By Michael Moore

As the week drew to a close and President Biden desperately tried to get Congress to vote on his infrastructure bills (build roads, help people) before he headed to two major summits in Europe, pundits and corporatist Dems railed against the progressive lawmakers for holding things up. Of course the only people holding things up were two pro-wealthy Democratic senators — and every single Republican. The progressives? They were holding out on behalf of the vast majority of Americans whose lives would be turned around and vastly improved should Biden’s big bill pass. 

Biden was beside himself to get something enacted before going to the G-20 summit and the COP-26 climate meeting. So he started tossing major pieces of his beloved bill overboard. He threw out paid family leave, got rid of free community college, took dental and eyeglasses away from the elderly and made a thousand other little cuts. He also decided the wealthy would not have to pay their true fair share of the taxes. 

So Biden left for Europe without anything becoming law. In the weeks leading up to his trip, he (I mean the Republicans and the two lame Dems) also failed to raise the minimum wage and they failed to protect voting rights. The pundits howled. “Biden goes to Europe as a weakened president!” “Biden humiliated in front of the world!” “The US cannot govern itself and Biden enters these summits with America as the laughing stock amongst world leaders.”

Seriously?

Are the press and politicians that clueless as to why the world is laughing at us? I hate to tell you, it ain’t because of the roads and child tax credits. We are the laughing stock because we refuse to take care of our own people — and NO ONE around the world can understand why we force our old people to suffer and why we put our own children last. Not other country’s children. OURS!  

I hate to reveal this secret, but here it goes:

Every one of the E.U. countries has:

•Universal free health care.
•Free or nearly-free college. 
•Paid Family Leave for at least four months.
•Complete care of all elderly. 
•Robust funding of schools. 
•All sorts of help for the jobless and the poor. 
•Workers enjoy mandatory paid vacation with a minimum of four weeks off (some countries are almost double that).
•Women having full equal rights. Abortion and birth control is legal and easily available in all but two E.U. countries (Malta and Poland). Most of their constitutions have what we don’t have — an equal rights clause for all women. 

The list goes on. And not just social safety net policies. Portugal has stopped mass incarceration and made possession of drugs legal — and has seen drug use go down because they treat drug addiction as a medical problem, not a crime.

Countries like Slovenia and Germany not only have free college, they will let any foreign student come there and attend college for free. Yes, you read that right. They will even let American students come to their countries and get a free four-year degree! What? You say you can’t speak Slovenian? No problem! They have a whole curriculum taught in English!

Spain, France, Italy and others all have high speed affordable bullet trains. Cheap mass transit is everywhere. 

In Austria you can vote at 16. Teenagers have held seats in the Austrian parliament!

In Norway, when you commit a crime you spend a few years going to school, learning a trade, making amends to those whom you’ve hurt — and no sentence can be longer than 21 years (including for the mass murderer of 77 people, mostly teenagers). 

Yes, other countries have their own problems. But, while American school boards are enacting rules prohibiting teaching students about the history of American slavery, racism and genocide, these other countries REQUIRE its young people to be taught about their own evil past (and present) in the hopes that the next generation won’t make their parents’ mistakes. So German students are thoroughly enmeshed in learning about the Holocaust. French students are taught about their brutal colonial past in Algeria and Vietnam. Irish students are well aware of the abuse caused by the Catholic Church. Spanish students get courses on the evils of fascism and Spain’s fascist past. Antifa, you say? Right down the hall in Room 104, 3rd Hour social studies with Señora Valdez! 

Yes, we are a laughing stock. Biden’s “humiliation” this week in Europe is that the nation he leads is a brute to its own people. It’s not that the other leaders are laughing at him. They feel sorry for him. They pity us. “Those poor Americans!” Most people around the world actually like us. They admire our creativity and inventiveness. Which makes their incredulity even worse — they simply can’t figure out why in a democracy we allow this misery to continue! Why we haven’t thrown the bastards out. Why 50+1 votes out of 100 senators isn’t called a majority. American math says 60 out of 100 is the majority. We look like idiots. The Europeans, the Japanese, the Australians, the Argentinians, the South Africans — they don’t hate us. They pity us and they cannot friggin’ figure us out. 

And they fear us. Not because of our weapons and desire to invade other countries (although they should remain very, very afraid of that). No. They’re afraid because, if we treat our own people this way, if we require an enforced ignorance and teach lies to our students, then what they truly fear is what will happen to this planet if the wealthiest nation, the one blessed with the most resources on Earth, shits so easily and happily on itself. It is MIND-BOGGLING to the rest of the world that we are so hell-bent on destroying our Democracy and ourselves.

I do feel sorry for Joe Biden sitting on that world stage this week. But not because he couldn’t get an infrastructure bill passed. It’s because he has to sit there over Scottish tea and explain why our old people are now finally going to get to have free hearing aids! — but not glasses, and not a visit to the dentist. “You see,” Uncle Joe will explain, hanging his head, “in America, if you are old, you do have a right to hear — but not to see. And not to chew. God Bless America.”

https://www.michaelmoore.com/p/the-laughing-stock-of-the-world

Please Michael, do not mention Antifa... It's a hypocritical pseudo-organism that has morphed into a dangerous stupid destructive force. And please remember that Joe Biden was the fellow who wrote the "Patriot Act"... and did dirty deeds in Ukraine... If you do not see this, I pity you as well... and Biden is still keeping JULIAN ASSANGE IN PRISON...

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

BY Christopher Black

On December 9 and 10 the American President will host a virtual meeting titled a “Democracy Summit” with participation from many countries with all their variety of government and political systems, and even the participation of the Chinese renegade province of Taiwan, justly angering China, perhaps the world’s largest socialist democracy, which is pointedly not invited.

This meeting is a follow up to the dress rehearsal Copenhagen Democracy Summit held in 2018 and again in May of this year which I wrote about at the time as a meeting of the new Nazis, organised by the “Alliance of Democracies” so-called, meaning the USA and its allies and nations seeking its favour. I do not think my characterisation was far off the mark.

That rehearsal revealed what it was all about with the opening address made by the former Secretary-General of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who was head of NATO when the US and its allies attacked Libya and murdered Gadhafi, overthrowing the socialist democracy there and reducing it to chaos and civil war. It is worth mentioning his other accomplishments, since he is emblematic of the cabal that is organising the Summit.

As prime minister of Denmark he supported the invasion of Iraq, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, the Israelis against the Palestinians and at home, this “democrat” lowered corporate and property taxes for the benefit of the rich while shifting the tax burden to working people through sales taxes, and reduced democracy in Denmark by reducing the number of smaller towns and regions into larger ones with a consequent reduction of the ability of people to have their voices heard about local issues, and all the time encouraged privatisation of the economy.

It was he who founded the Alliance of Democracies in 2017 along with his friend Joe Biden who made the first address to its members in 2018, the whole thrust of which is to advocate “free markets” and hegemonic control of them by the US and its NATO allies.

The list of countries that are invited to the December Biden summit is long, but does not include China, Russia, Turkey, Iran, the DPRK, Venezuela, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Belarus. There are only two countries from the Middle East, Israel and Iraq, and only sixteen nations from Africa out of fifty-four.

The participants include nations where the existence of “democracy,” whatever its form, is questionable, such as Kosovo, the key province of Serbia occupied by NATO and handed over to the terrorists of the Kosovo Liberation Army, and Ukraine where the elected government was overthrown in a NATO backed coup in 2014 and replaced with US puppets with strong fascist tendencies and which has attacked its own people in the Donbass.

It includes Poland which has a government of far-right tendencies which has banned abortions, reduced the independence of the judiciary, and meets refugees trying to cross its border with attack dogs, tear gas and gunfire, Israel which has created an apartheid state, India where farmers had to use strikes to make their voice heard against a hostile government of the right wing Modi, Brazil, where Mr. Bolsonaro, installed after President Lula was framed up on corruption charges, caused the rapid immiseration of his country, and as expected, none of them are socialist countries.

Finally, of course it is all arranged by the USA, where democracy hardly exists, with its tweedle-dum, tweedle-dee party system that maintains control of political life for the benefit of the industrialists, bankers, and the military caste that controls every aspect of American society, with results the world can only observe with disgust.

No, the “Democracy Summit” is purely a capitalist affair, and even then, does not include capitalist states that the Americans view as being in the way of their quest of for world hegemony, Russia being the most notable.

Those who are interested in democracy will be hard pressed to find anywhere on the US State Department website any definition of what “democracy” means to them. It is just a word, a symbol, used to veil the real purpose of the meeting, which is to confirm and support the US Will To World Power against the peoples’ need for a Will To Peace.

Their propaganda is replete with code words for hegemony under the guise of “fighting corruption” –for is not the American government one of the most corrupt, or “fighting authoritarianism”-is not the American system with its heavily armed police that shoot down citizens on the slightest pretext, especially if the citizen is dark skinned or poor, elections controlled by the ruling elite, its controlled media, economic and social policies that benefit only the capitalists while reducing the working population to penury and desperation-one of the most authoritarian states? What is “democracy” to them? It is nothing more than the worship of form over content. Joe Biden and his Democratic Party are proof of it.

During President Trump’s regime, Biden’s party concocted a litany of lies about Russian influence on the US electorate in order to explain their loss and justify their continued attempts to remove Trump from office, to frustrate the will of the people that voted for him. The recent revelations that the entire affair was fabricated have shown how tawdry American democracy has become so that the consequence is a nation in which half the voting population believe Biden’s election victory was rigged. It matters not whether it was or was not. The fact is the entire political system in the USA has become so corrupted that the population no longer trusts the electoral wins of their political opponents. The Democrats argue Trump’s win was rigged, while the Republicans believe Biden’s win was rigged, resulting in a precarious state of affairs in which no one in the USA has any confidence in their democracy” whatsoever. Yet Biden presumes the right to lord it over the world as some high priest of “democracy” while the structure of what remains of American democracy is on the verge of collapse.

The US State Department website states:

“Democracy and human rights are under threat around the world. Democracies — whether in transition or established for decades — are confronting serious challenges from within and outside of their borders. Public distrust and the failure of governments to deliver equitable and sustainable economic and political progress have fuelled political polarization and the rise of leaders who are undermining democratic norms and institutions. Across the globe, weak state capacity, tenuous rule of law, high inequality, and corruption continue to erode democracy”. 

To take this statement apart could take a book, but in short when they say “around the world” they really mean the nations that stand up against the American diktats, and not themselves, although they make a nod to the troubles they face inside their own nation. Who is responsible for the lack of trust in western governments but the parties who controlled those governments and behind them the owners of the American, British, Canadian, Australian, Japanese and European capital who have pursued policies designed to keep wages low and profits high, with war as an accepted instrument of policy, and in so doing have had to lie to their people to be able to do it?

The State Department then looks in its own mirror and catching its own reflection states,

“At the same time, authoritarian leaders are reaching across borders to undermine democracies — from targeting journalists and human rights defenders to meddling in elections — all while sowing disinformation to claim their model is better at delivering for people. Hostile actors exacerbate these trends by increasingly manipulating digital information and spreading disinformation to weaken democratic cohesion.”

For is this not a description of the United States today?

Finally they state,

“As President Biden has said, we have to prove democracy still works and can improve people’s lives in tangible ways. To do that, democracies have to come together …”

And there you have part of the reason this Summit is taking place; to make propaganda to be used against the people of the United States to somehow convince them that they actually live in a democracy in order to shore up the continued domination of political and economic power by US capital threatened by the rising discontent of the people.

The other reason of course is to create propaganda against all the nations the United States wants to dominate and exploit, which not only resist but also advocate a multipolar world, in which every nation respects every other. The ultimate objective is to justify war against those nations. For that is where this leads. And how can war lead to democracy?

In 1795 Immanuel Kant wrote his famous essay “A Perpetual Peace, A Philosophical Sketch,” and it was President Theodore Roosevelt who, on receiving the Nobel Prize for Peace stated,

“It would be a masterstroke if those great powers honestly bent on peace would form a League of Peace.” 

But of course his country and many others were never honestly bent on peace when war was more profitable.

The eternal quest for more profit drives the modern imperialist nations to rely on plunder and pillage as a regular means of income just as much as the empires of the past. The claim by early capitalists and philosophers that free trade and commerce would lead to peace and not war, out of pure commercial self-interest, and the ruinous cost of wars, was proved wrong as soon as the claim was made. We see similar claims made today by world leaders who every day wage war on other states, or resist the wars conducted against them.

Morality, law, ethics, these are empty words for those who the capitalist system makes into thieves and murderers. But then, when the working population is composed of wage slaves, whose labour power is taken from them every hour of the day without compensation, the only way by which profit can be derived from industrial production, when the whole basis of the economy is theft, how can we expect the governments of such nations, the captains of this slave system, to be anything else except murderers and thieves.

And since the United States has been the preeminent capitalist power since 1945, a world imperialist power, we witness the United States, and its servant nations in the NATO, and other vassal alliances, forcing the world to the edge of world war in a continual and never-ending cycle of crises.

Its actions against Russia, against China, against Iran, against the DPRK, even against its own allies, can push us over that edge into the abyss at any time. The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, the North Koreans, warn the American leadership, warn the world, again and again that the consequences will be catastrophic for the world; but the irrational leadership of the United States, corrupted beyond redemption by the presumption that their power gives them the right to dominate the world, only increase their aggressive rhetoric and actions, blinded by hubris and an ignorance of reality. They think they can triumph over the world and threaten to reduce it to a radioactive wasteland.

Kant thought that democracy, that republican forms of government, in which the people ruled, would necessarily lead to peace among nations as democratic rule spread among nations. But we have seen through history that so long as the debt system allows nations to have standing armies and to spend huge sums on creating weapons of unlimited destructive power, so long as the quest for profit remains the basis of the economic system, which leads inevitably to imperialism and colonialism, so long as governments pay men and women in their standing armies to kill, to be killed, for the benefit of others, to be reduced to expendable machines of death, we shall risk incessant war and annihilation.

What better example of this is there than The President of the United States of America threatening to “obliterate” North Korea, to “obliterate” Iran. This is the vocabulary of the deep evil that rests within the heart of the system, evil because it knows no morality, no law, and regards itself to be superior to humanity itself.

Democracy works only when there is a free exchange of ideas, but they control the ideas, control and manipulate the people, blind us with a world-wide system of propaganda using the mass media, and more and more, the social media, to mould our opinions and actions, or inaction. Independent media that are dedicated to peace and dialogue between peoples are becoming fewer or are compromised. So few are able to see the reality, to understand how the system works, how they fit into the system and how they can overcome it.

During the Soviet period, after the defeat of European fascism, the idea spread through the world of the equality of peoples, of nations, of international cooperation, of the community of mankind, of economic systems designed to produce social wealth for the benefit of the people instead of private wealth, making money for a few. Che Guevara wrote a book about the new human beings that this system needed and would produce.

But instead, we have a world in which the oldest capitalist powers are ruled by cutthroats and mobsters. The United States acts as captain of a world order of bandits; all of them dressed up in the clothing of democrats. They want world order, but their “order” is state of world servitude to their moneyed interests.

The Russians, the Chinese, and other still independent nations, call for a new order, one of multi-polarity, but this is to replace the world order of American autocracy with the order of a world aristocracy, still the rule of big powers over small, however well-intentioned they may be. But what is needed is a just world order in which all nations and peoples are equally respected, and have a real voice in solving global problems, an order which exists for the benefit of all the world’s peoples.

We need a world League of Perpetual Peace to replace the United Nations, which, because of its undemocratic structure and control by the great powers, has not been able to accomplish its objectives. Armies need to be abolished, for if all armies are abolished, no one can have the excuse to create one. Differences among nations have to be solved peacefully and this cannot be done if armies and weapons of mass destruction are in the possession of nations. Without the means to make war, there cannot be war. Only then can we have and enjoy any real democracy, and the democracy that each nation and people are able to choose for themselves.

Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Read more:

https://journal-neo.org/2021/11/29/biden-s-democracy-summit-america-s-push-for-world-domination/

Read from top....

See also: https://journal-neo.org/2021/11/23/biden-xi-summit-only-confirms-unending-competition/

I say BIDET instead of "Biden" because the old man's brain is in cotton wool. Biden is teleprompter-driven and cannot make decisions, in the same way a puppet is pulled by strings...

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oligarch...

From The New Internationalist March/April 2020...

See toon at top.

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