Those who refuse to be duped by a duopoly masquerading as a democracy will note that what divides the US ruling class (a split only weakly and diffusely reflected along red-blue lines when cross party Neocon/Neoliberal separators afford the better indicator) is not whether Iran poses a threat to its licence to loot the planet. It is how that threat is best handled.
Three takeaways from the US mid-terms
Trump’s vulgarity has made it easy for liberal voters to hate him. But what are Democrats in power if not Trump without the coarseness? For them it isn’t the long red neckties or the hair or the obesity or the foul language or the obsession with money. No, for them Trump has run the imperium crudely at a moment American power must be projected with Obama-like subtlety … there is only one major party in American politics: the War Party.
Patrick Lawrence, Now What?
It’s clear the radical Democrat rank and file, young and running on misplaced trust as they rang a hundred million door bells to get the anti-Trump vote out last week, serve the same objective function as the Labour Left in my country. Which is to say that their objective role, regardless of a subjective sincerity I don’t for a moment doubt, is to sanitise the brand after each betrayal.
That said, we needn’t harbour amnesiac notions of the Democrats as the party of peace, far less of the Left, to enjoy Yves Smith’s Naked Capitalism verdict on the target of Tuesday evening’s eight articles of impeachment …
- three for illegally waging war against Iran in violation of the War Powers Resolution
- one for ignoring laws designed to minimize civilian casualties
- one for overseeing “extrajudicial killings” in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean with strikes on alleged drug boats
- one for suppressing free speech, brought in connection to the effort to punish Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., for a video telling service members they can refuse illegal orders
- one for the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro without congressional authorization
- one for illegally waging war against Yemen in violation of the War Powers Resolution
… brought by Republican Rep, Thomas Massie, ousted in the primaries by a Trump man.
Says Yves:
If Hegseth were a movie creation, his loud-mouthed arrogance and male pompadour would have been deemed over the top. But with the likes of Scott Bessent, overly-Botoxed Kristi Noem, and Pam Bondi, Trump has demonstrated an appetite for personalities that verge on caricature.
Spoilt for choice, she omitted the spectacularly creative White House spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, and the attack dog Stephen Miller, who replaces his former (nominal) boss, the hapless Susan Wiles, 1 as Trump’s Chief of Staff.
Meanwhile, over at the Blue Face of America’s oligarchy, I’ve featured two third party writings this past week – by Patrick Lawrence at the Floutist, and Andre Damon with Joshua Kishor at WSWS – on why the Democrat aristocracy must betray the will of Elm Street America, and of those starry eyed canvassers. Already the DNC is pledging “bipartisan common ground” with Trump.
Here for good luck is a third, by the one and only Chris Hedges.
The Enemy at Home – The Chris Hedges Report
The belief that Democrats will dismantle a system designed to serve the rapacious greed of the war machine and the ruling billionaire class is a mirage.
Power does not rest in the Congress. It does not rest in the courts. It does not even rest in the imperial presidency. It rests in the hands of Wall Street financiers, Silicon Valley, private equity firms, the fossil fuel industry, the predatory health care and pharmaceutical giants, agribusinesses and, most of all, the war industry.
No mainstream politician, including Bernie Sanders, dares utter a word against our entrenched militarism. If you do, you end up like Ralph Nader, who was turned into a pariah by a compliant media and our corporate-indentured political parties. Nader spoke the truth. He paid for his honesty.
We are about to witness the largest increase in war spending in American history with a proposed $1.5 trillion budget. The average taxpayer already shells out over $4,000 a year to the war industry as consumer and environmental agencies are dismantled, health care and education are defunded and programs such as Medicaid and food stamps (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) are slashed.
The new Pentagon budget will hand $58.5 billion to artificial intelligence and military command-and-control centers and see the effective merging of the United States and Israeli military industrial complexes. Seventy-four percent of the increase in the proposed $1.5 trillion budget will go to private contractors, including those who are building massive data centers on military bases.
None of this is good for us or good for the planet …
Read in full on Chris’s substack.
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