1888, and re-won it in 1892. Whether Trump runs again or not, he is sowing grievance with his supporters that will far outlast 2020.
What made the Republican Party under Trump so frightening was not just the bad policies it supported, but the danger it posed to democracy in a multiracial country. Republicans did not play by the rules we have taken for granted, and in so doing they exposed how fragile our democracy can be when politics divides people in a way that makes compromise feel like surrender. Trump made clear his contempt for political norms early on with his nicknames for his opponents: Marco Rubio was “Little Marco,” Elizabeth Warren was “Pocahontas.” But the personal insults were nothing compared to the contempt he and his supporters showed for political traditions both parties once respected. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/a-letter-to-my-students-on-the-election
2020-11-12 Here’s the real danger lurking in Trump’s world-historical tantrum what terrifies so many Biden voters — an astonishing number of people are complaining of panic attacks or lost sleep on social media — are the real moves Trump’s team and many Republican politicians are taking that make this less like a typical tantrum and more like a genuine attempted coup.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has trolled reporters by talking about Trump’s “second term”. General Services Administration head Emily Murphy, a Trump appointee, is refusing to sign paperwork that would allow the Biden transition team to begin work. Trump’s campaign is continuing to file relentless and frivolous suits, even though they’re getting promptly thrown out of court, making false allegations of “voter fraud.” Relatively few Republican elected officials will even admit that Biden won, and a healthy number are backing Trump’s false accusations that Democrats stole the election.
But what really sent a lot of people around the bend was Trump’s petulant firing of various leaders at the Pentagon and in U.S. intelligence services, replacing them with loyalists apparently trained at Rep. Devin Nunes’ Camp for Incompetent Conspiracy Theorists. This triggered a fear response, largely due to outdated American notions of what a “coup” looks like, borne from half-remembered ’70s-era news footage of tanks and military fatigues in foreign countries.
Mostly, the public chest-thumping and administrative tricks are designed to trick people into believing that some election reversal is still possible, both to troll the left and, perhaps more importantly, so Trump — who is anywhere from $425 million to over $1 billion in debt — can shake down his gullible supporters for more cash before he’s pushed out the door.
Trump will be slinking out of the White House in about nine weeks. But that doesn’t mean his reality TV-style failed coup isn’t dangerous. It’s very much is — because Trump is pushing his already vitriolic and authoritarian followers further down the path towards rejecting democracy entirely. But of course the implication of all Trump’s prattling about “legal” and “illegal” votes — language that is being picked up by all manner of Republican politicians — is that Democratic votes are somehow not legal. This is, it should go without saying, preposterous. But it’s the clear message being sent by all the outrage from Trump and his minions at the pedestrian fact that Democrats voted and that those votes are being counted. he is likely driving his supporters to feel even more hostile to the very concept of democracy, and especially of the right to vote being extended to Americans they see as less American than they are. A poll released Wednesday by the Economist and YouGov shows that 86% of Trump voters believe that Biden did not legitimately win the election. https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump-coup-2648878907/
2020-11-12 Two-face America: 73 million Trump party apparatchiks guarantee turmoil over the coming years One defeat of the Party of Trump and its 73 million apparatchiks is not enough. In Trump, the United States has bred its own dictator in waiting and he’s got an army of servile apostles willing to fight and die for him. Vigilance by his opponents has never been more important.
Incumbent President Donald Trump now owns the Republican Party, lock, stock and barrel. With 73 million restless apparatchiks clearly beholden to the cult of Trump, will it be long before the Republican Party gets rebranded as the Trump National Party; or, perhaps, the MAGA Party (Make America Great Again)? Maybe Trump sells-off his faltering real estate empire and creates a media conglomerate—consisting of television, radio,and the Internet/WWW—that spews out divisive, fascist, ultraconservative fare 24 hours a day, 7 days week. Trump Media would absorb the National Review, New York Post and similar conservative publications/websites. http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/31287
2020-11-12 JOHN KIRIAKOU: The Depressing State of US Politics The politics of the past month have been overwhelming. I’ve had enough of the disaster that has been Donald Trump over the past four years. I’ve had enough of the Democratic National Committee’s demonization of the progressive movement. I’ve had it that nobody takes third parties seriously. I’m sick of politics. I’ve always been something of a political animal. But this latest election has just been too much. It has pushed me over the edge.
There’s a lot wrong. Foremost is the hypocrisy of the Republican Party. For example, Trump’s margin of victory in battleground states in 2016 was far smaller than Joe Biden’s margin in those states in 2020. Yet, Trump has pulled out all the stops to delegitimize Biden’s election, apparently with no memory of his or his underlings’ actions from 2016.
White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, who right now is alleging pro-Democratic voter fraud at every opportunity, said in 2016: “You have people trying to delegitimize the president-elect of the United States right now. You have people out there that are calling for recounts that are unsubstantiated based on no evidence.”
That’s rich. Rudy Giuliani, the president’s shameless lawyer, who at one time was actually a serious person, and who is currently leading the charge alleging voter fraud, called protestors against Trump’s election in 2016 “a bunch of spoiled crybabies.” I get that politics is a tough game. But this bald-faced hypocrisy is too much.https://consortiumnews.com/2020/11/12/john-kiriakou-the-depressing-state-of-us-politics/
2020-11-12 The frivolous lawsuits of a sore loser Yet, despite the historic number of popular votes cast for the Biden/Harris ticket and their ticket gaining 279 electoral votes, as states continue to count, Donald Trump has continued to show his ill-mannered, boorish contempt for democracy by refusing to accept defeat.
Instead, Trump and his campaign have continued to pour fuel on the fire of conspiracy theories plaguing this year’s election. Rather than a phone call to begin the peaceful transition of power, they continue to make unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud and ramp up their threats of lawsuits that will lead to a supposed Trump victory.
As of this morning, Nov. 8. Trump administration appointee to the General Services Administration, the agency in charge of federal buildings, that also signs off on access to government funds, and office space to the president-elect’s transition team, Emily Murphy had refused to do so.
Trump’s strategy of filing a flurry of lawsuits challenging the Biden/Harris win isn’t about upholding the law or ensuring transparency throughout the voting process. It’s about providing Trump with a viable off-ramp for a loss he can’t accept and is about giving his supporters something to be angry about. http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/31291
2020-11-12 State of Chaos: Trump Knew Us Better Than We Knew Ourselves Whatever his political position of the moment, he reflected one thing above all: the underlying chaos and bad faith of a world of wealth, power, and ever-growing inequality, a world, as it happened, just waiting to go down.
Now that he’s defeated, count on one thing: he’ll take as much of this country with him as he can. If he has his way, when he finally decides to jump ship, money in hand, he’ll leave the rest of us at a vast mask-less rally with death running wild in our midst. From the beginning, he was always the orange-faced, yellow-haired personification of chaos. Now, just as the Republican Party did in 2016, this country has taken on his chaos as our own and, in the wake of the recent election, one obvious question is: Are we, too, scheduled for the ventilator of history? https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/12/state-of-chaos-trump-knew-us-better-than-we-knew-ourselves/
2020-11-12 Six Brief Theses on the Trump Era It was as much an election to prevent “socialism” as “fascism.” The mainstream of the ruling class wants neither right now, and it continues to make the decisions. Biden is now the face of the ruling class, the bulk of which (Wall Street numbers suggest) is happy to see his victory. Far from being a puppet of the left, as the defeated Moron President warned might happen, he will say “thank you very much, AOC and Ilhan,” before combining with Spanberger to marginalize them. https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/12/six-brief-theses-on-the-trump-era/
2020-11-12 ELECTION 2020: Payback For Russiagate After trying to undermine Donald Trump with Russiagate, Democrats are now facing a reprisal from Republicans trying to undermine Joe Biden’s election.
Hillary Clinton laid the groundwork during the 2016 campaign to undermine Trump by recklessly branding him a “Putin puppet.” That blossomed into four years of full-blown Russiagate, which was meant to question the validity of Trump’s election, undermine his legitimacy and hamper his ability to act as president.
Now the Republicans are questioning the validity of Biden’s election, undermining his legitimacy and hampering his ability to act as president-elect, and later as president. This is tit-for-tat for the Russiagate gambit. Put bluntly, this is what the Democrats get for starting all this.
Don’t be surprised if Fox and other Republican outlets gear up to question Biden’s legitimacy for the next four years, the way Democratic media stirred up Russiagate madness the previous four years. Russiagate may morph into Chinagate following stories of Hunter and Joe Biden’s business deals in China, which partisan, liberal media suppressed. https://consortiumnews.com/2020/11/12/election-2020-payback-for-russiagate/
2020-11-11 Can Trump really stage a coup? Experts break it down For the first time in history, an incumbent president is refusing to concede after clearly and indisputably losing a presidential election. Trump may be preparing to stage a coup of some sort, or perhaps call again on his supporters to commit violence to sustain his rule.
Though it sounds alarmist, such happenings are certainly not unprecedented in the global arena; the United States frequently interferes with the Democratic process in other countries, and often undermines it in order to provoke a coup or make a citizenry lose faith in a governing party, as US interests did in Bolivia last year. What is more unprecedented is for such a thing to happen in the United States.
Some political scientists are arguing that rather than a coup, we should be more concerned that Trump’s baseless claims erode faith in democracy. Such moves are often the first step in a longer process towards a future coup — a kind of death spiral for democracy. 70 percent of Republicans say they don’t believe the 2020 election was “free and fair,” an alarmingly high percentage.
“Violence and other costly forms of conflict are avoided by the mere fact that the political forces expect to take turns,” Przeworski told Farrell. “Yet this mechanism fails when the short-term stakes in an election are too high or when the opposition sees no chance to win according to rules.” Trump is trying to overturn the election, but is not likely to succeed. The main reason is that none of Trump’s lawsuits provide evidence of voter fraud. In fact, what Mystal argues is that the Trump campaign is going to put America through 70 days of turmoil all in the name of a grift. “These lawsuits purportedly challenging the election are a huge money-making opportunity for the Trump campaign,”
If Trump launches “a full-scale coup d’état and uses the military to keep him in power” then yes, we’d be at war. Trump’s attempted coup appears disorganized, as he clearly doesn’t have the support of generals. It’s important to remember that an estimated 71 million Americans voted for Trump, and 76 million voted for President-elect Joe Biden. Our country remains just as divided, if not more so, than in 2016. But research shows that such divisiveness isn’t enough fodder for a civil war.
The appearance of what Trump is doing matters most to the GOP. “Everything Mitch McConnell is doing and saying is about keeping the Trump voters enraged enough to get out in full force for those Geogia’s Senate seats,” “I think they believe this will help maintain their base of support, whether for a potential 2024 presidential run or to help the president succeed in whatever other plans he has after January of 2021.” https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/can-trump-really-stage-a-coup-experts-break-it-downtrump-coup/
2020-11-11 Donald Trump’s Terrible Coup Attempt Is Killing Americans It’s pulling focus from the most dangerous moment of the crisis. This is The COVID-19 Daily Report for Veterans Day, 2020. Every moment Donald Trump tries to steal the election is a moment that he’s not paying any attention to the most harrowing moment of the coronavirus crisis. Cases are now completely out of control; we could easily hit 200,000 a day soon. Hospitalizations are at an all-time high, and we’re approaching triage conditions in several states. The medical profession has been able to save lives as they learn more about the disease, but if they cannot attend to all the patients, many people will die unnecessarily. In North Dakota, where some astronomical percentage of the population is hospitalized with COVID, they’re allowing asymptomatic carriers to keep working because they have no reinforcements to treat people. Sidelining medical staff is a big a problem as having too many patients. https://prospect.org/coronavirus/unsanitized-donald-trump-coup-attempt-killing-americans/
2020-11-10 How Fox News Foiled Trump’s Plan to Steal the Election The television network known for spewing the president’s propaganda is now being accused by right wingers of being biased. epublicans had ensured, via the courts, that Pennsylvania couldn’t begin counting mail-in ballots prior to November 3rd. So Trump was relying on an early lead in that state coming from those who had voted in person on Election Day. That made Arizona pivotal to the public relations campaign for Trump to claim victory.
But at 11:20 pm on Tuesday, Fox News foiled the plan by calling Arizona for Biden. The Associated Press followed at 2:50 AM. Eventually, they were joined by NPR, “PBS NewsHour,” Univision, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal. With Arizona gone, Trump would have no clear path to 270 electoral votes.
As had been predicted, the call set up a showdown at Fox News. The Trump campaign was livid. According to Washington Post reporters Sarah Ellison and Josh Dawsey, the White House sprang into action.
Trump erupted in anger, telling others in the White House to “get that result changed,” a senior administration official said. His chief of staff, Mark Meadows, phoned Fox News’s decision desk repeatedly. Top aide Hope Hicks, who had returned to the White House earlier this year after a stint at Fox Corp., messaged Raj Shah, a former Trump White House staffer whom she hired at Fox, about how to get the call reversed. Kellyanne Conway got in touch with Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier to complain. Jared Kushner reached out to Fox Corp.’s billionaire owner, Rupert Murdoch.
2020-11-10 Rival Governments Are Often Recipes for Violence and Regional Warfare Even as Biden continued to rack up votes in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada, Trump tweeted and told aides that he would refuse to concede the election, hold periodic campaign “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) rallies across the country, refuse to depart from the White House on January 20, and even suggested he might stage a rival inauguration in January as Biden is sworn in as president on the west façade of the U.S. Capitol building.
If Mr. Trump fails to leave the White House at the constitutionally-mandated hour of noon on January 20, 2021, he and his family and staff would be physically removed from the Executive Mansion by federal law enforcement officers. President Biden would be free to move into the White House and take up his post in the Oval Office. Trump may decide to forgo such a public humiliation of being placed under arrest and stage a rival inauguration at his private club at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, in the hope that Republican officials, including Florida’s Republican governor and two U.S. senators, as well as other Republican officeholders, pro-Trump county sheriffs in Florida, and a few Trump-appointed federal judges, might be in attendance.
Trump may also decide to seek the support of wealthy right-wing Cuban, Colombian, and Venezuelan interests in South Florida to help defend his rival administration, taking a cue from Venezuelan National Assembly leader Juan Guaido, who, on January 23, 2019, declared himself the acting president of Venezuela in opposition to the re-election on May 20, 2018 of incumbent President Nicolas Maduro. https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/11/10/rival-governments-are-often-recipes-for-violence-and-regional-warfare/
2020-11-10 Trump can’t steal the election now — but Mitch McConnell sees it as a power grab Trump’s attempted coup, to be clear, has zero chance of working. His election lawsuits are pathetic and keep getting thrown out, including by Republican judges. All the whining about “illegal” voters — which is mostly code for voters whose skin color or political leanings are not to Trump’s taste — amounts to nothing, since the votes he’s complaining about are already opened and counted. At this point, the main purpose of all the false promises that the courts will invalidate the election appears to be money — the fine print on the solicitations for Trump’s “legal defense fund” makes clear that the money will mostly be used to pay down Trump’s campaign debts. Since Election Day, more than 130 such emails begging for cash have gone out to gullible marks — sorry, I mean Republican voters. Considering what a practiced con artist Trump is, he’s probably already working out how to leverage his fake victim status to squeeze his hapless supporters for more cash down the road.
The problem, unfortunately, is that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has decided to back Trump’s play, as I predicted he would a year and a half ago. or one thing, McConnell implied there could be something shady about the presidential election, but affirmed the legitimacy of down-ballot elections, where Republicans did better than expected. Problem is, these are literally the same ballots. How can the same ballot be legitimate one when it comes to a congressional or Senate race, but a fake in the presidential race? It’s the same Mitch-style logic under which confirming a Supreme Court justice nominated by a Democratic president nine months before the next election is somehow unacceptable, but confirming a justice just days before the next election is perfectly fine, as long as a Republican president nominated that person. Put more bluntly, it’s just bad faith. https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/did-donald-trump-steal-the-election-2648851916/
2020-11-09 ‘These Lawsuits Are Incredibly Rinky-Dink’ Trump, of course, announced in advance that, “As soon as that election is over, we’re going in with our lawyers.” But Republicans didn’t just start going in with their lawyers. In particular, since the gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, they’ve used the courts to provide cover for the kind of voter suppression they feel favors them. They’ve played these cards face up for so long, it’s hard to see why anyone would credit Trump’s current legal maneuvers as anything other than what they are—frank attempts to hold on to power, no matter what. https://fair.org/home/these-lawsuits-are-incredibly-rinky-dink/
2020-11-09 Emily Murphy: Release the Biden/Harris transition funds! A little-known Trump appointee is refusing to release the Biden/Harris transition funds!! This is one of Trump‘s strategies, and we need to respond urgently.
Normally after the election the new President-Elect’s team immediately shifts into plans for governing the country. But the head of the General Services Administration, Emily Murphy, a Trump appointee, is holding the transition up — she won’t recognize Joe Biden as the winner of the election or release essential transition funds. This decision is not supposed to be political! https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/start_the_transition_10/?
2020-11-07 Media Still Refuse to Report the Real News: Trump Is Actively Trying to Steal the Election When the media are unable to present as fact that Trump is trying to steal the 2020 election, they are implying that there is room for debate about what his intentions are, simply because he hasn’t explicitly stated: “I am trying to steal the election.”
Since media know—and are reporting—that Trump has not won the election, and there is no “major fraud,” Trump’s statement amounts to a declaration that he will overturn the results of the election to keep himself president—“for the good of this nation,” of course. In the face of this assault on democracy, corporate media appear content to offer factual corrections of the sort that Trump and his base will simply ignore, as they have done for the past four years regarding countless other lies he has told.
Indeed, corporate media cannot even straightforwardly report that Trump is lying about winning the 2020 election, instead employing flaccid euphemisms like “falsely asserts” and stating things “without evidence,” which have by now become mere comical and impotent phrases to describe presidential deceit.
This failure to report an ongoing coup attempt is even more incredible when we recall that Trump had already telegraphed his attempt to steal the election by prematurely declaring victory on Election Day. Yet we are not seeing many headlines in corporate media like Mother Jones’ “The Trump Campaign Is Openly Trying to Steal the Election” that would more accurately convey the gravity of the situation.
2020-11-07 State Legislatures Should Stay Out of the Presidential Contest One of the most disconcerting developments of the 2000 presidential contest in Florida was the prospect that the Republican state legislature might attempt to settle the dispute by selecting its own slate of presidential electors. Some supporters of President Donald Trump have suggested that a similar call is in the playbook this time. That would be a huge mistake, and elected leaders in Republican states should make clear that they would not support such a plan.
Presidential electors have overwhelmingly been chosen directly by voters for most of American history. By 1796, the first presidential election without George Washington as a candidate, less than half the states were still using direct legislative selection of presidential electors. The last state legislature to choose electors was Colorado in 1876, and that was only because Colorado was admitted into the Union too late in the presidential election cycle to organize an election. https://reason.com/volokh/2020/11/07/state-legislatures-should-stay-out-of-the-presidential-contest/
2020-11-07 2020 election reveals deep flaws in how the U.S. chooses its president The Electoral College: Why do we still have the Electoral College, a vestige of our agrarian roots, that makes little sense in our mobile and confederated way of sharing political power? The idea that there is a popular vote that is somehow divorced from the actual naming of a national leader is nuts. And even if we keep the logic of the Electoral College, why can’t it be made proportional by state — which it was at the start of the Republic — rather than winner-take-all?
Can’t we seek bipartisan acknowledgment that the Citizens United case has led to a monstrous cloud of dark political money and demand a federal law to address this with some kind of reasonable limits, like public financing?
We just proved the case for mail-in ballots, for early and spread-out voting over days, for ending long lines and for encouraging full voter participation. Let’s make sure these approaches are made permanent.
Why are we allowing one-party state legislatures to gerrymander districts and to pass an increasing set of voting laws aimed at suppressing the vote? How about renewing the Voting Rights Act right now? And let’s insist on independent district line drawing in the next year to account for census results.
Something is seriously wrong with polling and our insistence on creating them, misinterpreting them and publicizing results that we find advantageous. Maybe we just should abandon them for the one poll that seems to count.
Those debates were pretty terrible. Let’s cancel the next round for organized side-by-side interviews.
Having a Senate in opposition to the White House is not good for most of us, unless, like re-elected and once and probably future Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), your goal simply is to block anything the other side wants to accomplish.
2020-11-06 The RNC is recruiting Republican activists across the nation to make false claims of election fraud If you incite a riot, that’s a crime. If you suborn perjury, that’s a crime. And if you participate in a multi-state conspiracy to engage in election fraud … that’s definitely a crime. On Thursday evening, it became clear that Trump’s campaign had attempted to get Wisconsin voters to contact Trump supporters in Pennsylvania with the apparent goal of adding late submissions to the stack of mail-in ballots.
2020-11-06 Will the Supreme Court Overturn the Election Result? The Court isn’t going to overturn the election result. The election isn’t close enough for any of Trump’s litigation to affect the result. What the president wants is to stop the counting of votes in Pennsylvania (while demanding that vote counting continues in Arizona!). But there is no legal controversy about the votes in Pennsylvania. They were received before election night. There is no question they should count. The Pennsylvania legislature should have changed the law to allow them to be counted before Election Day, as many other states permit, but Republicans in the legislature would not allow this, perhaps because they wanted to support Trump’s fraudulent claim that votes counted after election night are fraudulent. But, to repeat, the election result in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania just isn’t close enough for the Court to find any credible basis for interfering. https://prospect.org/justice/will-the-supreme-court-overturn-the-election-result/
2020-11-06 Lawsuits Unleashed in Pennsylvania’s ‘Collar Counties’ The four historically purple “collar counties” surrounding Philadelphia—Chester, Montgomery, Bucks, and Delaware—may decide whether deeply divided Pennsylvania gives 20 electoral votes to President Trump or puts Joe Biden in the White House. Pennsylvania’s collar counties look to be solidly in the Biden column: Bloomberg reported on Thursday that Biden is leading by a wider margin than Clinton in 2016 in all four counties. But either way, county election officials are already dealing with a flood of litigation—just as promised.
According to Chester County Commissioner Josh Maxwell, 66 lawsuits had been filed in Pennsylvania by the Republican Party or the Trump campaign by early Thursday. Maxwell says that all Chester County ballots received before 8 p.m. on Election Day have been counted. The rest—provisional, military, and ballots postmarked after November 3—will be counted by Friday. https://prospect.org/politics/lawsuits-unleashed-in-pennsylvanias-collar-counties/
2020-11-06 Donald Trump Jr. is promoting an authoritarian plan to steal the presidency Murphy explains: “With Pennsylvania on the verge of flipping into the Democratic column — the remaining uncounted ballots appear to heavily favor Biden — Levin was promoting a legal theory that drew some attention before the election. Because state governments have to formally certify results and then formally send electors to the Electoral College, the Republicans who control the state legislatures of Pennsylvania and several other swing states could, in this theory, simply send their own set of rival electors and force Congress to choose — potentially tipping the election to Trump.”
“Changing the process by which Pennsylvania appoints its electors requires changing Pennsylvania law, which the Democratic governor (Tom Wolf) would veto,” Murphy writes. “If Biden goes on to win enough of the remaining uncalled states, perhaps his sizable Electoral College and popular vote lead will dissuade Republicans from attempting to deploy such chicanery.” Murphy also points out that Republican Jake Corman, majority leader of the Pennsylvania Senate, “wants nothing to do with” that type of power grab.
2020-11-06 Steve Bannon faces massive backlash after saying Trump should behead Fauci and the FBI director Trump went on to spread more misinformation about the election as he described the votes being counted as “late ballots.” The president once again alluded to the possibility of attempting to rely on the Supreme Court to have the election outcome “corrected.”
Although the ballots being counted are legal votes that were submitted on or before Election Day, Trump claims the U.S. Constitution is being “ignored.” “This is what we know. We have to go back to the state level and how this morass came to be in the first instance. The Governor, Wolf, and the State Supreme Court, flagrantly violated the Constitution of the U.S. The power to set these rules and regulations is vested in the Legislature.” https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/bannon/
2020-11-06 Trump’s last ploy for the presidency: Wage war against reality Now, Trump is resorting to “a wild, relentless war against reality and truth, falsely claiming several states are stealing the election by adhering to their laws, rules, and long precedents,” according to Axios. The publication reports that Trump is aware that his greatest fear may be released today: the election could be called in Biden’s favor today, ironically by Fox News.https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump-reality-show/
2020-11-06 Labor Organizer: I Witnessed Bush Steal 2000 Election in Florida. We Can’t Let Trump Steal This One The fact is that Al Gore did win Florida. And the consequences of that decision is something we’re still paying for. So, the parallels right now, that are sort of nerve-wracking, from my viewpoint, are the following. One, what we hear from, we hope, President-elect Biden is a lot of the same sort of commentary that we heard from Al Gore: Stay calm, the process is working. There’s sort of an overinvestment in the idea of counting and the legal process. And that, that was an error of judgment in a pretty profound way in Florida in 2000.
We needed it because we understood that the conservatives, the right wing, were going to frame a narrative that it was Al Gore who was trying to steal the election versus Bush. And, of course, we didn’t have to wait for Election Day, you know, because Trump has been saying this for the month and a half leading up to Election Day. So he’s been forecasting every single thing he’s doing right now. https://www.democracynow.org/2020/11/6/jane_mcalevey_2020_election_trump_biden
2020-11-06 Trump’s limp coup is falling apart — and right-wing media is losing it It was an odd mix of emotions. There was the disgust of watching the actual president of the actual United States demand that legal votes be thrown out insinuating that millions of American voters were somehow fakes. But there was also the relief of seeing Trump’s facade of bravado collapsing, exposing the loser that was always hiding behind that wall of bluster. Even many Trump voters knew, at that moment, that it was over. Trump’s attempted coup is collapsing under the weight of his own incompetence and laziness. We are now at the portion of the right-wing cycle of failure where the supporters of the corrupt and failed Republican president slink away and pretend that they were never that into him in the first place. (See: Nixon, Richard M., and Bush, George W.) But for whatever reason, a decent number of rats are clinging fiercely to the side of the sinking ship, insisting, as the water starts lapping against their skinny tails, that Captain Bleach-Injector can still somehow save himself. https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trumps-limp-coup-is-falling-apart-but-right-wing-media-and-certain-gop-politicians-dont-know-when-to-cut-bait/
2020-11-06 Opinions | Thank goodness Trump is too incompetent to properly organize a coup Trump’s definition of an “illegal vote,” it is clear, is one that is cast against him. This is the kind of thing you expect to hear from Robert Mugabe, Alexander Lukashenko or Nicolás Maduro — not from the leader of a constitutional republic. No president in our history has mounted such a blatant assault on our democracy.
Nor have the courts intervened despite all of the judges that Trump has appointed. Unable to mobilize a high-powered legal team as George W. Bush did in 2000, Trump is relying on the usual low-wattage loyalists: Rudolph W. Giuliani, Richard Grenell, Pam Bondi, Corey Lewandowski. Their arguments play well on Fox “News” — but, so far, not so well in court. Trump’s Supreme Court appointees are not exactly rushing to sacrifice their reputations on Trump’s altar.
Many of us have spent the past few years decrying the tendency of Trump supporters to live in a world of alternative facts. But ultimately reality bites. The fact that Trump and his cultists cannot point to a single actual case of fraud — much less enough fraud to overturn an election that he is on track to lose by a significant margin — makes it impossible for them to effectively challenge the results. Their theory — that Democrats perpetrated a massive fraud in the presidential race but neglected to fix the results of House or Senate races — is laughably absurd. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/opinions-thank-goodness-trump-is-too-incompetent-to-properly-organize-a-coup/ar-BB1aLyix?ocid=msedgdhp (corporate media)
2020-11-06 Trump continues campaign of lies, protests break out to protect the vote As Joe Biden heads closer to victory, Donald Trump and the right-wing have launched a massive campaign of lies over the results. Protesters have taken to the streets across the US demanding that all votes be counted. As of Wednesday, the Trump campaign also approached courts in the key States of Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania asking for the counting to be halted. According to reports, the campaign will be seeking a recount in the state of Wisconsin, which all polling companies have declared for Biden. The existing litigation, which include one in the Supreme Court for an intervention in Pennsylvania, seek to challenge existing rules on the counting of late postal ballots. Several States, including the four in question, allow for postal ballots to be counted if they come in within three days after election, provided the mail is dated November 3. https://peoplesdispatch.org/2020/11/06/trump-continues-campaign-of-lies-protests-break-out-to-protect-the-vote/
2020-11-06 U.S. NETWORKS DROP RACIST TRUMP AD AHEAD OF ELECTION DAY NBC, Fox News, and Facebook pulled an ad by President Donald Trump’s campaign that critics had labeled racist as a bitter election fight for control of the U.S. Congress headed on Monday for an unpredictable finish. The 30-second ad, which was sponsored by Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign and which debuted online last week, featured courtroom video of an undocumented immigrant from Mexico convicted in the 2014 killings of two police officers, juxtaposed with scenes of migrants headed through Mexico. Critics, including members of Trump’s own party, had condemned the spot as racially divisive. https://sojo.net/articles/us-networks-drop-racist-trump-ad-ahead-election-day
2020-11-05 Whoever Wins, This Election Is Not the End of Trumpism Joe Biden and the Democrats have steadfastly refused to articulate a compelling alternative political vision to Donald Trump’s reactionary right-wing politics. Trump looks likely to have lost, but without creating an alternative to defeat it, Trumpism could return with a vengeance four years from now.
On top of that, with the Senate likely remaining under Republican control and a judiciary packed from top to bottom with Trump appointees (not just the Supreme Court), Trump’s supporters will retain plenty of avenues for exerting power. As for Trump himself, we can’t exclude the possibility that he will just keep campaigning so that he can run again in 2024. In any case, the Republican Party is likely to remain Trump’s party for the foreseeable future.
As for the Democrats, they lack any kind of coherent political vision to counter Trumpism. Biden’s principal — really, his only — message during the campaign was that he was not Trump. He steadfastly refused to advance any kind of comprehensive, progressive vision to respond to the burning issues of today, like climate change, the economic crisis, racial justice, health care, and more. Biden even bragged at several points about the fact that he beat the candidates like Bernie Sanders who were advancing that kind of vision precisely because he rejected that vision.
But in rejecting a broader vision, and in doing little more than promising a return to “normal,” a President Biden would risk returning to the very kind of politics that laid the groundwork for Trump. The Trump phenomenon is the symptom of a profound crisis of political representation in the United States. Neither of the two major parties can address the concerns of the vast majority of Americans: economic security, health care, jobs. Trump may have failed miserably to deliver on each of these counts and never had any intention of delivering on them in the first place, but at least he talked about these issues in a way that resonated with a significant, desperate chunk of the population.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party, which is supposed to represent the interests of working- and middle-class voters, has, at least since the Bill Clinton era , promoted policies that have neglected their ostensible base in favor of cozying up to Wall Street. In 2016, the party paid the price for these policies, as some white working-class voters in the Midwest switched to Trump, while many disillusioned voters of color stayed home, clearing Trump’s narrow path to victory. Absent some compelling progressive political vision from Biden, it’s likely that we will see the return of an amplified form of Trumpism four years from now. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/11/election-trumpism-trump-biden
2020-11-05 Trump’s especially low-caliber legal team tells us exactly where Trumptanic is headed In a matter of several years, Rudy Giuliani has gone from being America’s mayor to the serial butt of its jokes. That’s what makes him the perfect figurehead of Donald Trump’s farcical multi-pronged legal effort to claw back the will of The People and invalidate enough legally cast votes so that Trump can retain the presidency.
Rudy, more plugged into Ukrainian corruption than U.S. election law, is no James Baker, the attorney who led the successful legal bid by the George W. Bush campaign in 2000 to end the Florida recount and claim the presidency for the GOP. Team Trump had hoped for a Baker-like figure but has instead rolled out Giuliani, partisan hack Pam Bondi, and a handful of other miscreants willing to jump aboard the Trumptanic right as it’s hitting the iceberg. Trump’s low-caliber team is also a sign that every conservative attorney who has a reputation worth preserving for a post-Trump era is steering clear of this legal dumpster fire. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/11/5/1993124/-Team-Trump-wanted-a-James-Baker-to-head-their-legal-push-It-got-Rudy-Giuliani-instead
2020-11-04 “Today Is About Defending Democracy”: People Take to the Streets to Stop Trump’s Attempted Coup nearly 1,000 activists with community organization Bay Resistance took to the streets of Oakland, California on Wednesday to ensure that every vote is counted. They are part of a nationwide grassroots effort to mobilize in defense of the democratic process — and stop Trump from staging a coup — in the days and weeks ahead.
With millions of votes left to be counted, Trump falsely declared victory at 2:28 a.m. eastern time on Wednesday and, throughout the day, repeated his previous untrue claims that mail-in ballots are illegitimate — a move clearly aimed at preventing the counting of mail-in ballots in key battleground states. Those mail-in ballots are believed to overwhelmingly favor former Vice President Joe Biden, who is currently ahead in both the popular and electoral vote count. https://inthesetimes.com/article/oakland-protest-donald-trump-coup-attempt-defend-democracy-protect-the-results-election
2020-11-04 Media Fail to Prepare Public for Potential Trump Coup Corporate media approached election night with circuitous, often tepid reporting, scattered with euphemisms that obscured GOP voter suppression efforts and the clear possibility that Trump will try to steal the election. https://fair.org/home/media-fail-to-prepare-public-for-potential-trump-coup/
2020-11-04 Lincoln Project ‘Epically Failed,’ Say Progressives as Trump Wins Bigger Share of Republican Voters Than in 2016 “Turns out there were no ‘Biden Republicans.'” In response to Tuesday night exit polls showing that a greater percentage of self-identified Republicans voted this year to reelect President Donald Trump than supported him in the presidential contest four years ago, progressive commentators characterized the massive spending by anti-Trump conservative groups like the Lincoln Project and the associated attempt by Democratic challenger Joe Biden’s campaign to appeal to GOP voters as a misguided and ultimately losing strategy that squandered crucial resources.
The Lincoln Project, “the anti-Trump cash cow for veteran Republican consultants”—ran “ads focused on trying to court disaffected Republican voters and attack Trump’s character, as Biden loaded up the Democratic convention with GOP speakers.” “Imagine how much of a Democratic voter turnout operation could have been funded in places like Pennsylvania or Georgia with the $67 million that was lit on fire by the Lincoln Project to supposedly court GOP voters,” Sirota quipped on social media. https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/11/04/lincoln-project-epically-failed-say-progressives-trump-wins-bigger-share-republican
2020-11-04 As Wisconsin Called for Biden, Trump Campaign Baselessly Cries ‘Irregularities’ and Demands Recount Baselessly claiming “irregularities” in the vote-counting process, the Trump campaign on Wednesday afternoon demanded a recount in the key battleground of Wisconsin as both CNN and the Associated Press called the razor-close state for Democratic candidate Joe Biden. In Wisconsin, a state Trump narrowly won in 2016, a recount is automatically conducted if the margin is less than 0.25 percentage points. If the margin is under one percentage point, candidates can request a recount that they must finance. https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/11/04/wisconsin-called-biden-trump-campaign-baselessly-cries-irregularities-and-demands
2020-11-04 ‘Every Vote Must Be Counted’: Democracy Defenders Face Off Against Trump Lies About Election Results As President Donald Trump doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down on his baseless claim of widespread voter fraud as results from Tuesday’s election continued to slowly roll in Wednesday, watchdog organizations and rights groups made clear they are undeterred by the president’s dangerous rhetoric and committed to doing everything in their power to ensure that all legally cast ballots are counted.https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/11/04/every-vote-must-be-counted-democracy-defenders-face-against-trump-lies-about
2020-11-03 Statement by Ralph Nader and Bruce Fein on Trump, Hannity and Limbaugh Election Law Violations Both Hannity and Limbaugh have collaborated with President Donald Trump to turn their invaluable radio and television programming time into soap-boxes for his 2020 re-election efforts. Also, Hannity and Limbaugh have made no effort to hide it: they openly boast about it. The in-kind programming contributions Hannity and Limbaugh have made to Trump’s campaign vastly exceed $2,800 in value based on the costs of 60 seconds of advertising on their respective shows. Trump has violated the Federal Election Campaign Act in neglecting to report the in-kind contributions from Hannity and Limbaugh to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). Will the FEC ever enforce its own regulations? The failure to report these election law violations is also journalistic malpractice. https://nader.org/2020/11/03/statement-by-ralph-nader-and-bruce-fein-on-trump-hannity-and-limbaugh-election-law-violations/
2020-11-03 ‘We’re ready for it all’: Inside the Democratic Party’s months-long methodical preparation for a Trump election coup According to Axios reporter Jonathan Swan, Trump plans to prematurely declare victory on Election Night if he is ahead in the vote count. And Pennsylvania, a key swing state, could be Ground Zero. If the vote count on Election Night shows Trump ahead in Pennsylvania — with many mail-in votes from Philadelphia and its suburbs having yet been counted — Trump might announce that he won Pennsylvania and won the election. But no one will know for sure who won Pennsylvania until all of its votes have been counted.
Pelosi told HuffPost, “We have been prepared for the worst for a long time because what we have seen is the worst on the part of this president in terms of his disrespect for the Constitution, his disregard of free will of the people and his stooping to any level for his own reelection. We have tremendous intellectual, political and financial resources at our disposal…. We have our lawyers poised to move on a dime on Election Day or evening, as we see a problem.” https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/were-ready-for-it-all-inside-the-democratic-partys-months-long-methodical-preparation-for-a-trump-election-coup/
2020-11-01 Unsanitized, Election Edition: The Virus in Voters’ Minds What’s keeping Democrats from being confident, and how undecided voters will have the grimness of 2020 in their thoughts. Three things are preventing rapturous celebration or at least the prevention of despair.
One is, simply, 2016. Liberals are simply not going to believe victory is in hand until it’s actually delivered. The polling error nationally was actually not that large in 2016, and an error at the state level of comparable 2016 size would not shift the states Biden needs to win, if it came to pass.
Second is the expectation of the random shredding of Democratic votes in what amounts to a legislative coup.
2020-11-00 How to Fight a Coup: The Role of the Workers’ Movement “It can’t happen here.” That is the complacent mantra that societies with long-standing “democratic” institutions cannot possibly succumb to authoritarian dictatorship. Sinclair Lewis used the phrase as the title for his 1935 novel about the rise of a fascist dictatorship in the United States. Even as the aspiring dictator rises in prominence, and mobilizes a paramilitary army to deliver him to power, many of the novel’s characters ignore those who try to raise the alarm, refusing to believe that such a dictatorship could ever take power in their country. The relevance of the novel to our own times is not lost on those who have read it. http://dollarsandsense.org/archives/2020/1020reuss.html
2020-11-01 A “Y2K” election in 2020? Seriously 6 reasons why this election is like the Y2K exercise History has both criticized and praised the Y2K response. As to the critical view, what was all the hoopla about? While most accounts agree it was time and money well spent, the doubters are still vocal.
That’s the problem with prevention. The public doesn’t worry about what didn’t happen. And it’s hard to prove that what did not occur might have occurred. (The problem with successfully combatting COVID 19 is eerily similar). The presumed apocalypse turned into a challenge ultimately well-handled by an international effort. Even in those countries that did nothing to prepare for it — or had no resources to devote to it — the sky did not fall. Pretty much everyone felt vindicated.
But the history of U.S. democracy also indubitably has its dark sides. Currently, we are experiencing how fragile democracy can be. That experience, however, is not limited to the past four years. Look at what Franklin Delano Roosevelt faced: Father Coughlin and Huey Long. Hard to believe now that, for all the progress we have made as a culture and as a civilization, we are dangerously back to the 1930s.
Nevertheless, having a President at the helm of the nation, who is clearly unhinged, as well as highly incompetent, and always has been, is a new experience. He is truly our “crazy uncle.” So, like the anti-Y2K programmers just over two decades ago, Americans are being called upon to do their part — large and small. Individuals, families, groups and organizations are kicking in to tackle the current major “bug” that threatens American civilization — never mind modernity. https://www.salon.com/2020/10/31/a-y2k-election-in-2020-seriously-_partner/
2020-10-31 The “hanging chads” of 2020: More than 1 million mail-in ballots could be rejected this election “Rejecting thousands of ballots would be enough” to swing a close race, says Columbia professor Richard Briffault “It is possible millions of ballots will be disqualified — at least one or two million due to the normal 1-2% disqualification of mail-in ballots, primarily for errors in completing the ballot, such as a signature problem or late submission,” Richard Briffault, a professor a the Columbia School of Law, told Salon. “Of course, in a close election, rejecting thousands of ballots would be enough.” Just under 1% of mail-in ballots were rejected in the 2016 election, according to the Election Administration and Voting Survey, and about 1.2% of all mail-in ballots cast between 2016 and 2018 were disqualified, according to an analysis by ABC News. https://www.salon.com/2020/10/31/the-hanging-chads-of-2020-more-than-1-million-mail-in-ballots-could-be-rejected-this-election/
2020-10-29 This Election Is About Trump’s Pandemic Failures. But What Happens Next? It’s going to take more than a change of personnel in Washington to address our decaying climate, public health, and democracy. But it’s not too late.
In a country that feeds the world, nearly 30 million Americans don’t have enough to eat, triple the number of people from two years ago. COVID-19 has also exposed political dysfunction in the United States. The country could not overcome political divisions in the face of what should have been a unifying threat. The federal government failed to coordinate an effective response with the states. A near civil war has erupted between the masked and the maskless, the lockdowners and the open-uppers. As a result, the upcoming presidential election has been turned into a referendum on the pandemic response.
Americans are rightly upset that their country, with only 4 percent of the world’s population, has suffered 20 percent of the world’s deaths. China and South Korea have already restarted their economies while the United States is still struggling to return to some semblance of normality.
Donald Trump promised to make America great again. In no election in recent memory has the gap between campaign promise and political reality been so enormous. The November election will not spell the end of the COVID nightmare. But it can represent the first step in a necessary pivot — away from the flawed status quo that was incapable of handling the pandemic emergency and toward a more resilient, sustainable, and equitable future. https://fpif.org/this-election-is-about-trumps-pandemic-failures-but-what-happens-next/
2020-10-22 Trump Has Been Quietly Setting the Stage for an Authoritarian Second Term On the one hand, Trump has clear authoritarian tendencies in his rampant flouting of rules and laws, his encouragement of violence and hostility toward political opponents and democratic institutions, the cult of personality that surrounds him, and his threats of state violence against nonviolent protesters.
On the other, he has largely governed as, in Barton Gellman’s words, “a weak authoritarian,” while some of his most headline-grabbing acts of despotic-type behavior — his efforts to prosecute Julian Assange and various whistleblowers, suppress the vote, go after political dissidents, and use executive orders as an end run around Congress — are largely in line with, if escalations of, the actions of previous presidents and other parts of the US political spectrum.
2020-10-21 Trump’s Durable Base and Rolling Coup Every few weeks or so for the last three years, I have engaged in the masochistic exercise of seeing whether Donald Trump’s latest outrages have significantly hurt his approval rating. The answer is almost always the same: not really. Which is depressing, for the orange-brushed fascist’s maniac’s crimes and horrors are endless. Where to begin? Here’s a short list: …………….
And…the list goes on and on and on. I could fill up volumes with a registry of the orange-brushed Antichrist’s mind-boggling and soul-wrenching transgressions against human decency, democracy (what’s left of it in corporate-managed neoliberal America), and the common good. It’s not for nothing that the nation’s leading intellectual, Noam Chomsky, calls the tangerine-tinted Twitter-tantruming tyrant Trump “the most dangerous criminal in human history.” Recall that “our” malignant Danger Clown of a Pennywise “president” sits atop a global Superpower whose planetary reach and exterminist capacity for human catastrophe far dwarfs any powers of destruction ever enjoyed by Hitler’s Third Reich. https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/21/trumps-durable-base-and-rolling-coup/
2020-10-14 The United States is a Sick Society That Produced Two Sick Options for President The United States is a sick society and the COVID-19 pandemic is but one of its ailments. Joe Biden and Donald Trump are agents of the dictatorship of capital—the disease that has made the U.S. a sick society since its formation. The dictatorship of capital relies upon a feverish spread of the exploitation and destruction of its hosts: the people and the planet. Biden and Trump are ill-equipped to provide an antidote for austerity, endless war, mass incarceration, and the other symptoms of the disease. Each of these symptoms are a prerequisite to the existence and reproduction of the disease itself. https://www.blackagendareport.com/united-states-sick-society-produced-two-sick-options-president
2020-10-09 Trump’s Election Day Coup Threat: Into the Streets! Shut it Down! The spectacle of some dozen U.S. TV stations broadcasting election returns on November 3 while Trump’s White House simultaneously prepares its own count is almost beyond belief. Yet, if would-be dictator Trump takes this route there is zero doubt that we will see a massive protest mobilization of unprecedented proportions in the streets of the nation.
Anticipating such a mobilization the threatening Election Day coup plotter bigot Trump has announced his response in advance. He intends to interpret the 1807 Insurrection Act as empowering him to deploy the U.S. military and federalized National Guard troops to brutally repress demonstrators across the country who insist on the constitutional right to peacefully protest and insist on the right of the people to vote. https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/09/trumps-election-day-coup-threat-into-the-streets-shut-it-down/
2020-10-14 The United States is a Sick Society That Produced Two Sick Options for President The United States is a sick society and the COVID-19 pandemic is but one of its ailments. Joe Biden and Donald Trump are agents of the dictatorship of capital—the disease that has made the U.S. a sick society since its formation. The dictatorship of capital relies upon a feverish spread of the exploitation and destruction of its hosts: the people and the planet. Biden and Trump are ill-equipped to provide an antidote for austerity, endless war, mass incarceration, and the other symptoms of the disease. Each of these symptoms are a prerequisite to the existence and reproduction of the disease itself. https://www.blackagendareport.com/united-states-sick-society-produced-two-sick-options-president
2020-10-09 This November, America’s Safety Is on the Ballot Americans are already less safe because of growing distrust in their intelligence. Dangers will multiply without a change in political leadership.
In the popular imagination, espionage is all about lies, deceit, and deception. But the ability of the United States’ security agencies to warn against threats and inform sound foreign policies depends on a more elusive condition: trust. Slow to grow, easy to break, and painstaking to rebuild, trust is flagging in four essential intelligence relationships. The country will be less safe until it is restored. When Americans vote in November, this trust—and their nation’s safety—will be on the line.
The first relationship where trust is eroding is with the human sources on whom intelligence-gathering depends. Every day around the world, courageous foreign sources risk everything to provide information that protects the United States, relying on a promise that the U.S. government will safeguard their identities, alert them to hazards, and, in extreme cases, extricate them from danger. The reasons why sources cooperate with U.S. intelligence are invariably complex, but if the U.S. government falls into the habit of compromising clandestine sources and creates the perception of being indifferent to their fate, it will inevitably diminish its future ability to collect intelligence from human sources. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/10/09/trump-intelligence-election-2020/
2020-10-08 ‘War is imminent’: Iraq’s Kadhimi moves to fend off US threat to target pro-Iran groups Iraqi government scrambling to head off threatened closure of US embassy in Baghdad amid fears move could lead to political and economic collapse The United States has drawn up a list of 80 sites in Iraq linked to Iranian-backed groups that it plans to target if it follows through with a threat to close its embassy in Baghdad, Middle East Eye has learned. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/iraq-us-embassy-baghdad-pompeo-shia-armed-groups
2020-10-06 Abraham Accord: Experts Warn Trump Peace Deal a Precursor to War with Iran Experts warn that the Accord is motivated by a desire to secure a united front against Iran for a potential future war — a conflict that would likely make Iraq and Afghanistan look mild by comparison. The Abraham Accord, as it is known, is likely to expand the power of Gulf dictatorships and increase the number of devastating high-tech weapons in the Middle East, fueling further instability and bloodshed, a welcome prospect for neoconservative hawks and religious zealots who see the deal as fulfilling ancient prophecies about the end of the world. Above all, the deal can be seen as an attempt to present a united front against Iran for any potential future war — a conflict that would likely make Iraq and Afghanistan look mild by comparison. But across corporate media, the accord was almost universally hailed as a “peace deal” — and a potentially massive breakthrough.https://www.mintpressnews.com/abraham-accord-experts-warn-trump-peace-deal-a-precursor-to-war-with-iran/271799/
2020-10-05 100,000 BALLOT REQUESTS WERE INVALIDATED IN IOWA AFTER COURTS SIDED WITH TRUMP CAMPAIGN Democratic wins for the presidency and the Senate could hinge on an absentee-ballot snafu affecting tens of thousands of voters. “Is Iowa going to be the deciding factor in the presidential race?” Wahls said. “That’s not necessarily unlikely. But could we decide the balance of power in the Senate? Theresa Greenfield could quite possibly be the difference between a Democratic majority or not, and that’s a big deal.” Biden and Trump are neck and neck in Iowa, according to polling averages, while recent surveys show Greenfield holds a slim lead over her Republican opponent, making the race one of the best pickup opportunities for Democrats. https://theintercept.com/2020/10/05/iowa-absentee-ballot-requests-trump/
2020-10-05 Chris Hedges: Trump’s Barrett Nomination Another Step Toward Christian Fascism The Christian Right is content to have the focus on Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett revolve around her opposition to abortion and membership in People of Praise, a far-right Catholic cult that practices “speaking in tongues.” What it does not want examined is her abject subservience to corporate power, her hostility to workers, civil liberties, unions and environmental regulations. And since the Democratic Party is beholden to the same donor class as the Republican Party, and since the media long ago substituted the culture wars for politics, the most ominous threat Barrett’s appointment to the court represents is going unmentioned.
All fascist and totalitarian movements paper over their squalid belief systems with the veneer of morality. They mouth pieties about restoring law and order, right and wrong, the sanctity of life, civic and family virtues, patriotism and tradition to mask their dismantling of the open society and silencing and persecution of those who oppose them. This is the real game being played by Christian fascists, which since the early 1970s have been building institutions with tens of millions in corporate donations to take power. Donald Trump, who has no ideology, has allowed the Christian Right to fill his ideological void. He is the useful idiot. https://www.mintpressnews.com/trumps-barrett-nomination-another-step-toward-christian-fascism/271764/
2020-10-05 TEXAS VOTER SUPPRESSION TACTICS RECALL THE JIM CROW ERA Gov. Greg Abbott’s voter suppression tactics have inspired voting rights advocates to redouble their efforts to get out the vote.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott had invalidated the county’s decision, issuing a statewide proclamation that limits all 254 counties in the state to only a single site where absentee ballots could be dropped off. By the end of the day, the League of Women Voters of Texas, the National League of United Latin American Citizens, and the League of United Latin American Citizens, had sued the governor over the change, charging that it puts an unreasonable burden on voters during the pandemic.
Over the past several months, as Covid-19 rates have soared throughout Texas, Abbott and the state’s Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton, have fought against efforts to expand mail-in voting during the pandemic. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Texas Democrats’ argument that people concerned about contracting the coronavirus at polling places should be allowed to vote by mail. Texas is one of five states where voters concerned about coronavirus exposure will not be allowed to vote by mail.
In 2019, the state also banned temporary and mobile voting sites, a change cheered by Republican lawmakers and expected to depress turnout near college campuses and residents of senior centers.
Although Abbott issued a state-wide mask mandate in July, his order specifically exempted polling places. During the primary held later that month, some poll workers left their polling site in Collin County after Republican workers refused to wear masks. Voting rights advocates fear the phenomenon will be repeated in November, when the state and country may be experiencing a second wave of coronavirus infections.
Diaz fears that, emboldened by both Trump and Abbot, the poll watchers who respond to the recent call will increase the bullying of Biden supporters that he’s witnessed at “Trump train rallies” over the past several weeks.
Statewide, Texas saw 750 polling places close during this period, a change that disproportionately affected communities of color, according to the report.
Even successful delivery of a ballot won’t ensure that his vote will be counted. Each absentee ballot can be challenged on several grounds, including if the signature on it doesn’t perfectly match the signature on the application for the ballot. Research shows that white people are much more likely to have their absentee ballots counted, with Black voters accounting for only 10 percent of absentee ballots, but 18 percent of rejected ones, and Hispanic voters accounting for 12 percent of absentee votes and 36 percent of rejections. https://theintercept.com/2020/10/05/texas-voter-suppression-greg-abbott-absentee/
2020-10-02 Despite Trump’s Boast, Insulin in America Among the Most Expensive Liquids on Earth During the debate Trump claimed that insulin is now “so cheap it’s like water,” but A 10ml vial of insulin from Novo Nordisk or Eli Lilly, for example, costs Americans $290, ranking it alongside the likes of Chanel No. 5 and scorpion venom as among the most expensive liquids in the world. https://www.mintpressnews.com/trump-boast-insulin-america-most-expensive-liquids-earth/271712/
2020-10-02 The election has already been hijacked and the winner decided: ‘We the people’ lose Republicans and Democrats alike fear that the other party will attempt to hijack this election. President Trump is convinced that mail-in ballots are a scam except in Florida, where it’s safe to vote by mail because of its “great Republican governor.” The FBI is worried about foreign hackers continuing to target and exploit vulnerabilities in the nation’s electoral system, sowing distrust about the parties, the process and the outcome. I, on the other hand, am not overly worried: after all, the voting booths have already been hijacked by a political elite comprised of Republicans and Democrats who are determined to retain power at all costs. The outcome is a foregone conclusion: the Deep State will win and “we the people” will lose. The damage has already been done. http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/30932
2020-09-30 Stopping Trump’s Coup But there’s a precedent for countering Trump democratically, with a symbolic declaration that could be as potent as his debate performance: the four living former U.S. presidents—Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter—should come together to announce their shared conviction that Donald J. Trump is a clear and present danger to the republic. That might help to galvanize sustained, widespread democratic organizing not only in the courts and in some states’ election bureaucracies but also among voters and federal workers within the Post Office and the Department of Justice, among other agencies.
Millions of us now need to take what may be this last best chance to prove that the republic isn’t ultimately about Trump or his presidential predecessors, or even Joe Biden, every one of them a carrier and partial casualty of the virus of financial capital that’s enveloping and consuming us. We need prophetic witness like Schell’s to chasten them and to move others to vindicate the humbler, braver Americans whose example we’ll need to follow on November 3. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/stopping-trumps-coup
2020-09-30 Former Neo-Nazi Says Trump’s Call for Proud Boys to “Stand By” Will Encourage More Violence President Trump refused to condemn white supremacists during the first of three scheduled presidential debates with Joe Biden. When pressed by moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News to disavow far-right extremism, Trump name-checked the Proud Boys and told them to “stand back and stand by,” words widely denounced as a tacit endorsement of the violent, white supremacist organization classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. The Proud Boys almost immediately responded by changing its logo online to include the Trump quote. Christian Picciolini, a former neo-Nazi who now leads the Free Radicals Project, a group focused on helping people disengage from violent extremism, says Trump’s words were a clear encouragement for “continued violence” from far-right groups. We also speak with Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill, who says Trump’s performance at the debate is a continuation of his white supremacist project. “He wants violence in the streets, he wants chaos at the polls, because he wants Americans to feel a sense of unsafety. It’s its own kind of diplomatic terrorism,” he says.https://www.democracynow.org/2020/9/30/trump_biden_debate_white_supremacists
2020-09-30 “Vigilantism at the Polls”: Trump Attacks Election Integrity, Ballots & Backs Illegal Poll Watching It’s a rigged election,” claimed President Trump when he and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden were asked about election integrity during last night’s debate as the two men sparred over mail-in voting. Trump ended the debate by calling for poll watchers. We speak with Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, who says Trump is promoting unlawful intimidation and voter suppression, and has vowed to go to court to block any attempt to discourage or block people from freely casting their ballots. https://www.democracynow.org/2020/9/30/trump_biden_debate_voting
2020-09-29 Donald Trump’s Real Mob Connections Will the November election be decided in the streets? White mobs have once again moved out of the shadows and into the limelight during this Trump moment. Militia movements and right-wing extremists are starting to turn out in force to intimidate racial justice and anti-Trump demonstrators. Predominantly white and often explicitly racist, these groups now regularly use social media to threaten their adversaries. This election season, they’re gearing up to defend their president with an astonishing degree of support from Republican Party regulars.
According to a January 2020 survey by political scientist Larry Bartels, most Republicans believe “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” More than 40% agree that “a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.”
As the 2020 election nears, that party is also desperately trying to flip the script by using fear of “their mobs” and “Antifa terrorists” to drive its base to the polls. Of course, this country has no such Marxist mobs. The only real groups of vigilantes with a demonstrated history of violence and the guns to back up their threats congregate on the far right. The white supremacist Atomwaffen Division, for instance, has been linked to at least five killings since 2017. In late May and early June, members of the far-right Boogaloo Bois conducted two ambushes of police officers and security personnel, killing two of them and injuring three more. Over the summer, as far-right organizations spread the meme “All Lives Splatter” around the internet, dozens of right-wingers drove vehicles of every sort into crowds of Black Lives Matter protesters.
The prospect of far-right vigilantes or “militias” heading into the streets to contest the results of the November election has even mainstream institutions worried. https://fpif.org/donald-trumps-real-mob-connections/
2020-09-29 “…the biggest threat to the rule of law” is not ‘organized, violent leftist terrorism’, but Trump President Trump successfully markets a fictional version of himself. For years he has reaped immense rewards from that effort. But then his hallmark combination of incompetence and narcissistic overconfidence leads him to squander those rewards on ill-conceived schemes. Yet he continues milking his fictional image by peddling a series of increasingly transparent scams.
2020-09-25 Trump openly admits he wants to fill RBG vacancy before election day so his justice can help fight mail-in ballots ‘They aren’t hiding that they want to confirm a new Trump justice so that justice can steal the election.’ President Donald Trump frankly stated his motive for rushing to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: To help him dispute the legitimacy of mail-in ballots in the November election.
“We need nine justices. You need that. With the unsolicited millions of ballots that they’re sending, it’s a scam, it’s a hoax,” said the president, who for months has falsely attacked mail-in voting as highly susceptible to fraud. “Everybody knows that. And the Democrats know it better than anybody else.”
Trump said pushing his nominee through the Republican-controlled Senate before Election Day—now just over 40 days away—”would be a very good thing” and baselessly claimed Democrats are “trying to sow confusion and everything else.” http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/30872
2020-09-25 “The Election That Could Break America”: Inside How Trump & GOP Could Steal the Vote As President Trump refuses to commit to accepting the results of the upcoming election, we speak to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Barton Gellman, whose latest piece in The Atlantic looks at how Trump could subvert the election results and stay in power even if he loses to Joe Biden. “Trump’s strategy is never to concede. He may win, he may lose, but under no circumstances will he concede this election,” says Gellman. “That’s a big problem, because we don’t actually have a mechanism for forcing a candidate to concede, and concession is the way we have ended elections.” https://www.democracynow.org/2020/9/25/barton_gellman_trump_strategy
2020-09-24 Voters warned of a ‘five-alarm fire’ as Trump plots a ‘flat-out coup’ Democratic lawmakers and progressives did not mince words Thursday regarding President Donald Trump’s refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power after the election, warning that Trump—and Republicans who continue to enable and support him—are paving the road towards a fascist takeover that threatens the fabric of American democracy.
Other Democratic leaders and government watchdogs employed descriptors including “flat-out coup” and “autocracy” after Trump told the press that election officials should “get rid of the ballots” in order to “have a very peaceful…continuation” of his presidency. “The president is openly and explicitly considering a coup to hold onto power,” tweeted Public Citizen. https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/voters-warned-of-a-five-alarm-fire-as-trump-plots-an-flat-out-coup/
2020-09-24 Trump can’t even keep his coup secret he first time Karem asked Trump whether he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the election, Trump pulled his usual move, pretending that the fate of our democracy is like a reality-show cliffhanger: “Well, we’re going to have to see what happens.”
But Karem was dogged and asked him again: “Do you commit to making sure that there’s a peaceful transferral of power?” That’s when Trump let the cat out of the bag: “Get rid of the ballots, and you’ll have a very — we’ll have a very peaceful, there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There’ll be a continuation.”
Trump has been falsely claiming for months that mail-in ballots are fraudulent. The purposes of this false claim are crystal-clear. First, it creates a pretext to prevent people from voting in the first place, through legal challenges against efforts to make mail-in voting more accessible during the pandemic. Second, it’s the excuse Trump and Barr intend to rely on when they try to get those votes thrown out before they can be counted. https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-cant-even-keep-his-coup-secret/
2020-09-23 A ‘naked ballots’ crisis triggered by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court just put 100,000 votes on the line in the key state So what is a “naked ballot”? In Pennsylvania, mail-in ballots come with two envelopes. The first, blank envelope, contains the ballot and is meant to keep it secret. The ballot and the first envelope are then together placed in a second envelope, which is postmarked, addressed and carried to the elections office. When a voter accidentally skips the first envelope, placing the ballot directly in the second envelope, it’s called a “naked ballot.” Philadelphia Board of Elections has traditionally counted these ballots. After all, the first envelope is mean to ensure a voter’s privacy. If a ballot is “naked,” it doesn’t undermine the integrity of the vote at all, it just means the voter won’t have all the privacy they could have.
But the state supreme court’s ruling would invalidate these ballots, she explained. According to Deely’s accounting, 6.4 percent of ballots in a 2019 general election were naked. Statewide, she estimated, this could result in 100,000 votes or more that would be discarded under this rule — “votes that will not be counted, because of a technicality.” This problem could be exacerbated because mail-in voting is expected to be widespread, and many people will be engaging in the process for the first time. https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/a-naked-ballots-crisis-triggered-by-the-pennsylvania-supreme-court-just-put-100000-votes-on-the-line-in-the-key-state/
2020-09-17 Warning: Trump and his Rioters can win using “The XII” Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Six weeks ago, I told Naomi Wolf, on air, that President Donald Trump can win via a constitutional coup d’état—via the first-ever use of the 12th Amendment. And yesterday, Trump let the cat out of the bag: he expects to invoke the 12th Amendment loophole.
He said, “You think November 3 [decides the election]….at a certain point it goes to Congress.” He was giving away what his minions must have told him: you’ll win using Amendment XII.” Here’s what I said on August 5. (And thanks to Thom Hartmann for first warning about a “coup d’état by XII.”): I want people to think about this carefully. For example, the Brooks Brothers Riot with Roger Stone back in 2000 where we saw $1,200 an hour consultants banging on the windows and stopping the vote count. Now we’ll get Boogaloo Boys in Hawaiian shirts with crowbars and pipes who will be smashing the buildings, Molotov cocktails thrown into post offices because our president has said there are a million ballots in these 12 Post Offices from Venezuela and we have to stop the election from being stolen. There will be protests in the streets on both sides. We already had the test run in Portland. It’s a test run of the unmarked SUVs picking up people as if we were in Peronist Argentina. https://www.gregpalast.com/warning-trump-and-his-rioters-can-win-using-the-xii/
2020-09-17 Socialist Action 2020 Presidential Candidate Jeff Mackler: No to Trump’s Coup Threat! Should Trump continue to threaten the election or its results, we must stand in the political forefront against such a move without in any manner indicating political support to Biden and the Democrats. Indeed, should there be anything resembling an electoral coup, we can fully expect outraged millions to take to the streets, perhaps in numbers exceeding the millions that have done so to date. While it seems obvious that if Trump moves to declare himself re-elected in the face of massive evidence to the contrary, the Democrats are not likely to accept being out-maneuvered, as they did with Bush v. Gore in 2000, we put no faith in the institutions of the bourgeoisie to uphold the right to vote in any form. In that election, Bush had serious ruling class support and credibility, to the point that the Democrats understood that a challenge in the streets was the last thing they wanted. https://socialistaction.org/2020/09/17/socialist-action-2020-presidential-candidate-jeff-mackler-no-to-trumps-coup-threat/
2020-09-15 “Mass Voter Disenfranchisement”: GOP Ramps Up Assault on Voting Rights Across U.S. Ahead of Election With just seven weeks to go before the U.S. presidential election, the battle for the White House is increasingly being fought in courts across the country. From Wisconsin to Florida, Pennsylvania to Colorado, judges are making major rulings deciding who gets on the ballot, how a record number of mail-in ballots are handled and distributed, and who ultimately gets to vote on November 3. Ari Berman, senior writer at Mother Jones and author of “Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America,” says Republicans are carrying out a nationwide attack on voting rights aimed at keeping a shrinking white minority in power. “This is the Republican Party’s game: Don’t do anything for the American people, make it as hard as you can to vote, and then put in place judges who will then uphold those new voter suppression laws.” https://www.democracynow.org/2020/9/15/ari_berman_voting_rights
220-09-15 Journalists Need to Be Clear About a Clear Threat to Democracy When the president of the United States has:
explicitly declared his intentions to withhold federal election funding from states that are trying to make it easier to vote during a pandemic;
appointed a major donor to his campaign with conflicts of interest to sabotage the US Postal Service—while stating that he opposes additional funding for the post office in order to prevent the opposition party from having universal mail-in voting;
claimed that the defeat of lawsuits aimed at disenfranchising voters is the “biggest risk” to his reelection bid;
…then the evidence threshold has been more than satisfied for journalists to declare that he is trying to steal the 2020 election. Journalists and newsrooms have an obligation to report that the most powerful person in the country is trying to subvert the election and retain power illegitimately, and a failure to blow the whistle on a clear threat to democracy is journalistic malpractice. https://fair.org/home/journalists-need-to-be-clear-about-a-clear-threat-to-democracy/
2020-09-09 Would Trump Cancel the Election? Republican parties in four states—Nevada, Arizona, South Carolina, and Kansas—are on track to cancel the 2020 primaries. Why would they do such a thing? Because Trump is facing some primary opposition. The crazier he gets, the more the chances increase that he could face more than token opposition in his own party. The fact that four state parties are moving in tandem and others may follow is no coincidence. This is all orchestrated by the Trump machine.
But can they do this? Canceling elections is the very hallmark of a dictatorship. In principle, yes. Supposedly, this is an internal Republican Party affair, and not a general election. In past years, when an incumbent was running for re-election, primaries were occasionally canceled.
On the other hand, when Dixiecrats tried to preserve an all-white Democratic primary, the Supreme Court intervened in the 1944 decision Smith v. Allwright, holding that the Democratic Party in the South in that era was the only game in town; that even though this was ostensibly an internal party affair, it effectively denied black citizens voting rights. Of course, that was a very different Supreme Court. Between Trump’s cavalier treatment of canceling elections and increasingly captive courts, we are well on the road to dictatorship. https://prospect.org/blogs/tap/trump-cancel-election/
2020-09-09 The Winter of Our Discontent Projecting the 78 harrowing days after the election This is a horror story. Maybe you think that way about the past three years: the corrupt self-dealing, the fusillade of lies and ignorance, the corporate handover of the regulatory state, the authoritarian repression. The oncoming election may provide you with a crack of hope for America to reverse what many consider a grave mistake.
But while Election Day will signal the end of a campaign, it’s not the end of Donald Trump’s term in office.
The 78 days from November 3 to January 20, known as the transition, have kept me awake at night since I started reporting out this article. The coming interregnum is likely to be one of the most politically, economically, and socially fraught periods in American history, one that could set the trajectory for the nation’s future. “If you think things cannot possibly get worse, trust me, they can,” Michelle Obama counseled in her Democratic Convention speech. Trust me on that as well; they will, immediately after the election. With Trump at the helm, it could become more “confrontational and unmoored to truth,” said Rick Hasen, election law expert and professor at the University of California, Irvine. Attorney General Bill Barr did not shut down the possibility raised in congressional testimony that the Justice Department would step in and demand that ballot-counting stop. Right-wing media would amplify rhetoric about a stolen election. And this may not play out in just one state, but several with close margins.
The scenarios quickly get more extreme. Trump has alleged that any election with high levels of mail-in votes is fraudulent and cannot be trusted. “Rather than just litigate, what if Trump tries to convince a Republican legislature to take back their power under the Constitution to appoint electors directly?” Hasen explained. “They would be canceling the election for president and picking the president themselves.”
This is theoretically constitutional, in that each state has the power to choose electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court confirmed that state legislatures can legally determine electors themselves, rather than via a vote of the people. Florida’s legislature made preparations to do this, in fact, though the ruling rendered it unnecessary. Does anyone believe that Trump couldn’t convince Republican state legislators to act on his behalf and overturn the election process?
It’s not clear whether governors could veto a legislature wresting control of electors. But Arizona and Florida, two key battleground states, are controlled by Republicans at all levels, so there wouldn’t necessarily be a check on this activity. In Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, Republicans control the legislature but Democrats hold the governor’s mansion; there, you could see competing slates of electors, one from each branch of government. (This happened in 1876, with the Hayes-Tilden election leading to separate slates in Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana.)
Public outcry would be intense. “We’re talking about an intentional effort to use retroactive voter suppression and overturn a democratic result,” said Norm Eisen, a Brookings Institution fellow who served as counsel for the House Judiciary Committee in the impeachment process. Progressive activist groups are already preparing for the possibility of mass street protests, using an umbrella group called Protect the Results. Trump supporters would likely take to the streets as well. Many of the TIP scenarios ended in general strikes and riots. Of course, at least until January 20, Trump would be in control of military forces confronting protesters, as we’ve already seen.
Underlying this tumult are some deadlines. Per the Federal Election Commission, states must report results by December 8. Electors cast their votes in the Electoral College on December 14. The incoming 117th Congress certifies the election on January 6. In a protracted fight, some or even all of those deadlines could be missed.
State courts or the Supreme Court could get involved at any step along the way, with the Supremes foreclosing challenges before states must report on December 8. But in 2000, the Court was able to do that with one ruling, ending ballot-counting in Florida. There could be several states embroiled in litigation, with different challenges in each. The calendar becomes a factor.
In addition, a resolution depends on the Supreme Court retaining authority among all participants. Al Gore’s acceptance of the ruling in Bush v. Gore ultimately resolved that dispute. In one tabletop scenario, Democrats refused to accept a Trump Electoral College win if he lost the popular vote by millions, pushing to overturn certified results in states with Democratic governors. https://prospect.org/politics/winter-of-our-discontent-trump-2020-election/
2020-09-08 How Trump Will Try to Win the Election Donald Trump hates to lose. Here’s how he’ll try to steal an electoral victory.
Option 1: Lie This summer, Trump told his 20,000th lie. To reach the 10,000 mark, Trump told a dozen lies a day. He literally doubled down for the next 10,000, by telling nearly two dozen a day.
Option Two: Incite Violence Donald Trump has repeatedly encouraged his supporters to get physical. As president, Trump has defended violent police and neo-Nazis. He has praised the QAnon conspiracy theory, which the FBI considers a terror threat. But heading into the last 60 days of the election, Trump is taking incitement to the next level. He is telling his supporters not just to focus their wrath on a couple of demonstrators. He is effectively urging his base to start a civil war.
Option 3: Steal the Election Donald Trump has no regard for the rule of law. He has broken so many laws during his presidency – from the emoluments clause of the constitution to his collusion with foreign leaders to aid his reelection campaign – that he has no compunction about doing so again with an important election on the line. The Republican Party has engaged in widespread voter suppression activities. It has removed voters from the lists, prevented people from registering, and closed down polling booths. Trump is just as interested in reducing the number of voters in the next election. To that end, he has called into question the very legitimacy of the voting process by disparaging mail-in ballots. Trump has said, “Mail ballots, they cheat.” However, there is no evidence of significant cheating associated with mail-in ballots.
Option 4: Don’t Leave Office If all else fails, Trump could simply refuse to vacate the White House. He could say that the election was rigged, that he actually won, and that his supporters have to come out into the streets to defend his “victory.” In other words, Trump could bundle all the options together – lie, steal, incite violence – to turn democracy into autocracy. For the last several months, Trump has been seeing exactly what military forces he can count on in an emergency. Fortunately, without the support of the U.S. military, Trump doesn’t have enough fire power on his side to suspend the constitution and subvert American democracy. https://fpif.org/how-trump-will-try-to-win-the-election/
2020-09-00 Six ways the Right is shredding the vote Little known fact: In more and more races, the GOP doesn’t have broad enough appeal to fairly produce an election majority, so it has resorted to rigging the system so a minority prevails.
How the Right rigs elections. Many voter suppression techniques have been around a long time, and some even get regular media coverage, but in this month’s Lowdown, I want to highlight some of the newer and lesser known repressions spreading across the country.
SURGING THE PURGES GOP governors, judges, and election officials have turned this simple feather- dusting chore into a supersonic leaf blower blasting masses of living, eligible voters out of the system. They’re targeting precincts with lots of young, poor, immigrant, and other Democrat-inclined constituents.
UNLEASH THE LAWYERS As of August, his campaign and the Republican Party had amassed a $20 million war chest for voting-related lawsuits, with many already filed in the battlegrounds of Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In Florida, for example, they’ve sued to stop postage-paid return envelopes. In Pennsylvania, they’ve sued all 67 counties to allow GOP-hired, out-of-county “poll watchers” who, it is feared, will castigate and challenge voters. And they’ve sued California and Nevada to keep them from mailing ballots to all eligible voters. Trump himself sees these courtroom efforts to restrict access to the polls as crucial.
ADVANCE THUGGERY Over and above legal machinations, one of the GOP’s tried-and-true vote-suppression techniques is deploying squads of partisan muscle into non-white, immigrant, and other Democratic-leaning neighborhoods and precincts. These “poll watchers” single out voters they view as “suspicious” and accuse them of trying to vote illegally. They aren’t subtle. Sometimes packing guns, badges, cameras, arm bands, etc. to pose as official ballot police, they literally pull people out of line to loudly demand proof of eligibility. It’s ugly and frighteningly autocratic … and yet legal in many states.
SHUT THE DOORS Don’t want Black people to vote? Or tribal members on reservations? Or students on campus? Simple: Eliminate their polling places. Or just slash the budgets for voting machines, poll workers, and early voting in their precincts, creating punishingly long lines and waits. COVID can turn this systemic disenfranchisement lethal.
KILL THE POST OFFICE The Lowdown has been puzzled by Trump’s crazed hostility to the US Postal Service–by his fevered demands that the most effective and popular agency of government shut its 31,322 offices. But now we see why: USPS workers could securely handle our ballots in the coming election, making it easier and safer for America to vote. But that would increase turnout and democracy –two things Trump hates.
SUPREME SUPPRESSION in 2013 Chief Justice John Roberts, a partisan legal hack who had pushed to stifle minority voting since his days as a Reagan White House operative, the Court decreed the Voting Rights Act unnecessary. Sure enough, right after Robert’s astonishing expression of ignorance, every state that had been subject to the law raced to pass new voter restrictions, while also closing 1,688 polling places, making it harder for African Americans to vote. The court clamp down has since accelerated. This year alone, Roberts and his robed Republican brothers have voted in lockstep in four other big cases to disenfranchise the electorate–especially people of color–to help the GOP win elections.
2020-08-28 Press Normalizes Trump’s Lawlessness as Use of ‘Tools of Presidency’ to ‘Broaden Appeal’ Americans got a Republican Convention featuring—to pick just one thing— gleeful violations of the Hatch Act. That’s the law that prohibits federal employees from taking part in partisan political activities. So, things like having the Secretary of State make a campaign speech from Jerusalem, where they’re engaged on state business, or the first lady stumping with the White House Rose Garden as backdrop, or the head of Homeland Security performing a naturalization ceremony, with Trump looking on, as part of the convention—all patently illegal and unethical.
But besides framing it as “many Democrats were outraged,” as did USA Today (8/26/20), elite media normalized the behavior with passivity, like the New York Times headline (8/26/20), pointed out by Eric Boehlert in his newsletter Press Run (8/27/20), “At RNC, Trump Uses Tools of Presidency in Aim to Broaden Appeal.”
When Trump was threatening to ban the app TikTok, explicitly because of its “Chinese ownership”—or else, he said, it could get taken over by Microsoft, in which case the US Treasury should get a cut since it was his threat that made the sale possible? The BBC, with restraint, called that “almost Mafia-like behavior,” but, as Dan Froomkin of Press Watch spotlighted (Twitter, 8/4/20), the New York Times (8/3/20) described it in a headline as Trump’s “Impulse to Act as CEO to Corporate America”—his “interventions in company dealings based on his own instincts” being, you guessed it, “a departure” from the “approach of predecessors.” https://fair.org/home/press-normalizes-trumps-lawlessness-as-use-of-tools-of-presidency-to-broaden-appeal/
2020-08-21 The Specter of a Fascist Coup by Trump Haunts the US, But There’s Worse to Worry About Spreading faster than COVID-19 among those on the portside, warnings of a fascist-style coup by Trump are rampant this presidential campaign season. Should Trump fail to carry the Electoral College, Noam Chomsky admonishes, “he could send Blackshirts out in the streets… preparation for a plan to try to bring the military in to carry out something which would amount to a military coup.”
A New York Times columnist opines: “Put nothing past Trump, not even the destruction of the American electoral process.” Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, explains that Trump’s election delay threat is a coup in the making. Economist Jack Rasmus speculates Trump will “call for his radical right, gun-toting friends to come to Washington to surround and protect the White House.”
The left World Socialist Web Site joins the liberal chorus: “In an act unprecedented in American history, Donald Trump has repudiated the Constitution and is attempting to establish a presidential dictatorship, supported by the military, police and far-right fascistic militia acting under his command.”
Short of a fascist coup by Trump, the liberal-left has legitimate concerns. A rightward specter is haunting the US and beyond with serious consequences. White supremacy remains seminal in a nation founded on the expropriation of the Indigenous and the exploitation of African slaves. The decline of living standards and an ever more precarious workforce are reaching crisis proportions with the pandemic. The worst is yet to come, creating a political dynamic of discontent that can swing either left or right. https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/08/21/the-specter-of-a-fascist-coup-by-trump-haunts-the-us-but-theres-worse-to-worry-about/
2020-08-20 POGO Files Hatch Act Complaint Against Postmaster General Louis DeJoy The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) writes to file a Hatch Act complaint regarding potential violations of the Hatch Act by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and possibly other senior federal officials for engaging in prohibited political activity by using their official authority to attempt to sway an upcoming election. The Hatch Act explicitly prohibits executive branch officials from using their “official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election.”
According to recent reporting, USPS has removed high-speed mail sorting machines from USPS facilities.4 These machines would be used to sort any mail-in ballots and are capable of sorting around 35,000 pieces of mail each hour. Documents gathered by CNN show that the removal of these machines is a part of a plan by USPS to remove “671 machines used to organize letters or other pieces of mail”—a coordinated “reduction” that began in June of this year during Mr. DeJoy’s tenure. These changes include cutting back employee hours and prohibiting overtime.
USPS has recommended that states employ the more costly 55-cent first-class stamp in lieu of the 20-cent stamp which is typically used for bulk mail and takes longer to deliver.12 Yet, historically, USPS has treated mailed in ballots as first-class mail even without a first-class stamp.
Another recent policy change seems inarguably aimed at directly affecting mailed-in ballots: USPS has banned postal clerks from signing as witnesses for mail-in ballots while on duty. This ends a long-time practice that seems uniquely important under physical-distancing concerns related to the coronavirus pandemic.14 This practice has been so common that the state of Alaska includes postal officials as an example of an authorized witness for ballots on their mail-in voting instructions website.
Although several of these policies may have been walked back as recently as August 18,16 this does not negate the possibility that Postmaster General DeJoy—who was until recently a former finance chair of the Republican National Committee17—violated the Hatch Act.18 In that light, we also urge you to investigate the actions of other federal officials who may also have engaged in potential Hatch Act violations. https://www.pogo.org/letter/2020/08/pogo-files-hatch-act-complaint-against-postmaster-general-louis-dejoy/
2017-08-17 Trump faces ‘humiliation and possible imprisonment’ if he won’t leave after losing: Legal analyst “Were he to attempt such a maneuver, however, history suggests it would end with his personal humiliation, disgrace, and possible imprisonment on criminal charges,” Callan explains. “In 1807 former Vice President Aaron Burr was tried for treasonous acts against the United States… though Burr was acquitted, it seems clear that an attempt to illegally seize and retain presidential power would violate a variety of criminal conspiracy laws.”
Callan speculates that, if Trump is truly insistent about not leaving the White House, even the military could get involved to tell the president that it will have no part in participating in a coup. Should Trump file a lawsuit challenging the results of the election, he could theoretically delay rival Joe Biden’s inauguration — but that would also backfire because it would make House Speaker Nancy Pelosi the interim president.
2020-08-16 Top Democrat demands rapid IG probe into postmaster general The top Democrat on the House Subcommittee on Government Operations, a panel with jurisdiction over the U.S. Postal Service, is demanding that the agency’s inspector general conduct a “flash review” of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s recent policy changes that have dramatically slowed mail delivery across the nation and raised the specter of calculated election sabotage.
“The timing of his proposals—amidst a global pandemic and just weeks before a contentious presidential election that will rely on the Postal Service to deliver unprecedented volumes of mail-in-ballots—constitutes a deliberate attempt to use the Postal Service to stifle democracy and influence an election,” Connolly noted that DeJoy—a major Republican donor to President Donald Trump—has in recent weeks:
Removed employee access to overtime, despite clear evidence of a workforce shortage caused by the coronavirus pandemic;
Told employees to leave late-arriving mail behind, changing years of Postal Service practice;
Introduced a reorganization plan without providing any evidence or justification for it;
Announced plans to request authority for a hiring freeze, again in the midst of a global pandemic that is prompting workforce shortages; and
Announced plans to consolidate regions without clarity as to what problem these changes would solve.
2020-08-12 What Will Trump Do to the World to Win Re-Election? Trump shrugged at 150,000 U.S. COVID-19 deaths. Who’s to say he’s above starting a fight with China or Iran? To put it mildly, Donald Trump has not been the most engaged president in U.S. history. He doesn’t pay attention to his briefings. He plays golf while a pandemic rages throughout the land. He has only a vague understanding of the world that exists beyond the global archipelago of Trump Organization holdings.
After experimenting with North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran, the Trump administration has decided that China is the most useful adversary to distract attention from the president’s many failures. As with Iran, Trump is probably not thinking about starting a war with China. But a skirmish in the South China Sea that produces a rally-around-the-flag surge in support of the president could certainly fit the bill for an October surprise. The U.S. military seems to be preparing for such a contingency, with Pentagon chief Mark Esper effectively drawing a line in the water near China.
Surely, you might be saying, Donald Trump wouldn’t pick a fight with China or Iran just to win an election. Wouldn’t the potential casualties, if nothing else, stay his hand? But remember, this is a president who has already dismissed more than 150,000 American coronavirus deaths as “it is what it is.” What’s another few thousand deaths to guarantee four more years? https://fpif.org/what-will-trump-do-to-the-world-to-win-re-election/
2020-08-11 Will War with Iran Be Trump’s Election Eve Shocker? Was Donald Trump’s January 3rd drone assassination of Major General Qasem Soleimani the first step in turning the simmering Cold War between the United States and Iran into a hot war in the weeks before an American presidential election?
Trump’s administration also seems to have launched a series of covert actions against Tehran that look increasingly overt and have Iran watchers concerned about whether an October surprise could be in the cards.
“The Central Intelligence Agency has conducted a series of covert cyber operations against Iran and other targets since winning a secret victory in 2018 when President Trump signed what amounts to a sweeping authorization for such activities, according to former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the matter… The finding has made it easier for the CIA to damage adversaries’ critical infrastructure, such as petrochemical plants.” https://countercurrents.org/2020/08/will-war-with-iran-be-trumps-election-eve-shocker/
2020-08-11 On Right-Wing Violence in Texas, Media’s Silence Sends Message Hank Gilbert, the Democratic challenger to Rep. Louie Gohmert in Texas’ 1st congressional district, held a rally in Tyler, Texas, on July 26 against federal law enforcement agencies’ recent intervention in Portland, Oregon. But armed participants of a “Back the Blue” counter-protest crashed the event, beating and robbing attendees in the park. The attack injured a number of rally attendees, including Gilbert’s campaign manager Ryan Miller, resulting in at least two police reports being filed so far. armed supporters of a far-right politician holding Confederate flags and attacking people in broad daylight in front of police, in a place like East Texas with a history of white supremacist violence, is an important event with national implications about the growing boldness and militancy of the far right. It is a critical example of the white supremacist violence that has skyrocketed in response to the George Floyd uprisings.
Major media’s silence is also striking in light of Gohmert’s infamy across the country for a number of incidents which include, in the last year alone, being one of the four (out of 414) votes against an anti-lynching bill, outing an impeachment whistleblower on the House floor, drafting a resolution to ban the Democratic Party for its “loathsome and bigoted past,” and, most recently, testing positive for Covid-19 after refusing to wear a mask. Gohmert supporters’ July 26 armed attack of his opponent’s rally came just three days after Gohmert’s July 23 resolution to ban Democrats, and three days prior to his July 29 Covid-19 diagnosis. https://fair.org/home/on-right-wing-violence-in-texas-medias-silence-sends-message/
2020-08-10 Freedom Rider: How Trump Can Steal the 2020 Election The election was stolen from Clinton four years ago and the even weaker 2020 candidate can expect the same fate. “No one in the media or the Democratic Party gives a basic civics lesson or talks about how elections are really stolen.” Republicans win the presidency…
It is important to remember the real electoral threats when Donald Trump decides to have fun with America’s collective reptile brain. When he tweeted that he might postpone the election, people who should have known better immediately began responding with anger and fear. The corporate media, who love the president because he is always good copy, failed to inform the public about American law and how presidential elections are regulated.
Simply put, election day can’t be changed absent congressional action. Nor can a president stay in office if he loses. If Trump loses he will no longer be president on January 20, 2021. While the Trumpian desire to mess with our heads continues, no one in the media or the Democratic Party gives a basic civics lesson or talks about how elections are really stolen. Once again Trump is used as the perfect foil, a poster child for vote blue no matter who. His every nonsensical remark is a substitute for policy change that would motivate the high voter turn-out that democrats need. https://www.parkindymedia.org/freedom-rider-how-trump-can-steal-the-2020-election/
2020-08-03 What If Trump Refuses to Accept a Biden Victory? A Look at How Electoral Chaos Could Divide Nation As President Trump floats the idea of delaying the election, we speak with Nils Gilman, historian and co-founder of Transition Integrity Project, which organized a bipartisan group of experts to game out what a contested November election might look like. “In every scenario except for the one where Biden won in a landslide, we ended up with severe electoral contestation, protests in the streets, crazy stories happening on social media, and the challenges went down to Inauguration Day,” Gilman says. https://www.democracynow.org/2020/8/3/nils_gilman_2020_election_scenarios
2020-07-30 President’s Call to Delay the Election is Dangerous Congress has the power to set elections, not the president, and there are no legitimate concerns about fraud with mail-in voting. Mail-in ballots are a secure form of voting that the American military has been using since the Civil War. Trump’s push to delay the election appears to be a politically motivated attempt to preemptively call the election results into question. His tweet clearly aims to distract from bad economic news and is not based on legitimate concerns about the integrity of the upcoming election.https://www.pogo.org/press/release/2020/presidents-call-to-delay-the-election-is-dangerous/
2020-07-30 ‘Trump’s Troops Are Breaking the Law and Creating Chaos’ A man, dressed in black, stands apparently alone on a darkened sidewalk, when two heavily armed men in camouflage walk up on him, hustle him off into an unmarked van and drive off, refusing to identify themselves to observers.
We’ve since learned this is part of an orchestrated effort by the Trump administration to deploy federal law enforcement agents to deal, SWAT-style, with what they call “violent anarchists.” What’s more, they plan to replay those nightmarish scenes from Portland wherever they see fit. As Acting Homeland Security Chief Chad Wolf says, “I don’t need invitations.” Wolf also subsequently described federal agents as arresting demonstrators “proactively.” Alarm seems appropriate. https://fair.org/home/trumps-troops-are-breaking-the-law-and-creating-chaos/
2020-07-24 ‘A Combination of Forces Puts Our Postal Service at Grave Risk’ Big Trump donor—surprise—Louis DeJoy issued a series of memos, disclosed to the Washington Post, calling for significant operational changes, including restrictions on overtime that many, including the Postal Workers Union, contend would slow down mail delivery, at the same time as Donald Trump holds up crucial pandemic support for USPS, contingent on it making steep price increases. “Sabotage” starts to sound like quite an apt description.
But what we should know is that this direct attack on the Postal Service, while it may be felt especially acutely during a pandemic and an election in which the most reasonable response is voting by mail, is absolutely nothing new, only the latest iteration of a decades-long assault on the US Postal Service, featuring some characters and some ideas with which you might be, unfortunately, familiar. https://fair.org/home/a-combination-of-forces-puts-our-postal-service-at-grave-risk/
2020-07-22 Trump’s Last Hand The groundwork for a police-state and subsequent coup has been laid-out in advance by the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. With Clinton’s police and prisons, Bush’s patriot act and war on terror, Obama’s continuance and expansion of the Patriot Act, enhanced surveillance, and the removal of Habeas Corpus and the Posse Comitatus under the NDAA, which he signed in 2011. These two ancient laws that are the foundation of modern constitutional law, having been weakened or removed from the security and rights of US citizens, now allow the federal government to use US troops in the arrest and indefinite detention and trial in military courts of any US citizen. This, along with the corruption of the election system and electoral process– from purges of registration rolls to limiting polling places and other forms of suppression and tampering– brings us to the end of our constitutional republic.
The Trump administration, by all appearances, is ready to play the last remaining cards. The scripts for totalitarian dictatorship has been written and handed down through the decades, and Trump, with his cabal of traitors, has studied them well. Trump is not concerned with the presidency as we know it; he has gone beyond that. A presidency with its limits on stature, power and years in office does not interest or appeal to Trump. Trump wants much more than a simple and limited four or eight year as president. Trump is making way for the greatest gamble. He is betting everything on this hand. To succeed is virtually unlimited wealth and power, to fail is to risk humiliation, prison, bankruptcy, or worse. Trump, from all appearances, is now ready to make his final push. Trump knows that he cannot win the election, so he is preparing to sabotage the election. This is where his last 3 ½ years have been spent, on cueing-up for his final coup. https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/22/trumps-last-hand/
2020-06-13 ‘Trump Judges Are Showing Just How Extreme They Are’ Donald Trump has done so many high-profile egregious things as president—building a wall on the Mexican border, calling white supremacists “very fine people” and trying to ban Muslims from the country—that it can distract from other behind-the-scenes harms his administration is enacting. Importantly, harms that will outlast his presidency. At the top of that list: judges. https://fair.org/home/trump-judges-are-showing-just-how-extreme-they-are/
2020-06-11 Trump Plays To White Supremacist Voters In 2020 Re-Election Bid Who Trump’s voter base consists of, and what their philosophy and ideology make up is all about, became abundantly clear once Trump announced the date and place he had chosen to hold his first 2020 Presidential re-election rally, following the lifting of the pandemic lockdown. It originally was scheduled to be held on June 19th in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
2020-05-20 ‘Efforts to Make Voting More Difficult Are Magnified in a Pandemic’ t was called “one of the most brazen acts of voter suppression in modern history.” With an unsigned opinion, believed to come from Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court voted 5–4 that it was OK for Wisconsin to disqualify ballots postmarked and received after their primary election day—even though thousands of voters didn’t even get those ballots until after election day, due to the sheer overwhelm of requests for absentee ballots resulting from the pandemic. Coming literally on the night before the election, the ruling overturned a lower court’s decision to extend the absentee ballot deadline, and forced people to risk their health in order to exercise their right to vote. In trying to understand what happened with April’s primary in Wisconsin, you have written that you need to start the clock earlier than, say, Governor Evers’ push to postpone the election in the face of Covid-19, and the Republican-dominated state supreme court’s reinstatement of it.
One of the things they did was they passed these really horrible gerrymandered maps that made it possible for Republicans to win no matter what happened. So in 2018, Republicans in Wisconsin only got 46% of the vote, but they got 64% of seats in the state legislature. Now, they’ve also done other stuff, like pass an array of voter suppression laws, such as a voter ID law, such as cutbacks to early voting, changes to voter registration, that have also made it easier for Republicans to win elections, including to win a majority on the state supreme court, which, of course, was the court that said that Tony Evers, the governor, couldn’t delay the election. https://fair.org/home/efforts-to-make-voting-more-difficult-are-magnified-in-a-pandemic/
2020-05-15 Ari Berman on Voter Suppression and Coronavirus From targeted “voter ID” laws to purging people from the rolls to fighting vote by mail, Republicans are making ever-bolder attempts to suppress voting—expanding the franchise doesn’t work in their favor, Donald Trump unabashedly stated recently. It’s a patently anti-democratic project by definition, but corporate media’s business-as-usual, partisan framing reduces a struggle over a fundament of societal participation to jockeying between elephants and donkeys. It’s a failure of the greatest magnitude, and no amount of ponderous, prize-winning books written in the aftermath will substitute for tough reporting done now to protect the integrity of the vote going into one of the most monumental presidential elections in the country’s history. https://fair.org/home/ari-berman-on-voter-suppression-and-coronavirus/
2020-05-06 The President Is Goading Anti-Lockdown Militias to Violence We must not overlook the danger of Trump’s signaling. But a presidential call to “liberate” states led by elected officials of the opposition party while Trump supporters carry guns into their state capitols shouldn’t be one of them. The anti-lockdown rallies were initiated and anchored by former White House officials, a number of state-based conservative policy groups, and a coalition of high-level GOP donors. Attorney General William Barr has aligned the Justice Department with the protesters’ goals. Most important, Trump’s tweets appeared to back the rifle-carrying militia component of the protests, as the President called for defying legal authority. https://inthesetimes.com/article/militias-coronavirus-trump-reopening-lockdown-protests-biden-republicans
2020-04-00 How to destroy a government Trump’s White House was chaotic and vicious, unlike anything in American history, but it didn’t really matter as long as “the adults” were there to wait out the president’s impulses and deflect his worst ideas and discreetly pocket destructive orders lying around on his desk.
After three years, the adults have all left the room—saying just about nothing on their way out to alert the country to the peril—while Trump is still there.
The adults were too sophisticated to see Trump’s special political talents—his instinct for every adversary’s weakness, his fanatical devotion to himself, his knack for imposing his will, his sheer staying power. They also failed to appreciate the advanced decay of the Republican Party, which by 2016 was far gone in a nihilistic pursuit of power at all costs. They didn’t grasp the readiness of large numbers of Americans to accept, even relish, Trump’s contempt for democratic norms and basic decency.
When Trump came to power, he believed that the regime was his, property he’d rightfully acquired, and that the 2 million civilians working under him, most of them in obscurity, owed him their total loyalty. He harbored a deep suspicion that some of them were plotting in secret to destroy him. He had to bring them to heel before he could be secure in his power.
But a simple intuition had propelled Trump throughout his life: Human beings are weak. They have their illusions, appetites, vanities, fears. They can be cowed, corrupted, or crushed. A government is composed of human beings. This was the flaw in the brilliant design of the Framers, and Trump learned how to exploit it. The wreckage began to pile up. He needed only a few years to warp his administration into a tool for his own benefit. If he’s given a few more years, the damage to American democracy will be irreversible.
2020-01-03 Why Trump is escalating the US-Israeli war on Iran Trump – who ran for office railing against the Iraq war – is now resorting to the same sorts of lies and exaggerations all his predecessors have used to manipulate the public into supporting their military adventures.
Following the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the US invaded Iran’s eastern neighbor Afghanistan. Two years later, the George W. Bush administration invaded and occupied Iraq, immediately to Iran’s west. This came amid euphoria from the neoconservatives at the heart of the Bush administration that Damascus and Tehran would be the next targets. This all followed the script set out by the Project for the New American Century, a think tank pushing for regime change across the region as a way of securing American and Israeli domination.
Allied with American imperialists, Israel and its supporters have been the prime backers of escalation if not outright war with Iran. Israel, and specifically Netanyahu, took the lead in working to end the 2015 deal which saw Iran voluntarily place its nuclear energy program under strict limits in exchange for a lifting of economic sanctions. Israel has relentlessly pushed for the punishing economic war waged by Trump aimed at inflicting suffering on ordinary people and bringing Iran to collapse. The hatred is so extreme that Sheldon Adelson, the pro-Israel billionaire and top funder to Trump and the Republican Party, has previously called on the United States to nuke Iran.
The growth and spread of groups like ISIS and al-Qaida – a direct consequence of American wars and interventions – has been a catastrophe for millions of people across the region. But these groups never really bothered the United States and Israel, who just see them as more tools in their effort to impose their will. That is why the United States sent at least a billion dollars of arms into the hands of such groups to fuel the war in Syria. That is why Israel armed and funded groups linked with al-Qaida in Syria as well.
Columbia University professor Joseph Massad has suggested that recent US-backed moves to reach formal “non-aggression pacts” between Israel and certain Gulf States may be a preparatory step for a wider war against Iran as well as against Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and the Palestinians. Understanding this perverted logic is essential to seeing why the US and Israel appear so determined to pursue conflict with Iran no matter the human cost. https://electronicintifada.net/content/why-trump-escalating-us-israeli-war-iran/29231
2020-01-00 Will Small Farmers’ Beef With Trump Sway the 2020 Election? Ranchers on horseback converged to demand fair cattle markets. demand that the White House rein in the power of massive transnational companies, like Tyson and Cargill, that slaughter and pack more than 80 percent of the cattle raised in the United States. As corporate meatpackers have expanded, small ranchers have been getting squeezed: In 1970, they earned about 70 cents of every dollar that consumers spent on beef; today small ranchers get less than 40 cents. Their profit margins have fallen nearly 30 percent since 2016, while packers’ profits have jumped 68 percent. Another measure of desperation, farmer suicides, are believed to be on the rise. As a succession of speakers harangued the crowd about the plight of ranchers, attendees were encouraged to tweet at the president and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, punctuating their complaints with #FairCattleMarkets. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/01/ranchers-fair-cattle-markets-omaha-trump-beef-tyson-cargill/
2019-09-19 New national security adviser recently considered war to free prisoners in Iran So, just days before assuming his new White House post, O’Brien postulated that the US could go to war with Iran to secure the release of a small number of people. Amnesty International has reported that conditions in Evin prison are “inhumane and unsanitary” and that abuses including torture take place.
The human rights organization has also recently pointed to the “horrific human rights violations” including torture committed by the United States at its Guantánamo Bay military prison. Additionally, it has condemned breaches of international law and “callous and dehumanizing” practices at a federal super-maximum-security prison in the United States. The use of solitary confinement in prisons across the country is described by Amnesty as a “shocking abuse.” https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/michael-f-brown/new-national-security-adviser-recently-considered-war-free-prisoners-iran
2019-05-28 Donald Trump’s Path to Victory This is how the GOP plans to re-elect Trump in 2020. First get-out-the-vote campaign targeting the 36% of the electorate in swing states who are “inclined to vote for Trump.” Second, the Republican Party will suppress the vote of Democratic constituencies — with the help of the five-justice conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Third, the GOP will try to win over affluent suburbanites by smearing Democrats with the S‑word. “We’re going into the war with some socialists,” Trump told GOP congressmen in April. Fourth, Politico reports that pro-Trump PACs, like America Rising and America First, are spending millions “pursuing a strategy intended to pit Democrats against each other in a battle of progressive bona fides.” https://inthesetimes.com/article/donald-trump-2020-reelection-campaign-electoral-college
2019-05-08 Trump Floats Proposal to Cancel 2020 Elections Referring to the Democratic Party-led effort to label Trump a Russian collaborator, the tweet read: “Trump should have 2 yrs added to his 1st term as pay back for time stolen by this corrupt failed coup.”
By re-tweeting this proposal, Trump is, in effect, threatening to cancel the 2020 elections and declare himself above the law. Article II of the US Constitution states that the president “shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years.” Trump’s action is a direct threat to abrogate the Constitution. Bourgeois politics has degenerated to such a degree that political and legal norms considered fundamental since the American Revolution are now challenged by presidential tweet.
Trump’s Republican backers claim that Trump was only joking. But canceling elections is not something about which presidents’ joke. The president is the most powerful person in the world and his every word is closely followed in the US and internationally. Politicians, businessmen and decision makers around the world parse even seemingly mundane statements or off-the-cuff remarks for their deeper significance. https://www.globalresearch.ca/trump-floats-proposal-cancel-2020-elections/5676898
2018-07-17 Voter Suppression Is Warping Democracy Voter suppression almost certainly helped Donald Trump win the presidency. Multiple academic studies and court rulings indicate that racially biased election laws, such as voter-ID legislation in places like Wisconsin, favored Republican candidates in 2016. Like most other elections in American history, this one wasn’t a fair fight.
A new poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and The Atlantic has uncovered evidence of deep structural barriers to the ballot for black and Latino voters, specifically in the 2016 election. More than that, the survey finds that the deep wounds of Jim Crow endure, leaving America’s democratic promise unfulfilled. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/07/poll-prri-voter-suppression/565355/
2018-07-00 Trump’s border cruelty is a test of our national character There’s no need for me to chronicle each step in this Trump-run-amuck saga, for nearly everyone has seen shocking videos and photos of his troops seizing and ripping apart families. Again, and again, we’ve heard recordings of bewildered, anguished, and sobbing children and absorbed weeks of 24/7 coverage and commentary about this flagrantly immoral assertion of Trumpist autocracy. And we’ve heard the bizarre twists, turns, and tweets of Trump, Sessions, Spence, Kelly, Huckabee-Sanders, Nielson, et al. trying to rationalize their intentionally cruel policy. Rather, this edition of The Lowdown will consider the deeper issue of what their relentless pursuit of zero tolerance says–not just about them, but also about us.
2018-04-00 Is Trump mentally ill? And does it matter? In The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, Yale psychiatrist Dr. Bandy Lee and her 26 co-authors warn that the president is a clear and present danger because he is mentally ill. Their diagnosis? Trump has malignant narcissism. His symptoms? He is alienating our allies, taunting our enemies, threatening our democracy, and undermining our national security. And he’s in control of the nuclear trigger. It’s their duty, exclaim the authors, to warn America.
The authors clearly support progressive issues, but they do not once question the underlying economic system that aids and abets social crimes like racism. They do not consider that it was precisely the mass disillusionment created by a bipartisan assault on working people’s standard of living that put Trump in the spotlight.
Whatever Trump’s mental status, what must be addressed is his political program, because many politicians who are considered quite normal, whose sanity is not called into question, endorse exactly what he is trying to accomplish. They are working with him, and he with them. He’s not in this alone. And they’ll still be around once he is gone, still leading us to the brink of disaster. https://dev.socialism.com/fs-article/fs-book-review-trump-mentally-ill-matter/
2018-03-28 2020 Census Citizenship Question Trump’s Latest Move in War on Immigrants “A naked attempt to politicize the census, with the goal of suppressing minority participation.” The Trump administration’s decision to add a controversial question on citizenship status to the 2020 Census questionnaire is its latest attack on immigrant communities—a far-reaching power grab disguised as a technicality.
2020-03-09 Trump Has Turned the 2020 Election Into a Political Version of “Survivor” But The Donald was fixated on 2020 even before he pulled off the upset of the century on November 8, 2016. After all, no one seems to have been more surprised by his victory that day than Trump himself. Donald Trump filed his paperwork to run for reelection only hours after his inauguration in January 2017, setting a presidential record, the first of his many dubious achievements.
According to Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury and his personal attorney Michael Cohen, even on election night 2016, the billionaire tycoon didn’t think he’d win his first presidential bid. His wife, Melania, assured by her husband that he’d lose, reportedly wept as the news came in that she would indeed be heading for the White House. Before his surprise victory, Trump described the election many times as “rigged” and seemed poised to declare the vote illegitimate as soon as the final returns rolled in. The attacks he’d launched on Hillary Clinton during the campaign — on her health, her integrity, her email account — were not only designed to hurt an opponent but also to undermine in advance the person that everyone expected to be the next president.https://truthout.org/articles/trump-has-turned-the-2020-election-into-a-political-version-of-survivor/
2019-09-03 House Democrats turn their attention to Donald Trump’s involvement in hush-money payments The House Judiciary Committee is picking up where federal prosecutors in Manhattan left off. Former special counsel Robert Mueller’s refusal to indict the president or his family is presented as favorable evidence by the White House and its allies to suggest Trump was somehow vindicated and acquitted of any wrongdoing. Not only did Mueller not acquit Trump, now it turns out the White House’s celebration for avoiding indictments may have been a bit premature. House Democrats, back in session after the summer recess, are reportedly preparing to launch a comprehensive investigation into hush-money payments made on Trump’s behalf to at least two women — former Playboy model Karen McDougal and adult film actress Stormy Daniels. Both women say they had affairs with Trump. https://archive.thinkprogress.org/house-democrats-turn-their-attention-to-donald-trumps-involvement-in-hush-money-payments-50d200c6ceac/
2017-01-00 Trump and National Neoliberalism Trump’s ascendance means the end of globalism—but not of neoliberalism. The election of Donald Trump portends the completion of the U.S Government’s capture by wealthy corporate interests. This election appears to be a key stage in the ongoing process of American democratic disintegration, though in my opinion Trump’s election does not signal the beginning of a rapid descent into European-style fascism. Instead, the merger of state and corporate interests is proceeding along an already-established trajectory. American democracy has been under attack from large and wealthy corporate interests for a long time, with this process accelerating and gaining strength over the period of neoliberal globalization (roughly the early 1970s to the present). This time period is associated with the rise of powerful multinational corporations with economic and political might that rivals that of many national governments. I am persuaded by the argument that the U.S. political system is not democratic at all, but rather an “inverted totalitarian” system. http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2017/0117bregerbush.html
2017-01-02 The End of Progressive Neoliberalism In a moment of political upheaval, it is up to the left to reject the false choices on offer and seize upon widespread discontent to redefine the terms of debate. The election of Donald Trump represents one of a series of dramatic political uprisings that together signal a collapse of neoliberal hegemony. These uprisings include the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, the rejection of the Renzi reforms in Italy, the Bernie Sanders campaign for the Democratic Party nomination in the United States, and rising support for the National Front in France, among others. Although they differ in ideology and goals, these electoral mutinies share a common target: all are rejections of corporate globalization, neoliberalism, and the political establishments that have promoted them. In every case, voters are saying “No!” to the lethal combination of austerity, free trade, predatory debt, and precarious, ill-paid work that characterize financialized capitalism today. Their votes are a response to the structural crisis of this form of capitalism, which first came into full view with the near meltdown of the global financial order in 2008.
Until recently, however, the chief response to the crisis was social protest—dramatic and lively, to be sure, but largely ephemeral. Political systems, by contrast, seemed relatively immune, still controlled by party functionaries and establishment elites, at least in powerful capitalist states like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. Now, however, electoral shockwaves reverberate throughout the world, including in the citadels of global finance. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/progressive-neoliberalism-reactionary-populism-nancy-fraser
2016-11-14 Authoritarian Democracy: A Playbook From India to Turkey to the Philippines, authoritarian-leaning leaders of major world democracies have refined a set of strategies to make their countries less democratic. Here are five common tactics to watch out for.
Politicizing the prosecution of political opponents. In countries like India, it is not uncommon for politicians in power, or their allies, to bring cases against opposition politicians.
Selective application of the law to the media and civil society
2016-11-13 Prepare For Regime Change, Not Policy Change Those of us who witnessed illiberal populist movements take hold in Turkey, Russia, Hungary, Poland, the Philippines, and elsewhere are watching the election of Donald Trump with a particularly acute sense of foreboding. With this difference: unlike the United States, none of these countries have ever stood out as a beacon of liberty. To many Americans, this means that however autocratic his leanings, Trump’s designs will fail. But this is exactly the wrong conclusion to draw. It is precisely such overconfidence in the United States’ long and illustrious tradition of liberty that could lull the American public into a false sense of security and facilitate the rapid destruction of that very tradition.
Confidence in the exceptional resilience of American democracy is particularly misplaced in the face of today’s illiberal populist movements, whose leaders are constantly learning from each other. Trump has a wide variety of tried and tested techniques on which to draw; already, he has vowed to take pages out of Putin’s playbook. Defenders of liberal democracy, too, must learn from each other’s victories and defeats. Below are some hard-earned lessons from countries that have been overrun by the contemporary wave of illiberal democracy. They could be essential for preserving the American republic in the dark years to come. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/trump-victory-regime-change-lessons-autocrats-erdogan-putin
2020-10-16 The US Should Indict American War Criminals, Not Julian Assange The US is attempting to imprison one of its critics, Julian Assange, by claiming a global right to prosecute any journalist in the world. If that prosecution succeeds, it would be a severe blow not just to press freedom, but to our very right to oppose imperialism and empire. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/10/julian-assange-wikileaks-espionage-act-war-crimes
2020-10-15 Proposed Reform to US Espionage Act Would Create Public Interest Defense Legislation proposed in Congress would amend the United States Espionage Act and create a public interest defense for those prosecuted under the law.
“A defendant charged with an offense under section 793 or 798 [in the U.S. legal code] shall be permitted to testify about their purpose for engaging in the prohibited conduct,” according to a draft of the bill Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard introduced.
Such a reform would make it possible for whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, Reality Winner, Terry Albury and Daniel Hale to inform the public why they disclosed information without authorization to the press. The legislation called the Protect Brave Whistleblowers Act is supported by Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.
“If this long-overdue revision of the 1917 Espionage Act had been law half a century ago, I myself could have had a fair trial for releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971: justice under law unavailable to me and to every other national security whistleblower indicted and prosecuted since then,” Ellsberg declared. Defending Rights And Dissent (DRD), a group committed to the freedom of political expression, backs the legislation as well. https://rootsaction.org/news-a-views/2347-proposed-reform-to-us-espionage-act-would-create-public-interest-defense
2020-10-15 Steal This Secret: CIA Does Exactly What it Accuses Julian Assange of Doing While the spy agency boasts about its record, WikiLeaks is subject to prosecution. “Hell yeah, we steal secrets,” Mike Pompeo acknowledged in 2017, when he was the director of the CIA. “That’s what we do. It’s in our charter.”
WikiLeaks denies its own engagement in this practice, saying it does not steal, but reveals. The organization identifies itself as a media organization that specializes in publishing secret information about war and espionage. In recent years, WikiLeaks has partnered with several leading news organizations, including The New York Times, to expose lies, misconduct, and criminal activities by governments around the world.
2020-10-14 THE UNPRECEDENTED AND ILLEGAL CAMPAIGN TO ELIMINATE JULIAN ASSANGE OVER THE 17 DAYS of Julian Assange’s extradition hearing in London, prosecutors succeeded in proving both crimes and conspiracy. The culprit, however, was not Assange. Instead, the lawbreakers and conspirators turned out to be the British and American governments. Witness after witness detailed illegal measures to violate Assange’s right to a fair trial, destroy his health, assassinate his character, and imprison him in solitary confinement for the rest of his life. Courtroom evidence exposed illegality on an unprecedented scale by America’s and Britain’s intelligence, military, police, and judicial agencies to eliminate Assange. https://www.parkindymedia.org/the-unprecedented-and-illegal-campaign-to-eliminate-julian-assange/
2020-10-12 The Tortured Trial of Julian Assange Most people might be excused for not knowing it, because the story is mainly ignored, or is shamelessly misreported in the corporate media when it does get any attention. A courageous Australian journalist, abandoned by his own country, is being railroaded by a British court towards extradition to the US where he could face life in prison in solitary confinement for the “crime of espionage”—exposing US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.
What Julian Assange and his organization Wikileaks have revealed for the whole world to see is the systematic devastation of peoples, of lands, and perennial military pollution of planet earth. The main perpetrator is the most powerful and self-declared “greatest democratic nation” in the world, the United States of America—accompanied by its European and Commonwealth vassal states, plus proxy allies in the Middle East and Zionist Israel.
2020-10-05 Reporters Claim Facebook is Censoring Information on Julian Assange Case “90% of my traffic has just been cut off by what seems to be a general algorithm command of some kind to downplay Assange.” “I think it is as simple as that.” Asked about the situation by former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges, Murray explained that Anybody who is at all radical or takes any view of anything that is out with the official establishment view gets used to occasional shadow banning, but I have never seen anything on this scale before.”
2020-10-04 The call to free Julian Assange echoes around the world Ahead of and during the extradition hearings for Julian Assange, political leaders, activists, journalists and lawyers across the world have condemned the prosecution and demanded the dropping of charges. Assange is being punished for working with Chelsea Manning to release documents that exposed war crimes and atrocities by the US and its allies in Afghanistan and Iraq, and other similar documents.
2020-10-01 Julian Assange’s Prosecution for Publishing Leaked Government Documents Is an Extremely Dangerous Precedent In a time when journalists soliciting leaks from high-level sources have been cast as the vanguard of the resistance to Trump, his efforts to criminalize that very practice seem to have been given a free pass.
Since 2016, Assange has become a bipartisan enemy of the state, hated by conservatives for exposing US government war crimes and general malfeasance, and hated by liberal politicians for exposing various misdeeds of the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign, which they believe cost her the election.
2020-09-28 As his extradition trial drags on, media and rights groups are still ignoring Julian Assange with the case widely seen as setting an important precedent for freedom of speech and of the media worldwide. Yet as the case reaches its pinnacle, a number of press freedom groups have gone silent on the matter. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has not mentioned Assange in months, on either its website or its Twitter account. London-based PEN International has only one article this year on the Australian and appears to have gone quiet since July. The CPJ has also refused to include him among its list of jailed journalists, arguing that Wikileaks’ role is more that of a publisher. While this could be debatable, the omission of by far the most famous and influential of the world’s 248 imprisoned media figures could be seen as a politically calculated decision.
Big media outlets seem just as uninterested in the U.S. government’s attempts to capture the man who released hundreds of thousands of documents detailing American war crimes http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/30889
2020-09-26 Julian Assange: Press shows little interest in media ‘Trial of Century’ The extradition, widely viewed as politically motivated, has profound consequences for journalists worldwide, as the ruling could effectively criminalize the possession of leaked documents, which are an indispensable part of investigative reporting.
Since the hearing began on September 7, the Times, for instance, has published only two bland news articles (9/7/20, 9/16/20)—one of them purely about the technical difficulties in the courtroom—along with a short rehosted AP video (9/7/20). There have been no editorials and no commentary on what the case means for journalism. The Times also appears to be distancing itself from Assange, with neither article noting that it was one of WikiLeaks’ five major partners in leaking information that became known as the CableGate scandal. https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/julian-assange-press-shows-little-interest-in-media-trial-of-century/
2020-09-23 DOCTOR DIAGNOSED JULIAN ASSANGE WITH ASPERGER’S SYNDROME Dr. Quinton Deeley, who works for the National Health Service (NHS), conducted an Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) test on Assange and produced a report. He interviewed Assange for six hours in July. https://shadowproof.com/2020/09/23/doctor-assange-aspergers-prison-extradition-trial/
2020-09-22 Julian Assange says he ‘hears voices’ in prison: psychiatrist Michael Kopelman, a psychiatrist who has interviewed Assange around 20 times, said the former hacker would be a “very high” suicide risk if he were extradited to the United States for leaking military secrets.
2020-09-18 Daniel Ellsberg warns US press freedom is under attack “The American press has remained in kind of a state of denial for 40 years, really, since my case, that the Espionage Act has wording in it that could be aimed directly at them,” says Ellsberg, who testified in Assange’s defense at his extradition trial via video stream from the United States. “Now the American press is staring right down the barrel at the use of the Espionage Act against American journalists and publishers for doing journalism.” https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/daniel-ellsberg-warns-us-press-freedom-is-under/
2020-09-18 ‘Putin’s favorite congressman’ offered Julian Assange a pardon if he covered up Russian meddling: lawyers American prosecutors said this week that former Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) offered WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange a pardon from President Donald Trump if he agreed to help cover up Russia’s role in interfering in the 2016 presidential election.
2020-09-11 Failed Irish politician pushes agenda shaped by Israel’s spies We should be jealous of how he and his team have unearthed more facts about US imperialism in the 21st century than any other media organization. Disgracefully, contributors to supposedly serious publications like The Guardian have mocked Assange and effectively applauded his tormentors. As well as doing a disservice to their profession, those “journalists” have conveniently forgotten recent history. Not long ago, The Guardian was happy to team up with Assange and publish his scoops.
One of the numerous US diplomatic cables which entered the public domain as a result deserves more attention than it has received. It summarizes a two-hour meeting held on 26 July 2007 between Frances Townsend – at the time the “homeland security” assistant to President George W. Bush – and Meir Dagan, then head of Israel’s spy agency Mossad.https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/david-cronin/failed-irish-politician-pushes-agenda-shaped-israels-spies
2020-09-09 Julian Assange, Prometheus Bound Prometheus is being punished not for stealing fire – but for exposing power under the light of truth, thus provoking the unbounded ire of Zeus The Exceptionalist, who’s only able to stage his crimes under multiple veils of secrecy. Prometheus pierced the myth of secrecy – https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/09/09/julian-assange-prometheus-bound/
2020-09-07 The Stalinist Trial of Julian Assange When I first met Julian Assange more than ten years ago, I asked him why he had started WikiLeaks. He replied: “Transparency and accountability are moral issues that must be the essence of public life and journalism.”
It is this morality of purpose that so threatens the collusion of powers that want to plunge much of the world into war and wants to bury Julian alive in Trumps fascist America.
In 2008, a top secret US State Department report described in detail how the United States would combat this new moral threat. A secretly-directed personal smear campaign against Julian Assange would lead to “exposure [and] criminal prosecution”. The aim was to silence and criminalise WikiLeaks and its founder. Page after page revealed a coming war on a single human being and on the very principle of freedom of speech and freedom of thought, and democracy. The imperial shock troops would be those who called themselves journalists: the big hitters of the so-called mainstream, especially the “liberals” who mark and patrol the perimeters of dissent. https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/09/07/the-stalinist-trial-of-julian-assange/
2020-09-07 Julian Assange: prolific leaker of secrets back in spotlight He has spent most of the past decade either in custody or holed up in Ecuador’s London embassy as he has tried to avoid extradition — first to Sweden to answer allegations of rape, and then to the United States. Swedish prosecutors confirmed last year they had dropped the rape investigation, saying that despite a “credible” account from the alleged victim there was insufficient evidence to proceed. But as he had feared, after his arrest it was revealed that Washington was charging him with violating the US Espionage Act over the 2010 leaks. https://www.rawstory.com/2020/09/julian-assange-prolific-leaker-of-secrets-back-in-spotlight/
2020-09-05 Extraditing Assange Would Be a Crushing Blow to Free Speech Soon, the American left will make a decision that may have grave consequences for global press freedom. No, it’s not the election in November where two capitalists will fight it out to decide who will implement deadly austerity. It’s the trial of WikiLeaks co-founder, Julian Assange, or more accurately, a trial on press freedom. Assange is being used as an example of what happens when someone challenges the U.S. empire, and whether or not the left stands in solidarity with him will impact all future efforts to platform voices that fight against Western, capitalist propaganda. https://www.leftvoice.org/extraditing-assange-would-be-a-crushing-blow-to-free-speech
2020-06-15 Request for Compassionate Release of Julian Assange As current and former elected representatives in democracies committed to human rights, the presumption of innocence and the rule of law, we wish to support the urgent appeal sent to you by Australian MPs Andrew Wilkie and George Christensen, who wrote https://www.globalresearch.ca/request-compassionate-release-julian-assange/5715950
2020-05-18 Exposed: CIA used Sheldon Adelson’s firm to spy on Julian Assange Max Blumenthal’s new exposé details how the US surveilled and targeted Assange inside Ecuador’s London embassy, all while working with Trump mega-donor and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson’s security team and a Spanish company that had initially been hired to protect the embassy. Drawing on court testimony and internal documents, Blumenthal reveals how the CIA sabotaged an asylum plan for Assange; installed software that allowed it to directly monitor him; and harassed and monitored Assange’s attorneys, friends, family, and journalist colleagues.https://thegrayzone.com/2020/05/18/exposed-cia-used-sheldon-adelsons-firm-to-spy-on-julian-assange/
2020-04-29 Newly released FBI documents reveal extent of Roger Stone’s direct communications with Julian Assange: report FBI records, according to AP, show that in a direct Twitter message sent in June 2017, Stone “reassured Assange that the issue was ‘still nonsense’ and said, ‘As a journalist, it doesn’t matter where you get information — only that it is accurate and authentic.”
Stone, AP reports, mentioned a 1971 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that paved the way for newspapers and magazines to publish the Pentagon Papers — documents about the Vietnam War that had been classified. The Trump ally, via Twitter, told Assange, “If the US government moves on you, I will bring down the entire house of cards. With the trumped-up sexual assault charges dropped, I don’t know of any crime you need to be pardoned for — best regards. R.” https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/newly-released-fbi-documents-reveal-extent-of-roger-stones-direct-communications-with-julian-assange-report/
2020-04-13 A Year Since the Arrest of WikiLeaks Publisher Julian Assange A year later, there can be no doubt that the assault last April 11 marked the beginning of an attempted US-British political assassination. Assange sits in the maximum-security Belmarsh Prison, dubbed the UK’s Guantánamo Bay, as the coronavirus pandemic sweeps through the facility. This lawless treatment, which recalls the actions of the fascist regimes of the 20th century, and Assange’s arrest, is the culmination of a years-long campaign to destroy the WikiLeaks publisher, spearheaded by the US and supported by all its allies. As early as 2008, the US military had prepared a secret report detailing the means that could be used to suppress Assange and WikiLeaks. https://www.globalresearch.ca/year-since-arrest-wikileaks-publisher-julian-assange/5709458
2020-04-12 Diapers and WikiLeaks: The Unknown Romance and Children of Julian Assange
2020-04-12 Julian Assange: One Year In Belmarsh Having spent a year at Her Majesty’s Belmarsh prison, the WikiLeaks publisher faces the permanent danger of contracting COVID-19 as he goes through the bone-weariness of legal proceedings. Even during the extradition hearings, he has been treated with a snooty callousness by District Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser, which does not bode well for a favourable finding against the US submission. As he endures them, he suffers in a facility that is succumbing to the misrule caused by the coronavirus.
On April 9, Assange’s friend Vaughan Smith gave a description of conditions that gave little cause for Easter cheer. “Julian is now confined alone in a cell for 23.5 hours every day. He gets half an hour of exercise and that is in a yard crowded with other prisoners.” “With over 150 Belmarsh prison staff off work self-isolating, the prison is barely functioning.” https://countercurrents.org/2020/04/julian-assange-one-year-in-belmarsh
2020-04-06 As it releases thousands of prisoners, UK government keeps Julian Assange locked-up in danger In response to the coronavirus crisis, the British Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has announced plans for the early release of up to 4,000 prisoners in England and Wales—just under 5 percent of the prison population. The selected “low-risk” prisoners in the last two months of their sentences will be electronically tagged and allowed back into the population to ease overcrowding.https://countercurrents.org/2020/04/as-it-releases-thousands-of-prisoners-uk-government-keeps-julian-assange-locked-up-in-danger
2020-04-02 Assange’s Privacy Breached During 24/7 Surveillance of Ecuadorian Embassy A Spanish private security firm, Undercover Global S.L., which was hired as security for the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, was allegedly responsible for employing a number of surveillance devices to spy on Julian Assange during his lengthy asylum stay at the embassy. Assange and his lawyers allege that workers from Undercover Global planted a number of microphones in the embassy in 2017 and early 2018. They were hidden in things like fire extinguishers and inside the women’s bathroom where Assange’s lawyers would meet to avoid any potential prying eyes and ears. Employees from Undercover Global were also instructed to set up a streaming access point so that recordings could be accessed remotely. The Spanish news company El Pais reported that one of the three parties who were given access to this footage included agencies in the United States.
Beyond raising general concerns over privacy, these secret surveillance methods could be seen as a serious breach of attorney-client privilege, as conversations and meetings between Assange and his legal team would be picked up and broadcast through the embassy bugging network. What’s more, the head of Undercover Global, David Morales, has some ties to individuals close to President Trump, providing circumstantial evidence that the US might have been involved in the operation. https://www.projectcensored.org/assanges-privacy-breached-during-24-7-surveillance-of-ecuadorian-embassy/?
2020-02-24 Trump’s Betrayal of Julian Assange One thing we’ve learned from the Trump Presidency is that the “deep state” is not just some crazy conspiracy theory. For the past three years we’ve seen that deep state launch plot after plot to overturn the election. It all started with former CIA director John Brennan’s phony “Intelligence Assessment” of Russian involvement in the 2016 election. It was claimed that all 17 US intelligence agencies agreed that Putin put Trump in office, but we found out later that the report was cooked up by a handful of Brennan’s hand-picked agents.
The real tragedy of the Trump presidency is nowhere better demonstrated than in Trump’s 180 degree turn away from Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange. President Trump should preempt the inevitable US show trial of Assange by granting the journalist blanket pardon under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. The deep state Trump is serving by persecuting Assange is the same deep state that continues to plot Trump’s own ouster. Free Assange! https://www.globalresearch.ca/trump-betrayal-julian-assange/5704693
2020-02-21 Drop Charges and Extradition Pursuit of Assange, Says Amnesty International, Denouncing US Govt’s “Full-Scale Assault on the Right to Freedom of Expression”
2020-02-13 Free All Political Prisoners –- Including Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning All of our fates are entwined with that of Julian Assange, a political prisoner of the global imperial state. Assange, an Australian currently held in solitary confinement in Britain’s Belmarsh prison, faces 175 years behind bars if extradited to the United States, the imperial power whose international crimes and domestic machinations have been severely compromised by Wikileaks, the journalism operation Assange founded.https://www.blackagendareport.com/free-all-political-prisoners-including-julian-assange-and-chelsea-manning
2020-02-10 The Truth About Julian Assange UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, speaks in detail about the explosive findings of his investigation into the case of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. According to the testimony of the woman in question, a rape had never even taken place at all. And not only that: The woman’s testimony was later changed by the Stockholm police without her involvement in order to somehow make it sound like a possible rape. I have all the documents in my possession, the emails, the text messages. https://www.globalresearch.ca/truth-about-julian-assange/5703054
2020-01-20 Why Americans should be concerned about Julian Assange’s extradition case WikiLeaks has radically changed the media landscape. By publishing truthful information about the United States, the organization came head-to-head with the Pentagon and the CIA. Yet, effectiveness of his fearless journalism is not the only reason Assange became a political prisoner; designated as an enemy of the state and psychologically tortured inside Belmarsh prison (once known as the UK’s Guantanamo Bay).
WikiLeaks 2010 publication of the Collateral Murder video shed light on a hidden history of the United States. Assange, through his work with WikiLeaks, not only informed the public about America’s troubled beginning but also provided a mechanism for people to redeem its unaccounted past. From Manning to Jeremy Hammond to Edward Snowden—waves of whistleblowers created an insurgency of contagious courage. People inside the institutions who want change came forward to defy the unjust laws in order to uphold the high ideals. This kick-started an open experiment of democracy, creating a network that seeks to understand flaws, collaborates to amend them, and invites all to participate in envisioning a new society. https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/why-americans-should-be-concerned-about-julian-assanges-extradition-case/
2019-12-27 Wikileaks Still Holding Powerful to Account as Founder Julian Assange “Slowly Dies” in Prison Assange is kept in being kept in solitary confinement 23 hours per day, often sedated, in Britain’s notorious Belmarsh Prison. https://www.mintpressnews.com/?s=Julian+Assange
2019-11-20 The Trials of Julian Assange A new book offers a sweeping defense of the controversial Wikileaks publisher. The just-published book In Defense of Julian Assange demonstrates convincingly that what is at stake in his upcoming trial is the future of free journalism, here and abroad. It is edited by British socialist scholar and writer Tariq Ali and civil rights attorney Margaret Kuntsler. Assange is an Australian citizen. He never set foot in the United States. He never published untruthful materials. https://portside.org/2019-11-20/trials-julian-assange
2019-11-11 The Persecution of Julian Assange Assange’s real “crime” is that he exposed American and British war crimes and crimes against humanity in Iraq and Afghanistan. Because of this legitimate action, Assange is punished and used to remind journalists and reporters of the consequences if anyone dares to follow in his path, exposes Western regimes’ war crimes and crimes against humanity. “Despite Assange’s award-winning journalism and truth-telling, the Western corporate mainstream media have shown utter disregard for his plight. Indeed, such media have tended to bolster the vilification and character assassination piled on Assange by the American and British governments.” https://countercurrents.org/2019/11/the-persecution-of-julian-assange
2019-10-25 “I Was Fired for Helping Julian Assange, and I Have No Regrets” We talk to Fidel Narvaez, the ousted Ecuadorian diplomat who handled Julian Assange’s case about why Lenín Moreno caved to international pressure, broke his promises, and gave Assange up to British authorities. https://www.jacobinmag.com/search?query=Julian+Assange
2019-10-23 FlashPoints – Julian Assange: Countdown to Freedom, Continues with Randy Credico, of Live on The Fly. Today we are joined by former British Ambassador, Craig Murray. Later we speak with civil rights attorney, author, Margaret Ratner Kunstler, about her book, In Defense of Julian Assange. https://kpfa.org/episode/flashpoints-october-23-2019/
2019-10-22 EDITORIAL: Don’t Railroad Julian Assange to Virginia this were a normal legal case, WikiLeaks’ lawyers would almost certainly be able to get the extradition request by the United States for their client Julian Assange thrown out on the grounds that his privileged conversations with his lawyers at Ecuador’s London embassy were secretly videotaped. The very nation that wants him extradited to stand trial in Virginia has obtained access to those videos. In a normal extradition case it would be hard to imagine Britain sending a suspect to a country whose government has already eavesdropped on that suspect’s defense preparations. But this is not a normal legal case.https://consortiumnews.com/2019/10/22/editorial-dont-railroad-julian-assange-to-virginia/
2019-10-21 Assange Lawyer Decries ‘Legally Unprecedented’ Assault on Journalism as Judge Denies Request to Delay US Extradition Hearing “This is part of an avowed war on whistleblowers to include investigative journalists and publishers.” Assange’s legal team requested a three-month delay to submit new evidence in the U.S. extradition case, including reports that a Spanish security firm spied on Assange on behalf of U.S. intelligence agencies. The allegation is the subject of an ongoing investigation by the Spanish National Court.
If Assange is sent back to the U.S., he could face up to 175 years in prison on more than a dozen charges related to WikiLeaks’ publication of classified documents that exposed American war crimes and other state secrets. “I don’t understand how this is equitable,” Assange said Monday. “This superpower had 10 years to prepare for this case and I can’t access my writings. It’s very difficult where I am to do anything but these people have unlimited resources.”
2019-10-21 Coverage of Assange’s court appearance shows what a sorry state the media is in Clearly, the full weight of the British and US state apparatus is bearing down on the WikiLeaks founder in this extradition case. That was made explicitly clear in a statement by Nils Melzer, the UN special rapporteur on torture, in May. He urged the UK not to extradite Assange to the US, saying:
In 20 years of work with victims of war, violence and political persecution I have never seen a group of democratic States ganging up to deliberately isolate, demonise and abuse a single individual for such a long time and with so little regard for human dignity and the rule of law
2019-10-12 Calls rise to demand the release of Julian Assange Singer MIA has joined the call to demand the release of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange after visiting him in London’s high-security Belmarsh prison.
2019-10-03 ‘Is It a Crime to Expose Crimes Already Committed?’ Last year, it was reported (not widely) that the Office of Inspector General in the United States conducted a six-month investigation into whistle-blower retaliation, which was abruptly terminated in April 2017. The report revealed that out of 190 cases brought to the attention of the inspector general of the intelligence community, only a third were investigated—and of those the IG judged only one case in favor of the whistle-blower, and that case took 742 days to complete! All this despite a presidential directive (PPD19) in 2012 designed to prevent whistle-blower retaliation. If the “lawful” means to public disclosure are so unreliable and fraught with negative backlash—as we’ve seen again just now with the Ukraine revelations—what other form can disclosures in the public interest take? https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/trump-snowden-whistleblower/
2019-09-29 Julian Assange’s lawyers were placed under surveillance. But that’s not the whole story. A private security company organised 24/7 surveillance of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange during his stay at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. This included confidential meetings between Assange and members of his legal team. The surveillance was provided directly to the CIA. These revelations could possibly jeopardise the viability of the US extradition case.https://www.thecanary.co/uk/analysis/2019/09/29/julian-assanges-lawyers-were-placed-under-surveillance-but-thats-not-the-whole-story/
2019-09-24 FlashPoints – John Pilger on Hong Kong, Brexit & Julian Assange extended interview with Emmy Award Winning filmmaker, John Pilger, about what’s going on in Hong Kong, Brexit and the endangered fate of Julian Assange. https://kpfa.org/episode/flashpoints-september-24-2019/
2019-07-31 Judge’s ruling throws huge spanner into US extradition proceedings against AssangeA US judge has ruled that WikiLeaks was fully entitled to publish the Democratic National Congress (DNC) emails, which means no law was broken. The ruling is highly significant as it could impact upon the US extradition proceedings against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, as well as the ongoing imprisonment of whistleblower Chelsea Manning.
The ruling: On 30 July, federal judge John G. Koeltl ruled on a case brought against WikiLeaks and other parties in regard to the alleged hacking of DNC emails and concluded that: If WikiLeaks could be held liable for publishing documents concerning the DNC’s political financial and voter-engagement strategies simply because the DNC labels them ‘secret’ and trade secrets, then so could any newspaper or other media outlet.
In other words, if WikiLeaks is subject to prosecution, then every media outlet in the world would be. The judge argued that: [T]he First Amendment prevents such liability in the same way it would preclude liability for press outlets that publish materials of public interest despite defects in the way the materials were obtained so long as the disseminator did not participate in any wrongdoing in obtaining the materials in the first place.
2019-05-29 Endless procedural abuses show the Julian Assange case was never about law It is astonishing how often one still hears well-informed, otherwise reasonable people say about Julian Assange: “But he ran away from Swedish rape charges by hiding in Ecuador’s embassy in London.” US finally admitted hat it wants to lock up Assange for 175 years on bogus “espionage” charges – a hand anyone who wasn’t being willfully blind always knew the US was preparing to play Assange faces no charges in Sweden yet, let alone “rape charges.” Assange did not seek sanctuary in the embassy to evade the Swedish investigation. No state in the world gives a non-citizen political asylum to avoid a rape trial. The asylum was granted on political grounds. Ecuador rightly accepted Assange’s concerns that the US would seek his extradition and lock him out of sight for the rest of his life.https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/endless-procedural-abuses-show-the-julian-assange-case-was-never-about-law/
2019-05-24 Sanders, Warren, and Wyden Slam Assange Indictment, a Renegade Use of the Espionage Act to Criminalize Journalism “Let me be clear: it is a disturbing attack on the First Amendment for the Trump administration to decide who is or is not a reporter for the purposes of a criminal prosecution,” Sanders wrote in a tweet Friday afternoon after The Intercept contacted his office for comment. “Donald Trump must obey the Constitution, which protects the publication of news about our government.”
Warren distanced herself from Assange but condemned the Justice Department’s move to curtail press freedom. “Assange is a bad actor who has harmed U.S. national security — and he should be held accountable,” Warren said in a statement. “But Trump should not be using this case as a pretext to wage war on the First Amendment and go after the free press who hold the powerful accountable everyday.”
“This is not about Julian Assange,” Wyden said in a statement. “This is about the use of the Espionage Act to charge a recipient and publisher of classified information. I am extremely concerned about the precedent this may set and potential dangers to the work of journalists and the First Amendment.” https://theintercept.com/2019/05/24/julian-assange-extradition-espionage-congress/
2019-05-23 Julian Assange Indicted for Publishing US Secrets Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks leader, has been indicted on 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act for his role in obtaining and publishing secret military and diplomatic documents in 2010, the Justice Department announced on Thursday — a novel case that raises profound First Amendment issues. https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/05/julian-assange-indicted-for-publishing-us-secrets/
2019-05-23 18 Ways Julian Assange Changed the World Julian Assange is a dick. It’s important you understand that. Assange and WikiLeaks revealed the American military’s war crimes, the American government’s corruption and the American corporate media’s pathetic servile flattery to the power elite. So, if you’re a member of our ruling class, you would view those as textbook examples of dickery. https://www.truthdig.com/articles/18-ways-julian-assange-changed-the-world/
2019-04-22 Remembering the Crimes of the Powerful Exposed by Wikileaks’ Julian Assange Assange’s “crime” was revealing deep, embarrassing, sometimes deadly, malfeasance by numerous actors, including the U.S. government, the media, the Democratic Party-Clinton machine, and Israel. https://www.mintpressnews.com/remember-the-crimes-of-exposed-by-julian-assange/257652/
2019-04-17 First They Came for Assange Mike Pompeo, Trump’s first CIA director and now US Secretary of State, once described WikiLeaks as “a non-state hostile intelligence service.” That is exactly right, and it is an equally accurate description of what every self-respecting news outlet ought to be. https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/04/17/first-they-came-assange
2019-04-12 The Media’s 7 Years of Lies about Julian Assange Won’t Stop Now Assange was reduced from one of the few towering figures of our time – a man who will have a central place in history books, if we as a species live long enough to write those books – to nothing more than a sex pest, and a scruffy bail-skipper. https://www.mintpressnews.com/7-years-lies-julian-assange-wont-stop-now/257361/
2019-04-11 ACLU Comment on Julian Assange Arrest “Any prosecution by the United States of Mr. Assange for Wikileaks’ publishing operations would be unprecedented and unconstitutional, and would open the door to criminal investigations of other news organizations. Moreover, prosecuting a foreign publisher for violating U.S. secrecy laws would set an especially dangerous precedent for U.S. journalists, who routinely violate foreign secrecy laws to deliver information vital to the public’s interest.” https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2019/04/11/aclu-comment-julian-assange-arrest
2020-04-11 London police forcefully arrest Julian Assange on behalf of the US Assange was arrested from the Ecuadorian embassy after the country withdrew the political asylum it had granted him in 2012. Assange, along with former US soldier and whistleblower Chelsea Elizabeth Manning, exposed American war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan https://peoplesdispatch.org/2019/04/11/london-police-forcefully-arrest-julian-assange-on-behalf-of-the-us/
2019-04-07 Chelsea Manning Faces Contempt Hearing After Refusal to Answer Grand Jury Questions “In solidarity with many activists facing the odds, I will stand by my principles.” Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning expressed no regrets Thursday when she revealed that she faces a contempt hearing— and possible jail time—after declining to answer a grand jury’s questions. Manning said the grand jury questioned her about her disclosure to Wikileaks, which was also the focus of her questioning in 2013 when she was court-martialed. Manning was convicted and sentenced to 35 years in prison for her disclosure—which helped expose war crimes by the U.S.—but her sentence was commuted in 2017 by President Barack Obama.https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/03/07/chelsea-manning-faces-contempt-hearing-after-refusal-answer-grand-jury-questions
2018-11-21 Prosecution of Julian Assange, America’s Betrayal of Its Own Ideals As Trump’s administration now carries on Obama’s legacy, vowing to destroy WikiLeaks for engaging in publishing activities that are protected under the First Amendment, American people are slowly coming to see their own government’s dirty war that has been waged in their name. https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/11/22/prosecution-julian-assange-americas-betrayal-its-own-ideals
2018-11-19 The Case Against WikiLeaks Is a Crisis for the First Amendment The Trump administration once celebrated WikiLeaks. Now it wants to prosecute Julian Assange simply for publishing things it doesn’t like. That’s a threat to all journalists. https://fpif.org/the-case-against-wikileaks-is-a-crisis-for-the-first-amendment/
2018-11-14 US Intel Will Bring Assange to the US in Chains Those of us who understand how revolutionary Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange are hope that he won’t suffer that fate, but it seems more and more likely. It’s hardly a surprise given that, in 10 years’ time, Wikileaks published more classified information than all other media combined. It exposed human rights abuses, government spying, torture, and war crimes on an unprecedented scale. It put government, corporations, and even the Pentagon, the FBI, the CIA and other intel agencies on notice that they could no longer count on operating in secrecy. It created a trove of primary source material that serious journalists and researchers will mine for years to come. Its publications are accessible to readers who prefer primary sources to most mediated news.
2018-11-08 Trump’s “Nuclear Option” Against a Free Press ExposeFacts, a project of IPA, released a statement by Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg in 2017, “Trump Threats to WikiLeaks ‘Nuclear Option’ Against the First Amendment,” which stated: “If journalists and publishers fail to call this out, denounce and resist it — on the spurious grounds that Julian is ‘not a real journalist’ like themselves — they’re offering themselves up to Trump and Sessions for indictments and prosecutions, which will eventually silence all but the heroes and heroines among them.”https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2018/11/08/trumps-nuclear-option-against-free-press
2018-10-01 BEING JULIAN ASSANGE We, the people, are the last line of their defenze. Part of protecting WikiLeaks – and ultimately ourselves – is to understand the relentless nature of the psyops employed against them; that the hardships inflicted upon them by the enemies of human progress are not just reputational or financial but physical; that for those waging this thankless war of truth on our behalf, this is a matter of life or death. And that is why we must push back. https://popularresistance.org/being-julian-assange/
2018-05-15 How Julian Assange became an unwelcome guest in Ecuador’s embassy In June 2012, a tall, mysterious figure turned up at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. He rang the bell, walked in and asked for political asylum. It was Julian Assange. Days earlier, he had lost his long legal fight against extradition to Sweden, where two women accused him of rape.
Soon afterwards, the left-leaning then president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, agreed to Assange’s request, precipitating a major diplomatic row with the British government. And a full-blown siege. Metropolitan police officers swarmed outside the building, ready to arrest Assange should he venture out.
It was against this febrile backdrop that Correa authorised a secret programme named “Operation Guest”. It was later renamed “Operation Hotel”. The guest was Assange, politely referred to as el huésped. The goal, at first, was to stop detectives bursting into the modest ground-floor embassy and dragging Assange away. But documents seen by the Guardian show it developed into something more complex. The aim seems to have changed from protecting Assange – which propped up WikiLeaks in the process – to spying on him.
2017-11-16 We Knew Julian Assange Hated Clinton. We Didn’t Know He Was Secretly Advising Trump. WikiLeaks offer to help Trump came less than two weeks after The Washington Post had revealed that Trump had boasted of sexual assault in comments recorded during the taping of an “Access Hollywood” episode in 2005. The recording caught Trump saying that, “when you’re a star,” you can “do anything” to women, even “grab them by the pussy.” WikiLeaks released its first batch of emails hacked from Clinton’s campaign less than an hour after that report was published. https://portside.org/2017-11-16/we-knew-julian-assange-hated-clinton-we-didnt-know-he-was-secretly-advising-trump
2017-11-13 The Secret Correspondence Between Donald Trump Jr. and WikiLeaks The transparency organization asked the president’s son for his cooperation—in sharing its work, in contesting the results of the election, and in arranging for Julian Assange to be Australia’s ambassador to the United States. https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/545738/
2015-05-27 Democracy Now – Julian Assange on NSA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership: Secretive Deal, and Europe’s Secret Plan for Military Force on Refugee Boats from Libya. https://kpfa.org/episode/democracy-now-may-27-2015-2/
2013-01-31 Stand Up for Julian Assange – Nobel Prize Winner Calls for Support Mairead Corrigan Maguire, 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for her work for peace in Northern Ireland, calls for support for Julian Assange. His only crime is that he embarrassed the U.S. and other powerful governments with WikiLeaks’ release of documents in which the U.S. military appear to have deliberately killed civilians. https://portside.org/2013-01-31/stand-julian-assange-nobel-prize-winner-calls-support
2012-10-25 Anonymous Criticizes WikiLeaks’ Ethos After Instituting Paywall In the face of mounting legal fees, WikiLeaks says its newly implemented pay structure is necessary. Assange also justified the cost structure to help fund its “publishing and infrastructure costs.” WikiLeaks claims it is funded solely through donations of its site’s users and personal contacts to Assange, but first expressed financial hardship last October. A large part of the implementation of a paywall system is due to a financial blockade once set up against the site from companies such as Visa, Mastercard, Paypal and Amazon.
In response, WikiLeaks filed a lawsuit against both Visa and Mastercard. After nine months of legal battles, WikiLeaks won a ruling in an Icelandic court that ordered the credit card companies to resume processing donations made to WikiLeaks. The Assange-led site believes the economic blockade was instructed by the U.S. in order to halt leaked information, which often contained sensitive data to America. https://www.mintpressnews.com/anonymous-criticizes-wikileaks-ethos-after-instituting-paywall/38742/
&2012-10-01WikiLeaks And The MEK: The Paradoxical Labeling Of Foreign Terrorist Organizations The U.S. designated the whistleblower website, WikiLeaks “an enemy of the state,” placing the self-described free speech project in the same category as al-Qaida, the Taliban and other foreign terrorist organizations (FTO). The unprecedented labeling of the website known for leaking classified government documents signals a new escalation in U.S. efforts to shut down WikiLeaks and other groups speaking out against crimes, corruption and misconduct in the government and armed forces. https://www.mintpressnews.com/wikileaks-and-the-mek-the-paradoxical-labeling-of-foreign-terrorist-organizations/37970/
2012-08-31 Waging War On Leaks And Whistleblowers On July 30, the Washington Post headlined “A bill to stop security leaks puts a plug on democracy,” saying that journalists and others talk to officials daily. Background briefings are commonplace. Vital information is discussed. Most of it is unclassified. On May 15, HR 5743: Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013 was introduced and referred to committee. On May 31, it passed. https://www.mintpressnews.com/waging-war-on-leaks-and-whistleblowers/36358/
2012-04-05 WikiLeaks chief: I’ve made 75 press complaints WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange has made 75 official complaints over what he describes as the shoddy reporting of his long-running extradition battle, the online activist said Thursday. Assange itemized the complaints in a submission to Britain’s judge-led inquiry into media ethics, which is examining the standards and practices of the country’s scandal-tarred press. https://www.mintpressnews.com/wikileaks-chief-ive-made-75-press-complaints/23376/
2010-11-24 WikiLeaks Founder Urges US to Investigate Alleged Abuse by Its Troops Julian Assange says the US has not started any investigations into the alleged incidents detailed in thousands of documents published by WikiLeaks and has instead concentrated on tracking down those responsible for the leaks and on hounding his group. Last month, WikiLeaks published 400,000 US field reports containing evidence that US soldiers handed over detainees to a notorious Iraqi torture squad. This followed a the publication of 75,000 documents in the summer revealing how coalition forces killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents in Afghanistan. https://www.commondreams.org/news/2010/11/04/wikileaks-founder-urges-us-investigate-alleged-abuse-its-troops
