Revealed: the Trump-linked ‘Super PAC’ working behind the scenes to drive Europe’s voters to the far right

openDemocracy undercover investigation reveals ‘explosive’ evidence of ‘extraordinary coordination’ between controversial Madrid campaign group and far-right parties across Europe. 

Español.

Adam RamsayClaire Provost

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/revealed-the-trump-linked-super-pac-working-behind-the-scenes-to-drive-europes-voters-to-the-far-right/

A controversial Madrid-based campaign group, supported by American and Russian ultra-conservatives, is working across Europe to drive voters towards far-right parties in next month’s European Parliament elections and in Spain’s national elections this Sunday, openDemocracy can reveal today.

Our findings have caused alarm among lawmakers who fear that Trump-linked conservatives are working with European allies to import a controversial US-style ‘Super PAC’ model of political campaigning to Europe – opening the door to large amounts of ‘dark money’ flowing unchecked into elections and referenda.

The Madrid-based campaign group CitizenGo is best known for its online petitions against same-sex marriage, sex education and abortion – and for driving buses across cities with slogans against LGBT rights and “feminazis”.

But now openDemocracy can reveal new evidence of “extraordinary coordination” between this group and far-right parties across Europe – from Spain to Italy, Germany and Hungary.

In Spain, CitizenGo is supporting the far-right party Vox that is expected to make big gains this weekend, winning seats in the country’s parliament for the first time and potentially forming part of the new government.

Speaking to our undercover reporter posing as a potential donor, CitizenGo’s director described plans to run attack ads against Vox’s political opponents, and talked about how to get around campaign finance laws.

Meanwhile a senior Vox official compared CitizenGo to a “Super PAC” in the US, referring to the controversial groups that can spend unlimited sums influencing elections in America – and which are known for aggressive, negative campaigning.

openDemocracy can further reveal today how CitizenGo has been supported by an experienced American political fundraiser and tech consultant linked to the Trump campaign, the Republican Party and the Tea Party movement, who boasted of being able to use controversial technology to collect personal data about potential voters.

Former US Democratic Senator Russ Feingold described our findings as “frightening” and called on European leaders to act to protect the democratic process.

“Europe has an opportunity to get ahead of this and not make the same mistakes that were made here in the United States”, said Feingold, who worked alongside Republican senator John McCain for reform of electoral finance in the US.

CitizenGo’s board also includes a close business associate of the “Orthodox Oligarch” Konstantin Malofeev – who has been targeted by USand European sanctions for allegedly propping up the pro-Russian breakaway republic in eastern Ukraine – and an Italian politician, Luca Volonte, currently on trial in Milan facing corruption charges.

European lawmakers have described openDemocracy’s findings as “explosive” and have called for “urgent action” to “maintain the integrity” of upcoming elections.

In a letter to the European Commission’s transparency tsar Frans Timmermans, MPs, MEPs and Senators from six European countries said these findings “merit urgent and high-level investigation by the European Commission and relevant national authorities”.

“We have all seen how democracy can easily be eroded if we remain complacent about the activities of anti-democratic actors… [who oppose] European fundamental rights, European values and liberal democracy”, they warned.

‘Make Spain Great Again’

The Spanish far-right party Vox has pledged to build walls around Spanish enclaves in North Africa, jail Catalan independence leaders, loosen gun control laws and “make Spain great again”. The party also opposes “political correctness”, marriage equality for gay people and laws against gender-based violence.

CitizenGo’s leader, Ignacio Arsuaga, has publicly supported Vox, as has the group’s Spanish language partner organisation, HazteOir – which recently lost the equivalent of charity status after campaigns the government said “denigrate or devalue” LGBT people.

But our research reveals new evidence of the close relationship between CitizenGo, HazteOir and Vox.

Describing Vox as “my friends”, Arsuaga said they’ve met with its senior officials to share their campaign plans and described how they ‘indirectly’ support the party.

Our undercover reporter specifically asked Arsuaga how to get around Spanish campaign finance laws rules – donating more to Vox than the legal limit – and about doing so anonymously, which is against the law.

Arsuaga explained that there are no such limits on donations to groups like CitizenGo, and “if you give privately to a non-profit there is no need to disclose that”. He said CitizenGo would not channel money to Vox itself but “you could give to any foundation that doesn’t mind to give, to forward the money, to Vox... that would be a good option”.

“This is something we haven’t made public”, Arsuaga continued, “but, in Spain, we’re going to launch a campaign before the general elections... where we are going to show bad things that have been said” by the leaders of parties that Vox is running against, for example “in favour of abortion or in favour of LGBT laws” – describing since-released posters and adverts against candidates from other parties.

“We’re never going to ask people to vote for Vox... but the campaign is going to help Vox indirectly”

Ignacio Arsuaga, CitizenGo

The Vox official that Arsuaga put our undercover reporter in touch with confirmed that supporting CitizenGo could help the party, “indirectly”, describing them as independent but that “we are actually currently totally aligned”.

He told our reporter that while there is a limit on the size of individual donations to parties, “there is not a limit on the number of donors, okay, it can be split among several donors… and they only have to register [their first] name, last name and the origin”.

“There are other ways of making support”, he added, describing “a lack of regulation in terms of the equivalent of Super PACs in the United States, those institutions or organisations that give airtime or advertising in support of causes or candidates or political parties. I understand that that is outside of the limitations of the actual political parties which is very, very regulated”.

Super PACs don’t officially exist in Europe but he said “there are movements to create those and I think they are unregulated” and “Ignacio’s organisation, that’s kind of that”.

Financial scandals and links to the ‘hard right’

Vox has been hit by several financial scandals, including the late 2018 supreme court condemnation of its then vice-president for “accounting irregularities” in one of his companies, disqualifying him from overseeing other accounts for three years.

It also received €800,000 in donations from an extremist Iranian opposition group for its 2014 European elections campaigns – and has been linked to a controversial foundation that glorifies Francisco Franco, Spain’s former dictator.

Arsuaga also told our reporter that Vox’s General Secretary Javier Ortega Smith, simultaneously the lawyer leading Vox’s private prosecution of Catalan independence supporters, “comes, I would say, from the hard right, like Falangists… Franco’s movement – but nobody knows, it’s a kind of private thing”.

Neither Ortega Smith nor the Vox party responded to openDemocracy’s requests for comment on Arsuaga’s claim.

“He comes, I would say, from the hard right, like Falangists... Franco’s movement – but nobody knows, it’s a kind of private thing”

Ignacio Arsuaga, CitizenGo

Responding to openDemocracy’s request for comments before publication, Arsuaga said: “It is self-evident that supporting HazteOir.org or CitizenGO means indirectly supporting the parties that defend (in some way) the principles we defend”.

It is “public knowledge that we work to influence and put pressure on political parties”, he said, saying that this is done “by no means ‘behind the scenes’”. He also disputed the characterisation of parties that CitizenGo aligns with as “far right”.

Powerful American and Russian backers

CitizenGo was set up in 2013 – the same year as Vox – as an ultra-conservative version of the progressive campaign platforms Avaaz.org and MoveOn.org. It has run powerful campaigns globally, including in Kenya where last year it helped get the reproductive health charity Marie Stopes temporarily banned from providing abortion services.

CitizenGo also has some very powerful international backers and partners. As previously mentioned, Alexey Komov, a close associate of the “Orthodox Oligarch” Konstantin Malofeev, and Luca Volonte, the Italian politician currently on trial in Milan facing corruption charges, both serve on the group’s board of trustees.

Bank statements from Volonte’s Novae Terrae Foundation in Italy, seen by openDemocracy, show that it paid CitizenGo €12,000 in 2014 – at the same time as the foundation was receiving money from entities later identified as part of a ‘laundromat’ pumping illicit cash into Europe from Azerbaijan and Russia. There is no evidence to suggest that the money paid to CitizenGo came from these illicit sources.

Meanwhile, Arsuaga told our undercover reporter that Patrick Slim, son of the Mexican oligarch Carlos Slim, gave his group €40,000, which “for him is just a very small amount”, Arsuaga noted – although it is close to the maximum individual donation to a political party permitted under Spanish law (and four times election campaign limits).

It was not clear whether this donation was for CitizenGo or HazteOir, neither of which are political parties. At the time of publication, Patrick Slim had not replied to openDemocracy’s request for comment.

Another CitizenGo board member is Brian Brown, a prominent US anti-LGBT activist who leads the World Congress of Families (WCF) network that recently met in Italy, with deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini from the far-right Lega party among its speakers.

Arsuaga told our reporter that he met Brown at a WCF meeting in Madrid in 2012 and that CitizenGo gets advice “every couple of months or so” from a “senior expert” in fundraising and technology who is “paid by Brian Brown”.

This expert is Darian Rafie, Brown’s partner at an American organisation called ActRight, which describes itself online as a “clearinghouse for conservative action”.

Previously, CitizenGo has presented itself in the logo on its website as a “member of the ActRight family” and openDemocracy understands that ActRight paid for a CitizenGo staff member in 2013, a claim that Rafie did not deny in emailed comments.

ActRight is currently encouraging people to “thank president Trump for stopping transgender insanity in the military”. On Facebook, its recent posts include those supporting Trump; those mocking the appearances of left-wing women; and asking “How much do you think Barack Obama paid Harvard to admit his pot-head daughter?”

ActRight’s Rafie is an experienced political consultant in the US who has played key roles in a number of companies that have worked for the Republican National Committee and the Republican party in Ohio and Michigan; received payments from a Super PAC supporting Texas Republican Ted Cruz (as did ActRight in 2015); and worked with the Tea Party group Think Freely Media.

Speaking to our undercover reporter, Rafie said he “did a lot of fundraising politically with Trump”, through political action committees (PACs) but also “directly with the campaign… [and] directly with the party”, and that he expects one of his companies to be working “in the majority of states” in the 2020 election campaigns.

‘Your phone is leaking information’

“There is a lot of stuff to be done with mobile phones and geo-fencing areas”, Rafie told our reporter. He explained: “Say there’s a rally somewhere, one of these big Trump campaign rallies. What we’ll do is we’ll draw a Polygon around that event and then we’ll register all the phones that were there”.

“Then we follow those phones home, then we know who they are, and what they do, and now I know what your Netflix unique ID is, and I’ve got your Facebook unique ID, so then I can communicate with you through a whole variety of ways”.

Rafie said “you can do that in Europe” too, though “it’s a little more limited… because the privacy laws are better, for the consumer”.

He said: “It’s actually really scary, when you peek beneath the covers, and realise that this phone that you’re carrying around with you is leaking everywhere all of your information” which can be correlated with personal data “very quickly”. In the US, he explained, “all of the data is routinely collated and correlated and available for sale”.

“We follow those phones home. Then we know who they are, and what they do, and now I know what your Netflix unique ID is, and I’ve got your Facebook unique ID, so then I can communicate with you through a whole variety of ways”.

Darian Rafie

Over email, Rafie clarified to openDemocracy that this company uses “ad networks” as do “many political campaigns and businesses in the United States… to delineate an area and identify unique device IDs and their associated advertising profiles”.

“We should all be frightened by the amount of data routinely collected, collated and sold by ad networks (such as Google and Facebook)”, he added.

Friends across Europe

On stage at the World Congress of Families meeting in Verona, Italy, in late March, CitizenGo’s Arsuaga urged European and other international ultra-conservatives to pursue an indirect, “less understood, practised path to power” that he summarised as: “By controlling [politicians’] environment… you also control them”.

‘By controlling [politicians’] environment… you also control them’

Ignacio Arsuaga, CitizenGo

Speaking to our undercover reporter at this event, Arsuaga revealed that CitizenGo also has “a lot of contact” with the Fidesz and Lega far-right parties in Hungary and Italy, along with “some contact” with the far-right AfD in Germany.

Asked if he discussed his group’s campaign strategies with these parties, Arsuaga told our undercover reporter “yeah, yeah… we inform them about what we are going to do”.

He also offered to introduce us to Lega party senator Simone Pillon and an AfD official believed to be Maximilian Krah, who was photographed with Salvini at the Verona event.

In Germany, CitizenGo’s events have attracted Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis – another World Congress of Families speaker, patron of conservative Christian causes and a friend of Steve Bannon – along with the AfD’s Benjamin Nolte.

In Italy, CitizenGo was one of the organisers of the WCF event in Veronaalong with the ProVita anti-abortion campaign that has ties to the neo-fascist party, Forza Nuova.

CitizenGo has also been involved in training Italian activists including via a four-day workshop in 2018 with the Leadership Institute – a US conservative group that counts Vice President Mike Pence among the alumni of its trainings in America.

openDemocracy contacted the Lega, AfD and Fidesz parties but they did not respond to requests for comment on their relationships with CitizenGo.

‘A loud and clear wake-up call’

Lawmakers from across Europe have expressed alarm at openDemocracy’s findings about CitizenGo and its international networks.

German MEP Terry Reintke, Greens/EFA spokesperson for gender equality and social policy in the European Parliament, said: “It is shocking how close and deep-running the ties between right-wing, nationalistic populists are – even spanning over the Atlantic. Especially with the European elections ahead, this is extremely worrying”.

She added that this “needs to be a loud and clear wake-up call… This is an attack on fundamental rights and freedoms of all of us”.

British MEP Molly Scott Cato called for “tough and immediate action... to protect the integrity of the democratic process”. CitizenGo is an example, she added, of how “the extreme right often… presents themselves as protectors of life, liberty and family” – while “behind this thin veneer there so often lurks a sinister political agenda”.

Scottish National Party MP Alyn Smith reiterated his concern that “these [European] elections will face a concerted effort to manipulate the outcome” and called for “more investigations, particularly in the UK after the activities of the Leave campaigns, so legislators can tackle these in the future”.

Petra Bayr, an MP from Austria and Vice-President of the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights, expressed her concern about European groups “trying to import a controversial US-style ‘Super PAC’ model of political campaigning to Europe, which can allow large amounts of dark money to flow unregulated into elections and referenda, often in support of extremist parties and financing controversial, negative campaigning”.

Commenting on openDemocracy’s findings, former Wisconsin Democratic senator Russ Feingold warned of a “downward spiral effect on democracy”.

“There is a great irony in this. [Far-right parties] are trying to appeal to ultra nationalist sentiments but they are using tactics that are completely contrary to the sovereignty of those countries. These are international actors, oligarchs and others who are trying to control the political processes of these countries. Even if you are a nationalist, one would think you would be a little bit concerned about that”, Feingold said.

Speaking from Washington DC, Adav Noti, a US election lawyer with the Campaign Legal Center, also warned that Super PACs have been “destructive” in the US, with “horrible effects” for American democracy.

“The last eight years since the invention of this Super PAC vehicle have seen a real sharp increase in the extent to which our elections are dominated by a small number of ultra wealthy individuals and corporations”, said Noti.

“A federal election in the US is supposed to be decided by 150m voters and yet the policy preferences are being determined by literally 20 people, 20 major donors”.

In emailed comments to openDemocracy, CitizenGo’s Ignacio Arsuaga said his groups do report donors to Spain’s Ministry of Interior and that “according to the current Data Protection legislation, we cannot tell the press who is our donor”.

He said “all the donations we have received are legal”, and that “the destination of our funds has always been legal and public”.

Additional reporting by Peter Geoghegan, Claudia Torrisi, Belen Lobos and Alexander Nabert.

What's Really Behind Julian Assange's Arrest

APR 26, 2019  

Robert Scheer

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/whats-really-behind-julian-assanges-arrest/

The recent arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has provoked a wide spectrum of responses in the media, but many journalists seem to recognize the Trump administration’s attack on the publisher as setting a dangerous precedent for freedom of the press. Many reports have focused on what Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer deems a mischaracterization of Assange’s character that is used to justify a heinous persecution and bury the fact that Assange, in his publishing of news, has acted much like any newspaper.

“It’s kind of a shame that we have to say, put in this disclaimer, ‘whatever you think of Julian Assange,’” the Truthdig editor in chief tells his guest, Bruce Shapiro, in the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence.” “Because of course, any whistleblower is going to be attacked, and it’s the traditional argument of shooting the messenger. […] Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning more spectacularly […] distributed at least 700,000 military, war and diplomatic records. And there is no question of the news value of those records, the right of the public to know that information, the need of the public to know that information. There has not been one documented example of an injury or death as a result of the release of that information.”

Shapiro, a contributing editor to The Nation and the executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, is concerned about the ethical question surrounding the alleged assistance the WikiLeaks founder proffered whistleblower Chelsea Manning when she was trying to crack a password. And yet, the potential use of the Espionage Act, which Shapiro reminds us, “has never been used against a journalist in the history of the United States, or against a publisher” is far more disconcerting to Shapiro.

“The danger to press freedom by allowing the government to root around in source relationships like this far outweighs whatever my judgments on Assange’s own character or state of mind may be,” Shapiro tells Scheer. “I think what we have to focus on now is how the government is … exploiting, you know, the complicating factors of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks to undermine all kinds of watchdog reporting here in the United States.”

What’s at stake, in other words, is not one man’s life but rather the very essence of the press freedoms the U.S. was founded on. Assange’s arrest is about national security reporting, the criminalization of source-journalist relationships involving leaking and, more broadly, an “attempt to criminalize investigative reporting,” Shapiro argues. The Nation contributor also notes the courage behind Manning’s decision to return to jail rather than take further part in the government investigation into Assange.

“Chelsea Manning is doing something that I find unprecedented in the history of American journalism,” Shapiro says. “We often hear, or from time to time hear, about journalists going to jail to protect a source. I’ve never before heard of a source willingly go to jail to protect a journalist.”

Listen to the entire discussion between the two journalists regarding Assange, the rare heroism of whistleblowers and the government’s menacing assault on the First Amendment. You can also read a transcript of the interview below the media player and find past episodes of “Scheer Intelligence” here.  

If you have trouble viewing or hearing the podcast player posted above this notice, click this link.

Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of “Scheer Intelligence,” where the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, it’s Bruce Shapiro, a contributing editor to The Nation magazine and the executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. And we’re here to discuss–I’m probably misusing the concept of trauma as you define it. But the presence of Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, has been traumatic for his critics, and certainly in the Democratic Party and elsewhere, and even for journalists. And he’s now been charged by the U.S. government with a single count of violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, for attempting unsuccessfully to understand a password or change it; he failed. And that’s led to the arrest and extradition attempt to take him from England to face this charge, and presumably other charges can be added on. And you have, the reason I wanted to talk to you, Bruce Shapiro, is that you wrote a number of articles, but most recently in The Nation, the indictment of Julian Assange as a threat to press freedom. So can you basically summarize your view of this?

Bruce Shapiro: Sure. And I suppose I should start by saying that my view of this is that it’s a mess. It’s contradictory, it’s complicated. And I think it’s important to separate, for this conversation, whatever personal views or political views we may have of Julian Assange as an individual, or WikiLeaks as an institution. And instead, look at the indictment and say, what are its implications for the work of journalism and journalists, what are its implications for publishing, what are its implications for free expression. That’s what I’ve tried to do. A lot of news organizations, I think, have kind of stepped back from Assange with the revelation in this indictment that he seemed to be actively trying to crack a government password at the request of his source, Chelsea Manning. Usual press practice would be to accept leaked materials, but not to participate actively in the breaking into the file cabinet, whether a real file cabinet or a virtual one. And because he crossed that line, some free press folks have said, Oh, that’s it, we don’t need to worry about it anymore. I disagree strongly. And it’s for a couple of reasons. First of all, the underlying charge is not just the limited charge of having tried to crack a password; that’s sort of a predicate to get him extradited and maybe add more later, who knows. But even in this limited indictment, it’s a conspiracy charge. The indictment charges Assange and Chelsea Manning with conspiracy, and in particular conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act, which has never been used against a journalist in the history of the United States, or against a publisher.

And the nature of that conspiracy is everything surrounding this act of purported password-cracking back in 2010. The indictment details Assange’s conversations with Manning, his attempt to reassure her that the effort was worth it, sort of cajoling, stroking. Talks about them discussing how best to protect her, to cover her tracks. This is the kind of conversation that journalists–especially those who report on national security, but other kinds of investigative reporters, too–have with sources every day. And so this indictment in order to get to this limited act of password-cracking, is criminalizing the work, the day-to-day work of investigative reporting. That seems to me to be very dangerous. I think the government, the Trump administration is counting on a lot of people’s dislike of Julian Assange personally to get this through to, to establish the precedent for criminalizing investigative reporters’ relationships with leakers.

You know, the Obama administration, which was no friend of whistleblowers–which prosecuted more whistleblowers than any administration in history–the Obama administration looked at this same material and concluded that it would intrude on the First Amendment, that it would be a threat to freedom of the press, to prosecute Assange. It wasn’t worth it to them. The Trump administration, now Secretary of State Pompeo, formerly the head of national intelligence, the Trump Justice Department, now under Attorney General Barr, have decided for political reasons, I think, to turn around that decision by the Obama Justice Department and go after Mr. Assange. Again, whatever you think of Assange, the question is, what are the implications of this indictment for the practice of investigative reporting? And that worries me very much.

RS: Yeah, it’s kind of a shame that we have to say, put in this disclaimer, “whatever you think of Julian Assange.” Because of course, any whistleblower is going to be attacked, and it’s the traditional argument of shooting the messenger. The fact of the matter is, there’s two points to be made. First of all, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning more spectacularly, and the real victim of prosecution here so far, has–you know, they distributed at least 700,000 military, war, and diplomatic records. And there is no question of the news value of those records, the right of the public to know that information, the need of the public to know that information. There has not been one documented example of an injury or death as a result of the release of that information. So the rump of this whole issue here, the documents that were released, that really showed evidence of serious war crimes, the killing of civilians, shooting of reporters, everything else–no one has gone for jail on the other end. No one has, you know, been held accountable for any of those crimes. And Chelsea Manning, of course, has been prosecuted, and then was pardoned and is now back in jail because she won’t cooperate with the grand jury, having said she has said everything she can. The interesting thing here is that Julian Assange is in the position–the same the New York Times and the Washington Post were in the Pentagon Papers case.

BS: Well, you know–yeah.

RS: Ellsberg was Chelsea Manning, and the fact of the matter is, whether you like the publication or not, basically with the exception of this breaking the password charge, Julian Assange is a publisher. And the interesting thing is that Chelsea Manning, who supplied the password, was not charged with this, and with this failed effort. And this was used, again, to drag Julian Assange into a court in England.

BS: Well, it’s interesting. So there’s–let me just unpack a few layers. You know, there’s a big argument within journalism right now about whether Assange is really a journalist and whether WikiLeaks is really journalism. I actually think this is an irrelevant argument, because whether or not you think a public interest document dump is journalism or meets the best ethical standards or whatever, what Julian Assange unquestionably is a publisher. And the First Amendment doesn’t only protect journalists; in fact, journalism as a profession didn’t really exist when the First Amendment was passed back in 1789. The First Amendment protects publication and publishers, and that was the meaning as well of the Pentagon Papers case, right? When the Supreme Court agreed to let the New York Times and Washington Post and everybody else go ahead with publication of the Pentagon Papers, what they found is that under American law there can be no prior restraint. We do not have an official secrets act here that allows the government to put stories on spikes. And I think there’s been a lot of confusion caused by this argument about whether or not Assange is really a journalist or not. I certainly agree that the Iraq War logs, which are the documents at the heart of this conspiracy indictment, that there is an unquestioned public interest in their release. It revealed, you know, all kinds of unknown, previously unknown activity and cover-ups for accountability in deaths of civilians, and the deaths of journalists–the famous collateral damage video. You know, those–there is a public interest. Chelsea Manning is in exactly the same position as Daniel Ellsberg was in when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, with a couple of important differences. Back then, the Nixon administration wanted to use the Espionage Act to go after Daniel Ellsberg; it didn’t only because that would have revealed the Nixon administration’s illegal break-in into Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. So Nixonian dirty tricks prevented this kind of a conspiracy charge at that time. And, you know, Daniel Ellsberg was a person at the top of the power pyramid when he decided to leak the Pentagon Papers. He’d been to Harvard, he had been a top Defense Department official, he worked for the Rand Corporation. Chelsea Manning was a lowly private, except a lowly private with access to the goods. And you know, the–in many ways, again, whatever you think of Assange, Chelsea Manning is doing something that I find unprecedented in the history of American journalism. We often hear, or from time to time hear, about journalists going to jail to protect a source. I’ve never before heard of a source willingly go to jail to protect a journalist. And that’s what’s happened here, with Chelsea Manning now in prison for contempt of court for refusing to cooperate with the investigation and to give more information to back up this indictment. Now, look. That said, I think we would be–Bob, you and I would not be doing our job as journalists if we didn’t acknowledge the fact that Julian Assange is a complicated and contradictory and very messy figure. You know, we’re speaking on the day that the Mueller report was released, which goes into–was just looking at it before we talked–some detail about the nature of Assange’s interactions with some of the Russian operatives behind the Clinton leaks. He’s a person who arguably contributed to the election of Donald Trump, because of his profound hatred of Bill Clinton, through the publication of those leaks. But that’s a historic irony. I mean, it’s an irony that the administration he now, he supported, is now the one to go after him. But that doesn’t diminish the press freedom stakes in this, and it doesn’t diminish the injustice of a criminal conspiracy brought against a public-interest publisher for releasing information.

RS: I understand what you’re saying. I actually consider that to be so irrelevant here. As you’ve pointed out, when we had this protection of freedom of the press, you know, the press–the point of the–same with speech–was not to honor the messenger. The press was quite scurrilous at times. I’m not agreeing with you, by the way, in your characterization of WikiLeaks.

BS: [Laughs]

RS: I’m not. I think–I would take exception. But I don’t think it’s the issue. In fact, you know, Tom Paine was considered a traitor; when he died, they dug up his body and threw his bones out to the countryside, there were plenty of people hated him so much. The press, the freedom of the press that was enshrined, the press was reviled, was attacked, whether it was town criers or wall posters or so forth. The issue–and by the way, I was a witness, a defense witness in the Ellsberg trial, and I can tell you they were digging up a lot of dirt on Ellsberg, on his personal–the reason they went into his psychiatrist’s office, or his psychologist’s office, was to get data to disparage his intention, his motives as a human being. There were even some journalists who went after him in a very scurrilous way, to you know, attack him. And that is not the issue. First of all, WikiLeaks is in a–as you point out–far stronger position than Ellsberg was. Ellsberg has pointed this out. Ellsberg had taken an oath.

Ellsberg had said he would honor classification. And then he had to make the case, this was such an extreme case of hiding information from the public, that he had a constitutional obligation to reveal it. WikiLeaks, and whether the New York Times likes it or the Washington Post likes it, is in the same position they were in, in terms of our Constitution. It is not a question of whether you like the–now the Washington Post is owned by the richest man in the world; does that mean I can go challenge their motives in publishing a story, whether I like it or not? No, that’s a shoot the messenger argument; I’m not saying you’re advancing it, but I am saying I’m hearing that a lot in media circles.

BS: Oh, I–very much. Now, I will say, to its credit, that the Committee to Protect Journalists came out very strongly and very clearly describing this as a very troubling indictment, particularly for the way in which it would seem to encourage prosecutors to root around in the source reporter relationship. And kudos to CPJ for that. There are a lot of corners of American journalism, anyway, that are trying to distance themselves as far as they can from Assange, and therefore are not, I think, living up to their responsibilities to our own free-press traditions. You know, the freedom of the press is rooted not–as you say, not in the likeability or agreeability or whatever of the publisher. In the most famous libel case, the most important libel case in American history, New York Times vs. Sullivan, [Justice] Brennan, who wrote the majority opinion in that, talked about the importance of caustic speak, of offensive, even caustic speech, being protected by the First Amendment. And the same thing is true of investigative matters. Deeply controversial leaks, deeply controversial revelations about the abuse of power–sources who essentially, whether it’s Ellsberg or Manning, who have committed an act of civil disobedience by violating an oath that they took to secrecy–are part of the public interest discussion. Particularly when the stakes are so high on matters of war and peace. The reality of this indictment is that if it, if this were to become the norm, there’s a whole host of important stories from the last 20 years regarding all kinds of institutions, and regarding democratic and republican presidencies alike, that would never have come to light if reporters or publications feared being called co-conspirators for working with their sources to figure out the best way to leak material. This is, it’s a very dangerous act.

RS: Well, in fact, if you apply it to what part of the media has done in their effort to criticize Trump and talk about Russian collusion and using the Steele memo and so forth and so on, you could develop a vast conspiracy. That is the real danger. And you’re absolutely right in pointing out that the use of–and for listeners who don’t understand, let’s just be legally specific. The CFAA, which is the legislation that we’re talking about, is legislation that basically has been–well, it’s been used, it’s the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. It’s used by corporations when they want to punish people, it’s used in all sorts of ways; famously, it was used against one of the true heroes of internet freedom in my book and caused his suicide. And that was Aaron Swartz, who downloaded judicial documents, again, that I think the public had a right to see; he downloaded scientific journals from JSTOR, and JSTOR even said they didn’t want him prosecuted, and yet the government used this same CFAA, with its draconian penalties, and Swartz took his own life. I mean, it was so intimidating.

BS: The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is a troublingly broad and very confusing statute. Which makes it all the more dangerous that it’s sort of the predicate for this conspiracy charge, the kind of thin, thin hook to hang an entire conspiracy case on. You know, I think there is some chance that a British court looking at this, and in particular looking at the Trump Justice Department’s decision to revive a charge that the Obama administration had deliberately chosen not to pursue. There is some chance that a British court, looking at the totality of this, will say that it amounts to a political act of prosecution. Which under international law, and under UK and European law, they’re allowed to refuse extradition for what is deemed to be a political prosecution. You know, that may be a thin chance, but I think it’s a real one.

This is clearly a politically motivated prosecution by an administration looking to distract attention from its own problems, by an administration eager to control the media, and an administration in particular that has threatened and taken action against reporters on other fronts. The administration’s open hostility to what Donald Trump calls “the enemies of the people” makes this a political prosecution. And that’s something, I think, that the British courts will need to pay some attention to in the course of deciding whether to hand Mr. Assange over.

RS: [omission for station break] I want to focus, in the time that remains, just a little bit more on the role of the media, particularly the establishment media. And people are generally, a lot people are very angry with Julian Assange because of what happened in the election, and basically, the release of material that had nothing to do with this charge. But the Podesta file showing that the Democratic National Committee had basically tried to undermine the Bernie Sanders campaign. And the other important thing that was revealed, again having nothing at all to do with this charge or Chelsea Manning, was the content of the speeches that Hillary Clinton gave for three quarters of a million dollars to Goldman Sachs, saying that she would like to bring these wonderful bankers back to Washington with her to straighten out the problems that we have, that of course the banks caused. And there’s such a sense of animus to, you know, anybody who hurt the chances of the democrats in that last election, and all other issues seem to be pushed aside. And what is particularly troubling in the whole treatment of Julian Assange–and Chelsea Manning, because she’s, after all, in jail now, and there isn’t much of an outcry–is there seems to be no concern that war crimes were committed by the United States, or at least the very strong possibility of serious war crimes–a war on civilians in Iraq, a country we invaded partially on the basis of misreporting by the New York Times and other establishment papers. And there seems to be no concern, in this zeal to get Chelsea Manning or Julian Assange convicted of additional charges, of what about the crimes that they revealed? What about the killing of civilians? What about the invasion of a country and doing this, the dismemberment of a whole region? And there is absolutely no sense at all–which we usually bring to whistleblowing cases; we usually say, was the information important? Did the public have a right to know it? That is, after all, the First Amendment basic argument in defense of the press, that you need a vital press. And you could not have a better example of the vitality of a press, in terms of the documents revealed by WikiLeaks. No one can challenge that, I don’t think. And yet there’s no mention of it.

BS: Well, I think there’s been some mention of it. And I think, to be fair, that American journalism is divided over Assange, and is divided over this case, and is having exactly this argument. There are an awful lot of reporters I know, editorial page editors and others, who are saying exactly what you’re describing now. Now, listen. I do, I’m going to push back gently in one way. I do think it’s important that we acknowledge that there are ways in which Mr. Assange, through his judgment and I what I think is sometimes poor judgment, has contributed to the situation. And here I’m not talking about the 2016 presidential campaign at all. I think in this case, for example, in the case of 2010, in the War Logs, while I think it is dangerous and wrong for the government to be prosecuting him now–and I’m very strongly writing against this prosecution, OK–I do think it was a poor judgment of Assange to actively participate in cracking a password. And here’s why: it actually put his source in more legal jeopardy. We’ve seen this before; back in the 1990s, the Cincinnati Enquirer had a magnificent scoop that a team of reporters worked on for a year, about corruption and criminality and violence by the Chiquita Banana company. They ran the story, and it turned out that one of the reporters on the team had been quietly, privately hacking into the executive voicemail system with a password he’d been given by a source.

That action, that actually participating in the extraction of files in an active way, or voice mails in an active way, gave Chiquita–which was very politically connected–an opportunity to sue the Enquirer and its publisher. Got to go to prosecutors and get criminal charges against the reporter in that case. And this entire, huge series about crimes against humanity by a major multinational American corporation–that entire series ended up being unpublished, retracted, taken out of LexisNexis–you can find it somewhere on the internet, but it’s hard to find. The reporter ended up being charged criminally, and in order to stay out of jail, ended up giving up his source, who lost his job. When reporters, or when publishers, themselves decide–and sometimes it may be necessary. But when reporters themselves decide to cross a certain line of law, or a certain line of action, the risk to the story itself, the risk to their publications, the risk to their sources rises. I’m, you know, I teach journalism ethics, and I would be irresponsible if I didn’t say that I think Assange made some important mistakes in this case. But so what, right? The danger to press freedom by allowing the government to root around in source relationships like this, far outweighs whatever my judgments on Assange’s own character or state of mind may be. I think what we have to focus on now is how the government is using Julian Assange, and using the controversial nature of his actions, as a smokescreen to cover up a broad attack on national security reporting, a broad attack to criminalize source-journalist relationships involving leaking, a broad attempt to criminalize investigative reporting.

They’re exploiting, you know, the complicating factors of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks to undermine all kinds of watchdog reporting here in the United States.

RS: Yeah. And you know, the complicating factors are always there in every story of this kind. For God’s sake, we’re talking about the area of national security where the government routinely–every government in the world, but ours is masterful at it–routinely lies about every bit of information you need, and anything that would be unflattering to what they’re doing. And you can go here with the Steele memo, and how is that created, and what was this relation to government agencies? You could go through–

BS: Well, that—

RS: Anyway, but let me just, I mean, ‘cause I, I think I take your point. That the whistleblowers, yes; you know, John Kiriakou, who gave the name of a CIA person to a New York Times reporter, ended up spending years in jail. He’s the one who first revealed that we were doing torture, and they used, you know, that passing that card with the name. In this case, by the way, it’s not that he cracked the password; it was part of a password. And Chelsea Manning had asked, would he know anything about it, and they did not crack the password, it did not happen. And if people want to, I mean, I’ll post this at the end of it, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which I don’t know if you would agree with me, but I think it’s the most exemplary organization. It has a libertarian bent, but that can be positive in the case of questioning government…

BS: Well, that’s right. And look, I think it’s also important to say, as both in terms of what EFF is saying and as a kind of extension of what I was saying a few minutes ago, that the source has not been born, the whistleblower has not been born who has pure motives. And the journalist has not been born who is pure of motive and character, right? We are, these are complicated, messy motivations; complicated, messy stories. But the First Amendment means nothing if it doesn’t mean the right to publish information gleaned from hopelessly messy, and indeed maybe even compromised, sources. And it means nothing if it doesn’t mean the ability of journalists, for their own complicated reasons and complicated motives and complicated characters, to pursue public interest information about abuses of power by the government.

RS: And so, I take your point, and I’m not trying to glorify anyone, a whistleblower of any sort. But I do want to say something, push back a little bit on the characterization of Julian Assange. This guy has sacrificed a great deal to do what other people have failed to do. There are a lot of people who knew about crimes being committed in Iraq and elsewhere. I always raise this question about whistleblowers. There was one Daniel Ellsberg; there were thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people who had already read the Pentagon Papers and knew that the war in Vietnam was a tissue of lies, and yet millions continued to be killed because of this lie. And in the case of Julian Assange, this incredibly valuable information that he, thanks to Chelsea Manning’s incredible courage, revealed–that seems to be lost. The rest of the media, including the media that celebrated going into Iraq on a lie–that’s the New York Times, Washington Post, and many others–celebrated going into it, bought the lies, takes no accountability for the needless civilian destruction of lives, American troops killed, what have you. And somehow, Julian Assange, who more than any other single figure enlightened us, with Chelsea Manning, about the reality of what our government was doing in Iraq–more than any of those two people–and somehow we’re sitting here nit-picking about their motives. And the scoundrels–the scoundrels who lied, none of them have been prosecuted. None of them–they all feel self-righteous. The people who voted for the war based on the lies, who were in Congress. The people who spread the lies when they were in the government. You know, including democratic and republican governments. None of them are put in our crosshairs the way we’re doing with Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning.

BS: Well, and that’s why, you know, we need to view–I think American journalists, in particular, and American press freedom groups, which are trying to figure out their relationship to this complicated case–need to understand that leaking in a matter like this, and the choices that a publisher like Assange makes in a matter like this that is about war crimes, about cover-up for atrocity, that’s about misleading the public–that sometimes breaking, you know, a computer hacking law, sometimes breaking a secrecy oath, is a kind of civil disobedience as historically significant as Rosa Parks, you know, refusing to sit in the back of the bus. That is what we’re dealing with here. And that’s why I think it’s particularly notable that we pay attention to the courage of Manning at this moment, who as I said, is doing something that as a sort of journalism historian I find unprecedented, which is a source going to jail to protect a journalist. We need to be focused on Chelsea Manning as much as perhaps we are on Julian Assange. And we need to separate out the–look, the very complicated emotions that many folks have in light of the 2016 campaign. Forget about all that. Because what we’re talking about here is the basic ability of journalists to do their job, of sources to act out of conscience, of publishers to publish secrets, which has been protected by the First Amendment, and will be in grave danger if the conspiracy rap is allowed to run its course. If Julian Assange can go to prison for conspiring with Chelsea Manning over a password, really the whole nature of source-reporter relationships in American law is up for grabs.

RS: Yeah, I think that’s an important point on which to end it. I pushed back on–

BS: Yeah, I thought it was good.

RS: I think you’re being very polite. I don’t feel polite about a mainstream media that is quite willing to pass on government lies and rarely apologize for it, but when you have the rare whistleblower–my goodness, we’ve had what, 10, 12 whistleblowers in 40 years of any significance on national security. And we learn that wars were unnecessary and millions died unnecessarily. And yet these whistleblowers are always challenged. Their lives are messed up terribly; divorce, they lose their jobs. You got Thomas Drake trying to hold down a job at an Apple store, losing all their benefits. I can go through the list. And you have to really ask a question: why are there so few whistleblowers? If we’re such a great, free society, you know, where are the people of courage? Are they so worried–what are the risks they would be taking, there would be a slight kink in their career curve? But how many people, how many people on the inside, with security clearances, whether they’re in the academic world, the military world or so forth, have stepped forward and told the American people the truth they need to know in order to make intelligent decisions as an electorate? In national security, 95 to 99 percent of the information we operate on is government-tailored information, quite often fraudulent. You have that rare person, like a Julian Assange, an Edward Snowden, a Daniel Ellsberg and so forth, you can name them all right now on this program in a few minutes, and you have to ask the basic question: Where are the other folks? Where are the people with the security clearances who keep quiet while lies are sold to the American people that they know are lies?

BS: So let me close by drawing your attention and that of listeners to a wonderful organization recently set up, based in San Francisco, actually, called the Signals Network, which was set up specifically to promote the support of and defense for whistleblowers in the wake of Snowden, in the wake of Assange, in the wake of all of these cases. The Signals Network is doing very important work to advance exactly the kinds of questions that you’re asking here, and to say, how do we turn these–how do we give these people who so easily as whistleblowers, as Chelsea Manning, turn in to defendants and pariahs, how do we give them the honor, respect, and support they deserve for the courageous act of telling the public what it needs to know?

RS: Thank you, Bruce Shapiro, for that statement. And yes, those are good sources. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is another one. There are good folks out there–including, by the way, let me hasten to say, Bruce Shapiro and his writings in The Nation magazine [Laughter], which is why I wanted him on this show now. So even though he’s very polite [Laughter] towards, I think, an establishment that’s out of control and can be quite dangerous and deceitful, I do want to thank you for taking the time to do this. Bruce Shapiro, contributing editor to The Nation, executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, and a longtime really important journalist on his own terms, and a media critic. I want to also thank Kat Yore and Mario Diaz, our engineers here at KCRW, and Joshua Scheer, the producer of “Scheer Intelligence,” and we’ll be back with another edition next week. Thank you.

Joe Biden: An Imperial Corporatist Wrapped in the Bloody Flag of Charlottesville

APRIL 26, 2019

by PAUL STREET

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/04/26/joe-biden-an-imperial-corporatist-wrapped-in-the-bloody-flag-of-charlottesville/

Besides being a grabby old coot who needs to stop joking about complaints over his serially inappropriate touching of females, Joe Biden is a grinning neoliberal sell-out who stands well to the right of majority progressive public opinion. No elegantly crafted three-and-a-half minute campaign launch video on the horrors of Charlottesville and Donald Trump can change that essential fact.

The media trope that portrays “Lunch-Bucket Joe” Biden as a regular, down-to-earth guy who cares deeply about regular folks is pure, unadulterated bullshit. His real constituents wear pinstripe suits and works on Wall Street and in corporate headquarters. They fly around in fancy private jets. And the supposed “everyman liberal” Joe Biden is their loyal apparatchik.

“The Folks at the Top Aren’t Bad Guys”

It’s not for nothing that Biden relies on big money backers, not small and working-class donors – and that he is an especially close ally and beneficiary of Washington lobbyists. He has spent decades ripping on progressive “special interests” while joining with Republicans to advance policies harmful to the working-class.

In 1978, Biden worked for Wall Street by voting to rollback bankruptcy protections for college graduates with federal student loans. Six years later he did the same to vocational school graduates. In 2005, he worked with Republican allies to pass the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, which put traditional “clean slate” Chapter 7 bankruptcy out of reach for millions of ordinary Americans and thousands of small businesses. The bill put bankruptcy filers under far stricter Chapter 13 rules, turning countless citizens into de facto indentured servants of finance capital (including the many credit card companies headquartered in Delaware.) Biden backed an earlier version of the bill that was too corporatist even for Bill and Hillary Clinton.

He voted against a bill that would have compelled credit card companies to warn customers of the costs of only making minimum payments.

In 1979, Biden recognized campaign donations from Coca-Cola by cosponsoring a bill that permitted soft-drink producers to skirt antitrust laws. That same year he was one of just two Congressional Democrats to vote against a Judiciary Committee measure to increase consumers’ rights to sue corporations for price-fixing.

Biden strongly supported the 1999 Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, which permitted the re-merging of investment and commercial banking by repealing the Depression-era Glass–Steagall Act. This helped create the 2007-8 financial crisis and subsequent recession.

Biden naturally supported the corporate-neoliberal North American Free Trade agreement and the globalist investor rights Trans-Pacific Partnership deal.

All of this and more in Biden’s record is richly consistent with the beginning of his political career. He’s been an unapologetic corporatist from the start. As Branko Marcetic noted on Jacobin last summer:

“In 1984, the Washington Post specifically named him, along with Gary Hart and Bill Bradley, as one of the best-known figures among that era’s Democratic Party’s ‘neo-liberals,’ who ‘singled out slimming the role of government and pushing new technology’….Biden built his career advertising himself as someone who refuses to toe the progressive line. He proudly boasted of defying liberal orthodoxy on school busing, for instance. But throughout his career, that boast has most often taken the form of bashing liberal ‘special interests.’ Biden toured the country in 1985 chiding…unions and farmers for being too narrowly focused, and complained that Democrats too often ‘think in terms of special interests first and the greater interest second.’ In the latter case, Biden was specifically complaining about their opposition to his calls for a spending freeze on entitlements and an increase in the retirement age” (emphasis added).

“The Anti-Populist”

Biden is so corporatist and pro-Wall Street that he can’t join the other corporate (neo) liberals in the 2020 presidential horse race in playing what a still-Left Christopher Hitchens once called (in a sharp volume on the neoliberal Clintons) “the essence of American politics”: “the manipulation of populism by elitism.” Biden won’t deign to pay lip-service to populism. Indeed, he has billed himself the “anti-populist” – the antidote to both the right-wing reactionary populism of Trump and the leftish progressive populism of Bernie Sanders.

Biden absurdly criticizes those who advocate a universal basic income of “selling American workers short” and undermining the “dignity” of work. He opposes calls for free college tuition and Single Payer health insurance. He defends Big Business from popular criticism, writing in 2017 that “Some want to single out big corporations for all the blame. … But consumers, workers, and leaders have the power to hold every corporation to a higher standard, not simply cast business as the enemy.”

That’s called blaming the working-class victim. It’s also called propagating a fantasy – the existence of a political system in which the working-class majority has the power to hold concentrated wealth and power accountable.

“I don’t think five hundred billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble. The folks at the top aren’t bad guys,” he told the Brookings Institution last year – this as he claimed to worry about how the “gap is yawning” between the super-rich and the rest.

“I Have No Empathy…Give Me a Break”

Joe Biden is such a right-winger that he has even gone so far as to say that he has “no empathy” for Millennials struggle to get by in the savagely unequal and insecure precariat economy he helped create over his many, many years of service to the Lords of Capital. “The younger generation now tells me how tough things are—give me a break,” said Biden, while speaking to Patt Morrison of the Los Angeles Times last year. “No, no, I have no empathy for it, give me a break.”

So what if Millennials face a significant diminution of opportunity, wealth, income and security compared to the Baby Boomers with whom Biden identifies? Who cares if he helped shrink the American Dream for young people with the neoliberal policies and politics he helped advance?

“Reaching Across the Aisle to Get [Capitalist] Things Done”

How Biden has managed to simultaneously distance himself from majority progressive-populist sentiments and pose as a friend of the everyday working man is an interesting question that probably can’t be answered without factoring in the Orwellian role of corporate media in promoting love as hate, war as peace, black as white, and corporate apparatchiks as regular working-class guys.

A critical part of Joe “Anti-Populist” Biden’s media-crafted appeal is his “get things done” claim to be able to “reach out across the aisle” in the famous, hallowed, and CNN- and “P”BS-honored “spirit of bipartisanship.” That’s a shame. Why should we want a president who promises to team up with the widely loathed and creeping fascist white-nationalist Republican Party? And what has the holy bipartisanship that Biden is celebrated for embracing wrought for We the People over the years?

Not much. As Andrew Cockburn wrote last month at Harpers:

“By tapping into…popular tropes—‘The system is broken,’ ‘Why can’t Congress just get along?’—the practitioners of bipartisanship conveniently gloss over the more evident reality: that the system is under sustained assault by a [bipartisan] ideology bent on destroying the remnants of the New Deal to the benefit of a greed-driven oligarchy. It was bipartisan accord, after all, that brought us the permanent war economy, the war on drugs, the mass incarceration of black people [Biden backed Bill Clinton’s ‘Three Strikes’ crime and prison bill – P.S.], 1990s welfare ‘reform’ [Biden backed the Clinton-Gingrich abolition of Aid for Families with Dependent Children], Wall Street deregulation and the consequent $16 trillion in bank bailouts, the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, and other atrocities too numerous to mention. If the system is indeed broken, it is because interested parties are doing their best to break it” (emphasis added).

Biden even took his embrace of the supposedly sacred virtue of bipartisanship to the grotesque level of forming close friendships with vicious southern white racists like Republican Senators Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, not to mention the frothing warmonger John McCain.

With Biden as with Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and a long line of dismal dollar Democrats in the neoliberal era, there’s an accurate translation for “reaching across the aisle to get things done:” joining hands across the two major party wings of the same corporate-imperial bird of prey to make policy in accord with the wishes of the rich and powerful.

“A March to Peace and Security”

Speaking of young people and empire, no assessment of “Lunch Bucket Joe” (LBJ) Biden is complete without reference to what Institute for Policy Studies foreign policy analyst Stephen Zunes calls Biden’s “key role in making possible an inappropriate and utterly disastrous war” – the monumentally criminal and mass-murderous U.S. invasion of Iraq. As Zunes explains at The Progressive:

“As chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, Biden stated that Saddam Hussein had a sizable arsenal of chemical weapons as well as biological weapons, including anthrax, and that ‘he may have a strain’ of smallpox, despite UN inspectors reporting that Iraq no longer appeared to have any weaponized chemical or biological agents. And even though the International Atomic Energy Agency had reported as far back as 1997 that there was no evidence whatsoever that Iraq had any ongoing nuclear program, Biden insisted that Saddam was ‘seeking nuclear weapons.’”

“At the start of hearings before his committee on July 31, 2002, Biden stated, ‘One thing is clear: These weapons must be dislodged from Saddam, or Saddam must be dislodged from power. If we wait for the danger from Saddam to become clear, it could be too late…

“In an Orwellian twist of language designed to justify the war resolution, Biden claimed in Senate session in October 2002, ‘I do not believe this is a rush to war. I believe it is a march to peace and security.’ This gave President Bush the unprecedented authority to invade a country on the far side of the world that was no threat to the United States” (emphasis added).

It was an invasion that led to the premature death of 4500 mostly younger U.S. Americans – and of course to much larger Iraqi casualties.

The “Stop Sanders Democrats”

Why is this dirty old imperialist and corporatist dog being rolled out to corporate media acclaim as the supposed people’s alternative to Trump in the White House? It’s all about blocking Bernie Sanders, who is the Democrats’ best chance to win back the presidency since he nearly won the Democratic presidential nomination three years ago (Sanders would have prevailed over the vapid centrist Hillary Clinton but for the corrupt shenanigans of the Democratic National Committee) and is still running (as before) in sincere accord with majority-progressive-populist sentiments on key domestic issues. Norman Solomon has explained it well here at Counterpunch:

“Biden has arrived as a presidential candidate to rescue the Democratic Party from Bernie Sanders….Urgency is in the media air. Last week, the New York Times told readers that ‘Stop Sanders’ Democrats were ‘agonizing over his momentum.’ The story was front-page news. At the Washington Post, a two-sentence headline appeared just above a nice photo of Biden: ‘Far-Left Policies Will Drive a 2020 Defeat, Centrist Democrats Fear. So They’re Floating Alternatives.’…Biden is the most reliable alternative for corporate America. He has what Sanders completely lacks—vast experience as an elected official serving the interests of credit-card companies, big banks, insurance firms and other parts of the financial services industry. His alignment with corporate interests has been comprehensive. It was a fulcrum of his entire political career when, in 1993, Sen. Biden voted yes while most Democrats in Congress voted against NAFTA….In recent months, from his pro-corporate vantage point, Biden has been taking potshots at the progressive populism of Bernie Sanders. At a gathering in Alabama last fall, Biden said: ‘Guys, the wealthy are as patriotic as the poor. I know Bernie doesn’t like me saying that, but they are’” (emphasis added).

Only the popular front-runner Sanders is likely to prevail against Trump even without a recession (certainly a possibility) between now and the election. But, as in the last presidential cycle, corporate-Democratic politicos are working to sabotage the nomination of their most viable candidate in the general election. They are:

+ Flooding the primary campaign with such an absurdly large number of candidates that Sanders will likely be unable to garner the majority of primary delegates required for a first-ballot nomination at the 2020 Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee.

+ Coordinating among the Democratic Convention super-delegates—the more than 350 county and state party bosses and elected officials who are granted delegate status without election—to vote as a bloc to stop Sanders on the convention’s second ballot. (These super-delegates exist precisely for the purpose of blocking challengers to the party’s corporate establishment.)

+ Working to change state party elections from caucuses to primaries, as caucuses are friendlier to progressive challengers. (Sanders won 11 of the nation’s 18 caucus states three years ago.)

+ Smearing Sanders’ popular social-democratic policy agenda as “fantastic,” “unaffordable,” “unrealistic” and too dangerously “socialist”—this while Democratic elites refuse to acknowledge the fascist tendencies of the president they helped elect in 2016.

+ Branding the electable Sanders “unelectable” on the grounds that he is an “extremist” who is “too far left” for the U.S. electorate generally and independent voters specifically.

The “unelectable” charge is false. Sanders appeals to independents (who are nowhere near as conservative as is commonly reported), people of color, infrequent voters and the white working-class that has largely abandoned the Democratic Party.

His anti-establishment message, coupled with his long record of representing rural voters, makes him highly competitive with Trump, not only in the Rust Belts states where Hillary Clinton faltered but even in some dark red states like West Virginia. Even the likes of Karl Rove believe Sanders could defeat Trump in 2020.

Biden is part of the corporate “Stop Sanders” campaign inside the Democratic Party. It helps that he is a white male in an election cycle shaped by the Democrats’ fear that running a woman and/or person of color might fuel the patriarchal and racist sentiments of the Trump base, increasing its turnout in battleground states.

Look for the Democratic establishment to do everything it can to prevent its party from defeating Trump by running its most popular candidate, Bernie Sanders. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. The Democratic Party exists to serve its corporate clients. Its leaders fear the specter of socialism while the world’s most powerful nation threatens to slide into fascism. (Never mind that democratic eco-socialism—a political project significantly more radical than what Sanders is proposing—is precisely what America and the world need right now.) Establishment Democrats would rather lose to a white-nationalist right than even the mildly social-democratic left within their own party. It’s why the late political scientist Sheldon Wolin labeled them “the Inauthentic Opposition.”

The Best Thing Joe Can Do

Joe Biden can wave the bloody flag of Charlottesville all he wants. He is the distilled essence of neoliberal Fake Resistance and Inauthentic Opposition. Barring an economic meltdown between now and the first Tuesday in November of 2020, look for him to get knocked out by the orange beast in the general election if the “Stop Sanders” Democrats are successful.

Keep your passports up to date. Trumpism is Amerikaner fascism, eager to up its ugly game by stepping beyond mere flirtation with mass violence. As Paul Krugman recently told a nonplussed Anderson Cooper on CNN, “if you’re not terrified” yet, then “you]re not paying attention”:

Cooper: “You write that it’s very much up in the air whether America as we know it will survive.”

Krugman: “Institutions depend upon the willingness of people to obey norms, and occasionally to say, okay, ‘this is not how we do things in our country.’ …This didn’t start with Trump. There’s been a steady erosion of those norms. This has been building for a long time, and we’re very close to the edge right now.”

Cooper: “When you say close to the edge, what does that mean to you?”

Krugman: “You know, on paper, we’ll stay a democracy, but I worry very much about a sort of Hungary-type situation where you have on paper the institutions of democracy. You even hold votes, but the system is rigged, and in fact, it’s become effectively you have a one-party rule…We’re very close. If Trump is re-elected if the Republicans retake control of the House, what are the odds that we will really have a functioning democracy after that?”

Cooper: “I mean, that’s a pretty terrifying idea”

Krugman: “If you’re not terrified, you’re not paying attention”

What Biden said in his launch video yesterday morning is correct: “If we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation…We can’t forget what happened in Charlottesville.” A second Trump term is not a pleasant thing to contemplate. Biden says he “can’t stand by and let that happen.”

The irony is the best thing he could do to stop a second Trump term is to stand aside and tell the rest of the candidate field and voters to congeal behind Sanders. The corporate-neoliberal Democratic Clinton-Obama model is what put the supremely dangerous orange monster in the White House in the first place in 2016. The establishment Democrats, who prefer barbarism to even the mildest hint of socialism, are working to give the monster a second term. If Joe really hates fascism as much as his launch video suggests, then he needs to de-launch. Maybe some activists in Iowa or New Hampshire can set up for his final, politically fatal gropes.

Extreme times call for extreme measures. His candidacy is terrifying.