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https://scheerpost.com/2023/08/02/patrick-lawrence-reading-the-mess-the-democrats-have-made/

Reading the Mess the Democrats Have Made

At writing, we are 16 months and five days from the 2024 presidential election. If a week is a long time in politics, there is too strong a chance that the interim upon us will prove one of awful eventfulness. In my read, the risk of brazen lawlessness in the upper reaches of power and, in consequence, a constitutional crisis, is now greater than at any point in the postwar period. It is time to brace ourselves against this eventuality. 

Is there any other plausible conclusion as things now stand? I do not see one. Two reasons: 

One, the Democrats have emerged since Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016 as a party of liberal authoritarians intent on imposing their political hegemony on our republic by whatever means this project requires. Nothing is out of bounds, as these people have already demonstrated. Two, in what looks like one of the great political miscalculations in my lifetime, the Democrats are determined to stand a candidate in 2024 whose senility has been publicly on display for the past two years and change. 

This is a combustible pair of realities. The second of these, President Biden’s failing mental condition, makes the first of these, the culture of authoritarian righteousness in the Democratic mainstream, very perilous. The party hierarchy has already declared Biden will not face any challenger in a primary debate—an openly antidemocratic regression without precedent since televised debates became essential to the political process during the Kennedy–Nixon contest in 1960. What else will come in this line, we have to ask. In my judgment, the Democrats’ willingness to let Biden run again is all too suggestive of what dangers and disorders may come between now and Tuesday, November 5, 2024. They appear determined, one way or another, to keep this man in the White House. This is not a thought with which one rests easily. 

Things have gone very poorly for Joe Biden since he moved into the White House two and a half years ago. Yes, he continues to hide behind that carnival barker’s smile he plastered on as political equipment 50–odd years ago. But if the president and all the president’s men and women are not in the way of desperate at this point, they are in the way of insentient. In his Substack newsletter a few weeks ago, Seymour Hersh quoted one of his inside sources saying the administration is a behind-closed-doors madhouse. I see no reason to doubt this.

Let’s briefly run down the list.

Biden, who carried the Ukraine portfolio during his years as Barack Obama’s vice-president, went to work provoking a war between Ukraine and Russia—a proxy war, of course—as soon as he took office. Better put, he escalated his previous efforts in this line once he won the White House. Here is John Mearsheimer, the prominent foreign relations scholar, on this point during an interview The Grayzone published Sunday: 

I think it was stupidity.  I think you can’t underestimate just how foolish the West is when it comes to the whole question of Ukraine—and all sorts of other issues as well. But I think that the West believed—and here we’re talking mainly about the United States—that if a war did break out between Ukraine and Russia, that the West plus Ukraine would prevail, that the Russians would be defeated. I believe we thought that was the case.

It is now clear that the Ukraine project, the centerpiece of a president who has long traveled on the myth of his foreign policy expertise, is a flop. There will be no Russian withdrawal or defeat, and the Kyiv regime is exposed as a right-wing gathering of compulsive crooks. Along with this goes Biden’s cosmic democrats-vs-authoritarians proposal to organize the 21^st century: Nobody beyond the West and its appendages wants anything to do with it. Americans, let’s note immediately, are paying dearly for these escapades—in out-of-pocket expenses as well as in lost opportunity, a larger category of costs, and they appear at last to be figuring this out. 

On the domestic side it is one bit of tomfoolery after another with these people. We are now treated to the notion of “Bidenomics.” Not even Biden knows what Bidenomics is supposed to be about. It comes to little more than citations of job numbers that do not mean much unless wage numbers are also considered, and wage numbers are left out of the Bidenomics equation. Remember Build Back Better? Oh, come on, you must, distant as the memory is at this point. 

There is the censorship case, in which the Biden regime is charged with First Amendment violations for colluding with Silicon Valley to suppress dissenting opinion. As widely reported, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against the Biden regime and numerous of its operatives several weeks ago. In doing so he suggested clearly that the final judgment, now pending, is likely to go to the plaintiffs, the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana as well as five private citizens. 

The Hunter Biden affair, growing like a grotesque weed as we speak, could now prove to be Biden’s greatest vulnerability—and so the Democratic Party’s. The House Oversight Committee is looking at documents directly implicating the president in bribery schemes that brought the Biden family $17 million during Joe’s time as Obama’s veep. A federal judge in Delaware has thrown back Hunter’s disgraceful plea bargain, rejecting the preposterous provision that the president’s son be immune from all future findings of corruption. “The blanket shield against any other charges based on past misconduct was so inappropriate,” Michael Goodwin wrote in the New York Post over the weekend, “that the only possible explanation is that the aim was to shut down the probe of the family permanently.”

No, they are not insentient. They are desperate. 

There are, finally, the Biden Justice Department under Merrick Garland and the FBI under Christopher Wray. The latter, continuing the practice during the Russiagate years, has, open and shut, turned the agency into a politicized instrument at the Democratic Party’s disposal, most recently by withholding for several years documents exposing Joe Biden’s direct involvement in Hunter’s influence-peddling schemes. Anyone who does not recognize the political motives of Garland’s campaign to get Donald Trump jailed and, on the other side, his direction of the Hunter Biden plea deal, is reading too many Gail Collins columns. 

Look at this mess. A senile president—the physicians call Biden’s condition “neurocognitive disorder,” but “senile” or “demented” is what they mean—is standing for reelection with a wasteful proxy war failing, nothing much to show for himself at home, mounting evidence of epic-scale personal corruption, institutional failure of the same magnitude: There is only one way to explain this shambles: Every one of these crises traces back to the Democratic Party’s obsession with taking and holding power more or less indefinitely to suit its hubristic, end-of-history “narrative” of righteous liberal triumph. 

I do not approve of columnists who self-reference, but I will breach my own rule on this occasion. 

I warned when all this started in 2016–2017 that liberal authoritarianism was vastly more dangerous than Trump’s arrival on the political scene. And here we are. I am reminded of my Tokyo years, when we used to say the governing Liberal Democratic Party was neither liberal nor democratic nor a party. As the Democratic Party has reconstituted itself in response to the Clinton defeat seven years ago, it is neither democratic nor, given how it operates, properly a party. It is a diabolic machine built to seize and hold power without reference to law or institutional integrity. 

There are some suggestive polling numbers in the Michael Goodwin column mentioned above. Half of those surveyed by Reuters/Ipsos in June, as Hunter Biden’s plea bargain took shape, thought the president’s son was getting favorable treatment. This included a third of all Democrats, count ’em, and more than 40 percent of those independent of either party. Translation: Half the country recognizes the White House and the DoJ as corrupted. 

In the same line, a Quinnipiac University poll conducted at roughly the same time found that nearly two-thirds of those surveyed think the DoJ’s indictments of Donald Trump are politically motivated. Translation: Most people recognize that A–G Garland has corrupted the DoJ as an impartial institution charged with enforcing the law without favor. 

I do not argue here that the game is up for the Biden regime. There are many more moves to come on this perilous, play-for-keeps game board. Mainstream media are so far holding the line, but at this point they may as well be telling us the sky is not blue and it does not get dark at night. There are limits—somewhere out there—and a denouement of one of another kind coming, surely. 

Let us finish with a consideration of what may come during our 16 months and five days of uncertainty.  

Impeachment proceedings are an obvious possibility at this point—and seem a lot closer than they did even a few weeks ago. The decisive factor here is how seriously the House Oversight Committee follows the lines of inquiry now opening up to it. I cannot read this at the moment. Even among those driven by purely partisan sentiment, it is a very grave matter to impeach a president when you know you have the goods on him. The Trump impeachments were spectacle and intended as such. The material coming to the surface against Biden is entirely more serious.

A reader of these columns suggested in a recent comment thread that, should the corruption charges mount such that denial and games of pretend are no longer feasible, Biden may resort to a major, all-bets-are-off escalation in Ukraine such that the mess at home gets shoved into the background and—most favorable outcome—never returns to the headlines. More perverse, inhumane things have happened. Two weeks after I voted for the first and last time in my life, for Bill Clinton in 1998, he sent a cruise missile into the only pharmaceutical plant in Sudan to get people to stop thinking about his pleasures with Monica Lewinsky. This is a minor case next to numerous others. 

Biden is on the very brink of a Nixonian, I-am-not-a-crook moment in his corruption messes. He is already deflecting in ridiculous fashion. Asked about the bribes he replied to a reporter, “Where’s the money?” When Miranda Devine, the New York Post columnist, asked him recently why Hunter was named to a well-paying position in Ukraine in 2014, Joe replied, “Because he’s a very bright guy.” Joe Biden is buck-dancing at this point. I cannot see that he will get away with doing so much longer. 

The question here is simple. A short while after Nixon’s not-a-crook speech, he was forced to resign. Will Biden meet the same fate? The problem here is to whom Biden would hand off. At this point in the American story, the Deep State or whatever you wish to call it seems to prefer semi-competent or incompetent White House occupants who stay out of the way while they run the imperium. But Kamala Harris … well, once again there are limits.

The biggest worry we face is that, should desperation among Democrats spread as is very possible now, they will corrupt the political process yet further than it already is, and we are in for one or another degree of civil disorder. I rate this a strong possibility. The liberal authoritarians, their dream of domestic hegemony a sand castle washing out to sea, have nowhere else to turn, as the case of Devon Archer bitterly reminds us.  

Archer, formerly in business with Hunter Biden, was previously found guilty of some kind of swindle involving fraudulent bonds and was awaiting his reporting date to begin serving a sentence of one year and one day. No date had been set. 

Now to the chase: Archer was scheduled to appear at a House Oversight Committee hearing early this week, during which he was expected to testify under oath that he was present on various occasions when Joe and Hunter Biden conducted their influence-peddling business. Out of nowhere, the DoJ ordered him over the weekend to report immediately to the prison where he was to begin serving his sentence. At one point, Archer was reported to be in hiding—in hiding from the judicial authorities charged with enforcing the law. And immediate uproar—James Comer, who chairs Oversight, denounced the move as straight-out obstruction of justice—appears to have forced the DoJ to relent. Archer testified for several hours behind closed doors on Monday. 

We do not know everything Archer said, and his lawyer, who has close ties to the Democratic hierarchy, may have advised him to resort to “I do not recall” in reply to numerous questions. But Archer seems nonetheless to have said plenty. Joe Biden worked  intimately and regularly with Hunter as his son built “the brand,” Archer testified. Hunter put “the Big Guy” on his speakerphone during more than 20 calls in the course of his influence-peddling projects. There were dinners with Hunter and those to whom he was selling access to “my guy.” 

The spin coming out of the Democratic quadrant since Archer’s testimony is quite beyond belief. Hunter wasn’t peddling access to Joe: That was just a ruse to fool those with whom he was dealing. All those telephone calls were just father-son stuff. Yes, he met some of Hunter’s business “associates” and, yes, there were dinners at Georgetown restaurants, but it was all just “casual conversation.” They talked about “the weather.” 

The ice across which these people are skating is getting awfully thin, I would say.      

Lies told straight to our faces. More or less complete unaccountability. Lawlessness in the name of the law. This is what I mean by acts of desperation. And what I mean when I suggest we must brace ourselves for what is to come.

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https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2023/08/01/the-us-economy-is-there-one/

The US Faces Ignored Challenges

For the longest time, Bureau of Economic Analysis jobs reports show that industrial and manufacturing jobs–jobs that have high value added and produce good incomes–are declining in the United States. For some time US corporate profits have been based on sending Americans’ jobs to Asia where labor  costs are lower.  The stock market boom was a product of low interest rates, which meant Federal Reserve liquidity, and reduced labor costs from offshoring.  It was not a sign of a vibrant US economy.

Today and for a couple of decades the US exists as a market for foreign made or offshored goods of US corporations.  Americans have been separated from the income associated with the production of the products that they consume.  This is the avenue to Third World Existence.

US corporations, always short-term in their outlook because of quarterly performance bonuses, have destroyed America’s economic future. 

For years I reported the payroll jobs reports, pointing out that there were never any jobs gains of noticeable magnitude in industrial and manufacturing jobs where wages are good.  Year after year US job gains, if they were real, occurred in retail sales, social assistance, waitresses and bar tenders, and government where high value added is not present.

The neoliberal economists, termed correctly “junk economists” by Michael Hudson, could not be bothered to notice the ongoing destruction of the US economy.  Instead the bought-and-paid-for-economists promised that there would be higher paying jobs for US workers who lost their livelihood by the movement of their manufacturing jobs–called “dirty fingernail jobs by neoliberal economists–to Asia.

As I pointed out repeatedly in my columns and in my book, The Failure of Laissez Capitalism, the promised better jobs never showed up.  America’s neoliberal economists simply lied through their teeth to the American work force and left them struggling for existence. 

The next step in the economic disaster that is becoming the United States is the US dollar.  Serving as the reserve currency since World War II, the dollar as reserves for foreign central banks has meant that US trade and budget deficits are easily financed by foreign central banks’ holdings of US Treasury debt. Foreign central banks kept their reserves not in gold but in liquid US Treasury bonds.  This removed all financing problems from the US government, and the US never had to be concerned about its growing trade (due to offshored manufacturing and industry) and budget deficits.  In effect foreign central banks financed Washington’s wars as well as its deficits.

Washington, in an act of unbelievable stupidity, is driving foreign central banks away from keeping their reserves in US Treasury bonds by weaponizing the reserve currency. Washington destroyed its hold on power with economic sanctions, by seizing Russia’s dollar central bank reserves, and by blocking international clearance of payments by sanctioned countries.

The result is that a growing number of countries are ceasing to use the US dollar for their international payments, instead using  their own currencies or those of their trading partners.  Russia and China are also keeping their reserves in gold,

So, what has happened is that the demand for US dollars for international payments is declining, but the supply of US dollars from growing trade and budget deficits has not.  The implication is a falling exchange value of the dollar as supply exceeds demand.

As a result of offshoring its manufacturing, the US is import dependent, so a decline in the dollar’s exchange value means a rise in price of imported goods and services ( for example, Apple’s imports of computers and iPhones made in China come in as imports when they are marketed to US customers). Apple’s imports worsen the US trade imbalance. 

A rise in inflation from dollar devaluation means a reduced standard of living for US residents.

What the Biden Regime has managed to accomplish is the reduction of US power. The incompetent regime is destroying the world currency role of the US dollar, thus threatening the US government with the inability to finance its trade and budget deficits. 

The dollar’s decline might be slow.  The Russian sanctions have wrecked European economies, and Washington and its allies can organize attacks on currencies that are traded in foreign exchange markets.  Nevertheless, the dollar’s use in settling international payments has already declined substantially.

Instead of paying attention to the eroding basis of US power,  the ideological Democrats are focused on delegitimizing white Americans and constructing on this delegitimization a  one-party rule of “equity,” which means a revolution against a society based on merit.

I do not see any organized group defending the founding document of the United States from repudiation by the Democrat Party.

My conclusion is that the United States is on a road to economic decline as it is being unmoored  from its founding document and is undergoing a revolution.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/fitch-ratings-downgraded-us-projects-recession-debt-war-spending-being-key-reasons/5827879

Fitch Ratings Downgrades U.S.: “Erosion of Governance, Fiscal Mismanagement” Attributable to Debt and War Spending

Fitch Ratings, one of the “Big Three” credit ranking agencies, has downgraded US long-term currency issuer default ratings, on August 1, from AAA to AA+. According to the agency’s “rating action commentary”, this rating downgrade of the country “reflects the expected fiscal deterioration over the next three years, a high and growing general government debt burden, and the erosion of governance” that “has manifested in repeated debt limit standoffs and last-minute resolutions.”

The same commentary further elaborates on “erosion of governance”, adding that, in Fitch’s view, over the last two decades, “there has been a steady deterioration in standards of governance”, including “on fiscal and debt matters.” According to it, “repeated debt-limit political standoffs and last-minute resolutions” have mined trust in “fiscal management”, the US government has no “medium-term fiscal framework”, and “economic shocks” and “tax cuts” as well as “new spending initiatives” have contributed to debt increases.

Moreover, “there has been only limited progress in tackling medium-term challenges related to rising social security and Medicare costs due to an aging population.” The agency projects the US economy to be pushed into “a mild recession”, with tighter credit conditions, weakening business investment, and a slowdown in consumption.”

The aforementioned commentary does not mention Ukraine, but Washington’s proxy attrition war there certainly is one of the major debt-generating “new spending initiatives” generally mentioned. Writing for the Council on Foreign Relations, Jonathan Masters (its deputy managing editor) and Will Merrow (a CFR associate director) show in charts just how much the US has sent to Ukraine. They quote the Kiel Institute for the World Economy on the fact that, since the current conflict in Ukraine began, Washington has directed over $75 billion to Kiev, in military, financial and humanitarian support.

Since 2022, a number of Western voices have in fact been calling for “a new Marshall plan for Ukraine”.  Heather Conley, president of the German Marshall Fund of the US, for one, has proposed the Marshall Plan, the 1948 US initiative to provide foreign aid to Europe after the war, be replicated in the Eastern European country – and such projects have been discussed in public talks with the Open Society Foundations.

Few people know that Washington in fact spent more on Afghanistan than on the Marshall Plan  – and to little avail. Quoting Akhilesh Pillalamarri’s 2014 article for The Diplomat, “according to the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), congressional appropriations for reconstruction in Afghanistan have reached $109 billion in today’s dollars. On the other hand, the Marshall Plan delivered $103 billion in today’s dollars to 16 European countries between 1948 and 1952.”

While figures in the Western Establishment call for a Ukrainian Marshall Plan and US Senate Democrats block an initiative that would increase oversight over the billions Washington sends to Kiev (amid corruption concerns), the lessons of Afghanistan are being ignored.

Jeffrey D. Sachs (University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University), in his May article, stressed that the American “addiction to war and military spending” is the main reason why, by 2022, US government debt was $24 trillion, equal to 95% of GDP.

American fiscal decline and its huge war-fueled debt is yet another piece of the puzzle; it is part of a larger societal and civilizational crisis. I have written on how the US “all-volunteer force” (AVF) now faces a major crisis, its high costs being one of the main factors that make the US military small – since 911, military pay and benefits have escalated. But there is also a recruiting crisis, with only 23% of young Americans (aged 17-24) being “eligible for military service without a waiver” and with most ineligible youth being disqualified “for multiple reasons”, which include being overweight, having poor medical health, and drug abuse. All of these reasons are related to structural and social problems: to name just a few issues, Americans today face its worst drug crisis ever (the opioid epidemics) meanwhile the world’s richest nation’s healthcare system is collapsing, with overcrowded and understaffed facilities, hospitals closing down, and lack of basic items such as ICU beds. n addition, there is a mental health crisis, with 40% of parents reporting their children have issues such as depression or anxiety.

There is a perverse logic here – a vicious cycle: given all the aforementioned domestic issues and crises, the fact that most youth do not qualify for service or do you want it (only 9 percent of young US citizens today seriously consider military service) is hardly surprising – this being so, bringing back the draftee would simply not solve the recruiting issues, not to mention that the political cost would be huge. This is one of the reasons why the overburdened US increasingly needs to fight proxy wars – as it does in Ukraine. This in turn increases spending, and debt, while the US own population faces the deterioration of health and so many other social problems.

Rod Dreher, an American Conservative senior editor, and the author of three New York Times bestsellers wrote in August 2022 that Westerns were being ruled by “a claque of Neros”. In July AD 65, the Great fire of Rome destroyed 70% of the city, and Emperor Nero blamed Christians for it, which initiated a campaign of persecution.

Rumor had it that Nero himself had started the fire and this became a very popular myth, albeit without historical evidence. Although the accusation against Nero in all likelihood is historically false, the image of a ruler, mad with power, celebrating while his own reign burns conveys a powerful image. The debt crisis, for one thing, was one of the key reasons for the decline of the Roman empire. Amid today’s crises and Western triumphalist war rhetoric (and lack of diplomacy), Dreher’s description of a Nero-elite is increasingly convincing.