Saturday, June 29, 2019

Racial Segregationist Joe Biden's Dishonesty on Full Display In Democratic Party "Debate"

In the second round of the Democratic Party's candidate "debates" (more like quasi-free-for-alls) on June 27,  Senator Kamala Harris of California challenged Joseph Biden Jr. on his anti-"busing" record, meaning in effect  his opposition to school integration. (The millions of kids who are bussed to school daily NOT for integration purposes doesn't bother the opponents of "busing.")

In his response, he continued his practice of blatant lying, which he's been doing starting just before he officially announced his run for the presidency:

"I do not praise racists, that is not true," Biden emphatically insisted. This is lying on a Trumpian level. Blatant, outrageous, in your face absolute inversion of reality. He has repeatedly praised the worst racists in the U.S. Senate. Either he's denying his own words, including of just a few days ago, when he lauded two of the worst Southern crackers to an audience of rich swells in the Carlyle Hotel in New York City whose money he wants for his campaign for president, or he's denying that the likes of James Eastland, Herman Talmadge, John Stennis, Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, were racists. Either assertion is absurd.

"I ran because of civil rights..." WHAT! There he goes again. Presumably he means ran for U.S. Senate, or maybe vice president with Obama. He also ran twice before for president, in 1988 and 2008.

Or maybe by "because of" he meant "in order to oppose civil rights." But I assume he runs for office because he's driven by personal ambition and a lust for power, and for Senator to defend and advance the interests of big banks and credit card companies, which are the main powers in his state, Delaware. This is the guy who got a law on the books forbidding the discharge of student loan debt by bankruptcy, among other awful acts.

Harris launched her challenge by relating her personal experience as a child, how "busing" was critical to her education and subsequent success. Biden replied that there was no problem because her locality was okay with busing. Telling Harris things worked out fine because her local government bowed to Constitutional law as set down in 1954 ignores the fact that the vast majority of U.S. localities ONLY integrated grudgingly, if at all, and only under pressure. And massive resistance continues to this day in many places, especially the South, where private all-white "academies" were created to ensure that pure "white" youth would not mingle with and be contaminated by "black" ones.

Biden disingenuously bellowed at Harris that he wasn't against "busing," he was merely against the Federal government mandating it. HE wanted to leave enforcement of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to local city councils. But it is precisely BECAUSE such local "authorities" (and states too) adamantly REFUSED for DECADES after the Brown decision to integrate their schools, and continued to consign "black" children to grossly inferior ones, that the Federal government was finally forced to do SOMETHING. Biden denounced the 1954 Supreme Court decision, and opposed racial integration of schools for decades, indeed apparently until a month or so ago, when under pressure he suddenly belched out some mendacious, mealy-mouthed, revisionist rhetoric.

EVEN IF his abrupt change under political pressure were genuine (which there is no reason to believe is the case), his entire political history would have to weigh a hundred times greater in considering the man for the presidency.

In fact, in the debate of June 27, Biden took the segregationist position that it should be up to local government to integrate, NOT the Federal government. That is precisely the "states" rights" argument of Southern racists. However, this went unnoticed in the bourgeois blatherariat that is corporate media "commentary."

And the fact that, of all the Democratic Party hacks he could have chosen to be his vice president, Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama chose a segregationist, speaks volumes about the cynical, completely amoral character of Obama. And how thoroughly duped black Americans were and are about Obama. Not to mention his other supporters.

Biden insists he's not a racist ("I don't have a racist bone in my body") and his rival Democrats have carefully avoided saying he is. But what is a person who supports segregation? That is objectively racist. So whatever Biden's subjective consciousness is, however he "feels" about "black" people, he is objectively racist by his actions over decades of time.

And of all the U.S. Senators that he's known over a long career, the ones he chooses to fondly reminisce about are the very worst racists!

Some propagandists thought Harris crossed some invisible line of political propriety. Rachel Martin, a co-host of the "news" program "Morning Edition" on the U.S. government radio propaganda network NPR, said of Harris in a scandalized tone of voice that "she's making it personal" and "she's attacking his record on civil rights." Actually Harris was accurately describing his record of opposition to civil rights, and calling him to account for it. If you aren't supposed to talk about politicians' actual records of what they did and said, what CAN you discuss, Rachel? (NPR, "Morning Edition," npr.org, June 28, 2019.) Harris did preface her anecdote about her own childhood schooling by saying the issue was "personal" for her. It was NOT a "personal attack" on Biden, unless critiquing someone's political record is too "personal" to do!

Here's an extended quote of Biden from the debate, responding to Harris:


"It’s a mischaracterization of my position across the board. I did not praise racists. That is not true, number one. Number two, if we want to have this campaign litigated on who supports civil rights and whether I did or not, I’m happy to do that. I was a public defender; I didn’t become a prosecutor. I came out, and I left a good law firm to become a public defender. …" [That was a dig at Harris, who was a prosecutor and indeed later California state Attorney General, before snagging a Senate seat. She actually compiled a terrible record of repression, protection of police criminality, and imprisoning innocent defendants as state AG. But on the other hand, she did cut at least one criminal a break: Stephen Mnuchin, Trump's U.S. Treasury Secretary. Mnuchin controlled a bank in California, OneWest, of which he was CEO, which Harris' staff found committed 1,000 cases of mortgage foreclosure fraud, and estimated they could find another 1,000 if they kept looking. Harris killed the investigation into this racketeering bank. Mnuchin showed his gratitude with a $2,500 campaign donation to her. That makes Harris not just a political prostitute, but a very cheap streetwalker of a political prostitute.]

Biden again: "In terms of busing, the busing—I never—you would have been able to go to school the same exact way, because it was a local decision made by your city council. That’s fine. That’s one of the things I argued for, that we should not be—we should be breaking down these lines. But so, the bottom line here is, look, everything I’ve done in my career—I ran because of civil rights. I continue to think we have to make fundamental changes in civil rights. And those civil rights, by the way, include not just only African Americans, but the LGBT community." 

Oh shut up, man. You're no progressive. That's the segregationist line. Let the white racists choose whether or not to integrate.

"I did not oppose busing in America. What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education. That’s what I opposed. I did not oppose—" and then he stopped. 

Of course this is totally disingenuous, as I explained already.

Biden collaborated with the Southern racists in the Senate to pass his own anti-busing bills. That is what he's referring to when he says they "worked together to pass legislation." Biden even wanted to amend the U.S. Constitution to ban the use of busing for school integration. That is pretty extreme. 

Biden is a typical reactionary Democrat of the "old" school. He is the most rightwing of all the politicians vying for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. And THAT is why much of the "elite" establishment media keeps promoting him as the "front runner" with the "best chance of beating Trump." (Coincidentally, the line that he has the best chance of beating Trump is Biden's line too. Fancy that.)

The propaganda system always promotes the most rightwing politicians they think they can put over on the populace. 


Guess it's only "asinine" if it's to integrate schools. 


Kamala Harris Confronts Joseph Biden, Jr., on his opposition to "busing."


For more on this horrible segregationist's history of hostility to black advancement, see for example "When Joe Biden Collaborated With Segregationists," The Nation, June 6, 2019; 





Saturday, June 22, 2019

Trump Is Right- Biden Is Stupid. (And Racist. Read On.)

Biden doesn't even have enough brains to hide his segregationist history. A few days ago he fondly reminisced about his loving friendships with the worst Southern racists in the U.S. Senate. He was free-associating to a crowd of rich swells in a swanky Manhattan hotel, hitting them up for bucks for his presidential campaign. We bragged that working with the likes of Senators James O. Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia, "We got things done!" (Awful things, of course.)

Other contenders for the Democratic Party's nomination for president jumped on the news, including Kamala Harris, Bill de Blasio, and Cory Booker, calling it unacceptable. Booker demanded an apology, which made Biden wax indignant:

"Cory should apologize. He knows better. There’s not a racist bone in my body. I’ve been involved in civil rights my whole career, period, period, period.”


If by "involved in civil rights," you mean opposing them, then sure!

Biden has a long history as a segregationist and as one of the worst enemies of African-Americans in the U.S. 

Biden has been a staunch opponent of what he calls "busing." Of course he doesn't mean that no school child should have to take a bus to school. No, the "busing" he has always opposed is busing to racially integrate schools. He even recently reaffirmed this position.

Biden adamantly opposed affirmative action, doing ANYTHING to try and undo the results of centuries of extreme oppression and economic exploitation, and racist discrimination right into modern times:

Notice how "hold the white man back" is in perfect sync with the notoriously racist reelection ad run by Jesse Helms showing a white hand crumpling up a slip of paper while a voice-over says "You needed that job, and you were the best qualified, but they had to give it to a minority, because of a racial quota.  Is that really fair?" Not racist, Joe?




 So what IS the difference between "desegregate" and "integrate"? Not clear from this. What IS clear is that he opposes Affirmative Action. "Quotas" is the slur used by racist opponents of attempts to bring more African-Americans into places long closed to them, namely universities and white collar jobs. As far as "ensuring mediocrity," since only a select few blacks will be chosen, the best and most qualified ones will be picked. So that sentence ONLY makes sense if you believe all blacks are innately inferior to all whites!


Ohh, INTEGRATION is the "most racist" concept, NOT, say, Jim Crow laws,or lynching, or redlining, or government rules barring blacks from government benefit programs like subsidized mortgages and the G.I. Bill,  or "theories" of innate black "inferiority," integration is the most racist thing!


This one has to go down in the Annals of Disingenuousness. The point of school integration wasn't that some darkie had to "rub shoulders with my white child" (notice how he personalizes it about his child!) in order to learn, but that segregated schools for the descendants of slaves were deliberately made grossly inferior to those for the "white" population, starved of funds and resources. The 1954 Brown v. Topeka, Kansas Board of Education decision finally dropped the myth of "separate but equal" schools, a "legal doctrine" used to justify segregation, because reality overwhelmed it. An avalanche of facts, and the social pressure of the civil rights movement, forced the change in legal "reasoning."

Note: The Supreme Court, which was extremely tardy in recognizing and doing a thing to redress the gross repression and persecution of blacks in America, came out with the Brown decision in 1954. Here's Biden in 1975, twenty-one years later, resisting it and hewing to the segregationist line.

But guess what? You can always hire some amoral liar to lie for you:


Talk about turning reality upside down! Other than adamantly opposing school integration, and Affirmative Action, spearheading "crime" bills that increased the repression of black communities, and forming close alliances with the worst arch-segregationists in the Senate (the closest relationships with any of his Senate colleagues, the ones he rhapsodizes about to this day), what exactly has Biden done FOR civil rights? Huh Bill?

Biden did play a major role in imprisoning millions of blacks over the years by taking the lead in pushing extremely repressive "crime" bills through Congress. He even instructed his staff that he wanted to be known for this. (These days, he's presenting himself as a criminal "justice" "reformer." 
He was a key figure in the draconian punishments for possessing minuscule amounts of crack cocaine.

Stoking racial panics in the name of "fighting crime" has been a hallmark of Biden's Senate career.

Yet Joe Biden insists he doesn't have "a racist bone" in his body. But his ligaments, tendons, arteries, and veins sure seem racist.

Joe Biden may really believe he isn't a racist. He's the type of racist whose racism is so ingrained and unconscious that he isn't even aware how racist he is. But then, this is a man who never imagined that pawing, sniffing, hugging, and kissing strange women, children, boys, wouldn't be considered perfectly natural. After all, everyone ELSE does it, right? (Wrong.) How clueless IS Joseph Biden?

Pretty clueless. [1]


Lucky Boy! The Vice President of the United States wants to give you a kiss on the lips!

Biden is a throwback in time. Electing him president would be revanchist. And in policy terms, he would be no better than Trump (like Trump, he's for a reactionary Supreme Court, being the man who is more responsible than anyone for putting arch-reactionary Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court.

Biden and Trump are much alike. Both are devoted first and foremost to promoting the interests of the richest people. Biden publicly defends billionaires- as if billionaires don't have enough protection. Both Biden and Trump are U.S. imperialists, of course. (They wouldn't have establishment support if they weren't.) Both are compulsive liars. And both are racists.

THAT is the choice the power structure wishes to offer the citizens of America in 2020. An unchanging and seemingly unchangeable status quo of imperialism, corporate oligarchy, bourgeois class dictatorship.

Unfortunately the flock of sheep that is the bulk of the American electorate refuse to even vote for the available alternatives that have managed through great effort to claw their way onto most state ballots (the Green and Libertarian Parties) that would at least try to change the system of power. So ultimately some responsibility for this anti-human system must be placed on them.

One more thing Biden and Trump have in common: Grossly inappropriate behavior. Trump on television expressed a desire to date (read: sleep with) his daughter Ivanka, just for starters. And of course grabbing women's vaginas through their clothes, forcibly kissing them, walking in on naked "beauty pageant" contestants- all things he's publicly boasted about doing or was captured on video boasting about. (His numerous affairs and payoffs to silence women he's used for sex he's not so eager to brag about.)



The bourgeois blatherariat insist Biden is the best Democratic candidate, a man hardly preferable to Trump. American Democracy, an Inspiration to the World!



"What, ME RACIST? Ya gotta be kiddin' me!"


 [1]  See "Joe Biden In Pictures: The Race for 2020!"



Thursday, June 20, 2019

Dishonest U.S. Media Lying U.S. Into Another War of Aggression

Last time it was Iraq. This time Iran.

We KNOW that Iran didn't attack a Japanese oil tanker and a Norwegian tanker in the Gulf of Oman, just south of the Strait of Hormuz, as the Trump regime is asserting and the U.S. media is echoing. (Also part of the propaganda echo chamber are the media of stooge lackey nations. For example, the British government's overt propaganda arm, the BBC, is pushing the same lie. And the rightwing British government headed by the loathsome Theresa May is parroting the U.S. false indictment of Iran. Also Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany, put in her sycophantic two cents blaming Iran. These craven courtiers to U.S. power are deluding themselves if they think Trump won't screw them on trade deals and everything else if they suck up to him hard enough. Trump is an ingrate, which makes him the perfect U.S. president. U.S. ingratitude is a historical fact. But that's another essay.)


Here's the proof the U.S. condemnation of Iran is a lie: the U.S. asserts that Iran placed mines on the hulls of the ships, damaging them, and then retrieved an unexploded mine from the side of the Japanese vessel. But the president of the Japanese shipping company that owns the Japanese tanker reports that the crew of the tanker said there was no mine, but that two flying objects hit the ship.


And this: the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, was in Tehran, Iran, at the very time the U.S. claims Iran attacked a Japanese ship by attaching limpet mines to the hull. (Magnetic mines.) This was a critical visit for Iran, which is trying to find ways to defeat the U.S. economic strangulation of the country. Previously the Iranian foreign minister went to Tokyo, Japan, and this visit by the Japanese prime minister was set up. The top ruler of Iran, Ayatollah Kamenei was meeting with Abe when the "attack" occurred.

Qatar TV station Al-Jazeera.

So if you accept the U.S. government and media version of reality, seconded by lackey stooges like the British government and media and others, Iran invited the prime minister of Japan to Tehran for a rare visit just to sabotage Iran's own diplomatic effort.

Yeah, right.

Who is more likely to want to sabotage Iranian diplomacy, Iran or the U.S.? The question answers itself. [1]

So of course the U.S. and allied propaganda media systems simply IGNORE the facts that Abe was IN TEHRAN during this "attack," that the owner of the tanker SAYS IT WAS FLYING OBJECTS that hit the ship, and instead keep repeating the lies of the Trump regime. [2]

Iran's foreign minister saw right through the U.S. false flag attack. But it's not designed to fool Iran. It's designed to fool YOU!



Tellingly, the Japanese government, which has been a supine lickspittle to the U.S. ever since the U.S. occupied it in 1945, hasn't fallen into line behind the U.S. The government has been very circumspect. The Japanese foreign minister, Taro Kono, even referred to the sabotage attack as an "accident." (!) And in a sign that the U.S. attempt to sabotage Iran's diplomacy has failed for now, Kono said that Japan will continue to engage in "dialogue" with Iran to reduce tension (which the U.S. is working overtime to ratchet up) and "seeking the peace in the region." Refusing to go along with the U.S. "proof" of Iran's guilt, he said Japan would continue to gather information to find out "what really happened." 

Wow! What really happened? Don't you believe Michael Pompeo, the egregious U.S. Secretary of State, who within hours of the attack summoned the media to hear him read a statement that it was ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that Iran mined two ships. (You don't think this wasn't all arranged in advance?) (Pompeo took no questions. Gee, I wonder why.)

Also, Japan's defense minister said Japan wouldn't send troops to the region, as the U.S. war cabal must have hoped to goad them into doing.


Singapore station cna.





What about the other tanker that was attacked by the U.S. and blamed on Iran? It is Norwegian. Here's why I think that was a deliberate choice. Trump obviously is reluctant to start an actual war with Iran. He knows how bad that would be, and indeed the entire region would be thrown into even greater turmoil. The last thing he needs as he runs for reelection is another unpopular war. And he badly needs to get reelected to run out the clock on the statute of limitations for the various crimes he committed before becoming president. (Maybe the New York State Attorney General should get some indictments for state crimes NOW.) It has been reported that he's griped about his "National Security Advisor" John Bolton pushing him to war. And just today (June 20) Iran shot down a U.S. spy drone and Trump publicly soft-pedaled it as no big deal and opined that it was probably an accident by low level personnel as opposed to a state decision.

Trump also puts Norway on a pedestal. This was shown just recently when he was asked on TV if he'd accept dirt on a political opponent from a foreign nation, and Trump said "Norway" as an example of such a nation.

And a few years ago, when he referred to African and other "non-white" nations as "shithole countries," he he mused why can't "we" get more immigrants from Norway. Also, for what it's worth, his first Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, is Danish on her father's side. Most of all, Trump is a well-know white supremacist.

So I have a suspicion that attacking a Norwegian tanker was designed to provoke Trump's ire at Iran.

Bonus Plus: Norway is a NATO member. When the U.S. goes to war on Iran, that gives it an excuse to demand that NATO members contribute forces, as some have done for the U.S.' Excellent Never-Ending Adventure in Afghanistan, and the "Liberation" of Iraq. 

Trump has called in to Murdoch's propaganda minions on TV, Fox "News," to blame Iran categorically. So he is sinking into the quicksand trap laid for him. Of course, as president of the United States, he is way out of his depth. A sleazy grifter son of a cutthroat immoral and criminal real estate baron, he is experienced in pulling off scams and acting as a shill for himself on television, but he has no understanding of geopolitics or how to run an empire. And he picked the worst possible imperialist apparatchiks to help him do it. I guess he equates extremism with toughness.

Let us briefly consider the "evidence" that supposedly proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Iran planted mines on the hulls of the two tankers. The first and main evidence is a grainy video purporting to show Iranians on a patrol boat removing a mine from one of the ships. Trouble is, no mine is visible in the video.

Qatar station Al-Jazeera.
 See the mine? It's right there! Are you blind?

Also, IF there was a mine on the hull, how do we know the U.S. didn't put it there for the Iranians to find when they sent out vessels to rescue the crews of the tankers? (No crew members were injured or killed in the U.S. attacks on the vessels. Apparently the U.S. deliberately fired relatively low-yield projectiles at the tankers designed to start fires but not sink the ships or cause loss of life.)

One last note on videos: this video may well be genuine, but on the day of the incident it was reported that a bogus video was posted I believe on Facebook seeming to show Mark Zuckerberg saying things he never actually said. Also I recently heard a program about the "danger" of technology allowing the creation of seemingly genuine videos that are fake, but the fakery is undetectable by technical means. It has been possible to create undetectable photographic forgeries for years with Photoshop. The point being, images are not the last word on anything. Even before digital photography, photos could be dramatically altered, as when under Stalin, officials who had been purged had to be airbrushed out of photos. So this kind of manipulation is nothing new, but with digital technology it has reached dramatic new levels of verisimilitude. (Go see a Hollywood "action" or Sci-Fi or comic book "hero" sometime and see!)

The grainy video the U.S. released seems genuine, as we would expect a surveillance video taken from far away to look like this. (But I think that is naive. The U.S. has space satellites that can resolve objects the size of car license plates. Surely their warships have camera lenses that can do better than this video.) Conveniently, you can't really make out what the Iranian crew is doing.

Over the following days, the U.S. dribbled out more "evidence," such as a photo of the Japanese ship with a black triangle smudge on the hull that it purported was the "unexploded mine," but could just as well have been (indeed looks like) a mark added with a simple photo editing program.


A ship mine makes such a TINY HOLE? How could it ever sink a ship? That's what ship mines are designed to do! And that little triangle- DEFINITELY a mine!

Pompeo has also claimed that the U.S. had mine fragments that were Iranian-like.

Last month four tankers were sabotaged in some vague way in a UAE port. Saudi Arabia rushed to blame Iran. But apparently the designed effect wasn't achieved.

To be sure, Iranian officials have publicly noted that Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz to ship traffic if it wished. This is played as an "Iranian threat" in Western media and by government officials.

I don't think they could. The U.S. Navy could wipe out Iran's fleet of tiny patrol boats, and minesweepers could clear sea lanes of any floating mines.

There are plenty of covert units in the U.S. government that specialize in false flag operations and such types of frame-ups. When Pompeo was CIA director, his first job for Trump, in addition to demonizing Julian Assange and increasing vicious sneaky attacks on Venezuela, he took the opportunity to form a CIA task force, the "Iran Mission Center," in 2017.

The U.S. has had it in for Iran ever which the Iranian people had the temerity to overthrow one of the U.S.' favorite dictators, a man president Jimmy Carter called a "great friend," "Shah" Reza Pahlavi, in 1979. (Pahlavi was installed in 1953 in a CIA coup ordered by president Dwight Eisenhower, which destroyed Iranian democracy and resulted in the deaths of a quarter million Iranians during the Shah's 25 year reign, many after hideous torture by the CIA-created and coached secret police, the SAVAK.)

Now, I don't like the current Iranian regime. it is a repressive theocracy. But that is NOT why the U.S. opposes it. Saudi Arabia is a FAR MORE repressive theocracy, and the U.S. is joined at the hip to it. The U.S. is in the business of destroying democracies and creating and backing dictatorships to allow economic exploitation of captive nations. But it won't admit that of course because it isn't inspirational. It needs to dupe people, especially the American people. So it pretends to be a spreader of freedom and democracy, when it does the exact opposite, over and over and over.

The war cabal in the U.S. government, led by Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, a political creature created by the Koch Brothers, a man who has publicly called for the execution of the heroic whistleblower Edward Snowden [3], and John Bolton, a lifelong psychopathic war monger and fanatical imperialist, are maneuvering Trump into war against Iran. The U.S. is already waging economic warfare against that country- which of course primarily hurts the people of Iran. (People whom the sick imperialist dog Bolton says "deserve a better government," as if he or any U.S. imperialist gives a shit about the welfare of Iranians or of any other people, for that matter. Similar Bolton opined on television that having U.S. oil companies seize control of Venezuela's oil would benefit the American AND Venezuelan people. How the hell diverting that oil wealth into the coffers of large corporations would do that, he didn't bother explaining.)

If and when the war cabal succeeds in its goal, a goal enthusiastically supported by Israel and Saudi Arabia, two darling nations of the U.S. government, the only thing most Americans will care about, unfortunately, is American casualties, not the far greater number of Iranian deaths and maimings, or the devastation to be wreaked upon Iran's infrastructure. And Iran's retaliation and self-defense will be branded "terrorism," and used as excuse and justification for the U.S. aggression.

Just as, during World War II, the Nazis branded the armed partisans who resisted them in various occupied nations "terrorists." Really, the same word. Oh, and "enhanced interrogation techniques," the euphemism the Bush regime and U.S. media adopted to pretend they didn't torture people, was lifted straight from the Gestapo interrogation manual, which the CIA carefully studied after the war. (Ray McGovern, the retired career CIA analyst who briefed presidents daily and who is fluent in German and Russian, revealed this.)

Anyway, here's hoping you won't drink the propaganda Kool-Aid being served up daily around the clock by "the" media.


Propaganda smoke gets in your eyes.


Enemies of humanity Pompeo and Bolton.


The primary target of the war cabal's psychological-political warfare: the Grifter-in-Chief as dupe.

1] Speaking of well-timed sabotage of diplomatic events, remember when special counsel Robert S. "Grand Inquisitor" Mueller III released an indictment of Russians RIGHT BEFORE Trump was to meet Putin? Quite a "coincidence."

Or how about the October Surprise, when Reagan's gang cut a secret deal with Iran to delay the release of U.S. embassy personnel until minutes after Jimmy Carter was out of office, thus insuring his defeat by Reagan in the 1980 election?

Or Nixon's sabotage of Lyndon Johnson's peace talks with North Vietnam in 1968? He told the "South" Vietnamese military regime to refuse to go along with a deal. FBI wiretaps alerted Johnson to this, but he didn't want to expose that spying so kept it quiet. Nixon beat the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, Johnson's vice president, by about 1/2 of 1% of the "popular' vote.  (Oh, but Trump is paranoid and insulting to think a sitting president would wiretap a candidate!)

2] Not that the blackout was total. But it doesn't need to be to keep most people in the dark. For example, there was one article in the Washington Post about the Japanese tanker company's statement. Did YOU happen to read it? How about everyone you know? They've all heard the U.S. propaganda line, day after day after day.

Incessantly for a week now, "the" media has repeated the government line about Iran's guilt, while ignoring the facts that prove the U.S. assertions a lie, so most people will be unaware of these key facts. Bourgeois commentary now takes for granted the "fact" that Iran mined two tankers, just as it takes for granted the lie that Russia "hacked the DNC server." All that remains to be determined is what the U.S. should do to punish Iran. For that purpose, it gives a platform to, for example, Senator Tom Cotton. A first-term senator from the insignificant state of Arkansas, Cotton is a former military officer and rabidly aggressive militarist and imperialist. Why HE of all people should be all over television is a question properly put to the media czars and their henchmen, the executives and producers of television propaganda programs. ["Japanese ship owner contradicts U.S. account of how tanker was attacked," Washington Post, June 14, 2019.





Wednesday, June 19, 2019

Trump Announces By Tweet Mass Roundup of 11 Million People

U.S. president/emperor Donald Trump issued an edict using Twitter to round up and deport 11 million people living in the U.S. "illegally" whom he claims entered illegitimately. A fact often repeated but simply ignored by Trump, his minions, and the millions of xenophobic "white" racists who are his enthusiastic supporters, is that the vast majority of the people living in the U.S. "illegally" entered on valid entry visas issued by the U.S., which they overstayed.

They are not being sent "home." Home is where you live. Their home is the U.S.A.

Mass roundups of millions of people are no simple tasks. Trump might want to study how the Nazis did it in World War II. Or rather, since he doesn't study things, hire another white supremacist like Stephen Miller and others already working for him, who is familiar with Hitler's ways.

By the way, some of those deported will be killed when they arrive back in the very dangerous countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and other places. Some fled after being specifically targeted by gangs or government death squads.



Boy, does he hate Hispanics!

Wednesday, June 12, 2019

The Sure Way To Get Rid of Donald J. Trump

The Democratic Party is currently in a tizzy trying to agree internally on the best way to be rid of U.S. president Donald J. Trump. A faction of the party's Congressional Representatives in the House want to impeach Trump, even though there is no hope of getting the Senate to vote to convict Trump and thus remove him from office, since this requires a vote by two-thirds of the members in that body, and virtually no Republican Senators can be expected to vote to convict their party leader, who is overwhelmingly popular with Republican voters. (Republicans currently are a majority in the 100 seat U.S. Senate.)

The other faction among the Democrats say the only way to remove Trump is by victory in the 2020 presidential election. But that too is problematic. There are 25 Democrats vying for the party's nomination, which surely will create confusion and result in a nominee lacking great stature. Plus, the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) consistently steals elections, for president, senators, state governors, by underhanded and illegal means. They have even resorted to assassination to grab control of the Senate, as occurred with the murders of Paul Wellstone and Mel Carnahan.

This subversion by the GOP of what little democracy there is in the U.S. has been going on for two decades, and the Democrats never make a peep about it or lift a finger to counter it. Instead they have spent the past three years promoting the gigantic hoax that Russia had a major influence on the 2016 election, that it massively interfered, and that it constitutes an ongoing "threat to our democracy."

Can a political party get any lamer than that?

So with impeachment not a viable method to remove Trump from power, and the Democrats' sorry record in electoral politics, one must consider other alternatives.

So herein, A Modest Proposal.

I was musing on the life of another headstrong and ambitious individual who ruthlessly grabbed the top rung of power in an empire: Julius Caesar, Emperor of Rome.

Caesar, a ruthless general who slaughtered an estimated million people in his conquest of Gaul, committing innumerable atrocities to facilitate the Roman Empire's seizure of the area and the subjugation of its people by such methods as chopping off all the hands of male inhabitants who dared resist being conquered, made himself Emperor by marching into Rome with his army, "crossing the Rubicon" river, as the phrase memorializing his power grab has it.

A group of Roman Senators decided to eliminate this dictator, and did so by luring him onto the Senate floor, where they dispatched him with daggers. The story goes that with his dying breath he rebuked one of the assassins whom he had considered loyal, with the words "Et tu, Brute?" ("And you, Brutus?" by which Caesar meant, even you?)

I thought: what a classy way to free the nation of Trump if Senators would emulate their Roman counterparts of two millenniums ago!

Just imagine the scene: Trump, lying on the floor of the Senate like a beached whale or mortally wounded buffalo, his blood oozing out in an expanding puddle on the marble floor, his killers standing over his body in their expensive suits, observing their handiwork.

If he has any sense of classical history- and he went to "good" schools, so he should- the words on Trump's dying lips could be, "Et tu, Mitch?"

But no way Republican Senators would turn on Trump, whom they fear. Their "base" would surely avenge such treachery against their idol. And they have guns, lots of guns.

So what would Trump gasp out as he lay dying? "Et tu, Chuck?" That makes no sense. He doesn't expect loyalty from Schumer. And Schumer, being a Democrat, is far too timid and compromised to take bold action, ever. So we wouldn't get the wonderful historical bookend, the reverberation from millenniums past, that would make this so satisfying. Besides, the Democrats are renowned for their cupidity, so surely that would stay their hands.

I suppose we'll just have to see if the Democrats let the Republicans steal another presidential election through chicanery, voter suppression, and the like, as they did in 2000, 2004, and 2016.

And if the Democrats "lose" again, they'll just pretend that RUSSIA did it! BLAME IT ON RUSSIA!! THEY'RE UNDERMINING OUR DEMOCRACY!! In fact, they are already preparing the ground to blame an upcoming loss on Russia, running around saying that the "threat" is "still there," and that Trump is "doing nothing to protect our democracy." Various media propagandists and secret police types peddle the same lurid threat-mongering.

It's contemptible and pathetic.


Trump better hope past is not prologue. Sometimes bullies end up badly.



The Wise Emperor Takes His Bodyguards With Him To The Senate



Beware the Ides of March, O Emperor! (Or of April, May, June, etc.)






Saturday, June 08, 2019

Donald Trump Projects. Again

Democratic Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi was quoted saying she'd rather see U.S. President Donald Trump in prison than impeached. Trump of course had to punch back. "She's a nasty vindictive horrible person."

Well he oughta know. Every day he looks in the mirror and sees a nasty, vindictive, horrible person.
By the way, I remember a certain presidential candidate in 2016 leading chants of his supporters in "LOCK HER UP!" directed at his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.

But to be fair, BOTH Trump and Clinton have committed numerous felonies and misdemeanors and it would be appropriate to imprison both of them.


 Trump doesn't much like Pelosi.
 

"Here's looking at you, Creep!"


 


Friday, June 07, 2019

Trump Lagging Dangerously Behind Obama's Record of Overthrowing Foreign Governments

One duty of U.S. presidents is to overthrow the governments of other nations. Trump has a compulsion to brag constantly about being the greatest and best at everything- he portrays himself the way the North Korean media describes Kim Jong-Un, the current hereditary dictator of North Korea. (Trump is probably jealous that he doesn't have an entire monopoly state media to sing his praises as Kim does, just Murdoch's Minions at Fox "News" and the various rags and other propaganda assets of the global Murdoch media empire.)

But in this primary obligation of anyone charged with being the chief manager of U.S. imperialism, Trump has a poor record so far. He's zero for one in known overthrow attempts. (Or zero for two if we count Iran.) Currently he is struggling to overthrow his first foreign government, Venezuela's, despite the help of an expert coaching staff including veteran imperialist apparatchiks John Bolton and Elliott Abrams and the hard-charging Koch Bros. creation Michael Pompeo. But Venezuela is proving a stubborn nut for the coup specialists of the U.S. to crack. And Trump has less than a year and a half left in his first term. Should he fail to win election, he may end up seriously deficient in this key metric of U.S. presidential "leadership."

It must be especially galling to Trump to be trailing behind Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama, whom he holds in contempt and wants to prove he's better than by outdoing him in every metric.  (Trump believes in White Superiority.) Obama overthrew at least two governments (that we know of) during his eight year reign: Honduras and Ukraine. Obama's predecessor George "The Dumb One" Bush also notched two "victories for freedom" in his belt, Afghanistan and Iraq, but very messily and expensively, doing so by invasions.

Bush's father invaded Panama and overthrew a dictator, Manuel Noriega, who had fallen out of favor with his U.S. imperialist masters by disobeying an order to increase the level of cooperation he was providing to the U.S. anti-Nicaraguan contra terrorist army. The cost of replacing Noriega was a bargain-basement price of only 4,000 Panamanian lives. (Mostly poor slum dwellers, who received decent burials by having their corpses thrown into mass graves and bulldozed over, in best Third Reich fashion. But that's a cheap shot. The U.S. doesn't need to take lessons from Nazis in barbarism. It has a proud tradition of massacres. Over three decades before Hitler came to power, the U.S. was slaughtering poor Filipinos and disposing of their bodies in the proper mass murder style. And speaking of eliminating pesky indigenous populations, who could forget Andrew Jackson's memorable Trail of Tears death march for native Americans?)

Bush the Elder however squandered the chance to overthrow Saddam Hussein of Iraq, supposedly at the behest of other Arab dictators- an oversight his son would remedy a little over a decade later.
Nixon infamously unleashed the CIA and U.S. military on Chile to destroy democracy there in a campaign of economic warfare, subversion, and terrorism that lasted from 1970-1973. He also destabilized Laos and Cambodia with savage bombing campaigns that led to collapses there and the coming to power in Cambodia of the murderously psychopathic Khmer Rouge.

Lyndon Johnson arranged the overthrow of civilian democracies in Brazil and Greece and their replacement with proper fascist military dictatorships. He was also forced to invade the Dominican Republic when the dumb natives there, failing to understand now democracy works, elected the wrong person president and the U.S. had to clean up their mess by overthrowing him. (Hey maybe those white supremacists have a point about dark-skinned people being unable to govern themselves. as Jared Kushner just opined about Palestinians.)

John F. Kennedy gave a green light to a military coup in Vietnam against U.S. puppet dictator Diem, who just wasn't cutting the mustard in suppressing the national aspirations of the Vietnamese people. Tragically, he failed to overthrow Castro, one of his fatal failures that led to his assassination by the CIA, with the complicity of the U.S. military, the FBI, Dallas police, and after the fact especially "the" media.

Dwight David Eisenhower, "hero" of world war two, in later years hero of peaceniks because of a couple of sentences in his farewell address warning "don't get the military-industrial complex getcha!"- this from a guy who greatly expanded that complex and created a nuclear weapons arsenal of thousands of genocidal weapons- knew how to overthrow a democratic government or two- actually at least two, Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954), each democracy replaced by two of the most savagely murderous regimes in the world since 1945. (A quarter of a million of the citizens in each of these lands murdered by the U.S.-installed regimes.)

But presidential duties don't just consist in overthrowing governments. Presidents are also obligated to safeguard client dictators. Jimmy Carter "allowed" the overthrow of two very vicious and infamous dictators who were "friends" of the U.S.: the "Shah" (King) of Iran, and Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua. Thus he spoiled Eisenhower's legacy in Iran, from the perspective of U.S. imperialists. These failures are the real but unstated reason "the" media turned on him with a vengeance in the election year of 1980, and hailed the racist fascist Ronald Reagan. Carter was smeared as a weakling who was attacked by a rabbit while canoeing. (Such juvenile mockery is actually a standard tool in the propaganda toolbox of U.S. media.)

Fortunately for Trump, as much as Democrats and their media allies (and the secret police apparatus that has worked assiduously to undermine Trump- all support Trump wholeheartedly in his valiant attempt to overthrow the Venezuelan government. And Trump's imperialist hitman John Bolton has public announced that Nicaragua and Cuba are also in line for "regime change." Trump is already tightening the screws on Cuba, ending tourist travel there permitted under an educational exemption. (The anti-Cuba and anti-Venezuela campaigns are pet projects of Florida GOP Senator Marco Rubio, a loathsome slimy fanatic.)

One thing you can be sure of: Trump's imperialist subversion and aggression will NOT be used by Democrats to attack him in the presidential campaign of 2020. Most of the declared candidates have either been silent on these matters or supportive of U.S. imperialist criminality, and the few exceptions are mild in their criticisms.

We should devoutly hope for a failed presidency. That is what's best for humanity.


 Better Step Up Your Game, Fella! Don't You Want To Go Down In History As "Best President Ever"?



Trump is Gunning for Venezuela.