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https://scheerpost.com/2023/02/08/patrick-lawrence-no-joey-it-still-isnt-morning-in-america/

No, Joey, It Still Isn’t Morning in America

O.K., you have a speech of 7,000–odd words to deliver to Congress. It ought to run about an hour as these things go. But you have nothing to say. 

Call Joe Biden. 

He certainly got the job done Tuesday evening. But I am confused as to our 46^th president’s third State of the Union speech. 

On the one hand, I read here and there in the major dailies that this was among the most important speeches of Biden’s presidency, falling as it did midway in his term and delivered to a divided Congress. On the other, I read in so many words—in so very many many—that there was nothing in it. “Much of the president’s speech was vintage Biden,” I read in Wednesday’s editions of The New York Times, “full of phrasing he has used since the beginning of his first campaigns a half-century ago.” 

See what I mean? The thought of vintage Biden takes me back to university days, when all we could afford of a Friday evening were Mateus and those other sickly sweet Portuguese rosés.

“The story of America is the story of progress and resilience…. We’re writing the next chapter in the great American story…. To restore the soul of this nation…. To build an economy from the bottom up and the middle out….”  And so on until we are deep into Hallmark card territory with, “My Dad used to say, ‘Joey, a job is about a lot more than just a paycheck.’” Please pass the Lancer’s.  

What would America be without Dad Biden, not to mention Joey himself? Biden père et fils deserve a congressional medal for keeping 325 million Americans properly supplied with cornpone.

But I have this all wrong, Jeff Nussbaum, a former Biden speechwriter, tells me. Nussbaum has done exceptionally well as the press’s dial-a-quotation man in the runup to Tuesday evening’s speech and the commentary since. Here’s my favorite, delivered to The Times’s Katie Rogers and published in Monday’s editions: “Joe Biden has to say the same thing a thousand times before the world catches up to him.”

Is this a gem or what? Joey the visionary. As they used to say back in the fifties, “What’ll they think of next?”

To digress briefly that we may keep all this folksy silliness in perspective, I note the inimitable Sy Hersh’s extraordinary exposé, published Wednesday morning in his spanking new Substack newsletter, in which he tells us in incontrovertible detail of the Biden White House’s covert op to detonate the Nord Stream pipelines last September—a vicious betrayal of the Europeans, a flagrant violation of international law, a reckless escalation of tensions with the Russian Federation, and, as those who planned and executed the Nord Stream operation told Hersh they knew very well, an act of war. 

This is who addressed Congress Tuesday, hauling out yet again the I’m-just-Joey act. Sy’s piece, reported with technical advice from Ted Postol, the emeritus science prof at MIT, can be read here.

If you dwell a moment on the difference between what Biden said in Congress Tuesday and what Sy Hersh published Wednesday, you will understand a great deal about America and why it is so very broken.  

In the wider world, when someone tells you he or she has no politics, it cannot be taken at face value. Nobody has no politics: It is impossible to be alive and have no politics. People who say such things have stated their politics—the politics of the status quo. It is the same with people who use a lot of words to say nothing, and so it is with Biden’s stunningly empty State of the Union performance. In telling Americans nothing he has told Americans something important. 

What would this be?

Reminder: This is the man who reassured Wall Street during his 2020 campaign, when he was milking big investors for donations, “Nothing will fundamentally change.” He needed to say that because he had been pretending to breathe fire by way of reregulating The Street. 

It is only two years since Biden’s opening act in the White House, wherein he promised Americans a treasure chest of their very own— an infrastructure plan worth multiple trillions of dollars, student debt relief, health care reform, lower prescription drug prices, and so on just short of the moon. This was the second coming of FDR, some kind of new New Deal. No shortage of grandeur, if you recall. 

Biden knew what he was doing. He knew he would never have the numbers on Capitol Hill to get much of this done, if any of it, indeed. It was all performance. He would keep his word to Wall Street, if not to the rest of America.

He did the same thing Tuesday evening, in a watered-down version of the watered-down version of what has actually come to pass since his inauguration. No promises this time. No new initiatives. And as Joey the liar never misses a chance to do his thing, Biden had the nerve to boast of what Democrats eeked through the House and Senate on, for example, the infrastructure side—a plan worth trillions only when reckoned over a decade, an inadequate pittance on an annual basis—this a fact American media note only with reluctance and rarely at that.

It has long been evident that the so-called progressives in the Democratic Party act out brave political positions on social media, in stencils on the backs of formal gowns, and elsewhere while going along and getting along in mainstream Democratic politics and getting nothing of consequence done. Now our president gets up to the same sideshow: Snow the great broad masses while making sure nothing fundamentally changes.  

The best part of this speech is what voters had to say just prior to it. More than 40 percent of those who participated in a Washington Post–ABC News poll told Biden in advance they weren’t buying his version of Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America” bit, which is a fair description of what Biden has on offer.

I was curious what Biden would have to say about the most significant policies of his presidency by a long way. These are his instigation of a proxy war against Russia and the ensuing flood of money, weapons, and matériel into Ukraine; his associated bullying of the Europeans into submission, and what now looks like a full-court press across the Pacific in the anti–China campaign Biden inherited straight from Mike Pompeo, the Trump administration’s rabid bulldog. In dollars and cents terms, I read Washington is on the way to spending $100 billion on the Ukraine conflict alone. 

Biden mentioned “a stronger and safer Europe,” never mind it is neither. He spoke of Ukraine all of four times—once to complain about inflation, once to mention the grain shortage, once to call Vladimir Putin brutal, and once to welcome the Ukrainian ambassador to his audience. 

It was roughly the same with China—six mentions, nothing in them but the now-familiar pabulum: “I’m committed to work with China where we can advance American interests and benefit the world. But make no mistake about it: As we made clear last week, if China threatens our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country. And we did.”

I suppose Biden referred to the balloon incident. And I suppose we are to take the Air Force’s downing of a weather balloon off the coast of South Carolina as a measure of Joe Biden’s unwavering valor. And I suppose he thought Americans need be told nothing else about the brewing crisis with China. May I leave this passage of the speech without further comment?

Joe Biden did say one thing I thought was eminently honest:

For decades the middle class has been hollowed out, and more than—no one administration, but for a long time. Too many good-paying manufacturing jobs moved overseas. Factories closed down. Once-thriving cities and towns that many of you represent became shadows of what they used to be. And along the way something else was lost. Pride. Our sense of self-worth.

I was very moved by this brief passage. It has long been a source of sadness to me to watch Americans lose not only livelihoods but their self-respect, psychologically stripped down to a pervasive feeling of shame, socially isolated as Chris Hedges noted recently in these pages.

What makes Joey so preposterous an author of these words is the quite substantial extent to which he is responsible for what he described, the extent to which he takes no responsibility for his record in the Senate and since, the extent to which he makes no serious promises now to do anything about it—the extent, in short, to which there is no chance anything will fundamentally change so long as he lives in the White House. 

These things Biden told us Tuesday evening.

Comment to article:

" Patrick, once again, a needed, honest write-up of the tragic situation in which we find ourselves. An empty suit of a President with nothing more to do than meaningless utterances that show both his vacuousness and inherent dishonesty.

Many feel that to be a politician is to be dishonest. (“How do you tell when [ a politician] is lying?…Thei lips are moving.”, goes the not-so-funny joke.) In very many if not the vast majority of cases that may be true. Obama was certainly more clever in his deceits, continuing perhaps to this day to snow the Party faithful. But Biden, more the bumpkin, is certainly unabashed in saying whatever his handlers want him to say. It’s just so demoralizing that we even come to take such dishonesty for granted now. "

....

http://endoftheamericandream.com/another-conspiracy-theory-has-been-proven-true-and-it-brings-us-even-closer-to-nuclear-war/

Another “Conspiracy Theory” Has Been Proven True, And It Brings Us Even Closer To Nuclear War

We now know who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, and it shouldn’t be a surprise to any of us.  The corporate media tried very hard to convince us that the Russians were behind the sabotage when it originally happened, but that didn’t make any sense at all.  It took 15 years to build the Nord Stream pipelines, and the total cost ultimately surpassed 20 billion dollars.  So why would the Russians blow up pipelines that they had invested so much to construct and that were so critical to their own national economy?  Sadly, many Americans unquestionably believed the narrative that was being pushed by the Biden administration, but now we have learned that it was the Biden administration that was actually behind the attack.

Legendary journalist Seymour Hersh has just published an extremely detailed article entitled “How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline” in which he lays out precisely what happened.  If you are not familiar with Hersh, the following is some good background information about him from Wikipedia…

Hersh first gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. During the 1970s, Hersh covered the Watergate scandal for The New York Times and revealed the clandestine bombing of Cambodia. In 2004, he reported on the U.S. military‘s mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. He has also won two National Magazine Awards and five George Polk Awards. In 2004, he received the George Orwell Award.^[7]

As you can see, Hersh is not just another journalist.

He was winning awards long before many of you were even born.

And he would never go ahead with a story like this unless his source was rock solid.

According to Hersh’s source, the plan to blow up the pipelines came from a task force that was originally formed in December 2021…

In December of 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a newly formed task force—men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments—and asked for recommendations about how to respond to Putin’s impending invasion.

Apparently Sullivan made it quite clear that the task force was supposed to “come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines”, and it was also quite clear that Sullivan was “delivering on the desires of the President”…

What became clear to participants, according to the source with direct knowledge of the process, is that Sullivan intended for the group to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines—and that he was delivering on the desires of the President.

For the past two years, I have been repeatedly warning my readers that Jake Sullivan is a big time warmonger.

So it is not exactly a shock that he was directly involved in this decision.

According to Hersh’s source, those that were a part of this task force definitely understood that blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines would be “an act of war”…

Everyone involved understood the stakes. “This is not kiddie stuff,” the source said. If the attack were traceable to the United States, “It’s an act of war.”

So now that the fact that we have committed an “act of war” against Russia has been revealed for the whole world to see, how will the Russians respond?

Will they choose to strike back in some way?

Thanks to the foolishness of our leaders in Washington, we are now closer to nuclear war than ever before.

At the time when this attack was first being considered, there were a few officials from the CIA and the State Department that were warning about what would happen if the truth was ever revealed…

Throughout “all of this scheming,” the source said, “some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, ‘Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.’”

Now the truth has finally come out, and there will be very serious consequences.

Ultimately, Sullivan’s working group settled on a plan that involved the planting of underwater explosives.

And apparently those underwater explosives were put into place during the BALTOPS22 military exercises in June 2022…

In a compelling, 5,000-word report about the alleged attack, Hersh claims diving experts trained at the U.S. Navy Diving and Salvage Center in Florida planted the explosives.

The divers are said to have carried out the top secret and highly-dangerous operation during BALTOPS22, a series of military exercises in the Baltic Sea carried out by 16 NATO countries. The U.S. divers reportedly used the highly-publicized, 13-day event in June 2022 as cover for their top-secret mission.

The C4 explosives attached to the pipelines were fitted with sensors that enabled them to be detonated remotely at a later date, Hersh reports.

There was concern that it would be obvious that the U.S. was behind the attack if they were set off too quickly after the BALTOPS22 military exercises concluded.

So the explosives just sat on the pipelines until they were finally remotely detonated in late September…

On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few minutes, pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be seen spreading on the water’s surface and the world learned that something irreversible had taken place.

When asked about Hersh’s bombshell story, the White House responded by calling it “completely and utterly false”…

A spokesman for the White House said the report is ‘false and complete fiction’. A spokesman for the CIA said: ‘This claim is completely and utterly false.’

But what else can they do?

If the Biden administration admits the truth, it is likely that Biden will be impeached.

Needless to say, the Russians were exceedingly interested in this report, and they are demanding answers…

Russia’s Foreign Ministry says the Hersh report reveals new facts that must be answered to, however, with spokeswoman Maria Zakharova stressing, “We have repeatedly stated Russia’s position on the involvement of the United States and NATO, noting that they did not hide it, bragging to the whole world about their intention to destroy the civilian infrastructure through which Europe received Russian energy resources.”

If the Russians had attacked us in such a way, the American people would be crying out for revenge.

And rightfully so.

The recklessness of our leaders has pushed us to the brink of nuclear war, and as I discussed in a previous article, the United States is definitely not prepared for such a conflict.

Sadly, most Americans don’t even realize what is going on.

Elon Musk was quite correct when he observed that “most are oblivious to the danger”…

Tesla founder Elon Musk warned that “most are oblivious to the danger” of World War 3 as the conflict in Ukraine continues to escalate.

The comment was in response to a speech by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to the General Assembly on Monday during which he expressed his fear that humanity was marching toward a “wider war” with its “eyes wide open”.

But over in Russia the story is completely different.

The Russians believe that they are now engaged in an existential conflict with the United States, and there is constant talk about the possibility of nuclear war on Russian television.

When it finally happens, nobody will be able to say that they weren’t warned.

Over the past two years, I have been relentlessly warning my readers that Joe Biden and his all-star team of warmongers were going to push things way too far.

Now the truth about the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines has finally come out, and nothing will ever be the same after this.

....

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/02/06/more-evidence-that-the-west-sabotaged-peace-in-ukraine/

More Evidence That The West Sabotaged Peace In Ukraine

Days after the war in Ukraine began it was reported by The New York Times that “President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has asked the Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett, to mediate negotiations in Jerusalem between Ukraine and Russia.” In a recent interview, Bennett made some very interesting comments about what happened during those negotiations in the early days of the war.

In a new article titled “Former Israeli PM Bennett Says US ‘Blocked’ His Attempts at a Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal,” Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp writes the following:

Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said in an interview posted to his YouTube channel on Saturday that the US and its Western allies “blocked” his efforts of mediating between Russia and Ukraine to bring an end to the war in its early days.

On March 4, 2022, Bennett traveled to Russia to meet with President Vladimir Putin. In the interview, he detailed his mediation at the time between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which he said he coordinated with the US, France, Germany, and the UK.

Bennett said that both sides agreed to major concessions during his mediation effort.

But ultimately, the Western leaders opposed Bennet’s efforts. “I’ll say this in the broad sense. I think there was a legitimate decision by the West to keep striking Putin and not [negotiate],” Bennett said.

When asked if the Western powers “blocked” the mediation efforts, Bennet said, “Basically, yes. They blocked it, and I thought they were wrong.”

Bennett says the concessions each side was prepared to make included the renunciation of future NATO membership for Ukraine, and on Russia’s end dropping the goals of “denazification” and Ukrainian disarmament. As DeCamp notes, this matches up with an Axios report from early March that “According to Israeli officials, Putin’s proposal is difficult for Zelensky to accept but not as extreme as they anticipated. They said the proposal doesn’t include regime change in Kyiv and allows Ukraine to keep its sovereignty.”

Bennett is about as unsavory a character as exists in the world today, but Israel’s complicated relationship with this war lends itself to the occasional release of information not fully in alignment with the official imperial line. And his comments here only add to a pile of information that’s been coming out for months which says the same thing, not just regarding the sabotage of peace talks in March but in April as well.

In May of last year Ukrainian media reported that then-British prime minister Boris Johnson had flown to Kyiv the previous month to pass on the message on behalf of the western empire that “Putin is a war criminal, he should be pressured, not negotiated with,” and that “even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not.”

In April of last year, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said that “there are those within the NATO member states that want the war to continue, let the war continue and Russia gets weaker.” Shortly thereafter, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said that the goal in Ukraine is “to see Russia weakened.”

A September Foreign Affairs report by Fiona Hill asserts that in April of last year a peace deal had been in the works between Moscow and Kyiv, which would presumably have been the agreement that Johnson et al were able to sabotage:

According to multiple former senior U.S. officials we spoke with, in April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement: Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.

In March of last year Bloomberg’s Niall Ferguson reported that sources in the US and UK governments had told him the real goal of western powers in this conflict is not to negotiate peace or end the war quickly, but to prolong it in order “bleed Putin” and achieve regime change in Moscow. Ferguson wrote that he has reached the conclusion that “the U.S. intends to keep this war going,” and says he has other sources to corroborate this:

“The only end game now,” a senior administration official was heard to say at a private event earlier this month, “is the end of Putin regime. Until then, all the time Putin stays, [Russia] will be a pariah state that will never be welcomed back into the community of nations. China has made a huge error in thinking Putin will get away with it. Seeing Russia get cut off will not look like a good vector and they’ll have to re-evaluate the Sino-Russia axis. All this is to say that democracy and the West may well look back on this as a pivotal strengthening moment.”

I gather that senior British figures are talking in similar terms. There is a belief that “the U.K.’s No. 1 option is for the conflict to be extended and thereby bleed Putin.” Again and again, I hear such language. It helps explain, among other things, the lack of any diplomatic effort by the U.S. to secure a cease-fire.  It also explains the readiness of President Joe Biden to call Putin a war criminal.

All this taken together heavily substantiates the claim made by Vladimir Putin this past September that Russia and Ukraine had been on the cusp of peace shortly after the start of the war, but western powers ordered Kyiv to “wreck” the negotitations.

“After the start of the special military operation, in particular after the Istanbul talks, Kyiv representatives voiced quite a positive response to our proposals,” Putin said. “These proposals concerned above all ensuring Russia’s security and interests. But a peaceful settlement obviously did not suit the West, which is why, after certain compromises were coordinated, Kyiv was actually ordered to wreck all these agreements.”

Month after month it’s been reported that US diplomats have been steadfastly refusing to engage in diplomacy with Russia to help bring an end to this war, an inexcusable rejection that would only make sense if the US wants this war to continue. And comments from US officials continually make it clear that this is the case.

In March of last year President Biden himself acknowledged what the real game is here with an open call for regime change, saying of Putin, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” Statements from the Biden administration in fact indicate that they expect this war to drag on for a long time, making it abundantly clear that a swift end to minimize the death and destruction is not just uninteresting but undesirable for the US empire.

US officials are becoming more and more open about the fact that they see this war as something that serves their strategic objectives, which would of course contradict the official narrative that the western empire did not want this war and the infantile fiction that Russia’s invasion was “unprovoked”. Recent examples of this would include Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s speech ahead of Zelensky’s visit to Washington in December.

“President Zelensky is an inspiring leader,” McConnell said in his speech ahead of the Ukrainian president’s visit to Washington. “But the most basic reasons for continuing to help Ukraine degrade and defeat the Russian invaders are cold, hard, practical American interests. Helping equip our friends in Eastern Europe to win this war is also a direct investment in reducing Vladimir Putin’s future capabilities to menace America, threaten our allies, and contest our core interests.”

In May of last year Congressman Dan Crenshaw said on Twitter that “investing in the destruction of our adversary’s military, without losing a single American troop, strikes me as a good idea.”

Indeed, a report by the empire-funded Center for European Policy Analysis titled “It’s Costing Peanuts for the US to Defeat Russia” asserts that the “US spending of 5.6% of its defense budget to destroy nearly half of Russia’s conventional military capability seems like an absolutely incredible investment.”

In May of last year US Senator Joe Manchin said at the World Economic Forum that he opposes any kind of peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia, preferring instead to use the conflict to hurt Russian interests and hopefully remove Putin.

“I am totally committed, as one person, to seeing Ukraine to the end with a win, not basically with some kind of a treaty; I don’t think that is where we are and where we should be,” Manchin said.

“I mean basically moving Putin back to Russia and hopefully getting rid of Putin,” Manchin added when asked what he meant by a win for Ukraine.

“I believe strongly that I have never seen, and the people I talk strategically have never seen, an opportunity more than this, to do what needs to be done,” Manchin later added.

Then you’ve got US officials telling the press that they plan to use this war to hurt Russia’s fossil fuel interests, “with the long-term goal of destroying the country’s central role in the global energy economy” according to The New York Times. You’ve also got the fact that the US State Department can’t stop talking about how great it is that Russia’s Nord Stream Pipelines were sabotaged in September of last year, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying the Nord Stream bombing “offers tremendous strategic opportunity” and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland saying the Biden administration is “very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”

The US empire is getting everything it wants out of this proxy war. That’s why it knowingly provoked this war, that’s why it repeatedly sabotaged the outbreak of peace after the war broke out, and that’s why this proxy war has no exit strategy. The empire is getting everything it wants from this war, so why wouldn’t it do everything in its power to obstruct peace? 

I mean, besides the obvious unforgivable depravity of it all, of course. The empire has always been fine with cracking a few hundred thousand human eggs in order to cook the imperial omelette. It is unfathomably, unforgivably evil, though, and it should outrage everyone.