The lame duck President of the USA Joe Biden – a “proud Irish-American Zionist” – is a bigger danger to the people living in Gaza and Palestine because he does not have to bend to electoral pressures.
The US president’s behaviour towards Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has clearly retreated from the semi-critical approach he had begun to adopt after realizing how costly his total complicity in the Zionist aggression against the Palestinian people is electorally, especially among traditional Democratic Party voters, as it is even resented within the party itself.
This is a very persuasive analysis. Accordingly, we must hope that pressure mounts in the USA and elsewhere to drive Biden out of office as soon as possible. Some reports suggest that Biden only agreed to leave the election race in favour of Kamala Harris after Barack Obama threatened Biden with ejection from the White House, using the 25th Amendment mechanism.
This would mean that not only did they force Biden out of the race, but that the Democrats know full well that Biden isn’t fit to serve out the rest of his term, but are comfortable letting him continue as a figure head if it serves their efforts to retain power for the party.
At the same time we must dismiss wild conspiracy claims about these developments. There was no “coup” against Biden – since when did party bosses deciding to bully an unpopular leader to resign become a coup? A better argument is that Obama, Harris and company did not go far enough dumping candidate Biden, who clearly has major medical cognitive issues – War Criminal Biden should be booted out of the White House as soon as possible, by any means necessary – the 25th Amendment is a satisfactory instrument.
John Meehan August 7 2024
Joe Biden’s Crime Against Humanity
Joe Biden will alas not stand in the dock before the International Criminal Court – that much is sure. There is no doubt, however, that the court of history, which is the fairest of criminal courts, will include his name prominently on the list of perpetrators of crimes against humanity.
Since he announced his decision to stop running for a second presidential term, Joe Biden has become a “lame duck” – an expression that commonly refers in the United States to an elected official who has reached the final months of their term without any extension prospect. The expression means that the official’s influence has become limited, as everybody knows that they will not remain in office for long. However, a person in such a situation in a presidential political system in which the president is elected by popular vote (indirectly in the US case), is also, in contrast, more free-handed than a president campaigning for an additional term, who must therefore ensure that he (no she, yet) does not lose votes as a result of positions or measures he may take.
It is our pleasure to present the launch of Maurice Casey’s new book Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism’s Forgotten Radicals, which follows Irish radical May O’Callaghan and her friends, three revolutionary families brought together by their vision for a communist future and their time spent in the Comintern’s Moscow living quarters, the Hotel Lux. This fascinating history history of international communism will be launched at 6pm on Thursday 22nd August. Join us to celebrate!
An article from the Financial Times journalist Edward Luce, which should be a wake-up call.
Donald Trump’s running mate opposes abortion and aid to Ukraine and says he would not have certified results of 2020 vote.
With Vance, Trump is doubling down on Maga
Ohio senator is an intelligent and forceful exponent of the Maga movement — and maybe also its future
If there were any doubts that Donald Trump would go full “America First” he banished them on Monday with his vice-presidential pick. JD Vance is the most high-profile Trumpian cheerleader among senior Republicans.
Trump could have held his nose and chosen Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, who gave him the biggest run for his money in the Republican primaries. Haley is a relative moderate on abortion. Selecting her, or a like-minded figure, would have signalled that he wanted to broaden his appeal to wavering suburban female Republicans.
Vance, by contrast, is an unapologetic Christian conservative. If Joe Biden can find a silver lining in the gathering storm clouds, Vance would be it. Biden’s vice-president, Kamala Harris, is an effective campaigner on a woman’s right to choose.
The main lesson of the first results of this second round is the setback suffered by the Rassemblement national and its allies. The defeat of the hundreds of fascist, racist, Islamophobic, antisemitic and ultra-racist candidates put forward by the RN is a huge relief for racialized people, women, LGBTI+ people and workers. This victory for the united left has halted the momentum of the far right, which nonetheless won around fifty more seats. This defeat of the far right of Bardella and Le Pen is the fruit of the popular mobilization that took place thanks to the unitive impetus provided by the creation of the New Popular Front.
This is already a victory for the New Popular Front, which was made possible by the rallying of the entire left – political parties, trade unions and campaigning groups – , but also and above all by the grassroots mobilization of large sectors of the working classes, in particular racialized people and young people, who committed themselves everywhere to blocking the RN. This made it possible for a very large number of New Popular Front MPs (including a relative majority for LFI) to be elected to the National Assembly on the basis of a programme that breaks not only with Macronism in the service of the ultra-rich, but also with the liberal left of the Hollande mandate, which had followed the policies of the right.
When you listen to this June 25 car-crash interview with former Leicester South Labour MP Jonathan Ashworth, you would be forgiven for thinking he was a member of the far-right racist party, Reform.
Jonathan Ashworth's car crash interview on returning asylum seekers to their country of origin
Jonathan Ashworth, "Rather than sending flights to Rwanda, we're going to be sending flights to the countries these people came from"
Shockat Adam was not alone. Five pro-Gaza independent candidates (including former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in Islington North) are members of the new Westminster parliament :
One of the biggest donors to Nigel Farage’s anti-net zero Reform UK during the general election campaign has significant Russian business interests, DeSmog can report.
Natural resources investor David Lilley donated £100,000 to Reform on 10 June – a week after Farage announced that he was returning as the party’s leader. Lilley’s donation was the third largest to Reform during the campaign so far.
As revealed by The Mirror and Good Law Project in the former’s print edition, Lilley controls a series of companies that own 12,000 hectares of farmland in the Stavropol region of Russia, in the south west of the country, used to produce cereals and oilseeds.
Lilley confirmed to DeSmog that he still owns this land, saying that “I have never made a secret of my assets in Russia.” He said that he had made no profit on these assets since February 2022 and that he had been prevented from selling them by the Russian state.
Farage has come under fire in recent days for suggesting that Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine was provoked by the west, and for calling on Ukraine to enter peace talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Good Law Project executive director Jolyon Maugham told DeSmog that Reform is “starting to feel a bit like Russia’s unofficial British Embassy.”
There is more to this story than initially meets the eye. Much capitalist development is based on Ethnic Cleansing of original populations and the plantation of new non-indigenous populations – it happened in the United States of America (USA) and Australia – naming just two. It did not happen so brutally in Ireland – but British imperialism made a significant effort.
The Northern province of Ulster was “planted” in the 1600’s, but the native Irish were not completely exterminated. Waves of native Irish emigrated – especially in the 19th century after a misnamed Famine (in reality a “Great Hunger” caused by British Imperialist Policy) drove millions of the native Irish to the four corners of the globe. These emigrants kept alive the idea of Irish freedom, and played a significant role in every attempt to rid Ireland of British rule.
The stubborn Irish “national question” remains on today’s agenda because of the 1922 Anglo-Irish Treaty which divided Ireland into 2 sectarian states. A key feature of extreme Irish Unionism is identification with plantation/ethnic cleansing forms of capitalism – and that goes a long way towards explaining Irish far-right Unionist sympathy for the present day attempted ethnic cleansing of Palestine and Ukraine. We should situate recent pro-Putin and anti-Ukraine statements by the British far-right politician Nigel Farage and Sammy Wilson within this framework :
Nigel Farage Endorses DUP Antrim MP’s Wilson and Paisley, Dumping a different extreme unionist, Jim Allister
The Russian imperialist occupation of Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk is ethnic cleansing capitalism in action – accompanied by child stealing and abuse similar to the behaviour of the Catholic Church in the 26 county bit of Ireland from the 1930’s to the 1990’s.
An excellent Ukrainian blog, Ukr-Taz, covers the story of Putin’s ethnic cleansing dreams in Ukraine, and Donald Trump’s enthusiastic support :
For all that can be said about Thursday’s debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump — including about the former’s dismal performance and about the boundless creativity of Trump’s fabrications on almost every topic under the sun — Trump’s curious note about Putin’s “dream” stood out to me:
The remote Pacific Ocean island of Saipan suddenly hit Irish and global headlines in 2002 when Irish soccer star Roy Keane walked away from the Irish team’s base for the World Cup in Korea and Japan after a blazing row with his manager Mick McCarthy. Today the island is back in the headlines after the political prisoner Julian Assange walked to freedom following a court hearing in the USA-owned North Marinara territory. Like Keane, Assange did not linger in Saipan – he flew home to his native land, Australia.
That is not the only Irish connection. Many innocent Irish political prisoners were held, like Assange, in noxious British jails such as Belmarsh. A small number of dedicated human rights lawyers became household names in Ireland. The picture below shows the released Julian Assange beside one of those lawyers, Gareth Pierce.
Political Prisoner Julian Assange and Civil Rights Lawyer Gareth Pierce
The campaigns for the release of the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four, the Winchester Three and Judith Ward offer an important lesson :
When the left should get together in defence of political prisoners, it is very often a serious mistake to conduct a debate about the political views and activities of the prisoners. In Ireland that was true of the Birmingham 6, the H-Block/Armagh political prisoners, Nicky Kelly and the IRSP members framed for the Sallins Train Robbery, and the Jobstown Not Guilty political activists in Tallaght. Many comrades would be well advised to go back further and examine the Sacco and Vanzetti campaign in the 1920’s, and the Moscow Trial Purges of the 1930’s. The faults (or lack of faults) of the victims are regularly used as an excuse to avoid a united campaign in favour of the victims. The bigger story is that “An Injury to One is An Injury to All”.
The decision by President Emmanuel Macron to hold snap legislative elections in four weeks’ time, a move taken on Sunday immediately after the landslide victory of the French far-right in European Parliament elections, has had the effect of a political bombshell. Not least because it now appears possible that the far-right Rassemblement National party, riding high on the results of Sunday’s poll, may gain enough seats in parliament to form a government. For some in France, that prospect has made them fearful over their future. Mediapart has been listening to their concerns.
Since the victory of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party in Sunday’s European Parliament elections in France, and the subsequent decision by Emmanuel Macron to call snap general elections, in which the RN is hoping to gain an absolute majority, Oumar fears the worst.
“We’ll no longer have the possibility of getting our papers sorted out,” he said. “We risk being massively expelled.” The “we” he refers to are the ‘undocumented’ immigrants who hope to one day receive legal residency and working status. Oumar arrived in France from Mali in 2017. In his thirties, living in the Paris region, he finds work on a temporary basis, most often in logistics. “We come home late in the evening, we pay contributions, but we have no right to anything if we have an accident,” he said. “But the far-right, through populism, presents us as people who want to profit from [social] aid.”
Nouveau Front Populaire – New Popular Front – Left Alliance Campaigning in French parliamentary elections against the right-wing Macron government and the Far-Right RN led by Marine Le Pen
As the father of a child who has French nationality, Oumar officially applied for residence and work permits in February, but has not yet been given a response. Since Sunday evening, his concerns have heightened.
Many potential targets of a far-right government are unsure of their future. Smail, a 36-year-old Algerian, said that on Sunday evening he told himself “it was perhaps the moment to request French nationality, because afterwards the doors will be closed”. He has a renewable ten-year residency permit, has a full-time, open-ended working contract in the fibre-optic cable business, and owns a property.
Provisional results of the 2024 European Elections, as at June 19. Source: results.elections.europa.eu
At first glance it looks as if the parties to the left of the social democracy held their ground against the surge of the far right and mainstream right that marked the June 9 European Union (EU) parliamentary elections (see here for results in detail).
Although the smallest of the European parliament’s seven groups, The Left managed to maintain its EU-wide vote at 5.4% and increase its seat tally from 37 to 39 in the 720-seat assembly.
In addition, left green Members of the European Parliaments (MEPs) and those representing stateless nations (part of the Greens group as the European Free Alliance) at least maintained their numbers in the chamber.
Yet the Greens group as a whole shrank from 71 seats to 53 while that of the liberals (known as Renew) fell from 102 to 79. This drop reflected that the environmental issues that in part drove the big advance of these parties in the 2019 election were less important for many voters this time.
The campaign was dominated by insecurity about the future, the cost of living (particularly housing), the fear of war, the “immigration threat” and intolerance of difference.
In this grim atmosphere the biggest growth went to the mainstream right European People’s Party and the two far-right groups (Identity and Democracy and Conservatives and Reformists): taken together the right and far right won an extra 30 seats, bring it to 324.
Because it would take only 37 ungrouped MEPs to join them to from a reactionary majority, the June 9 result poses with new urgency two old questions about politics in the European parliament. How much, if at all, does the real balance of political forces in the chamber differ from that among its formal groupings? And how much does membership of a group represent disciplined commitment to its positions?
Left divisions over Ukraine
The questions are sharply relevant in the case of the Left group, where differences over what stance to take towards the Russian invasion of Ukraine were already pointing towards a split before June 9.
On May 31, Li Andersson, chairperson of the Finnish Left Alliance told the Helsinki Times that these differences could not be tolerated in the group in the new legislature. Referring to Clare Daly and Mick Wallace, Irish left independent opponents of military aid to Ukraine, Andersson said: “The Nordic Green Left as a whole [covering Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands] is of the opinion that if they manage to win re-election, they can’t join our group.”
For Andersson, the same went for the new Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance: For Reason and Justice (BSW), a split in Germany from leading Left group member Die Linke (The Left). BSW opposes military aid to Ukraine and supports resuming the gas trade with Russia, in common with most of Europe’s far-right parties.
Tomás Ó Flatharta 