Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.
The Jimmy Dore Show
For best effect in the character assassination of RFK, Jr, the wily DNC mafia chose two experts at hatchet jobs, Stacey Plaskett and the utterly corrupt Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. The choice of two women, one black, the other Jewish, was also made to make RFK's responses more difficult.
Despite an unfortunate reference to communism, product no doubt of pervasive anti-communist conditioning, Jimmy is again spot on in this exposé of Democrat vileness and hypocrisy, and outright McCarthyist tactics.
If you’re wondering why Democrats appear to be so terrified of Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential candidacy, just watch his opening statement during this week’s House hearings about online censorship. RFK very effectively sang the praises of the First amendment while excoriating Democrats who sought to silence him.
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It’s not controversial to make the observation that American global hegemony is tottering, or at least in a serious crisis. But it is a dangerous illusion to make such a judgment too soon. In addition to its overwhelming military arsenal, the American Empire has another asset- its overwhelming cultural hegemony. Hollywood. Silicon Valley. Google. Facebook. Netflix. The force of cultural power is so great that tens of millions of people all over the world, even people whose countries have been devastated by US bombs and military coups, are hypnotized. Many will hand over their sovereignty, their culture, their history, their dignity to be part of the consumerist amusement park that’s being offered to them on their TV and iPhone screens. This power cannot be underestimated. What the scholar Catherine Liu describes as “virtue hoarding”- the practice of the modern American professional managerial class to loudly broadcast its enlightened views on race, gender, and sexuality to justify its privileges over the ‘backward’ lower classes is something that the American Empire is planning to do on a large scale over the entire globe. This means that the United States will justify the right to dominate the world because it is morally superior due to its ‘progressive’ cultural liberalism. The Woke Man/Woman’s Burden. Woke identity politics is the latest legitimizing ideology of the East Coast, WASP establishment of the Ivy Leagues, which enjoys an intertwined, incestuous relationship with the national security state. It has a distinctly Calvinist morality at its center, which presupposes sin (‘privilege’’/’white supremacy’) as the natural state of humanity, unless proven otherwise. Given that prejudice concerns our most intimate and private thoughts and feelings, it is close to impossible to prove one's innocence. For all the talk of ‘systemic racism’ and other ‘systems’, it is a worldview that is concerned with cleansing the individual and controlling social behavior. In 2020, what has been called the Great Awokening needs to be re considered in a new light. It was not a typical protest movement. Viewed in a different lens, it can be argued that the United States underwent perhaps the first internal ‘color revolution’ in its history. The playbook one has seen in Kyrgyzstan, in Lebanon, in Ukraine, in Venezuela, in Bolivia, and in Kazakhstan recently played out on America’s own streets. Color revolutions are not merely manufactured wholesale by the CIA or Western NGO’s out of whole cloth. Instead, such entities embed themselves into society, and when a crisis emerges from that society's own internal contradictions, these organizations activate and steer the unrest in the direction US dominated corporate interests wish them to go. Organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy abroad, and the Ford Foundation at home, carry out parallel functions. Thus, regime change can be accomplished with a great deal of deniability. This is what happened in the United States in the summer of 2020. Culturally liberal capital, especially the Big Tech oligarchs of Amazon, Twitter and Microsoft, immediately lined up behind the (originally spontaneous) mass street protests around George Floyd’s killing and poured tens of millions of dollars into Black Lives Matter. The purpose was twofold: reap a massive public relations coup by being seen on the ‘right side’ of a progressive cause, but also to use the protesters as foot soldiers to counteract Trump’s popular right-wing grassroots movement and drive Trump out of office. Trump represented the old way of doing Empire- overt right-wing nationalism, undisguised contempt for weaker nations, politically incorrect, xenophobic rhetoric. His crude bigotry was embarrassing to the professional managers of American Empire and threatened to undo decades of carefully cultivated US soft power. The suave sophisticates in Silicon Valley, in the drawing rooms of Langley, Virginia, and on Wall Street needed to remedy this.
A chaotic, undisciplined street movement, lacking strong leadership or a clear direction, quickly became molded by private capital in its own image. The fatuous conceit that there can be ‘leaderless’ movements is belied by the fact that such directionless movements always wind up making cosmetic symbolic changes or become football in intra elite struggles. Thus, the Great Awokening was a ‘revolution’ of sorts, but not of a BIPOC underclass. It was instead a power grab by culturally liberal professionals doing the bidding of finance capital/Silicon Valley, against nativist lower-level elites. Biden’s coming to office inaugurated not just a new administration, but a new way of doing Empire. The CIA came out with a slick new recruiting video promoting its inclusivity of LGBT and saying that its mission was now ‘Intersectional’. Coups would now be about deconstructing white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. This was reflected in one of the Biden administration’s more successful regime operations in Ecuador in Feb. 2021, where the socialist candidate there was successfully sabotaged by a spoiler candidate claiming to be pro-environment and pro indigenous, while being covertly backed by oil corporations and Wall Street hedge funds. John Gray in the New Statesman describes this phenomenon thus bluntly: “Certain American thought has always tended to a certain solipsism, a trait that has become more prominent in recent times. If Fukuyama and his neoconservative allies believed the world was yearning to be remade on an imaginary American model, the woke movement believes ‘whiteness’ accounts for all the evils of modern societies”. In other words, Woke-ism is the new neo-conservatism.
The corporate interventionists' embrace of LGBQT issues goes back decades, when they began promoting "wedge issues" to bury discussion of economic/working class issues.
Facing a rising China and a resurgent Russia, the American ruling class needs a moralizing crusade to motivate its counter offensive against its enemies, both at home and abroad. Under the banners of Black Lives Matter, multi-colored Pride flags and trumpets announcing the correct gender pronouns, the guns of the American Empire will spread the creed of Woke Empire. China must be opposed because it is oppressing Muslims. Cuba must have regime change because it is oppressing black people. Belarus’s government must fall because it is anti-trans. Putin must be confronted because he is a homophobe. All of these are positions that the New York Times, the Washington Post, Vox, and countless other outlets have advanced at some point or another to advance the case for attacks against ‘America’s enemies’. The West’s Eastern enemies are barbarians who must be subjugated, because they are not enlightened by the standards of American liberalism. In foreign and domestic politics alike, the grievances real and imagined of minorities are spotlighted, then weaponized as a battering ram against entire populations and entire nations which challenge the Anglo-Saxon imperialist global order. Many on the left may acknowledge this cynical weaponization of calls for racial and gender justice on some level, but insist that it is a “co-option’ of innately noble concepts such as intersectionality and Critical Race Theory. This is, frankly, a way that people on the left can sidestep some hard questions- what about the ideology makes it so easy to ‘co-opt’ in the first place? Were these ideas actually ever revolutionary to begin with? In what material way has such discourse actually challenged power and privilege, beyond shallow rhetoric? Neither intersectionality theory nor Critical Race Theory came from working class movements. Not the Black Panthers, the Young Lords or the Young Patriots ever used these words or used them to dictate their praxis. Neither did the Communist Party of the 1930’s or the IWW of the 1910’s. They spoke of solidarity, internationalism, pragmatic alliances of workers and the oppressed, concepts and practices which have been around for centuries. ‘Intersectionality’ is a different creature. Concepts like it arose entirely in the Ivy Leagues academia and reflect a distinctly upper-middle-class morality. The formulation of these theories was in the 1980’s, as a reaction (and a capitulation) to the Reaganite counterrevolution which smashed the labor movement. Contrary to the claims of right-wing conspiracy theorists and left-wingers alike, its links to actual Marxism are tenuous and in most cases nonexistent.
Why are most gay people unconcerned that their cause is being shamelessly hijacked by the corporate imperialists for heinous ends?
Kimberle Crenshaw, the dean of ‘intersectional’ theory, was always a liberal and never claimed to be a socialist of any sort. She was groomed for her position in academia by the Quill and Dagger Society at Cornell, an elite secret society heavily tied to the CIA (Paul Wolfowitz was one of its more prominent members). From 1913 and 1988 a member of this society was entering Congress every year. The cocoon of the heart of the Eastern establishment nurtured and rewarded the careers of these supposedly ‘radical’ theorists. Why would the intelligence community and the corporate world be so comfortable with such theories? Because it tears the very heart out of any sort of egalitarian left from within. Intersectionality removes the centrality of class. Class struggle, and fights on the terrain of economic relations, are replaced with endless moralistic, individualistic struggle along cultural lines. Past revolutionaries always opposed racism and bigotry in all its forms of course, but it was always a component of an overall project for a socialist society. Without that overarching project it becomes a bourgeois philanthropic and evangelical enterprise, akin to the moral uplift projects of the Victorian British elite. Like the war on terrorism, by waging wars on abstractions such as ‘racism’ and ‘patriarchy’, it’s a struggle that can never be won. And thus, is immensely profitable, for both the individuals who make careers off such a war and for institutions with a vested interest in diverting popular frustration and anger toward any struggle but class struggle. In the Great Awokening, we saw the rise of the new priesthood of this religion Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DeAngelo, and others. Kendi is directly on the payroll of the likes of (ex) Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who gave Kendi a 10 million dollar donation to set up an indoctrination temple in Boston University. This new religion is necessary because the old ways of managing the current American/Western order is falling apart at the seams. 40 years of hollowing out of the social state by neoliberalism has all come to a head in COVID, as the wealthiest society in human history allows a million of its people to succumb to a pandemic due to a lack of infrastructure to deal with a public health crisis. The much-vaunted middle class has collapsed in a heap. After generations of retreat and subservience, organized labor is fighting back finally, often over the protests of its own sellout union tops. Hundreds of thousands of workers went on strike in the United States in 2020 and 2021, the greatest strike wave in close to 50 years. Workers of all races, ethnicities, and sexes have no choice but to fight for safe workplaces, decent protective gear, rent control, universal healthcare, and decent wages. In the New Gilded Age, the elite has no butter to give the masses. It has only austerity, repression, surveillance, and going along with that, a morality police staffed by its professional managerial elite. We are already seeing woke ideology play out in the realm of workplace relations. ‘Racial sensitivity training sessions’ are being utilized by corporate management to spy on workers, sabotage union organizing drives, and provide a convenient pretext for the arbitrary firing of employees. There is an entire professional layer of the capitalist management structure (multibillion dollar industry) which not only makes its living off of ‘anti racism’ but which has no material incentive to actually solve the problem, and even has an interest in stoking the flames of division. The crusaders of woke Empire are off to subjugate two frontiers- the ‘problematic’ working masses who are outside the Eastern establishment/Silicon Valley bubbles within the United States, and the even more problematic unwoke billions in Eurasia and Latin America who insist on holding values not compatible with 21st century cosmopolitan liberalism. It is notable that in nearly every country where the American Empire is trying to destroy a socialist, nationalist or anti-imperialist project- whether in Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Belarus, Russia, China, or Iran- the allies of neoliberal imperialism come from the cosmopolitan urban centers where Westernized upper middle classes reside, while the backbone of anti-imperialist resistance comes from the soil of the countryside- the global deplorables. In old fashioned colonialism, doctrines of the biological superiority of the white race served an important ideological role. Yet capitalism and imperialism has mutated ideologically, like a virus. It is high time to recognize that ‘anti racism’ and advocacy of racial/gender equality can be just as much of an effective reigning ideology for the Empire as its opposite. It is time to acknowledge that language so long cherished by the left is now a cudgel against working people at home and abroad. Evil has often come disguised as good.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marius Trotter is a writer residing in Massachusetts. He comments on history, politics, philosophy and theory. He can be reached by his email trottermarius@gmail.com
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The US President Joe Biden (R) met NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg at the White House, Washington, June 13, 2023
If only the US President Joe Biden had a time machine as in the post-apocalyptic science fiction novella by H. G. Wells, he should have used that vehicle or device to travel purposely and selectively backward through time all the way to 1999 when it was that the US lost the plot on European security and Russia’s perennial quest for mutual security with Europe.
At that defining moment of the post-cold war era 24 years ago, George Kennan was prophetic to warn the Bill Clinton administration that US-Russia relations would be irreparably damaged if the western alliance expanded to include the former Warsaw Pact countries. His advice was ignored. It is generally accepted today that the war in Ukraine is the culmination of the NATO’s relentless advance to the borders of Russia.
Agreement on Measures to Ensure the Security of the Russian Federation and Member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation would require that NATO members commit to no further enlargement of the alliance, including in particular to Ukraine, and the related issues concerning the alliance’s deployments, which impacted Russia’s core security issues.
Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Security Guarantees. Taken together, the two drafts represented an opening bid by Moscow for serious negotiations but it led to no engagement since the Biden administration simply stonewalled that the US and Russia cannot cut a deal over the heads of Europeans and Ukrainians!
As the National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan famously said, “nothing about you [Ukraine] without you.” It was a lame excuse, for the Kiev regime installed in power through the US-backed unconstitutional, armed and bloody coup in Ukraine in 2014, was a mere tool of Washington.
The Biden administration thought it was cornering Moscow and setting a bear trap as Russia was damned either way — whether it passively accepted the reality of NATO presence right at its doorstep, or chose to resist through coercive means. When Russia’s special military operation began in February 2022, Strobe Talbott who was the mastermind in the Bill Clinton administration pushing through the doctrine of NATO’s eastward expansion into the former Warsaw Pact territories, tweeted congratulating the Biden Team for cornering the Russians!
Several US analysts triumphantly wrote that Russia was going to be bogged down in a quagmire with dire consequences to the country’s regime and its very existence. The western narrative gained ascendancy for a while. The rest is history.
However, in one of the great turnarounds of history in modern times, Moscow eventually prevailed in the battlefields decisively and irreversibly.
Against such a historical backdrop, Biden’s remark on Saturday that the US is “not going to make it easy” for Ukraine to join the NATO can only be seen as a retrogressive journey into the past. Biden underscored that Ukraine will be required to meet the “same standards” as any other member of the bloc, implying that Ukraine must conform to the so-called Membership Action Plan or MAP, which requires a candidate nation to make military and democratic reforms, with NATO’s advice and assistance, before a determination of membership can be made.
The MAP process can take years. Macedonia took 21 years. Biden’s remark is not only a signal to Kiev but comes at a time when there is a groundswell of opinion within the alliance that Europe and the US must provide Ukraine clear-cut NATO security guarantees, which is important for the future of European security.
In fact, Biden spoke only 4 days after meeting with Jens Stoltenberg, NATO secretary-general, at the White House last Tuesday, where, reportedly, the latter sought to simplify the accession process for Ukraine on the plea that Kiev had already made significant progress toward membership.
What prompted Biden to take a hard line? Poland’s President Andrzej Duda declared, in the run-up to his talks in Paris on June 12 with France’s President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in the Weimar Triangle format, that Ukraine would like to have “a very concrete perspective … of joining the North Atlantic Alliance.” Duda hoped that the NATO summit in Vilnius will “send a positive message to Kiev, …that Ukraine’s future membership in NATO is clearly visible.”
Apparently, there was consensus amongst the Weimar Triangle members also that Ukraine should receive security guarantees. Scholz declared: “It is evident that we need something like this, and we need it in a very concrete form.” Macron endorsed, calling for a rapid agreement on “tangible and credible security guarantees.”
Indeed, there have been threatening noises too that if there is no concretisation on Ukraine’s membership in Vilnius, some of the “hardcore” allies may take things into their own hands, and the renegade undertaking – at the national level –- could also include stationing of troops from NATO members in Ukraine.
Now, Biden has ignored these demands from Old and New Europeans. He is confident he can shift the goal post. Maybe, Macron and Scholz are only playing to the gallery? We may never know.
The heart of the matter is that Biden realises that the ongoing Ukrainian offensive is heading for a train crash and the decimation of Kiev’s remaining army. It is uncertain how long Kiev will be able to recruit enough soldiers. The two figures whom Washington had groomed for precisely the sort of Plan B in Kiev that it needs now — commander of the armed forces Gen. Valeri Zaluzhny and spy chief Maj. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov — are out of reckoning, having been put out of action summarily by recent Russian missile strikes.
Don’t rule out an insurrection in Ukraine if war deaths become unsustainable for the society. Biden also sees that there is continuously shrinking approval in America for his war policy, which could possibly endanger his re-election. Biden pointed out to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky during his last visit to Kiev that the funds that Washington could provide were limited. And CIA chief William Burns separately left a message with Zelensky that continued American military assistance beyond July is problematic.
Suffice to say, if Putin’s harsh remarks last week (on Tuesday and Friday) are anything to go by, the Kremlin leadership has zero trust or confidence in Biden or his European allies. Meanwhile, the plain truth is, 90 percent of Ukraine’s resource base lies in regions under Russian control. Which means that the rump state is going to be a huge drain on US resources, while Russia is showing no signs of exhaustion.
Biden has not said anything new. Biden senses that the US lost the proxy war but he must not and cannot admit it. So, in the absence of a time machine, which could have taken him all the way back to 1999when the NATO’s expansion began unfolding, Biden simply walked back to the default position of the 2008 NATO Summit at Bucharestwelcoming Ukraine into the alliance via the MAP route — as if that moment fifteen years ago is now the past and cannot be pulled back to the present. Russia is not going to accept it.
Russian President Vladimir Putin: Kiev has lost 186 tanks, 418 armoured vehicles, losses mounting, St. Petersburg, June 16, 2023 (TGP screenshot)
With the Ukrainian offensive underway for a fortnight, all eyes are on the battlefields, and, crucially, Russia’s options ahead. In a little over three weeks from now, NATO will be holding a summit in Vilnius and the West has choices to make too. We are arriving at a fork in the road.
NATO expected the Ukrainian forces to punch through key Russian fortifications by now. In reality, they are struggling to get anywhere near the sprawling layered fortifications and in that desperate attempt, are taking massive losses, entrapped in minefields and taken to pieces by Russian artillery and missiles and the dreaded multi-role attack helicopters known as Alligator.
The signposts are best seen in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin press conference on Tuesday, lasting over three hours, with war correspondents. In just a week’s time after Ukraine’s offensive began, “25–30 percent of the supplied equipment (from NATO) has been destroyed,” Putin said.
Putin underscored three things. First, the goals set for the special military operations are “fundamental for us” because “Ukraine is part of the effort to destabilise Russia.” What does that mean?
It means Russian operations will not end without realising the twin objectives of “demilitarising” Ukraine and uprooting the present neo-Nazi regime in Kiev. The security and welfare of the Russian population also remains a cardinal objective — no more pogroms. Putin said Russia is going about realising these objectives “gradually, methodically.”
Second, Putin flagged: “The Ukrainian defence industry will soon cease to exist altogether. What do they produce? Ammunition is delivered, equipment is delivered and weapons are delivered – everything is delivered. You won’t live long like that, you won’t last. So, the issue of demilitarisation is realised in very practical terms.”
Third, the Kremlin’s preference so far has been to continue to grind down the Ukrainian military, whilst giving “selective responses” whenever any red lines were crossed — eg., Russian strikes on Ukraine’s energy system, the destruction of the headquarters of the Ukrainian military intelligence. By the way, in that Kiev strike, Russia claims to have seriously injured Ukraine’s spy chief Kyrylo Budanov, the poster boy of Western media.
Going forward, Putin said “everything will depend on the potential that is left at the end of this so-called counter-offensive. This is the key question.” After taking such “catastrophic losses,” it is up to the leadership in Kiev to rationally think about “what to do next,” Putin said.
He added, “We will wait and see what the situation is like and take further steps based on this understanding. Our plans may vary depending on the situation when we deem it necessary to move. That includes NATO equipment.”
Given these stark realities, Kiev should roll back the offensive. But that is not going to happen. Kiev is under immense pressure from Washington to claim some dramatic success. That said, the Ukrainian reserves are not infinite, either.Around 35,000 to 40,000 strong Ukrainian reserves are facing a massive Russian deployment manifold stronger in numbers (in hundreds of thousands) and advanced weaponry, and enjoying air superiority. There is a distinct possibility that at some point, the Russian forces may go on the offensive too.
Against this backdrop, the West claims that the NATO Allies are “looking at an array of options to signal that Ukraine is advancing in its relationship” with the alliance, to borrow the words of the US ambassador in Brussels Julianne Smith.Andres Rasmussen, former NATO chief and presently official advisor to Ukrainian President Zelensky, has threatened that a group of NATO countries may be willing to put troops on the ground in Ukraine if member states including the US do not provide tangible security guarantees to Kiev at the Vilnius summit.
Specifically, Rasmussen claimed that “Poles would seriously consider going in and assembling a coalition of the willing if Ukraine doesn’t get anything in Vilnius. We shouldn’t underestimate the Polish feelings, the Poles feel that for too long western Europe did not listen to their warnings.” The rhetoric took a heightened tone lately at the meeting of Heads of State and Government in the format “Weimar Triangle” (France-Poland-Germany) on June 12 in Paris where a consensus emerged that Ukraine should receive some security guarantees.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz declared, “It is evident that we need something like this, and we need it in a very concrete form.” French President Emmanuel Macron also called for a rapid agreement on “tangible and credible security guarantees.”
Indeed, this is all bluster. The idea of Poland “putting boots on the ground” is so patently absurd. The Polish military will wither away in a confrontation with Russia.But what such theatrics show is that nerves are on edge as the spectre of defeat in Ukraine is endangering NATO’s unity.
So, Jens Stoltenberg, NATO secretary-general, stepped in to inject some realism into the discussion, pointing out that for the present what matters most is that Ukraine survives as a nation.Stoltenberg stated: “I believe it’s not possible to give precise dates (for Ukraine’s admission as NATO member) when we are in the midst of a war… the most urgent task now is to ensure that Ukraine prevails as a sovereign, independent nation… because, unless Ukraine prevails, then there’s no membership to be discussed at all, because it’s only a sovereign, independent, democratic Ukraine that can become a NATO member.”
Stoltenberg took the cue from Washington. In fact, he was speaking while on a visit to Washington, in an interview with PBS.
Russia is not taking the eyes off the battlefield. In reality, Moscow is shoving down the western throat a historic strategic defeat. The choice for the West narrows down to negotiating with Russia on its terms, or to expect a military solution, which might meanthe obliteration of Ukraine as a nation and the eviction of NATO.
Make no mistake, Russian offensive plans have been drawn up. There is talk among opinion makers in Moscow about creating new facts on the ground — a De-Militarised Zone along the Polish border.Now, that entails Russian forces crossing the Dnieper and liberating Kiev as well as liberate Kharkov and Odessa, two other Russian cities historically. Russia has no interest in annexing the western regions of Ukraine, which is hostile territory that Stalin annexed.
But western Ukraine has other neighbours — Poland included — who would have unfinished business of partition of their historical lands to settle. The unresolved nationality question is explosive, as Poles still remember the killings by the Ukrainian nationalists aligned with the Nazis. Historians say that more than 100,000 Poles, including women and even the smallest children, perished at the hands of their Ukrainian neighbours in a nationalist drive in areas that were then in southeastern Poland and are mostly in Ukraine now. To put it mildly, what remains of Ukraine under the weight of a crushing military defeat no one can predict.
The Kremlin will exercise its options depending on the exigencies of the situation. Moscow seems to have concluded that there is no real alternative to a military solution. It will not allow Ukraine to remain a chronic wound infected by the microbial species from the transatlantic universe. Cauterisation of the wound is necessary, albeit with potential risks.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE
The author is a highly respected retired diplomat with the Indian foreign service.
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The fact that the vast majority of US politicians are prostitutes for sale should surprise no one at this point.
CHUCK SCHUMER, NANCY PELOSI AND HAIM SABAN, AT THE ISRAELI AMERICAN COUNCIL, DECEMBER 2018.
he outraised Omar, $3.2 million to $472 thousand, and he has $2 million cash on hand compared to Omar’s $1.1 million” (according to the Hill’s hit-job on Omar).
One way to understand the donations is BDS. Ilhan Omar is for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) targeting Israel. Melton-Meaux is against it.
This is now a fault-line in the Democratic Party. The rank-and-file clearly are favorable to BDS. Polling data show that 44 percent of Democrats support BDS; while only 15 percent oppose it. Yet 92 percent of House Democrats vote for a bill that characterizes BDS as antisemitic.
Ilhan Omar threatens that official unanimity. She is the thin end of the wedge. Along with Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Omar gives a voice on Capitol Hill to a grassroots movement that the party leadership abominates.
Why does the party leadership abominate BDS — a nonviolent campaign aimed at granting Palestinians human rights — when ordinary Democrats have no problem with it?
My own unscientific study of contributions to the Democratic Party shows that many of the largest donors are ardent supporters of Israel. Haim Saban — who pressed Hillary Clinton to oppose BDS publicly four years ago — has given well over $2.5 million to the Democratic Party’s various branches over the last 16 months, in addition to supporting Melton-Meaux.
Many other big Democratic donors are well-known supporters of Israel. I review some of those names below. And if you want to know why the party is against BDS, this is the donkey in the room: the party is getting millions of dollars from people who don’t like pressuring Israel.
Joe Biden has rejected BDS as antisemitic and promised in May that he would fight it as president:
Biden … vowed that his administration will “firmly reject the BDS movement – which singles out Israel and too often veers into antisemitism – and fight other efforts to delegitimize Israel on the global stage.”
But BDS-sympathizers managed to get a free-speech disclaimer in that draft; and the issue is playing out in the grassroots. Last summer the House overwhelmingly approved legislation that calls BDS antisemitic. Democrats voted 209 to 16 on the bill. The sixteen dissenters include Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
AOC is a one-person wrecking ball of the party establishment in New York, with Israel implications. AOC endorsed Jamaal Bowman, who last month sent shock waves through the Israel lobby by knocking off House Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot Engel. Bowman has approved the idea of conditioning aid to Israel because of its expansive conduct, though he has not actually endorsed BDS. A politician who has endorsed BDS — Phara Souffrant Forrest, 31– knocked off incumbent assemblyman Walter Mosley, 52, in a widely-watched race in Brooklyn. Mosley had appeared at the rightwing pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC and had pushed legislation against BDS. Souffrant Forrest had the backing of AOC and the Democratic Socialists of America.
Clinton “privately signal[ed] to wealthy Jewish donors that… she will be a better friend to Israel than President Barack Obama,” Politico reported. Even as Benjamin Netanyahu was speaking to Congress against Obama’s Iran deal in 2015 (yes, that really happened), Clinton issued statements of attachment to Israel. Months later she supported the Iran deal, but she balanced that with a letter against BDS. Leaked emails from the DNC show that donors were the core concern in her balancing act.
“[H]as she made a clear statement on Israel yet?” her campaign manager wrote. “I get this question from donors all the time. Does she need to state her principles on Israel before Iran?”
Another campaign aide answered, “That’s basically the goal of the BDS letter.”
The BDS letter was a statement of “alarm” that Clinton wrote to Saban the same month she endorsed the Iran deal:
AAH, THE GOOD AND PRIVILEGED LIFE! THEN SENATOR HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON AND HAIM SABAN AT THE 2006 SABAN FORUM. (PHOTO: MARSHALL H. COHEN, SABAN CENTER AT BROOKINGS)
I am writing to express my alarm over the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement, or “BDS”, a global campaign to isolate Israel…. I know you agree that we need to make countering BDS a priority.
Even though she was in the fight of her life politically, against Republicans, Clinton assured Saban she would work with Republicans on BDS: “I am seeking your advice on how we can work together – across party lines and with a diverse array of voices – to reverse this trend… and fight back against further attempts to isolate and delegitimize Israel.”
Clinton’s friendship with Republicans on this issue that goes against the Democratic street surely reflects the fact that Haim Saban was working with Sheldon Adelson, the largest Republican donor, to oppose BDS.
My unscientific survey of the 100-largest donations to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee supports the idea that donors drive this position. Several of the party’s biggest givers are fiercely pro-Israel.
–Haim Saban has given $213,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2020. Saban is famous for saying, “I’m a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel.”
–Maryland Rep. and liquor baron David Trone has given $248,500 to the congressional campaign committee in the last 16 months.
Israel is the homeland of the Jewish People, one to which my family and I are deeply committed… we must also speak out against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which is rooted in anti-Semitic sentiment – and we need to fight back against it. I am deeply troubled by the BDS movement on college campuses across the country and around the world.
–Cari Sacks and husband Michael Sacks of Illinois gave $426,000 together to the congressional campaign committee in late 2019. The Sackses surely care about Israel: their family foundation gives a lot of money to Birthright Israel and other Zionist causes.
–S. Daniel Abraham and wife Ewa Abraham, are legendary Israel supporters. They also gave $426,000, according to Open Secrets.
–Seth Klarman, the chairman of the Times of Israel, who was mentioned in an Ilhan Omar mailer as a donor to her opponent, gave $106,500 to the DCCC earlier this year.
–Donald Sussman, a liberal Democrat who is on the board of the Weizmann Institute in Israel, also gave $213,000 to the DCCC in March.
–Producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, who gave $112,000 in March 2020, is an ardent supporter of Israel.
–Andrew Hauptman appears to have wide interests philanthropically, but Israel is one of them. He gave $109,000 in March 2020.
Right there you have over $2 million in gifts from a dozen pro-Israel donors. You can imagine that that money means a lot to the Democrats, when the average gift is a lot closer to $250 a pop.
No wonder Nancy Pelosi has said that the Capitol would crumble and fall before the Congress turns against Israel. She spoke on a stage with Haim Saban, two months after his $1 million to a Democratic House majority pac in the last cycle helped do just that. Pelosi:
If this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain would be our commitment to our aid, I don’t even call it our aid, our cooperation with Israel. That’s fundamental to who we are.
In adding up those numbers, I am not counting Steven Spielberg, who cares about a lot of issues but is Israel-friendly. Or supporters of liberal Zionist causes, like George Soros and Steve Silberstein. Presumably they might support real pressure on Israel.
Another thing the DCCC records show is that while Jews are obviously many of the largest givers to the Democratic Party (conventional wisdom saying about half of Democratic gifts come from Jews), most of those Jewish givers seem to care about other things than Israel. For instance, Susan Zadek Mandel cares about the environment and education, Josh Bekenstein cares about the environment, hospitals, the arts, Boston civic organizations, refugees.
Thanks to Dave Reed and Michael Arria.
Philip Weiss is the founding editor of Mondoweiss, a site dedicated to critical analyses of Israeli life, zionist politics and misdeeds.
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Washington Post op-ed calls for news media to censor videos of police brutality
Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.
By Nick Barrickman
An opinion piece published in the Washington Post last week by ESPN sportswriter and journalism professor at the University of Maryland Kevin Blackistone calls on the news media to censor images of police brutality and killings of African Americans.
The column, titled “Why I can’t watch the police videos anymore,” is accompanied by a short video (“This is why the media should not replay viral videos of black men being killed”), in which Blackistone, who is African American, demands that media outlets “give greater consideration to how they display these deaths.” What is implied is that such videos should be removed or their viewings limited by those in control.
According to Blackistone, “[w]e don’t see people having visceral reactions” to filmed episodes of sadistic police violence. Instead, “they watch this as if it’s theater.”
By people, Blackistone clearly means “white people.” This inference is made clear when he likens police brutality caught on film to postcard images of lynchings in the Deep South in the early 20th century. Asserting that such videos have “never been in opposition to the inhumanity of these acts,” Blackistone asks, “How many times have you seen a slain white body in the media?”
One might ask what gives Blackistone such penetrating insight into the thought processes of the millions of people who view the videos of police beatings and murder that so frequently “go viral” in the United States. It is likely that his assertions about the reactions of white viewers are more a reflection of his conceptions than theirs.
In fact, in the years since the 2014 police slaying of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, dozens of bystander videos of police violence against unarmed people, white as well as black, have sparked angry protests against police brutality. In Ferguson in 2014 and Baltimore in 2015, following the police killing of Freddie Gray, declarations of emergency were issued and National Guard troops deployed to put down widespread protests, which spread beyond those cities to cities and towns across the country.
These events, culminating in the current wave of multi-racial and multi-ethnic protests across the US and around the world, refute Blackistone’s contention that “white people” who view such atrocities sympathize with the police, not the victims.
Moreover, it is false and absurd to draw an equal sign between the racial attitudes of people in America a century ago and the attitudes of the population today. Vast changes in the social outlook of the population have occurred, corresponding to the increased integration of workplaces over the past 75 years. The Great Migration of millions of African Americans from the rural south to northern industrial cities from approximately 1915 to 1970 encouraged the development of social consciousness among workers of all races.
Featured articles on the police murder of George Floyd
According to a 2017 Pew study, a large majority of the population (81 percent) had views of interracial marriage that were favorable or neutral. In contrast, less than 10 percent looked upon such relationships in a negative way. In 2015, 17 percent, or almost a fifth, of all opposite-sex marriages were interracial, up from only 3 percent in 1967, when the Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision overturned anti-miscegenation laws.
Of course, racism still exists, but it is false to claim that the United States today is dominated by racism or exemplifies “white supremacy.” The most virulent forms of racism are concentrated within the frontline elements of the capitalist state, such as the police and immigration agents who are charged with policing the population on behalf of the ruling class.
According to Blackistone, people viewing images of police violence tend not to see “that this person [being killed] was a human being.” Instead, the murder of innocent people by police is “normalized… a distant reality.”
The journalist-professor cites a National Institute of Health study from 2017 that finds “deaths [by police] that go unpunished send a message to Black communities that their bodies are police property, disposable, and undeserving of dignity and justice.” The study adds that such incidents “can bring about collective anger, grief, and hopelessness.”
In other words, the NIH warns, in addition to “hopelessness” and more passive expressions of hostility, such atrocities can stoke “collective anger” and mass opposition. In calling for the suppression of such videos, Blackistone joins in opposing such mass expressions of social anger.
Who would benefit from such censorship? Not the minority and working class victims of police violence, but the perpetrators.
In the initial days of the protests following George Floyd’s murder, some Democratic Party politicians and black nationalist allies reacted to the multi-racial character of the demonstrations by accusing “suburbanites,” i.e., whites, of “intruding” into the protests and fomenting violence. They openly expressed the fear and hostility within the ruling class toward a movement that refuted the racialist narrative that has been an ideological and political pillar of capitalist rule in America for the past 50 years.
If, moreover, censorship is a positive good when it comes to police violence, then surely there are other events and opinions that would similarly be better suppressed. The logic of Blackistone’s position leads inexorably to censorship of all forms of journalism and art. Anything that could lead to “collective anger” and produce opposition to the present social order must be suppressed.
While Blackistone acknowledges the “evidentiary value” of such film, his argument for censorship puts him squarely on the side of the police. Government officials and police departments regularly seek to withhold incriminating evidence and videos from the public by claiming that such films would “upset” the families of the victims or jeopardize an ongoing investigation. In the current protests, the police have repeatedly targeted reporters in an effort to prevent their actions from being reported. And police officers routinely fail to turn on, or deliberately turn off, body cameras to ensure that an incident is not recorded.
That the Washington Post is giving credence to such views is not an anomaly. Along with the New York Times, the Post has been a chief media mouthpiece for the claims that Russian online “disinformation” has “sown discontent” in American society around “sensitive social issues.” This authoritarian argument has been used to censor left-wing opposition to US imperialism on the internet and to persecute courageous journalists such as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
It is the healthy, humane and democratic reaction of millions of people to the exposure of wanton police violence, thanks to cell phone videos and social media, that concerns the ruling class, as well as its media and academic apologists such as Blackistone.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The author writes for wsws.org, a Marxian publication.
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