...

Adams’ music uses many of the popular devices of that decade. He flirts with pop music and Minimalism and Wagner. Reviewing the premiere in the New York Times, Donal Henahan came up with the memorably dismissive line, “Mr. Adams does for the arpeggio what McDonald’s did for the hamburger, grinding out one simple idea unto eternity.”

After 23 years of familiarity with the opera, I can say, at least for myself, that this is a marvelous, ever interesting eternity of which I have not tired. The score doesn’t paint a picture of a modern China unknown to the West, but rather of Americans filtering it for the first time through an upbeat but bewildered sensibility. East is East and West is West, with a very large ocean between. The Chinese are poetic, philosophical, enigmatic, and intentionally so. Everyone is insecure. The insecurity, not the politics, is the opera’s theme. How do we deal with the unknown?

The opera eventually veers away from narrative into the private thoughts of Nixon, Pat, Mao, Madame Mao and Chou. The portrayal of Henry Kissinger is the opera’s one weakness. The imagination of these highly imaginative artists went only so far, and Kissinger was the one character for whom they couldn’t imagine an inner life.

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https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-ca-nixon-china7-2010mar07-story.html

GOUGH WAS THERE FIRST....

Accompanying him on that trip was a delegation of Labor parliamentarians, political advisers, China experts – including Dr Stephen FitzGerald, now Distinguished Fellow at the Whitlam Institute – and journalists.

The trip was historic for many reasons: Gough Whitlam was one of the first Western leaders, in opposition at the time, to make high-level political contact with the most populous communist power in the world during the Cold War. And the visit demonstrated Whitlam’s ambition to reimagine Australian foreign policy and reposition Australia in the world.

Dr FitzGerald said of the trip, "Gough Whitlam had a breadth of vision on international geopolitics unmatched by any Australian leader. He also understood it was critical to any new direction in foreign policy to have widespread public understanding and support.”

The influence of Cold War fears prevailed over Australian politics at this time, making it a politically risky venture. The trip was criticised as potentially damaging Australia's alliance with the United States, which did not have diplomatic relations with China.

Whitlam's bold initiative was vindicated, however, when it was revealed that just as Whitlam's ALP delegation was leaving Beijing, US National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, was arriving to arrange President Nixon's own visit to China.

“In one fell swoop, his 1971 visit to China not only paved the way for diplomatic relations and a resumption of important trade, it changed how Australians understood China in our foreign policy and opened the way to public support for engagement with Asia on a new basis of equality and mutual respect,” said Dr FitzGerald.

In1972, within three weeks of taking office, the Whitlam Government had negotiated an agreement with the People's Republic of China to establish diplomatic relations between that country and Australia, cementing a radical shift in Australia's outlook on the world, and its region. For decades, Australia had looked to China with distrust, anxiety and paranoia. The Whitlam Government's establishment of diplomatic relations allowed a mature cultural, social and economic relationship to develop.

The Whitlam Institute commemorates this historic visit and its impact on Australia-China relations. Gough Whitlam’s strategic, respectful, informed and independent approach to diplomacy established a new place for Australia in the World. Fifty years on, much can be drawn from this approach in how we tackle the foreign policy challenges of today.

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

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

HYPOCRISY ISN’T ONE OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS SINS.

HENCE ITS POPULARITY IN THE ABRAHAMIC TRADITIONS…

PLEASE DO NOT BLAME CHINA IF WW3 STARTS. BLAME YOURSELF.

Jimmy Carter: The Last Progressive Evangelical

The former president embodied a strain of Christianity that emphasized caring for those on the margins — but was eclipsed by the Religious Right.

By RANDALL BALMER

Jimmy Carter’s death marks both the passing of a peacemaker and the demise of a distinguished strain of religious life in America: progressive evangelicalism.

This tradition, with roots in the Second Great Awakening at the turn of the 19th century, set the social and political agenda of much of the 19th century as evangelicals sought to reform American society according to the norms of godliness, paying particular attention to the admonition of Jesus to care for “the least of these.” Carter’s life and career, not to mention his probity, cannot be understood without reference to progressive evangelicalism.

But his electoral defeat in 1980, at the hands of Ronald Reagan and the Religious Right, dealt a crippling blow to this tradition, which has been reeling ever since. That election led to the melding of white evangelicals with the far-right reaches of the Republican Party, culminating in overwhelming support for Donald Trump, hardly an avatar of the “family values” that evangelicals claimed lay at the heart of their activism. Over the decades the Religious Right has become the most reliable component of the Republican Party, much the way that labor unions once served as the backbone of the Democratic Party.

Carter’s successful presidential run in 1976 was propelled by popular distrust of politicians generally, and Washington specifically, in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Wearied of Richard Nixon’s endless prevarications, Americans were prepared to consider someone from outside the Beltway, someone with a moral compass. Carter, the one-term governor of Georgia and a Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher from the tiny town of Plains, fit the bill.

Carter’s election was also abetted by the brief resurgence in the 1970s of progressive evangelicalism, the particular stripe of the Christian faith that he embodied. Others have tried to keep the tradition alive — people like Jim Wallis and William Barber II and institutions such as Sojourners and the Black church — but progressive evangelicals have never been able to match the media megaphones of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson or Franklin Graham.

Part of what made the voices of the Religious Right so effective was their canny use of the rhetoric of victimization. Even though evangelicals, by virtue of their numbers and their mobilization, exercise outsized influence in American society, they claim that their values are under siege, that they represent an embattled minority. That rhetoric has proven very effective — and it’s one of the reasons white evangelicals gravitated to Trump, who speaks this language more fluently than anyone I’ve seen.

The demise of progressive evangelicalism has opened the way for compromise on other evangelical principles, including the separation of church and state. Even though evangelicals have benefited perhaps more than any other religious group from the free marketplace of religion set up by the First Amendment, many are now perpetrating the falsehood that the United States is and always has been a Christian nation and that our laws should conform to “Christian” mores. The Religious Right’s opposition to abortion, an attempt to camouflage the real origins of evangelical mobilization, nevertheless proved effective, despite the fact that the Dobbs decision entails government intervention in matters of gestation.

With Carter’s passing, the far-right shift of political evangelicalism is complete — but history will note the massive impact that progressive Christians like Carter have had on American life.

Progressive evangelicalism traces its roots to the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament and to a much earlier era in American history. Jesus enjoined his followers to be peacemakers and to care for those on the margins of society. Throughout American history, progressive evangelicals have sought to take those commands seriously. Especially in the antebellum period, evangelicals worked to promote peace and to end slavery, even though many Southern evangelicals continued to defend it. Evangelicals also advocated equality for women, including the right to vote, and supported the expansion of public education so that children on the lower rungs of the economic ladder might be able to improve their lives.

Although the fight against slavery arguably represented the zenith of progressive evangelicals’ influence, their presence continued into the early decades of the 20th century. William Jennings Bryan, for example, the “Great Commoner” and three-time Democratic nominee for president, continued to advocate for women’s equality and also for the rights of workers to organize.

Following the Scopes trial of 1925 — which was not Bryan’s finest moment, as he argued against teaching human evolution in state-funded schools — evangelicals largely abandoned the political arena. Bryan might have won the trial (John T. Scopes was convicted), but he, and by extension evangelicals, lost decisively in the larger courtroom of public opinion. Humiliated by the coverage of the trial and by Bryan’s poor performance, evangelicals chose to turn away from politics. Many, expecting the imminent return of Jesus, refused even to vote in the middle decades of the 20th century. This world, they believed, was transitory, corrupt and corrupting, and their time was better spent securing individual regeneration rather than working for social amelioration. What evangelical political advocacy existed in the middle decades of the 20th century listed toward the right of the political spectrum. Evangelicals’ suspicions of “godless communism” helped to push them in a conservative direction, and evangelist Billy Graham’s very public friendships with a succession of Republican politicians reinforced that predilection.

In the early 1970s, however, progressive evangelicalism mounted a comeback. In the throes of the Vietnam War, progressive evangelicals sought to reclaim Jesus’ command that his followers be peacemakers. They gravitated to the 1972 presidential campaign of George McGovern, a Wesleyan Methodist preacher’s son and himself a former seminary student. A year after McGovern’s landslide loss to Nixon, a small group of progressive evangelicals gathered at the Chicago YMCA hoping to keep the tradition of progressive evangelicalism alive. The document that emerged out of that November 1973 meeting was called the Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern, a remarkable reprise of evangelical concerns from a century earlier. The signatories — 55 initially, but many more signed later — called the powerful to account and decried the persistence of racism and rampant militarism in American life. They lamented the persistence of poverty and hunger in an affluent society. At the insistence of an English professor from Trinity College in Deerfield, Illinois (where I was then an undergraduate), the Declaration also reaffirmed evangelicals’ historic commitment to women’s equality.

Not quite six months later, Carter echoed many of these themes in his famous remarks at the University of Georgia Law School, though he did so in far more strident terms. One of the venerable traditions at the University of Georgia Law School is Law Day, an occasion to honor student achievements, as well as to invite distinguished guests, including Supreme Court justices, senators, attorneys general and, on this day, the governor. On a warm spring day in May 1974, Carter unleashed a blistering extemporaneous critique of the legal and legislative process. His own sense of justice, he said, derived from two sources. The first was theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and his oft-quoted lament that the “sad duty of politics was to establish justice in a sinful world.” The second was Bob Dylan. It wasn’t until Carter heard Dylan’s “I Ain’t Gonna Work on Maggie’s Farm No More,” he said, that he began to appreciate the plight of the poor, especially tenant farmers.

Carter lamented that “the powerful and the influential in our society shape the laws and have a great influence on the legislature or the Congress.” He lit into lobbyists and decried the incestuous relationship between corporations and the agencies regulating them. The governor also noted that the prison population consisted overwhelmingly of poor people. Part of the problem, he suggested, is that “we assign punishment to fit the criminal and not the crime.” He concluded his remarks by sounding the populist theme that he was already honing for his presidential bid. Any hope for the future, Carter said, lay in “the combined wisdom and courage and commitment and discernment of the common ordinary people.”

Carter’s address captured the attention of Hunter S. Thompson of Rolling Stone magazine. During the course of his speech, Carter noticed that Thompson had briefly left the room; he surmised that the self-proclaimed “gonzo journalist” had simply exited to refresh whatever adult beverage he was consuming that day. Thompson, however, scurried to the parking lot to retrieve a tape recorder so he could record what he believed was an extraordinary moment: a politician who dared to speak the truth.

“I have heard hundreds of speeches by all sorts of candidates and politicians,” Thompson later wrote, “but I have never heard a sustained piece of political oratory that impressed me any more than the speech Jimmy Carter made at Law Day at the University of Georgia on that Saturday afternoon in May 1974.”

Carter’s campaign for the presidency would emphasize many of the themes articulated by progressive evangelicals in Chicago: racial, economic and gender equality; justice; care for those less fortunate. (Although he didn’t describe himself as a progressive evangelical at the time, he eventually embraced the term.) By no means were progressive evangelicals decisive in Carter’s 1976 victory, but many evangelicals supported him either for his policies or simply for the novelty of voting for one of their own at a time when evangelicals themselves were largely apolitical. His share of the evangelical vote would have been even greater were it not for the misbegotten Playboy interview that appeared a few weeks before Election Day; Carter’s approval dropped 15 points, and by Election Day evangelicals split their vote evenly between Carter and Gerald Ford, the Republican incumbent.

Carter was not the only politician in the 1970s to advocate progressive evangelicalism. Harold Hughes, Democratic senator from Iowa, and Mark Hatfield, Republican senator of Oregon, were among the most prominent. John B. Anderson, a Republican member of Congress from Illinois, was a member of the Evangelical Free Church, an evangelical denomination with Scandinavian roots, and could also be counted in that cohort. Still, Carter was the most prominent among them.

As president, Carter sought, with mixed success, to act on the principles of fairness and equality that he articulated. Early in his presidency, he recognized that if the United States were to have a meaningful relationship with Third World nations, especially in Latin America, it would need to renegotiate the Panama Canal treaties; he expended a great deal of political capital to do so. He sought to move American foreign policy away from the reflexive dualism of the Cold War and toward an emphasis on human rights, even though it angered many U.S. allies. He worked tirelessly for peace, especially in the Middle East, and one of his proudest accomplishments was that no American soldier died in military conflict during his presidency. Although he was not averse to defense spending — and succeeded in restoring the cuts enacted by his Republican predecessors — Carter often said the best and the most effective military armaments are the ones never used. He worked for racial and gender equality, and many environmentalists consider Carter the greatest environmental president ever.

Leaders of the Religious Right routinely claim that opposition to abortion led them to mobilize politically in the 1970s. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Evangelicals considered abortion a “Catholic issue” for most of the decade. The Southern Baptist Convention, hardly a redoubt of liberalism, passed a resolution calling for the legalization of abortion in 1971, a resolution they reaffirmed in 1974 and again in 1976. Several evangelical leaders applauded the Roe v. Wade decision when it was handed down in 1973, and Reverend Jerry Falwell, by his own admission, didn’t preach his first anti-abortion sermon until 1978.

Despite the durability of this “abortion myth,” the genesis of the Religious Right is rather less edifying. As the Internal Revenue Service began to scrutinize the racial policies of evangelical institutions, including church-related “segregation academies,” evangelical leaders rushed to defend the tax-exempt status of their schools, arguing that they should be able to retain both their racially segregated policies and their tax exemptions. Falwell, who had described civil rights as “civil wrongs” and who had his own segregation academy in Lynchburg, Virginia, led the charge, disingenuously asserting that Carter was responsible for endangering their tax status. Falwell, together with other leaders of the Religious Right, effectively turned evangelicals into hard-right conservatives.

Carter’s reelection campaign in 1980 was bedeviled by a sour economy, the taking of the American hostages in Iran and a challenge from within his own party with the candidacy of Edward M. Kennedy. The formation of Falwell’s Moral Majority, together with the efforts of other Religious Right leaders, undermined the president further; by the end of the race, the Reagan-Bush campaign had begun to emphasize opposition to abortion, ignoring the fact that Carter had a much longer and more consistent record of working to limit the incidence of abortions.

Carter’s loss to Reagan in 1980, and the defection of evangelicals from one of their own, were devastating to him personally. But his defeat also signaled the eclipse of progressive evangelicalism in American politics and the stampede of evangelicals toward the far-right precincts of the Republican Party. Only Hatfield, the senator from Oregon, remained as a national politician who advocated principles consistent with progressive evangelicalism; he retired from the Senate in 1997.

The Carters, Jimmy and Rosalynn, returned to Plains in January 1981, four years earlier than they had planned. Carter told me that one of the reasons he rebounded so quickly from his defeat was that he had to keep reassuring his wife that they still had a life ahead of them and could continue to do good work. Eventually, he said, he began to believe his own rhetoric.

Forced into political retirement, he set about making plans for his presidential library, and here, freed from political constraints, Carter would be able to act most fully on his religious principles. As James Laney, former president of Emory University, memorably remarked, Carter is the only person in history for whom the presidency was a steppingstone. He conceived the Carter Center as a working institution, not merely a celebratory one, and it has been extraordinarily effective in the eradication of disease, the monitoring of free and fair elections, and the pursuit of peace, justice and care for those on the margins

These are the principles of progressive evangelicalism that Carter sought to advocate throughout his political career. These are the principles he was able to advance even more fully once he left Washington. As a progressive evangelical, someone who took seriously the command of Jesus to care for “the least of these,” Carter might have been the last of his kind. He was also surely among the best of his kind.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/12/29/jimmy-carter-progressive-evangelical-00084165

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

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

HYPOCRISY ISN’T ONE OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS SINS.

HENCE ITS POPULARITY IN THE ABRAHAMIC TRADITIONS…

PLEASE DO NOT BLAME RUSSIA IF WW3 STARTS. BLAME YOURSELF.

The Untold Story of Carter’s Fateful Foreign Policy
Many of Washington’s dysfunctions—and dysfunctional players—got their start under the Georgian.

BY James W. Carden

The former President Jimmy Carter passed away on Sunday at the age of 100. Carter was elected by a convincing margin over the Republican incumbent Gerald Ford in 1976 and served one term. His wife of 77 years, Rosalynn, passed away in November 2023. 

His presidency is perhaps among the most misunderstood in recent American history. 

Unique among presidents, Carter’s post-presidential years will likely be the focus of much of the forthcoming commentary on his life. If we agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dictum that “greatness is the perception that virtue is good enough,” then on that basis, Carter’s post-presidential life was indeed great.

The caricature that emerged of Carter’s presidency—one that has been lodged in the popular imagination for some 40 years—has always been misleading. Carter, so we are told, was idealistic but weak. The truth is far more interesting—though ultimately the direction his foreign policy took does not redound to Carter’s credit. 

No real discussion of U.S. foreign policy under Carter is possible without an in-depth consideration of Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who broke into Carter’s inner circle early on. Like his fellow emigre Henry Kissinger, Brzezinski was ambitious to the point of shamelessness. During the ’76 campaign, Brzezinski, according to the former Council on Foreign Relations president Leslie Gelb, also made himself available to a number of Carter’s opponents including Senators Henry Jackson, Hubert Humphrey, Edward Kennedy, Walter Mondale and Birch Bayh.

Some saw trouble brewing early on. Robert Lovett, one of Washington’s legendary “Wise Men” and Harry Truman’s fourth and final secretary of defense, sniped, “We really shouldn’t have a national security advisor like that who isn’t really an American.”

Lovett was righter than he knew. In the decades that followed, the U.S. foreign policy establishment was flooded with Brzezinski proteges, including Bill Clinton’s foreign-born secretary of state, Madeleine Korbel Albright. The parochial concerns of bureaucrats, operatives and think-tank fixtures with competing national loyalties have had an undue influence on American foreign policy in the decades since—even resulting in the impeachment of a sitting president in December 2019 on the grounds that these people did not like what their ostensible boss, the president, was saying to a foreign leader.

The importance of a new president choosing the right people or the right combination of people cannot be overstated. Carter fumbled early on when, under pressure from the growing caucus of neocons (who were still, in late 1976 and early 1977, mainly Democrats, before jumping ship for Reagan four years later) led by Washington Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, he decided not to go with his first choice for secretary of state, the former under secretary of state George Ball. 

In a conversation with the historian Douglas Brinkley in 2002, Carter recalled his concerns over whether Ball could win Senate confirmation; after all, “he had the courage to question aspects of America’s attachment to Israel.” And Ball’s “outspokenness on the Middle East would have made it difficult for him to pass confirmation hearings. So I chose Cyrus Vance.”

Brzezinski would likely have had a harder time besting Ball, whose lonely, principled, and prescient opposition to the war in Vietnam as a member of  Lyndon Johnson’s inner circle is too often forgotten. Carter’s first mistake, then, was to hand the Israel lobby a scalp without so much as a fight. The second mistake was making Brzezinski primus inter pares among his advisers. 

After the election, Carter’s campaign manager Hamilton Jordan was quoted as saying, “If after the inauguration you find Cy Vance as secretary of state and Zbigniew Brzezinski as head of national security, then I would say we failed. And I’d quit.” But as Brinkley wryly notes, “Both men, as it turned out, were selected for those posts, and Jordan never quit.”

Brzezinski’s scholarly work on the Soviet Union should have been a red flag. He was a leading proponent of what was known as the “totalitarian school,” which posited that the internal dynamics of the Soviet system largely explained its behavior abroad. Scholars like Brzezinski drew a straight line from Lenin to Stalin to Khrushchev and Brezhnev; no allowances were made for the vagaries of succeeding Soviet regimes. The late professor of Russian politics at Princeton, Stephen F. Cohen, who was a leading theorist of the rival “revisionist school,” had crossed paths with Brzezinski at Columbia in the 1960s. Cohen was critical of what saw as the “deterministic quality” of the scholarship produced by high profile members of the “totalitarian school” such as Brzezinski and Harvard’s Adam B. Ulam, who, like Brzezinski, was a Polish immigrant. 

Brzezinski, drawing that straight line, had posited that, “Perhaps the most enduring achievement of Leninism was the dogmatization of the party, thereby in effect both preparing and causing the next stage, that of Stalinism.” 

Yet, as Cohen later noted, 

the totalitarianism school became consensus Sovietology on the basis of generalizations that claimed to explain the Soviet past, present and future. It turned out to be wrong, or seriously misleading, on all counts.

The myopia that characterized Brzezinski's approach to U.S.–Soviet relations was perhaps to be expected from the son of a Polish diplomat. Under Brzezinski, Kissinger and Nixon’s detente (a policy they borrowed from France’s Charles de Gaulle) never stood a chance. And his misreading of Soviet history led, quite naturally, to mistakes down the line. 

The power that Brzezinski wielded on behalf of “the Captive Nations” lobby (i.e. emigres from the nations comprising the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact) led Carter into some perilous cul-de-sacs. And nowhere was this more so than in Afghanistan, which ranks among the Carter administration's most serious foreign policy bungles.

What happened in Afghanistan in 1979–1980 was essentially a Soviet overreaction to American meddling that was met with a subsequent American overreaction. The sequence—if not the interpretation—was confirmed by Brzezinski himself in a 1998 interview with the French paper Le Nouvel Observateur.

“According to the official version of history,” said Brzezinski,

CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on Dec. 24, 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was on July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Once the Soviets intervened to protect the regime of their client, the Afghan President Nur Muhammad Taraki, the Carter administration, at Brzezinski’s urging, convinced itself that Moscow’s ultimate aim was to dominate the Persian Gulf. Carter melodramatically pronounced the invasion as “the most serious threat to world peace since the Second World War.” Yet, as the distinguished Cold War scholar John Lamberton Harper notes, “to consider such a move plausible meant assuming Moscow believed it could overcome the combined resistance of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. Once again, it required doubting not only the Russians’ declarations but their sanity as well.”

The Carter Doctrine, authored by Brzezinski, was the formal policy response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In the same way the Truman Doctrine committed the U.S. to a perpetual role in Europe, the Carter Doctrine transformed the Persian Gulf into a U.S. protectorate in all but name. Carter’s policy was unveiling during his final State of the Union address in January 1980 in which he declared that “an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

Our decades-long misadventure in the Greater Middle East had begun in earnest.

Brzezinski passed away in 2017 at the age of 89, yet his approach to foreign affairs remains broadly influential. For years, he served as a professor at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and as a fellow at the Center for International and Strategic Studies. He helped spawn generations of imitators who staff the think tanks, graduate schools of international relations, and the national-security bureaucracy today. While a number of his later books correctly castigated the errors of the Bush administration and eloquently warned of the increasing fragility of the American social order, it would be hard to argue with the withering judgement of Hodding Carter, a journalist who served as State Department spokesman under Cyrus Vance. He condemnedBrzezinski as “a second-rate thinker in a field infested with poseurs and careerists [who] never let consistency get in the way of self-promotion or old theories impede new policy acrobatics.”

No account of Carter’s foreign policy would be complete without a consideration of his administration’s policy toward Iran. 

By the late 1970s, the regime of the shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a stalwart U.S. ally since the CIA-engineered overthrow of Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, was teetering on the precipice of collapse. In November 1978, George Ball was summoned back to Washington at the request of the president in order to provide an objective analysis of the unfolding situation in Tehran.

Ball had long experience in dealing with Iran, going back to his days as under secretary of state under Kennedy and Johnson; from his perch as a partner at Lehman Brothers, he had kept in intermittent contact with the shah in the ensuing years.

What Ball saw upon returning to Washington did not encourage him. Assigned to an office in the NSC, Ball witnessed the dysfunction that plagued the policymaking process under Brzezinski, who, as Ball recalls, “was systematically excluding the State Department from the shaping or conduct of our Iranian policy. To ensure the Department’s insulation, he admonished me, immediately on my arrival, that I should not talk to the State Department’s Iranian desk officer, because he ‘leaked’—an instruction I, of course, immediately disregarded.”

Ball handed his report on the situation to the president and the NSC just over a year later, December 1979. He recommended that Washington help the shah accept the reality of his “precarious power position and help him face it.” Carter should, Ball advised, make clear that the only chance he had to “retain our support is for him to transfer his power to a government responsible to the people.”

But Carter and Brzezinski wouldn’t budge. 

As Princeton’s Richard Falk observed at the time, “when most others in Washington had given up on the shah, Brzezinski continued his plot for survival.”

The seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the taking of 66 American hostages was a direct consequence of the decision by Carter (with the support of, among others, Kissinger, Vice President Walter Mondale, and Brzezinski) to admit the shah into the United States for medical treatment in October 1979. The decision was made over the objections of the State Department’s man in Tehran, chargé d’affaires L. Bruce Laingen, who opined in a memo that “with the power of the mullahs growing, admission of the shah, even on humanitarian grounds, might provoke a severe disturbance.”

By April 1980, Vance felt he had no choice but to resign. He was and remains only the third secretary of state to do so. The proximate cause was Vance’s opposition to Carter’s decision to send in American forces to rescue the hostages.

The deeper issue was the betrayal and unprofessionalism of Carter and his national security team, led by Brzezinski, which called a meeting of the National Security Council to approve the ultimately ill-fated hostage rescue plan while Vance was on vacation in California. In this, Vance was also betrayed by his deputy, Warren Christopher, later to become Bill Clinton’s first secretary of state, who declined to inform Vance of the meeting until after Vance had returned to Washington. The mission failed. On April 24 one of the eight rescue helicopters collided with a parked C-130 transport plane in the Iranian desert. The doomed mission likely also doomed Carter’s prospects for reelection. 

Carter’s reputation as a peacemaker rests largely on his successful brokering of the Camp David Accords and his post-presidential diplomacy. His reputation also benefited thanks to his elevation of “human rights” as a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy which has often been the object of praise by scholars and foreign policy practitioners. Indeed, the moralizing that has become a defining feature of American foreign policy in recent decades has it roots in the Carter years.

The problem, as we have come to see, is that such sentiments are too easily appropriated by those who wish to see the U.S. forever embroiled in far-off sectarian conflicts in the Middle East. It was, of course, under the cover of such “humanitarian” concerns that Brzezinski’s heirs in the Obama national security apparatus, including Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and, above all, Hillary Clinton, fought tooth and nail for the disastrous policies of regime change in Libya and covert war in Syria.

By the end of his presidency he had come around to fully embracing Brzezinski’s worldview. The decision to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics over the USSR’s blundering military campaign in Afghanistan was a deeply unserious way for a great power to conduct itself—not least because it was the actions of the Carter administration that precipitated the Soviet invasion.

None of this was lost on a sizable number of Democrats who, by the time Carter ran for reelection, had urged Ted Kennedy to challenge him in the Democratic primary. Perhaps foremost among Carter’s critics within the Democratic establishment was the historian and former Kennedy adviser, Arthur M. Schlesinger. He denounced Carter in the pages of the New Republic, writing, “1980 has been his banner year for blunders; and what is finally destroying his immunity is less his confusion in grand strategy, impressive as this has been, than his incorrigible incompetence in detail.”

Carter, who had easily bested Schlesinger’s friend in the primaries, owed his resurrection in the polls to, in Schlesinger’s words, “two international crises—Iran and Afghanistan—that he himself helped bring about.”

Still worse, with the passage of time, Carter’s presidency more and more resembles that of a more recent vintage—that of another inexperienced Southern governor who campaigned on cleaning up a sordid mess left by his predecessor. Like Carter, that president was captured by hardline neoconservative advisers and schemers put in place around him. His experienced and moderate secretary of state got frozen out—indeed, had circles run around him by the fanatical hardliners within the national security bureaucracy. The president, on the advice of these hardliners, stumbled and overreached and committed the U.S. to a series of objectives it could not possibly, even plausibly, fulfill. 

The big difference, of course, is that George W. Bush got elected to a second term. But the policies—particularly in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf— adopted by Carter on the advice of Brzezinski paved the way for what was tragically to come some two decades later, in the autumn of 2001.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-untold-story-of-carters-fateful-foreign-policy/

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

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

HYPOCRISY ISN’T ONE OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS SINS.

HENCE ITS POPULARITY IN THE ABRAHAMIC TRADITIONS…

PLEASE DO NOT BLAME RUSSIA IF WW3 STARTS. BLAME YOURSELF.

By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost

Jimmy Carter, out of office, had the courage to call out the “abominable oppression and persecution” and “strict segregation” of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in his 2006 book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” He dedicated himself to monitoring elections, including his controversial defense of the 2006 election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and championed human rights around the globe. He lambasted the American political process as an “oligarchy” in which “unlimited political bribery” created “a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.”

But Carter’s years as an ex-president should not mask his dogged service to the empire, penchant for fomenting disastrous proxy wars, betrayal of the Palestinians, embrace of punishing neoliberal policies and his subservience to big business when he was in office.

Carter played a significant role in dismantling New Deal legislation with the deregulation of major industries including airlines, banking, trucking, telecommunications, natural gas and railways. He appointed Paul Volcker to the Federal Reserve, who, in an effort to combat inflation, drove up interest rates and pushed the U.S. into the deepest recession since the Great Depression, a move that saw the start of punishing austerity cuts. Carter is the godfather of the pillage known as neoliberalism, a pillage fellow Democrat Bill Clinton would turbo charge.

Carter fell under the disastrous influence of his Svengali-like national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Polish exile, who rejected the Nixon-Kissinger reliance on détente with the Soviet Union. Brzezinski’s life’s mission, one that meant he saw the world in black and white, was to confront and destroy the Soviet Union along with any government or movement he deemed to be under communist influence or sympathetic to it.

Carter, under Brzezinski’s influence, walked away from the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks treaty (SALT II) with the Soviet Union, which sought to curb nuclear weapons deployment. He increased military spending. He sent military aid to the Indonesian New Order government during the Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor, which many have characterized as a genocide. He supported, along with the apartheid state of South Africa, the murderous counter revolutionary group, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), led by Jonas Savimbi. He provided aid to the brutal Zairian dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. He supported the Khmer Rouge.

He instructed the Central Intelligence Agency to back opposition groups and political parties to bring down the Sandinista government in Nicaragua once it took power in 1979, leading under the Reagan administration to the formation of the Contras and a bloody and senseless U.S.-backed insurgency. He provided military aid to the dictatorship in El Salvador, ignoring an appeal from Archbishop Oscar Romero — later assassinated — to cease U.S. arms shipments.

He poisoned U.S. relations with Iran by backing the repressive regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi until the last minute and then allowing the deposed Shah to seek medical treatment in New York, triggering the occupation of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and a 444-day hostage crisis. Carter’s belligerence — he froze Iranian assets, stopped importing oil from Iran and expelled 183 Iranian diplomats from the U.S. — played into Ayatollah Khomeini’s demonization of the U.S. and calls for Islamic rule. He obliterated the credibility of Iran’s secular opposition.

Carter gave Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, although he ruled under martial law, billions in military aid. He armed the Mujahideen in Afghanistan after the Soviet intervention in 1979, a decision that cost the U.S. $3 billion, saw the deaths of 1.5 million Afghans and led to the creation of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The blowback from this Carter policy alone is catastrophic.

He backed the South Korean military in 1980 when it laid siege to the city of Gwangju, where protestors had formed a militia, which led to the massacre of some 2,000 people.

Finally, he sold out the Palestinians when he negotiated a separate peace deal, known as the Camp David Accords, in 1979 between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. The agreement excluded the Palestine Liberation Organization from the talks. Israel never, as promised to Carter, attempted to resolve the Palestine question with Jordan and Egypt’s involvement. It never permitted Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and Gaza within five years. It did not end Israeli settlements — a refusal that led Carter to later claim Begin had lied to him. But since there was no mechanism in the agreement for enforcement, and since Carter was unwilling to defy the Israel lobby to impose sanctions on Israel, the Palestinians found themselves, once again, powerless and abandoned.

Carter, to his credit, did appoint the civil rights activist Patricia Derian as his Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, leading to the blocking of loans and reduction in military aid to the military junta in Argentina during the Dirty War, restrictions the Reagan administration removed. Derian’s commitment to human rights was genuine. She supported Philippines leader Benigno S. Aquino Jr. and the South Korean dissident and former president Kim Dae-jung. Carter allowed her to anger a few of our most repressive allies. But his human rights policy was primarily designed to back democratic dissidents and worker movements in Central and Eastern Europe, especially Poland, in an effort to weaken the Soviet Union.

Carter had a decency most politicians lack, but his moral crusades, which came once he was out of power, seem like a form of penance. His record as president is bloody and dismal, although not as bloody and dismal as the presidents who followed. That’s the best we can say of him.

NOTE TO SCHEERPOST READERS FROM CHRIS HEDGES: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my now weekly Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.

https://scheerpost.com/2024/12/30/chris-hedges-dont-deify-jimmy-carter/

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

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

HYPOCRISY ISN’T ONE OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS SINS.

HENCE ITS POPULARITY IN THE ABRAHAMIC TRADITIONS…

PLEASE DO NOT BLAME RUSSIA IF WW3 STARTS. BLAME YOURSELF.

On a bright January morning in 1979, then US president Jimmy Carter greeted a historic guest in Washington: Deng Xiaoping, the man who unlocked China's economy. 

The first leader of Communist China to visit the United States, Deng had arrived the previous evening, to light snow and a welcome by the US vice-president, the secretary of state and their spouses. 

It was the start of a diplomatic relationship that would forever change the world, setting the stage for China's economic ascent - and later, its rivalry with the US.

Establishing formal ties with China was among Carter's more remarkable legacies, during a turbulent presidency that ended with one term. 

Born on 1 October, the same date as the founding of the People's Republic of China, "he liked to say it was destiny that brought him and China together", said Yawei Liu, a close friend of Carter's.

Even after leaving office, he painstakingly cultivated a close bond with the Chinese people - but that was affected as ties between Washington and Beijing cooled. 

Yet he remains one of a small group of US statesmen cherished by Beijing for helping to bring Communist China out of isolation in the 1970s. 

Beijing has expressed its condolences, calling Carter the "driving force" behind the 1979 agreement. But the Chinese internet has gone much further, referring to him as "Meirenzong" or the "benevolent American", giving him a title that was once reserved for emperors.

READ MORE:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn446nmjp1vo

NIXON WAS THE FIRST (SEE ABOVE).... BUT THE VIETNAM WAR WAS IN THE WAY... UNTIL...

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

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

HYPOCRISY ISN’T ONE OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS SINS.

HENCE ITS POPULARITY IN THE ABRAHAMIC TRADITIONS…

PLEASE DO NOT BLAME RUSSIA IF WW3 STARTS. BLAME YOURSELF.

 ... Yes! Larry nails it. 

For those who still have lingering doubts, here is from my latest book about sheer ignorance of the American "strategists":

Brzezinski stands here as a special figure not just because of his fanatical Russophobia, but because of his very prominent position as a foreign policy adviser to the Obama Administration and later, before his death, to Joe Biden and, in general, to the Democratic Party establishment going back to the times of Lyndon Johnson. In this respect this professional political scientist, who distinguished himself as a National Security Adviser in the Carter Administration, was a classic product of America’s humanities academe in a sense that most of its “products” never had any serious understanding of either real scientific-technological developments or, as is the case even today, had any clear idea of the tsarist/Soviet or contemporary Russian history, economy, cultural idiosyncrasies and, especially, its military history. Remarkably, these very same people have very little understanding of their own country, the United States, precisely because modern American higher education does not provide a required tool kit for proper connection to that reality. The only tool this education provides is the ability to juxtapose accurately selected facts which serve politically expedient narratives, but not to engage with an objective picture.

In layman’s terms, Brzezinski would have been described as a military amateur, as would be the majority of America’s geopolitical thinkers, who have never had a systemic military and technological education and never served a day in military officer uniform. In other words, most American geopolitical thinkers who emerged in 1970s through the 1990s elucidated their views on geopolitics founded on an anecdotal image of military power—a defining tool of geopolitics. 

The United States, akin to an acute appendicitis patient being rolled into the operations room, allowed appendectomy to be performed on itself by a random illiterate fanatic from the street who wouldn't pass a simple elementary school exam in arithmetic. Yet, here we are today. Brzezinski wanted Poland to be "free", and in pursuing this objective, as is expected from most "political scientists" and consistently low intelligence US National Security Advisers, he laid the bomb under America's future, including by manipulating an intellectually mediocre POTUS such as late Carter into insane foreign policy. 

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The right-wing legacy of Jimmy Carter
BY Patrick Martin

The death of former President Jimmy Carter, at the age of 100, has become the occasion for his public canonization, as the corporate media, former and current US presidents Biden, Trump, Clinton and Bush, and a multitude of leaders of world capitalism join hands to praise Carter as an advocate of peace, human rights and aid to the poor and downtrodden.

Carter left office in January 1981, so more than half of all Americans, and far more than half of the world’s population, have no memory of his presidency. They perhaps know something of his post-presidency, which combined humanitarian efforts in the poorest countries in the world—Habitat for Humanity, campaigns against guinea worm and other debilitating diseases—with occasional diplomatic missions on behalf of American imperialism.

The question for the working class is not to evaluate Carter as a human being in comparison to those who succeeded him in the White House. The downward curve is unmistakable, reflecting the decline of the American ruling class as a whole, culminating in the senile warmonger Biden and the demented fascist Trump. 

The purpose of this brief review of the history of Carter’s presidency is to make a Marxist assessment of a president who, like all the leaders of American imperialism, defended the interests of the capitalist ruling elite against its overseas enemies and, above all, against the working class at home.

Carter’s four-year presidency was a critical transition point in American politics. It marked a definitive shift in the political trajectory of the Democratic Party, which was moving sharply to the right, breaking its association with the policies of limited social reform. These were begun under Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s and continued through the “Fair Deal” of Truman, the “New Frontier” of Kennedy and the “Great Society” of Lyndon Johnson, ending in the debacle of the Vietnam War in the 1960s.

The Nixon administration too was shipwrecked by the war in Vietnam, and the overall decline in the economic position of American capitalism, expressed most starkly in the ending of dollar-gold convertibility in August 1971. Nixon turned sharply against the working class, but he could not pursue efforts to suppress wages struggles and impose austerity as his administration disintegrated in the Watergate scandal. Nixon was forced to resign in August 1974, succeeded by Gerald Ford, his unelected vice president. Ford’s pardon of Nixon and his inability to contain inflation led the ruling elite to seek a replacement who could, at least temporarily, provide some stability.

The federal government was widely discredited, not only by the Watergate break-in and cover-up that led to Nixon’s resignation, but by a whole series of revelations of government criminality: the FBI’s COINTELPRO program of illegal surveillance, provocation and even murder; the CIA assassinations and coup plots exposed in the Church committee investigation; the identification of the US government with such crimes as the military coup in Chile, in which tens of thousands of youth and workers were slaughtered.

Carter’s function was to refurbish the bloodstained record of American imperialism, after decades of wars, coups and assassinations, with the ludicrous pretense that the foreign policy of the most powerful imperialist nation would now be based on the defense of “human rights.” At the same time, in the wake of the open criminality and corruption of the Nixon administration, Carter projected an image of piety and personal modesty and pledged to establish a government that would “never lie to you.”

At the time he announced his candidacy for the US presidency, in late 1974, it would be no exaggeration to describe Carter as an entirely unknown quantity to the American public. A former aide recalled that Carter went on the popular quiz show “What’s My Line?” and none of the panelists could identify him as the governor of Georgia.

His elevation to the Democratic presidential nomination was the product of a well-orchestrated effort in ruling circles. Carter was invited onto the Trilateral Commission, the panel financed by Chase Manhattan banker David Rockefeller and directed by fanatical anticommunist Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski to groom advocates for the policies demanded by the financial elite: fiscal austerity at home and bristling anti-Soviet militarism abroad.

Brzezinski became the foreign policy guru to the Democratic candidate and then held the position of National Security Advisor—previously occupied by Henry Kissinger—throughout Carter’s term. There he spearheaded actions around the world that were the precursors of today’s drive by American imperialism towards World War III.

The central focus was to prosecute the Cold War as aggressively as possible. It was Brzezinski who conceived the plan to turn Afghanistan into “Russia’s Vietnam,” a strategic disaster on the scale of that suffered by Washington in Southeast Asia, which would undermine the domestic stability of the Soviet Union. US military aid to Islamist guerrillas fighting the pro-Soviet government in Kabul ultimately triggered the reactionary Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, a process very similar to the US effort over the past decade that used NATO expansion to provoke the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

It was the Carter-Brzezinski foreign policy that brought Saudi multimillionaire Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan and gave birth to Al Qaeda and Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. Brzezinski would later remark that “a few stirred-up Muslims” was a small price to pay for the collapse of the Soviet Union. As part of this anti-Soviet focus, Carter completed the Nixon-Kissinger rapprochement with China, giving China full diplomatic recognition in order to use Beijing against Moscow, which was then perceived as the greater threat to US world domination.

Much has been made in the past days’ media blitz of Carter’s role in brokering the 1979 Camp David Accords, which ended the most dangerous military threat to Israel by cementing a “peace” deal with Egypt. This gave Israel a free hand to carry out unrestricted attacks on the Palestinian people, a road that led straight to the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank by fascistic Jewish settlers and the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Less has been said about Carter’s announcement that any outside military threat to the Persian Gulf oil fields would be taken as a major national security challenge to the United States requiring American military intervention. The “Carter doctrine” was the US response to the Iranian Revolution, which overthrew the blood-soaked regime of the Shah, the main US ally along with Israel, in the Middle East. It set the stage for all the future American wars in the region, including the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War, launched by George H. W. Bush, and the 2003 invasion and conquest of Iraq, carried out by his son, George W. Bush.

All these plans, which prefigured in many ways the current focus of American imperialist foreign policy, were blown up by revolutionary upheavals. The most powerful blow came from the Iranian Revolution, which overthrew the regime of the Shah, who had ruled the country as an absolute monarch since the CIA-backed coup of 1953 overthrew the elected government of Mossadegh. The Shah’s secret police, the Savak, had become a watchword for torture and murder.

Carter set aside his human rights rhetoric when it came to the Shah, since the despot was the American gendarme of the Middle East, along with Israel, using his military and oil power as a key imperialist ally. In one notorious incident, Carter was feted by the Shah at a banquet in Tehran on New Year’s Eve of 1977. “Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world,” Carter declared. “This is a great tribute to you, Your Majesty, and to your leadership and to the respect and the admiration and love which your people give to you.” In barely a year, the Shah fled the country as millions took to the streets against him.

The US government could not crush the Iranian Revolution of February 1979 or even the Sandinista revolution in tiny Nicaragua in the same year, and Carter was compelled by mounting nationalist pressures in Panama to sign a treaty to return the Canal Zone by 1999. These were retreats made unavoidable by popular opposition at home to US military adventures, in the wake of Vietnam, but they were nonetheless denounced by the right wing of the Republican Party and became the basis of the election campaign of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

The final blow on this front, in the eyes of the US ruling elite, was the hostage confrontation with Iran, triggered by the decision, at the urging of Brzezinski and Kissinger, to admit the deposed Shah into the United States, supposedly for “medical treatment.” Iranian students then stormed the US embassy in Tehran and seized US personnel, demanding the Shah be repatriated in exchange for the hostages, so that he could be tried for mass murder and other crimes against the Iranian people.

The crises in Iran and Afghanistan led to two important Carter decisions on national security policy. The first, made in the wake of a failed hostage rescue raid that ended in a helicopter crash in the Iranian desert in which eight soldiers died, was the creation of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). This is the counterterrorism force which now includes the Navy Seals, Army Rangers and other elite killer units. The second was the initiation of a worldwide campaign against the USSR, ranging from the boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics to a massive strategic weapons buildup, which foreshadowed the policies carried out by the Reagan administration. So much for Carter the “peacemaker,” as the New York Timesheadlined its obituary.

In domestic policy, the shifts inaugurated under Carter were in many ways even more consequential than those in foreign policy, although these must be summarized more briefly. Carter was a fiscal conservative, who told aides he was closer to the Republican Party than to the Democrats on such issues. His administration balked at any significant expansion of the social programs established in the 1960s, such as Medicare and Medicaid, and there was no longer any pretense of a “war on poverty.”

Instead, Carter embraced conventional, right-wing “free market” economics, including the deregulation of key sections of the economy, beginning with the airlines, the trucking industry, the railroads and natural gas production and distribution. In this he was following the same path as Margaret Thatcher in Britain who came to power in 1979, J. R. Jayawardene in Sri Lanka (1977), and other ruling class politicians throughout the world, as they responded to the global crisis of capitalism.

Emphasizing the strategic need for the United States to cut its energy costs and dependence on oil imports, in the wake of the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74, the Carter administration sided with the coal companies in their assault on the coal miners, which sparked a 111-day strike by more than 160,000 members of the United Mine Workers. In March 1978, as the strike ended its third month, Carter issued a back-to-work order under the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Law. The miners defied the order, and Carter could not enforce it, even after calling out the National Guard. Only the betrayals by the UMW and AFL-CIO leaders finally imposed a settlement and ended the strike.

The Trotskyist movement in the United States, then known as the Workers League, predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party, fought energetically to alert the working class to the dangers of the Carter administration, particularly in the course of the coal miners’ strike, when the Bulletin, the party’s newspaper, was widely circulated in the coal fields. It was so influential that, according to one UMW official, at a meeting in the White House, the president brandished a copy of the Bulletin and expressed outrage that it contained details of contract proposals that Carter and the coal companies were seeking to impose.

Remarkably, there is not even a mention of the coal miners’ strike and the failed invocation of Taft-Hartley in the lengthy obituaries of Carter published in the New York Times and the Washington Post, which set the tone for the adulatory coverage in the media as a whole. But the experience of the 1977-78 strike was decisive, both in alienating large sections of the working class, particularly throughout Appalachia, from the Democratic Party, and in the loss of political confidence in Carter on the part of the corporate ruling elite. 

The shift to the right under Carter accelerated after his failure to crush the miners. Wall Street demanded measures that would suppress working class militancy and make possible a frontal assault on the social gains made by American workers in the period from the 1930s to the 1970s. To spearhead this social assault, Carter brought in banker Paul Volcker to head the Federal Reserve Board in August 1979. Volcker pushed up interest rates to an unheard of 20 percent, throwing the US economy into recession. Price inflation at the grocery store and the gas pump, particularly driven by the Middle East crises, was combined with rapidly rising unemployment.

At the same time, Carter enlisted the trade union bureaucracy in the first major exercise in corporatism, the federal bailout of Chrysler Corporation. UAW President Douglas Fraser was brought onto the company’s board of directors, and the union pushed through cuts in wages, pensions and other benefits under the rubric of “saving jobs.” This was the starting point of the transformation of the unions from workers’ organizations, however limited and bureaucratized, into the industrial police force for big business which they are today.

In the course of this process, Carter gave the green light to the drafting of plans for smashing the air traffic controllers’ union PATCO, although because of his electoral defeat in 1980, the actual destruction of the union, avenging the humiliation of the government by the coal miners, was carried out by Reagan. This set the stage for the anti-labor rampage of broken and betrayed strikes throughout the 1980s.

It is this history, of four of the most consequential years in the class struggle, globally and within the United States, that must inform any evaluation of the Carter administration. This review underscores the central political issue facing the American working class today, as it did during Carter’s presidency: the urgent necessity of breaking free of the political straitjacket of the Democratic Party and the whole corporate-controlled two-party system, and establishing its political independence through the building of a mass movement of the working class for socialism.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/12/31/xzke-d31.html

WHO IS THAT IN THE PICTURE?

YES IT IS... JOE BIDEN, THE SHIFTY DECEITFUL CHARACTER THAT EVENTUALLY BECAME AN EVEN WORSE PRESIDENT THAN CARTER....

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

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

HYPOCRISY ISN’T ONE OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS SINS.

HENCE ITS POPULARITY IN THE ABRAHAMIC TRADITIONS…

PLEASE DO NOT BLAME RUSSIA IF WW3 STARTS. BLAME JOE BIDEN.