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should america still police the world?.... the answer is in the toon...

In 1939, shortly before the German invasion of Poland, a British emissary, Lord Lothian, visited the White House with an unusual request. The United Kingdom was unable to protect the world from the Nazis, Lothian told President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “Anglo-Saxon civilization” would thus need a new guardian. The scepter was falling from British hands, Lothian explained, and the United States must “snatch it up.” Though informally made, it was an extraordinary entreaty. London was willing to step aside and let Washington lead the world.

 

Should America Still Police the World?


On the problem—and potential—of a seventy-year-old superpower.


By Daniel Immerwahr (THE NEW YORKER— Nov 2020)

 

But F.D.R. was not interested. Indeed, he was offended. “I got mad clear through,” he wrote. Who were the British to dump their burdens onto his lap? Saving civilization was their job. The United States’ army at the time was only slightly larger than Bulgaria’s, with little ability to hold back illiberal forces in Central Europe. “What the British need,” F.D.R. concluded, was to buck up with “a good stiff grog.”

That was perhaps the last time a President would be so blithe about U.S. hegemony. As Stephen Wertheim explains in his new history, “Tomorrow, the World,” the Second World War is what changed Roosevelt’s mind, and the minds of nearly all those around him. The fall of France, in 1940, convinced U.S. leaders of the need to enter the fray. In 1941, the publisher Henry Luce went further and proposed an “American Century,” a postwar global order led by the values, institutions, and ultimately the military force of the United States. Luce’s idea was controversial at first, yet by the end of the war it seemed inevitable. By then, the hastily expanded U.S. military had gained footholds all over the planet, and Washington was reluctant to give them up. As Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, put it to Congress, in late 1945, “We must relentlessly preserve our superiority on land and sea and in the air.”

And relentless that preservation has been. Today, the Pentagon controls around seven hundred and fifty bases in some eighty foreign countries and territories—a pointillist empire that spans the globe. Last spring, Mike Pence told West Point’s graduating class that it was a “virtual certainty” they would see combat. (He then offered an expansive list of possible locales, from the Americas to the Korean Peninsula.) Even in the absence of troops on the ground, U.S. drones hover overhead, surveilling people and occasionally firing missiles at them. By the calculations of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the United States has killed more people in the past five years by air strikes than by police shootings.

The argument for this widespread application of violence is a familiar one. Were it not for the U.S. military, we are told, the world would be lawless and dangerous. “If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation,” Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, explained, in a famous formulation. “We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.”

 

Such self-aggrandizement has often provoked eye rolls, but never more than now. Among the political pieties that Donald Trumpshredded, in his four years as President, is the notion that the United States stands for anything but stark self-interest. He scorned international agreements, romanced dictators, and made laughable the notion that the United States might be an impartial umpire in world affairs. Though he seemed less focussed on global leadership than his predecessors, this was not out of deference to international norms. When asked to define the Trump Doctrine, one senior Administration official put it plainly: “We’re America, bitches.”

 

Just as George Floyd’s killing sharpened a crisis of legitimacy for police departments, Trump’s reign sharpened one for Washington’s foreign policy. For billions abroad, it’s made certain questions hard to ignore. Why does this one country have the power it does? When that power is abused, can the United States be held to account? By whom? There’s never been a time, in the past decade, when a majority of people around the world approved of U.S. leadership, but that number is now less than a third, according to Gallup’s polling. In other words, the United States is markedly less popular globally than Trump is domestically.

Surely Joe Biden, who has promised to end the crass posturing and cultivate allies, will restore some international favor. But will his election change anything on a deeper level? Two recent books shed some light. One, by the former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, sees the United States as a “beacon to oppressed peoples everywhere” that, under Trump, temporarily strayed from its mission. The other, by the conservative Australian-British political scientist Patrick Porter, regards such talk as a gauzy fiction. For Porter, Trump is “less an aberration than a culmination.”

Robert Gates’s first memoir was titled “From the Shadows,” and that is an apt description of where Gates has comfortably resided. He is not a flashy man—a colleague once likened him to “the guy at P. C. Richards who sold microwave ovens”—but he has been for decades a quietly persistent presence in foreign policymaking. Gates has served as the Defense Secretary, C.I.A. chief, and deputy national-security adviser, among other roles. Unusually, he has occupied high positions under both Democratic and Republican Presidents. After George W. Bush placed him in charge of the Defense Department, Barack Obama kept him there as a trusted source of counsel. He has called Biden “a man of genuine integrity” and Trump “unfit to be Commander-in-Chief.”

Gates’s latest book, “Exercise of Power,” offers a stark view of the world. The country is “challenged on every front,” Gates believes. The places the United States must police are, in his various descriptions, a “bane” (Iran), a “curse” (Iraq), a “primitive country” (Afghanistan), and a “sinkhole of conflict and terrorism” (the Middle East). Its adversaries form a rogue’s gallery of “bad guys,” “thugs,” “serial cheaters and liars,” and “ever-duplicitous Pakistanis.”

The United States, by contrast, Gates sees as “the most steadfast example and proponent of human rights and individual liberty, and defender of the repressed everywhere.” Its willingness to put ill-intentioned actors in their place has been, by his reckoning, an enormous boon. Direct confrontations between the so-called “great powers” are routinely the deadliest wars, yet we are living in the longest stretch free of them since the Roman Empire. Wars of conquest are nearly a thing of the past, and, though the world possesses more than ten thousand nuclear weapons, not one has been detonated in anger in three-quarters of a century.

Gates believes that U.S. primacy has been essential to this relatively calm state of affairs. Which is why its erosion—straying allies, defiant enemies—concerns him so much. Gates blames the crisis on “recent political leaders” who have wielded power ineptly. They have leaned too heavily on the military and neglected such other “instruments of power” as persuasion, trade, aid, sanctions, public relations, and covert action. What Gates seeks, in essence, is reform: fewer choke holds, more community policing. A more supple exertion of influence, he argues, will shore up the United States’ flagging supremacy and “ensure that authoritarianism, twice defeated in the twentieth century, does not prevail in the twenty-first.”

Gates’s sense that the United States has relied too much on its armed forces is widely shared. Biden has also complained of it, and a recent Gallup poll found people nearly twice as likely to say that Washington is spending too much on its military as too little. They’re right. U.S.A.I.D., the governmental agency for distributing aid, has some three thousand five hundred employees, making it the size of a large newspaper or small university. The Defense Department, the agency for distributing force, is, by contrast, the world’s largest employer. It counts 2.1 million in uniform, plus more than seven hundred thousand civilian workers—it’s more than eight hundred times U.S.A.I.D.’s size. Gates describes the foreign-facing side of the government as “a nineteenth-century tricycle, with a giant front wheel (Defense) and tiny back wheels (everything else).”

Turning away from militarism means accepting limits on U.S. influence. At one point, Gates discusses North Korea, which continues to develop its nuclear arsenal. In 2017, Trump, in his first address to the United Nations, threatened to “totally destroy” the country. But Gates believes that North Korea will never voluntarily relinquish its nuclear weapons and that any attempt to force the issue could trigger a major war. “Perhaps, then, we should change the goal, lower our sights, and seek an agreement that limits the North’s nuclear weapons arsenal,” he writes. It would be no chest-thumping victory, but Gates appears to have little interest in those.

It’s refreshing to see Gates cast a skeptical eye on received truths. Yet there is one political axiom he refuses to question: U.S. primacy. Peace and safety, in Gates’s final estimation, are not goods secured coöperatively by well-meaning countries. They depend, rather, “almost entirely on long-term American strength, engagement, and leadership.”

 

But why should this be? A justification is hard to make out, beyond Gates’s insistence that the United States is uniquely “on the side of liberty and human dignity.”And even that assertion fits oddly with his hard-bitten realism. U.S. Presidents should avoid intervening with force, Gates writes, unless there is “a threat to American vital interests.” If intervention is ultimately a question of interests, though, why should other countries have any faith that Washington is protecting the collective good? It’s like trusting a police chief who brags about sending out officers only when the department’s budget is on the line.

Such questions lie at the heart of Patrick Porter’s bracing book, “The False Promise of Liberal Order.” In Porter’s view, the issue is not that policymakers like Gates are hypocritical; it’s that the very idea of a “liberal order” is contradictory. Liberalism, in the context of international relations, means freedom, equality, and consent, whereas world orders are hierarchies that rest “on the threat of force.” The United States, Porter writes, is the “gentlest hegemon thus far.” But it’s still a hegemon, and hegemony entails domination.

Consider the matter of the International Criminal Court in The Hague—which was created, in 1998, in the wake of the Rwandan genocide. The court promised to be a pillar of a rules-based system, bringing war criminals to justice no matter their nationality. Yet when it became clear that the rules would apply to the United States, Washington balked. “American armed forces have a unique peacekeeping role, posted to hot spots around the world,” David Scheffer, the country’s first ambassador-at-large for war-crimes issues, explained. What if U.S. service members were arrested for war crimes or crimes against humanity? “We simply cannot be expected to expose our people to those sorts of risks,” Scheffer insisted. “It is an absolute bottom line with us.”

Scheffer wasn’t bluffing. In the year that the court opened its doors, Congress passed a law banning military aid (with exceptions) to any country willing to comply with the court. The law also authorized military force to free U.S. or allied personnel imprisoned by the court, earning it the nickname The Hague Invasion Act. In the name of preserving order, Porter writes, “the superpower sought immunity from the ICC, reserving the right literally to attack its institutions.” He notes that even such champions of internationalism as Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry voted for the law.

Such is the way of hegemony, argues Porter. Rule-makers aren’t generally rule-takers. Porter, a realist in the classical tradition, is untroubled by this. What bothers him is the “false promise” that hegemony can be benevolent—a delusion, he believes, that warps the world view of U.S. leaders. From their perspective, the international order created in 1945 has been a blessing. They have thus struggled to understand why foreigners might not be content or might perceive U.S. policing as a threat. Puffed up on their own hype, policymakers in Washington have been repeatedly “shocked” when their “obviously benign actions result in resistance,” Porter writes. Seeing themselves as pure, they can explain opposition only by seeing the world as wicked: a sinkhole teeming with thugs, bad guys, and ever-duplicitous Pakistanis. “You know why they hate us?” George W. Bush asked after Al Qaeda’s attacks on September 11, 2001. “They hate us because we love freedom.”

Such a world view leads easily to the conclusion that Something Must Be Done. Bush started Middle Eastern wars in the name of freedom—wars that, in different forms, Obama and Trump continued. The titles of the military missions read like tombstones in a graveyard of liberal ambitions: Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, Operation New Dawn. We’re now at Operation Inherent Resolve, the ongoing mission to extirpate the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. It’s the first one whose name makes no reference to freedom or transformation, yet it would be optimistic to interpret this as a backing down. Recent years have shown Washington’s military commitments to be wedged tightly in place. This past September, on the same day that Trump declared “we are out of Syria” other than to guard its oil fields, the Pentagon announced that it was increasing troop levels by twenty per cent.

“You guys want me to send troops everywhere,” Trump reportedly complained to his top national-security aides as they proposed more force in North Africa. “Unfortunately, sir,” Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis replied, “you have no choice.”

Does the United States, in the end, have a choice? Not really, writes Gates. With U.S. primacy, the world is a place where differences can be resolved peaceably. Without it, the planet “descends into a dog-eat-dog, might-makes-right environment.” The question for Gates is not whether the United States should reign but how it should do so. A defter hand, he hopes, will restore the country to its necessary role. This restoration would, as Biden has put it, “place America back at the head of the table.”

Porter has different advice: abandon the seat. The U.S.-centered system was built at the end of the Second World War, when the U.S. economy was larger than the four next-largest economies combined. Today, by some measures, it is smaller than China’s. The crisis of U.S. supremacy has been in the making for decades, though Porter thinks that it has now reached its culmination. For the United States to hang onto its increasingly untenable position would only leave it “a militarized, overextended empire in a permanent state of alarm,” perpetually threatening the peace it claims to protect. A better course for the obsolescent hegemon, Porter proposes, would be to “decline gracefully.”

What might a graceful decline look like? It would require Washington to give up the notion that its troops or its values should dominate the planet. This wouldn’t mean retreating from worldly affairs, just adjusting to a more level international field. Relieved of having to frantically defend its leadership, Porter notes, the United States could focus, as it had before the Second World War, on the more achievable goals of protecting itself from physical attack and defending its republican institutions.

 

Both tasks would be easier with a smaller military. It’s hard to be a calm and secure republic with armed forces stationed everywhere, stirring up resistance. A dethroned Washington would still need to maneuver against powerful rivals—Porter recommends that the United States contain China and block it from forming a strong alliance with Russia. Yet it would no longer have to compulsively monitor the map for threats to its primacy.

Relinquishing that primacy—giving up the seat at the head of the table—is about as palatable to U.S. policymakers as defunding police departments. It’s not just that the position is unpopular among them; it’s that, until recently, it was in many circles unthinkable. But is that because the idea is so horrendously bad that it would quickly trigger global catastrophe, as Gates believes? Or is U.S. hegemony yet another relic from a bygone era, long overdue for reappraisal?


Daniel Immerwahr, a contributing writer at The New Yorker, teaches history at Northwestern University and is the author of “How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States.”

 

https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/should-america-still-police-the-world

 

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

a crooked cop...

Washington should open direct talks with Moscow right away and stop mistaking Russia’s restraint for weakness, the Republican presidential nominee’s son Donald Trump Jr. and former Democrat Robert F. Kennedy have said.

RFK Jr, the nephew of President John F. Kennedy, endorsed Trump senior last month and cited the Russia-Ukraine conflict and its potential to escalate into a nuclear war as one of the main reasons.

The US and its allies allowing Ukraine to use their weapons for long-range strikes into Russia “would put the world at greater risk of nuclear conflagration than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis,” Trump and Kennedy wrote in an opinion piece published by The Hill on Tuesday.

Titled “Negotiate with Moscow to end the Ukraine war and prevent nuclear devastation,” the article argues that the US must focus on finding a “diplomatic off-ramp to a war that should never have been allowed to take place,” accusing the White House of pursuing a policy that Russia has explicitly said would amount to open war.

“Some American analysts believe Putin is bluffing, and favor calling his bluff,” Kennedy and Trump wrote. “These analysts are mistaking restraint for weakness. In essence, they are advocating a strategy of brinkmanship.”

Noting that the US has steadily expanded weapons deliveries to Kiev, from HIMARS rocket artillery and cluster munitions to Abrams tanks, F-16 fighter jets and long-range ATACMS missiles, Trump and Kennedy said that each step “draws the world closer to the brink of Armageddon.”

“Their logic seems to be that if you goad a bear five times and it doesn’t respond, it is safe to goad him even harder a sixth time,” they said. “Such a strategy might be reasonable if the bear had no teeth.”

The Biden-Harris White House seems to have “forgotten”that Russia is a nuclear power and has said multiple times it was ready to use such weapons if endangered, the authors argued.

“Imagine if Russia were providing another country with missiles, training and targeting information to strike deep into American territory. The US would never tolerate it. We shouldn’t expect Russia to tolerate it either,” they said.

Firing US missiles into Russia would inevitably lead to a nuclear exchange, Trump and Kennedy argued, warning that “this game of nuclear ‘chicken’ has gone far enough.” 

No American interest is at stake in Ukraine, they argued, calling it “madness” to risk nuclear war for the sake of “the neoconservative fantasy of global ‘full-spectrum dominance’.” Such a war would end civilization and maybe even humanity, so de-escalating the Ukraine conflict is “more important than any of the political issues our nation argues about.”

The American public must “demand, right now, that [Vice President Kamala] Harris and President [Joe] Biden reverse their insane war agenda and open direct negotiations with Moscow,” Trump and Kennedy concluded.

Peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine broke down in the spring of 2022, with both sides accusing each other of making unrealistic demands. The US has since insisted that a peace deal can only be on Kiev’s terms, and repeatedly pledged to support and arm Ukraine for “as long as it takes.”

https://www.rt.com/news/604197-trump-rfk-nuclear-peace-russia/

 

YUCKRAINE CANNOT WIN THIS CONFLICT... THE ONLY SOLUTION IS:

MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT HITS THE FAN:

 

 

NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.

THESE WILL ALSO INCLUDE ODESSA, KHERSON AND KHARKIV.....

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

TRANSNISTRIA WILL BE PART OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION.

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.

 

EASY.

 

THE WEST KNOWS IT.


 

READ FROM TOP

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

lies and dark cash...

THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY IS A LYING FOGHORN DESIGNED TO PROTECT THE EMPIRE — NO MATTER WHAT....

 

While many believe Joe Biden’s falling poll numbers and cognitive challenges prompted his replacement as the Democratic Party’s standard bearer, it is more likely that this event was but a symptom of a much deeper, more profound crisis confronting the unseen, and in some cases unknown forces that are in perpetual pursuit of world domination.

For generations, an oligarchy comprised of wealthy individuals and their families, large corporations, and quasi-criminal syndicates have lurked in the shadows, buying, trading and controlling hack politicians even as clueless, toiling masses of people have been duped into the fervent belief that as active participants in a purported democracy, they control the destiny of the U.S. Their ritualistic visits to polling places are exercises limited and constrained by the quiet use of power and intimidation to ensure that voters never have a realistic opportunity to elect anyone who will threaten the hegemony of the oligarchy.

Even now, as voters on a Kamala Harris high convene and campaign, many are blissfully unaware that elected national officials’ sole responsibility is to make the machinery of government available to the small, powerful elite as it pursues the maintenance and expansion of a Global empire. The elite group’s unfettered access to the planet’s natural resources and markets often depends heavily on strategic use of the country’s diplomatic corps, the military and intelligence agencies. For decades, these imperialists, with the collaboration of obsequious politicians, have wreaked havoc in underdeveloped regions of the world. By destabilizing governments, assassinating leaders, fomenting conflicts, staging invasions and in some cases, prosecuting full-scale wars, the empire has successfully crushed its opponents and plundered the wealth of countries that have been mortally wounded by these assaults.

President Biden has been a good and faithful servant of the empire. But unfortunately for him, his tenure occurred during a period when he could not be allowed to survive. The discovery of oil in Gaza, and visions of highly profitable resorts in the region created a need to clear the territory of its indigenous population. President Biden dutifully financed and collaborated with the Israeli government in its genocidal campaign, but in the process of killing nearly a quarter of a million Palestinians, he branded himself as a war criminal in the eyes of most of the world. His image was already threatened by suspicions of NATO shenanigans in the Russia/Ukraine conflict.

https://www.laprogressive.com/election-and-campaigns/save-a-crumbling-empire

 

As a junior Democratic senator in 2019, Vice President Kamala Harris took direct aim at dark money, cosponsoring election reforms that would have revealed the identities of the megadonors behind these secretive efforts to sway elections.

“It does not represent justice in America when dark money is fueling elections and when the few who have the greatest amount of wealth behind a veil without even presenting themselves or their names, manipulate and fuel the election process,” she said in a speech at the time. “We’ve got to take that money out of politics.”

But now, as her presidential campaign benefits from millions in contributions from secret donors — including a whopping $20 million donation from the Democrats’ main dark money group a week after she became the party’s presumed nominee — what is Harris saying about untraceable political spending?

So far this election cycle, not much.

During last week’s presidential debate, Harris and former president Donald Trump discussed hot-button topics including the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the war in Ukraine — but said nothing about the concealed political donations that have aided both presidential campaigns.

Behind the scenes, political committees supporting Democratic candidates have reported more than $100 million in dark money contributions this election season, while committees supporting Republicans have reported similar amounts. According to OpenSecrets, which tracks campaign finance and lobbying data, dark money groups are on track to contribute more money to this election than ever before.

At the same time, the Harris campaign is further obscuring the origins of its donations. Harris has yet to release the names of her “bundlers” — fundraisers who compile massive “bundles” of campaign checks from numerous donors.

The Harris campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Committee decision — a development decades in the making — triggered the flood of dark money by ruling that politically active nonprofits such as 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organizations can spend unlimited amounts to influence elections. Such nonprofits are considered “dark” because they don’t have to disclose their donors, allowing them to bombard Americans with political ads and messages without revealing the identities or motives of the people funding them.

Both parties have come to rely on dark money, but critics say such behavior from Democrats is especially hypocritical. The party has repeatedly introduced legislation to stop anonymous political donations, including a 2019 bill cosponsored by Harris, and its 2024 platform pledged to “end ‘dark money’ by requiring full disclosure of contributors and ban 501(c)(4) organizations from spending on elections.”

But at the same time, Democratic lawmakers have been unwilling to take the necessary steps to pass such reforms — all while continuing to welcome massive checks from 501(c)(4)s.

Some Democrats say that in this era of tremendous dark money campaign spending, legislators have no choice but to play ball if they want to remain competitive. But others say that by doing so, the party is allowing the elite to tighten their grip on the country’s political system. Instead, election reformers say small-donor financing systems, in which public funds that match small donations, could help reduce the influence of special interests and empower everyday voters.

“Unfortunately, especially after the Citizens United decision, both parties continue to accept and benefit from hundreds of millions of dollars of dark money,” said Aaron Scherb, senior director of legislative affairs at the watchdog group Common Cause. However, “overwhelming majorities of Democratic and Republican and Independent voters support . . . more transparency in political money. It’s really only in Congress where this is seen as a partisan issue.”

Dark Money Contradictions

Before Harris became vice president, she had a clear message about dark money: it plays a dangerously influential role in our political system.

As California’s attorney general in 2014, Harris was sued by the conservative charitable group Americans for Prosperity Foundation for seeking the names and addresses of the organization’s donors. The foundation, which has spent over $257 million backing conservative congressional and presidential candidates since 2004, was founded by right-wing petrochemical tycoon Charles Koch.

Then, while serving as California’s junior senator in 2019, she called out the Citizens United decision, saying it “has fundamentally changed the foundation of our political system, giving the top 1 percent an unfair advantage in our elections” and we need to “get big money out of politics.” That same year, she and the rest of the Senate Democratic Caucus introduced the Democracy for All Amendment, a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.

In 2019, Harris also cosponsored the Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections, or DISCLOSE Act. First introduced in 2010 by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), the bill would require all organizations spending money in federal elections to disclose donors who had given $10,000 or more during an election cycle.

But in 2022, the DISCLOSE Act failed, even after President Joe Biden urged its passage following the Lever’s reporting on a record-breaking $1.6 billion dark money donation. This was thanks to Senate Republicans’ use of the filibuster — a tactic used to delay or block a vote on a bill by preventing debate on it from ending.

Democrats could eliminate the filibuster, which has repeatedly been used to stop the DISCLOSE Act. But amid massive donations from business interests eager to preserve this “legislative kill switch” and convenient opposition from corporate Democrats like Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (AZ) and Joe Manchin (WV), they’ve long failed to do so.

Alternatively, experts say that Democrats could use a legislative practice called budget reconciliation, which allows them to bypass the filibuster to pass bills that impact the federal budget. In fact, as vice president and presiding officer of the senate, Harris has been in a position to overrule any objections to this process. But despite nonpartisan government researchers concluding the DISCLOSE Act would have budget implications, Harris and her Democratic colleagues never tried the maneuver.

Democrats’ lack of meaningful action on untraceable election spending has led some observers to think the party is more interested in reaping the benefits of dark money than actually taking the steps to restrict it.

“Many Democrats and Republicans alike feel like it’s more important to win by any means necessary than unilaterally disarm in the political fundraising arms race,” Michael Beckel, research director for the political reform group Issue One, wrote in an email to the Lever. “It’s disappointing that so many Democratic and Republican political operatives have embraced secret spending as a tool in political campaigns.”

A Flood of Dark Money

Meanwhile, unprecedented amounts of dark money have flooded both parties’ 2024 election coffers.

For Democrats, much of that has come from Future Forward USA Action, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit associated with a political action group run by former Biden aides called Future Forward. While super PACs — a type of political action committee that can raise and spend unlimited sums on candidates — like Future Forward must disclose their donors, dark money nonprofit groups like Future Forward USA Action do not. Therefore, when these dark money groups donate to super PACs, it’s often impossible to trace the original source of these contributions.

According to the Federal Election Commission, this election cycle the Future Forward USA Action dark money group has donated nearly $56 million to Future Forward — roughly a third of the super PAC’s total contributions over the past two years. That includes $20 million on July 29 — eight days after Biden suspended his presidential campaign and endorsed Harris.

In early 2024, Future Forward, which a senior Biden adviser called “the preeminent Super PAC supporting the Biden-Harris agenda and 2024 efforts,” announced a record-breaking $250 million pro-Biden ad spend. Then in July, the super PAC revealed it would mount a $50 million ad blitz focused on Harris ahead of the Democratic National Convention.

And last year, the Future Forward dark money group reportedly shelled out tens of millions highlighting Biden’s policy wins. In total, the two Future Forward groups raised a combined $208 million in 2023, according to reporting by Politico.

Dark money groups like Future Forward USA Action could be spending far more on election efforts than what’s tracked by federal regulators, since such groups are only required to report efforts that explicitly advocate for a candidate’s election or defeat.

Very little is known about who is bankrolling Future Forward USA Action or what they hope to achieve through a Harris presidency. Last March, CNN used previously unreported tax records to show that the nonprofit’s top donors included husband-and-wife financial traders with ties to AI investments and cryptocurrency.

Meanwhile, one of Harris’s campaign ads claims that “grassroots supporters like you are the only thing standing between us and Donald Trump winning in November.”

The Harris campaign has also failed to disclose the identity of its bundlers, or super fundraisers who solicit and compile hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars from individual donors, who by law are only allowed to give $3,300 each to a particular candidate.

Campaigns are not required to disclose the names of their bundlers, though presidential campaigns have typically done so. But that trend has started to shift: Trump failed to disclose his bundlers in 2016 and 2020, and Biden revealed the names of his bundlers just two days before the 2020 presidential election.

Earlier this month, the political reform group Issue One called on Harris to disclose information about her 2024 campaign bundlers, arguing that “government accountability depends on transparency in our campaign finance system.”

“By raising hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars, bundlers are able to ingratiate themselves — and curry favor — with their preferred presidential candidate, while receiving special perks and access that most voters can only dream of,” Beckel, Issue One’s research director, told the Lever.

A Never-Ending Era of Dark Money?

There is also the question of whether Harris and Democratic lawmakers are willing to take the necessary steps to pass campaign finance reform if they win in November.

If Harris wins the presidential race and Democrats keep the Senate majority, Schumer said he wants to enact the Freedom to Vote Act, which includes the DISCLOSE Act, to require more transparency around political donors.

Yet to accomplish this — along with other promises made by Harris at the Democratic National Convention this August — lawmakers will likely need to set aside the filibuster.

“Each year, important and popular legislation dies on the Senate floor, because the filibuster allows a minority of senators — representing a disproportionately white segment of the country’s population — can stop any legislative action in its tracks,” noted Common Cause in a policy report.

Schumer told the Washington Post that Democrats are willing to reform filibuster rules to pass their agenda. And if Democrats manage to regain control of Congress, one obstacle to doing so will no longer stand in their way: Sens. Sinema and Manchin, who voted against the DISCLOSE Act and opposed filibuster reforms, are retiring from the Senate.

If Democrats do away with unlimited dark money campaign spending, election-reform advocates say a better alternative could be small-donor public financing initiatives, in which small-dollar contributions are matched by public funds.

New York State launched such a program this year, allocating $25 million to match contributions from individual donors. A 2023 analysis by OpenSecrets and New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice found that if this new campaign finance program was in place in 2022, small donors could have accounted for 41 percent of statewide candidates’ funds, as opposed to just 6 percent.

But for now, the question remains: If elected, will Harris use her presidential power to push for dark money reform, or will she allow these secretive donors to continue influencing U.S. politics?

“It’s ultimately the voters who lose out, who get the short end of the stick here,” said Scherb from Common Cause. “Because they are left in the dark about who is trying to influence their voices and their votes.”

https://jacobin.com/2024/09/kamala-harris-dark-money-donations

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

cynically....

ONE CYNIC SUSPECTS THAT THESE REPUBLICAN FLOPPERS DO NOT WANT PEACE AS STATED BY THE DONALD... THEY WOULD HAVE BEEN INSTRUCTED BY THE DEEP STATE (THE ESTABLISHMENT) THAT PEACE IS NOT GOOD FOR THE BUSINESS (THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX).... KAMALA IS FOR INCREASING THE WAR SAUCE, under the guise of defending de-mo-cra-cee....

 

NEW YORK - More than 100 former US Republican officials and lawmakers endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday, while calling Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump "unfit to serve again as president".

In a letter shared by the Harris campaign, 111 Republicans, including former officials who served under Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Trump, said that despite their disagreements with Harris' policies, "we believe that she possesses the essential qualities to serve as President and Donald Trump does not."

"As president," the letter said, Trump "promoted daily chaos in government, praised our enemies and undermined our allies, politicized the military and disparaged our veterans, prioritized his personal interest above American interests and betrayed our values, democracy and this country's founding documents".

They condemned Trump's incitement of the attack on the Capitol on Jan 6, 2021, saying that "he has violated his oath of office and brought danger to our country."

"Anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be President of the United States," the letter quoted former Vice President Mike Pence as saying.

The signatories included two former defense secretaries, Chuck Hagel and William S. Cohen; two former Central Intelligence Agency directors, Michael V. Hayden and William H. Webster; a former director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte.

Robert B. Zoellick, former president of the World Bank, and eight former members of Congress also endorsed in the letter.

The letter came days after former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz Cheney, former Representative and one of Trump's loudest conservative critics, announced they would vote for Harris.

 

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202409/19/WS66eb7675a3103711928a88cc.html

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.