Uprooted Palestinians are at the heart of the conflict in the M.E Palestinians uprooted by force of arms. Yet faced immense difficulties have survived, kept alive their history and culture, passed keys of family homes in occupied Palestine from one generation to the next.
The United States 2021 elections are drawing near, with the majority of them taking part on November 2nd, 2021.
Many are taking place on the surrounding days.
It is a volatile season, as the Democratic Party won the Presidential Elections in the face of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and holds a majority thanks to the vice president in the Congress.
In the House of Representatives, the Democrats hold the majority.
Interestingly, in the Senate the Republicans have 50 senators, but still Democrats hold majority with 48 senators, due to Kamala Harris swinging the vote.
Political instability was introduced in the United States following the fiasco that the withdrawal from Afghanistan turned into.
Americans were abandoned, Afghan allies were left behind, and an ISIS terror attack left 13 Americans and hundreds of Afghans dead.
This political instability didn’t simply appear out of nowhere with the fiasco in Afghanistan.
It was brewing when former President Donald Trump faced Joe Biden in the polls, and even before that.
This could also be a way to set the stage for Biden’s resignation, for health reasons or otherwise. A power grab is in order by Vice President Kamala Harris and the neoliberals she represents and whose interests she fights for.
Conservatives and traditionalists would surely come in the spotlight and receive quite a bit of negative attention focused at them. After all, they are the ones who elected Trump, and almost even re-elected him.
Various neoliberal movements, such as BLM and others will become the norm at Washington level, and that is when the true suppression attempts can begin.
This leading ideology will marginalize the states that are more conservative. There will likely be an ideology split within the United States, and even within singular states themselves.
Local authorities, as well as the local business elites and opinion leaders, will be strained, they will need to guide the population in one direction or another.
As a result, every state that’s strongly conservative or liberal will play a significant, leading role in the upcoming events ahead of the election, and after it.
If Texas remains strongly conservative, pro-Republican, as there is not even a Democrat candidate, it is likely that changes might be coming. Some states may wish for more independence in spending, development, legislation and more and be freed from some compulsory factors coming from Washington.
This doesn’t relate to a splitting of the federation into smaller countries, but rather a US in “two speeds”, similar to what is being observed in the European Union.
Texas is second in the US – second richest, and with its 29.1 million residents in 2020, is the second-largest U.S. state by both area and population. It is also a staple of conservatism and the Republican party, it promises to remain as such.
Naturally, the winner of the elections will become an important figure.
Currently, the governor of Texas is Greg Abbott, from the Republican Party.
He seems like a rather conservative, but adequate leader of his state, with the population having a generally positive opinion of him.
It is an up-and-down, however.
Recently, the most radical abortion law in the US has gone into effect, despite legal efforts to block it.
A near-total abortion ban in Texas empowers any private citizen to sue an abortion provider who violates the law, opening the floodgates to harassing and frivolous lawsuits from anti-abortion vigilantes that could eventually shutter most clinics in the state.
Senate Bill 8 ushered through the Republican-dominated Texas legislature and signed into law by the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, in May, bars abortion once embryonic cardiac activity is detected, which is around six weeks, and offers no exceptions for rape or incest.
He is also widely considered to have failed the COVID-19 pandemic. Texas was also woefully unprepared for the freezing cold, and citizens were left without power and heat for days.
Still, despite controversy, he is the favorite.
When CPAC, the nation’s leading conservative political conference, met in Dallas earlier this month, speakers included former Dallas state Sen. Don Huffines. And while Huffines bashed President Biden, he spent most of his time on stage blasting a fellow Republican: Gov. Greg Abbott.
Huffines invoked the story of the Alamo and praised Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, then said:
“Well, we don’t have a Donald Trump as governor. We don’t have Ron DeSantis as governor. We don’t have William B. Travis as governor. Unfortunately, we’ve got a career politician that’s a political windsock, a RINO (Republican in name only.)”
Abbott, citing the kickoff of the legislative special session, wasn’t there to defend himself. Huffines used his absence against him, attacking Abbott’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“He doesn’t want to face you,” Huffines said, “because he shredded our constitution. He put 3 million Texans on unemployment and dependent on the government in one day.”
But Huffines wasn’t just speaking out of passion. He’s also one of two candidates challenging Abbott as the governor seeks a third term in 2022. The other: former Texas Republican Party chairman Allen West, who’s made many of the same charges against Abbott’s pandemic response.
Essentially, the situation in Texas is such – the Republican party, more or less, has the victory certain. The favorite appears to be Greg Abbott, but his two main competitors are also from the Republican party.
The two main candidates: Don Huffines and Allen West are simply pushing the same platform, and want to win over the state away from Abbott, who has gone rogue, according to them.
There’s little to mention about West, he simply wants to “overthrow” Abbott, and he even gave up on the chairmanship of the Republican Party in Texas for the purpose. Both him and Huffines are on the same “team”.
In the case of Huffines, experts say that he didn’t win his own seat when he ran for Senate (in 2018), and it’s a seat that was more Republican than the state as a whole when he lost it. It is unlikely that this time he would have success.
Still, when he announced his campaign, he made no mention of Abbott.
It took aim at “politicians who offer nothing but excuses and lies” and promised to take on the “entrenched elites of the Austin swamp.” In promising more decisive action, Huffines said Texas needs to “finally finish the [border] wall” and that he would put the state “on a path to eliminating property taxes.”
Huffines was a strident conservative in the Senate. His announcement highlighted his record on issues important to the right, as well as his successful push to shut down the Dallas Public Schools bus agency amid reports of financial mismanagement there.
He got to the Senate in 2015 after unseating Sen. John Carona, R-Dallas, in the primary, attacking him as too moderate. But the Dallas-based Senate District 16 swung toward Democrats under former President Donald Trump, and Johnson beat Huffines by 8 percentage points in 2018.
Huffines stayed politically active after leaving the Senate and especially so in the past year, as conservative angst simmered over Abbott’s pandemic management. Even then, Huffines has an interesting family connection to the governor’s circle: His brother is James Huffines, whom Abbott tapped last spring to chair the Governor’s Strike Force to Open Texas.
Southern Methodist University political science professor Cal Jillson said the odds are that Republicans will ultimately get everything they’re pushing in the current special session, even if it takes several more special sessions to get those priorities passed.
“Right now, the Republicans have the Democrats strung up by their thumbs with their feet barely touching the ground,” Jillson said. “I think the Republicans are going to win on the substance, and how the Democrats frame their eventual loss very much will determine whether or not the two bases are equally energized by this fight or one is energized more than the other.”
In his most recent gubernatorial race in 2018, Abbott won with 55.8% of the vote.
Abbott has money too.
He’s sitting on a war chest of $55 million.
But despite rampant rumors that former Congressman Beto O’Rourke or even actor Matthew McConaughey will get into the race, Democrats still don’t have a declared candidate for governor.
Still, the Democrats appear to have given up on Texas, as there is no candidate, two months prior to election.
For those American readers not old enough to remember a time before the nationwide legalization of abortion through the court case known as Roe v. Wade (1973), let me remind you of some of the attributes of that era. The prevailing law made it very difficult to get an abortion in the United States, but not impossible. The real question was how much danger a pregnant woman was willing to face in the illegal “back alley” operations that were available. You see, as with most things illegal, a “black market” existed which would not only eliminate the unborn fetus, but often kill the distraught mother as well. If you were well off and determined, you could go abroad and have the operation performed with relative safety—often making the whole issue one of class privilege. Behind the scenes, one found two dramas played out: (a) the frantic, sometimes near-suicidal despair of the pregnant woman, often only a teenager, and (b) the sanctimonious prattle of those anti-abortionists —mostly men—who said they represented the will of an imagined deity.
Having said this, I do not want the reader to believe that there is no moral question when it comes to abortion. From an evolutionary standpoint, the fetus is a potential human being upon conception and may well have a “moral right” to that life trajectory. Yet that right exists within a broader context which requires that it should be balanced against a woman’s “moral right” to control her own body and the child’s “moral right” not to be born into an environment where he or she is basically unwanted. If we were to deal with this issue logically, the real answer to the dilemma of competing rights is surely free and universally available contraception—along with sensible sex education.
Part II—Anti-Abortion and Gun Mania—An Eerie Connection
There is yet another relevant fact to consider. Remember that the whole anti-abortion movement assumes that human life is uniquely valuable. However, our societies often do not act as if human life is something special—morally or otherwise. Take a look at the essay I wrote in June 2019 entitled “The Alleged Preciousness of Human Life.” I think it lays this failing out clearly and convincingly. Here in the United States, this fact is most obviously brought home by the society’s glorification of guns and the resultant deadly mayhem.
Actually, there is an eerie connection between the abortion issue and gun mania. It runs, of course, through the Republican Party. At the end of July 2021, “228 Republican members of Congress told the Supreme Court that it should overturn Roe v. Wade and release the court’s ‘vise grip on abortion politics.’” These are the same politicians who have sworn loyalty to the official Republican party platform that states “We uphold the right of individuals to keep and bear arms, a natural inalienable right . . . secured by the Second Amendment. Lawful gun ownership enables Americans to exercise their God-given right of self-defense.” In other words, the Republicans who demand that the courts subscribe to their view of the “right to life” of unborn children are the same ones who insist that each citizen has a right to possess society’s chief instrument of death. In this effort they invoke, once again, the approval of that imagined deity. They also misinterpret the Second Amendment, and play fast and loose with such words as “natural” and “inalienable.” Well, as it is often said of American politics, hypocrisy is the name of the game.
Part III—Culture War
Both abortion “rights” and gun “rights” are parts of a continuing American culture war—which also includes other hot topics such as real equality for Blacks, Native Americans, women in general, homosexuals, and transgender people, as well as other questions such as multiculturalism.
None of these issues existed as publicly divisive ones before the 1960s. Before that time, the misleading though strongly promoted image of American society was white, male, heterosexual, and benevolent. For those old enough to recognize it, the benign version of this model was given in a classic TV show called The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, which aired from 1952 to 1966. The resulting false picture of the near-perfect American family dwelling in a community where there were no serious social problems became so iconic that, subsequently, many Americans came to idealize the 1950s. One strongly suspects that the anti-abortion and pro-gun lobbies still do.
The Ozzie and Harriet model had broken down by the second half of the 1960s. What shattered the iconic image were (a) the demand for equal rights, both in social and political terms, for, initially, the country’s Black minority and female majority—that is, the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Liberation Movement and (b) opposition to the Vietnam War, which shredded any claims of “God-given” moral exceptionalism for the nation.
The “excrement hit the fan” the moment these campaigns for equal rights and peace began to gain political backing. People knew this was happening because new laws came into existence: anti-discrimination laws and others like the “war-powers act” which sought to limit presidential power to wage undeclared war. These were seen as progressive moves attuned to a different, if yet unfulfilled, humane canon of American ideals.
From that general moment until today, the progressive equality camp has been engaged in a culture war—really a struggle for political power—with the camp that favors the traditional white-male-heterosexual-anti-abortionist setup.
Part IV—Fascist Potential
For the past five years Donald Trump has been the leader of the latter camp, and this alignment helped him win the presidency in 2016. During this time Trump has been accused of racism, misogyny and sexual harassment, being a deadbeat, tax evasion, nepotism, blackmail, compulsive lying, encouraging police violence, subversion and insurrection, and being an advocate for the destruction of the world’s climate, among other things. If even half of these allegations are true, it means that the white-male-heterosexual-anti-abortionist crowd is quite willing to have a criminal personality with fascist leanings as their leader.
One way to interpret this is that, for this camp, democracy is not an important issue. It was democracy that led to the progressive change they hate and fear, and democracy that seems unable to reverse this course as quick as they would like. If voter rolls expand and gerrymandering is corrected, their influence will shrink. Under these circumstances this side in the culture war is willing to throw democracy out in favor of an authoritarian government run by thugs. We already see intimations of this in Arizona, Florida, and Texas, to say nothing at the U.S. capital on January 6, 2021.
One might ask, can the sane citizens of the U.S. take hope in Trump’s defeat in 2020? The answer is, perhaps not. If Donald Trump keeled over from a fatal coronary tomorrow, we would still be in trouble as a nation. One indicator of this, relevant to the abortion question, is that, in his brief stay in the White House, he was able to appoint to the Supreme Court three reactionary judges—making the balance 6 to 3 in favor of decisions turning the clock back to a pre-progressive time. The constitutional argument these six judges will most likely use toward this end is “states rights”—turning important social decisions over to state legislatures even if these bodies are filled with anti-democratic, conspiracy-theorist, paranoid, irrational politicians.
Part V—Democratic Party Weakness
This brings us full circle back to Roe v. Wade. “At issue before the court is a Mississippi law that bars most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy [Roe v. Wade set the cut off at 24 weeks when most experts believe fetus viability occurs.] There is no exception for rape or incest. The court will render its decision by next June, in the lead up to the mid-term elections.” Upholding the Mississippi law would invalidate Roe v. Wade and the legal status of nationwide abortion.
If legal precedent was a factor in this contest, there would be no doubt that Roe v. Wade would be upheld. For over forty years both lower court and past Supreme Court decisions have upheld the present law affirming the “woman’s right to choose an abortion before viability.” But, because the Trump administration managed to shift the balance of power on the high court, most observers now expect that Roe v. Wade will fall. Like wolves circling a wounded prey, various states with Republican legislatures have “introduced more than 500 restrictions on abortion over the past four months, a huge increase from previous years.”
In the meantime, the Democratic administration of Joe Biden has not spoken out strongly about the possible demise of Roe v. Wade. In fact, President Biden, who is Catholic and perhaps fears increased criticism by the Catholic Church, has refused to use the word “abortion” in public. His administration has also chosen not to challenge other conservative icons, such as the issue of gun control (or lack thereof). Put it all together and one suspects that President Joe Biden is a man bypassed by time. He is a politician of an age when bipartisan cooperation, and thus meaningful compromise, was possible. Yet this ended with the Obama presidency (2009-2017), when the Republican leadership, which is still in place, systematically attempted to defeat or stall everything President Obama attempted to accomplish. Biden was a witness to all of this in his role as vice president, but he seems to have learned nothing from that experience.
Part VI—Conclusion
So here is the situation: (1) An ex-president with a sociopathic personality leads a Republican minority of mostly white, heterosexual, male conspiracy theorists who have also taken up the cause of outlawing most abortions and, given half the chance, are perfectly willing to selectively overthrow the U.S. Constitution; (2) the defense of the realm is in the hands of Democratic Party leaders who, for the most part, have misjudged the current situation and rely on traditional bipartisanship—to wit: they are trying to compromise with those who do not respect the present democratic system; (3) as a consequence, leaders like Joe Biden have probably lost that part of the nation’s progressive achievements encoded in Roe v. Wade, and perhaps a lot more; (4) finally, in 2022 there will be mid-term elections for the Congress—to reelect the Republicans as they now exist is to put into power the bigoted, the prevaricators, and often the deranged.
It is anyone’s guess if, devoid of able and forceful Democratic leadership clearly articulating what is at stake, enough voting American citizens will understand the risk or have the motivation to stop a reactionary takeover.
In the United States, there is a dispute over whether democracy and freedom are compatible. Some, such as Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, have questioned their compatibility, and even asserted that freedom, rather than democracy, is what the U.S. really stands for. These terms are often used out of context and the dispute often suffers from a lack of historical knowledge, but there is nothing surprising about that.
Most of the men who put together the U.S. Constitution saw the world in class, racial and gender terms. While they wanted a more democratic government than that in England which, for propaganda purposes, they had portrayed as a tyranny, the new American democracy had to be carefully structured. Here is how this translated from theory into practice: the common man’s passions should be held in check by a system that kept the power to make policy in the hands of those white males who had “a material stake in society”—that is, the propertied class. For large segments of the population democracy was to be denied due to both gender and color.
Only a relative few of these men were thinking about freedom per se. And those who did, certainly did not define it in open-ended libertarian terms. Indeed, in late 18th century America, freedom came in two flavors: (1) first and foremost, the freedom from “unreasonable” taxation. What is unreasonable in this sense, would be argued about incessantly right up into the present. (2) Protection against the abuse of government power. The notion of abuse was directly connected to a) examples of alleged British excesses leading up to the American Revolution and b) Federalist party practices (when in power) like the suppression of critical newspapers and pamphlets. It is to cover a host of these sorts of issues, collectively posited as the protection of individual rights or freedoms, that Jefferson and Madison insisted a bill of rights be added to the Constitution as its first set of amendments. Once this was accomplished (December 1791) America’s democracy and a constitutional list of protected rights/freedoms, became compatible.
Part II—Getting Things Wrong
Now we fast forward to the present and Republican Senator Rand Paul, who was recently quoted in the New York Times as follows: “The idea of democracy and majority rule really is what goes against our history and what the country stands for [which is freedom]. The Jim Crow laws came out of democracy. That’s what you get when a majority ignores the rights of others.” He goes on to connect Republican Party opposition to a bipartisan congressional investigation of the January 6 “protest” (it was really an attempted insurrection) with the right of the political minority to protect itself against the majority. All of this is ahistorical and illogical.
When taking up Paul’s position there are several points to consider:
First: Historical accuracy. Paul seems confused about the status of majority and minority when it comes to freed slaves in the American South at the time Congress abandoned Reconstruction (March 1877). At this time, the Black population in large parts of the rural South constituted the numerical majority. So, the Jim Crow laws that quickly followed were the products of a local political/racial minority (southern Whites) seeking to suppress the newly won rights of their local majorities (southern Blacks). Thus, Paul has his facts backwards. He might have made this mistake because he thinks that the American Black population has been a minority at all times and in all places throughout the country’s history. Yet here we have an important exception—an exception that challenges the senator’s argument that discriminatory behavior principally has its source with oppressive majorities.
Today, if Senator Paul is looking for a minority in need of protection, he should focus on contemporary southern Blacks (who are now indeed a minority both in size and power.) They are now faced with a white Republican Party in control of state legislatures seeking to suppress the voting access of minorities.
Second. Paul seems not to take into consideration that the American majority has grown and diversified. In other words, when it comes to what the government (local, state and federal) cannot do to you (like suppress your voting rights)—the you have steadily grown larger. Theoretically this should bode ill for the rightwing state legislatures mentioned above. It is unclear how Senator Paul personally feels about this (such narrowing of the election laws has not taken place in his home state of Kentucky), but he is an active member of the Republican Party, and that is party playing fast and loose with the voting laws in a host of southern and mid-western states. Why is the Republican Party doing this? Because a growing and diversifying majority creates a growing number of voters and most come from Black and other non-white segments of the population. Exercising their participatory political rights, they tend to vote Democrat.
Third. The constitutionally protected rights or freedoms are not open-ended. Yet Paul seems to suggest that they are when he asserts that to protect the Republican minority in the Senate, the party can block a bipartisan investigation of the January 6 insurrection. On the one hand, it is quite true that the bill of rights was designed as, and remains, a necessary defense of individual rights from majority demands for political or cultural uniformity. On the other, one can ask, what is Paul and the Republicans trying to protect their party from? The bill of rights does not, and never was supposed to stifle investigation of criminal acts. The only thing the bill of rights does in this regard is to guard the individual against illegal evidence gathering procedures and other abusive practices on the part of law enforcement.
Part III—Misusing the Bill of Rights
Against this background, how are we to understand Paul’s specific application of minority rights? At the very least, we can understand it as a misinterpretation of the purpose and intent of the bill of rights and the protections it offers individual citizens. In other words, he is defending his party’s refusal to allow a bipartisan investigation of an apparent crime—a crime with potentially embarrassing trail of evidence.
The Republican Party and its conspiracy-spinning allies in the press and social media (whose speech is nonetheless protected) essentially created an alternate reality for millions of Americans that led some of them to insurrection. Despite many evidence-based demonstrations to the contrary, millions have bought into the myth that former President Donald Trump was cheated—and thus they, his supporters, were also cheated—out of victory in the 2020 presidential election. While both the Republicans and their supporters may believe the unbelievable—aver the demonstrably false—they have no right under the Constitution and its bill of rights to express such a delusion by going on a rampage, destroying public property, and attacking public officials. They have no protected right—no “freedom” to do this even if they claim, probably truthfully, that they believed the president told them to do it.
Taking the next step, what is the real-world consequence of Paul’s defense? Well, given the likelihood that the investigation would connect elements of the Republican Party to the actions of the insurrectionists, this must be seen as self-serving obstruction of justice—itself a crime. For Paul, this is the “freedom” that—conveniently—supersedes democracy.
Finally, the whole affair is a scary example of a paradox: The protection of speech, that is the right to free speech, can degenerate into a campaign of lies and this can easily lead people to unprotected, that is criminal, actions. This is, admittedly, a downside of the bill of rights. An individual (and keep in mind that under U.S. law corporations are seen as individuals) has a protected right to lie to the public—to wit: broadcasted fantasies ranging from those of the National Inquirer to Fox TV and, lest we forget, Donald Trump.
Part IV—Conclusion
It is worth repeating that one of the positive things about the political evolution of the United States is that it has expanded the ranks of the participatory majority. In political terms, citizens of all genders and races now have both participatory rights and protected individual rights. Correspondingly, the minority—referring here specifically to those who object to this historical expansion—is slowly shrinking. While the latter’s rights to, say free speech, will remain protected, their ability to retain political and cultural power may well diminish over time. There is no doubt that the Republican leadership has a sense of this possibility, and this accounts for their increasingly fierce and frenzied attempts to turn back the clock.
The shift of emphasis from an expanding democracy with protected individual rights/freedoms, to a dangerously ad hoc and sometimes illogical version of freedom, is part of that frenzied activity. Senator Paul and his friends, very short on historical facts and judgment, want all of us to believe in the absurd. That is, obstruction of justice in the name of minority rights is “what the country stands for.”
[ Editor’s Note: Iran seems to have found some middle ground. It will meet in Vienna with the remaining JCPOA countries with the US ‘down the hall’, or one could say ‘in the dog house’, until it comes back into full compliance with the agreement.
Nothing could show more weakness than negotiating with someone who has walked out of a deal unilaterally, and only wants to dicusss coming back into it on the terms that it can renegotiate the deal, which is obviously a continuing reneging on the deal. That would be a humilation for Iran.
An Iranian government doing so would have zero chance of being reelected, and hence the Biden administration’s opening strategy was not a confidence builder. So far, as a token concession, it has put on the table releasing a few billion of frozen (stolen) Iranian funds, a mistake made to pretend the US was being flexible.
On the American side Biden knows that any deal with Iran will be attacked by the Republicans as selling out to Iran, but he should not be concerned about that at all. We recently had the large numbers of the Republican party after the January 6th insurrection vote not to certify the election, fearing the punishment of our ex-Mafia-in Chief president.
The saying about this situation that we learned about as kids was ‘people who live in glass houses should not throw stones’. If Biden flubs this he runs the risk of the Iranian hardliners coming to power, where he will then be blamed for that by the Repubs.
While the Republicans have openly launched the most massive nationwide voter supression campaign in modern history, we are way past having to worry about making them happy.
The world is watching while America devours itself on the one hand and then is posing that it should be the world leader of a new ‘coalition’. Some would suggest that is not a bet that makes good sense to even entertain… Jim W. Dean ]
Iran cannot prevent its being tormented by the US, but it will not be pushed around
First published … April 03, 2021
In an exclusive interview with Press TV, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh rules out any step-by-step lifting of sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic under former US president Donald Trump.
“As has been clearly stated many times, no step-by-step plan is being considered,” Khatibzadeh said on Saturday.
“The definitive policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran is the lifting of all US sanctions, whether those which Trump reimposed after withdrawing from the JCPOA or those which he initiated, as well as sanctions imposed under any other heading,” he said.
“Obviously, this lifting of sanctions must be effective and must be verified by Iran,” Khatibzadeh added.
His remarks came in response to claims made by US State Department deputy spokeswoman Jalina Porter about a planned meeting by representatives of Iran and other countries in Vienna Tuesday to discuss the troubled 2015 nuclear deal.
Restoring the nuclear agreement would be a major step, nearly three years after Trump scrapped it and imposed new sanctions or reimposed others lifted under the deal, forcing Iran to take a series of “remedial” measures in response to the decision.
Porter said Friday that the discussion would focus on “the nuclear steps that Iran would need to take in order to return to compliance with the terms of the JCPOA”, using initials for what is formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
In the talks, American officials would be down the hall while British, German, French, Chinese and Russian officials meet with Iran.
And that would be joined with discussion of “the sanctions relief steps that the United States would need to take in order to return to compliance, as well,” Porter said, an acknowledgment that the United States is currently in violation of the accord.
Khatibzadeh stressed that “the suspension of Iran’s remedial measures and their reversal will take place only after the lifting of all sanctions and its verification” by the Islamic Republic.
In a tweet on Friday, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said the aim of the Vienna session would be to “rapidly finalise sanction-lifting & nuclear measures for choreographed removal of all sanctions, followed by Iran ceasing remedial measures”.
“No Iran-US meeting. Unnecessary,” he added Friday.
American officials have said they were willing to meet directly with the Iranians, but the Iranian government has insisted on working through the Europeans, a stance which Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi reiterated Friday.
“We only negotiate with the members of the JCPOA. The parties that are now known as the P4+1 will be our negotiating partners. They can talk to the other sides as they wish. We have no direct or indirect dialogue with the Americans,” he said.
If you wish to understand the concerns of those who attended the 1/6 Save America rally, you can learn much by watching the first three minutes of this video . If you wish to understand the issues that lie at the heart of the Nancy Pelosi – Never-Trump response, you can do no better than watching the same three minutes. Three minutes is not a long time. Maybe it saves the Republic. Perhaps not.
I recognize many of the locations shown; it was in Seattle that I met my first wife and my memory of the city is tainted by the youthful hormones associated with love and romantic attachment. Dispense with those gemütlich thoughts, strip all the romance away, and the video remains a searing reintroduction to an America in decline.
The Articles of Impeachment cite Trump for the remark,” ‘if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.’ He said those words because he believed them to be true. His supporters believed them to be true. The founders of this country believed them to be true. The ghosts of Concord, Omaha, Antietam, Betio, and a thousand other forgotten battles, laid down their lives to consecrate those words. America is drenched in blood. Is it worth asking who spilt it and why?
At the end of President Regan’s term in office, America was the greatest exporter of manufactured goods, the world’s largest creditor nation, the world’s largest importer of raw materials. Each year, America created the greatest value added in the history of the world. Today all these numbers are reversed. America is the world’s greatest debtor nation, America imports almost all its manufactured goods, and the main source of value added is found in the FIRE sector.
In an earlier era, America hired people to add value to raw materials and sell the finished products. People had good jobs. They lived the American dream. Today, they live the American nightmare. Today the route to wealth is found in the creation of SPACs and CDOs and other pieces of paper backed by little more than a promise. Or it is found in creating a new virtual universe composed entirely of electrons. The plungers have bid up the market to incredible heights of fantasy, interest rates border on the negative, and Biden is in the process of adding a few trillion more dollars to the top of an already teetering matchstick pyre. As the great sage of America once said: “What, me worry?”
In the years since President Regan, middle America has been in constant decline. Republicans came into office, made a lot of promises, and when they left office the majority of America was worse off than before. The Democrats came into office, promised hope and change, and when the Democrats left office the majority of America was worse off than before. The Red Hatters suspect the emergence of a pattern.
There have been 16 years of Republican presidents: Bush 41, Bush 43, Trump 45, and 16 years of Democrat presidents Clinton and Obama. Trump’s supporters have learned, much to their chagrin, and at great personal expense, that it does not matter who you vote into office, the outcome is always the same. The average American is yearly worse off, their savings erode, their debt explodes as increased debt is the only way to keep their head above water, send their children to school, pay their bills. On the coasts, and in Washington, live the elites who get richer and richer every year. The banks collapse and wipe out the savings of ordinary Americans? No problem. We bail out the culprits with trillions of dollars and the bank executives, the ones who created the funny money in the first place, they give themselves multi-million-dollar bonuses. For what? For crashing the world economy and coming out on top? Nice work if you can get it. And the ordinary folk? They lose their job, their savings, possibly their home. Some get the bonus of a cardboard mansion.
When Enron collapsed, people went to jail. When the savings and loans collapsed people went to jail. In the financial crisis fat paychecks and get out of jail cards went to a small segment of the population. None of them wore Red Hats. The systemic causes were never addressed, except as a band-aid solution, which implies they remain as a hidden set of weaknesses ready to rip open at the next great signs of stress.
The Democrats want you to believe that 1/6 was a coup, a rebellion, a putsch, an overthrow of a legitimate government. It is unclear how you claim to be a legitimate government, of the people, by the people, for the people, when each year the elites get more and more wealthy and ordinary folk are driven into poverty and then laughed at. Called Deplorables. Despicables. Traitors. Insurrectionists. Domestic Terrorists. Refused airline travel because of their political views. Refused legal counsel because of their political views. Have their employment threatened because of their political views. Have their insurance contracts revoked because of their political views. Have their communications media cancelled because of their political views. Put on watch lists because of their political views. Labelled as American ISIS for their political views. Al Qaeda in America. Bin Laden’s corpse is adrift in the Arabian Sea but he is winning.
Two observations. The first is that the Red Hatters have legitimate grounds for grievance. The elites that populate the coasts and inhabit the Capitol appear greatly unwilling to acknowledge that fact. In fact, the response of the Washington and coastal elites appears dedicated to the destruction of any form of political unorthodoxy. The Red Hatters strike me as empiricists. They experience the fact of reduced opportunity, reduced paychecks, a decline in their standard of living. These are the people who staff small business, the fire stations, the police stations, who are shipped overseas to combat the war on error. Those who send them overseas, who seek assistance from the fire stations, the police stations, are ideologues. And the ideologues are disconnected from reality and therefore indifferent to the plight of their fellow citizens. They hold the belief that the physical and financial distress the Red Hatters claim to experience is all in their head. If they removed the hat all would be fine. And what they really require is ostracization. A period of re-education and indoctrination. A few years in the Gulag. Ship them out to the Xinjiang re-education camps. Store them in Gitmo. It’s the American way.
The Ideologues have it all. And they want even more. Their appetites are immense and unyielding. Any form of challenge, appeal, or protest, is to be crushed. Legitimate grievance will be labelled Al Qaeda in America and destroyed. The orange man who appears to have provoked the uprising; he too will be destroyed. None can be allowed to remain standing because the sheer fact of their presence threatens the Ideologues beatific view of a world in which they have absolute mastery. Political mastery, commercial, and military.
The second observation is that history has gone out of fashion. It is an outdated subject well past its best before date. America’s history of rebellion and revolution is outmoded and inapplicable. Not pints, but gallons, hundred of gallons, VLCCs brimming with blood, all of it spilt, and none of it matters. Because this time its different. Those history guys in their funny hats, weird britches, and leggings, they did not have computers. They knew nothing of social media. If any remain alive today, they are dodos, too stupid to know they went extinct years ago. The problem is exacerbated by a Fourth Estate which is of the belief that “goebbels” is a noise made by turkeys, or the description of a rushed and greedy eater. People who do not know history are forever condemned to repeat it. That includes 1929 as well as 1776.
I remain confident of one thing. Joe Biden will unify the country.
The truth of this is found in his first initiatives. His imposition of a $15 minimum wage, his approval of increased immigration, his grant of amnesty to those present in the country illegally, his increase in corporate taxes, and his termination of the XL pipeline, coupled with the termination of drilling on Federal lands, will increase the cost of energy which will act as a regressive tax on those who can least afford it. These initiatives will have negative impact on Blacks, Latinos, hard hats, and Red Hats. All will have a negative impact on jobs and employment.
Biden’s single greatest achievement is the executive order stipulating that those males who self-identify as a woman are to be free to participate in women’s sports. For any impoverished youth seeking a higher education the best means to a scholarship is now to self-attest to female identity and win a post-secondary sports scholarship.
By this initiative alone, Biden will add fifty percent of the population to the group of persons already united against him. He only needs another 15% to 20% and he will have achieved 100% of his inaugural goals. I think he can do it.
There has been some feedback from persons who attended the Save America rally on 1/6. They dispute my estimate of crowd size which was based on the only aerial photograph I was able to locate. I have since found other imagery which confirms a new estimate of close to 500,000. It was standing room only in the ellipse and there was a multitude on the West end of the mall and to the East of the George Washington Monument.
When the British burned the Capitol, they came with a small brigade of 4,500 men. That small force burned the Capitol, the White House, the US Treasury, and the War Department. Then they blew up Fort McNair. That was achieved by 4,500 men.
Does anyone honestly believe there would be much of Washington left standing if a force of 500,000 had been incited to attack?
The current public estimate is of 800 people having entered the Capitol (I believe this to be high. The available imagery does not support such a high number. The F.B.I. presently has case files on 200 persons). If the full size of the crowd was 500,000 then the entrants are 0.0016 of the total participants. The Democrats and the press are gleefully slandering large numbers of people possibly creating grounds for a class action suit. The litigants would have grounds for damages based on loss of employment and loss of reputation.
Second, Incitement requires that people attacking the Capitol, heard what Trump had to say, listened to it as instruction, command, or direction, and acted as they did because of what he said. Press reports show the first attacks commenced at 12:50 and Trump did not complete his remarks until 13:13. The alleged incitement did not occur until the end of his speech. In addition, the significant size of the crowd completely swamped the available cell towers. Many Save America attendees reported no cell phone reception.
Third, incitement requires that those persons allegedly incited are in fact guilty of some crime. Marching to the Capitol is not a crime. Thousands of tourists do it every day. The words: ‘if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore’ is language not found in the criminal statutes. It is used as a legitimate form of grievance and has been used throughout history for exactly that purpose. Trump never incited burglary. He never told anyone “steal Pelosi’s lectern” In fact, it is unclear what exactly it is presumed he incited.
Fourth, there may still exist in this country a legal tradition known as the presumption of innocence. All of those charged by the state for alleged criminal activity are innocent of that criminal charge until such time as the legal process pronounces them guilty. Madame Pelosi and her compatriots in the House have put the cart before the horse. What if every alleged criminal is found innocent? What then is Trump to be found guilty of inciting? An Antifa conspiracy? Was Trump a secret BLM plotter?
Fifth, the evidence suggests that there were multiple independent groups at the Capitol on 1/6. This citizen report by a person with some knowledge of special forces activity claims there were at least four different groups present: 1) Plainclothes militants; 2) Agents-provocateurs; 3) Fake Trump protesters; 4) Disciplined, uniformed column of attackers. This citizen account confirms details found in The Defense of Mr. Trump: there was a relatively minor observed police presence, there was limited, or no, cell phone reception, the majority of the crowd was jovial and friendly, and included people of all ages, and races, including parents with children. There was minimal sense of threat.
Sixth, this new account supports the fact that among the Save America participants there were persons who were not Trump supporters but who sought to appear to be Trump supporters. Some were dressed in militant gear. The exact numbers of these militants, and their pollical affiliation, will not be known until the police complete their investigation (if the police complete an investigation) and have obtained statements. Trump cannot be accused of inciting people who were part of a pre-existing disciplined and militant cadre, persons who conspired to disrupt the Save America rally, and attack the Capitol, weeks before Trump made his remarks. The fact that some of those charged are alleged conspirators suggests the police are aware the violence was pre-meditated well in advance of Trumps remarks at the Save America rally.
Seventh, it is well known that in the summer of 2020 there were riots across the United States and these riots were led by groups known as Antifa and BLM. These riots and violence were described as “peaceful” by both the press and political leaders. In the summer of 2020, a group of violent militants had been permitted to raise havoc. There was no condemnation of this rioting and violence. It was applauded. The Vice-President worked to provide bail for those arrested. These rioters were not Trump supporters. Trump condemned this violent action. If Antifa and BLM agitators were present on 1/6, as it appears that they were, if they conspired to stir up a peaceful protest (as it appears that they did), if they ordered Save America participants forward into the attack (as it is reported that they did), if they sought to prevent peaceful participants from departing the scene (as it is reported that they did), then those individuals are guilty of incitement. If they are found guilty of conspiracy and incitement, then why the impeachment of Trump?
Eighth, by not condemning the violence occurring in the summer of 2020, the political leaders communicated to the citizens that violent protest was acceptable. That to burn buildings was acceptable. To proclaim an independent state was acceptable, That police defunding and disbanding was acceptable. The press, and the political leadership who failed to condemn activity that put lives at risk, condoned unlawful deaths, and caused over 1 billion in property damage. Certain groups known to have led the 2020 violence are reported to be complicit in the events of 1/6. The political leaders and the press, by virtue of their lack of condemnation, gave notice to Antifa and BLM that their actions would be tolerated, that there would be no legal sanctions, that the police would not arrest them, and the state would not prosecute them. They sent entirely the wrong message to the hoodlums. Did sending this inaccurate message lay the foundation for the riots at the Capitol? Was it misleading to claim Antifa to be just an idea? The press reporting during this period, and in prior periods, also gave endorsement to Antifa. Support for Antifa was seen as a means to undermine a sitting President. Does such conduct rise to the level of sedition? Is it possible the wrong president is being impeached? If you can impeach an out of office president, should others also be held to account for their conduct?
I do not have the answer to these questions. But I think the following sums up the situation:
The president-elect’s demeanor and furor certainly were not compatible with his media image as the supposedly angelic uniter of the country. Within 24 hours he had gone from blasting the police authorities as racists to the old reductio ad Hitlerum trope of comparing a few Republican senators to Nazi propogandist Joseph Goebbels, in a hysterical rant that descended into incoherent numerology about the bombing of Dresden. I’m sure Xi Jinping and Ayatollah Khamenei were impressed by his historical recollections. (see American Greatness)
Lastly, if disputing an election result is an impeachable offense what does this say about the Democrats who have disputed election results multiple times in the past? What does it say about the Speaker of the House, the person who bears ultimate responsibility for the security of the Capitol and appears to have been negligent in the discharge of her duties? On 1/6 did she fail to properly execute her responsibilities toward Congress? Is this the reason for her attack on legitimate assembly and grievance? To reassign blame for her own failure? Should Pelosi be subject to impeachment?
Chairman Roger Wicker, R-Miss., right, and Senator Roy Blunt, R-Mo., confer during the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee confirmation hearing for Gina Raimondo, nominee for Secretary of Commerce, in Russell Senate Office Building in Washington, DC on January 26, 2021. / AFP / POOL / Tom Williams
(Ramin Mazaheri (@RaminMazaheri2) is currently covering the US election. He is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea, and elsewhere. He is the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China,’ which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.)
Tuesday, 26 January 2021 10:40 PM [ Last Update: Tuesday, 26 January 2021 10:44 PM ]
Much ink could be spilled about the upcoming, and second, Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump, but that would be a waste of ink – the trial has nothing to do with social justice or patriotism and everything to do with aggravating political divisions for elites’ gain.
We could say it’s just “politics as usual”, but only if: the “True Rate of Unemployment” wasn’t pushing 30%, even per Politico; 2020 didn’t witness the biggest annual rise in the US poverty rate since the 1960s; America didn’t just have its most disputed election in anyone’s memory; there weren’t armed soldiers protecting politicians nationwide, or, according to nearly 40% of the country, there weren’t armed soldiers making sure politicians are illegitimately installed in the White House. In the US right now politics are not usual, whatsoever.
It is incredibly bad journalism the way the US Mainstream Media endlessly overplays the number of Republican defectors against Trump – they get way, way too much press, and of course it’s because they don’t want to admit Trump has any grassroots support (which is not from neo-Nazis). One might have easily imagined that scores of House Republicans were about to vote in favor of Trump’s impeachment, yet only 10 out of 211 did (5%). To give one mainstream example, it was totally misleading of the Los Angeles Timesto write that a “bipartisan House majority voted to charge him” after the House’s January 13 vote, and in their lede paragraph, no less, and to even mention the 10 Republicans in their headline. Trump remains the most popular Republican by leaps and bounds – there is no way 17 of 50 Republican senators will end their re-election chances just to appease a Never Trumper movement which only won the general election by a 51-47 margin. Trump’s first Senate trial was a landslide – by supermajority standards – for “not guilty”: 52-48 in favor of Trump.
Given the assurance of acquittal (again) we should ask who benefits from this second trial, and who does not benefit?
Obviously, the enormous mass of everyday Americans will see no benefit from the trial, and I listed just a few of the once-in-a-century reasons why they have more pressing concerns. It is never declared in the US media that the US public has no real appetite for the Senate trial – they need and want the governors of the nation to govern, and right now.
The only way Americans could possibly be convinced that the nation needs to shut down Congress for weeks with a trial whose conclusion is not in doubt is via constant Mainstream Media talking heads shrieking about its necessity, and with the very same fervor that they were shrieking that Russia stole the 2016 election. This is fake-news, too, and it certainly takes airtime away from discussing things like the “True Rate of Unemployment”.
The only people among average Americans who insist that seeing ex-president Trump in the dock is more pressing than resolving the multiple areas of socioeconomic disaster are the most bloodthirsty and rabid of the Never Trumpers. How can one easily switch off four years of demonization? Answer: many simply are psychologically unable to move on, and even though they got what they want – Trump is out of the White House. But while these people – generally upper- and upper-middle class persons who are not very touched by the economic crisis – are loudly obnoxious they are not in actual control of the levers of power.
It’s primarily the nation’s elite-level politicians who really want to make America’s Marianas Trench-depth cultural-political divide even deeper, but not for the reasons one may think.
Many Congressional Democrats are no doubt embarrassed and vengeful over having been turned into cowering, world’s fanciest gas mask-wearing deserters on January 6 – these people control the legislative docket and they want Trump to look afraid now. That would be a self-centered and over-emotional reaction, but why should we ascribe self-sacrifice for the well-being of the nation among the virtues of Congressional Democrats?
The Capitol Hill protest did make many Democrats even more dead-set on getting Trump out: Despite being elected president once and narrowly winning re-election – or rather, precisely because of this electoral success – Democrats want to try and ensure that Trump cannot run in 2024, and a Senate conviction would bar Trump from ever holding public office again. Again, they are deluded by endless MSM spin if they think they have a realistic chance of turning so many Republicans.
Those are two plausible motivations for the Senate trial, but they are not sufficiently convincing.
How elite Democrats gain from a trial, but America loses (unless a 3rd party truly sprouts)
There seem to be so many tiny groups which gain in the many instances where one reads “but America loses”? Thirty million Americans file for unemployment in 2020 – the S&P 500 gains $14 trillion in value over the same timeframe (up 16% annually). Four hundred thousand Americans die from coronavirus – the first vaccine announced only two days after Joe Biden prematurely declares victory, allowing Biden to change the media focus from his divisive and promise-backtracking early declaration.
By forcing a trial in the Senate Democrats seem to think they can win big by playing “divide and conquer” or even just “divide and divide”.
In the latter scenario Democrats certainly gain by forcing Congressional Republicans to openly divide themselves into pro- and anti-Trump factions, which will necessarily be revealed during the Senate vote on the 2nd impeachment. That vote will be like the 2003 Iraq War vote for Democrats (but only if we falsely imagine today’s Democrats to actually be an anti-war party anymore). If nothing else is gained for elite Democrats – who happily watched households crumble and workers go hungry until after Biden’s election to finally become willing to negotiate a second, paltry household stimulus – a Republican Party distracted by squabbles, and thus open to being bought into defection on certain key votes, is enough reason to waste everyone’s time with a Senate show trial.
The “divide and conquer” scenario is more worrying for national health, because the pro-War Democratic Party does like to conquer human beings: There are incredibly shocking efforts to blacklist, censor and seemingly criminalize Trump supporters. By forcing Trump’s Congressional supporters into the open Democrats will know exactly where to set their stigmatizing sights. I cannot believe that Democrats are going to lead a multi-month, much less multi-year, “Trumperphobia” campaign, but I also couldn’t believe the 2016 Russophobia campaign lasted until even after the 2019 Mueller Report’s exoneration of Russia. Is it possible that Democrats are going to persist in their anti-Trumper cultural pogrom for years rather than honestly discuss America’s decline?
But the main question is: How deep is the American duopoly? Answer: the deepest and oldest in the world.
What if Democrats are actually trying to create a Republican Party division into two parties, with the Trumper faction defecting to a new “Patriot” or “America First” party? That would end the need for Democratic legislative majorities – all they’d need is a plurality (as in every other modern democracy).
Is it possible that Trump will actually undo America’s awful legislative duopoly and bring in a multi-party system? Like most good things Trump has done, this boon would be an unintended consequence of Trump’s actual political agenda.
Are Democrats looking to end the two-party system by giving Trumpers a clear indication that they can either organize, drop out or get persecuted by the US system? Are anti-Trump Republicans daft enough to think that the Republican Party will stay Reaganite forever, even after Reaganites allowed the Great Financial Crisis to mushroom into the Great Recession for so many of their voters?
I would say that – in the end – Democrats are not looking to end the duopoly, in which they are the party which is paid no matter what: they are paid to make sure actual leftist ideas lose, by combining them with fake-leftists idea such as identity politics, and they are paid to make sure leftist gains are truly, truly minimal when they do occasionally have power.
But Democrats are US politicians, after all – they cannot think long-term, and they openly admit they spend 2/3rds of their working hours focused on getting campaign money for their re-election – and so they really don’t know what they are doing, or even care about the medium- and long-term consequences of their actions. The Senate trial of Trump is useless theater, but who knows what these professional actors really feel or if they even feel anything at all? If they feel anything it is for their supporters and “work family”, which can be found on Wall Street and not Main Street.
Just as the January 6th protest was improvised and not the start of a long-term “Occupy Capitol Hill” movement – it had none of the determination and planning of Egypt’s Tahrir Square” (in a nod to this week’s 10th anniversary of that wonderful progressive movement, which was repeatedly sabotaged by Washington and Tel Aviv and their Egyptian compradors). Democrats are now improvising a way to keep inflicting opprobrium, censorship and maybe even criminal convictions on the odious – yet quite popular and taboo-breaking – Trump. Just like in 2016: anything to keep from discussing the real roots of any sort of “drain the Swamp” political feeling and America’s undeniable decline.
Elite Democrats don’t have Russia to kick around anymore, let’s remember – all they have is Trump and his 74 million supporters. Kick them too much and Democrats might break their own precious duopoly.
(The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV.)
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