Welcome to Suspicious Angels

Hoist your glass, hum a few bars of “So long it’s been good to know you.  Elvis (aka Joe Biden) has left the building. As he departs stage left, democratic pols and main stream media perennially in the tank for the dems along with befuddled celebs jump into action. As they sprint to the podium to declare their love and devotion for the man they just threw overboard, both their relief at Biden’s downfall and their desire to make sure the condemned man had a stupendous last meal is evident. 

The dynamic duo, Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff got out ahead of the crowd: “he’s beloved, he is respected, and people want him to make that decision.” [Nancy Pelosi, 4 days before she slammed down the hammer on him]. “[Joe Biden] has been one of the most consequential presidents in our nation’s history, and his lifetime of service as a Senator, a Vice President, and now as President has made our country better.” [Statement from Congressman Adam Schiff who also participated in the Biden (symbolic) beheading]. Other media personalities and celebs kissing the ring included Rachel Maddow (of course), Stephen Colbert. Even the Veep and now presidential candidate, weighed in with her usual styleless prose: “Joe Biden’s legacy of accomplishments over the past three years is unmatched in modern history” [Kamala Harris]. 

Everyone who mattered got in on the benediction.  Look over there, a war criminal singing the praises of a fellow war criminal: “From a proud Israeli Zionist to a proud Irish American Zionist, I want to thank you for fifty years of public service and fifty years of support for the state of Israel.” [Benjamin Netanyahu, July 25] Make no mistake about it, Biden’s “support for the state of Israel” has brought him a very bountiful ROI. During his 36 years in the Senate, Biden was the chamber’s biggest recipient of donations from pro-Israeli lobbyists taking in $4.2 million. Moving on to his 2020 presidential campaign, grateful Zionists passed the hat and made his campaign the top beneficiary of their largesse: $3,747,383 [Open Secrets]

“Biden will go down as one of the great ones” Wait a minute what is this a coronation or a requiem for a fallen hero? Should we be readying a spot on Mount Rushmore? Or has TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) induced a state of total amnesia in America’s movers and shakers? History matters and in the case of Joe Biden who has been around so long, it matters immeasurably. So let’s take a quick stroll down memory lane and see how Joe the Senator, Joe the Veep and Joe the President fulfilled his promises to the people who elected him. The two areas that might reveal the real Joe Biden are first his foreign policy with particular emphasis on U.S. wars—both shooting wars and economic ones and second his domestic economic policy.

As a senator Joe Biden had the nasty habit of voting with the republicans as they pandered to the donor class.  He voted yeah with his republican brothers and sisters in 1981 to slash the top tax rate paid by the 1% from 70% to 50% and created exemptions from the estate tax for lots of millionaires and billionaires. That was just the beginning. In 1986, Biden voted (along with 32 other Democrats) to pass another of Ronald Reagan’s tax “reforms,” which lowered the top marginal tax rate, already at 50% to 28%. During his long tenure in the Senate, he always took the low road, voting to balance his gifts to the 1% with austerity for the 99%. When it came to making the 99% pay for the government revenue lost by tax cuts to the rich, he voted for draconian changes in Social Security including a gradual increase in the “normal” age for full retirement benefits from 65 to 67. Here’s how slippery Joe defended the undefendable —“While this program is severe, it is the only proposal that will halt the upward spiral of deficits, [which threaten] an economic and political crisis of extraordinary proportions.” 

There’s much more havoc that Joe’s undying support of corporate and financial interests wreaked on the 99%. We’ll only touch on two acts which together precipitated the 2008 financial collapse in which 11 million Americans lost their homes — the repeal of Glass Steagall, originally passed during the 1929 depression, prohibiting commercial banks from engaging in risky security trading (too late he described his vote as the “biggest regret” of his career) and the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act, another pig in a poke.

When it came to U.S. involvement in wars (which it never won), both as senator and vice president, Joe never saw a war he couldn’t cheerlead. An early advocate of NATO intervention in Bosnia in the mid-1990s, he doubled down by supporting a resolution authorizing President Clinton to send in American ground troops. He was all in for the Iraq wars (both Clinton’s and Bush’s). You’d be hard pressed to find a war that Joe couldn’t get behind including the war on drugs which by dint of its harsh penalties helped make America the number one penal colony in the world particularly for people of color (another war the U.S. lost).

 But the best is yet to come. As Obama’s VEEP, he was pleased as punch to cheerlead the coups and war policies that resulted in the overthrow of democratically elected governments in Honduras, Egypt, and Ukraine and military assaults on Yemen, the destruction of Libya and assassination of its leader, expansion of AFRICOM, the aggressive “pivot to Asia,” the subversion of Venezuela and war against Syria.

“I’m the first president this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world.” [Joe Biden, address to the nation, 7/24/2024]

That’s your president doing what American presidents do best. Lying. On the same day he made that [ludicrous] claim, the Pentagon announced air strikes in Yemen (which were unsuccessful). But what really gets the Prez’s juices flowing is the engagement of U.S. ground forces, which he managed to do in five countries (not counting Ukraine or the genocide in Gaza). [Cost of War Project, Brown University Annual Report]

How do we know all this? Because Biden told us —Oh, sure, I had months [to challenge Trump], but I was also doin’ a hell of a lot of other things, like wars around the world, like keeping NATO together, like working––anyway, But look…” [Biden to George Stephanopoulos, 7/25/2024]

While we’re at it, the War Hawk in Chief forbade Ukrainian President Zelensky from negotiating with Putin to end the Ukraine war several months after it started. A tragic decision from the view of both the Ukrainian and Russian people and an expensive decision for Americans who watched $175 billion U.S. taxpayer dollars fly into the most corrupt country in Europe. 

But demented Joe wasn’t through enriching those who least deserve it. He was Johnny-on-the-spot becoming a full-blown accessory to Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. 

We can see how well Joe is doing at blowing up the world by checking out the Doomsday Clock (The Doomsday Clock illustrates how close humanity is to self-destruction, due to nuclear weapons and climate change). For purposes of comparison, in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union and the signing of the START treaty (Strategic Arms Reduction treaty) the Doomsday Clock was set at 17 minutes to midnight. Now three decades later, after four ex-presidents and the sitting president have exercised their military muscle and catapulted the U.S into a military juggernaut, the hands of the clock stand at 90 seconds. Since Biden took office and started cranking up the war machine, the doomsday clock has lost another 10 seconds going from 100 seconds to 90, the closest to global nuclear catastrophe it has ever been.

That only counts the shooting wars Biden has led the U.S. into. The Biden administration has also waged world-wide economic war. Remember when Joe announced what the media called “punishing sanctions” on Russia? Joe promised to “turn the ruble into rubble. How did they work out? As the death knell to America’s hopes that it had successfully crippled Russia’s economic engine, the International Monetary Fund predicts that Russia will record economic growth of 3.2% this year, more than in any of the world’s advanced economies.

No doubt about it, the Biden foreign policy is a bust, but what about the domestic economy? Can he hang his hat on how his policies and programs have affected the lives and fortunes of the American people (aka voters)? Let’s check out some of the key metrics of how the economy is doing: Gas has risen more than 50% since the beginning of Biden’s presidency. [AAA, April 2024]; home prices are up 47% [Yahoo Finance, May 2024]; mortgage rates have more than doubled, a 21-year high [Newsweek, 9/26/2023]; most often purchased grocery items up 35% [Wall Street Journal]; during the Biden administration, student loan interest rates went from 3.73% to the current 6.53%.  As another mark against the administration, surveys indicate that almost half of Americans (46%) don’t have $500 in savings. Feeling hungry? A Big Mac will cost you 27% more than it did four years ago.

Joe’s entire 52-year career in public office is a troubling tale of betrayal of the peoples’ trust to serve the interests of wealthy backers. On two occasions he made haste to absolve his ultra-rich campaign donors of any responsibility for the highest income inequality the U.S. sports among all advanced nations. In 2018 — “I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason why we’re in trouble.”  And in 2019 —”Rich people are just as patriotic as poor people.”

On the campaign trail, he promised to deliver jobs, reduce poverty and tackle climate change. What the American public got instead was wars abroad and austerity at home. What he considers the signature acts of his administration — the Inflation Reduction Act, the Chips Act and the Infrastructure Act have been huge moneymakers for one group of Americans: the billionaires. Have the vast majority of Americans benefitted? No. Inflation is still high, particularly in the service sector (rents, insurance, mortgages etc.) which is 80% of the economy. But American corporations made out like bandits receiving $1.65 trillion in direct subsidies and tax cuts.

There’s lots more to be unimpressed by but what it adds up to is a leader who put politics over principle, who never saw a billionaire or a war he didn’t love, who played havoc with the free speech guarantees of the first amendment, became a partner in genocide and faced with a declining empire set at least one-third of the world on fire.

“Joe Biden will go down as one of the great ones, having led the country out of the disastrous term of his predecessor and quietly doing good things for all Americans… accomplishments that put him up there…with LBJ and FDR. Joe, I can’t imagine where we’d be without your selfless service.” [Ken Burns]

Who are you going to believe Ken Burns, George Clooney, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi or your lying eyes?

Hot off the press, U.S. president Joe Biden finally succumbed to the inevitable and dimly recognized what everyone else not only in America but worldwide have known for two years: one term of a demented president in the (self-described) most powerful country in the world is more than enough. Game over for Joe Biden. 

Who’s in charge now? Sad to say, only one credential, money, billions of it, is required to join the august gaggle of movers and shakers whose control over the two major U.S. parties is unshakeable. That’s where the “juice” in both parties comes from. A billionaire bonehead (Elon Musk) promising $45 million dollars PER month to Donald Trump’s candidacy automatically dons the mantle of kingmaker. Even what used to be the “party of the people”, doesn’t violate the rules of the game. $30 million raised in one evening as Hollywood heavy weights tried to hold on to the tottering dream of a second Joe Biden term. While the ashes of that dream were still warm, Kamala, the second half of this unholy pair, stepped in to revive the flailing ticket and the big money boys and girls stepped right up. Here’s what happened — “Donations Flood in for Kamala Harris as ActBlue Says It Raised Nearly $50M in Record Time” [Hollywood Reporter]. As far as the big money is concerned — question asked, question answered. If she was the perfect match for Joe Biden, who never saw a war he couldn’t get behind, prescribed austerity for everyone but his major donors and made the surveillance state America’s new normal then she’s the perfect person to fulfill his promise to them that “nothing will fundamentally change.”

If the qualifications for the top job in the U.S include catering to the wants of the rich and powerful, ignoring the rise of income inequality greater than in any other advanced economy and flipping the bird to the working-age adults who owe close to a quarter of a trillion dollars ($220 billion) in  medical debt. Kamala is the perfect fit. Meet the new boss same as the old boss.

For an up-close personal look at this latest imperial pick, SA is reprinting a piece we posted the day before the 2020 election shining the spotlight on Kamala — an article that’s as true in 2024 as it was in 2020.  Amazing, isn’t it, how the tiger never changes its stripes.

Two Peas in a Pod: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris

What hath the Democratic establishment composed of an assortment of neo-liberal glad-handers, austerity buffs, economic right wingers and war hawks presented us with for this quadrennial celebration of hypocrisy and boorishness (aka U.S. presidential election)? Why it’s a matched set — a super hawk and a super cop.

We’ve discussed ad nauseam the dispiriting career of Joe Biden, Democratic candidate for president. Now we turn the fire hose of truth onto the new democratic “It” girl—vice-president-in-waiting Kamala Harris. If Biden reminds us of the less than stellar past of the empire, Harris has donned the laurel wreath as the ‘gift’ the present tries to foist on the future. It’s a melody that’s been repeated with slight changes in harmony over the last eight decades, making the past a blueprint for a future which for the majority is no future at all.

How to describe a political chameleon like Kamala Harris? As with another go-along-to-get-along Democrat, John Kerry, she was for the Green New Deal and Medicare-for-all before she was against them. Anxious not to make her reversal seem like what it was — political opportunism— she deflected a question about her departure from progressive policies taking refuge in the identity defense, describing herself as — “a woman who grew up a black child in America who was also a prosecutor, also has a mother who arrived here at the age of 19 from India, who also likes hip-hop…” followed by that insincere and monumentally annoying giggle.  On another occasion, when she was asked to explain her 2019 comment on Medicare-for-all — “The idea is that everyone gets access to medical care…Let’s eliminate all that [the complexities of a profit-driven healthcare system) and move one,” she punted — “I would not have joined the ticket if I didn’t support what Joe is proposing.” To give it a nice global spin she ended with — “The future of everything we care about – from access to health care to voting rights – is on the ballot.”

That’s the essential Kamala — establishment-friendly, always on the side of the Democratic center-right mainstream, while continuing to keep a sharp eye on the pulse of other sectors of the party in order to shift her position as the wind blows.

What Kamala’s performance as both the San Francisco DA and the Attorney General for California point to are disturbing harbingers of an unprincipled, ambitious politician who by dint of her immorality and lack of principle is the perfect running mate for Joe Biden.

In her book, The Truths We Hold, Harris imaged herself a “progressive prosecutor” who used “the power of the office with a sense of fairness, perspective, and experience, someone who was clear about the need to hold serious criminals accountable and who understood that the best way to create safe communities was to prevent crime in the first place.”

That is not how others remember it. “As far as I know, she did very little if anything to improve the criminal justice system …when she had the authority to do something as attorney general she was absent… I’m very skeptical of her views of criminal justice… she basically carried on the policies of her predecessor for the most part in battling us on getting the prison population down and anything else that the government wanted to do to prevent prison conditions from improving.” [Donald Specter, executive director of the Prison Law Office]

Her self-described role as a “progressive” prosecutor is belied by her position on numerous progressive issues —1) Opposed legislation that would have made it mandatory for the California DOJ to independently investigate all police shootings. 2) Refused to support the use of body cameras on police state-wide. 3) Attempted to block a court order allowing transgender reassignment surgery for a transgender inmate. 4) Opposed the elimination of cash bail.

Taken as a whole her human rights record when she was California’s Attorney General makes her an ideal vice presidential candidate — for the Republicans. In a televised interview, she bragged about putting over 1500 people in jail for marijuana use and then emitted that fearsome giggle when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana. In another case, she blocked evidence she knew would have freed a man from death row until the courts forced her to do so.

Her disregard of lawful judicial orders set a new record. Even the normally acquiescent media had their fill. The LA Times reported that attorneys in Harris’ office had unsuccessfully argued in court that the state could not release the prisoners it had agreed to release [after a court order] because “if forced to release these inmates early, prisons would lose an important labor pool.” These are prisoners, the Times reported, who are paid between “8 cents to 37 cents per hour.”

What’s a crooked politician to do when her dirty deeds are uncovered? Just what Kamala did — “I was shocked, and I’m looking into it to see if the way it was characterized in the paper is actually how it occurred in court. I was very troubled by what I read. I just need to find out what did we actually say in court.” [“I’m shocked, shocked, to find that gambling is going on in here,” says Captain Renault while he’s collecting his winnings in Casablanca]

One of the most troubling blots on her record was her criminalization of truancy —ramming a law through the state legislature that gave her the power to jail the parents of kids who skipped school, most of whom she knew would be in black and brown families. “I believe a child going without an education is tantamount to a crime. So I decided I was going to start prosecuting parents for truancy. As a result of Harris’ bid to put herself in the national spotlight, in 2012, a homeless woman was sentenced to 180 days in jail. After a public outcry Harris was forced to drop the charge and the program.

No surprise then that Biden’s announcement of Harris as his VP sent for-profit prison stocks through the roof.

Harris talked a good game — “Fighting for the people meant fighting for middle class families who had lost their home and been defrauded by banks during the Great Recession. We went after five biggest banks in the U.S. and won $20B for California homeowners and passed the strongest anti-foreclosure laws in the country.” Nowhere near enough for the damage criminal banks wreaked on beleaguered California homeowners.

Like all politicians who allow dreams of glory to override their commitment to justice, the taint of corruption tarnishes her record. Take the case of current Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin, known to most Californians as the “foreclosure king” when he was CEO of One West Bank. In 2013, prosecutors on her staff told Harris in a “secret” memo that they had “uncovered evidence suggestive of widespread misconduct” at OneWest Bank, and recommended that she “conduct a full investigation of … misconduct and provide a public accounting of what happened.” Harris never did. The Campaign for Accountability went even further and called for a federal investigation of Mnuchin and OneWest Bank claiming they used “potentially illegal tactics to foreclose on as many as 80,000 California homes.” Harris’ response — “We went and we followed the facts and the evidence, and it’s a decision my office made. We pursued it just like any other case. We go and we take a case wherever the facts lead us.” [1/04/2017].

Steve Mnuchin left California a multi-millionaire. Thousands of Californians lost their homes and went bankrupt. Coincidentally, Harris was the only Democratic Senate candidate in 2016 to get a donation from a grateful criminal, Steve Mnuchin.

There’s much more. Often repeated on the campaign trail, her claim that she always fought “on behalf of survivors of sexual assault, a fight not just against predators but a fight against silence and stigma.”  There were a number of exceptions to that policy, notably the Catholic Church, a heavyweight in San Francisco politics. As district attorney, she threw survivors of pedophile priests under the bus by refusing to meet with them or release the clergy abuse files they needed to make their cases.

Joe and Kamala, two self-serving political hacks. One wrote a bill that criminalized the lives of black and brown people, the other enforced it.  So now you know. Two peas in a pod.

“Under the provisions of Title 2 of the 1950 Internal Security Act also known as the McCarran Act, the resident of the United States of America is still authorized without further approval by congress to determine an event of insurrection within the United States… The president is then authorized to
apprehend and detain each person for whom there is reasonable ground to believe will engage in future acts of sabotage. Persons apprehended shall be given a hearing… and shall then be confined to places of detention.” [Punishment Park, movie released in 1973)

Sound familiar? Like a dress rehearsal for a lot of broken promises. One stunning example is the political and law enforcement response to the January 6, 2021 hijinks at the Capitol when citizens, mostly weaponless and peaceful, protested the result of the 2020 election and attempted to enter the Capitol. That wasn’t how the powers-that-be saw it including Joe Biden set to be sworn in as president on January 20, 2021. Their unanimous reaction: rioters who “held a dagger at the throat of America and American democracy”. When he was finally “crowned,” President Biden (with overwhelming bipartisan support of congress, the media and his rich donors) decided that the events at the Capitol constituted an insurrection. Once what happened at the Capitol had been labeled an insurrection, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies had their marching orders— “to apprehend and detain each person [involved in the insurrection]

This can only be construed as an assault on the constitutional protections embodied in the Bill of Rights particularly the first amendment — “Congress shall make no law …abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or the right of the people to assemble peacefully” using national security as the excuse (justification). Don’t think almost every president hasn’t tried it, some more successfully than others going all the way back to 1798 and John Adams, second president of the U.S. A mere seven years after the Bill of Rights containing the first amendment was passed, he signed the Sedition Act into law making it a crime for American citizens to “print, utter, or publish…any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” about the government. Maybe presidential dementia is inherited. After that it was off to the races as insults to the civil rights of Americans became the sport of kings, or in this case, U.S. presidents.

Which brings us to two fundamental questions: What is a democracy? Does the U.S. qualify as one? According to Merriam Webster, democracy is a “government by the people… in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.” How about the United States? Sure it has all the trappings of a real democracy, a constitution —“We the people of the United States in order to form a more perfect union… and Bill of Rights (Amendments to the Constitution).

The trappings of democracy. Every two years there is a national election for congress, every four years a presidential election. But that troublesome phrase, “supreme power is vested in the people” doesn’t reflect the way things work in the U.S. Unless you are one of the people who are major donors of either party, your opinions are only taken seriously every four years when both parties are trolling for votes. In a poll taken last year [Associated Press—Norc Center for Public Affairs Research) in a strident rejection of what most U.S. lawmakers call the finest democratic republic in the world, the majority of U.S. adults agreed that the laws and policies set forth by what passes for the peoples’ representatives, including the president, are out of step with what most Americans want. While 71% of Americans believe that laws should truly represent the will of the people, less than half (48%) think they do. If it’s not for the voters who elected them, in whose interests are American laws being made? One-third of Americans believe that politicians march to the tune of their donors (lobbyists and interest groups) while only 10% believe that peoples’ needs and wants drive lawmaking in America.

Whether America ever was a democracy is debatable but since 1945 America has definitely gone in a different direction. Throwing off the façade of democracy to reveal its neo-colonial imperial core, the U.S. got right to work establishing its bona fides as the world’s hegemon, lavishing billions on its military industrial complex (remember Eisenhower’s warning) to build a military colossus. With virtually no competitors, it didn’t take long to become the world’s sole superpower, financially, economically, even politically. Not just a garden variety empire but the self-described mightiest empire in world history, sitting astride a unipolar world.

U.S. politicians keep spinning the tale of America’s world class democracy but the facts on the ground tell a different story. Income and wealth inequality are higher in the United States than in any other eveloped country, and they’re rising. Twenty-six million Americans do not have health insurance, the number one cause of bankruptcy in the U.S. is medical debt, close to 700,000 Americans are homeless every night, more than 13 million children experienced hunger in 2022, 40% of Americans cannot afford a $400 emergency and 11.5% of Americans live below the poverty line. Does this look like democracy, “a government by and for the people,” to you?

For decades the U.S. has marched to the beat of the Star-Spangled Banner, possessing the
world’s reserve currency, maintaining 800+ bases all over the world, its defense budget far
outstripping any other country, obsessed with spending trillions on national security and
defense. Enriching the military industrial complex was a side benefit but for their “generous” BFFs a welcome one. Reveling in its empire status, the U.S. made its living by overthrowing other countries and promoting endless wars (most of which it lost)—Korea in the 50s, Vietnam in the sixties and seventies, Grenada and Panama in the eighties, Iraq in the nineties and then again in the 2000s along with Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen, and as an accessory to genocide in Palestine.

What is it about an empire that pairing it with democracy is an oxymoron? An empire has to rely on its wealthy benefactors to stay in power. The price of their fealty involves a dust up with Americans and their civil rights. The whole world watched as American college students peacefully protested the rape of Gaza. The answer to what was called “insubordination” was horrific. Students, and professors who went to their aid, were pummeled, arrested, in the case of students, not allowed to graduate. Constitutional guarantees of free speech and assembly and right to protest suspended. The excuse is always the same. National security in wartime. Since the U.S. is always at war, fomenting one or assisting another country who is at war (think Israel and Ukraine) that pretty much wipes out the Bill of Rights.

There’s another way an empire can keep its people under control — make laws. Here are two examples: In 2023, the government wanted to ban Tik Tok, an immensely popular Chinese-owned social media company that one-third of Americans watch. Popularity of that magnitude raised the empire’s blood pressure. It accused Tik Tok of being in cahoots with the Chinese Communist Party, providing it with access to the user data of millions of Americans. As usual, no evidence existed to support this absurd allegation outside of the nationality of Tik Tok’s owners — Chinese. You can guess what happened. A number of Congressional boneheads introduced the Restrict Act requiring the creation of “procedures to identify, deter, disrupt, prevent, prohibit, and mitigate transactions involving information and communications technology products in which any foreign adversary has any interest and poses undue or unacceptable risk to national security.” A bill specially designed with Tik Tok in the cross hairs. If it passes the senate, Tik Tok must either sell its U.S. franchise to an American company or get outlawed.

The national security state bared Its teeth again in 2024 when it was challenged by young American college students peacefully protesting U.S. complicity in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. It worked once, why not again? The Antisemitism Awareness Act was passed by the dim bulbs in the House on May 2, by a vote of 320-91. To be sure most congress people were not so much inspired by the cause as by the boatloads of money AIPAC (main Israeli lobby) handed out in advance of the vote.

A hegemon no longer in a world that is multipolar, the U.S. has gone from “America at this moment stands at the summit of the world” [Winston Churchill, Iron Curtain speech 1945] to a declining empire that “can neither see others for who and what they are nor hear what they have to say. [2024 Patrick Lawrence, journalist and author]