Monday 18th of November 2024
Home » Blogs » Gus Leonisky's blog

idealised before death.....

Although Jimmy Carter left the White House in one of the biggest landslides of the modern American era, tributes poured onto social media moments after the Carter Center announced that he would receive hospice care. The oldest-living former president elicited praise often reserved for public figures who have already died, but the attention focused more on what he did after his presidency than during it.

 

Carter, 98, is not the first president to be memorialized while still alive, but the evolution of his legacy is unusual because he had such a long period between the end of his unpopular presidency and Saturday’s announcement that he would end several hospital stays and spend his final days at his Plains, Ga., home.

“Between the time he left office and entered hospice care, he got to sit back and enjoy the adulation of a grateful nation,” said Jeffrey A. Engel, the director for the presidential history center at Southern Methodist University.

 

READ MORE:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/19/jimmy-carter-memorialized-before-death/

 

IN REALITY, CARTER WAS A CONSERVATIVE NUT:

 

 

BY TED RALL

 

Jimmy Carter will almost certainly be remembered as a liberal lion. That reputation, however, stems from his post-presidential work with Habitat for Humanity and his role attempting to mediate peace in the Middle East and elsewhere. His affable manner and trademark smile contributed to that impression.

But Carter’s leading role was as president. Personal rebranding and the haze of history have obscured the fact that the peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, was conservative. As a right-wing “New Democrat,” he ushered in a radical shift of his party from champions of the working class and skeptics of foreign interventionism to the bellicose defenders of big business currently occupying the White House.

Domestically, Carter was notable primarily for what he did not do. His inactions invariably leaned left.

Carter became the first Democratic president not to propose an anti-poverty bill since the realignment that brought Franklin Delano Roosevelt to power in 1932. A deficit hawk more concerned about inflation than unemployment, he broke his 1976 campaign pledge to push for a national health care plan. He considered, but rejected, proposals from fellow Democrats for a universal basic income and increasing welfare benefits. Though he personally favored and campaigned for decriminalizing cannabis, he backtracked and allowed the brutal war on drugs to continue.

Empathetic statements bemoaning the ills and injustices of late-stage capitalism in the post-Vietnam era of deindustrialization, coupled with executive dithering, set the template for Clintonism: liberal rhetoric on the stump, conservative laissez faire in reality.

“Fundamentally, Jimmy Carter ended the New Deal and started America on the path of pushing wealth and power upward, a path dramatically accelerated by his successors,” Matt Stoller, author of “Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy,” told The Washington Post. “As just one simple example, one reason Americans today can’t sue airlines for consumer protection or safety violations is airline deregulation, passed in 1978 and signed by Jimmy Carter. Carter cut capital gains taxes in 1978, and under the term ‘deregulation,’ removed public rules from the banking, telecommunications, railroad, trucking, natural gas and airline industries.”

Carter was a man of peace — technically. He didn’t start any wars. He talked about human rights in international affairs, criticizing America’s coddling of dictators. He distanced the U.S. from apartheid-era South Africa and Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio “Tachito” Somoza. And he negotiated a peace deal between Israel and Egypt.

 

But his foreign policy hawkishness made the world more dangerous. The president’s highflying rhetoric was full of “built-in hypocrisy,” Foreign Policy magazine’s Jonathan Alter observed in 2020: “The president’s new policy was selective and inconsistent from the start, especially as applied to strategically important allies. Vital interests took priority over moral ones, most fatefully in the case of Iran, where Carter toasted the shah and raised the abuses of his secret police only in their private meetings. When the shah was driven from power in 1979 by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Carter’s support for the monarch led to the seizure of U.S. hostages in Tehran.”

Carter’s anti-communist national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski encouraged him to arm the radical Islamist mujahedin in Afghanistan, drawing the Soviet Union into a proxy war that helped set the stage for 9/11. He used the Soviet invasion as an excuse to politicize the 1980 Olympics by boycotting the Moscow games. In a transparently ridiculous attempt to look tough, he restored draft registration, which remains in force despite the all-volunteer military.

And it was Carter who started the giant defense spending spree of the 1980s credited to Ronald Reagan. There may not have been any cash for infrastructure or health care or poverty, but when it came to nuclear saber-rattling against the Soviets, money was no object. “I am committed as a matter of fundamental policy to continued real increases in defense,” Carter told Congress in his 1980 State of the Union address. Reagan later acknowledged Carter’s massive defense spending. “My predecessor had proposed a five-year expansion of the defense budget,” Reagan said in 1986.

By 1979, the liberal voting base of the Democratic Party had had enough of Carter’s rightward shift. And then they had their champion: Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy challenged Carter from the left in the 1980 primaries, “trying to run on sort of FDR-type policies, the old-style liberalism, you know, trying to be a populist,” said journalist Jon Ward, author of a book about that race.

Kennedy’s defeat was fateful. 1980 marked the rise of the centrist-right Third Way/Democratic Leadership Council control over the Democratic Party apparatus, which went unchallenged until Bernie Sanders in 2016. Clinton continued Carter’s aggressive foreign policy and embraced right-wing domestic projects: NAFTA, the crime bill, welfare reform. Obama perfected Carter’s style, controlled and measured and calm in an effort to deliver a vaguely liberal impression rarely reflected by his policy decisions.

Carter is considered to be a great ex-president, mainly because his post-1981 life of humanitarian service contrasts with his presidential reputation as an incompetent, vision-free micromanager. But Carter did have a vision, one that was consequential if ignored. He sucked the liberalism out of the Democratic Party, rendering the American Left homeless, marginalized and alienated within electoral politics as the country spiraled into a half-century of rightward decline with no end in sight.

 

Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis.

 

READ MORE:

https://www.unz.com/trall/jimmy-carter-was-a-right-winger/

 

IMAGE AT TOP BY CHAPPATTE......

AND PLEASE DO NOT FORGET: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/43171

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....

we disagree....

 

By Jeffrey Sachs

 

We are not at the 1-year anniversary of the war, as the Western governments and media claim. This is the 9-year anniversary of the war. And that makes a big difference.

The war began with the violent overthrow of Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, a coup that was overtly and covertly backed by the United States government (see also here). From 2008 onward, the United States pushed NATO enlargement to Ukraine and Georgia. The 2014 coup of Yanukovych was in the service of NATO expansion.

We must keep this relentless drive towards NATO expansion in context. The US and Germany explicitly and repeatedly promised Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not enlarge “one inch eastward” after Gorbachev disbanded the Soviet military alliance known as the Warsaw Pact. The entire premise of NATO enlargement was a violation of agreements reached with Soviet Union, and therefore with the continuation state of Russia.

The neocons have pushed NATO enlargement because they seek to surround Russia in the Black Sea region, akin to the aims of Britain and France in the Crimean War (1853-56). US strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski described Ukraine as the “geographical pivot” of Eurasia. If the US could surround Russia in the Black Sea region, and incorporate Ukraine into the US military alliance, Russia’s ability to project power in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, and globally would disappear, or so goes the theory.

Of course, Russia saw this not only as a general threat, but as a specific threat of putting advanced armaments right up to Russia’s border. This was especially ominous after the US unilaterally abandoned the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, which according to Russia posed a direct threat to Russian national security.

During his presidency (2010-2014), Yanukovych sought military neutrality, precisely to avoid a civil war or proxy war in Ukraine. This was a very wise and prudent choice for Ukraine, but it stood in the way of the U.S. neoconservative obsession with NATO enlargement. When protests broke out against Yanukovych at the end of 2013 upon the delay of the signing of an accession roadmap with the EU, the United States took the opportunity to escalate the protests into a coup, which culminated in Yanukovych’s overthrow in February 2014.

The US meddled relentlessly and covertly in the protests, urging them onward even as right-wing Ukrainian nationalist paramilitaries entered the scene. US NGO spent vast sums to finance the protests and the eventual overthrow. This NGO financing has never come to light.

Three people intimately involved in the US effort to overthrow Yanukovych were Victoria Nuland, then the Assistant Secretary of State, now Under-Secretary of State; Jake Sullivan, then the security advisor to VP Joe Biden, and now the US National Security Advisor to President Biden; and VP Biden, now President. Nuland was famously caught on the phone with the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, planning the next government in Ukraine, and without allowing any second thoughts by the Europeans (“F*ck the EU,” in Nuland’s crude phrase caught on tape).

The intercepted conversation reveals the depth of the Biden-Nuland-Sullivan planning. Nuland says, “So on that piece Geoff, when I wrote the note Sullivan’s come back to me VFR [direct to me], saying you need Biden and I said probably tomorrow for an atta-boy and to get the deets [details] to stick. So, Biden’s willing.”

US Film director Oliver Stone helps us to understand the US involvement in the coup in his 2016 documentary movie, Ukraine on Fire. I urge all people to watch it, and to learn what a US-regime change operation looks like. I also urge all people to read the powerful academic studies by Prof. Ivan Katchanovski of the University of Ottawa (for example, here and here), who has laboriously reviewed all of the evidence of the Maidan and found that most of the violence and killing originated not from Yanukovych’s security detail, as alleged, but from the coup leaders themselves, who fired into the crowds, killing both policemen and demonstrators.

These truths remain obscured by US secrecy and European obsequiousness to US power. A US-orchestrated coup occurred in the heart of Europe, and no European leader dared to speak the truth. Brutal consequences have followed, but still no European leader honestly tells the facts.

The coup was the start of the war nine years ago. An extra-constitutional, right-wing, anti-Russian and ultra-nationalist government came to power in Kiev. After the coup, Russia quickly retook Crimea following a quick referendum, and war broke out in the Donbass as Russians in the Ukraine army switched sides to opposed the post-coup government in Kiev.

NATO almost immediately began to pour in billions of dollars of weaponry to Ukraine. And the war escalated. The Minsk-1 and Minsk-2 peace agreements, in which France and Germany were to be co-guarantors, did not function, first, because the nationalist Ukrainian government in Kiev refused to implement them, and second, because Germany and France did not press for their implementation, as recently admitted by former Chancellor Angela Merkel.

At the end of 2021, President Putin made very clear that the three red lines for Russia were: (1) NATO enlargement to Ukraine as unacceptable; (2) Russia would maintain control of Crimea; and (3) the war in the Donbass needed to be settled by implementation of Minsk-2. The Biden White House refused to negotiate on the issue of NATO enlargement.

The Russian invasion tragically and wrongly took place in February 2022, eight years after the Yanukovych coup. The United States has poured in tens of billions of dollars of armaments and budget support since then, doubling down on the US attempt to expand its military alliance into Ukraine and Georgia. The deaths and destruction in this escalating battlefield are horrific.

In March 2022, Ukraine said that it would negotiate on the basis of neutrality. The war indeed seemed close to an end. Positive statements were made by both Ukrainian and Russian officials, as well as the Turkish mediators. We now know from former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett that the United States blocked those negotiations,, instead favouring an escalation of war to “weaken Russia.”

In September 2022, the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up. The overwhelming evidence at this date is that the United States led that destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines. Seymour Hersh’s account is highly credible and has not been refuted on a single major point (though it has been heatedly denied by the US Government). It points to the Biden-Nuland-Sullivan team as leading the Nord Stream destruction.

We are on a path of dire escalation and lies or silence in much of the mainstream US and European media. The entire narrative that this is the first anniversary of war is a falsehood that hides the reasons of this war and the way to end it. This is a war that began because of the reckless US neoconservative push for NATO enlargement, followed by the US neoconservative participation in the 2014 regime-change operation. Since then, there has been massive escalation of armaments, death, and destruction.

This is a war that needs to stop before it engulfs all of us in nuclear Armageddon. I praise the peace movement for its valiant efforts, especially in the face of brazen lies and propaganda by the US Government and craven silence by the European governments, which act as wholly subservient to the US neoconservatives.

We must speak truth. Both sides have lied and cheated and committed violence. Both sides need to back off. NATO must stop the attempt to enlarge to Ukraine and to Georgia. Russia must withdraw from Ukraine. We must listen to the red lines of both sides so that the world will survive.

 

 

READ MORE:

https://johnmenadue.com/the-ninth-anniversary-of-the-ukraine-war/

 

WE DISAGREE WITH THE LAST PARAGRAPH OF AN EXCELLENT ARTICLE BY DR JEFFREY SACHS.

WE HAVE EXPLAINED MANY TIMES OVER WHY "UKRAINE" ISN'T UKRAINE. "UKRAINE" IS AN ARTIFICIAL CONCOCTION OF THREE MAIN PEOPLE:

— THE WESTERN GALICIANS WHO HAVE BEEN NAZIS DURING WW2 AND STILL ARE GOVERNED BY FASCIST.

— THE SOUTH WESTERN REGIONS (JOINED IN 1949) OF POLAND

— THE COMMUNIST RUSSIAN REGIONS OF THE DONBASS (JOINED IN 1922) AND OF CRIMEA (JOINED IN 1954 BY KHRUSHCHEV)

 

THE UKRAINIAN REGIONS HAVE HAD A HISTORY OF SIMMERING DISAGREEMENTS GOING BACK ONE HUNDRED YEARS, EVEN UNDER THE COMMUNIST REGIME OF STALIN WHO WAS A GEORGIAN. SINCE 1991, THE KIEV GOVERNMENT HAS HAD TO BALANCE A FINE LINE BETWEEN THE REGIONS. WE KNOW AS EXPLAINED BY DR SACHS THAT THE AMERICAN PLACED A WEDGE BETWEEN THE VARIOUS FACTIONS IN ORDER TO CREATE A COLOUR REVOLUTION. 

THE ETHNIC VARIETIES CANNOT BE RECONCILED AS THEY SPEAK DIFFERENT LANGUAGES. THE PRESENT KIEV GOVERNMENT HAS BEEN SEEKING TO DESTROY THE RUSSIAN CULTURE IN "UKRAINE". THE PRICE TO PAY FOR THIS IS FOR UKRAINE TO BE SPLIT UP LIKE THE UK LOST IRELAND IN THE 1920s: THE GALICIAN FASCIST ON ONE SIDE AND THE RUSSIAN DONBASS ON THE OTHER. 

THAT THE RUSSIAN SIDE OF UKRAINE SEEKING AUTONOMY SINCE 2014 HAS NOW VOTED FOR JOINING THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION SHOULD BE RECOGNISED BY THE WEST, LIKE THE WEST ACKNOWLEDGED THE SEPARATION OF THE UK AND EIRE.

THE DONBASS REGION VOTED TO JOIN THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION — NOT UNDER DURESS FROM THE RUSSIANS, BUT UNDER THREAT FROM THE REGIME IN KIEV. WE ALSO KNOW THAT THE BIGGEST PORTION OF UKRAINIAN REFUGEES WENT TO RUSSIA.

SO, THE DONBASS AND CRIMEAN REGION HAVE RETURNED TO THEIR RUSSIAN ROOTS. 

THE RUSSIANS NEED TO COMPLETE THE JOB OF PREVENTING WESTERN UKRAINE TO MASSACRE THE ETHNIC RUSSIANS OF THESE REGIONS. THE WEST ALSO NEED TO UNDERSTAND THAT THE AMERICAN EMPIRE CANNOT GET AWAY ANYMORE WITH THE LONG LIST OF INVASION, DESTRUCTION AND REGIME CHANGE IT HAS PERFORMED SINCE 1945 (AND SINCE THE MONROE DOCTRINE).

RUSSIA CANNOT WITHDRAW FROM THESE REGIONS, WHICH WERE OF "UKRAINE" BY DECREES, NOT BY POPULATIONS. SHOULD RUSSIA WITHDRAW, THE GALICIANS WOULD DO JUST THAT: MASSACRE THE PEOPLE THERE TO TAKE OVER WHAT THEY THINK THEY OWN... THEY DON'T. GUS LEONIKSY SUPPORTS RUSSIA, WHETHER WE LIKE PUTIN OR NOT.

 

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....