Eric Zuesse
Obama-Biden: Shameless Crooks R Us. But also par for the course in US pollitics and certainly much of the West.
[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hat can one say when a well-respected investigative journalist exposed both Joe Biden and Barack Obama as closeted fascists, and the entire mainstream ‘news’-media has ignored it? This was a news-report that would be a candidate for the Pulitzers if the Pulitzer prizes were at all honest — but it is instead utterly ignored. What does that say about the reality of ‘freedom of the press’ in the U.S.A.?
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The news-report that ought to terminate Joe Biden’s possibility of representing the Democratic Party as its nominee in the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections is Blumenthal’s July 28th “How Joe Biden’s privatization plans helped doom Latin America and fuel the migration crisis”. It exposes (according to Biden’s own brag) Biden’s key role in the Obama Administration’s (with almost 100% cooperation from both houses of Congress) imposition upon Honduras of a libertarian heaven of privatizing (to the aristocracy) whatever national assets hadn’t yet been privatized in that deeply corrupt and impoverished nation. This plan has been heaven for Honduras’s and America’s aristocrats, but anti-liberty hell for Honduras’s public, and Biden now says that he designed it. Everyone who is considering whether to vote for Joe Biden to represent Democrats in the upcoming U.S. Presidential election should read Blumenthal’s article, because it documents that the Democratic Party’s turn toward fascism will become complete if Biden does become the Party’s nominee. I won’t summarize Blumenthal’s article here, since I think that every Democratic Party voter needs to read it in order to know the real Joe Biden. However, I shall here supplement it, with important historical background:
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The core of Biden’s plan has been privatization of public assets. Privatization was actually invented by the inventor of fascism, Benito Mussolini, in 1922-1925.
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Despite the aristocracy-spread myth that privatization was introduced by two (supposed) democracies, the USA (Reagan) and UK (Thatcher), in the 1980s, privatization was, in fact, a big aim of the elite fascists, ever since the start of fascism. After all, aristocrats control the vast majority of the private wealth. Privatization means that they get to control also what was previously public wealth. Privatization moreover provides corrupt politicians (their politicians) an opportunity to pay-off their contributors by offering them an inside track on public-asset sales. In September 2009, the European University Institute issued their RSCAS_2009_46.pdf, titled “From Public to Private: Privatization in 1920’s Fascist Italy” (subsequently retitled “The First Privatization: Selling SOEs” in the 2011 Cambridge Journal of Economics), by Germa Bel. She said in her summary: “Privatization was an important policy in Italy in 1922-1925. The Fascist government was alone in transferring State ownership and services to private firms in the 1920s; no other country in the world would engage in such a policy until Nazi Germany did so between 1934 and 1937.” She particularly noted: “In his first speech as a member of the Italian Parliament in June 1921, Mussolini said: ‘The State must have a police, a judiciary, an army, and a foreign policy. All other things, and I do not exclude secondary education, must go back to the private activity of individuals.’” He was the first libertarian. Then, in the February 2010 Economic History Review, she headlined a study specifically about the German case, “Against the Mainstream: Nazi Privatization in 1930s Germany”. Here, she reported that, though “privatizations in Chile and the UK, which began to be implemented in the 1970s and 1980s, are usually considered the first privatization policies in modern history, ... none of the contemporary economic analyses of privatization takes into account an important, earlier case: the privatization policy implemented by the National Socialist (Nazi) Party in Germany. ... Although modern economic literature usually fails to notice it, the Nazi government in 1930s Germany implemented a large-scale privatization policy.” Furthermore, “Germany was alone in developing a policy of privatization in the mid-1930s,” since Italy had finished its privatizations by then. The purposes of these privatizations, in both cases, were chiefly “receipts from selling” the assets to finance rearmament, and also “the desire to increase support from” the major aristocrats (such as, in Germany, the armaments-making firms of the Thyssens, the Krupps, and the Flicks), who received sweet deals on these assets.
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Back in October 2013, I headlined “Hillary Clinton’s Two Foreign-Policy Catastrophes” and wrote:
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Honduras was now (even more than before Zelaya) under a “libertarian” government — a government that respected only property-rights of approved people [the aristocracy and their agents], no personal or other rights for anyone else (such as for [the richest of Honduras’s aristocrats] Facussé’s propertyless campesinos). Paul Romer, the husband of Obama’s former chief economist Christina Romer, was joining with other libertarians to promote the idea of a totally “free market” model city in Honduras. On 10 December 2011, Britain’s libertarian ECONOMIST magazine bannered “Hong Kong in Honduras,” and “Honduras Shrugged [a play on Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged]: Two Start-Ups Want to Try Out Libertarian Ideas in the Country’s New Special Development Regions.” Then, on 6 September 2012, Britain’s Guardian bannered “Honduras to Build New City with Its Own Laws and Tax System.” However, the entrepreneur aiming to develop this new Honduran city freed from the law, the grandson of the far-right economist Milton Friedman, Patri Friedman, headlined at his Future Cities Development Inc., on 19 October 2012, “Closing Statement From Future Cities Development, Inc.” and he announced that though “passing with a vote of 126-1” in the Honduran legislature, his project was ruled unconstitutional by a judge, because it would remove that land from the Honduran legal system. Patri had been fundraising for this project ever since he had publicly announced at the libertarian Koch brothers’ Cato Institute, on 6 April 2009, “Democracy Is Not The Answer,” and he then said, “Democracy is rigged against libertarians.” He ended his statement by announcing “my proposal,” which was to “build new city-states,” where there would be no democracy, and only the investors would have any rights at all — an extreme gated community. Just months later, the new Honduran President, a libertarian like Patri, invited him to do it, but this judge killed the idea.
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Furthermore, as Foreign Policy in Focus reported on 15 March 2012, “Land grabs to transfer land and resources from small-scale farmers, indigenous peoples, and poor urban residents into the hands of large-scale developers and megaprojects have generated violence throughout the country.”
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Inasmuch as Honduras was becoming too dangerous for Americans, the AP headlined on 19 January 2012, “Peace Corps Pullout a New Blow to Honduras”and reported that, “The U.S. government’s decision to pull out all its Peace Corps volunteers from Honduras for safety reasons is yet another blow to a nation still battered by a coup and recently labeled [by the U.N. as] the world’s most deadly country.” Three days later, on the 22nd, Frances Robles of the Miami Herald, headlined “Graft, Greed, Mayhem Turn Honduras into Murder Capital of World,” and reported the details of a nation where aristocrats were protected by their own private guards, the public were on their own, and all new entrants into the aristocracy were drug traffickers and the soldiers and police who worked for those traffickers. Narcotics were now by far the most booming industry in Honduras, if not the only booming industry there post-coup. Robles reported, “Everybody has been bought,” in this paradise of anarchism, or libertarianism (i.e.: in this aristocratically controlled country — which is what fascism is: the modern form of feudalism).
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On 12 February 2012, NPR headlined “Who Rules in Honduras? Coup’s Legacy of Violence.” The ruling families weren’t even noted here, much less mentioned, in this supposed news-report on the subject of “Who Rules in Honduras?” However, this story did note that, “Many experts say things got markedly worse after the 2009 coup.” (That was a severe understatement.)
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And that also explains this:
“Yadira Alvarado just remembers the fear that forced her out of Honduras. She lived with her brothers in the Riviero Hernandez area of San Pedro Sula, but when her brother and a nephew became murdered, her only thought was to flee. Her goal was to reach the United States, but Mexico provided her support, and is where she now lives. She is setting up a food business."
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The U.S. regime has made it so hellish for the Honduran public, they're forced to flee, and the only question is Where to? Where is safety?
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This has been the result of Biden, according to Biden. He even said, on July 5th, CNN, that Obama himself “delegated authority to me from the moonshot to Ukraine, he gave me the authority to make decisions, because he knew I knew where he was. He knew that I knew something about it. And he knew we were simpatico.” He’s claiming all of Obama’s Presidency and wants to turn that 8 years into 16 years. It’s as if Dick Cheney had campaigned in 2008 for the Presidency and claimed that George W. Bush’s 8 years were his 8 years, actually (which would have been more honest from Cheney than this is from Biden). His argument is: Give me another 8 years! But Obama’s 8 years were actually nothing to brag about. Quite the contrary: invading and destroying Libya, Syria, and Yemen, for examples, and perpetrating a bloody coup in Ukraine, and imposing a murderous coup-regime in Honduras, just for a few examples — destroying all of those countries.
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On 21 June 2018, the AP headlined “Governor orders probe of abuse claims by immigrant children”, and reported about a half-dozen sworn statements from Latino youths held for months or years at the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center near Staunton, Virginia. The AP report also cited an adult who saw bruises and broken bones the children said were caused by guards.
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Multiple detainees as young as 14 said guards stripped them of their clothes and strapped them to chairs with bags placed over their heads. The incidents described in the lawsuit occurred from 2015 to 2018, during both the Obama and Trump administrations.
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“Whenever they used to restrain me and put me in the chair, they would handcuff me,” said a Honduran immigrant who was sent to the facility when he was 15 years old. “They also put a bag over your head.”
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In addition to the children’s first-hand, translated accounts in court filings, a former child-development specialist who worked inside the facility told the AP she saw kids there with bruises and broken bones they blamed on guards. She spoke on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to publicly discuss the children’s cases.
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But still it’s safer in the U.S. than in Honduras. (Of course, the current U.S. President might wish that this weren’t so — he doesn’t want them here, at all.)
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Biden, on July 5th, CNN, was asked by Chris Cuomo what Biden’s plan was to reduce the millions of people coming from Latin America, and his answer was:
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Look, the other thing, Chris, is why are they coming? The reason the vast majority of these people coming from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador is because they're in trouble. Crime rates are high. Education is terrible. In Guatemala, you can't turn on a light switch and have them out.
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And so what do we do? I put together a $740 million program with Republicans, I might add. At the very end, saying, we'll make a deal with you. You do the following things to make your country better so people don't leave, and we will help you do that. Just like we did in Colombia. What did we do in Colombia? We went down and said, "OK," and I was one of the architects of plan Colombia in Colombia.
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According to the BBC, Plan Colombia largely failed. Furthermore, it was started by Bill Clinton, and only continued under George W. Bush and Barack Obama; so, everything that Biden is bragging about is actually just lies from him. Furthermore, it had nothing to do with Honduras, nor with El Salvador, nor with Guatemala (all of which he’s claiming here), but only with Colombia’s Farc guerillas. Biden was just faking. He really doesn’t give a damn about anybody but himself. But what’s factual is the Obama Administration’s (with almost 100% cooperation from both houses of Congress) imposition upon Honduras of a libertarian heaven of privatizing (to the aristocracy) whatever national assets hadn’t yet been privatized in that deeply corrupt and impoverished nation. And Biden wants to take credit for that (which was instead actually from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama). Nobody can deny this fraudulence from Biden. His fraudulence is real. And only a psychopath would claim credit for what Obama and Congress did to Honduras. Is the United States, from now on, to have onlyPresidents who are psychopaths? Is that what Biden’s voters really want? Of course not. But they are fooled; they are the fools of such politicians and of their financial backers. And fools like that threaten the entire country’s welfare.
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This news-report has been submitted to all U.S. major news-media; and, so, any that don’t publish it, or that don’t republish or at least summarize and link to Max Blumenthal’s article, doesn’t want its audience to know this information. (Perhaps they want to fool Democrats to vote for Biden. And perhaps we’ll now get to see which ones those are. Just google the title “Max Blumenthal Exposes Joe Biden & Barak Obama as Fascists” to find out.)
This article is part of an ongoing series of dispatches by historian Eric Zuesse
ERIC ZUESSE, Senior Contributing Editor • Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity. Besides TGP, his reports and historical analyses are published on many leading current events and political sites, including The Saker, Huffpost, Oped News, and others.
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