#Trump foreign policy

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

“President Joe Biden ticked through several things that he needed to see Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu do immediately: open up the Erez crossing into northern Gaza and the port of Ashdod in southern Israel for humanitarian aid; significantly ramp up the supplies getting in through Kerem Shalom.

A person familiar with the Thursday call paraphrased Netanyahu as responding: “Joe, we’re gonna do it.”

But Biden wasn’t finished. The prime minister must announce the moves that evening, the president insisted.

By Thursday night, the Israeli security cabinet had approved those three measures to increase humanitarian aid entering the besieged enclave.”

[kimkimberhelen]

You can acknowledge disappointment of a Democratic president's handling of certain issues/policies and also acknowledge that voting blue is the only feasible alternative to ensure Trump doesn't take back the White House - but I feel like this point has been made in every modern general election to ad nauseam

Not voting or voting third party has only contributed to Republican presidents getting elected (and re-elected) who enact sociopathic economic policies and abortion rights getting revoked.

Of course, there are other factors that lead to Republicans getting elected - most notably white people who feel constantly threatened by anything and everything. It'll always be forever a bummer to see white women vote Republican because that's what their loser husbands want them to do.

Everyone gets tired of the 'lesser of two evils' argument, but it's a valid one to make. I'm a progressive, but I choose to live in our current reality as opposed to a parallel universe where socialist utopia is magically achieved overnight. Harm reduction is important, and a Biden presidency will cause less harm than a Trump one. It doesn't mean one can't critique or work towards something better, but I'm old enough and have seen enough to know that sometimes you have to work with what you have and not what you wish you had.

[tanadrin]

trump killing the JCPOA was so bad because the way it happened meant that even if a US administration did want rapprochement with iran in the future, iran will never, ever trust the US again--and in this case they are correct not to do so! the US has shown it will not abide by international commitments where iran is concerned, if hardliners in the US take power. and the hardliners are still enthusiastic about the prospect of war with iran, so developing nukes is probably the sanest possible move the iranian government could make at this juncture to protect itself.

trump's foreign policy was insanely reckless and belligerent, and the fact that he got credit as being somehow "anti-war" (still does!) is incredibly stupid.

[godisarepublican]

Does anyone REALLY believe that the Ukraine wants peace? Well. Try this one on for size:

One of Zelensky's conditions for peace is that Russia's leadership agrees to stand trial for war crimes.

There can be no peace until Putin surrenders to Zelensky to stand trial, according to Zelensky.

That's among the conditions that Zelensky requires before he'll accept peace. And Joe Biden is paying for this guy to launch terrorism at Russia, risking nuclear war... because he's so reasonable, one presumes.

[spitblaze]

I'm not a psychologist or a politician or anything approaching an expert about literally anything except a few specific video games but I feel like so many people wouldn't be agonizing over the moral implications of one (1) vote if we as the less-than-uppest-of-upper-crust had the ability to meaningfully affect change in ways other than 'spend money/do not spend money, vote for the red or blue tie'

[spaceboitoi]

It’s crazy too seeing people say Trump would be worse for Palestine because Biden is like easily the most openly Zionist president we’ve ever had

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Dennis Draughon, CBC

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

April 2, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

APR 03, 2024

Almost six months have passed since President Joe Biden asked Congress to appropriate money for Ukraine in a national security supplemental bill. At first, House Republicans said they would not pass such a bill without border security. Then, when a bipartisan group of senators actually produced a border security provision for the national security bill, they killed it, under orders from former president Trump. 

In February the Senate passed the national security supplemental bill with aid for Ukraine without the border measures by a strong bipartisan vote of 70 to 29. Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) cheered its passage, saying: “The national security bill passed by the Senate is of profound importance to America’s security.”

The measure would pass in the House by a bipartisan vote, but House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has refused to take it up, acting in concert with Trump. 

On March 24, on Washington Week, foreign affairs journalist Anne Applebaum said: “Trump has decided that he doesn’t want money to go to Ukraine… It's really an extraordinary moment; we have an out-of-power ex-president who is in effect dictating American foreign policy on behalf of a foreign dictator or with the interests of a foreign dictator in mind.” 

On Thursday, March 28, Beth Reinhard, Jon Swaine, and Aaron Schaffer of the Washington Post reported that Richard Grenell, an extremist who served as Trump’s acting director of national intelligence, has been traveling around the world to meet with far-right foreign leaders, “acting as a kind of shadow secretary of state, meeting with far-right leaders and movements, pledging Trump’s support and, at times, working against the current administration’s policies.”

Grenell, the authors say, is openly laying the groundwork for a president who will make common cause with authoritarian leaders and destroy partnerships with democratic allies. Trump has referred to Grenell as “my envoy,” and the Trump camp has suggested he is a frontrunner to become secretary of state if Trump is reelected in 2024. 

Applebaum was right: it is extraordinary that we have a former president who is now out of power running his own foreign policy. 

For most of U.S. history, there was an understanding that factionalism stopped at the water’s edge. Partisans might fight tooth and nail within the U.S., but they presented a united front to the rest of the world. That understanding was strong enough that it was not for nearly a half century that we had definitive proof that in 1968 Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon had launched a secret effort to thwart incumbent president Lyndon Baines Johnson’s peace initiative to end the Vietnam War; Nixon had tried very hard to hide it. 

But the era of hiding attempts to undermine foreign policy ended in 2015, when 47 Republican senators openly warned Iranian officials that they would destroy any agreement Iran made with then-president Barack Obama, a Democrat, over nuclear weapons as soon as a Republican regained the White House. At the time it sparked a firestorm, although the senators involved could argue that they, too, should be considered the voice of the government.

It was apparently a short step from the idea that it was acceptable to undermine foreign policy decisions made by a Democratic president to the idea that it was acceptable to work with foreign operatives to change foreign policy. In late 2016, Trump’s then national security advisor Michael Flynn talked to Russian foreign minister Sergey Kislyak about relieving Russia of U.S. sanctions. Now, eight years later, Trump is conducting his own foreign policy, and it runs dead against what the administration, the Pentagon, and a majority of senators and representatives think is best for the nation.  

Likely expecting help from foreign countries, Trump is weakening the nation internationally to gain power at home. In that, he is retracing the steps of George Logan, who in 1798 as a private citizen set off for France to urge French officials to court popular American opinion in order to help throw George Washington’s party out of power and put Thomas Jefferson’s party in. 

Congress recognized that inviting foreign countries to interfere on behalf of one candidate or another would turn the United States into a vassal state, and when Logan arrived back on U.S. shores, he discovered that Congress had passed a 1799 law we now know as the Logan Act, making his actions a crime. 

The law reads: “Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.”

Trump’s interference in our foreign policy is weakening Ukraine, which desperately needs equipment to fight off Russia’s invasion. It is also warning partners and allies that they cannot rely on the United States, thus serving Russian president Vladimir Putin’s goal of fracturing the alliance standing against Russian aggression.  

Today, Lara Seligman, Stuart Lau, and Paul McLeary of Politico reported that officials at the meeting of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) foreign ministers in Brussels on Thursday are expected to discuss moving the Ukraine Defense Contact Group from U.S. to NATO control. The Ukraine Defense Contact Group is an organization of 56 nations brought together in the early days of the conflict by U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and then–Joint Chiefs chair General Mark Milley to coordinate supplying Ukraine. 

Members are concerned about maintaining aid to Ukraine in case of a second Trump presidency. 

Jim Townsend, a former Pentagon and NATO official, told the Politico reporters: “There’s a feeling among, not the whole group but a part of the NATO group, that thinks it is better to institutionalize the process just in case of a Trump re-election. And that’s something that the U.S. is going to have to get used to hearing, because that is a fear, and a legitimate one.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[anniegetyourbubblegum]

I keep seeing posts from people in the US debating whether to vote for Biden in their upcoming elections to stop Trump from winning again or to punish the democrats for aiding Israel in the genocide of Palestine.

I'm argentinian and as far as I'm concerned, you should vote for whichever candidate you think will benefit you more, because you're from the US and that's all it's good for. The rest of the world will continue to suffer at your hands no matter what. Let me explain.

Democrats and republicans are not a representation of left and right wing politics: both parties are on the right side of the spectrum, only the GOP is more honest about it.

Republicans, as right wing parties do, run on promises of austerity, reducing taxes and being tough on crime. Democrats run promising to use tax money to ease your life: affordable healthcare, education and housing, all guaranteed so you can live the life of a first world citizen.

And then, they don't deliver.

You still have school shootings, massive incarceration, corruption in all levels of government, and the poorest pay a higher proportion of taxes than the richest. Healthcare, education and housing are extremely expensive and often require people to get into heavy debt to afford to have their most basic needs met, and that's only possible if you have good credit.

It's a reductive analysis for the sake of brevity, but you get the gist. The point is that having you be poor and afraid is the goal: it's a feature, not a bug.

You want to go to college? You need to buy a house? You want to start a family? Well, the military complex needs bodies! The US has far too many enemies to their way of life, so they'll need people to defend it! In exchange, they'll "guarantee" just enough money that you won't be destitute.

The US spends the most amount of money on their military in the world, by a long shot. To justify spending that kind of money, you HAVE to have wars. To have wars, you need enemies.

So, you get propaganda. "Muslims are extremists and hate our way of life." "Latin americans want to come to our country and steal our jobs." "China and Russia are communist countries that are waiting to destroy us." And you gobble it up.

You love it so much. It's in your news, in your videogames, in your movies and TV series and comic books. So, when they ask you to fight, you go running! You'll get some money out of it and you'll get to live your life the way you were promised. Sure, PTSD from the horrors is a given, but there's pills for that! And award winning movies about how difficult it is to go to war! It's all covered.

So the small, poor countries that you invade lose their money, natural resources, and their sovereignty but HEY, you brought democracy there! And the US is protected from this many enemies! Mission accomplished, right?

Well, as a citizen of a third world country whose current president is an insane pawn of the GOP, I'd like to say fuck you. He was placed so that the US could take our recently discovered lithium, and you'll get it. Enjoy your shitty iPhone 5000 I guess. It'll come at the small price of the hunger of my countrymen, but since Twitter user dan91883719 says argentinians all descend from escaped nazis, I guess it's alright.

Israel has killed Palestinians and illegally expanded its borders for over 70 years. Both democrats and republicans have sent aid and weapons to make this possible. It's in the US best interests to have conflict in the Middle East and have an ally control the area. Israel is a feature, not a bug.

And those of you who vote blue? You're trapped. Even if you know it's shit, you're unable to organize. Instead of rallying to form a new party, or a at least get a better candidate, you keep voting bad instead of worse and pat yourselves on the back for a job well done. Democrats are well aware of this and that's why they run on platforms that promise to make your life better and then sit back and say "our hands are tied" when you lose rights.

So, if you're still doubting it, vote for whoever the fuck you want. The war machine that you call 'country' won't stop no matter who's president, because those who hold the real power are already getting exactly what they want from it. Your suffering as US citizens is just as planned as the suffering of those who live outside of it.

TL,DR: Vote for whichever candidate you feel will defend your interests best. Lord knows it won't make a lick of difference for the rest of the world, because both political parties have the same plans when it comes to foreign policy.

[theculturedmarxist]

Posted onOctober 6, 2023 by Yves Smith

Yves here. One small quibble in this otherwise instructive piece is Rob Urie’s use of the word Left. By this he seems to mean liberals, particularly the professional-managerial class sort, while we here use left to mean advocacy of better material conditions for labor and the lower income.

By Rob Urie, author of Zen Economics, artist, and musician who publishes The Journal of Belligerent Pontification on Substack

At present, it is difficult to see how US politics get sorted in a way that avoids calamity. The Biden administration’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine appears to have been lost on the battlefield. In the midst of the Disney-on-meth-and-cough-syrup ‘pageantry’ of American elections, truth about the US-provoked catastrophe is unlikely to emerge, leaving most Americans wildly detached from the genocidal foreign policy being carried out in their names. Meanwhile, the administration’s Covid-19 ‘response’ has assured that a significant proportion of the population is being permanently disabled by long Covid.

From history, the US war in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia was understood to be ‘unwinnable’ (link below) by the political leadership of the US by the mid-1960s. However, no US president was willing to ‘lose’ Vietnam because of feared domestic political repercussions, leading them to implement profoundly destructive policies to crush domestic opposition to the war while multiple millions of Vietnamese nationalists were slaughtered. The war left three and one-half million Vietnamese dead and the land poisoned with Agent Orange. It finally ended in 1975.

With the military draft in place for most of that war, America’s ruling class was at least in theory at risk of being sent to fight and die in Vietnam. This led to a bourgeois revolt whereby the so-called educated classes turned against a war that was being overwhelmingly fought by working class kids. The bourgeois that joined the military were given leadership positions which many used to launch careers when their tours were up. However, because of bourgeois resistance to the draft, which sometimes bled through to the war, the draft was ended, leaving behind wars that are  consequence-free for most Americans.

This removal of consequences led the class that opposed the US war in Vietnam to be the primary supporters of the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Bourgeois class interest in 1967 was to oppose the Vietnam War because of the risk of being drafted. The bourgeois class interest in 2023 is to support the US proxy war in Ukraine because it is benefitting from it, at least in the near term. Tellingly, the articles in the bourgeois press about the causes of the war leave out all of the (true and relatively unambiguous) history cited by Russia to have motivated the conflict. Use of selective history is a form of deception.

On the Covid pandemic front, Lambert Strether from nakedcapitalism.com has done yeoman’s work keeping an analytical eye on it. The pandemic is politically relevant for more than just the misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation that has been disseminated by the Biden administration and the CDC about it. While Americans have been told that the pandemic is over, missing is that long-Covid is debilitating by degree, with a very real risk that ten to fifteen million Americans have been permanently disabled by it, most of them while Joe Biden has been in office (125 million infected X 10% long Covid rate = twelve and one-half million disabled).

This combination of the American proxy war in Ukraine and the domestic response to the Covid-19 pandemic was chosen because it illustrates the radical detachment of American governance from the political will and needs of the people. While the view here is that the permanent government in the US will prevail until it doesn’t, the question of how the US will extricate itself from Ukraine must be answered. And while the focus of this piece is on domestic politics, what of the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers who have been slaughtered to date? If you imagine that the Russians are responsible for these deaths, you haven’t been listening to the American political leadership exhibiting its glee at convincing Ukrainians to die for it.

While the bourgeois/Left press has focused on irreconcilable political and cultural differences in the polity— as if it had nothing to do with stoking these differences, the facts suggest a singular, if dynamic, political economy that has crafted a citizen-free set of policies intended to perpetually increase the power of the few over the many. Via technology, capital has shifted from using psychological coercion to sell its wares to using state power to force consumption. With a stunning lack of political foresight, the US has created commercial dependencies— e.g. the insurance industry bears no natural relation to healthcare, that leave ‘us’ beholden to corporate power.

One of the charges against Donald Trump (disclosure: I have never voted for a Republican) was that he ‘interrupted’ US foreign policy by challenging the foreign policy establishment to explain itself. Were Trump to be re-elected with the war in Ukraine still underway, the bet here is that he will bend to the will of the three-letter agencies. But what if he doesn’t? According to the fascist Left in the US, and despite four years of evidence to the contrary, Trump would be seeking an alliance with Vladimir Putin. If such an alliance ended the war, why would this be a bad thing?

This brings ‘us’ to the problem for the American foreign policy establishment that would arise if Trump (or whomever) negotiates a peace with Russia that sees the Russians withdraw from the parts of Ukraine that haven’t been permanently annexed. Were the Russians to fail to march on Europe, the American claim that the Russians are imperial competitors would be revealed to be the paranoid fantasy of a declining empire. In fact, the Russians have negotiated two settlements (see here, here) with Ukraine that the Biden administration stepped in to destroy. These were 450,000 or so dead Ukrainian soldiers before Biden claimed that Russia would ‘never negotiate.’

Readers are free to disagree with the particulars of this analysis. What isn’t in dispute is a startling disconnect between bourgeois assessments of the political and economic states of the US and those of vast majorities of the citizens. According to a new poll from the Pew Research Center, only four percent (4%) of Americans believe that the American political system is working. Four percent. In 2023. The reason why the year is important is because the elevation of Joe Biden was the response-from-power that was supposed to right the ship-of-state.

With the wisdom of hindsight, the full-throated (and batshit crazy) response of officialdom to the election of Donald Trump emerged over irritation that electoral politics was interfering with the policies of the permanent government. Neocon-neoliberal warmongers are now called ‘liberal imperialists’ because they espouse woke principles as they bomb the peoples of ‘competing’ nations into tiny pieces. However, as the results of the Pew poll suggest, the public has lost political interest in policies that benefit oligarchs and corporate executives alone. This result pits the institutions of the Federal government against the political will of the American people.

This latter point is important to understand. Russiagate was the American foreign policy establishment’s response to ‘interference’ from the duly elected president of the United States. Mr. Trump and the half of voters who voted for him likely believed that the President, in consultation with Congress, determines American foreign policy. Well, Russiagate was a case of the CIA, FBI, and the NSA disrespectfully disagreeing that the President has any say in US foreign policy unless it supports the CIA’s position. Biden has been a craven tool of the CIA for most of his time in Congress.

This latter point is important to understand. If elections don’t result in a transfer of power due to interference from the permanent state, the form of American governance is authoritarian. Via the convergence of corporate with permanent state institutions, the US already has fascistic form. Through the ascendance of this permanent government that is unanswerable to the polity as it unilaterally launches imperial wars, the US moves to full-blown fascism. If you want to see American fascist atrocities, look at the consequences of US foreign policy since capital has been placed in a position to control the American state.

In prospective terms, sixty-three percent— approximately two-thirds of the Americans asked, have little to no confidence in the form of the US political system. For those with memories— I’ll leave it at that low threshold for the moment, Democrats and the fascist Left in the US have claimed for the last seven years that the problem is ‘Republicans.’  One problem with this claim is that US foreign policy, a/k/a forever wars, are a bipartisan affair misleadingly put forward as the product of whichever party is in power when wars are started. For instance, Bill Clinton’s ‘Iraq Liberation Act’ established George W. Bush’s subsequent war against Iraq as official US policy.

Graph: corporate profits (blue line) cycled around wages and salaries (red line) from the end of WWII to about 2000, when financialization took over the American economy. Basic political logic would have led Barack Obama to return this relationship to its historical range had neoliberal ideology not consumed the American Left. As history has it, Mr. Obama’s Wall Street bailouts returned control of the US economy to the same people that crashed it. And in fact, these ‘profits’ represent the transfer of political control to the rich. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve.

The graph above of wages and salaries of American workers versus corporate profits is relevant in several ways. In the first, the period prior to 2000 saw a well-behaved mean-reverting process around a rolling mean. From 2000 forward a break occurred by which capital took ever-larger proportions of corporate revenues for itself. The claim in 2020 was that ‘lunch-bucket Joe’ (Biden) would reverse this trend with labor-friendly policies. In fact, Biden instantly reneged on his promise to raise the minimum wage. While pandemic funding muddies the picture, corporate profits exploded under Biden as wages and salaries went nowhere.

What this leaves is an epoch in which corporations have ‘partnered’ with the Federal government to raise corporate profits while excluding labor from its historic share. This epoch started around the mid-1990s and accelerated through the Biden years. Claims of a return to ‘normalcy’ through the election of Biden refer to the power of the Biden administration to silence its critics. My Google searches now return 1/10,000th of the relevant results that they did a quarter of a century ago. Actual history has been systematically replaced with propaganda that would embarrass the ‘running dog lackeys’ propagandists attributed by the CIA to Chinese Maoists of the 1960s.

Graph: the question of why Joe Biden finds China’s economic policies objectionable in 2023 leads back to Mr. Biden’s support for China entering the WTO in 2000. Mr. Biden and his neoliberal colleagues were true believers in the fantasy that capitalism works as neoliberal economists claim that it does. Were that the case, they (US officials) would be singing Kumbaya with Chinese officials instead of tossing poorly considered, anti-historical, threats of imminent war at them. The original sin was siding with oligarchs to end manufacturing in the US. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve.

The point: politicians and pundits looking for reasons why Americans are angry regarding ‘our’ political system need to leave their chairs every few decades and take a look around. The graph of corporate profits illustrates 1) the post-Great Recession surge in corporate profitability that has accelerated since Joe Biden entered office, 2) the epochal nature of this acceleration, and 3) labor has not benefited at all. Most likely, American capitalism has entered a terminal stage, call it the Louis XVI stage, where a remote and ghettoized ruling class misrules until it is no longer permitted to do so. In this respect, expect the Left in the US to act as a reactionary force in support of official power, as it has for the last seven years.

In class terms, the urban bourgeois support power because it pays their salaries. Corporations, NGOs, and so-called non-profits are concentrated in cities because Federal support has favored urban-based industries in recent decades. In other words, cities are where the paychecks are since the US was deindustrialized 1975 – 2023. ‘Woke’ is neoliberal framing of the path to ‘just’ capitalism. ‘Just’ capitalism is political economy where a few people control everything and tell the rest of us what to do for 40 – 60 hours per week for a preponderance of our lives.

Younger readers likely don’t know that this theory of how to accomplish social justice has a long, ignoble, history in the US. Federal Affirmative Action laws were in effect until the planned demolition of the industrial economy was completed. Industrialization had led the Great Migration of Southern Blacks to Northern factories. Deindustrialization was an oligarch-led undertaking to break the back of organized labor, with the added benefit of leaving US negotiators to negate labor and environmental regulations through the creation of international adjudicating bodies peopled by corporate representatives.

Erased from memory is that Black industrial workers sounded a lot like the supporters of Donald Trump in the 1980s and 1990s as deindustrialization was underway because they had been placed in direct competition with recent immigrants and foreign workers. Through financialization, Black access to credit led to a credit-based economy, and with it, the predatory loans that left utter devastation behind when Wall Street imploded around 2008. Given the known results of the Great Migration when NAFTA was being negotiated, how could deindustrialization that disproportionately impacted Blacks not be considered racist?

In fact, there is little evidence that race was considered when NAFTA was being negotiated. Here, from the Clintonite faction of the fascist Left, is a document that explains the relation of race to trade policy while claiming that the Republican version is racist while the Democrats’ version isn’t. With due respect, this type of self-serving parsing is intended to place blame on ‘Republicans’ so as to avoid blame being attached to the system of political economy that made the Democrats’ trade policies racist under their own terms of discourse.

The ’lesson’ here is that too-clever-by-half political party efforts to blame what ails us on the other party have lost some of their potency through the political incapacity of either party to legislate in the public interest. This formulation is a little messy because neoliberalism is the theory / ethos that what benefits capital and the rich benefits us all. This is the ideological path by which open graft has come to represent the ‘American system.’ It is also how a stealth class war was rendered visible. If legislators perceive the interests of business to reside in the executive suites, that is where they apply their energy. Labor, in this view, is a detraction from business interests.

Graph: as planned deindustrialization took root in the US, the loss of higher paying manufacturing jobs devastated Black communities. Following China’s entry into the WTO in 2000, this trend accelerated, tying the lots of Black communities to those of working-class White communities. This puts a lie to the received wisdom from officialdom that ‘economic anxiety’ was a White, working-class malady. And in fact, readers are invited to describe bank robbery at gunpoint as ‘economic anxiety’ on the part of bankers. That banks are protected by law from robbery while American labor isn’t illustrates ruling class control of ‘our’ discourse. Source: axios.com.

Democrats interested in why so-called ‘minority’ voters are fleeing their party, at least until the DNC works with the CIA to frighten them back into the fold, may wish to consider the aggregate class position of American Blacks. Through the Great Migration, Southern Blacks found employment in Northern factories until planned deindustrialization was implemented 1980 – 2023. This shifted them from being landless, or modestly landed, peasants to solidly working class. In the graph of corporate profits above, American Blacks on average find themselves without a benefit from surging corporate profits.

Woke fantasies and seven dollars might buy someone a cup of coffee. But the surge in corporate profits— while labor sees none of it, illustrates the challenge. As long as race is in the aggregate a class relation, woke solutions from authoritarian liberals will be racist. Consider: Joe Biden has been sold as the second coming of Dr. Martin Luther King. What has he wrought? A surge in corporate profits, creation of a permanently disabled class from long Covid, and a proxy war against nuclear armed Russia. I fail to see the social justice of any of this.

The Pew poll referenced above should be ringing alarm bells in official circles. And while it would be a mistake to underestimate the capacity of liberal institutions with unlimited resources to shift the political trajectory back toward liberal/ Left fascism, the powers-that-be have lit fires that they now have no idea how to put out. If you are blessed with ignorance of how cra-cra these powers have been through history, spend a little time reading about American General Curtis LeMay.

Unlike the dim cowards currently advising Joe Biden, LeMay put his own life at risk on many occasions. And, like Biden, LeMay had a nationalist / racist hatred of the Russians. Unlike Biden, LeMay had a plan. That plan was to launch an unprovoked nuclear attack against Russia and China that, through nuclear winter, would have killed 99% of the human population of the planet. I guarantee that Vladimir Putin knows this history as certainly as I know that the Americans ‘advising’ Joe Biden don’t.

[necarion]

According to a study by the Watson Institute at Brown University, civilian airstrike deaths in Afghanistan increased by 330% during the Trump presidency. And the Watson study largely credits this increase to a Trump regulation that relaxed the rules of engagement for airstrikes at the beginning of his presidency. As a result, the US military bombed more indiscriminately and more civilians died. Or, as the Watson study says quite bluntly, “When the United States tightens its rules of engagement and restricts air strikes where civilians are at risk, civilian casualties tend to go down; when it loosens those restrictions, civilians are injured and killed in greater numbers.” This wasn’t exclusive to Afghanistan. Airstrikes under Trump increased sixfold in Yemen, and there were more civilian deaths from airstrikes in Somalia under Trump than under Bush and Obama combined. Trump also oversaw a 200% increase in airstrike deaths in Iraq and Syria. In another move demonstrating how little Trump cared about airstrikes striking civilians, he removed an Obama-era rule that mandated reporting on civilian deaths from airstrikes. Conversely, Biden reversed Trump’s free-for-all airstrike policy, and tightened strike rules to ensure a “near certainty” that any strike does not injure civilians. He also banned signature strikes, a form of drone strike that targets groups of people and that is frequently cited as the form of airstrike resulting in the highest civilian casualties. As a result, in the first year of his presidency, Biden “nearly ended the drone war.” Biden did increase airstrikes in Somalia in 2022 in response to a wave of fighting from al-Shabaab militants. But overall, deaths from airstrikes have plummeted under Biden from the historic peaks they reached under Trump. Again, this isn’t an issue that receives substantial coverage. But airstrikes are a significant part of modern US military operations. More humane policies that lessen the impact airstrikes have on civilian populations make a major difference.

(From one of the linked articles, from the end of 2021):

Where Trump oversaw more than 1,600 air and artillery strikes in Iraq and Syria during his first 11 months in office, Airwars reports just four during Biden's term so far. Strikes in Somalia fell from roughly 75 last year to fewer than 10 this year, with no civilian casualties. And in Yemen, the annual total dropped from about 18 to maybe four, with fewer than 10 casualties of any kind. (Precise figures are unclear because some strikes are classified.)

I didn't know how stark these statistics were. Obviously there have been additional strikes in Yemen since this this was published. But also, I think there have been almost zero civilian casualties, which is an astounding difference from Trump, and even from Obama. (Also, Trump stripped away rules that prevented indiscriminate drone strikes on civilian areas or on things like weddings, which Biden almost immediately restored).

Just, like, on every possible foreign policy axis, Biden has been so much better for peace than Trump: ignoring the Rohinga Genocide, pulling out of the UN Human Rights Council, not just stopping tracking but censoring any reports of human rights abuses or sexual violence in other countries, pulling out of the Iran deal which could have brought them into the Western sphere (with benefits for Iranian citizens and all the victims of militant groups, including Russia, that it has been funding).

[nodynasty4us]

From the October 12, 2023 story:

Trump’s problem with Netanyahu isn’t even about the current war. “I’ll never forget,” Trump said to his cheering crowd in Florida, “that Bibi Netanyahu let us down” by not taking part in the 2020 assassination of Iranian Quds Force leader Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani. “That was a very terrible thing,” Trump went on, adding, “We did the job ourselves … and then Bibi tried to take credit for it.”

The implication of this remark—and others throughout the speech—was that Israel is hopeless and hapless without Donald Trump in the White House. He claimed, as he has claimed about nearly every crisis in the world, that this crisis—Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel last weekend—would not have happened if he were still president (or, as he put it, if the 2020 election “hadn’t been stolen”)....

[rabbits-of-negative-euphoria]

Iran & Russia are allies

Russia & China are allies

Japan & America are allies

America gives explicit permission for Russia to invade Ukraine

America lifts sanctions on Russia

America gives Afghanistan to the Taliban

Russia invades Ukraine

America funds Iran

Iran sends those funds to Hamas

Hamas invades Israel

Ukraine, being at war with Russia, allies itself with Israel

China, encouraged by Russia and the Taliban, eyes Taiwan

China expands military operations closer to Japan

Japan strengthens diplomatic ties with Taiwan

India & Israel are allies

I’m not saying WWIII is inevitable but this is how you start one

[flintbian]

Here's the thing that gets me about the whole political situation right now. Yes our options suck. They are non options. Biden sucks. But the alternative is far far worse. The U.S. has /always/ had horrific policy. It's kind of odd to me we're only focusing on that now when Palestine has been facing atrocities for literal fucking decades??? The Middle East has faced genocide after genocide and war after war, Yemen has faced the worst famine in the world for years, all due to the U.S., but it only matters now? If Trump comes back into power the situation for Palestine and the Middle East will be far worse. Not to mention things here will be far worse.

The right has been clear they want to install Trump as a dictator and remove every right possible. Either way the foreign policy will suck, as it always has.

Conservatives have always had an edge on the left because they always unify to get their office in power. They are absolutely using the fact the left is divided and won't vote to punish Biden against us, and they will win, and also take the supreme court. Our actions right now also determine the next several decades. We have been facing the consequences of Trump's term in office in the form of reproductive and LGBT rights being stripped state by state, it will only get worse if we let it continue. This isn't just about Biden and Palestine, there is a bigger picture. By the time the left realizes it, it will be too late.

[deslizada]

I will repeat myself: if you are campaigning for biden now, before he has called for a ceasefire, you are giving not only him but the entire democratic party a blank check to murder Palestinians. this is unequivocally what you are doing. if you do every reasonable thing you can to pressure him (including voting uncommitted in the primary!) and you're still stuck choosing between him and trump in November, that's one thing, but actively campaigning for him now? you are underwriting the genocide in the name of self-preservation.

[littlestarlex]

hearing my political influencer roommate say "I won't promote Biden because he hasnt called for a ceasefire to the genocide, but I am still voting for him" is so genuinely tone deaf and stupid and it alone convinced me I am DEFINITELY not voting for that stupid motherfucker (I already wasn't going to, but it confirmed I was making the right call)

the sentiment I keep hearing is "as long as it isn't Trump" but it's so frustrating to think, for some people, Biden is as bad as Trump, for some people his lack of action on major policy change has altered their lives permanently in ways than will never be undone

"well Trump is going to enact a national abortion ban, doesn't that scare you?" sure, but I'm scared right now for the very real people currently unable to get the Healthcare they need because of loss of roe v. wade, for some people that ban is already in place and they're facing very real consequences of it as we speak

I'm scared for my friends, my family, myself, and all the people I may never know who are being impacted RIGHT NOW by the democratic presidency we're currently under

just because I am not currently impacted does not mean it shouldn't be a priority, just because it doesn't directly impact me doesn't mean I should just let it go

they cannot have my vote just because they're blue, just because they pacify us with small scale wins while continuing to fund the very things that keep us from being in a position of power

shit in the government can take a long time, I get it, but clearly they can move quick when it's something they all want, like ripping the power from the people and silencing voices that want genuine change

they all want the same thing, just because democrats aren't up there screaming on stage doesn't make them any less evil than republicans

[willowways]

Is it me or does it seem like no one has a plan

Like both the skip the vote and the vote blue no matter who people are thinking less about what will benefit people and more on moral superiority

Like … I would like some direction please