zaterdag 27 april 2019

Why A Chernobyl-like Financial Disaster Is Inescapable

Why A Chernobyl-like Financial Disaster Is Inescapable

Why a Chernobyl-like Financial Disaster is Inescapable

In the early morning hours of April 26, 1986 – roughly 33 years ago – things went horribly wrong in the town of Pripyat, in northern Soviet Ukraine.  Reactor No. 4 at the V. I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant, also known as the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, was overwhelmed by an uncontrolled reaction.  There was no stopping it.
Chernobyl after the explosion (left) and today (right), encased in a steel sarcophagus. [PT]
Two initial explosions blew the top off the reactor.  Once exposed, plumes of fission matter were wafted into the atmosphere by an open-air graphite fire.  Before long, this radioactive material precipitated onto Western Europe and the Western USSR.
Nine days later the fire was finally contained.  But not before an estimated 400 times more radioactive material was released than from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Twenty-eight firemen and operators died from acute radiation syndrome in the following days and months.

A discovery channel documentary on the Chernobyl disaster [PT]
What exactly caused the Chernobyl disaster is still a matter of disagreement.  The first official explanation of the accident was later acknowledged to be erroneous.  But there is agreement on the fact that the nuclear disaster would not have happened when it did if the workers had played hooky and gone fishing.
Instead, an ill-planned late-night safety test to simulate a power-failure set in motion the very chain reaction that led to the disaster.  During the experiment, the emergency safety and power-regulating systems were both intentionally turned off.  Then the operators attempted to boost the reactor output; a violation of the approved test procedure.  Soon after, all control was lost…

A Moment of Silence

Most accounts we’ve come across assign equal blame to human error and reactor design flaws.  The shortsighted engineers failed to idiot proof the nuclear power plant for the operators.  The operators succeeded at being idiots.  Should we expect anything different?
Here at the Economic Prism we’re zealot aficionados of disaster – especially the human induced variety.  Hence, on the anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, we take a moment of silence for disasters past, present, and future.  We also scratch for an inkling of tutelage that we can squirrel away like a silver eagle for a time in need.
Murphy’s Law, for example, states: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”  Certainly, Murphy’s Law will always prevail over pant wearing human animals endeavoring to manage a complex system.  The Chernobyl disaster validated Murphy’s Law in spades.
Another point clarified by the Chernobyl disaster is that humans are fallible.  They’re prone to making big mistakes.  Some of these mistakes are attributable to sloppiness.  But many result from conceit and misperception of the limits of human control.
The Chernobyl operators thought they had a novel idea for how to boost reactor output.  Yet to test their idea, they had to turn off the emergency safety and power regulating systems.  They also had to attempt to operate the reactor in ways inconsistent with its design criteria.
Without question, they should’ve known better.  But, remember, these are humans we’re talking about.  Even the most judicious among us will go mad from time to time… always with the best of intentions.
There is a certain road that is well-known to be paved with good intentions… [PT]

Why a Chernobyl-like Financial Disaster is Inescapable

The main take-away from the Chernobyl disaster is that people frequently think they are better, smarter, and more capable than they are.  Moreover, they often charge forward with little more than misplaced beliefs in unfounded theories and ideas.  These adventures in madness nearly always end in disaster.
Indeed, a nuclear power plant is a complex system.  Still, an economy is infinitely more complex. Actions and reactions throughout an economy take place in varying and unpredictable ways. They are subject to spontaneous moods and social phenomena, which change over time – often without rhyme or reason.
An economy cannot be designed and constructed like a nuclear power plant, or other physical systems.  So, too, an economy is much too large and multifaceted to be planned and improved upon like a wedding planner arranging a large reception.  But that doesn’t stop central planners from attempting to control and operate the economy and financial system like Chernobyl operators in the early morning hours of April 26, 1986.
The 2008-09 financial crisis and great recession were man-made failures.  What’s more, the solutions that have been executed over the last decade have been guided by guesses derived from flimsy theories and wishful ideas. In other words, monetary policies, like the ill-fated Chernobyl test, have been a wild ass central banker experiment.
Ben Bernanke, the chief architect of it all, is a complete lunatic – what readers from our home state of California would call a 5150.  His insane QE, ZIRP, Operation Twist, and NIRP, have taken us past the point of no return.  QT and a neutral federal funds rate are unattainable.  Similarly, fiscal policies have taken debts and deficits to a place of sheer insanity, where they can never honestly be paid off.
US broad true money supply: up ~USD 8.15 trillion or 155% since early 2008´- the largest money supply inflation of the post WW2 era. This isn’t going to end well. [PT]
Yet unlike a nuclear reactor meltdown, the feedback loops from these monetary and fiscal experiments are indirect, can appear dormant for many years, and are impossible to fully understand and account for.  What is clear, however, is that the only way out of this predicament is a Chernobyl-like financial disaster; an economic meltdown and vaporization of the existing financial order.
An uncontrolled reaction has been set in motion.  There is no stopping it.


How Obama Defanged the EPA


How Obama Defanged the EPA Before Trump Gutted the Agency

 

Photograph by Petty Officer 1st Class Michael B. Watkins – Public Domain
It was a tumultuous tenure, productive by some accounts, lackluster by most, but one thing is for certain, Lisa Jackson’s short time as administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency was anything but dull. On December 27, 2012 the often-fiery Jackson announced she was not going to return for a second term, and it is surely not difficult to see why she’s fleeing her post.
Since President Obama was ushered into office in 2008, the EPA has consistently faced ridicule and criticism from corporate polluters and their greedy allies in Washington. On virtually every occasion Obama refused to side with Jackson’s more rationale, often science-based positions, whether it was cleaning up the air or forcing the natural resource industries to abide by existing regulations. Ultimately, the EPA is only as formidable as the White House allows it to be, and on Obama’s watch the agency has not received the support it has desired or deserved.
Take the case of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Even though those three horrible months watching oil spew into the Gulf have seeped out of our collective memory, the BP disaster is one of the largest stains on Jackson’s four-year stint at EPA. Soon after the underwater blowout, Jackson, a New Orleans native, demanded BP halt their use of the toxic dispersant Corexit 9500 to clean up their gushing mess. She took a tough line against a company that had gotten away with far too much for too long.
It could have been Obama’s iron-fist moment, where the young president stood up to the oil industry and permitted the EPA to run the operation instead of letting BP’s inept management have full control of the cleanup process.
Of course, after eight long years of President Bush, BP executives weren’t used to being bullied into submission by some bureaucrat, especially a surly woman at the EPA, so they dialed up their friendly White House staff and complained that Jackson had overstepped her boundaries. Obama quickly obliged and forced the EPA to bite its tongue. Then Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel discreetly assembled the administration’s oil response team. Lisa Jackson was conspicuously absent from the list.
Even though it was the largest oil spill the US had experienced in decades, Obama prevented the agency in charge of overseeing the country’s environmental regulations from being involved in any meaningful way. Could it have been that Obama surrendered to BP because he had two years earlier accepted more campaign cash from the company – a mix of cash from employees and political action committees – than any politician over the last twenty years? Not many in the environmental community were asking.
* * *
Following an EPA report on greenhouse gas emissions in 2009, Lisa Jackson appeared ready for a fight. In a written statement, Jackson declared carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases a threat to public health. No EPA administrator had ever made such bold comments.
“These long-overdue findings cement 2009’s place in history as the year when the United States Government began addressing the challenge of greenhouse-gas pollution and seizing the opportunity of clean-energy reform,” said Jackson.
It was her first major initiative at the EPA. This so-called “endangerment finding” was the necessary prerequisite that allowed the agency to enforce new fuel economy and greenhouse gas standards for motor vehicles and power plants. Jackson also moved to set stronger standards for mercury and toxic emissions and permitted California to implement its own set of greenhouse gas standards for vehicles, a reversal of a Bush-era policy.
This isn’t to say that Jackson enjoyed Obama’s support along the way. In fact, in some cases the administration outright opposed her efforts. In 2011 the White House moved to block the EPA from updating national clean air standards for smog. The episode echoed Bush tactics, where political expediency often trumped hard science. Sadly, Obama’s team was successful at stopping Jackson and the courts have stalled the EPA’s efforts to limit power plant pollution that blows across state lines.
“Disheartened would be a mild way to describe how clean air advocates felt when that happened,” said Frank O’Donnell of DC-based Clean Air Watch told CounterPunch. “Rather than rewarding Jackson for doing the right thing, the White House shoved her aside and literally adopted the polluter-friendly policy of … [President Bush] … and then proceeded to defend that flawed Bush policy in court.”
The message from the White House to clean-air advocates was clear: “Because the Republicans are so rotten on environmental issues, you’re stuck with whatever we do. If you don’t like it, tough luck. We don’t really care what you think. You have nowhere else to go.”
“I don’t recall any of the traditional clean-air champions in Congress raising hell over this. Party loyalty trumped substance,” recalls O’Donnell, who has spent decades working for better clean air standards in Washington. “William Faulkner once wrote, ‘Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.’ Lisa Jackson’s experience with ozone showed that an EPA administrator can get stabbed in the back by her boss just for doing her job.”
Jackson faced a similar uphill battle when it came to the issue of coal ash. In 2009 the EPA began the process to regulate coal ash, a byproduct of coal incineration, which contains toxic metals like mercury, arsenic, beryllium, cadmium, chromium and nickel. The United States produces over 70 million tons of coal ash annually. After numerous incidents where ash from power plants has made its way into groundwater supplies, environmentalists and concerned citizens have called for such coal waste to be regulated.
“The time has come for common sense national protections to ensure the safe disposal of these materials,” said Jackson when the EPA moved to first regulate coal ash, only to be halted by the White House. “Today, we are proposing measures to address the serious risk of groundwater contamination and threats to drinking water, as well as stronger safeguards against structural failures of coal ash impoundments.”
In 2008 a coal slurry impoundment at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston coal-fired power plant in Harriman, Tennessee, collapsed and more than 500 million gallons of toxic coal ash to enter the Tennessee River. Approximately 525 million gallons of black coal ash flowed into tributaries of the Tennessee River – the water supply for Chattanooga and millions of people living downstream in Alabama and Kentucky.
Obama wasn’t pleased with Jackson’s move to regulate filthy coal ash. In fact, he’s forced the EPA to delay its rules on multiple occasions. Despite lawsuits waged by environmental groups, as recently as January 2013 the EPA announced it “cannot provide a ‘definitive time’ for promulgating final regulations on the management of coal ash from power plants.”
No doubt it has been instances like these that prompted Lisa Jackson to leave the EPA and turn her back on Obama’s White House—a conflict adverse administration that more often than not made it difficult for Jackson to do her job. While she was no environmental crusader, as she defended fracking practices as well as nuclear energy, Jaskson did believe in regulatory enforcement. Her replacement, expected to be Gina McCarthy, will likely find the Obama White House as equally challenging in upholding these laws.
The was an excerpt from The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink.
More articles by:
JOSHUA FRANK is managing editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book, co-authored with Jeffrey St. Clair, is Big Heat: Earth on the Brink. He can be reached at joshua@counterpunch.org. You can troll him on Twitter @joshua__frank

Joe Biden: An Imperial Corporatist


Joe Biden: An Imperial Corporatist Wrapped in the Bloody Flag of Charlottesville

 

Photograph Source: Petty Officer 1st 

Class Chad J. McNeeley – Public Domain
Besides being a grabby old coot who needs to stop joking about complaints over his serially inappropriate touching of females, Joe Biden is a grinning neoliberal sell-out who stands well to the right of majority progressive public opinion. No elegantly crafted three-and-a-half minute campaign launch video on the horrors of Charlottesville and Donald Trump can change that essential fact.
The media trope that portrays “Lunch-Bucket Joe” Biden as a regular, down-to-earth guy who cares deeply about regular folks is pure, unadulterated bullshit. His real constituents wear pinstripe suits and works on Wall Street and in corporate headquarters. They fly around in fancy private jets. And the supposed “everyman liberal” Joe Biden is their loyal apparatchik.
“The Folks at the Top Aren’t Bad Guys”
It’s not for nothing that Biden relies on big money backers, not small and working-class donors – and that he is an especially close ally and beneficiary of Washington lobbyists. He has spent decades ripping on progressive “special interests” while joining with Republicans to advance policies harmful to the working-class.
In 1978, Biden worked for Wall Street by voting to rollback bankruptcy protections for college graduates with federal student loans. Six years later he did the same to vocational school graduates. In 2005, he worked with Republican allies to pass the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, which put traditional “clean slate” Chapter 7 bankruptcy out of reach for millions of ordinary Americans and thousands of small businesses. The bill put bankruptcy filers under far stricter Chapter 13 rules, turning countless citizens into de facto indentured servants of finance capital (including the many credit card companies headquartered in Delaware.) Biden backed an earlier version of the bill that was too corporatist even for Bill and Hillary Clinton.
He voted against a bill that would have compelled credit card companies to warn customers of the costs of only making minimum payments.
In 1979, Biden recognized campaign donations from Coca-Cola by cosponsoring a bill that permitted soft-drink producers to skirt antitrust laws. That same year he was one of just two Congressional Democrats to vote against a Judiciary Committee measure to increase consumers’ rights to sue corporations for price-fixing.
Biden strongly supported the 1999 Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, which permitted the re-merging of investment and commercial banking by repealing the Depression-era Glass–Steagall Act. This helped create the 2007-8 financial crisis and subsequent recession.
Biden naturally supported the corporate-neoliberal North American Free Trade agreement and the globalist investor rights Trans-Pacific Partnership deal.
All of this and more in Biden’s record is richly consistent with the beginning of his political career. He’s been an unapologetic corporatist from the start. As Branko Marcetic noted on Jacobin last summer:
“In 1984, the Washington Post specifically named him, along with Gary Hart and Bill Bradley, as one of the best-known figures among that era’s Democratic Party’s ‘neo-liberals,’ who ‘singled out slimming the role of government and pushing new technology’….Biden built his career advertising himself as someone who refuses to toe the progressive line. He proudly boasted of defying liberal orthodoxy on school busing, for instance. But throughout his career, that boast has most often taken the form of bashing liberal ‘special interests.’ Biden toured the country in 1985 chiding…unions and farmers for being too narrowly focused, and complained that Democrats too often ‘think in terms of special interests first and the greater interest second.’ In the latter case, Biden was specifically complaining about their opposition to his calls for a spending freeze on entitlements and an increase in the retirement age” (emphasis added).
“The Anti-Populist”
Biden is so corporatist and pro-Wall Street that he can’t join the other corporate (neo) liberals in the 2020 presidential horse race in playing what a still-Left Christopher Hitchens once called (in a sharp volume on the neoliberal Clintons) “the essence of American politics”: “the manipulation of populism by elitism.” Biden won’t deign to pay lip-service to populism. Indeed, he has billed himself the “anti-populist” – the antidote to both the right-wing reactionary populism of Trump and the leftish progressive populism of Bernie Sanders.
Biden absurdly criticizes those who advocate a universal basic income of “selling American workers short” and undermining the “dignity” of work. He opposes calls for free college tuition and Single Payer health insurance. He defends Big Business from popular criticism, writing in 2017 that “Some want to single out big corporations for all the blame. … But consumers, workers, and leaders have the power to hold every corporation to a higher standard, not simply cast business as the enemy.”
That’s called blaming the working-class victim. It’s also called propagating a fantasy – the existence of a political system in which the working-class majority has the power to hold concentrated wealth and power accountable.
“I don’t think five hundred billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble. The folks at the top aren’t bad guys,” he told the Brookings Institution last year – this as he claimed to worry about how the “gap is yawning” between the super-rich and the rest.
“I Have No Empathy…Give Me a Break”
Joe Biden is such a right-winger that he has even gone so far as to say that he has “no empathy” for Millennials struggle to get by in the savagely unequal and insecure precariat economy he helped create over his many, many years of service to the Lords of Capital. “The younger generation now tells me how tough things are—give me a break,” said Biden, while speaking to Patt Morrison of the Los Angeles Times last year. “No, no, I have no empathy for it, give me a break.”
So what if Millennials face a significant diminution of opportunity, wealth, income and security compared to the Baby Boomers with whom Biden identifies? Who cares if he helped shrink the American Dream for young people with the neoliberal policies and politics he helped advance?
“Reaching Across the Aisle to Get [Capitalist] Things Done” 
How Biden has managed to simultaneously distance himself from majority progressive-populist sentiments and pose as a friend of the everyday working man is an interesting question that probably can’t be answered without factoring in the Orwellian role of corporate media in promoting love as hate, war as peace, black as white, and corporate apparatchiks as regular working-class guys.
A critical part of Joe “Anti-Populist” Biden’s media-crafted appeal is his “get things done” claim to be able to “reach out across the aisle” in the famous, hallowed, and CNN- and “P”BS-honored “spirit of bipartisanship.” That’s a shame. Why should we want a president who promises to team up with the widely loathed and creeping fascist white-nationalist Republican Party? And what has the holy bipartisanship that Biden is celebrated for embracing wrought for We the People over the years? Not much. As Andrew Cockburn wrote last month at Harpers:
“By tapping into…popular tropes—‘The system is broken,’ ‘Why can’t Congress just get along?’—the practitioners of bipartisanship conveniently gloss over the more evident reality: that the system is under sustained assault by a [bipartisan] ideology bent on destroying the remnants of the New Deal to the benefit of a greed-driven oligarchy. It was bipartisan accord, after all, that brought us the permanent war economy, the war on drugs, the mass incarceration of black people [Biden backed Bill Clinton’s ‘Three Strikes’ crime and prison bill – P.S.], 1990s welfare ‘reform’ [Biden backed the Clinton-Gingrich abolition of Aid for Families with Dependent Children], Wall Street deregulation and the consequent $16 trillion in bank bailouts, the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, and other atrocities too numerous to mention. If the system is indeed broken, it is because interested parties are doing their best to break it” (emphasis added).
Biden even took his embrace of the supposedly sacred virtue of bipartisanship to the grotesque level of forming close friendships with vicious southern white racists like Republican Senators Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, not to mention the frothing warmonger John McCain.
With Biden as with Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and a long line of dismal dollar Democrats in the neoliberal era, there’s an accurate translation for “reaching across the aisle to get things done:” joining hands across the two major party wings of the same corporate-imperial bird of prey to make policy in accord with the wishes of the rich and powerful.
“A March to Peace and Security” 
Speaking of young people and empire, no assessment of “Lunch Bucket Joe” (LBJ) Biden is complete without reference to what Institute for Policy Studies foreign policy analyst Stephen Zunes calls Biden’s “key role in making possible an inappropriate and utterly disastrous war” – the monumentally criminal and mass-murderous U.S. invasion of Iraq. As Zunes explains at The Progressive:
“As chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, Biden stated that Saddam Hussein had a sizable arsenal of chemical weapons as well as biological weapons, including anthrax, and that ‘he may have a strain’ of smallpox, despite UN inspectors reporting that Iraq no longer appeared to have any weaponized chemical or biological agents. And even though the International Atomic Energy Agency had reported as far back as 1997 that there was no evidence whatsoever that Iraq had any ongoing nuclear program, Biden insisted that Saddam was ‘seeking nuclear weapons.’”
“At the start of hearings before his committee on July 31, 2002, Biden stated, ‘One thing is clear: These weapons must be dislodged from Saddam, or Saddam must be dislodged from power. If we wait for the danger from Saddam to become clear, it could be too late…
“In an Orwellian twist of language designed to justify the war resolution, Biden claimed in Senate session in October 2002, ‘I do not believe this is a rush to war. I believe it is a march to peace and security.’ This gave President Bush the unprecedented authority to invade a country on the far side of the world that was no threat to the United States” (emphasis added).
It was an invasion that led to the premature death of 4500 mostly younger U.S. Americans – and of course to much larger Iraqi casualties.
The “Stop Sanders Democrats”
Why is this dirty old imperialist and corporatist dog being rolled out to corporate media acclaim as the supposed people’s alternative to Trump in the White House? It’s all about blocking Bernie Sanders, who is the Democrats’ best chance to win back the presidency since he nearly won the Democratic presidential nomination three years ago (Sanders would have prevailed over the vapid centrist Hillary Clinton but for the corrupt shenanigans of the Democratic National Committee) and is still running (as before) in sincere accord with majority-progressive-populist sentiments on key domestic issues. Norman Solomon has explained it well here at Counterpunch:
“Biden has arrived as a presidential candidate to rescue the Democratic Party from Bernie Sanders….Urgency is in the media air. Last week, the New York Times told readers that ‘Stop Sanders’ Democrats were ‘agonizing over his momentum.’ The story was front-page news. At the Washington Post, a two-sentence headline appeared just above a nice photo of Biden: ‘Far-Left Policies Will Drive a 2020 Defeat, Centrist Democrats Fear. So They’re Floating Alternatives.’…Biden is the most reliable alternative for corporate America. He has what Sanders completely lacks—vast experience as an elected official serving the interests of credit-card companies, big banks, insurance firms and other parts of the financial services industry. His alignment with corporate interests has been comprehensive. It was a fulcrum of his entire political career when, in 1993, Sen. Biden voted yes while most Democrats in Congress voted against NAFTA….In recent months, from his pro-corporate vantage point, Biden has been taking potshots at the progressive populism of Bernie Sanders. At a gathering in Alabama last fall, Biden said: ‘Guys, the wealthy are as patriotic as the poor. I know Bernie doesn’t like me saying that, but they are’” (emphasis added).
Only the popular front-runner Sanders is likely to prevail against Trump even without a recession (certainly a possibility) between now and the election. But, as in the last presidential cycle, corporate-Democratic politicos are working to sabotage the nomination of their most viable candidate in the general election. They are:
+ Flooding the primary campaign with such an absurdly large number of candidates that Sanders will likely be unable to garner the majority of primary delegates required for a first-ballot nomination at the 2020 Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee.
+ Coordinating among the Democratic Convention super-delegates—the more than 350 county and state party bosses and elected officials who are granted delegate status without election—to vote as a bloc to stop Sanders on the convention’s second ballot. (These super-delegates exist precisely for the purpose of blocking challengers to the party’s corporate establishment.)
+ Working to change state party elections from caucuses to primaries, as caucuses are friendlier to progressive challengers. (Sanders won 11 of the nation’s 18 caucus states three years ago.)
+ Smearing Sanders’ popular social-democratic policy agenda as “fantastic,” “unaffordable,” “unrealistic” and too dangerously “socialist”—this while Democratic elites refuse to acknowledge the fascist tendencies of the president they helped elect in 2016.
+ Branding the electable Sanders “unelectable” on the grounds that he is an “extremist” who is “too far left” for the U.S. electorate generally and independent voters specifically.
The “unelectable” charge is false. Sanders appeals to independents (who are nowhere near as conservative as is commonly reported), people of color, infrequent voters and the white working-class that has largely abandoned the Democratic Party. His anti-establishment message, coupled with his long record of representing rural voters, makes him highly competitive with Trump, not only in the Rust Belts states where Hillary Clinton faltered but even in some dark red states like West Virginia. Even the likes of Karl Rove believe Sanders could defeat Trump in 2020.
Biden is part of the corporate “Stop Sanders” campaign inside the Democratic Party. It helps that he is a white male in an election cycle shaped by the Democrats’ fear that running a woman and/or person of color might fuel the patriarchal and racist sentiments of the Trump base, increasing its turnout in battleground states.
Look for the Democratic establishment to do everything it can to prevent its party from defeating Trump by running its most popular candidate, Bernie Sanders. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. The Democratic Party exists to serve its corporate clients. Its leaders fear the specter of socialism while the world’s most powerful nation threatens to slide into fascism. (Never mind that democratic eco-socialism—a political project significantly more radical than what Sanders is proposing—is precisely what America and the world need right now.) Establishment Democrats would rather lose to a white-nationalist right than even the mildly social-democratic left within their own party. It’s why the late political scientist Sheldon Wolin labeled them “the Inauthentic Opposition.”
The Best Thing Joe Can Do
Joe Biden can wave the bloody flag of Charlottesville all he wants. He is the distilled essence of neoliberal Fake Resistance and Inauthentic Opposition. Barring an economic meltdown between now and the first Tuesday in November of 2020, look for him to get knocked out by the orange beast in the general election if the “Stop Sanders” Democrats are successful.
Keep your passports up to date. Trumpism is Amerikaner fascism, eager to up its ugly game by stepping beyond mere flirtation with mass violence. As Paul Krugman recently told a nonplussed Anderson Cooper on CNN, “if you’re not terrified” yet, then “you]re not paying attention”:
Cooper: “You write that it’s very much up in the air whether America as we know it will survive.”
Krugman: “Institutions depend upon the willingness of people to obey norms, and occasionally to say, okay, ‘this is not how we do things in our country.’ …This didn’t start with Trump. There’s been a steady erosion of those norms. This has been building for a long time, and we’re very close to the edge right now.”
Cooper: “When you say close to the edge, what does that mean to you?”
Krugman: “You know, on paper, we’ll stay a democracy, but I worry very much about a sort of Hungary-type situation where you have on paper the institutions of democracy. You even hold votes, but the system is rigged, and in fact, it’s become effectively you have a one-party rule…We’re very close. If Trump is re-elected if the Republicans retake control of the House, what are the odds that we will really have a functioning democracy after that?”
Cooper: “I mean, that’s a pretty terrifying idea”
Krugman: “If you’re not terrified, you’re not paying attention”
What Biden said in his launch video yesterday morning is correct: “If we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation…We can’t forget what happened in Charlottesville.” A second Trump term is not a pleasant thing to contemplate. Biden says he “can’t stand by and let that happen.”
The irony is the best thing he could do to stop a second Trump term is to stand aside and tell the rest of the candidate field and voters to congeal behind Sanders. The corporate-neoliberal Democratic Clinton-Obama model is what put the supremely dangerous orange monster in the White House in the first place in 2016. The establishment Democrats, who prefer barbarism to even the mildest hint of socialism, are working to give the monster a second term. If Joe really hates fascism as much as his launch video suggests, then he needs to de-launch. Maybe some activists in Iowa or New Hampshire can set up for his final, politically fatal gropes. Extreme times call for extreme measures. His candidacy is terrifying.
More articles by:

UYGHUR KILLERS TRAINED BY THE USA

  https://x.com/Partisangirl/status/1867924657464295716 Syrian Girl  @Partisangirl When Syria falls, we all fall down. Post vertalen