from O Society by MoA edited by O Society Oct 14, 2020 ,
John Kiriakou, who blew the whistle about CIA torture under the Bush regime, warns of the foreign policy a Joe Biden administration would pursue:
Literally the last thing I would do is to urge anybody to vote for Donald Trump. Trump has been a disaster in every sense of the word and in both foreign and domestic policy. But Biden is no panacea. He’s a center-right placeholder. [..]
If you think things will change in foreign policy under a President Biden, think again. It’ll be the same old expansionist, militarist policy that we had under George Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama.
Biden is more right than center. Even his campaign slogan is shared with the British conservatives.
A Joe Biden administration would extend the hostile policies towards Russia and China and continue to push for regime change in Venezuela, Syria, Iran, and Belarus. Even the organ of U.S. foreign policy orthodoxy, Foreign Affairs, states U.S. induced regime changes never achieve their aims:
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s repeated assertion around the time of the Iraq war that Washington’s pursuit of “stability at the expense of democracy” in the Middle East had produced neither was broadly true. But it turned out to have a corollary—that pursuing democracy at the expense of stability might also produce neither, but at even higher cost.
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Regime change will always tempt Washington. [..] The long, diverse, and tragic history of U.S.-backed regime change in the Middle East, however, suggests that such temptations—like most quick fixes that come along in life and politics—should be resisted.The next time U.S. leaders propose intervening in the region to overthrow a hostile regime, it can safely be assumed that such an enterprise will be less successful, more costly, and more replete with unintended consequences than proponents realize or admit. So far, at least, it has never been the other way around.
U.S. foreign policy is neoconservatism. U.S. economic policy is neoliberalism. This does not change from presidency to presidency. In a recent interview President Bashar al-Assad of Syria explains why this is the case:
Question 9: You definitely follow the presidential campaign in the United States. And do you hope that the new US President, regardless of the name of the winner, will review sanctions policies towards Syria?
President Assad: We don’t usually expect presidents in the American elections, we only expect CEOs; because you have a board, this board is made of the lobbies and the big corporates like banks and armaments and oil, etc. So, what you have is a CEO, and this CEO doesn’t have the right or the authority to review; he has to implement. And that’s what happened to Trump when he became president after the elections –
Journalist: He used to be CEO for many years before.
President Assad: Exactly! And he is a CEO anyway. He wanted to follow or pursue his own policy, and he was about to pay the price – you remember the impeachment issue. He had to swallow every word he said before the elections. So, that’s why I said you don’t expect a president, you only expect a CEO. If you want to talk about changing the policy, you have one board – the same board will not change its policy. The CEO will change but the board is still the same, so don’t expect anything.
Question 10: Who are this board? Who are these people?
President Assad: As I said, this board is made up of the lobbies, so they implement whatever they want, and they control the Congress and the others, and the media, etc. So, there’s an alliance between those different self-vested interest corporations in the US.
Noam Chomsky and Caitlin Johnstone argue the two political camps in the U.S. hardly differ except in their so-called “trigger words”:
When you look at US politics, it appears as though there are two mainstream political factions who very strongly disagree with one another. “Divided” is a word that comes up a lot. “Polarized” is another.
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But beneath all the hurled insults and heated debates, these two factions are actually furiously agreeing with one another. They’re agreeing the entire time.
They agree the US government should remain the center of a globe-spanning empire; they just angrily quibble over a few of the details of how that empire should be run [..].
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On all issues that most severely affect real people on mass scale, these two political factions are in emphatic agreement. They just pour a whole lot of sound and fury into the tiny one percent of the spectrum wherein they have some disagreement.
They do not allow for any mainstream discussion of if the oligarchic empire should continue to exist; all their issues, arguments and histrionics revolve around how it should exist.
This is what they are designed to do.
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Politics isn’t real in America. It’s a show. A two-handed sock puppet show to distract the audience while pickpockets rob them blind.
If you want to see things clearly, ignore the fake drama of the sock puppet show altogether and focus on advancing the real debate: that the US-centralized oligarchic empire is corrupt beyond redemption and should be completely dismantled.
I find it hard to disagree with these views.
To understand US politics, just look at professional wrestling. In front of the cameras, the wrestlers look and sound like they hate each other, even going so far as to piledrive each other and hit each other with chairs. Off-camera, they are owned by the same people sleep in the same hotel rooms.
The Republic Party uses conservative-coded rhetoric to justify the policies of its shareholders. The Democratic Party uses liberal-coded rhetoric to justify the same policies of the same shareholders.
The so-called “leftist” initiatives of the Democratic Party are largely a bunch of giveaways to rich people dressed in liberal rhetoric. The best example is probably Romneycare… er, Obamacare, which was invented by Mitt Romney and the bastion of right-wing think tanks, The Heritage Foundation.
The so-called “individual mandate” legalized forced “universal enrollment” and fined those who don’t enroll through something called a “shared responsibilty payment.” This literally forced the poor and dispossessed to hand over their meager earnings to large insurance corporations in exchange for fake health insurance that they couldn’t actually afford to use or send money to the IRS for no coverage at all.
Meet the Billionaires Who Run Trump’s Governmrnt
I suspect the pillars of the Biden/ Harris Administration will be simply more of the same:
1) Continued “stimulus” for the wealthy elites and swamp creatures who are investing big in her candidacy (neoliberalism)
2) Warfare and plenty of foreign “intervention” to placate the Borg (neoconservatism)
3) Sexual and racial identity politics used to convince the gullible Democratic voters points 1 and 2 are “liberal.”
The Free 