The Skinny: And Sometimes You Miss

 

Fascist Financial Incentives, Biden Should Drop Out and Squad Goals

 

Why Nobody in the Establishment Really Wants to Stop the Fascist Creep in America

 

Private sector seeks to profit by detaining migrant kids 

In today’s article analysis I’d like to reach back to October 3rd to take a look at an incredibly important and well done AP/Frontline investigation that didn’t get anywhere near as much coverage in the mainstream media as it deserved for reasons I’m going to elaborate in this commentary.

Obviously you should read the whole article, but the essential points you need to know are that the Trump administration has begun offloading the warehousing of migrant children on a politically-connected private contractor through a no-bid contract. This contract was awarded despite the contractor’s legally documented past history of defrauding the U.S. government and remains in place even though the detention center is currently not holding any migrant children.

That contractor, Comprehensive Health Services Inc, is owned by a company called Caliburn International Corp and on the board of Caliburn sits Former White House chief of staff and retired general John Kelly.

Finally, in the odd event you aren’t already about to throw up please be reminded that Kelly is a “zero tolerance” immigration policy hardliner who has been selling myths about Al-Qaeda agents in Mexico and dirty bombs to demonize migrants for more than a decade now – and he was an instrumental part of the Trump administration’s ongoing war against brown people in general until he stepped down as Chief of Staff.

In short, what you’re looking at is a closed circle of corruption in which public money is being funneled to an administration-connected private corporation to address a “crisis” wholly created by that same administration (and administrator’s) objectively fascist policies. The synergy and brass balls involved here would almost be beautiful if it weren’t so evil, sickening and wrong – the fact that this is almost certainly entirely “legal” goes a very long way to explaining how deeply corrupt American politics is.

Unfortunately, as this article briefly touches on and I have repeatedly written about in the past, this situation is by no means unique – “While CHS is the first private company providing shelter to migrant children, other private companies have been involved for more than five years in providing other services relating to the care of migrant children. The GEO Group, for example, runs several migrant family shelters. Defense contractor General Dynamics Information Technology, whose board includes Trump’s former Defense Secretary James Mattis, has contracts to review children’s case files and make sure they are reunited with their parents or in safe homes, often with other relatives. Intelligence contractor MVM, Inc. holds contracts to transport migrant children by bus, van or even airplane.”

Nor is the problem confined to the care of immorally imprisoned migrant children; we have already seen the near identical merging of public policy and private interests in former Attorney General Jeff Sessions expanded “War on Drugs” and the hiring of thousands of new ICE guards for adult migrant capture and detention, benefiting private prisons and the ICE guard’s union, who both in turn enthusiastically support the Trump administration. As we just discussed recently, it seems entirely likely that this same “policy into profit” motive is the real motivation behind Trump’s recent attacks on the “homeless” and his rumored policy to “address” the problem.

Obviously this level of institutional corruption alone represents a serious problem; and that problem is largely bipartisan – although this article tries to give the Obama administration credit for moving away from CHS in particular and towards a religious organization for detaining migrant children, the simple truth is the fact that it was the previous administration that built these facilities and President Obama’s team only decided to look at phasing out *some* private contractors in 2016 suggests the rot goes far deeper than party politics.

And that I think is the handle that the average person needs to grasp precisely how, day after day, our society is falling to the fascist creep and inching towards something akin to open corporatism (in the Pinochet or Mussolini sense) backed by a police state, if not an outright fascist dictatorship.

When you’re trying to figure out how this happened, why we’re allowing baby jails, concentration camps, open nepotism, threats of civil war, a government standing in flagrant violation of its own laws, why aren’t we arresting fascist street gangs, how are we tolerating the very existence reactionary mass shooters openly inspired by the fascist rhetoric of an reality TV show president – it’s important to remember that someone, somewhere with enough power and influence to sway government policy is probably getting an extra five dollars a share and a cushy job on the board after he retires.

This isn’t really about Republicans (who’re open fascists) or Democrats (who’re merely fascist collaborators) so much as it’s about a ruling and or “investor” class that gleefully and often far too quietly profits from the fascist creep. Until those people are exposed and until that business is no longer profitable, there is little point in expecting the establishment (and their media lapdogs) to accurately report or recognize the fascist nature of the alarming violence and incessant, almost absurd levels of corruption going on around us.

As Upton Sinclair once wrote “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

 

Why “Palooka Joe” Biden Should End His 2020 Nomination Run Immediately

Frankly, I’m certainly not sure most people actually realize this yet (especially if some questionably conducted polls are to be believed) but in the past couple of months the entire rational for Joe Biden’s quixotic 2020 campaign to be President has now come completely undone.

As Palooka Joe himself and numerous other “establishment Democrat” influencers have noted, Biden’s major selling point as a candidate has always been his supposed invincibility against Downmarket Mussolini at the ballot box. This guy isn’t promising new programs, or any new ideas; Joe Biden is explicitly running on his ability to beat Trump in 2020 and take America back to the supposedly halcyon days before Herr Donald was elected.

In fact, Joe’s campaign has gone out of its way to associate Biden with former President Obama precisely to stress his established popularity with potential voters; which would seemingly be a prerequisite for beating a right wing “populist” demagogue in a fundamentally rigged electoral process. The logic here is simplistic enough: the American electorate is still madly in love with Barack Obama, the former President in turn liked Joe Biden enough to name him Vice President (twice) and as such the public should love Biden enough to put him over against Trump – a man who is hated by all sane people.

There’s just one obvious problem however – the more voters learn about Biden and his record of public service, the harder it becomes to like him or perhaps more importantly, meaningfully differentiate him from the man whose defeat represents the entire reason Joe is running, Donald Trump

Bear with me here for a moment – let’s just pretend Joe Biden has won the nomination and you’re a Democratic Party strategist charged with getting your guy across the finish line and winning in November 2020; how are you going to attack Trump without accidentally bringing up some reason why Biden is awful?

Are you going to go after Trump’s misogyny and shocking record of sexual assault allegations? Fine, but you’re still going to have to explain why Biden can’t stop inappropriately touching young women on the campaign trail. Are you excited to talk about the Anita Hill hearings? Because, let me assure you that Trump is.

Are you going to go after Trump’s well established “take all comers” bigotry? Well, Biden keeps touting his work with segregationists, has openly supported racist policies during his career and to this day keeps saying things about African Americans that are objectively pretty racist – that’s going to come up.

How about Trump’s mental fitness for office? Uh-oh, Joe Biden can’t string three sentences together without either a moment where he “misspoke” or a rambling, disconnected monologue about nothing in particular, which will often be interrupted by a repeating stutter that makes you question where the hell his mind is at during his answer to literally any given question.

How about attacking Trump’s bloodthirsty imperialism? Whoops, Biden backed George W. Bush’s illegal Iraq War until it was political suicide to keep supporting an obviously immoral conflict. Will you attack the concentration camps? Biden was part of the administration that built those camps. What about Trump’s pivot back towards racist mass incarceration? Biden wrote the 1994 Crime Bill that is universally recognized as a primary driver for racialized mass incarceration in modern America.

Ok so obviously you’re going to have to go after Trump’s gifts to corporations, Wall Street and the banks right? Or maybe not, since Joe Biden has made a career out of helping insurance companies and lenders traps poor folks in debt forever – and he sure does love himself some Wall Street.

I know; you’re going to base Biden’s 2020 campaign on the open specter of Downmarket Mussolini’s corruption right?

Unfortunately then you’ll then have to keep explaining why Hunter Biden was making $600K a year on the Board of a connected Ukrainian oil company with no experience; and all of this is of course assuming that you somehow figure out a way to absolve Biden for pressuring the Ukraine to have the prosecutor investigating the company that employs his son fired, even though Joe Biden absolutely admitted on video tape that he did so. Look you can feed partisans that line about “everyone thought the prosecutor was really corrupt and Biden was just the messenger” all you like, but it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny for the same reason Trump’s denials about pressuring Ukraine to get Biden doesn’t – he admitted it!

Finally if you somehow managed to swim through that f*cking minefield without dampening voter enthusiasm, we can repeat the entire process with Joe, Hunter and China every time Trump’s open corruption comes up. Sounds like fun doesn’t it? Yeah I didn’t think so either.

To put it bluntly, this actually goes a lot deeper than just the election because Joe Biden’s corruption is currently Donald Trump’s biggest and most effective shield in the ongoing maybe/sorta/likely impeachment inquiry conducted by the Pelosi-controlled House of Congress. Impeachment itself is an inherently political, not legal process and public opinion or outrage about the President’s crimes will play a significant role in whether or not these proceedings are successful. If the Democrats were truly committed to removing a corrupt fascist POTUS (and to be clear, I think they should be for a lot more reasons than just the Klepto Kaiser’s tin-pot dictator dance with the Ukraine) they would force Joe Biden to drop out – stripping Trump of his number one deflection and primary defense for grasping unconstitutional powers for the office.

In other words, far from being the antidote to Trumpism, Joe Biden is a significant portion of the reason why Trump’s outrageously dictatorial behavior has a chance of surviving both this impeachment inquiry and the 2020 election – his campaign is objectively an obstacle to removing a lawless, fascist president no matter which method of doing so you favor.

Now to be clear I think it’s important to note here that while a staggering number of the things wrong with Downmarket Mussolini are also in some way “wrong” with Palooka Joe Biden, I’m not making an effort here to suggest that they are “equally bad” – because that would be false and it’s very much besides the point. Donald Trump is by several orders of magnitude more repugnant than Joe Biden, as indeed all self-serving neoliberal politicians are not precisely “equally as bad” as the new breed of corrupt fascist slowly dominating American politics – the question at hand is does it matter?

In the 2016 presidential election the Democratic Party alienated left wing and “independent” voters by nominating an old time party apparatchik with a long and checkered service record whose flaws and corruptions curiously mirrored Trump’s own outrageous statements and behavior. In that election too however, it was fair to say that Hillary Clinton was not “as bad” as Trump – for just one obvious example, he’s a rapist, she merely married and defended one. Just as Trump is unarguably worse than Biden, Trump was unarguably worse than Hillary.

Unfortunately this mirror morass and Clinton’s resulting inability to effectively attack the monstrous qualities that should have disqualified Trump without harming her own campaign, had an asymmetrical effect on the electorate – while many traditional Dem voters lost interest in the race, Trump stayed steady. Whether this is “fair” or not is beside the point; Trump wasn’t some sort of unstoppable Election Day juggernaut – he was Romney plus a standard population increase boost. Sexism in American and the Electoral College were known quantities going into the election; Hillary failed.

Now we are again facing a situation where it looks like much of the Dem establishment is dead set on nominating “an old time party apparatchik with a long and checkered service record whose flaws and corruptions curiously mirrored Trump’s own outrageous statements and behavior.”

Are Democrats ready to risk another four years of fascist rule on the theory that this time voters will understand why Biden’s flaws are excusable because Trump’s similar flaws are not? Are you?

If Joe Biden wants to help beat Trump badly enough that it’s his only reason for being in the race (like he says it is) then he should drop the f*ck out of the nomination race immediately – for the good of his party and his country.

 

A Mea Culpa and What The Squad’s Endorsement of Sanders really means

As most of you are probably now already aware, the Bernie Sanders 2020 Presidential Campaign had a fantastic evening last night.

Not only was the candidate’s performance extremely sharp in what was once again a hostile debate environment, but credible news broke that Sanders had locked up the endorsement of key progressive Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Detroit’s own Rashida Tlaib for his 2020 campaign.

Obviously this is very good news, but before we talk a little bit about why, I feel obligated to offer at least a qualified mea culpa here.

I must admit that I am pleasantly surprised, although totally not shocked about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to endorse Bernie Sanders. Although I’m not sure I ever articulated my fears fully, I can confess that AOC’s slow shift into mainstream Democratic Party and rich liberal donor orbits had me convinced she was delaying her endorsement because she intended to back Elizabeth Warren at a later date and wanted to avoid unnecessary drama while doing so.

When I am right and the rest of the crowd is wrong, I am only too happy to remind readers of my prescience; and so it is only fair to acknowledge the times when I am (even just in my heart) wrong and admit that friends who possessed more faith in the young Congresswoman from the Bronx were in fact correct in their analysis.

Furthermore it should be noted that all three Congresswoman were under enormous amounts of pressure from the party’s mainstream to knife Sanders – this is a brave act and deserves to be acknowledged as such.

This is not meant to suggest that I don’t still question the wisdom of hobnobbing with celebrity neoliberals, calling to keep US troops in Syria or Tlaib’s bizarre fascination with continuing to imply Trump is a Russian spy long after the idea has been proven ridiculous, but some disagreement here is to be expected – all three Congresswomen are in fact “progressives” and not socialists; nobody, not even Sanders, is perfect.

Okay, so why are these endorsements so important for Bernie’s campaign?

First they put flame to the lie that Bernie and his movement are out of step, spent or devoid of momentum. Please keep in mind that not more than two days ago an LA Times opinion piece written by a public intellectual loosely connected to the mainstream Democratic Party via think tank, strongly advocating the idea that Bernie should drop out and endorse Elizabeth Warren – a suggestion that now reveals itself to be ludicrous on its face as three of the youngest, highest profile, most popular legislators in the entire Party back Sanders.

Indeed, these endorsement go a long way to suggesting that after three years of constant attempts to sideline the formation of a publicly popular, vocally demanding and decidedly “left wing” (at least by American standards) politics, the Democratic Party establishment has failed to shatter what is often called the “Sanders” movement but is perhaps more accurately described as a Democratic Socialist political insurgency breaking out all across American social (and thus political) life.

Secondly, albeit less vitally, the fact Ocasio-Cortez, Omar and Tlaib are all young women of color further discredits the constantly gurgling stream of smears suggesting that Sanders is too white, too male, too old, somehow sexist, somehow racist and objectively “the kind of dudebro who overstays his welcome on your couch”…

To be fair, the frequency and effectiveness of these types of smears against Sanders was already waning, but this firmly renders such false arguments impotent.

This is of course a surface level type of implicitly dishonest and maliciously weaponized identity politics; the true value in Sanders receiving an endorsement from a labor class Latina of Puerto Rican heritage from the Bronx, a naturalized Somali-American woman elected out of Minnesota and a Palestinian-American elected in Michigan because of her activist’s mentality, is the demonstration that Bernie can bring together the kind of broad voter coalition needed to win key states and beat Donald Trump in 2020.

While it won’t exactly be news to Sanders supporters that the policies and positions furthered by not only Sanders and the congresswomen now endorsing him, but also organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America and Our Revolution, has a broad and synergistic appeal to members of the U.S. labor class across an exceptionally wide number of traditional demographics – this is not exactly common knowledge in the mainstream media and exposes the campaign against the “Bernie Bros” as hogwash.

Despite the mainstream liberal machine’s attempts to wipe out the nascent, almost infant left inside the Democratic Party, the initial formations of a real resistance, a resistance to neoliberalism at the very least, have remained intact – and that is a joyous and vindicating result in its own right.

The Ocasio-Cortez endorsement is particularly important because it thwarts a months-long campaign by the media to isolate AOC from Sanders (because he’s an independent) as well as Omar and Tlaib (because they oppose Israeli apartheid and the legalized oppression of Palestinians).

Most importantly of all however, these three endorsements go a very long way towards demonstrating that Liz Warren’s attempts to peel off Democratic Socialist and other left wing voters by bridging (poorly) the gap between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, is not likely to remain successful in the long run – this is of course because it is in fact a product of tremendous media exposure and slanted coverage designed to split the left, as I’ve written about in the fairly recent past.

Finally and on a less relevant but infinitely more personal note, watching the mainstream liberal propagandists who tried to divide, de-fang and otherwise destroy not just the “Sanders” revolution but also their own youngest, brightest most left wing candidates in generations, recoil in horror from the realization that they had not only failed to play Ocasio-Cortez, but had in fact played themselves instead, was deeply satisfying on an intense and unabashedly personal level.

I almost got misty.

As even the always-ready-to-collaborate-Nation was forced to announce this evening: “Bernie’s Back” and the battle for the soul of the American left and the future of the U.S. labor class isn’t over at all – frankly, we’ve only just begun.

 

• Nina Illingworth