Germany honored U.S. President Joe Biden for his contribution to trans-Atlantic relations on Friday, ahead of his meetings with European allies on Russia’s war in Ukraine and the conflict in the Middle East.
Germany Honors Biden for His Contribution to Trans-Atlantic Ties as the U.S. Election Looms
The sheer delight the pathetic “Traffic Light” coalition government takes in abasing itself before the US hegemon is pornographic in its shameless indecency. Especially the same week that the Danes reported this:
Just days before the Nord Stream gas pipeline attack in September 2022, warships belonging to the U.S. Navy were on the scene and ordered nearby officials to keep away.
That is according to John Anker Nielsen, who is harbour master at Christiansø, the easternmost part of Denmark in the Baltic Sea, northeast of the island of Bornholm and close to the sites of the Nord Stream explosions.
Map showing the route of Nord Stream 1 and 2 in the southern Baltic Sea and location of the leaks. AWZ=Exclusive Economic Zone
Map: AFP / Nadine EHRENBERG, adapted
Nielsen late last month told a reporter at Politiken, a major Danish daily, that he went out with a rescue team four or five days before the blast to check on nearby ships with switched-off radios, suspecting there might have been an accident, only to find U.S. warships, whose staff ordered the team to turn back immediately.
Biden: If Russia invades uh that means tanks or troops crossing the uh the border of Ukraine again then uh there will be uh we there will be no longer a Nordstream 2. We will bring an end to it.
Reporter: What? How would you how will you do that exactly since the project and control of the project is within Germany’s control?
Biden: We will. I promise you we’ll be able to do it.
and Nuland did it too. This video is still up on the State Department’s official Facebook page because they’re proud of it:
“If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”
And Never forget what Nuland said at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on January 26, 2023:
“I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you [Ted Cruz] like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”
“…ultimately this is also a tremendous opportunity. It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs. That’s very significant and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come…”
German industry increasingly struggles to compete on the world stage. Particularly hard hit are its mighty chemical and heavy industry sectors, which are now in rapid decline. One of the main drivers is policies that have made energy costs skyrocket, and there Germany serves as a canary in the coal mine for other leading industrial nations.
It’s kind of grimly amusing that Forbes’ use of the euphemism “policies that have made energy costs skyrocket” rather than say “self-defeating sanctions on cheap Russian gas combined with the biggest act of industrial sabotage in modern history” and it also doesn’t mention that it’s been America’s policies that have deindustrialized Germany.
It’s also so humiliating as an American that the neo-conservative cabal of psychopathic nitwits has been in sole control of US foreign policy since the Clinton administration and now they have a lock on US corporate media as well.
In the eastern states of Saxony and Thuringia, the far-right AfD received more than double as many votes as the three parties which make up the federal coalition government — the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), environmentalist Greens and neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP) — combined. These parties’ results are each in the single digits. The Greens in Thuringia and the FDP in both states even failed to meet the 5% threshold to be represented in the state parliaments.
“Biden received the highest class of Germany’s Order of Merit, which was also bestowed on former U.S. President George H.W. Bush for his support of German reunification.”
Kind of fitting that the era of American unipolarity is framed this way. Bush at the beginning. Biden at the end. The Germans footing the bill for American foreign policy.
William S. Burroughs postulated four political parties in his 1959 novel Naked Lunch: Liquefactionists, Senders, Divisionists, and Factualists.
Per Wiki:
The city is contested by four rival political parties: Liquefactionists, who want to merge everyone into one protoplasmic entity; Senders, who want to control everyone else through telepathy; Divisionists, who subdivide into replicas of themselves; and Factualists, who oppose the other three.
The Senders are a metaphor for mass media propaganda as practiced by Edward Bernays, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Goebbels, and American political consultants.
The Democrats and their allied Never Trumper Republicans are the heirs to this legacy.
The rise of the Internet, then the World Wide Web, and finally social media initially threw them for a loop and played a role in Trump taking over the G.O.P.
Their reaction was to impose a surveillance and censorship regime using the tech monopolies as bottlenecks:
Matt Taibbi chronicled how my old boss Senator Mark Warner personally arm-twisted Twitter to censor “Russian disinformation.”
The Hunter Biden laptop story was suppressed just before the 2020 election per Twitter and Meta execs.
Essentially the Biden administration’s communications policy has been to relentlessly and flagrantly spin, distort, lie
Unfortunately, combining surveillance and censorship with slick media campaigns using the power of celebrity to encourage supporters to form parasocial bonds with politicians is way too much power for anyone to handle.
Because there’s no way not to get high on your own supply.
We have an entire army of NAFO trolls (on) Reddit and Twitter. People that believed 100% everything that was being said by Ukraine.
The Ukrainians will only show their successes to their population as if the Ukrainians are constantly winning.
At the same time we have a million Ukrainian men abroad. We have countless Ukrainian soldiers and enlisted personnel that are not at the front.
We have people in Kiev partying as if there’s no war happening.
The problem for Ukraine is that they haven’t managed to create (a) national feeling of it’s now or never. They always try to portray the war as ‘oh we’re winning. It’s fine.’
So everybody kind of kept their life going because everything is going well at the front but it’s not true and now it’s too late.
The disorientation goes to the top, as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s new piece for Foreign Policy illustrates.
The Biden administration’s strategy has put the United States in a much stronger geopolitical position today than it was four years ago. [Really??] But our work is unfinished. The United States must sustain its fortitude across administrations to shake the revisionists’ assumptions. It must be prepared for the revisionist states to deepen cooperation with one another to try to make up the difference. It must maintain its commitments to and the trust of its friends. And it must continue to earn the American people’s confidence in the power, purpose, and value of disciplined American leadership in the world.
The two most important consequences of this decision derive from the fact that Biden is old and almost certainly senile.
This means that Harris stands a good chance of becoming President if Biden dies or his incapacity cannot be concealed, even with the best drug cocktails.
If that doesn’t happen, Kamala is odds on to be the next Presidential candidate of the Democratic party.
Kamala is ruthless and ambitious, a hard person willing to do whatever it takes to win. That might be acceptable, but her ruthlessness has been used mostly in favor of doing evil. (Here’s a rather long list.)
Of course, Wall Street is thrilled, they know they can’t lose. Trump/Pence win, great! Biden/Harris win, great! If either President dies, the person who replaces them will take great care of rich people whose money comes from parasitical rentierism and direct financial subsidies from the Federal Reserve.
Biden/Harris will be worse in foreign affairs than Trump has been (despite the screams). Domestically, they’ll be somewhat better, but will keep the shovels feeding trillions to the rich going. American decline will continue. In four to twelve years, odds are Donald Trump’s true successor, the competent authoritarian “populist” will win, and that’ll be all she wrote.
The US has been offered many off-ramps (the most recent being Sanders, twice) and refused them all. Decline will continue until it is irreversible (it may already be), or until Americans accept that right-wingers aren’t going to produce good results, whatever their party, gender, skin color, or sexual orientation.
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Let’s start with Hunter Biden. In April 2014, he became a director of Burisma, the largest natural-gas producer in Ukraine. He had no prior experience in the gas industry, nor with Ukrainian regulatory affairs, his ostensible purview at Burisma. He did have one priceless qualification: His unique position as the son of the vice president of the United States, newborn Ukraine’s most crucial ally.
Pretty clear. It may not be illegal, but it is corrupt influence-peddling.
Lots of people get upset at me for saying the problem with Biden, Sr., and many others, is how they prioritize family…
Recently, Hunter Biden told The New Yorker that “the decisions that I made were the right decisions for my family and for me.”
Yeah. Self-dealing and making sure your family is rich, even though they have no qualifications, is exactly corruption. Exactly.
This family worship among public servants, politicians, and even corporate officers has to end. When you’re in a position of trust, your salary and your self is all that your family should get out of it. Not a cushy goddamn job for which they are in no way qualified.
This stuff is rampant in DC and elsewhere. A ton of corruption is semi-hidden. The politician doesn’t seem to take a lot of money, but their husband or wife, or their kids and their friends, well, they’re well taken care of.
This is a large part of how routine “in-office” corruption happens. After office, of course, those who play the game are given low, seven figure salaries, but before that, they wash it through the family.
Give me bachelors and spinsters every day. Give me people estranged from their families.
Your family love is your biz, but should have nothing to do with your public service.
And because corporations have the rights they do because they are supposed to be acting in the public interest, that applies to corporations as well.
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I’m finding the Biden run amusing, after a fashion, because of Joe’s absolute refusal to pander. He was right on NAFTA, doesn’t regret three strike laws, thinks the bankruptcy bill was great, is taking money from lobbyists (and started his campaign at a lobbyist run party), and so on.
And he’s way ahead in the polls. Oh, his lead is exaggerated because the polls are under-representing younger voters, who will actually come out for Sanders in higher than normal percentages. They’re also not including Independents who will vote in Democratic primaries and who broke for Sanders last time.
But they’re still accurate in the sense that a plurality of Democrats (and in a 1 v. 1 scenario, surely a majority) approve of Joe.
When Biden declared, most pundits were whinging on and about his record, which is terrible.
I wrote about the persona of “Uncle Joe” because that’s what matters to his electability. Joe is a meme, and in the meme he looks great. Your friendly, wonderful Uncle who’s maybe a bit handsy, but doesn’t mean anything by it. That’s Joe.
Moreover, most Democrats thought that the Obama/Biden administration did a good job. They’re, in my opinion, delusional (unless they’re in the top four percent or so), but that doesn’t matter, it’s what they believe. To them Obama was a good–even great–President.
And Joe was part of that. In fact, the most common Biden meme is some version of him and Obama having a great time (the Onion bears a huge responsibility for this, and if he wins they will have a great deal of responsibility for the disastrous policies which ensue (or his loss to Trump.)
So people think “Joe is a great guy” AND “Joe was integral to Obama’s Presidency, which I loved.”
Yeah…
Joe isn’t unbeatable, I suspect, but he starts out with some massive advantages. Sanders (or perhaps Warren, if she genuinely moves ahead of Sanders, which she has not yet, for the same reasons the polls overstate Biden’s support), will outperform the polls significantly.
But he’s still the odds-on favorite.
Because he’s “Uncle Joe” and because too many Democrats think Obama was the next coming of FDR, rather than the bought-and-paid-for servant of the banker class, and merciless murderer (he massively ramped up drone attacks, chose to destroy Libya, and supported the Saudi’s genocidal war on Yemen).
This is definitely the stupidest timeline: Trump and now a candidate who may be elected based on a persona created by memes, while his actual record is largely ignored.
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So, Biden’s in the primary. Plenty of other people are chewing up his record, which is terrible, so I’ll pass on that. Just remember that he’s the representative for fucking over poor people and minorities.
I want to address something else: Uncle Joe.
See, the thing is that Joe seems like a great friend, and an even better family guy. I believe that’s true, I’ve seen Biden and this comes across as genuine. Minus being overly handsy, Biden just has a really friendly vibe to him.
He’d be a great friend, and a better father or uncle.
But he’s not your father or uncle (well, unless he is, which is not my expected blog demo) and he never will be.
People have weird relationships with politicians. I remember back in 2000, the poll that showed people wanted to have a drink with Bush, and not with Gore.
Great, except “drinking buddy” isn’t your relationship with the President or anyone important enough to be nominee for president.
Don’t have fantasy relationships with politicians.
A politician is someone with power, and your relationship with one is as someone they can either help or fuck up, whom they don’t care about personally.
What matters is not how they act towards friends and family, but how they act towards people they don’t care about.
How they’re going to act towards you.
Biden has a clear record. If he doesn’t know you, and you aren’t rich, he doesn’t care about you. If you’re poor, owe money, or a cop ever thinks you might have done something wrong, he wants you hurt, badly.
That’s his record.
If you’re rich, of course, Biden’s a good candidate if the only people you care about are you and your rich friends.
But Biden capability of being a great friend and family member doesn’t apply to you unless you are actually his friend or family member.
What’s his (or any other politician’s) record toward people like you?
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So, Biden has someone accusing him of inappropriate touching.
Biden, as a perusal of news photos will show, has always been very, errr, touchy, with women.
Though he hasn’t said he’ll run for President in 2020, Biden is regularly included in the polling and generally runs just slightly ahead of Sanders, with the two of them well ahead of the other contenders. (Polling at this time is largely a matter of name recognition.)
This isn’t a problem which will go away. If Biden runs, more and more women will make these accusations, because Biden has been free with his hands. It may well be that he meant nothing offensive by it, but the fact is that he does it.
How much this matters is unclear. Trump did far worse things, we have tape, and it didn’t matter.
On the other hand Biden is running as a Democrat, not a Republican.
I suspect the wisest course of action for Biden would be not to run. But he’s reportedly upset he didn’t run last time, after seeing Clinton lose.
If he does run, however, this will be a persistent, open sore throughout his campaign, and probably into his Presidency.
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The two most important consequences of this decision derive from the fact that Biden is old and almost certainly senile.
This family worship among public servants, politicians, and even corporate officers has to end. When you’re in a position of trust, your salary and your self is all that your family should get out of it. Not a cushy goddamn job for which they are in no way qualified.