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Putin reveals Russia has used its new ‘Oreshnik’ hypersonic ballistic missile

RT | November 21, 2024

The Russian military has launched a start-of-the-art intermediate-range ballistic missile against a Ukrainian target, President Vladimir Putin said in a public address on Thursday.

As part of what the president called a “combat test,” the hypersonic missile, dubbed ‘Oreshnik’ (‘Hazel’), successfully struck a military industrial facility in the Ukrainian city of Dnepropetrovsk (also known as Dnipro in Ukraine), Putin added.

The strike was a response to Ukrainian attacks on military facilities located on internationally recognized Russian territory, the president stated. On Tuesday and Thursday, Kiev’s forces launched the attacks, using US-made ATACMS and HIMARS systems as well as British-made Storm Shadow missiles, he said.

Earlier, the Western media reported that Kiev had received approval from Washington and London for the use of Western-made long-range systems for strikes deep into Russia.

One of the strikes resulted in some casualties at a Russian command center in the Kursk Region but failed to disrupt its operations, the president said, adding that such developments have also drastically changed the nature of the Ukraine conflict, making it a more “global” one.

November 21, 2024 Posted by | Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

West has made Ukraine conflict ‘global’ – Putin

FILE PHOTO: Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS). © Global Look Press / Keystone Press Agency / Defense Ministry
RT | November 21, 2024

Russian President Vladimir Putin has confirmed that long-range missiles supplied to Ukraine by the US and the UK have been used against targets within the internationally-recognized territory of Russia.

A volley of six US-made ATACMS rockets was launched at Bryansk Region on Tuesday, while a number of British-made Storm Shadow missiles were fired at Kursk Region on Wednesday, the president said.

“From that moment, the Ukraine conflict previously provoked by the West acquired elements of a global nature, just as we warned more than once,” Putin said on Thursday, in a televised address to the nation.

The US and its NATO allies have previously stated they would allow Kiev to use their weapons, Putin said, noting again that such attacks could not take place without the participation of Western military personnel.

The attack on the munitions depot in Bryansk was intercepted by air defenses, causing no casualties and only minor property damage. The second strike, on a military command post in Kursk, resulted in deaths and injuries among the security and support personnel, Putin said. However, the command staff was unharmed and continued to manage the expulsion of Ukrainian invaders from that region of Russia, he added.

In response to these attacks, Russia struck a Ukrainian military-industrial site in Dnepropetrovsk using a new, non-nuclear hypersonic missile dubbed ‘Oresshnik’ (Hazel), Putin revealed.

The use of Western-supplied missiles is not going to change the situation on the ground, where Russian forces are advancing all along the front line and intend to achieve all their objectives, the president concluded.

November 21, 2024 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

In the beginning was the Pax Americana

By Lorenzo Maria Pacini | Strategic Culture Foundation | November 21, 2024

We often speak of the collective West, Hegemon, Seapower and Civilization of the Sea in relation to the United States of America. It is necessary to understand well what is the origin of this geopolitically determinant power for the world order.

He who wins the war, dictates the rules

Let us make clear at once an empirically incontrovertible factual truth: He who wins the war, dictates the rules of the post-war order. Whoever wins, writes history. Whether we like it or not, the defeated never had much decision-making power (which is not to say that they could not organize well to retaliate and return to power – but that is another matter).

World War II ended with the victory of the United States of America as the first, undefeated and predominant power. From there followed an expansion of U.S. influence toto orbe terrarum in all respects (cultural, economic, military, political).

The twentieth century was the “American century.” Almost the whole world took the shape the U.S. wanted to give it. The second half of the century was marked by the low-tension conflict of the Cold War, which ended-if it really did-with the collapse of the Soviet political system in the USSR and the beginning of the unipolar phase of American global domination. That period aroused much optimism in the West for a new world order, marking the end of the military and ideological rivalry of the 20th century. Two possibilities were on the horizon: a system based on balance of power and egalitarian sovereignty, or a U.S.-led liberal hegemony based on the values of democracy. The first approach evoked perpetual conflict, while the second promised lasting peace and global stability.

U.S. hegemony, already dominant in the transatlantic region after World War II, was seen as a model of peace and prosperity. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union removed the justification for a world order built on the balance of power, pushing the United States toward a mission of recognized hegemony to prevent the rise of new rivals. American supremacy, as declared by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, was deemed “indispensable to ensure global stability.”

This was the Pax Americana: the U.S. would ensure a period of prosperity and global peace – as early as the end of WWII – by extending control over the entire world. A peace for America was equivalent to a peace for the globe; a war for America would mean war for the entire globe. The stated goal of building a peaceful world often justified imperialistic approaches, revealing the contradictions of the hegemonic project.

Set this paradigm as an axiom of reasoning in international relations and geopolitical programming, lo and behold, everything acquired new meaning. The world had been formatted and the “control room” was now in Washington.

The time of ideologies

It was the time of ideologies. In the “short century” everything had changed rapidly. The great world chessboard was constantly being shaken and reshuffled. The clash between the Western bloc and the Eastern – or Soviet – bloc characterized all concepts of each country’s politics in an extremely powerful way.

In the 1990s, two visions dominated the debate on world order: that of Francis Fukuyama and that of Samuel Huntington. Fukuyama in his famous book The End of History, envisioned a future in which liberal democracy and capitalism would triumph universally, leading to perpetual peace under the leadership of the United States: he argued that economic interdependence, democratic reforms, and shared institutions would unite the world around common values, which were, of course, American values. Any other model of civilization would have been beside the point, because History was finished, there would be nothing left to write about. In contrast, Huntington, wrote The Clash of Civilizations, in which he predicted that the world would be fragmented into distinct cultural blocs based on civil, religious and economic identities. Individualism and human rights, according to him, were peculiar to the West and not universal. His theorizing assumed a future marked by conflicts between civilizations, fueled by the decline of Western hegemony and the emergence of alternative powers, particularly in Confucian and Islamic societies.

The influence of Fukuyama’s ideas shaped post-Cold War Western politics, justifying the expansion and exceptionalism of Pax Americana. Exceptionalism that has been one of the U.S.’s most pragmatic “values”: there are rules and only we can break them, when we want, how we want and without having to account to anyone.

History, however, does not have only one actor: other countries, such as Russia, have chosen to be fascinated by Huntington’s proposal – confrontational, certainly, but not already “final.” In Russia, this debate has deep roots, linked to the historical rivalry between Westernists and Slavophiles. In the 1990s, Russia initially tried to move closer to the West, but the West’s failure to include it reinforced the idea of a distinct Russian civilization, culminating in Vladimir Putin’s view that no civilization can claim to be superior.

A matter of ideologies, indeed, a low-profile but very high-value battle in which the steps of the new century that was beginning would be defined. These divergences highlighted the tension between universalist aspirations and distinctive cultural identities, defining the geopolitical conflicts of the 21st century.

Building Pax Americana at any cost

Washington promoted a world order based on the Pax Americana, a liberal hegemony that reflected the success of the peaceful and prosperous transatlantic system created by the United States during the conflict with the Soviet Union. It proposed to extend this model globally, citing as examples Germany and Japan, transformed from militaristic and imperialist nations into “peaceful”-or, rather, defeated-democracies under U.S. influence. But the success of these transformations had been made possible by the presence of a common adversary, Russia, and the history of Latin America suggested that U.S. hegemony was not always synonymous with progress and peace.

Charles Krauthammer described the post-Cold War period as a “unipolar moment,” characterized by American dominance, where the new Hegemon dictated the rules and the others had little choice. Although he recognized that a multi-participant set-up (today we can say “multipolarism”) would inevitably return, he believed it was necessary to exploit unipolarity to ensure temporary peace, avoiding a return to turbulent periods. There was a weakness, however: the United States was unlikely to voluntarily relinquish its dominant role, preferring instead to counter any threat by force, fueled by an obsession with its own historical greatness. It is a missile issue: whoever has it bigger, wins. Let us not forget that the U.S. invented the strategic concept of deterrence precisely by virtue of the atomic weapon it held, throwing the world into a climate of constant fear and risk in which we still live today.

It is equally true that many Americans wished for a dismantling of the U.S. empire, proposing a less interventionist foreign policy focused on domestic challenges: abandoning the role of superpower would allow the United States to strengthen its society by addressing economic, industrial and social issues. Walter Lippmann argued that a mature great power should avoid global crusades, limiting the use of power to preserve internal stability and coherence. Sort of like a “good hegemon.” But this has not been the case.

The notion of “good hegemon” has been criticized for the risk of corruption inherent in power itself. John Quincy Adams warned that the search for enemies to fight could turn the United States from a champion of freedom into a global dictator. Similarly, President Kennedy, in his 1963 speech at American University, opposed a Pax Americana imposed by arms, calling instead for a genuine and inclusive peace that would promote global human progress, which he called “The Peace of All Time.” An ideal that has faded into the oblivion of collective memory.

American hegemony is the sine qua non for having a Pax Americana. The universalism that characterizes this hegemony admits of no discounts. Inequality among global powers has been exploited as a pivot to increase U.S. profits and administrative expansion at the expense of weaker countries. Neoliberally speaking, there is no error in this. Everything is very consistent. The struggle of the strongest to destroy all the smallest. Not only the one who produces and earns the most wins, but the one who can maintain the power to produce and earn the most wins.

A hegemonic system needs internal stability without which it cannot subsist. A kingdom divided in itself cannot function. This applies to economics as well as politics. It is essential that the ideological paradigm does not change, that power can always be understood and transmitted, from leader to leader, as it has been successfully established. Because the “peace” of the ancient Romans was a peace given by the maintenance of political control to the very ends of the empire, which only came about through a solid military administration.

The Americans did not invent anything. To really control (realpolitik) one must have military control. In front of an atomic bomb, reasoning about political philosophies is worth little. The U.S. knows this very well and its concept of Pax has always been unequivocally based on military supremacy and the maintenance of it.

Something changed when with the first decade of the 2000s new poles, new civilization-states, began to appear that promoted alternative models of global life. The U.S. began to see its power wane, day by day, until today, where the West is worth less than the “rest of the world,” the U.S. no longer has its “exclusive” status, and we are not even so sure that it is then so strong that it can control the globe. The geometries change again. What Pax for what borders of what empire?

Is Trump ready to give up his Pax?

The crux of the question is, if imperialistic military supremacy is what has allowed the U.S. to maintain its dominance and this dominance is precipitating today, will the newly elected U.S. President Donald Trump really be ready to compromise the Pax Americana?

We are talking about a polymorphous compromise:

– Economically, he would have to accept the end of the dollar era and downsize the U.S. market on comparison with sovereign global currencies. Practically throw a century of global financial architecture in the trash.

– Politically, accept that it is possible to think otherwise and do otherwise. Politics is not just American “democracy.” There are so many possibilities, so many different models, so many futures to be written according to other scripts.

– Militarily, it means stopping with the diplomacy of arrogance and threats, accepting that we cannot arbitrarily decide how to deal with anyone and stop aiming missiles at the flags of other states.

– Most complicated and risky of all, all this means giving up peace within the United States. If the balances of power implemented externally are broken, those internally begin to falter and the organism undergoes remodeling.

Giving up the Pax Americana as it has been known does not mean that alternatives do not exist. The concept of “pax” is broad and can be interpreted differently by the American school. Taking this step, however, involves giving up a “tradition” of global power, having to go through the collapse of the entire U.S. domestic system and then rebuilding an alternative.

Make America Great Again will mean what? Restoring American hegemony in the world, or rebuilding America?

November 21, 2024 Posted by | Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

Biden’s Lust for War

By Andrew P. Napolitano | Ron Paul Institute | November 21, 2024

The war in Ukraine is an American war for which the United States government should be ashamed and blamed.

It was initiated by President Joe Biden and then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, both of whom advised Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that if he rejected a peace treaty that his own government had freely negotiated and agreed to in 2022 with Russian negotiators, Ukraine could join NATO. The treaty was more than 100 pages in length, each page of which had been initialed by both sides, and its essence accepted by the Kremlin and by Kyiv — until Biden and Johnson advised against it.

Their advice was essentially to trust their military support, as it would be strong enough to resist any Russian incursion into eastern Ukraine and relieve Kyiv of the need to make concessions to the Kremlin. They used Zelensky as a puppet, since their purpose was not motivated by peace or empathy or justice, rather by hatred for all things Russian.

So, the U.S. and the U.K. encouraged bloodshed instead of peace, confrontation instead of communication, and Congress began paying for a war without declaring one. Motivated by years of anti-Russian jingoism, heedless of its duties under the Constitution, thumbing its nose at at least three treaties ratified by the Senate that permit war only when the U.S. or an ally is gravely threatened, Congress permitted Biden to start an undeclared war against a country that poses no threat whatsoever to the national security of the United States.

Here is the backstory.

The war began in 2014 when the U.S. State Department and the CIA engineered a coup against the popularly elected and neutral-leaning government of Ukraine. Much of Russian-speaking and Russian culturally oriented Ukraine in the east was unhappy with the coup. The American and British plotters then installed a puppet regime that actually began attacking Russian Ukrainians in eastern Ukraine.

The area of eastern Ukraine in which this government-orchestrated violence was taking place has been Russian in culture, religion and language since before the American Revolution. The American and British plotters of the 2014 coup did not expect the resistance that their coup generated. Yet, they looked the other way when the Ukraine government attacked its own people for demonstrating a decided affinity for Moscow over Kyiv; so decided, that the province of Crimea actually voted overwhelmingly to return to Russia.

One person who did not look the other way was Russian President Vladimir Putin. Who could blame him? The U.S. has known since the early 1990s that Russia will not accept an eastward expansion of NATO. The George H.W. Bush administration promised the late Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev as much in return for the peaceful liberation of eastern Europe and especially the reunification of Germany. Nevertheless, with Poland’s entry into NATO, the western perfidy became apparent, as NATO — and its heavy weaponry — moved toward Moscow.

Angry that his predecessor had permitted this, fearful of the same mentality that engineered the 2014 coup now managing NATO, Putin came to the rescue of Russian Ukrainians. When the U.S. and U.K. succeeded in busting the Russia/Ukraine treaty tentatively agreed to in Istanbul, and tempted Zelensky with Ukrainian membership in NATO, Putin’s only alternative was to resist NATO expansion and the Ukrainian military by the use of Russian force.

Who can blame Putin? How would American presidents react to the threat of Chinese offensive weaponry in Mexico?

I know this is not a popular history in the U.S., as mainstream media as well as popular culture and government schools have demonized Russia since the end of the Cold War. That demonization gave Biden cover to promise Zelensky “whatever he needs for as long as it takes.” In his nearly four years in the White House, Biden has declined to articulate as long as it takes to do what.

Biden’s war has cost the American taxpayers nearly $240 billion and Ukraine 600,000 dead troops. It was not declared by Congress. It was facilitated by many Americans on the ground in Ukraine — military in uniform and out, intelligence personnel, and defense contractors. Much of the military equipment that the U.S. has sent to Ukraine — most from America’s substance, not surplus — required U.S. troops and other personnel to train Ukrainian troops in the use of it.

But last weekend, Biden — whose presidency has been thoroughly repudiated by American voters — authorized the use of offensive weaponry that can reach 190 miles into Russia and which can only be manned by U.S. personnel. At this writing, the U.S. equipment has attacked and destroyed a warehouse holding artillery ammunition some 70 miles inside the Russian border.

Who is firing U.S. offensive weaponry?

There is no dispute but that the U.S. is waging war on Russia — without a congressional declaration, without the consent of the United Nations (as the U.S. is obliged to do under a treaty that the U.S. wrote) and solely on its own. I say solely on its own because the weaponry that destroyed the Russian military warehouse requires secret U.S. satellite technology to operate, and U.S. personnel with top-secret security clearances to aim and trigger. It would be an act of espionage to permit Ukrainians to do this.

War is politics by other means. But it is the most deadly, destructive and irreversible means — and must always be a last resort. The Constitution intentionally separated the war-declaring power from the war-waging power. Its author, James Madison, poignantly argued that if presidents could both choose the enemy and fight it, such a person would be a prince and not a president.

Joe Biden’s presidency has been an abysmal failure, and he doesn’t know it. He must perversely hope that history will reward him if he keeps the killing coming to the last Ukrainian and even risks a wider war. Can a presidency of peace come soon enough?

To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.
COPYRIGHT 2024 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO
DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

November 21, 2024 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia | , , , | 1 Comment

All Risk, Little Gain: U.S. Authorizes Long-Range Strikes into Russia

By Ted Snider | The Libertarian Institute | November 21, 2024

On November 17, the United States told the world what they told Ukraine three days earlier: Ukriane had permission to fire American supplied long-range missiles deeper into Russian territory.

Not much needs to be said about the risks involved in the decision. They are the same risks that have caused the Joe Biden administration to hesitate green lighting the strikes for months. Russian President Vladimir Putin clearly said in September that because long-range strikes into Russia “are impossible to employ without intelligence data from… NATO satellites,” that “mean[s] that NATO countries… are at war with Russia.” And that, Putin says, “will clearly change the very essence, the very nature of the conflict.”

The calculation whether or not to take a risk can only be made by weighing it against the benefits. But the benefits of green lighting the long-range strikes are illusory.

The Biden administration has not given Ukraine carte blanche to launch missiles into Russia. The license comes with boundaries; the missiles can only be fired into the Kursk region of Russia that Ukrainian troops invaded in August.

The United States has given two reasons for their permission to use their missiles to strike the Kursk region. The Biden administration seems to have been tipped in favor of allowing the strikes by the introduction of North Korean troops into Kursk. The hoped for benefit would be deterring North Korea from sending more troops.

The presence of 10,000 elite North Korean troops who are currently in combat in Kursk has not been proven. And deterring their arrival cannot come close to balancing the risk of direct U.S. involvement in firing missiles into Russia. North Korean troops, even if present, do not alter the balance on the battlefield. The Russian armed forces are growing by 30,000 volunteers a month. 10,000 North Koreans represents only about ten days worth of soldiers. Russia is neither desperate for troops in the Donbas, where they are rapidly advancing, nor in Kursk, where U.S. officials say they have amassed a force of tens of thousands of soldiers without having to pull a single soldier out of Ukraine.

The second hoped for benefit is helping the Ukrainian armed forces hold onto Kursk until the arrival of the inevitable negotiations, at which time Kursk can be bartered for Ukrainian territory held by Russia.

That benefit is as illusory as the first. Ukraine seems to be throwing everything into holding onto the territory it has seized in Kursk. There are reports that Kiev has made the hard to understand decision to prioritize holding onto Kursk over defending its own territory in Donbas. According to these reports, the best military equipment and the best troops are being sent into Kursk to hold onto land instead of into Donbas to reinforce the crumbling front lines. Now, the risk is being taken to throw in the long-range missiles.

Russia, though, is not likely to negotiate until they reclaim Kursk, which they likely eventually will, even faced with long-range missiles. And even if Russia failed to reclaim Kursk, it is not at all clear that Putin would trade that frontier land for the large ethnic Russian Donbas territory.

In the face of the unrealistic benefits, one other possible motive remains. Granting Ukraine permission to fire U.S.-supplied missiles into Kursk is the trump card in the Biden administration’s policy of “Trump-proofing” the war in Ukraine. Freeing Ukraine to escalate and provoking Russia to respond creates a terrain that is much more difficult for Donald Trump to keep his campaign promise of ending the war in Ukraine. As Anatol Lieven, Director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, suggested to me, the legacy of Biden as the “fearless defender of Ukraine” also makes it easier for Democrats to “attack Trump for ‘surrender’ over a future peace deal.”

But “Trump-proofing” the war can only serve to prolong the fighting, pile on the dead, and contribute to a greater loss of Ukrainian territory. The likely ending, even if Ukraine holds Kursk for a while, is a negotiated settlement that looks much like the one on the table in the first weeks of the war, but with the additional costs the past three years has brought to Ukraine.

Ironically, “Trump-proofing” can also have an opposite, unintended effect. The policy, and the long-range missile decision, were meant to make it harder for Trump to end the war. Putin knows that too. The New York Times reports that Russian commentators are already framing it that way. Seeing the long-range missile decision in that light gives Putin a motive for patience. He can resist the provocation, not retaliate in a way that escalates the war, and wait for Trump.

The hoped for benefits do not justify the real potential of the risk. And there are longer term risks too.

Geoffrey Roberts, professor emeritus of history at University College Cork and a specialist in Soviet military policy, told me that he “doubts the decision will make much difference militarily.” He called it “another publicity stunt by the Ukrainian-Western side.” He said that he “expects Russia will act with restraint and continue to focus on winning on the battlefield ahead of a ceasefire and peace negotiations when Trump takes power.”

Not only will long-range missiles not significantly change the larger battlefield, Alexander Hill, professor of military history at the University of Calgary, told me that “this decision is unlikely to have a dramatic impact [even] on the fighting at the frontline in the Kursk region.” Though there may be some initial tactical successes, he says that the Russian armed forces will quickly make “the sorts of restrictions on troop and supply concentrations that they did in the Donbass that have minimized the consequences of ATACMS” and other Western missile systems for Russia.

On Monday, November 19, Ukraine fired American-made ATACMS long-range missiles into Russia for the first time. Ukrainian officials say the missiles struck an ammunition depot in the Bryansk region of southwest Russia, which borders on, but is not in, Kursk. The Russian Ministry of Defense, though, says that, of the six ATACMS that were fired, five were shot down and the other was damaged. They say that falling fragments from the damaged missile caused a fire at the munition depot but no damage or casualties.

The long-range missile decision won’t significantly impact troop numbers, North Korean or otherwise, and it won’t enhance the Kursk card in negotiations. But the decision “escalates tensions to a qualitatively new level,” as Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said. And it continues to poison trust and relations between Russia and the West. The escalation in arming Ukraine against Russia could even contribute to a belief in Moscow, Richard Sakwa, professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent, told me, that “Ukraine has to be destroyed to remove a permanent threat to the Russian Federation’s security.”

Though Putin could demonstrate patience and wait out the sunset of the Biden administration and the start of the Trump administration, the crossing of a Russian redline could also lead to further escalation. Hill told me that Russia could “supply allies such as Iran and North Korea with capabilities that they currently do not possess: that is, after all, what the U.S. and its allies did for Ukraine.” They could intensify attacks on military sites or energy infrastructure in Ukraine. They could strike distribution hubs in Poland or Romania through which ballistic missiles and other weapons transit on their way to Ukraine (something Russia has refrained from doing). They could even, Ian Proud, former British diplomat at the British Embassy in Moscow, suggests, “make a limited and pre-signaled strike on a US military facility in Europe or elsewhere.”

Almost simultaneously with the first ATACMS missile strike, Putin signed a revised nuclear doctrine that had been formulated in September. The revised doctrine specifies that a conventional attack on Russia by a country that is supported by a nuclear power will be treated as a joint attack on Russia. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, reminded the West on the sidelines of the G20 meeting that, “If the long-range missiles are used from the territory of Ukraine against the Russian territory, it will mean that they are controlled by American military experts and we will view that as a qualitatively new phase of the Western war against Russia and respond accordingly.” He also, however, said, “Russia is strictly committed to a position of avoiding nuclear war, and that the weapons act as a deterrent.”

Each of these risks outweighs the dubious hoped for benefits of direct U.S. participation in missile strikes deep into Russia. Instead of holding onto Kursk with its unlikely prospect of improving negotiations, the United States should be pushing for negotiations now. Instead of Trump-proofing and prolonging the war, the Biden administration should be facilitating a transition to diplomacy. Sooner, as Trump promises, or later, as Biden is supporting, the war in Ukraine will end at the negotiating table. And the result will likely be the same, minus all the deaths that are yet to come.

November 21, 2024 Posted by | Militarism | , , , | 1 Comment

‘Only Americans Can Do It’: Why Ukrainians Can’t Launch ATACMS Alone

By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 20.11.2024

The US is getting bogged down in the Ukraine conflict despite assertions to the contrary.

“American servicemen are involved in [ATACMS] missile guidance… and coordinating their flights to deliver the strike. We can say this with complete confidence,” Alexander Mikhailov, head of Russia’s Bureau of Military-Political Analysis, tells Sputnik.

The pundit explains that:

  • US-made ATACMS use satellite navigation data that is provided by the US military
  • target selection and their coordinates is carried out by US military-technical specialists
  • the process of loading the flight mission into the missile’s guidance head is conducted by US soldiers

“The launch cannot be carried out without the American officers,” says Mikhailov, “[Americans] wouldn’t transfer either the algorithms, or the codes, or the mechanisms for entering coordinates into the ATACMS missiles to officers of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.”

American security experts echo the Russian scholar.

Speaking on the Judging Freedom podcast on Tuesday, former Marine Corps intelligence officer Scott Ritter stated that “ATACMS cannot be operated by anyone but the US”:

  • the guidance system and the data that is going in is developed by the Pentagon’s geospatial analysts in Europe
  • the data, classified using National Security Agency cryptology, is communicated from the European site to a downlink station in Ukraine manned by US specialists
  • it then is loaded up on the ATACMS again by US specialists

“So the mission is planned by the US, the data is loaded into the missile and when the button is fired it’s being… fired by the US against Russia,” Ritter says. “Only Americans can do it.”

The Kremlin has repeatedly warned the US against growing involvement in the Ukraine conflict. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said that the US greenlighting Ukraine’s strikes deep inside Russia with ATACMS means “a qualitatively” new situation in terms of Washington’s involvement.

November 21, 2024 Posted by | Militarism | , | Leave a comment

The US Becomes Directly Involved in the War Against Russia – Now Entering a New Stage of the War

Colonel Douglas Macgregor & Professor Glenn Diesen | November 20, 2024

Colonel Douglas Macgregor shared his perspectives on Biden’s decision to authorise long-range missile attacks on Russia.

Why did Biden decide to escalate the war in such a reckless manner during his final weeks in office? Has the US become directly involved in the war as it operates the missiles used to attack Russia? Putin approved the new nuclear doctrine, however, how likely is Russia to use nuclear weapons in response to the US/Ukrainian attack with long-range missiles? What will Trump do?

Odysee

November 21, 2024 Posted by | Militarism, Video | , | Leave a comment

Borrell’s symbolic parting gesture is mired in hypocrisy

By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | November 20, 2024

Diplomats and parting gestures are nothing new. As the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell comes close to ending his tenure, he has called for EU member states to stop political dialogue with Israel. “After a year of unheeded pleas, we cannot continue with business as usual,” said Borrell. Make that a year of doing nothing but upholding Israel’s security narrative, thus becoming complicit in genocide.

The EU is neither blameless nor naïve. Borrell’s last ditch attempt at steering EU diplomacy towards at least a veneer of abiding by international law is meaningless, especially when Israel’s atrocities are still not described as genocide by the bloc. Furthermore, proposing an import ban on illegal settlement products is hardly going to dent or end Israel’s genocidal intent and actions in Gaza.

Borrell’s stance has been weak throughout the genocide, and the end of his term as the EU’s high representative was never going to see him leaving an honourable legacy in this respect. In his blog which detailed a timeline of events and EU involvement since Israel’s genocide began (although the g-word is not mentioned once), Borrell makes the case for Israel’s security more than he does for protecting the Palestinians.

“When self-defence started looking more and more like revenge, our appeals grew louder, but we doubled down on our commitment to Israel’s security,” he wrote. The EU’s primary concern, therefore, was to protect Israel’s security narrative at the expense of Palestinians in Gaza. Borrell also described ethnic cleansing and genocide as “some of these illegal and immoral ideas”.

Predictably, the EU foreign ministers rejected Borrell’s proposal. Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski declared that, “We know that there are tragic events in Gaza, huge civilian casualties, but we do not forget who started the current cycle of violence.”

Does Sikorsky remember who started the settler-colonialism in Palestine and who started the genocide, though? Clue: It wasn’t the Palestinians.

Cause and effect are clear, so let’s not forget the initial cause: the creation of the Zionist state of Israel in Palestine.

However, it was not just Sikorski who clearly believes that history began on 7 October 2023, and so uses the shortest timeframe to justify his stance; Borrell did the same. “Looking back, we need to acknowledge that the approach we have used for over a year with the Israeli government has failed,” he wrote. Look back even further, and see how many times the EU failed in terms of upholding international law, because the profits reaped by maintaining ties with Israel are too considerable to lose. Every time, Palestinians were forced to suffer the consequences of international diplomacy with Israel. And let’s not forget the EU’s obsession with maintaining the two-state paradigm’s relevance in rhetoric only.

Business as usual should never have happened. The EU knows it is dealing with a colonial enterprise and that it made human rights secondary to any deals between the bloc and Israel, despite the association agreements actually stipulating otherwise. Borrell’s weak stance is just a symbolic departure trinket, of purportedly having realised too late what was at stake.

The EU – Borrell included – prioritised pleading with Israel as its first diplomatic overture, and ongoing genocide is the result. Even if the EU foreign ministers decided to heed Borrell’s proposals of suspending dialogue and banning settlement products, neither are anywhere near being a tool to bring about an end to the genocide in which Europe and the US are complicit, and which most EU countries are still refusing to acknowledge, never mind stop.

November 20, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israeli jets strike Syria’s Palmyra from US-controlled airspace

The Cradle | November 20, 2024

Israeli jets bombarded the outskirts of the central Syrian city of Palmyra with violent airstrikes on 20 November, launched from within the airspace of Washington’s Al-Tanf military base in eastern Syria.

“Israeli warplanes launched a number of missiles from the airspace of the [US] base in the Al-Tanf area on the Syrian–Iraqi–Jordanian border, in the far southeastern countryside of Homs, targeting the vicinity of the city of Palmyra,” Sputnik’s correspondent reported, citing exclusive information.

The correspondent added that casualties were reported and that many ambulances were transporting the wounded to Tadmur National Hospital.

Nine members of the Syrian army’s auxiliary forces were wounded. Firefighting teams managed to contain the blaze that resulted from the Israeli attack. Images circulating on social media show large clouds of smoke in the area.

The US Al-Tanf base is surrounded by what is referred to as the 55-kilometer area.

According to numerous reports in the last couple of years, including Syrian and Russian officials, ISIS and other extremist groups receive training inside the Al-Tanf base, and are given logistical support to carry out hit-and-run attacks against Syrian military forces in the country’s desert region.

Earlier this month, Syrian troops foiled an ISIS ambush that originated from the 55-kilometer area in the vicinity of the US military base.

According to Israel, it has recently stepped up its violent and illegal campaign of airstrikes against Syria, particularly Syrian–Lebanese border crossings, in order to cut off the flow of weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon, where it is waging a brutal and deadly campaign.

The Al-Tanf base lies approximately 218 kilometers from where Israel struck in Palmyra on Wednesday. In May 2015, ISIS launched a massive offensive against the Syrian government and captured the ancient city.

Moscow and Damascus announced the full liberation of Palmyra in March 2017.

November 20, 2024 Posted by | Wars for Israel | , , , | Leave a comment

CIA Democrats and Other Party Hawks Win Races in 2024 Election

By Jeremy Kuzmarov | Covert Action Magazine | November 17, 2024

In March 2018, Patrick Martin of the World Socialist Web Site published a political pamphlet entitled “The CIA Democrats.”

In it, he wrote that “an extraordinary number of former intelligence and military operatives from the CIA, Pentagon, National Security Council and State Department” were “seeking nomination as Democratic candidates for Congress in the 2018 midterm elections.”

This is a departure from the 1960s and 1970s when Democrats like George McGovern, Leo Ryan and Frank Church were against wars like Vietnam and sought to reign in the CIA.

Some of the Class of 2018 CIA Democrats, like Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA operative with three tours in Iraq, were recruited as part of a “red-to-blue” program targeting vulnerable Republican-held seats.

In the 2018 race, there were far more former spies and soldiers seeking the nomination of the Democratic Party than for the Republicans. Martin wrote that there were so many “spooks” that with a “nod to Mad Magazine,” one might call the primaries “spy vs. spy.”

CovertAction Magazine has kept tabs on the “spook-soldiers” who were elected as part of the Class of 2018 and followed their careers in Congress. (According to Martin, 30 spook-soldiers won primaries and 11 were elected to Congress.)

Below is a summary of how some of them fared in the 2024 election:

1. Elissa Slotkin:

Slotkin narrowly defeated Republican challenger Mike Rogers in Michigan on November 5 for a seat in the U.S. Senate.

Slotkin is the one-time assistant to Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. Prior to her election to Congress, Slotkin put her stamp on the U.S.’s disastrous Ukraine policy as Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense following the U.S.-backed Maidan coup in 2014.

Over the past six years as a Member of Congress, Slotkin has continued to fervently support the Ukraine war, telling an NPR reporter: “I think we’ve got to give them [Ukraine] what they need….This is a black and white issue. Our weapons have made a huge difference.”

In reality, the only difference those weapons made is in killing more people while prolonging Ukraine’s inevitable defeat.

Described as a “moderate” or “conservative” Democrat of the kind the CIA and the plutocratic elite that it serves like, Slotkin is one of only five Democratic House members who voted against an amendment to prohibit support to and participation in the Saudi-led coalition’s military operations against the Houthis in Yemen—a genocidal operation.

Endorsed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) because of her strong pro-Israel stance, Slotkin further voted against H.Con.Res. 21, which directed President Joe Biden to remove U.S. troops from Syria within 180 days.[1]

When asked by a reporter about her favorite CIA movie, Slotkin tellingly named Zero Dark Thirty, which glorified the use of torture in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

In the same interview, Slotkin praised the CIA’s Hollywood liaison office, which she said helps Hollywood to “really understand what is going on”—comments that are in line with the CIA’s official cover story for their PR operations in Hollywood, and make it seem like the Agency is merely concerned with greater accuracy, not covering up its crimes or trying to rehabilitate its public image.

2. Andy Kim:

The seat of disgraced New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) has now been filled by Class of 2018 CIA Democrat Andy Kim (D-NJ), an adviser to former CIA Director David Petraeus who served as director for Iraq on Barack Obama’s National Security Council (NSC).

A graduate with degrees in political science from the University of Chicago and Oxford University who was a member of the progressive congressional caucus, Kim has been a staunch supporter of massive U.S. weapons supplies to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

The first person of South Korean descent elected to the U.S. Senate, Kim voted for a congressional bill declaring that the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is anti-Semitic, and referred to the death of Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny as a “murder”—absent any proof that this was the case.

Predictably, Kim adopts alarmist rhetoric regarding North Korea that could lead directly into a war. He claimed that “there’s a madman with his finger on the button that can send nuclear weapons to annihilate my family.” However, it is the U.S. that precipitated the development of North Korea’s nuclear program as a security blanket after it bombed North Korea nearly back to the Stone Age during the Korean War and has tried for decades to overthrow its government.

3. Jared Golden:

Class of 2018 CIA Democrat Jared Golden narrowly defeated Republican Austin Theriault to retain his seat in Maine’s 2nd congressional district on November 5.

Golden is a tattooed Iraq and Afghan war veteran who served as a policy adviser on the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

A conservative Blue Dog Democrat who was named Vice Chairman of the Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, Golden has urged President Biden to give F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine, and bragged about voting for more than $78 billion in border security funding during his time in Congress.[2]

Additionally, he has championed record military budgets that provided funding for the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine, and for developing new naval destroyers and F-35 jets and CH-53K helicopters, which will benefit Pratt & Whitney’s factory in North Berwick, Maine, and the Hunting Dearborn factory in Fryeburg, Maine.

According to Opensecrets.com, Golden took in $375,091 from AIPAC in 2023-2024 and more than $439,999 in total from pro-Israel lobby groups in the same period.[3] Not surprisingly given these totals, Golden has supported every U.S. military aid package to Israel while opposing calls for a cease-fire.

Golden showed himself to be totally deluded from reality when he claimed that Israel was not committing war crimes in Gaza, when they have been widely documented on the pages of mainstream newspapers.

4. Jason Crow

Jason Crow, a former Army Ranger who served in Afghanistan, handily defeated John Fabbricatore on November 5 to win a fourth term in Congress.

Holding a childish view of world affairs out of the 1950s McCarthy era, Crow promotes on his website his role in securing provisions within the National Defense Authorization Agreement (NDAA) to help finance Buckley Space Force base in Colorado as part of his goal of making Colorado a global aerospace leader.

Buckley Space Force Base is headquarters of the U.S. Space Command, which follows a Nazi blueprint of trying to dominate the world by militarizing and controlling outer space.[4]

Space expert Bruce Gagnon has warned that exhaust from escalating numbers of rocket launches by the U.S. Space Force is diminishing the ozone layer, and the growing space debris could even cause the Earth to go dark as collisions become more likely.

Since Ukraine has been a key theater for testing new space-based weapons, it is no surprise that Jason Crow is a staunch supporter of that war and has established close friendships with Ukrainian military and political leaders who have turned their country into a neo-colonial vassal.

Crow claims that “Taiwan will eventually fall if we’re not able to help Ukraine win.”

To avert this outcome, he has called for increased military training to Ukraine and sending more long-range weapons and missiles to hit inside Russia, which he wants to sanction even more than it already is.[5]

A hawk on Israel, Crow supported legislation with Mike Walz (R-Fl), Trump’s new National Security adviser, to strengthen U.S.-Israeli intelligence sharing in the Gaza war, stating that his years fighting terrorism taught him that “intelligence is the key to effective counter-terrorism.”

One of Crow’s biggest donors is Palantir Technologies, a data-analytics company founded with CIA seed money, which signed a major cooperative agreement with the Israeli Defense Ministry while providing artificial intelligence (AI) software used by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for bomb-targeting and for accumulating data on Palestinians in the occupied territory.

Palantir has also played a key role in the Ukraine War by tracking Russian military movements and helping Ukraine to coordinate battlefield maneuvers along with bomb-targeting and there is concern that the company’s AI software platform also is being weaponized against ordinary Americans.

5. Mikie Sherrill:

Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ), a U.S. Navy helicopter pilot with an intelligence background and Class of 2018 CIA Democrat, defeated Republican Joe Belnome on November 5 to win a fourth term in the 11th congressional district of New Jersey.

The New Jersey Globe reported that Sherrill might not serve out her full term if her gubernatorial campaign takes off.

Sherrill has served on the House Armed Services Committee and Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, a relic of the Cold War which promotes Sinophobia and confrontation with China.

On her website, Sherrill states that, serving on the House Armed Services Committee, she has been able to “significantly increase funding for Picatinny Arsenal—a major military research and manufacturing institute in her district—which remains the Army’s leading research institution for armaments and ammunition.”

Sherrill continues: “Beyond supporting the critical research and development programs at Picatinny, I am also proud to support the many defense technology companies that call NJ-11 home and are on the cutting edge of modernizing our Armed Forces. Many of my provisions in the FY23 National Defense Authorization Act support funding for our local defense industrial base and businesses.”

Sherrill is an anti-Russia and anti-China national security hawk. On her website, she writes:

“Both Russia and China have continued to build their military might and promote their influence across the globe. Neither country shares our values and often they are undermining our interests across the world. We must ensure we modernize our military to meet this threat and provide critical funding for cybersecurity and election protection.

“Putin instigated an unprovoked attack against Ukraine—a sovereign, democratic nation. He has attempted to rewrite history and has unleashed propaganda and disinformation in pursuit of his clear desire to rebuild the Soviet Union’s so-called sphere of influence. [In 2022], I traveled twice to Ukraine, once in January before Putin’s invasion and again in July. I met with President Zelensky and other top Ukrainian officials about the support they need from us and imparted to them the fierce support in New Jersey—home to one of the largest Ukrainian American communities in the country—for their independence and democracy.

“We secured emergency funding through a bipartisan package to support the Ukrainian people in their fight for freedom. American weapons support has made a tangible difference in the Ukrainians’ ability to hold off Russian aggression, including the M-777 Howitzer, developed here at Picatinny Arsenal.”

The M-777 howitzer, it should be noted, has been used to strike at and kill civilian targets in the Donbass, though has not reversed the failings of Ukraine’s summer 2023 counteroffensive.

Sherrill favors continued military support to Israel and a growing police state at home. She boasts on her website about supporting the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2022, which she claims would “better equip our law enforcement with information related to possible attacks and their relationship with hate crimes.”

In May 2022, Sherrill and then-Representative Mike Gallagher (R-WI), Chairman of the Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, participated in a strategic-operational war game, “Dangerous Straits: Battle for Taiwan 2027,” with the Center for a New American Security and NBC’s Meet the Press.

The war game provided important insight into how a potential war with China over Taiwan could develop, and how the U.S. and its allies and partners could defeat an attack on Taiwan by China.

A Party That Years Ago Crossed Over to the Dark Side

The Class of 2018 CIA Democrats are emblematic of the Democratic Party’s support for the warfare and surveillance states, which have made it hated among broad sectors of the population.

Kamala Harris is estimated to have gotten around 9 million fewer votes than Joe Biden did in 2020 in good part because of her embrace of war-mongering policies.

A key turning point in the history of the Democratic Party was the 1980 election, where many of the progressives of the 1970s were defeated by a big-money offensive and CIA campaign to destroy its congressional enemies.

Bill Clinton (and possibly Hillary too) had a background as a CIA “asset,” as did Barack Obama, who worked for a CIA-linked company that produced economic intelligence reports following his graduation from Columbia University.[6]

During their presidencies, Clinton and Obama helped re-empower the CIA while working to rehabilitate its reputation.

The Class of 2018 CIA Democrats did not come out of nowhere. They fit a historical trajectory by which the Democratic Party has completely crossed over to the dark side.

  1. Slotkin additionally voted to spy on U.S. citizens without warrant, for unconstitutional vaccine mandates and favored deployment of yet more draconian military surveillance technologies at the U.S.-Mexican border. ↑
  2. Opposing policing reform, Golden voted against Medicare for all. He got his start in politics working for Republican Senator Susan Collins. ↑
  3. According to Maine Wire, Golden has also received thousands of dollars in campaign funding from George Soros. Golden disputed the figures presented in Open Secrets. ↑
  4. See Annie Jacobson, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America (Boston: Little & Brown, 2014). ↑
  5. Crow developed a four-step plan for victory in Ukraine, which is delusional, as Ukraine has lost control over much of eastern Ukraine and has zero chance of victory. ↑
  6. See Jeremy Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019); Jeremy Kuzmarov, Warmonger: How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Set the Groundwork for Bush II to Biden (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2024). Obama’s grandfather and mother also appear to have worked for the CIA, with his mother and stepfather supporting the CIA-backed Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia that massacred more than a million suspected communists. ↑

November 20, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Sinophobia, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

US vetoes UNSC resolution calling for ‘unconditional, permanent’ ceasefire in Gaza

Press TV – November 20, 2024

The United States has vetoed another draft resolution at the United Nations Security Council calling for an “immediate, unconditional and permanent” ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.

Fourteen member states voted in favor of the draft resolution on Wednesday, but it was blocked by the US, the Israeli regime’s main ally.

The resolution had been put forward by the Security Council’s 10 non-permanent members.

The resolution called for “safe and unhindered entry of humanitarian assistance” including in the besieged northern Gaza. It denounced any attempt to starve the Palestinians.

The Palestinian delegation at the United Nations suggested the text did not go far enough.

“Gaza’s fate will haunt the world for generations to come,” Ambassador Riyad Mansour warned.

The Palestinian diplomat said the only course of action for the Security Council is to call for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter.

Since the beginning of the Israeli campaign of death and destruction in October 7, 2023, the Security Council has struggled to speak with one voice, as the United States used its veto power multiple times.

The few resolutions that the United States did allow to pass by abstaining stopped short of calling for an unconditional and permanent ceasefire.

In March, the Council called for a temporary end to the hostilities during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, but this appeal was ignored by the Tel Aviv regime.

In June, the 15-member body pledged to support a resolution that laid out a multi-stage ceasefire that ultimately went nowhere.

Some diplomats had expressed optimism that President Joe Biden might be more flexible in his few remaining weeks in power.

They hope for a repeat of December 2016, when then President Barack Obama’s second term was finishing and the Council passed a resolution calling for a halt to the Israeli settlement building in the occupied territories.

The United States refrained from using its veto then, something seen as a departure from the unqualified support for the Israeli regime.

China’s UN Ambassador Fu Cong said each time the United States had exercised its veto to protect Israel, the number of people killed in Gaza had steadily risen.

“How many more people have to die before they wake up from their pretend slumber?”

“Insistence on setting a precondition for ceasefire is tantamount to giving the green light to continue the war and condoning the continued killing.”

“Shocking but not surprising”

Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia said, “It is shocking that the US has vetoed an effort to save the lives of Palestinians and Israelis.”

“Though perhaps we should not be surprised about it.”

November 20, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

The Democratic Party Faces Its Day of Reckoning

By Leonard C. Goodman | Scheer Post | November 19, 2024

Following its crushing defeat in the 2024 election, the Democratic Party might finally face its day of reckoning. The party markets itself as the champion of the working class and a bulwark against the party of the plutocrats. But this has been a lie for at least three decades.

The Democratic Party has partnered with Wall Street donors since at least the 1990s. Under President Bill Clinton, the party overturned Glass Steagall and other New Deal programs that had effectively restrained Wall Street greed for 60 years. It also sold out American workers with so-called trade deals that freed their bosses to ship American jobs overseas. It ended welfare “as we know it” and passed draconian crime bills that destroyed mostly black and brown communities, sending mothers and fathers to prison for decades in the name of a cruel and senseless war on drugs.

Into the 21st century, the Democrats continued pushing the lie that they were fighting for working people. After September 11, 2001, the party put up a token resistance to the Bush/Cheney regime of illegal regime-change wars, black sites, indefinite detention and torture. All the while, it continued soliciting campaign contributions from the arms dealers profiting from Bush’s wars.

In 2008, the party found a Black face to carry on its Wall Street-friendly agenda. Gullible Americans, myself included, were taken in by Barack Obama’s promises to end “dumb wars” and to institute a single payer healthcare system. We ignored the red flags, like the fact that Obama’s campaign broke records in pocketing Wall Street donations. It was later revealed by Wikileaks that nearly every member of Obama’s cabinet had been selected by the giant Wall Street bank Citigroup.

It didn’t take long for President Obama to crush our hopes that he was a different kind of Democrat. One of his first acts as president was to funnel trillions of dollars to the big banks that, newly freed by Clinton from FDR-era regulations, had embarked on an orgy of unbridled greed, swindling millions of Americans out of their homes and retirement savings with a scheme to sell worthless mortgage-backed securities.

Adding insult to injury, Obama saw to it that the bailed-out bank executives faced no criminal prosecutions and received their year-end bonuses. In their place, the Obama Justice Department brought federal mortgage fraud charges against thousands of poor people — I represented a half dozen of these folks — who had signed their names to the phony mortgage loans that the Wall Street bankers encouraged, packaged and sold to pension funds and other unwitting investors.

The pipe dream that Obama would be an anti-war president was also quickly dispatched. During his two terms, Obama ushered in a new era of continuous war, envisioned by George Orwell and favored by Wall Street. Obama expanded Bush’s bombing campaigns into Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria and Somalia. Today’s Democratic Party is indistinguishable from the Republicans in its ties to war profiteers and trillion-dollar Pentagon budgets.

Obama also effectively ended the Democrats’ promise to fight for a true national health care system in which all Americans would be able to go to the doctor when sick without fear of bankrupting their families. In its place, Obama pushed through a health care plan developed in right-wing think tanks, that guaranteed profits (and taxpayer subsidies) for the private insurance industry and did little to contain costs.

By 2012, Glen Ford of the Black Agenda Report was describing the Democratic Party as the “more effective evil” for using its reputation as protector of the working class to neutralize effective opposition and push through right-wing policies that the Republicans could not get passed.

In 2016, the Democrats received a wake-up call when their chosen successor to Obama lost the White House to a crude-talking New York City real estate developer and game show host with no prior political experience. But with the help of its partners in corporate media, the party managed to limp along for another eight years, first by telling the American people that President Trump was an agent of Russia, and then by claiming that Trump was Hitler who was planning concentration camps and firing squads for his political enemies.

Now after the November 2024 elections in which Trump won every swing state and the popular vote, the Democratic party is finally being forced to face some uncomfortable truths. The party’s partners in the corporate media initially tried blaming the election result on the voters for being too misogynist, too racist, or too dumb to vote correctly. But there is little trust that remains in corporate media.

The party’s corporate consultants have put the blame on the party’s excessive focus on identity politics. But the issues for the Democrats run much deeper than bad messaging. The real problem is that the party takes direction from plutocrats whose interests are antagonistic to the needs of the working people it pretends to represent. Both Democrats and Republicans are financed by the same corporate interests. Thus, there is general agreement and support for policies that guarantee high rates of return on investment capital, policies like continuous war, for-profit health care, and outsourcing jobs. This leaves few issues for the parties to fight about other than abortion and identity politics.

Fifty years ago, American capitalists still relied on American workers to build everything from cars and televisions to sneakers and light bulbs. These titans of industry had to care about things such as functioning schools, decent wages, cities and public transportation. But the times have changed. Today’s plutocrats support outsourcing jobs to low-wage countries and have little concern for the condition of American workers. And while ordinary Americans want the country’s resources to be spent at home, plutocrats are heavily invested in foreign wars, and they shun diplomacy.

These contradictions could only be covered up for so long. Even with reliable partners in the corporate press, the internet has given Americans alternative sources for their news. During the last few years, in a desperate effort to keep its scheme afloat, the Democrats embraced censorship and a regime of corporate “fact checkers” to police social media and remove or punish unsanctioned speech. In so doing, the party abandoned the last of its core principles: standing up for free speech and the right to dissent.

Many Democrats argue that they had to go after Wall Street money to compete with the Republicans. In 2016, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer explained the strategy: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” But for this plan to work, the party still needed an actual message to take to the voters.

Forbes Magazine reports that during the 2024 presidential race, Kamala Harris’s campaign raised a billion dollars while Trump’s campaign raised $388 million. Harris’s substantial edge in fundraising allowed her to flood the airwaves with commercials. But she had nothing of substance to say to voters.

The Atlantic Magazine reports that early in her campaign, Harris gained ground by attacking Trump as a stooge of corporate interests—and touted herself as a relentless scourge of Big Business. But then, suddenly, Harris abandoned her attacks on big business at the urging of her brother-in-law, Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer.

Many Democrats, especially in swing states, opposed the Biden Administration’s unfailing support for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, which has killed more than 43,000 Palestinians and displaced nearly all of its 2.3 million residents. Harris could have gained the support of many of these voters by promising to stop arming Israel during the genocide. But her Party’s donors wouldn’t allow her to even hint at such a change in policy. Two days before the election, while campaigning in the swing state of Michigan, Harris stated, “I will do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza.” But as Ali Abunimah of the Electronic Intifada pointed out on election night, this promise carried no weight because Harris had also promised that she would never do the one thing within her power to stop the slaughter: cut off the flow of bombs to Israel.

After decades of malfeasance and deception, it has become evident that the corporate Democratic Party cannot serve as the lone opposition party to the corporate Republicans. The American people need a viable political party that represents the interests of ordinary working people.

A true workers party will not raise as much money as the corporate Democrats. But it will have an honest message with the potential to appeal to large numbers of Americans. Further, a political party that actually represents workers will press for reforms that begin to even the playing field between the haves and the have nots.

For example, one the most effective ways plutocrats game the political system is by flooding campaign contributions to the lawmakers who sit on the key committees that oversee their businesses. Members of Congress covet these committee chairs because they guarantee high fundraising numbers. Lawmakers who sit on the House Financial Services Committee have jurisdiction over banks and insurance companies and are targeted by those firms with campaign contributions. Lawmakers who sit on the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees provide funding for lucrative government contracts and are flooded with war industry cash.

These practices are corrupt and deprive American citizens of their right to be governed by representatives free from conflicts of interest. A judge who has received political contributions from a litigant must be removed from the case. Similarly, the most important functions of government, such as determining tax and how our tax revenue will be spent, should be performed by lawmakers who have not been bribed.

In 2017, the Center for American Progress, a think tank aligned with the Democratic Party, proposed a “Committee Contribution Ban” for Congress. It asserted: “Congress should enact a law to make it unlawful for members of Congress to accept campaign contributions from entities that fall within the jurisdiction of their committees.” Unsurprisingly, this proposal never reached the floor of Congress, that I could find.

Some states have enacted similar conflict of interest rules. And Congress could certainly pass such a law, if it chose. Of course, this will never happen as long as we are ruled by two corporate parties that benefit from the corruption. But if we had a political party that represented ordinary people, countless opportunities for positive change would soon emerge.

Leonard C. Goodman is a Chicago criminal defense lawyer and has been an Adjunct Professor of Law at DePaul University.

November 20, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Economics, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

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