How Mass Mail-In Voting Changes Everything
When the emphasis in elections shifts from turning out conventional in-person voters to chasing mail-in ballots, we have entered a qualitatively different electoral world than the one we inhabited before.

 

Since 2020, elections have been under assault by a complex of leftist lawyers, nonprofits, and election activists as they attempt to implement schemes and introduce administrative changes that fundamentally transform the way elections are conducted.  

Most of these changes have been undertaken in the interest of promoting mass mail-in voting. The objective of mail-in voting activists is an electoral world in which polls, historical trends, economic issues, messaging, voter enthusiasm, candidate quality, traditional get-out-the-vote efforts, candidate debates, and voter persuasion no longer matter in elections.  

All that ultimately matters in mass mail-in voting states is the number of absentee ballots that can be distributed, harvested, and ultimately counted in local election offices by partisan election activists over the weeks and months preceding election day. Through the strategic expansion of mass mail-in voting, Democrats are creating a new urban based, activist driven electoral playing field where they alone can win.

The idea that mass mail-in voting expands general “voters rights” is not what it appears to be. Instead, the spread of mass mail-in voting since 2020 has greatly increased the political power of urban and university-based bloc voters, partisan election activists, and the many wealthy nonprofits that support them, such as the Center for Tech and Civic Life and the National Vote at Home Institute. Meanwhile, conventional, in-person suburban and rural voters see their votes diluted by a flood of questionable absentee ballots emanating from heavily Democratic cities and university towns.

It is important to understand the insidious logic of mass mail-in voting, as it systematically empowers Democratic Party insiders, big left-leaning nonprofits, and partisan election activists at the expense of conventional, individual voters. Elections based on mass mail-in voting are not normal “elections” as that term has been understood for the last century.

 

The Democrats’ use of mail-in ballots and ballot harvesting techniques to win elections burst into full view in 2020 with the Center for Tech and Civic Life’s $332 million COVID-19 Response Grant Program (“ZuckBucks”), which was aimed at gaining control of election offices in areas that were critical to Democrats in 2020 though large, “strings attached” CTCL grants.

The bulk of that money was used to fund a sophisticated “inside” effort to mobilize the mail-in ballots of specific blocs of voters in order to benefit Democratic candidates. Large CTCL grant recipients were required by the terms of their grants to “encourage and increase absentee voting” mainly through providing “assistance” in absentee ballot completion and the installation of ballot drop boxes, and to “expand strategic voter education & outreach efforts, particularly to historically disenfranchised residents.”

The funding and direction of election administration by highly partisan, demonstrably ideological private actors was virtually unknown in the American political system before the 2020 election. 

Big CTCL money had nothing to do with traditional campaign finance, media buys, “dark money” advocacy, or other expenses that are related to increasingly expensive modern elections. It had to do with financing the takeover of election offices at the city and county level by partisan activists, and using those offices as a platform to implement preferred administrative practices, voting methods, ballot harvesting efforts, and data sharing agreements that were favorable to Democratic candidates. Many CTCL funded election offices then became launching pads for intensive multi-media outreach campaigns and precisely targeted, door-to-door voter turnout and mail-in ballot chasing efforts in densely populated urban areas packed with potential Democratic voters.

The explosion of mail-in voting in heavily Democratic urban enclaves in the swing States, fueled by big CTCL money, played a significant—if not a decisive—role in Joe Biden's victory in 2020.

 

The most convincing theory of Democrat overperformance in the 2022 midterm election in the face of an objectively terrible political and economic environment is James E. Campbell’s “Breakwater Theory,” which focuses on the impact of mail-in “ballot mobilization” in key statewide races with lax mass mail-in voting rules. 

According to Campbell, the expected “Red Wave” of 2022 failed to materialize because Democrats concentrated their attention and resources on changing the rules and conducting “ballot mobilization” campaigns (a euphemism for mail-in ballot chasing and mail-in ballot harvesting) in a handful of states. 

Strategically, a small set of competitive states allowed [Democrats] to focus their resources and offered, through mail-in voting, performance-enhancing electoral rules conducive to well organized mobilization campaigns that could raise the turnout of Democratic votes in those states. That is just what it did.

The problem with this explanation is that “turnout”—as Campbell uses the term—does not mean “voter turnout” in the conventional sense, because the only people who “turn out” are the Democrat election activists who are chasing and mobilizing mail-in ballots. Handing off a mail-in ballot to a ballot harvester at one’s front door that has been filled out with the assistance of some third party is qualitatively different from going to a designated polling place and voting in person, yet these two dissimilar activities continue to be lumped together under the term “voter turnout.”

In the states that were targeted by Democratic election activists for mass mail-in ballot mobilization, the majority of Democratic voters stayed at home, and under circumstances prevailing before 2020, their “votes” would not have counted because they would not have voted.

 

It is important to understand that heavily funded mass mail-in “ballot harvesting,” and ballot canvassing, at a scale that is likely to have a significant impact on election results, will not be successful outside of densely populated areas where homogeneous, highly partisan voting ‘blocs’ can be identified. 

The logistical difficulties and expense of a mass mail-in ballot mobilization campaign in less densely populated areas with politically diverse populations would be prohibitive. This is why Republican attempts to replicate Democrats’ urban based ballot harvesting machines in other areas will be prone to expensive failure.

Deep blue urban areas and large universities, with their heavy concentrations of Democratic bloc voters, on the other hand, are perfect settings for successful ballot harvesting and canvassing efforts based on mail-in voting.

Politico’s Charlie Mahtesian and Madi Alexander inadvertently illustrate the growing impact of expanded mail-in voting and mail-in ballot “chasing” on statewide elections, as they describe the increasingly Democratic partisan lean of university students. The authors explain how large college towns, especially in states that have relaxed mail-in voting rules, such as Colorado, Michigan, and Wisconsin, have become “Republican-Killing Death Star[s].”

As Mark Graul, a Republican strategist who ran George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign in Wisconsin, put it: 

This is a really big deal….What Democrats are doing in Dane County [home of the University of Wisconsin] is truly making it impossible for Republicans to win a statewide race.

Mahtesian and Alexander are right about the leftist lean of college age voters, but their high powered, college town voter turnout operations are only made possible by an avalanche of mail-in ballots, and the presence of, well-funded, data driven election activists in university towns who know how to mobilize them.

 

Suburban and exurban areas, where voters of diverse party affiliation live in proximity to one another, or rural areas, where population is more widely dispersed, do not lend themselves to the mass distribution and harvesting of mail-in ballots for partisan purposes. This reduces the impact of conventional voters who live in these areas in statewide elections with mass mail-in voting. 

On the other hand, vast new powers flow to process-oriented election activists and the nonprofits that fund them. Since their power is based on the mass distribution and harvesting of mail-in ballots, the political impact of the geographically concentrated, partisan voting blocs they target also increases.

James E. Campbell notes something similar in considering the “unintended consequences” of the spread of mail in voting in 2022, and hisobservations are worth quoting at length:

As intended, [the move toward mass mail in voting in 2022] made voting more convenient for many voters, but it also unintentionally has made big mobilization operations much more possible and has made the “big money” funding these operations even more important than it had been. Although voters are unlikely to be aware of it, easy and early mail-in voting is at the expense of voters who care enough to expend some effort to vote by conventional means (emphasis added). Their votes are less important to election outcomes than before.

 

It is important to note that when the emphasis in elections shifts from motivating conventional voters to chasing mail-in ballots, we have entered a qualitatively different electoral world than the one we inhabited before.

There is a substantive difference between mail-in ballots and conventional votes, which means that there are fundamentally different election systems operating in parallel with one another to determine outcomes in many states. The most important difference is that mail-in ballot distribution and collection is far more susceptible to manipulation by outside influences than conventional votes cast at polling places.

In elections in which mail-in voting plays a decisive role, the initiative of election activists, tech firms, and the nonprofits of the Democrats’ Election-Industrial Complex play the dominant role in determining elections. Under conventional, in-person voting, it is the initiative and rational faculties of individual voters that drive election outcomes. This is a critically important distinction.

Elections won on the basis of mail-in voting and ballot harvesting tell us far more about the ingenuity and logistical efficiency of ballot harvesters and election activists, than about candidate quality, voter enthusiasm, voter policy preferences, and whether voters are persuaded by political messaging.

 

It is important to understand that there have been recent exceptions to the vote-by-mail “Republican Killing Death Star” rule, especially in states that have maintained more conservative voting rules. The principle that underlies those rules is that fair and secure elections must not be sacrificed on the altar of “convenience,” or an expansive conception of “voting rights” that envisions a bespoke voting experience tailored to the preferences of the most disengaged, apathetic “unlikely” voters in the general population.

States like Tennessee and Texas, which limit the use of mail-in ballots, greatly reduce the impact of Democrats’ mail-in ballot mobilization efforts on elections. In other words, the key to destroying the Republican killing “Democratic Deathstar" is to restrict the use of mail-in ballots to registered voters who have a legitimate reason for not voting in person.

Despite the wishful thinking of some Republicans, demographics, financial constraints, and the lack of deep institutional support will make it virtually impossible for Republicans to mount their own ballot harvesting operations to counter the lavishly funded, finely tuned Democratic machine.

Pushing back against the radical transformation of elections through mail-in voting is therefore a very big deal. As Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton suggested in a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump was “one lawsuit away” from losing Texas in 2020, as Democratic lawyers tried to open the state up to mass mail-in voting. 

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/how-mass-mail-in-voting-changes-everything/

 

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Rebuilding Democracy
Recommendations from a sweeping civic learning initiative reinvigorate civics education on a national scale

 

When educators think about preparing students for the 21st century, they may think about teaching a generation of entrepreneurs or computer scientists. But before students can learn to build companies or code, they must first learn how to be citizens and participate in democracy.

To build a new foundation of excellence in civics and history, Education for American Democracy (EAD), a coalition of more than 300 academics, historians, political scientists, K-12 and community-based educators, state and district administrators, parents, and students from different backgrounds, recently unveiled an ambitious plan to equip 1 million teachers at 100,000 schools with the resources to teach an estimated 60 million students civics. The EAD reportand accompanying instructional road map offer new insights and frameworks for educators and school, district, and state leadership to support the reinvigoration of civics education for this new, diverse generation of American learners.

Here, Usable Knowledge identifies two ways the report is shifting civics instruction and two actionable steps for education leaders at the state and national level.

Shifting Practice and PedagogyAn interdisciplinary and inquiry-based approach that prioritizes depth over breadth.

Many state constitutions include a right to education and base that right on the need for educated citizens in a democracy. According to Danielle Allen, an EAD principal investigator and director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, that basic purpose continues today. “The job of supporting developing the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that flow into effective and rewarding participation includes,” says Allen, “approaches to the study of history that integrate multiple perspectives, media literacy and competency, and the development of participatory skills like collaboration and bridging.” Instead of focusing on covering dates or specific historical events, the EAD report presents a series of themes, design challenges, and questions for learners and educators to explore that develop those skills and incorporates different perspectives.

Reinvigorate instruction by empowering teachers to develop best practices around long-standing complexities in civics.

The roadmap identifies areas of practice and content that meet the needs of educators teaching in today’s polarized society. “We had to deal with the reality of teaching today,” says Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, an EAD principal investigator and director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University and. “There are things we were sensing were happening in classrooms and we tried to name them, so teachers feel like there’s concrete actions they can take.”

There are several design challenges that have long stymied innovation in civics and history instruction, according to the report, including Integrating perspectives of Americans from many different backgrounds consistently while also telling a common story and offering an account of democracy that is honest but not cynical, appreciative but not blind, to its faults.

Leaders Looking Ahead Should...Prepare the teacher workforce.

To enable teaching that can respond to these design challenges and can also offer students deep, rigorous content knowledge, pre-service teacher education needs to take the needs of civics instruction into account. For one, teachers need to be prepared with the necessary content knowledge. They also need to have the pedagogy to implement that knowledge in a way that’s developmentally appropriate and accessible. “The research team worked intentionally to combine best practices in teaching with expertise in content,” says Kawashima-Ginsberg. “There is actually a need to step back a little bit before we go right into techniques and strategies to think about the mindset of the teacher.”

Teachers, as part of their training, must also think about their own identity in relationship to that content and in relationship to the identities of their students. This means that leaders need to consider the diversity and inclusivity of the teaching force itself. “We worked hard from day one to make sure that we were building inclusive teams along many dimensions — demographic diversity, geographic diversity, viewpoint diversity, professional diversity, disciplinary diversity,” says Allen, noting that the report is also advocating for state and federal investment in fellowship programs that would diversify the pipeline of educators coming into the civic education field.

Cultivate widescale investment.

To support implementation, the roadmap requires buy-in and support from stakeholders ranging from the federal government, parents, textbook companies, and local nonprofits. Educators working in schools, tutoring spaces, and museums will also need preparation and professional development to support the initiative. Of course, the struggle is that funding and support of civics education at this level has largely been neglected over the last few years. But recommitment is needed across the board — by everyone. “The idea,” says Peter Levine, an EAD principal investigator and professor at Tufts, “is that if you’re involved with civic life in your community, working at a library or struggling against the police, you should care about civic education in schools because it’s preparing kids to be a part of what you care about."

https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/usable-knowledge/21/04/rebuilding-democracy

 

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Claudine Gay Turmoil Forces Harvard’s Secretive ‘Corporation’ Into Spotlight
Harvard’s powerful board has backed its president and said little else, yet a member privately said “generational change” may be needed.

 

On Tuesday, the day before Harvard acknowledged more problemswith its president’s scholarly work, two members of its governing body sat in a private dining room at Bar Enza, a popular Cambridge restaurant, and faced a grilling.

It was an exceedingly rare opportunity for a small group of prominent academics to speak directly to members of the reclusive board in charge of the school, as it endured a turbulent period. The campus was convulsed by demands for the resignation of Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, after allegations of plagiarismand anger over her handling of antisemitism and threats to Jewish students, which spurred a donor revolt.

The two board members, the nonprofit founder Tracy Palandjian and the private-equity executive Paul Finnegan, were told directly that they had to do more to address the ongoing maelstrom consuming the campus.

“You need to be more out front of this,” Jeff Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School, recalled telling them. “If people are saying the university is making mistakes — they are talking about you!”

 

The secretive, powerful group that runs Harvard, known as the Harvard Corporation, has projected unity amid the unyielding turmoil around Dr. Gay. The board’s Dec. 12 announcement to stand by Dr. Gay, who is also a member, was followed by silence, even in the wake of rising demands for her removal by powerful donors, alumni and media figures.

Yet private conversations with donors, professors and others indicate that there are signs of tensions among board members. Some members have conceded they need to address the billowing storms, people involved in those conversations have said. Critics and sympathizers who have tried to privately counsel the board say members have shown little concrete impetus toward changing their approach.

At Bar Enza, the corporation members had no specific answers to the professors’ pleas for action, according to people who were there. The professors did not ask for Dr. Gay’s resignation, but rather an explanation of the board’s plan to stabilize the school, said Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist at the table. The board members offered muted apologies, and promised follow-ups. 

The board members seemed aware of mounting disapproval. One toted a folder of news articles critical of the university, a Harvard spokesman confirmed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/24/us/harvard-corporation-claudine-gay.html

 

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The Worst of Both Worlds
State of the Union: Claudine Gay is the epitome of the current American higher education system.

 

The fact that Claudine Gay is a serial plagiarist isn’t the main issue—it’s that she’s a mediocrity. Gay has managed to do the American version of the Eton-OxBridge elite social-climbing while having fewer than twenty solo peer reviewed papers, mostly on topics of race that no one will remember in a decade—and several of which have incited charges of plagiarism. She has written no books. In sum, she has made no original or profound contribution to human knowledge, yet still manages to be the head of a premier higher-education institute of the republic. 

This is not the cause but rather the symptom of the deeper malaise. Theodore Roosevelt, an elite from another era, in comparison, managed to write a book on the War of 1812 only a year after graduating from Harvard, all while getting married, attending Columbia to study law, and planning to run for office. And, the book was one of the most significant of his generation.

It is not difficult to see why Gay’s Harvard (or any of the Ivies, for that matter) is so determinedly antagonistic to the very idea of merit or quality. What else would you expect from a quasi-subaltern gynarchy with a massive chip on its shoulder? At least Liz Magill resigned. Yet Gay is the epitome of the current American higher education system and has proven herself untouchable. Firing her would be a desecration, a sacrilege. 

Every society needs an elite ruling class. The premier institutions need to nurture and manage that elite. This is especially important in a republic, where an informed and rational citizenry is often the key, and where the structure is opposed to a natural imperial meritocracy. Eccentricity was tolerated in Victorian Britain, where the system was hierarchical and compartmentalized, and, therefore, naturally deferential to merit. If you have quality (say, a Charles Darwin or John Atkinson Grimshaw), you prove it, and you get patronage from the time’s social elite and the institutions they promote. A somewhat similar arrangement existed during the Gilded Age in America, if only for a brief moment. 

The current American system and the political class (from both sides), while nominally opposed to aristocracy, is simultaneously disdainful of true merit, and phobic towards those who think differently. Therefore, it has the worst of both worlds. 

Now, no one wants Harvard to be populated by neurotic autists who are great at calculus and can play note-perfect Chopin, but cannot carry a normal conversation. Harvard is still there to nurture the nation’s elites. Yet now it is also designed to elevate those like Claudine Gay: the Ivies are still elevating an elite, but the quality of that elite is not the same.

 

READ MORE:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-worst-of-both-worlds-3/

 

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GUSNOUE: AS SOON AS THE WORLD "ELITE" IS MENTIONED, DEMOCRACY DIES....

 

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Throughout its history, capitalism has been shaken by crises that it has resolved through wars, repressions, colonizations or coups d'état, but today it is undoubtedly going through one of the most serious crises which he was confronted with. We may be at a crossroads. Either the seizure of power by the working class for a social policy that eliminates capitalism, or the reactionary option, which will give the reins of power to fascist organizations. Contrary to what they want you to believe, far-right parties protect the capitalist system. These movements are in favor of a hierarchical society divided into social classes, and promote the superiority of one race over others. Politically and socially, they are the enemies of the working class. Beneath the veneer, their fine words to attract the popular classes do not stand up to the analysis of their votes in the antechambers of power.

Fascism has always been the spare wheel of capitalism, it was born after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917; it was at this moment that the big bourgeoisie was really afraid of a revolutionary contagion across Europe and it gave the keys to its salvation to Mussolini, then to Hitler. It was, of course, obliged to concede social advances to ease the pressure but, at the same time, it took care to direct the growing discontent towards trade union organizations, political parties and minorities. Fascism can only establish its power once workers' organizations are destroyed, which social democracy and the right have worked to do in recent decades. The bourgeoisie which de facto controls democracy inevitably slides into fascism when the difficulties of exploitation and the discontent of the working and middle classes threaten. The bourgeoisie then denounces “enemies from within”, from abroad to trade unionists, and encourages the desire for order, police, security and the State. Our democracies then encourage, without saying it, the transition to fascism. Alongside the desire for security, it must create a “crisis of the common”, linked to the loss of feelings of collective identity. The desire for order and police requires the almost obligatory support of this police for the seizure of power. Jean-Michel Fauvergue, former head of the Raid, declared on Cnews, July 22, 2023: “In a career as a police officer you will inevitably commit an illegality. Today, we must treat police officers differently, there must be inequality in the treatment of police officers in favor of these police officers. There must be an excuse for violence, I weigh my words. It must go through a particular court, or a commission, or a particular organization. »,

This declaration is an extension of the police press release of June 2023 following the violence, after the death of Nahel, shot dead by a police officer, when his life was in no danger, during a road check.

https://www.legrandsoir.info/elections-ou-pas-le-fascisme-arrive.html

 

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BY SCOTT RITTER

 

It’s an honor and a privilege to be here to have an opportunity to talk to you. I wish we could talk about better subjects. I wish we were in a time we could talk about moving forward with a confidence the world would move forward with us, but we live in difficult times.
  Today I’ve been asked to address “Global geopolitics in the context of the Ukrainian conflict.” I think when historians look back on the events that are transpiring today you’re going to be speaking of “BU” and “AU” the same way we speak of “BC” and “AD.” “BU” is “before Ukraine,” “AU” is “after Ukraine.” The Ukrainian war, ladies and gentlemen, has changed everything.
  The world that exists today is a fundamentally different world than existed before the conflict in Ukraine began. And when I say “the conflict in Ukraine” let’s just be clear: In reality, the conflict in Ukraine has been going on for decades. But the conflict I speak of is the conflict that has transpired since the decision by Vladimir Putin to send Russian troops into Ukraine on the 24th of February 2022.

 

“The USA will have to learn to participate in a global community of equals”

I have the honor and privilege twice a year to advise a board of some of the world’s most powerful and influential people, and those, of course, are people who operate in the oil and gas industry They make a lot of money and money equals power.
  I was brought in to talk geopolitics, and for several years now I’ve been hammering away at two things trying to convince these leaders of global industry that the world is evolving, that you need to evolve with it or you are going to be left behind. I spoke of the fact that the world is evolving away from an American singularity to a multipolarity, where America is no longer viewed by the world as the global hegemony – where, instead, America will have to learn to participate in a global community of equals. They have said, “No. Because that would require America to depart from the rules-based international order.” Which, of course, are rules that the United States wrote in the aftermath of the Second Word War to continue to empower ourselves.
  The rules-based international order is a sharp deviation from the principles, for instance, of the United Nation’s Charter, which speaks of multipolarity, global equality, and all that kind of nonsense. When I say “nonsense”, I mean from an American perspective because we don’t believe in any of that, we believe in the sole empowerment of the United States.
  Many of these leaders of industry are American. They lead multinational corporations, but the multinational corporations don’t enrich multi-nations. They enrich the United States. Therefore, they need the rules-based international order to continue to exist, to maintain the system of enrichment that they have put in place over the course of the past 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 years.

 

The days are over

The other thing I brought up to them is that for those who believe that America can impose its will on the world no matter what. Even if we run into an economic hiccup, we will be able to resolve this hiccup in our favor by projecting military power, which is unmatched: There is nobody in the world that can match the Americans in terms of military power. I said, “Those days are over, too”.
  They did not want to hear this. But I brought up the reality that twenty years of endless war in the so-called “global war on terror” had fundamentally transformed the lethality of the American military. No longer were we trained, armed, equipped, or prepared to fight a land-based war in Europe or a large-scale conflict in the Pacific. We, instead, had broken our military in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Syria – we no longer had the skill set. They didn’t want to hear that, either. They said, “No. America has aircraft carriers, America has armored brigades, America is America and the world will never be able to defeat America.”

 

After Ukraine …

That was “before Ukraine.” After Ukraine, a new reality has set in. Before Ukraine, the United States was able to convince Europe that Russia could be sanctioned into submission. I know we laugh about it today, when we reflect on the ludicrous nature of the overconfidence of those who thought so. But those who have memories that can go back simply two years remember, in the leadup to the conflict, how the United States said over and over and over again, “We will bring Russia to its knees.” That, “Together with the West, we will sanction Russia, we will break the will of Russia. Russia will fold. Even if Russia were to go into Ukraine militarily they could not sustain this attack because their economy will fail.”
  The Russian economy today is stronger than it has ever been largely because of the economic sanctions: “before Ukraine,” “after Ukraine.” But it’s more than simply the empowerment of the Russian economy. It’s how the world thinks about America: The American singularity is over.

 

BRICS – multipolarity is a reality

Just the other week [22–24 August] there was a meeting in South Africa of the BRICS organisation – five “developing nations”, we call them. Is China a developing nation? Is India a developing nation? These are developed nations. Now, they haven’t been able to come together before Ukraine. There were internal squabbles: India and China didn’t get along; the Russian economy wasn’t so hot. Who knew about Brazil? Was the African continent ready for development? These are questions that were thrown out there. There is no longer talk about that. BRICS prior to last week was a concept that had promise. BRICS today is a reality that has changed the world. Notice that I didn’t say “changing” the world. I said “changed the world”.
  Let me tell you what happened when BRICS came together and expanded. America went from being number one to being number two. The day of the American singularity is over. It’s past, it’s done, it’s finished, it’s gone. We haven’t, maybe, realissed it yet. Americans might believe that we’re still number one, but we’re not. We’ve been bypassed by BRICS. Well, you’ll say, “Wait a minute Scott, that’s many nations.” What do you think multipolarity means? It means many nations working together. And multipolarity is no longer a theory: It’s a reality.
  The reality of BRICS is such that America is number two. It will forever be number two because it will not have the economic strength to surpass the multipolar organisation known as BRICS, which is expanding as we speak. And an interesting thing about BRICS is that we tried to keep Russia off the agenda. We tried to keep Vladimir Putin away from that meeting. He attended by proxy with his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov. He attended by video. He dominated the proceedings, ladies and gentlemen. Russia will be the chair of BRICS starting in January 2024. When BRICS expands from its current membership of five, adding six, Vladimir Putin will be the head of BRICS. And when BRICS meets again next summer and they talk about brining ten nations in, Vladimir Putin will be the head of BRICS. 

 

NATO – nothing but failures

It’s backfired. Everything we do has backfired. And it’s not just economically. Militarily: Prior to Ukraine, before Ukraine, BU – I’m trying to inject this concept into people’s minds – before Ukraine, people did fear the American military. With good cause. We go to war a lot. There is lethality associated with what we do. In Europe, NATO believed that it was a powerful military alliance. NATO believed that when NATO flexed its muscle people listened – before Ukraine. After Ukraine, NATO has been exposed as a paper tiger. A paper tiger.
  There is no military strength in NATO. NATO has no capacity to project meaningful military power beyond the borders of Europe. NATO cannot fight a war along the lines of the war that’s being fought in Ukraine today. Don’t believe me, believe General Christopher Cavoli, four-star American general, commander of U.S. forces, supreme allied commander. He said in a Swedish defense forum last January (2023), that NATO could not imagine the scope and scale of the violence taking place in Ukraine today. Think about that.
  What do military people do? We prepare for the future. We prepare for the future based upon what we imagine. We imagine something, we create capabilities to meet that which we imagine. If we have not imagined the scope and scale of the violence taking place in Ukraine today, that means we’re not ready for it. We haven’t trained for it, we haven’t equipped for it, we haven’t organised for it. We can’t fight it. And this is a fact.
  Right now there’s a counteroffensive taking place in Ukraine. The Ukrainian army has three brigades trying to take the town, the village, of Robotyne. Three brigades. That’s 15,000 men. Imagine NATO putting three brigades on the line right now. They can’t. NATO cannot put three brigades on the line. But imagine if they did: They’ve assaulted the village, they’ve been repulsed by the Russians. So three brigades are now being pulled out, three more are being brought in, in a complex passage of lines. NATO has not done a six-brigade passage of lines ever. And Ukraine is doing it under fire. They’re failing, but they are doing it. [Editor’s note: As of 8 September, Moscow acknowledged withdrawing forces from Robotyne.]

 

NATO is a paper tiger – in the Pacific too

That war that’s taking place right now in Zaporizhzhia, in Kherson, in Luhansk, in Donetsk: It’s a war that NATO cannot fight. And now the world knows it. NATO is a paper tiger. The world knows it’s a paper tiger. They know the United States cannot meet its stated desire to reinforce Europe in a fashion. Ukraine has lost 400,000 men in battle, 40,000 to 50,000 in the last several weeks. It took America ten years to lose 58,000 in Vietnam and that broke our back. Can you imagine a situation where the United States military was asked to sacrifice 40,000 men in two weeks? Can you imagine a situation when any European army was asked to sacrifice 40,000 men in two weeks? The fact of the matter is: We can’t win a war today in Europe. We’re not number one anymore. We’re not number two anymore. We might be number three.
  But this is a reality. It’s not just in Europe that we can’t prevail. It’s in the Pacific. Don’t believe me, believe Lieutenant General Samuel Clinton Hinote. He was the deputy chief of staff of the United States Air Force. He just recently retired. But his job was strategy. And what he did for the last four years is war-game every potential scenario of conflict between the United Sates and China in the Pacific. And he recently, before his retirement, went to the Pentagon and went to the White House, and said the following: “Cease and desist your policies that push us to a potential military confrontation with China. Because if it does become a kinetic fight between the United States and China, there is no scenario in which we win. We lose every single time. And there is nothing we can do in the immediate future to change that outcome. We have to change the way we interface with China.”

 

“America loses”

That’s why Tony Blinken went to China in July. You remember that trip? He went – he had to go through thirty Chinese officials before he got to Xi Jinping – for a thirty-minute lesson in humility. The reason why he had to go there is because the United States had to hit pause on its China policy: Stop the path towards confrontation. We had just had a situation in the Strait of Taiwan where an American ship was almost rammed by a Chinese ship. And the Pentagon said, “If they do hit us, what do we do? Sink them?” And now the scenarios begin: If we sink them they retaliate, we retaliate, how does it end? Well, General Samuel Clinton Hinote said that it ends only one way every time: America loses.
  This is the reality today. We lose because we don’t have the capacity. But before Ukraine nobody understood that. Nobody believed that. Everybody believed that America was the supreme military power in the world. Today, the blinders have come off. Economically, we’re number two. Maybe we can maintain that position, maybe not. Militarily, we’re number three. And who knows where we’ll go with that. Because our military is a broken system. We spent hundreds of billions of dollars on a system that produces nothing beneficial to the defense of the United State. Let alone the defense of its allies. How can you spend $900 billion a year and say we can’t fight and prevail in a land war in Europe against the Russian army that spends $68 billion a year? It’s because our system is broken. But that’s another question.
  Ukraine has changed everything. Before Ukraine, America was number one, at least perception-wise. After Ukraine, American is number two economically, number three militarily, and this is a reality that the world is accepting. It’s not Scott Ritter saying this in a closed community to oil and gas executives. It’s Scott Ritter saying this while the rest of the world acknowledges this. Russia knows this. Russia no longer fears the American military. It’s not that they want to go to war against the America military, but Russia knows its capabilities. It’s been tested. China knows this, as well.

 

Europe must wake up

When will Europe know it? When will Europe realise that NATO is a false prophet? When will Europe realise that the money you put into NATO is wasted money? When will Europe realise that instead of pursuing war you should be pursuing peace? It’s time for Europe to wake up. Because if you don’t, if you continue to believe in the myth of American hegemony, the myth of American supremacy – because it is a myth, it isn’t real anymore, it exists in the minds of American politicians, but it doesn’t exist in the way the world operates today. Europe has to decide: Do you want to become a prisoner in a cage of your own construct? Because that’s what’s happening. The world is bypassing America. The world is moving on with their collective life. And the American singularity is in the rearview mirror going backwards.  •

https://www.zeit-fragen.ch/en/archives/2023/nr-20/21-sonderbeilage-xxx-kongress-mut-zur-ethik-2023/die-ukraine-vorher-und-nachher

 

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The world’s richest people got even richer over the past year, Bloomberg’s top-500 billionaire list, published on Wednesday, shows. Some 77% of the billionaires who made it on the list saw their fortunes grow even larger, while others experienced certain losses.

Elon Musk remains at the top, with an estimated net worth of $235 billion. The South African-born billionaire first dislodged Amazon owner Jeff Bezos from the pedestal in mid-2021, retaining first place ever since.

This year, Musk saw his fortune grow by nearly $98 billion, according to Bloomberg. While his social media platform X, formerly Twitter, has been in turmoil, locked into back-and-forth with advertisers and battered by various scandals, Musk’s flagship asset, Tesla, has enjoyed steady growth, further solidifying his position.

Bezos himself is currently in third place with $178 billion, narrowly outmatched by Bernard Arnault, the CEO of the LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton), whose wealth grew to some $179 billion this year.

https://www.rt.com/business/589787-rich-get-even-richer/

 

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THE RICH WHO HAVE LOST POCKET-MONEY WILL BLAME PUTIN FOR THIS....

 

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WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - Harvard President Claudine Gay on Tuesday announced that she has resigned from her position.

"It is with a heavy heart but a deep love for Harvard that I write to share that I will be stepping down as president. This is not a decision I came to easily," Gay said in a statement.

Gay explained in the statement that she decided to resign after consulting with members of the Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing body. Such a move is in the "best interest of Harvard," she said.

 

 

"When my brief presidency is remembered, I hope it will be seen as a moment of reawakening to the importance of striving to find our common humanity — and of not allowing rancor and vituperation to undermine the vital process of education," Gay's resignation letter reads.

 

"I trust we will all find ways, in this time of intense challenge and controversy, to recommit ourselves to the excellence, the openness, and the independence that are crucial to what our university stands for — and to our capacity to serve the world."

Harvard faculty members have reacted to the Tuesday resignation with disappointment, with one professor marking it as a "terrible moment."

 

https://sputnikglobe.com/20240102/terrible-moment-harvard-president-claudine-gay-resigns-amid-mounting-backlash--1115952528.html

 

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 Has capitalism failed?     By Ted Trainer

 

Anyone who thinks so is just plain dumb. It has obviously been stunningly successful. It has produced huge increases in wealth, for instance in the last few years the three richest people in Australia doubled their wealth. It has worked like a dream. The trouble is that it does not and is not designed to work for you. It works for the rich, not you.

If you expected it to work for you, or the environment, or the 5 billion poor people in this world, then it’s you who failed … failed to see that capitalism is structured in ways whereby it can do no other than use up dwindling resources, generate astronomical levels of inequality, develop the wrong things, require resource wars, impoverish and deprive, destroy social cohesion, drive many to support Trump, enrich the rich, and grow until it kills the ecosystems of the planet.

Just ask yourself, if you have an economic system which allows a few to own almost all of the capital and to invest it in the production of whatever is going to maximise the increase in their wealth, how likely is it that they will invest in producing what you need or what society needs or what the environment needs?

Ask yourself, if you have an economic system which allocates goods to those who can pay most for them should we be surprised that it will never allocate things according to need. Richer people will get them because they can pay more. That’s why more than a half a billion tonnes of grain are fed to animals in rich countries every year while around 800 million people are hungry.

It’s also why the wrong industries are developed. Investors (that is rich people who expect to get income without doing any work for it) invest in those ventures likely to make most profit, such as using Third World land to grow export crops. They neverinvest in developing industries that will produce what is most needed. That’s why poor countries have been developed into forms that ship out their resources to enrich our corporations and supermarket shoppers, not forms that enable their resources to go into producing what their people need. It is estimated that as a result the net flow of wealth out to us each year is around $2.5 trillion.

Recently the system has become “financialised”. Their most profitable option now is to get hold of assets to lend or rent out, such as toll roads, ports, student loans. Global debt to them is now three times global GDP and the lenders receive $13 trillion p.a, in interest let alone operating profits etc. On average each year Australian bank profits siphon out $3,600 per household. If the banks were publicly owned the sum could be zero. The most efficient bank in the US, the Bank of North Dakota, is the only bank that is state owned. But that’s socialism and therefore unacceptable.

Why let private firms run public utilities when they add to operating costs the cost of payments to shareholders? “But privatised industries run more efficiently than state owned firms, don’t they?” Google it, mate.

But worst of all, capitalism by nature must grow constantly and without limit. The factory owner must strive to increase sales knowing that competitors are out to drive him bankrupt. The lender wants more money back than he lent, and in the long run this is not possible unless the economy grows. But the global economy is now grossly overdeveloped. It’s demand for natural resources is almost twice a sustainable rate. The collateral damage is the elimination of biodiversity and the life support systems of the planet as habitats are taken or poisoned. More importantly the $307 trillion in global debt is too big to ever be paid. As Michael Hudson says, debts that can’t be paid won’t be paid. He discusses how debt has brought down entire empires in the past and is probably going to bring ours down soon.

Have you considered what 2050 will look like if 10 billion have risen to the “living standards” Australia would then have given the normal growth rate? Production and consumption and resource use will be more than 12 times as great as they are now. Happy with that? Do you think the ecosystems of the planet will be?

And does skyrocketing inequality surprise you? It shouldn’t. When most people in the world are very poor and have no money to invest but a few are very rich and have a lot of it to invest you can’t be surprised that now 1% of the world’s people own about half its wealth, and are getting richer at an accelerating rate, while the rising cost of living condemns increasing numbers to struggle and homelessness.

And how come there are so many resource wars raging in areas where our oil is unfortunately under someone else’s sand? A growth economy requires ever-increasing resourced inputs. Just as well the US spends over $1 trillion each year on weapons; looks like we’ll soon need them to “contain” China … they’re threatening to beat us to global resources and markets.

And have you ever wondered why we have such high rates of stress, anxiety, drug and alcohol dependence, family breakdown and loneliness that depression is now probably our most serious health problem? Might it have something to do with the fact that this economy makes everyone fear insecurity, makes us work too hard, struggle as competitive individuals in a system that drives out collectivist values and destroys community, and dumps large numbers into unemployment, precariousness and exclusion?

“Ah but we’re overlooking trickle down aren’t we. The rich get richer by investing and creating jobs and incomes for poorer people don’t they?” Yes they do. And for a long time we ordinary Australians did well on the crumbs from the tables of the rich. But somehow the trickle now is not even enough to prevent many Australians going without sufficient food. Oxfam’s latest report says the poorest 5 billion people in the world are getting poorer. Capitalist trickle goes up not down.

Does all this mean there is class war? Another dumb question. Warren Buffett explained this long ago when he said, “There is no class war. There was, but my class won it.” Look at America, stolen by the rich. In a list of 17 social indicators in OECD countries such as health, imprisonment, gun violence, drug dependence, poverty, the US rates in the worst three in all of them. (Trainer, 2021, Chapter 7.)

Do you think such system is going to provide well for everyone from here on? Young people don’t; they realise they will be poorer than their parents.

So isn’t it about time we dumped it?

“But there’s no alternative!” Well we had better work one out. This one has a good chance of killing us all. The literature on a coming global collapse is now substantial. A viable alternative would obviously have to be heavily “socialist”, in the sense of being based on much regulation and strict rules determining what is produced, how it is distributed and what is developed. But it need not be authoritarian or have centralised power. It could and should take an Anarchist, not Socialist, form involving federations of small thoroughly participatory self-governing communities. (For the detail.) It might (and I think it should) have a large sector in which (small) private family owned farms and firms operate and in which (limited) market forces could function within strict social guidelines.

This prospect is made much more feasible than it might seem by the fact that capitalism is now self-destructing. Marx saws that it is a system with built-in vicious contradictions. For instance it is in the interests of capitalists to oppose the interests of workers. Profit maximisation contradicts the interests of the environment. This capitalist is in conflict with that one. It is in the interests of the factory owner to automate, but if they all do then no workers have the wages they need to buy the products. The selfish and acquisitive capitalist dynamic drives out good values and destroys the social cohesion without which there can be no economy. Marx saw that this built-in dynamic would in time destroy capitalism.

Capitalist society is incapable of saving itself. There is no possibility of preventing the descent now. Our salvation must involve large scale Degrowth to a stable economy under social control. Many now realise this, but hardly any politicians, economists, corporate leaders, media owners or ordinary people do. Our fate depends on whether we can change the mentality sufficiently before the coming time of great troubles wipes out the possibility of sensible transition.

At least and at last the discontent and the disgust are gathering momentum. Somebody should let the Left know about all this.

 

https://johnmenadue.com/has-capitalism-failed/

 

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