Yves here. At least some of whom are in the left are not accepting the premise that they must ignore the Democratic Party’s sorry record and back Kamala Harris.
And keep this point of view in mind:
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) August 23, 2024
By Robert Urie, author of Zen Economics, artist, and musician who publishes The Journal of Belligerent Pontification on Substack
“If we lose, we’ll be tried as war criminals.” US General Curtis Lemay speaking of the US firebombing of Tokyo (and here) in WWII.
In addition to the war against Russia that the US launched with its coup in Ukraine of 2014, the next president of the US will have the US role in the genocide in Palestine to contend with. With respect to US relations abroad, it would be one thing if these conflicts had been forced on the US. But they weren’t. They were chosen by the Biden-Harris administration as part of its too-little, too-late, recognition that US-based capital, Wall Street acting in league with subsidized industries like Big Tech, has destroyed the US economy for most workers, meaning citizens.
Over the years, the position of Joe Biden with respect to China has been paradoxical. Or less charitably, incoherent. Biden joined with the (Bill) Clinton administration in 2000 to ‘normalize’ US trade relations with China so as to facilitate its entry into the WTO (World Trade Organization) in 2001. This followed Biden’s support for NAFTA (1994), which established the institutional circumstances by which the American manufacturing base was handed over to China. It was decided that American workers would either be bond traders or fentanyl addicts. What they wouldn’t be is industrial workers. Too many unions.
Graphic: NATO was formed as a residual of American power in Europe following WWII. For the uninitiated, the US lost 400,000 people in WWII while the Russians, then Soviets, lost 27,000,000. In the present, as cover for, or denial of, US imperialism abroad, NATO has successfully changed the subject from domestic economic looting to ‘Great Power politics.’ Post-War ideological competition washed the ethos of Western imperialism, euphemisms and all, through the cleansing agent of theories that need never come into contact with their facts. Sources: US Embassy, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.
The outcome of five decades of neoliberal (capitalist) predation looks remarkably like Marxist analyses of the first half of the twentieth century had it. The GFC (global financial crisis) and the Great Recession that followed it led to a full recovery of the predatory economy, the one where raw political and economic power are used not simply to loot, but through lawfare, surveillance, and factionalized labor markets. to pin Americans under the repressive boot of unfettered capital. This is the world that the Biden-Harris administration was appointed to perpetuate.
The political analog, possibly easier to see because it is fresh in the minds of Americans, is the gathering of oligarch donors to select Kamala Harris to be the Democrats’ candidate for president. The fake emergency regarding Joe Biden’s age— the man was widely understood to be unable to distinguish fact from fantasy (and here) forty years ago, was used to render visible the class dynamic that has a tiny cabal of corporate welfare queens and trust-fund opportunists openly and explicitly determining Federal policy.
Maps: the Russian complaint that NATO surrounded its western border after the US, Germany, and France individually and jointly promised not to, is an abstraction to Americans. In fact, the US has an answer to the question of what would happen if the Russians took actions similar to the US. It was called the Cuban Missile Crisis. Impressively, the story that Americans have been told about it is total bullshit. Not only had the Americans secretly placed nuclear weapons aimed at Moscow in Italy before the Russians sent weapons to Cuba, but word had it (link above) that JFK only had a fraction of the information that he needed regarding the US actions that precipitated the crisis. Source: cnbc.com.
While the capitalist press loves to tout the self-made nature of ‘wealth’ in the US, the richest of the Forbes 400 all saw their fortunes multiplied by the Federal Reserve’s relentless drive to raise the prices of financial assets since 2008. For example. Microsoft has a business that produces computer hardware and software. But it also has shares in the company that trade in financial markets. To the extent that Microsoft’s shares trade above the value of Microsoft as a going concern, wealth ‘creation’ is illusory. What is achieved in financial markets is redistribution upwards, not wealth creation.
This was / is part of the problem created by the Wall Street bailouts of 2008. Shares are owned by the rich. If memory serves, 90% of stocks are owned by the richest 10% of the population. Of this 10%, the very rich own a large preponderance of these shares. The American myth that people get rich by creating social (economic) value misses that in a financialized economy, the Federal Reserve plays a major role in economic distribution. Since 2008, the Fed has labored nonstop to make the very rich much, much, richer.
Graph: Democrats have a choice of crediting the phenomenal rise in the wealth of the very rich during the Biden-Harris administration to either the business acumen of the billionaire class or to the actions of the Federal Reserve. The graph clearly illustrates an ‘exogenous’ driver of the rise in wealth— the Federal Reserve. Otherwise, the results would be mixed. Capitalist economists credit the entire rise in the wealth of the rich to business acumen. Here is the Forbes 400 list. Please read Forbes’ explanation of this argument to understand why this is a problem for the rest of us. Source: inequality.org.
This all ties back to the subject at hand, electoral politics in the US, through the role that wealthy donors just played in the elevation of Kamala Harris to be the Democrats’ candidate for president. Again, if great wealth indicated a greater social contribution, that would have one meaning. But what it indicates in this case is that an agency of the Federal government made it its mission to make already rich people much, much, richer. This is part of the argument for why Barack Obama was a disaster as president. He rebuilt this rigged system whereby all social wealth is institutionally organized to flow upwards. And that is why oligarchs are supporting the Democrats.
It is US foreign policy that ties this post-bailout economic dysfunction to the empire-in-decline-that-is-acting-out-abroad that the US now represents. Readers are welcomed to agree or disagree with the characterizations of US foreign policy presented here. But what you can’t disagree with are the facts. A team of professional liars, prevaricators, and bullshit artists were apparently assigned to countering the fact that the Russians were repeatedly told by US and European officials that NATO would be kept away from Russia’s border. As the second graph up illustrates, between 1990 and 2023, NATO has surrounded Russia’s western border with the exceptions of Ukraine and Georgia.
Irrespective of whether or not you agree with the Russian position on the matter, the Russians have a legitimate grievance under any reasonable reading of this history. But what was it that elevated a thirty-year-old (dis)agreement to geopolitical relevance in 2022? That would be the 2014 US-led coup in Ukraine (link above) in which the US assumed control of the Ukrainian political system. Here is the infamous phone call in which Americans Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt selected the post-coup Ukrainian government. The people that Nuland said that she would put in office were put in office.
Following the US-led coup in Ukraine and the selection of the post-coup government by American neocons, the CIA built permanent facilities on the Ukrainian border with Russia with which to surveil and attack the Russians. Further, as (Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs) Victoria Nuland put it in 2022, eight years after the US-led coup in Ukraine took place, Ukraine was (is) loaded to the gills with bioweapons labs. Whatever their genesis (Soviet, US), the US had controlled Ukraine for nearly a decade before Nuland admitted their existence.
Graphic: it is telling to see how openly and crudely racist Israelis are toward Palestinians in their social media posts. While seeing the Israelis channeling their inner Nazis has a depressing, Freudian, quality to it, seeing Americans like Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Donald Trump doing everything in their power to perpetuate a racist genocide is even sadder, if not quite as Freudian. Presumably, Biden – Harris wouldn’t be engaged in such an act unless they thought it to be in the strategic interest of the US. But if this were the case, why is every word they say about it be a lie? Sources: al Jazeera English, Wikipedia.
With respect to the US – Israeli genocide currently underway in Palestine, Kamala Harris recently repeated the materially false Biden administration – Israeli state narrative around the Hamas attack inside Israel on October 7, 2023. As a recent analysis by Haaretz revealed, a material proportion— up to half, of the Israelis killed on October 7 were killed by the IDF (Israel Defense Force) under the Hannibal Directive issued by the Israeli political leadership. Further, the claims that Hamas used sexual violence— the ‘mass rape’ narrative, has been debunked by reporters at The Grayzone (see here, here, here).
The social dynamic that this factionalized ‘truth’ creates is of political cults that believe every word handed them by people they trust, as they discount every word uttered by those in competing political cults. Instead of wielding political power, the members of these cults exist to trade group-affirming talking points on social media, exhibiting little awareness that the leaders of both cults work for the same corporate chieftains and oligarchs. Or if not the exact same corporate chieftains and oligarchs, those who hold similar political – economic roles in different cults.
That Kamala Harris knew, or should have known, that what she was telling her constituents about the US conflicts in Palestine and Ukraine is untrue has political importance. Because she is an allegedly functioning adult who is vying for an official position of power in a major nation, she should know the facts of these conflicts. That there was no distance between her recitation of fake facts and that of the Pentecostal wing of the Republican party illustrates the conundrum. A necessary first step to solving problems is to understand their causes.
The model on which the US and Israeli responses to October 7 appear to be based is 9/11. Readers will recall that the George W. Bush administration was never made to give sworn testimony to the 9/11 commission regarding its knowledge of events, and 2) was allowed to redact the pages of the Report issued by the commission that implicated the Saudis in the attacks. Both decisions were superficially defensible. There is a separation of powers issue with compelling sworn testimony from a sitting president. And the Saudis were (in theory) US allies, in addition to being business partners with the Bush family.
Little need be said with respect to the fact that fewer than half of Americans believe the official explanation of 9/11, or that about half of Americans (link above) believe that the Federal government of the US was behind the attacks. While this may be interesting, it isn’t the point. The Bush administration entered office in 2001 intent on launching a war against Iraq. In addition to redirecting attention away from the Saudis, Bush attributed knowingly false motives for the 9/11 attacks to the Iraqis. Here is (Saudi national) Osama bin Laden explaining why al Qaeda attacked the US on 9/11.
Along with Wall Street’s implosion of the economy in 2008, public disillusion over the US war in Iraq represents a lynchpin in the imperial decline that the US is now decades into. George W. Bush lied the people who historically have fought American wars into going to Iraq based on false claims about why they were doing so. Bush’s ‘pre-emptive war’ relied on a credible threat having been posed by Iraq that simply did not exist. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11captures the psychological panic that the Bush administration successfully conjured to coerce Americans into fighting its war.
But actions have consequences. Having been lied into losing lives, limbs, and / or killing Iraqi civilians to put another dollar or two on Halliburton’s stock price, much of the soldier class was subsequently foreclosed on and / or rendered unemployed by Wall Street. These are the people that American liberals and ‘the Left’ were calling ‘fascists’ 2016 – present because they wouldn’t vote for the people who lied them into the war in Iraq and then took their houses as their jobs were systematically disappeared in the Great Recession.
Each of these acts undertaken against the interests of the American people features one or more groups or actors that purposely undertook them to enrich themselves and / or to accrue power. Neither the US war in Iraq, the GFC, nor the Great Recession, were facts of nature. They were each caused by the acts of some humans seeking to benefit from taking from other humans. In class terms, these were the actions of the rich preying on the rest of us. Each act had systemic drivers requiring institutional mediation. The rich have organized the US to vacuum up social wealth for their own benefit.
The ready-made genocide, genocide-in-a-box if you will, that the US and Israel have engaged in in Palestine since October 7, 2023 never looked like a response to the attack by Hamas. It has looked like an effort to exterminate the people of Gaza since it began. Supporting this interpretation have been Israeli Zionists who have said straightforwardly(and here, here, here, here) and repeatedly that ‘clearing’ Palestine of Palestinians is the goal. Here is Israeli Zionist Chanamel Dorfman, aide to Israeli Defense Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, complaining that the Nazis killed the wrong people. Is this really an argument worth making?
Graphic: Some, possibly many, readers will be offended by conflation of Kamala Harris’s likely policies with those of the Biden administration. After all, she’s her own person, runs the logic. However, ensuring that Harris isn’t her own person was the entire point of the oligarchs (donors) interviewing her before elevating her as their candidate. They wouldn’t have elevated her if they hadn’t liked what they heard in the interviews. More than anything else, it is this idea of personality-driven politics that unites American liberals with their fascist forebears. As long as hippie-earth-mother is willing to slaughter a million Palestinians for Israeli fascists, hire her! That doing so means that she never was hippie-earth-mother won’t be understood until after the money has been deposited in the bank.
So, when Kamala Harris repeats largely or fully debunked charges of Palestinian crimes on October 7 as if they really happened while ignoring evidence that the Israelis are knowingly and intentionally acting to exterminate the Palestinian people in Palestine, possible explanations include that she is misinformed, knowingly lying, or that she is incapable of separating truth from fiction. Alternatively, if the truth supports her position on the war, why is she lying? The reasonable inference to draw is that Harris knows that the truth doesn’t support her position. 
Chart: the great mystery of US foreign policy has finally been solved. Quickly, what is it that unites Venezuela, Iran, Iraq, Russia, and Libya in the minds of US foreign policy officials? Well, the officials— most of whom are currently engaged in a racist genocide in Palestine, would say that these nations are all ‘authoritarian.’ With billionaire donors and the CIA currently ‘overseeing’ American elections, the contrast that gave the fear of fascism its punch is looking more like a merging of interests. Source: worldometers.info.
Readers will recall that the George W. Bush administration wove the alleged facts of 9/11 into its policy decision to launch a war against Iraq. The purpose was to frame the war as defensive when it was an offensive war. It wasn’t until no weapons of mass destruction had been found and the war was coming unwound (2005) that a single true fact regarding 9/11 or the war could be uttered in the US. Further, with ‘loyalty oaths’ (to their administration) required for citizens to gain admittance to public rallies featuring government officials, the Bush administration understood the fascist roots of its political program.
What Harris’s statement (link above) regarding events in Palestine and Ukraine indicates is that she has fully internalized the lies emanating from US and Israeli officials regarding US foreign policy, and that she will act as if they are true if she is elected president. As with the KKK using emotive terms like ‘international Jewry’ to signify group allegiance, the Democrats have a fully developed internal discourse around US foreign policy that is unquestioned and unquestionable. It was hardly ironic then that Joe Biden was George W. Bush’s point man in selling the false story of Iraq’s WMDs to Democrats.
With all that is, and isn’t, being said by leading Democrats about the wars in Ukraine and Palestine, it is the facts on the ground that future US political leaders will be forced to reckon with. Russia’s western border is zero miles from Ukraine, whereas Washington DC is 5,000 miles from Kiev. US weapons and materiel are fussy and ludicrously expensive. Russian weapons and materiel are robust and designed to maximize lethality, versus the US goal of maximizing profits for the MIC. In other words, it was capitalism that rendered the American MIC considerably worse than useless.
US participation in the genocide in Palestine recalls the arguments of philosophers and scholars following WWII that what it was that differentiated the Holocaust from ordinary history was the effort by the Nazis to exterminate a people— the Jews. However, reading the quote from US General Curtis LeMay above regarding the firebombing of Tokyo, which he led, doesn’t impart a sense of a self-evident moral difference between Allied actions in WWII and those of the Axis Powers. Lemay didn’t see one, at any rate.
Within the frame of ‘military valor’ (that is not endorsed here), LeMay was an actual hero in WWII. The firebombing of Tokyo that he led burned 100,000 Japanese civilians alive on its first night. All told, the firebombing of civilian populations in Japan ended up killing between 330,000 and 900,000 people. Additionally, the allies bombed civilian populations in Germany relentlessly, with the bombing of Dresden being one of the better-known cases.
From the perspective of the present, civilian deaths from American wars are plausibly viewed as ‘collateral damage.’ But they aren’t collateral— meaning unintended even if predictable, because the civilians were intentionally targeted. Here, Osama bin Laden explains why he believed that American civilians were legitimate targets in the 9/11 attacks. For Americans who imagine that the illusion of democracy, fake democracy if you will, protects them from political reprisals for US actions taken abroad, the bin Laden letter is essential reading.
During the Cold War, General LeMay advocated pre-emptive nuclear strikes against the USSR (now Russia) and China (link above) while the US still had a strategic advantage by way of its larger nuclear arsenal. This didn’t mean ‘strategically’ or ‘surgically’ striking Command Centers— it meant slaughtering half-a-billion civilians—while they were wholly or partially defenseless. How then were Americans in 1965 morally horrified by the Holocaust when in ordinary conversations they advocated forcefully for the murder of half-a-billion innocents?
The lesson that the so-called intelligence agencies learned through the psychological manipulation of the American public during the Cold War was that once the groundwork— the instilling of unreasoned fears, had been laid, Americans would agree to pretty much anything. Even after no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq and the war had turned into the predictable catastrophe that it was, most Americans still found inane drivel about ‘freedom’ attached to the war to be compelling. To money-shot from the epoch: ‘freedom ain’t free.’
An aspect shared between Zionism and Nazism is the conceptual shift from the general claim of peoples with rights as such to the claim that particular peoples are special, and therefore deserve special rights. Following WWII, the argument was put forward that it was the Nazi effort to exterminate an entire people— the Jews, that separated the Holocaust from ordinary history. The Zionist shift from the defense of the rights of ‘peoples’ to the special rights of Jews recreated a variation on the racial case claimed by the Nazis.
The Nazis held retrograde racial views (borrowed from American eugenicists) that they claimed distinguished them from the rest of humanity. The Zionist claim is that Jews are God’s chosen people, and that this distinguishes them from the rest of humanity. The Nazi’s ‘Thousand-year Reich’ lasted about fifteen years. This is evidence against the claim that the Nazis possessed superior racial qualities. Likewise, if the Jews are God’s chosen people, why not leave the public assertions of this fact to their God? In fact, like American Pentecostals, they don’t trust their own God to follow scripture as they have interpreted it.
The practical problem with both theories is that there are about eight billion humans on the planet, most of whom are on the wrong side of Nazi / Zionist supremacy. That Democrats can’t see American racial history in the Zionist’s treatment of Palestinians might be bizarre if it weren’t so politically convenient. In 2024, American Democrats, led by the senior leadership of their party, are consciously and knowingly supporting a genocide against a racial, religious, and ethnic minority in Palestine. This makes them racists engaged in a racist genocide.
The social destruction being caused by both American conflicts ties to this latter point. WWI begat WWII. Further, it was the Biden administration’s decision to place these conflicts within the broader frame of economic competition between nations. Anyone who has followed the environmental back-and-forth of recent years knows that renewed imperial competition has been underway for decades now. A race is on by the US to secure the resources needed to fulfill the Democrats’ EV fantasies. As usual, the effort is bounded by too-convenient assertions that they can’t cross ‘their’ donors because Trump!
Graph: the Biden administration’s claim that it engineered a major recovery in manufacturing employment in the US isn’t a reason to uncork the champagne just yet. The facts are that ‘the Biden miracle’ was a reflexive recovery following the catastrophe of the Covid-19 pandemic. Biden’s real contribution to manufacturing employment came through his support for NAFTA. Additionally, Biden supported the normalization of trade relations with China that facilitated China’s admission to the WTO in 2001. Together, these caused the precipitous decline from 19.5 million manufacturing workers in 1980 to 13 million today. Source: Federal Reserve of St. Louis.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald has done a respectable job of identifying and commenting on the delusion, ignorance, and hypocrisy of the young Democrats now rushing to support Harris. As was the case with young Democrats in 2020, the response is Pavlovian. Good dog. What a good dog. Now, rollover and play dead. While the officials of various Federal agencies must be beaming with pride at their ability to manipulate electoral politics with such finesse, they have created the political equivalent of highly processed foods.
As the current American political leadership effectively demonstrates, capitalists favor having compliant, not-bright, people holding public office to do their bidding. This isn’t to suggest that a cabal of evil geniuses is running things. Having met and had long conversations with many very rich people, the only class dumber than the US political class are the oligarchs. What part of the nuclear annihilation that Biden-Harris are working so hard to bring about in Ukraine don’t Harris’s oligarch benefactors understand?
Tying this back to economics for a moment, the Democrat’s focus on child ‘influencers’ in Chicago was more than just political marketing. Following from 1990s Republican neoliberal Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, influencers, Uber drivers, cashiers, fentanyl dealers, financial advisors, crypto speculators, disinformation specialists, personal shoppers, bud-tenders, and dog-walkers represent the culmination of the Democrats’ industrial policy. So no, your ‘career’ picking up dog crap in the street (‘piece work’) isn’t how your grandparents raised a family.
The lever for Greenwald’s critique (above) is incongruity— the fact that reconciliation by the young with the party of Genocide Joe appears to have been so quick and easy. The ‘Hitler Youth’ quality of the conversion was / is impressive. However, what is the alternative? Toll-booth Zionist Trump! has already committed to the pay-as-you-go slaughter of Palestinians funded by Miriam Adelson. The only antiwar candidate in the upcoming is Jill Stein, whom the Democrats have successfully marginalized. But if you’re going to vote, Stein is the best (only) hope for the US.
In fact, the purpose of the American one-party system, the uniparty, is to ensure that nothing changes. Or rather, the faces change, but the policies stay the same. The hope held by Democrats that Harris’s policies will be less genocidal than Biden’s misses that the only people who interviewed her before she was elevated to be their candidate for president were donors. In fact, the donors are the glue that holds the uniparty together. How else could, marketing chatter aside, Biden and Trump have nearly identical policies?
Finally, not a word of this essay is anti-American. Opposing US foreign policy— the product of an antique and decrepit MIC filtered through the corrupt and dysfunctional American system of political graft, is to argue that the policies of officialdom run counter to the larger interests of the US and the world. Anti-Americanism is precisely what the George W. Bush administration engaged in when it lied the US into war with Iraq.
Further, the Germans are still apologizing for the Nazis seven decades after they were defeated in WWII. The Biden administration’s choice to emulate the Nazis by engaging in racist genocide likewise will have one meaning in the short term, and quite another in the longer term. As I wrote in multiple essays before the 2020 election, Joe Biden, like George W. Bush before him, is the embodiment of imperial decline. Kamala Harris represents an effort to put a fresh face on the same old imperialist foreign policy. You can understand this now or three years from now. The choice is yours.
