Wednesday 3rd of July 2024
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who's running the empire???....

Biden’s decline has been known to friends and insiders for months.

Readers of this column know that President Joe Biden’s drift into blankness has been ongoing for months, as he and his foreign policy aides have been urging a ceasefire that will not happen in Gaza while continuing to supply the weapons that make a ceasefire less likely. There’s a similar paradox in Ukraine, where Biden has been financing a war that cannot be won and refusing to participate in negotiations that could end the slaughter.

 

Who is running the country?    By Seymour Hersh

 

The reality behind all of this, as I’ve been told for months, is that the president is simply no longer there, in terms of understanding the contradictions of the policies he and his foreign policy advisers have been carrying out. America should not have a president who does not know what he has signed off on. People in power have to be responsible for what they do, and last night showed America and the world that we have a president who clearly is not in that position today.

The real disgrace is not only Biden’s, but those of the men and women around him who have kept him more and more under wraps. He is a captive, and as he rapidly diminished over the past six months. I have been hearing for months about the increasing isolation of the president, from his one-time pals in the Senate, who find that he is unable to return their calls. Another old family friend, whose help has been sought by Biden on key issues since his days as vice president, told me of a plaintive call from the president many months ago. Biden said the White House was in chaos and he needed his friend’s help. The friend said he begged off and then told me, with a laugh: “I would rather have a root canal procedure every day than go to work there.” A long retired Senate colleague was invited by Biden to join him on a foreign trip, and the two played cards and shared a drink or two on the Air Force One flight going out. The senator was barred by Biden’s staff from joining the return flight home.

I have been told the increasing isolation of the president on foreign policy issues has been in part the doing of Tom Donilon, whose younger brother, Michael, a key pollster and adviser in Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign and in the current re-election effort, was part of the team that spent much of the week briefing Biden for last night’s debate. Tom Donilon, who is 69, was President Biden’s national security adviser from 2010 to 2013 and sought unsuccessfully to be named as Biden’s director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He remains very much an insider.

Given Biden’s obvious decline in recent months, it is impossible for an outsider to understand why the White House agreed to any debates with Donald Trump before the election, let alone committing to the earliest presidential debate, the first of two, in modern history. One thought, I was told, was that if Biden performed well, as he had in his State of the Union speech in March, the issue of his mental capacity would be tabled. A poor performance would give the Biden campaign time to do a better prep job for the scheduled second debate.

There also was pressure from the major Democratic fundraisers, many of them in New York City, for the campaign to do something to counter the perception of the president’s obvious growing impairment, as reported and filmed by major media. I have been told that at least one foreign leader, after a closed meeting with Biden, told others that the president’s decline was so visible that it was hard to understand how, as it was put to me, “he could go through the rigors” of a re-election campaign. Such warnings were ignored.

What now? One of Washington political savants told me today that the Democratic Party is now facing “a national security crisis.” The nation is backing two devastating wars with a president who clearly is not up to it, he said, and it might be time to start drafting a resignation speech that would match or outdo the one given in March of 1968 by President Lyndon Johnson after his narrow victory over Senator Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary.

“They’re trapped,” he said of the senior advisers in the White House who hoped that Biden would somehow do well enough in last night’s debates to carry on, with the much-needed support of the more skeptical financial supporters in New York City.

Not everyone I talked to today agreed that it is time to force a Biden resignation and hope for the best at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August—to dump the ticket and seek new candidates. “My humble opinion,” one longtime contributor to the Democratic Party told me, “is to let the dust settle. Must examine the realistic options before some quick reaction creates an internal Democratic Party split with far-reaching consequences beyond 2024. Accept reality . . . 2024 is likely beyond recovery at this point. Too steep a hill to climb. Plan and execute a long-term plan to counter Mr. Orange and build a moderate platform for the recovery . . . and let Biden wander off to the Jersey Pine Barrens.”

A differing view was expressed by another political guru. “This is the age of social media—TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X—and a political campaign can go very far very fast.”

Whatever happens, we have a president—now fully unveiled—who just may not be responsible for what he does in the coming campaign, not to mention his actions in the Middle East and Ukraine.

Whatever happened to the 25th Amendment that authorises the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet to declare the president incompetent? What is going on in the Biden White House?

 

First published in Seymour Hersh’s Substack on June 28, 2024.

https://johnmenadue.com/who-is-running-the-country/

unfit....

 

Why the U.S. is increasingly unfit for world leadership

 

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

Andrey Sushentsov, the leading professor at the Russian Foreign Ministry’s MGMO University, and one of Russia’s top geostrategists, headlined on June 28th, “Why the Russia-US conflict will outlast the Ukraine crisis: Moscow must look at Washington as a long-term threat”, and he opened:

The desire of the US to dominate and its refusal to see other countries as equals, willing and able to assume equal responsibility for peace and stability, is the short answer to the question of why Moscow-Washington relations cannot get out of the current state of crisis. This attitude also leads the US to the same difficulties in its relations with China, India and even some of its own allies, such as Turkey. 

The Russian and Chinese position is buttressed by the principle that peace is the result of compromise between the major centers of power, and that without their mutual agreement – without equality, mutual respect, a willingness to recognize each other’s interests, and adherence to the principle of non-interference in internal affairs – a stable order is impossible. The US believes, however, that peace is a deterministic given, and that no special effort is needed to maintain it. This leads to paradoxical solutions: the more weapons, the more peace. The West is not yet ready to become just one of the Atlanteans holding up the sky. It still believes it should be in charge. …

All of that is correct, and the reason why it is, is that ever since George W. Bush became America’s President in 2001, the U.S. Government has been ruled not only by neoconservative (i.e., pro-U.S.-imperialistic) Presidents, but by U.S. Congresses whose seats have been filled more than 95% by fellow-neoconservatives; and, as a consequence, America now spends more than $1.5 trillion each year on its military (half of which is funded outside of the U.S. Defense Deprtment so as to fool the world to think that it’s instead only around $900 billion per year), while its federal Government’s debt has risen by $5 trillion in the past four years, which is only $1.25T per year, which is only 83% as much as the nation’s annual military expenses are, which means that all other expenses by the U.S. federal Government will inevitably soon be reduced each year by around $250 billion per year. Those non-military annual expenses constitute $5T ($6.5T minus $1.5T), so that from now on, the non-military part will be reduced by 5% ($.25T/$5T) each year, or else the growth in the federal debt will be $1.5T per year instead of $1.25T per year, or else the current $1.5T U.S. annual spending on its military will be cut down to $1.25T per year, which would mean that the very top priority of the almost 100% neoconservative U.S. Government, which is its military spending, will have to become annually reduced at least by 5%, by that almost 100% neoconservative Government, which won’t happen unless there is a Second American Revolution, which replaces all of these officials by Government officials who will be like what professor Shushentsov says will be needed in order to prevent yet further build-up to a WW3 global nuclear annihilation.

Alternatively: the growth in the federal debt will no longer be $1.25T annually, but instead $1.5T annually; but, if that happens, then global investors will disinvest in U.S. industries, which will also mean that the billionaires who control the U.S. elected officials by means of their political donations, lobbyists, news-media, think tanks, etc., will see their net worths decline because foreign investors will be withdrawing. So, that path forward will be even less acceptable to them than the other paths will be.

Perhaps the neoconservatives will say that this is Russian propaganda, or Chinese propaganda, or Iranian propaganda, or by some other country that neoconservatives hope to conquer, but they won’t be able to contest any of this by the numbers, because all of these numbers come from the U.S. Government itself. The actual propagandists are the neocons themselves, and they are funded by U.S. billionaires, who have been profiting from all of this. By contrast, nobody has paid me anything in order to research and write this. I always write only what the data display. In the case of my own country, the U.S., what the data display is why the U.S. is increasingly unfit for world leadership. The neoconservatives (including all U.S.-and-allied billionaires) are that reason why. They, themselves, are the reason. And they have enough money to be able to destroy America — and maybe the world.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

https://theduran.com/why-the-u-s-is-increasingly-unfit-for-world-leadership/

AMERICA WAS NEVER FIT TO "LEAD THE WORLD"... IT ALWAYS WAS A SELF-APPOINTED "LEADER" TO PLUNDER AND ENSLAVE OTHER COUNTRIES.... STILL TRYING TO, WITH LESS AND LESS SUCCESS....

 

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