Made to order political outsider, like Obama before him
"Change we can believe in" bait and switch again? Major Pete sounds more and more like Obama in each speech.
Election success of Clinton, Bush II, Obama, and Trump at the core was based on an interesting, and pretty dirty, political
trick. None of them has any political baggage at the time of their elections. So the campaign managers were using "Tabula_Rasa"
effect: such a person ability to be politically "all things to all people" for winning Presidential Elections. People can project
anything they want into such candidate as there is no political history. Some columnist noted the trend. See for example
Inexperience is one of Mayor Pete’s greatest assets
A major piece of Pete Buttigieg’s past remains a mystery to voters.
For nearly three years, he worked at McKinsey & Company, an elite management consulting firm with offices around the world. It
was work that took him, he has said, to Iraq and Afghanistan. And for years after that, in his early campaigns for public office,
Buttigieg held up his stint at McKinsey as a selling point and proof that he was a business-friendly Democrat, while only vaguely
describing what he did and never revealing his clients.
A deeper understanding of his time there a decade ago would be relevant to evaluating the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana,
who’s now trying to prove he has the experience to be president. But Buttigieg continues to keep most details a secret, citing a
confidentiality agreement. He also now describes the job — which informed his views on business issues — as “not something that I
think is essential in my story.”
..."I got my street smarts working in war zones on economic stabilization,” Buttigieg told the South Bend Tribune in October 2011,
“and I think that experience stands up next to anybody's."
According to Laura, he “now he claims to be living (currently) a “middle class lifestyle, in a middle class neighborhood, in middle
America”. All sorta true, although he makes a salary of $110K/yr and I don’t know what his husband makes but six figures here goes
a long way. In an interview about a year and a half ago (I will have to look for it) this is when he claims to have grown up “working
class”.”
Laura continues to ask:
I have some questions about Mayor Pete:
is he a CIA asset?
who is his Dad, Joseph Buttigieg, the Maltese immigrant?
who is his mom, Jennifer Anne Montgomery?
who is his husband, Chasten Glezman (now Chasten Buttigieg)?
why did he choose to go to Harvard instead of going to Notre Dame when he could’ve most likely gotten a huge tuition discount?
(It would be very unusual for someone from small town Indiana of “working class” background to go to Harvard, especially when they
could go to Notre Dame).
who funded his Harvard and then Oxford education? How did he get into those schools? Who was his “sponsor”? Kind of like how
a Saudi was the backer for Barry’s education, supposedly.
why did he deploy to Afghanistan during his time being mayor when he was just in the navy reserves? He was gone for I believe
7 months.
I want to know more about how he admired Bernie Sanders back in 2000 when most people, especially millennials, knew about him.
Mayor Pete is literally a month younger than I am so I have perspective on this.
he worked for John Kerry’s 2004 campaign as well as Jill Long Thompson’s congressional campaign in 2002 (she was part of the
Obama administration later).
named Aspen Institute Rodel fellow in 2014
he worked for the Cohen group in DC and also McKinsey and Company
of course, he has an autobiography already coming out (even though he’s only 37) next month, just in time for the presidential
campaign and to airbrush his past.
South Bend is notorious for voter/election fraud. Think of it as a mini Chicago or Detroit. Full of corruption. This past 2018
midterm election, there was controversy over 22,000 uncounted ballots in St. Joseph county which overturned 3 races. This was less
than Palm County, FL but got zero attention.
why is the national media saying South Bend is a “model of renewal”? That’s like saying a polished turd is a piece of gold. No,
South Bend is what our president calls a Sh$thole. Crime is high, especially violent crime, it’s run down, there is a huge homeless
problem. I never go there because it’s not a nice city, never has been even when I was a kid in the 80’s thru 2000’s. Notre Dame
is the only reason there is any decent areas near South Bend (like Granger) but even the campus is surrounded by bad neighborhoods. This city is not anything to brag about. Mayor Pete hasn’t improved anything there. His Lime Bikes just adds bikes to the trash
left around the city and his “smart streets” was a waste of taxes.
Anyways, this guy is a Trojan horse. He should not be elevated to a national political position, especially not president.
"... The eventual point of neoliberalism, then, is to exalt markets above people -- for the neoliberals, people are expendable but markets are superior. ..."
"... Postmodernism can give neoliberalism a cultural core ..."
"... The incubator regime for neoliberalism, as numerous authors have pointed out, was the regime in Chile under the dictatorial junta headed by Augusto Pinochet, beginning on the real September 11th, in 1973. The Department of Economics at the University of Chicago , the epicenter of neoliberal thought in America, was brought in to help Pinochet devise policy. Please keep in mind that neoliberals do not care one whit about democracy as long as the resultant regimes respect capitalism, and they're also okay with high death tolls for the same reason. Neoliberalism is a death culture. You live if you have money or if you have access to the government which invents money and forces you to use it. ..."
Cassiodorus
on Sun, 03/01/2020 - 5:00pm The neoliberals' cultural stuck is in decline. When they had
that suave dude Barack Obama telling everyone he was like Gandhi or Mandela, that was totally a
thing. Cultural neoliberalism was rockin' da house as every branch of government, both state
and Federal, was being
awarded to Republicans . Then they put all of their eggs in the Hillary Clinton basket,
waging a rather nasty campaign to get everyone to step in line while Clinton was and is very
much about money and about the society of her John Birch Society daddy. (She and Bill did make
great-looking hippies in the Sixties though, but you only see that in old photos.) Vote for her
because Trump is Hitler or something.
Now they have what? Pete Buttigieg, who is smarter than you and who reeks insincerity from
every pore of his skin as he delivers wooden imitations of Obama speeches? Michael Bloomberg,
who brags about what he can buy? Grandpa Joe Biden, with initial-stage dementia? Hallmark card
cop Amy Klobuchar, who will work with Republicans while helping maybe five or six people as she
promised? Elizabeth "I'm in it for me" Warren? It's not like these people come naturally to
cultural efflorescence -- they, after all, ran John Kerry, Al Gore, and Michael Dukakis -- but
this has got to be a new low for them, expanding the field to twenty-plus candidates only to
find themselves facing Super Tuesday with only this.
Philosophically, neoliberalism is a form of antihumanism . In an
article in "American Affairs" (which I suggest you all read from beginning to end) the
economist Philip
Mirowski suggests several principles common to neoliberal thought. I'll just post one
through four so as not to freak anyone out while making the point just as effectively:
(1) "Free" markets do not occur naturally. They must be actively constructed through
political organizing.
(2) "The market" is an information processor, and the most efficient one possible -- more
efficient than any government or any single human ever could be. Truth can only be validated
by the market.
(3) Market society is, and therefore should be, the natural and inexorable state of
humankind.
(4) The political goal of neoliberals is not to destroy the state, but to take control of
it, and to redefine its structure and function, in order to create and maintain the
market-friendly culture.
This then, is the core of neoliberal culture. The eventual point of neoliberalism, then,
is to exalt markets above people -- for the neoliberals, people are expendable but markets are
superior. It took a rabid nationalist like Donald Trump to end the war in Afghanistan , whereas
faithful neoliberal Barack Obama kept the war around because it provided "markets" for weapons
corporations. Neoliberals hate Bernie Sanders because he wants to get rid of some of the
markets for health insurance -- as long as people are buying health insurance, the neoliberals
don't care if anyone dies because they can't afford to use it.
... ... ...
Neoliberalism has been the dominant doctrine throughout the world's universities since the
Eighties. Academic vogues such as "postmodernism" can serve as Trojan Horse concepts for
hegemonic neoliberalism. Postmodernism, to own a definition, is an aesthetic concept involving
the juxtaposition of radically differing aesthetic concepts and celebrating surface
observations over "deeper meanings." The postmodern essence of visual art is in collage; the
postmodern musical form is the medley. Postmodernism is innocuous when it combines medieval
architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright, or when it combines classical music with rock and roll.
Neoliberalism, however, sees in postmodernism a market, something to create new products and
separate people from their money. Postmodernism can give neoliberalism a cultural core
.
The incubator regime for neoliberalism, as numerous authors have pointed out, was the
regime in Chile under the dictatorial junta headed by Augusto Pinochet, beginning on the real
September 11th, in 1973. The Department of Economics at the
University of Chicago , the epicenter of neoliberal thought in America, was brought in to
help Pinochet devise policy. Please keep in mind that neoliberals do not care one whit about
democracy as long as the resultant regimes respect capitalism, and they're also okay with
high death
tolls for the same reason. Neoliberalism is a death culture. You live if you have money or
if you have access to the government which invents money and forces you to use it.
The task of replacing neoliberalism with something else will be a daunting one. Neoliberals
rule the planet today. It appears at this point that our primary weapon is the fact that the
neoliberals don't really have any specific culture; instead, they speculate in culture for the
sake of the fetishes of markets and money and property through which they destroy the planet,
us, and ultimately themselves.
@entrepreneur
by a candidate with a degree in English Literature from Harvard (magna cum laude). Buttigieg
couldn't even win the idiot vote, which he was clearly aiming for. If you think "The shape of
our democracy is the issue that affects every other issue" means something, you are displaying
the Dunning-Kruger effect .
Cassiodorus
on Sun, 03/01/2020 - 5:00pm The neoliberals' cultural stuck is in decline. When they had
that suave dude Barack Obama telling everyone he was like Gandhi or Mandela, that was totally a
thing. Cultural neoliberalism was rockin' da house as every branch of government, both state
and Federal, was being
awarded to Republicans . Then they put all of their eggs in the Hillary Clinton basket,
waging a rather nasty campaign to get everyone to step in line while Clinton was and is very
much about money and about the society of her John Birch Society daddy. (She and Bill did make
great-looking hippies in the Sixties though, but you only see that in old photos.) Vote for her
because Trump is Hitler or something.
Now they have what? Pete Buttigieg, who is smarter than you and who reeks insincerity from
every pore of his skin as he delivers wooden imitations of Obama speeches? Michael Bloomberg,
who brags about what he can buy? Grandpa Joe Biden, with initial-stage dementia? Hallmark card
cop Amy Klobuchar, who will work with Republicans while helping maybe five or six people as she
promised? Elizabeth "I'm in it for me" Warren? It's not like these people come naturally to
cultural efflorescence -- they, after all, ran John Kerry, Al Gore, and Michael Dukakis -- but
this has got to be a new low for them, expanding the field to twenty-plus candidates only to
find themselves facing Super Tuesday with only this.
Philosophically, neoliberalism is a form of antihumanism . In an
article in "American Affairs" (which I suggest you all read from beginning to end) the
economist Philip
Mirowski suggests several principles common to neoliberal thought. I'll just post one
through four so as not to freak anyone out while making the point just as effectively:
(1) "Free" markets do not occur naturally. They must be actively constructed through
political organizing.
(2) "The market" is an information processor, and the most efficient one possible -- more
efficient than any government or any single human ever could be. Truth can only be validated
by the market.
(3) Market society is, and therefore should be, the natural and inexorable state of
humankind.
(4) The political goal of neoliberals is not to destroy the state, but to take control of
it, and to redefine its structure and function, in order to create and maintain the
market-friendly culture.
This then, is the core of neoliberal culture. The eventual point of neoliberalism, then, is
to exalt markets above people -- for the neoliberals, people are expendable but markets are
superior. It took a rabid nationalist like Donald Trump to end the war in Afghanistan , whereas
faithful neoliberal Barack Obama kept the war around because it provided "markets" for weapons
corporations. Neoliberals hate Bernie Sanders because he wants to get rid of some of the
markets for health insurance -- as long as people are buying health insurance, the neoliberals
don't care if anyone dies because they can't afford to use it.
As implied in
this article (password: AddletonAP2009) , the neoliberal "solution" to climate change is
the only one that has been tried. The point of focusing all climate change mitigation efforts
upon "reducing carbon emissions," from the Rio
Earth Summit of 1992 onward, is so that a new line of products can be manufactured to help
consumers reduce their carbon emissions, more efficient fossil-burning machines or alternative
energy machines or carbon permits or easements or something like that. The idea that
manufacturing new products also consumes carbon is not assumed to be a problem. Meanwhile the
fossil energy interests will stay hidden from all of this "mitigation" effort, it being assumed
that the sacred "market" will drive them out of business. Whether said "market" actually does
so, when obviously over the past twenty-eight years it has done nothing of the sort, is
nobody's business. Neoliberals are okay with carbon taxes because they can always be abolished
later, like they were in Australia
, and because their ideas of carbon taxes involve low carbon taxes so as not to hurt
businesses.
Neoliberalism has been the dominant doctrine throughout the world's universities since the
Eighties. Academic vogues such as "postmodernism" can serve as Trojan Horse concepts for
hegemonic neoliberalism. Postmodernism, to own a definition, is an aesthetic concept involving
the juxtaposition of radically differing aesthetic concepts and celebrating surface
observations over "deeper meanings." The postmodern essence of visual art is in collage; the
postmodern musical form is the medley. Postmodernism is innocuous when it combines medieval
architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright, or when it combines classical music with rock and roll.
Neoliberalism, however, sees in postmodernism a market, something to create new products and
separate people from their money. Postmodernism can give neoliberalism a cultural core
. Postmodernism is what is behind Pete Buttigieg's assertion that
people do not have to choose between revolution and the status quo . (Trust me, he's been to universities .)
We just combine them in some kind of postmodern market. Never mind that such an idea
eviscerates the concept of revolution.
The incubator regime for neoliberalism, as numerous authors have pointed out, was the regime
in Chile under the dictatorial junta headed by Augusto Pinochet, beginning on the real
September 11th, in 1973. The Department of Economics at the
University of Chicago , the epicenter of neoliberal thought in America, was brought in to
help Pinochet devise policy. Please keep in mind that neoliberals do not care one whit about
democracy as long as the resultant regimes respect capitalism, and they're also okay with
high death
tolls for the same reason. Neoliberalism is a death culture. You live if you have money or
if you have access to the government which invents money and forces you to use it.
The task of replacing neoliberalism with something else will be a daunting one. Neoliberals
rule the planet today. It appears at this point that our primary weapon is the fact that the
neoliberals don't really have any specific culture; instead, they speculate in culture for the
sake of the fetishes of markets and money and property through which they destroy the planet,
us, and ultimately themselves.
"... Buttigieg and Bloomberg have similar voting blocks to Biden. Buttigieg is the clean cut presidential type with PR trained words, a Biden 2020 model with less baggage. Older whites love him which is why he does well in Iowa and NH. ..."
"... If Biden/Buttigieg/Bloomberg join forces behind one of them, they won't add any new voters; they'll simply stop stealing votes from each other. Less self-destructive, of course, but hardly enough to beat Sanders. ..."
The Democratic establishment worries that if the "moderates" in the race do not start falling on their swords, dropping out,
and joining behind a single candidate -- Biden, Buttigieg or Bloomberg -- to challenge Sanders, they will lose the nomination
to Sanders and the election to Trump.
Strange and deeply delusional people. Let us imagine they fell on those proverbial swords and joined the forces behind someone.
Why should it work with Democratic voters any better than in did with Republicans in 2016?
Biden's voters are those who believe that he will become Obama's third term; a doubtful assertion, but the number of such believers
is rather stable and won't go either up or down. Warren's voters are more likely to defect to Sanders rather than to anyone else.
Buttigieg's and Bloomberg's voters... Wait. Who exactly those "Buttigieg's and Bloomberg's voters" as a voting bloc even are?
Anyways, the RNC tried a similar trick against Trump in 2016. Everyone knows how well it worked.
Buttigieg and Bloomberg have similar voting blocks to Biden. Buttigieg is the clean cut presidential type with PR trained
words, a Biden 2020 model with less baggage. Older whites love him which is why he does well in Iowa and NH.
Bloomberg is liberal Trump. Big business man that can "get things done". Has an ugly past but who cares. He was getting the
same votes as Biden (both white and non white so long as they are middle agreed and older, all moderates). So basically a Biden
3.0 now with Minority Power and a dash of Trump
Note that was before the Nevada debate.
Note that Warren was supposed to be a Sanders 2.0 with less baggage. The race has always been Biden-like vs Sanders-like. But
Warren couldn't go full Sanders while Biden ended up with that Romney effect where flashy new people would show up look nice then
fade away because they couldn't just stick with the original.
It would be a very different race if it was Biden vs Sanders and that's that. But Sanders side figured it out first.
That's right. If Biden/Buttigieg/Bloomberg join forces behind one of them, they won't add any new voters; they'll simply stop
stealing votes from each other. Less self-destructive, of course, but hardly enough to beat Sanders.
Though I'd disagree that Warren is Sanders 2.0 - as you noted, she cannot go full Sanders. She is Sanders 0.5 at best, if not
Sanders beta.
On the second matter the idea was for her to be Sanders 2.0. But Sanders always goes full Sanders to the point of flat out telling
you that he WILL raise taxes. Warren couldn't go full Sanders and actually tried so sneak into the Biden camp. "Sanders v.5 now
with more Biden" didn't sell well.
(Suddenly imagining a video of Sanders telling Warren to "follow me" then start parkour up a building while Warren watches
helplessly)
On the first I just listened to Mondays episode of political rewind that noted something in Nevada: Sanders only got about
30% of the initial vote which is the closest to a normal primary. His bump to over 45% came as voters of dead candidates had to
move to their second pick.
If this really was a moderate vs radical then Warren votes would go to Bernie and everyone else to Biden or buttigieg. Instead
they mostly went to Sanders. Which means voters went "I would rather have this person but if I can't I'll vote Bernie." Jeeesh
even TAC is doing it with Tulsi compete with hard social conservative folks seemingly to find a reason to vote for Sanders. Jeesh
I did that with Warren.
It's one caucus but it's an interesting idea. What if it's not Anyone but Bernie and more "Bernie is ok but I really like this
person." A mass consolidation may end up pushing them all to their second pick. It also explains why the field is so spread. It's
not confused voters deciding on a moderate. It's fans of a particular candidate that are willing to substitute for Bernie once
they're love drops out.
A consolidated field might not stop Bernie. It might give him the gold.
By the way, Tulsi as a veep candidate would significantly imporove Sanders's chances against Trump during the election itself.
Though picking her will be equal to saying "we're through" to the Democratic establishment. So I'll withhold my opinion as to
whether Bernie will dare to do it until he's nominated - at this point I expect that he will be nominated, unless the DNC
resorts to some highly unconventional (which is, outright fraudulent) measures.
I don't know if Sanders has the courage to nominate someone like Tulsi, but he should, and not just to win the election. If he
nominates some moderate, he'll have to watch his back constantly in fear that he might be given an untimely "heart attack."
Agreed, the idea that Sanders has a significantly lower ceiling than the others fell apart when the second alignment results from
NV came in. There were plenty of people who picked Sanders when they could no longer go with their 1st option.
""Medicare for All." Abolition of private health insurance. War on Wall Street. The Green New Deal. Free college tuition. Forgiveness
of all student debt. Open borders. Supreme Court justices committed to Roe v. Wade. Welfare for undocumented migrants. A doubling
of the minimum wage to $15 an hour."
With the exception of "open borders", which Sanders has repeatedly stated he is against, which of these issues do you think
hurts Sanders with the majority?
Abolition of private health insurance will hurt him with some union members, as well as people who have good health benefits currently.
My parents are public employees, and their insurance costs little and they get access to the best doctors in the area. A MFA system
would increase the demand to see those elite doctors, and they might get squeezed out. And Trump/GOP can simply say "They couldn't
even build a functioning website for Obamacare, do you really trust them to completely overhaul our healthcare system?" People
with no/bad health insurance might take that chance, but people with solid/good health insurance will probably be risk averse.
Do you think people are going to fall for "If you like your doctor, you can keep them" a second time?
The Green New Deal will hurt in TX and PA, since there are a lot of oil industry workers there. And if you look at polling,
Climate Change is nowhere near most voters, especially moderates, top concern.
Welfare to illegal immigrants is extremely unpopular to everyone outside of the hard left.
I definitely hear those concerns but MFA will absolutely help more people than it hurts. Arguing against it for the sake of preserving
jobs is to me like arguing for the carriage industry during the advent of the automobile. With regards to doctors, the problem
with Obamacare was that it left the insurance industry intact, which is why people couldn't always keep their doctors. It's not
a choice if your insurance won't cover the doctor you want. MFA would allow you to see literally any doctor you wanted, no concerns
about "networks".
With regards to the GND, again you're arguing for the carriage makers while Model-T's are rolling off the line. Green energy
is already edging out coal as it becomes cheaper and easier to produce, the oil workers are living on borrowed time. And any GND
will have provisions for re-training displaced workers so they can land on their feet. My brother just became trained as a wind-turbine
mechanic, he's working on job sites literally across the country (so far he's been to Texas, Iowa and Minnesota). The jobs for
the displaced workers are there, and the GND will make sure they're properly prepared for them.
Also you're incorrect on American's concerns about climate change. Pew Research center says 67% of Americans believe the federal
government should be doing more to stop it from getting worse. And while of course you see some demographic divisions in the data
the trend is that number is growing, in fact they say 65% of moderate Republicans feel that way.
First of all, to all my original point, I'm arguing about how those policies hurt Bernie Sanders politically, not on their merits.
Bernie continually votes to fund the F-35 even though it's a trillion dollar piece of junk, because some of its parts are built
in VT.
On comparing MFA and the GND to the advent of the automobile, that's a terrible analogy since the government didn't shove the
automobile down our throats. The automobile became affordable and convenient, and people voluntarily purchased it.
For MFA, there is no evidence that there will be any cost control measures that would make it economically viable. Congress
has been kicking the can down the road on cost controls for Medicare and Obamacare for years, so why would we expect MFA to be
different?
For the GND, if renewables are so awesome and cost effective, why do we need a new multi-trillion dollar government initiative
to make people adopt them?
And as to climate change, where is that on people's list of concerns when polled? Yes, people may say we should do something
about it, but 1.) typically they don't want to have to sacrifice anything for it and 2.) If you look at polls that rank peoples
concerns in the world, climate change consistently ranks quite low. Heck, they couldn't even get WA state to adopt a modest carbon
tax when it was voted on, so what makes you think that it will catch on nationally?
There was quite a lot of corporate chicanery, aided and abetted by government, that helped promote the automobile, from auto and
rubber companies butying up trolley systems to auto companies paying off movie producers to make newsreels promoting buses over
trolleys. There are documentaries, books and even comic books on the subject.
Sanders is for increasing the carried interest tax rate for private equity firms. He wants to turn the U.S. into Venezuela. Socialism
... sooooooocialism.
Bernie's Wall Street tax proposals are nonsensical. They are supposedly going to raise a ton of revenue without substantially
disrupting the financial sector. One, or potentially both, of those things are likely to be false.
For every Venezeula there is a Denmark, a Germany, a Finland, a Japan. It's easy to point to (I know it's not PC to say) a corrupt
3rd world country and crow about how "socialism failed". And yet if you glance over towards Europe you see dozens of nations with
one form of socialist safety net or another, and they're spending *less* per capita on healthcare *and* getting *better* results
than we are.
I flipped on this issue specifically because of the numbers, not ideological reasons. I happily voted for Johnson in 16, and
in a perfect world I'd prefer government to stay small. But you can't deny that the healthcare system we're currently in is MUCH
worse than just about everyone else's in the developed world (I mean it's the internet, you can deny all you want but the facts
are what they are). I flipped because if we're spending more and getting less, it's literally *more* fiscally conservative and
efficient to switch to a MFA system. I'd love a completely free-market system, but there's fewer examples that I'm aware of of
that sort of system working well, and honestly I don't think it could be pulled off.
We in essence have a free market health care system. At least outside of Medicare and the VA. For a market to function efficiently,
it requires 2 key ingredients: the ability to compare prices and the ability to compare quality. Due to the disparity in medical
training between the medical community and your average Joe on the street, having those 2 key ingredients is impossible. So we
just have a very inefficient health care market, as any economics book would predict. Less corrupt nations understand how this
works and mitigate the problem with different solutions: full government control (England), government single-payer (Canada),
non-profit insurance system (Germany) and many others.
"... When he is pressed to give specifics on foreign policy, his answers range from vague to terrible , and when he does get pinned down he ends up sounding more and more hawkish . ..."
"... Buttigieg's lack of foreign policy substance and experience make him the perfect vessel that his advisers can fill with their own ideas. The former mayor rails against "old failed Washington," but his entire career has been aimed at becoming part of it, and to that end he fails to attack our government's many foreign policy failures. ..."
"... Buttigieg's weakness on foreign policy reflects the larger problem with his candidacy. There doesn't seem to be any particular reason why he is running for president except his own overweening ambition, and there isn't any compelling reason why voters should prefer him to any of the other alternatives. ..."
"... The average American voter wouldn't recognize a coherent foreign policy if it showed up gift-wrapped on their doorstep. ..."
"... electability comes more from the intuitions of voters - at the margin - than actual policy formulations. Celebrity and stage presence mean a lot to people who regularly imbibe cable TV, Oprah, Game of Thrones and Super Bowl halftime shows ( all of which are intellectually indistinguishable from one another, I might add ). ..."
"... Apart from the irony of the NY Times asking questions about regime-change wars -- all of which the Times cheerleaded -- Buttigieg's near-silence on foreign policy isn't much different from Sanders' in 2016. ..."
"... Buttigieg is an empty vessel. He poses no threat to entrenched wealth in this country or to the neocon foreign policy establishment. He won't do anything to curb the excesses of American militarism. The only powerful group he offends is the religious right - a group deeply offended by his homosexuality. They won't want a gay couple in the White House. For the socially liberal wealthy who don't want their wealth and power threatened by Sanders or Warren, he is the perfect candidate ..."
Barndollar
notes that Pete Buttigieg avoids foreign policy substance all the time:
When the New York Times asked Democratic candidates about regime change wars and U.S. support
for coups, "Mr. Buttigieg did not answer this question." Ditto for all of the Times' questions
about Afghanistan, the war upon which Buttigieg's claims to foreign policy expertise hinge.
Buttigieg remains essentially a cipher on foreign policy, sensible words about the AUMF aside.
He sounds the right progressive notes but refuses to be pinned down on much of substance. It is
hard to imagine him diverging much from the bipartisan foreign policy consensus that has
wreaked so much havoc, in Afghanistan and elsewhere. When the New York Times asked Democratic
candidates about regime change wars and U.S. support for coups, "Mr. Buttigieg did not answer
this question." Ditto for all of the Times' questions about Afghanistan, the war upon which
Buttigieg's claims to foreign policy expertise hinge. Buttigieg remains essentially a cipher on
foreign policy, sensible words about the AUMF aside. He sounds the right progressive notes but
refuses to be pinned down on much of substance. It is hard to imagine him diverging much from
the bipartisan foreign policy consensus that has wreaked so much havoc, in Afghanistan and
elsewhere.
Buttigieg's Buttigieg's
aversion to substance is not limited to foreign policy, and his rhetoric frequently tends
towards the platitudinous. He proudly tweeted out a recent statement he made at a town hall in
New Hampshire, "The shape of our democracy is the issue that affects every other issue." The real
talent that Buttigieg has is that he says nonsensical things like that with a straight face. He
can repeat the phrase "end endless war," but he never wants to say when or how exactly he is
going to end any wars. In that respect, he may be the Democratic candidate most like Trump. When
he is pressed to give specifics on foreign policy, his answers When he is pressed to give
specifics on foreign policy, his answers
He delivered one underwhelming speech on the subject last year, and
we still know little more about his foreign policy views today than we did then. His campaign
website section on foreign policy includes nothing except a copy of that same speech. It is
probably because they assume that he poses no threat to conventional foreign policy that he has
It is probably because they assume that he poses no threat to conventional foreign policy that he
has It is probably because they assume that he poses no threat to conventional foreign policy
that he has hundreds of
foreign policy professionals rushing to endorse him when he has no qualifications.
Buttigieg's lack of foreign policy substance and experience make him the perfect vessel that his
advisers can fill with their own ideas. The former mayor rails against "old failed Washington,"
but his entire career has been aimed at becoming part of it, and to that end he fails to attack
our government's many foreign policy failures.
Buttigieg's weakness on foreign policy reflects
the larger problem with his candidacy. There doesn't seem to be any particular reason why he is
running for president except his own overweening ambition, and there isn't any compelling reason
why voters should prefer him to any of the other alternatives.
The average American voter wouldn't recognize a coherent foreign policy if it showed up
gift-wrapped on their doorstep. This is, for all intents and purposes, a moot issue in terms
of the upcoming election.
Donald Trump never had a coherent foreign policy that anyone could
discern when he was a candidate, and look how that turned out. Some Americans are intensely
interested in foreign policy; most are not. Oh, they have opinions, alright.
But electability
comes more from the intuitions of voters - at the margin - than actual policy formulations.
Celebrity and stage presence mean a lot to people who regularly imbibe cable TV, Oprah, Game
of Thrones and Super Bowl halftime shows ( all of which are intellectually indistinguishable
from one another, I might add ).
Apart from the irony of the NY Times asking questions about regime-change wars -- all of
which the Times cheerleaded -- Buttigieg's near-silence on foreign policy isn't much
different from Sanders' in 2016.
Politicians believe the American public isn't as interested
in foreign policy as it is in domestic issues. Also, with domestic issues, politicians have
become experts in pushing wedge issues so as to manipulate their constituencies. But a more
probable reason Buttigieg doesn't talk about foreign policy is because, as mayor of a small
town, he never had to deal with it. This vacuum will mean that, as president, he will adopt
the Democratic Party's pro-war, anti-Russia, neocon belligerency. He will be an inexperienced
puppet controlled by the Clinton-Obama-neocon war agenda.
Buttigieg is an empty vessel. He poses no threat to entrenched wealth in this country or to the neocon
foreign policy establishment. He won't do anything to curb the excesses of American militarism. The only powerful group
he offends is the religious right - a group deeply offended by his homosexuality. They won't want a gay couple in the
White House. For the socially liberal wealthy who don't want their wealth and power threatened by Sanders or Warren, he
is the perfect candidate.
Last night at the Democratic debate no one immediately noticed, most especially the lame
media, how Buttigieg screwed the pooch with this bit of misinformed, unenlightened, wiseguy
condescension:
Buttigieg said, I am not looking forward to a scenario where it comes down to Donald
Trump, with his nostalgia for the social order of the 1950s, and Bernie Sanders with a
nostalgia for the revolutionary politics of the 1960s.
Okay, but you really stepped into it butthead! You belittled and probably alienated
millions of former revolutionary boomers in their 60s and 70's, who have justifed nostalgia
for protest activism and social justice movements and organizations, the Civil Rights
Movement, the Anti-War Movement, the United Farm Workers, and an era rich in creative
awareness that gave rise to prominent revolutionary figures like MLK and Malcolm X and others
together with musicians and artists who helped evolve the consciousness of humanity and
changed the world.
The first big question, especially for a southern Black crowd, might be how the civil
rights movement squares with Buttigieg's concerns about an era which saw Martin Luther
King, Jr.'s rise to political prominence, and his tragic assassination; an era that gave
prominence to the Black Panthers, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and many, many more Black
leaders, whose work is still relevant today. These people, their work, and their movement
are undoubtedly part of the "revolutionary politics of the 1960s."
Or maybe Buttigieg is talking about the people fed up with the homo- and transphobic
policies of the times, who rose up, in 1966, at Compton's Cafeteria in San Francisco, and
at the Stonewall Inn, in 1969, in New York? Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, two of the
most notably lionized figures to come out of Stonewall and the ensuing years of LGBTQ
organizing in New York, even put the word "revolution" in the name of the organization they
started to house and care for LGBTQ youth, the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries
(STAR).
Maybe Buttigieg is worried about other movements from the 1960s. It was the era that
gave us the Brown Berets, the Chicano movement, and an outburst of activism from migrant
farmworkers. The '60s saw the birth of the Native-led Red Power movement and the Indigenous
reclamation of Alcatraz Island. The bra-burning antics of the decade's feminists may be
misremembered, but it's indisputable that the 1960s gave us a powerful wave of new feminist
thought. Through it all, protests against the Vietnam War grabbed national attention. And
many of these movements had young people leading the way.
We must remember that the revolutionary politics of the '60s were, in many ways, a
response to the social order of the '50s. And just as Trump has pitched himself to America
great again in a specifically '50s way, we need to make space for the revolutionary
politics of the '60s to challenge the ways this nation has oppressed, and continues to
oppress, the people it's pledged to liberate.
Bernie Sanders witnessed one of the most powerful eras in American history and
participated in the struggle for civil rights. Buttigieg owes him gratitude, respect and owes
an apology to the generation of boomers who actively mobilized for achieving rights for the
oppressed at that time.
Buttigieg is a shallow, vacuous pompous pretender to the highest seat of power in the
wrong race at the wrong time getting schooled by an inspiring, authentic leader and his
legion of defenders.
The revolutionary spirit of the 60s has been awakened at a critical moment in history once
again and Bernie Sanders will lead it straight to the highest office in the land.
Bernie Sanders will defeat Donald Trump bringing with him a new generation of
revolutionary warriors ready to fight corruption, take on the pressing issues of this time
and the existential threat that looms ahead for all mankind.
It is no longer Trumptime. Trump was merely the catalyst for this moment to be seized. I
wrote this and believed it from the moment I joined this site, and I am convinced we are
embarking on what I envisioned then.
THE UNASSUMING, GENUINE BERNIE SANDERS WILL DEFEAT DONALD TRUMP AND THE MOMENT WILL BE
TRANSFORMATIVE, EXHILARATING AND HISTORICAL.
"... The key promise of neoliberalism, which came to power in the USA in 1980 with the election of Reagan (aka "the Quiet Coup")
was that "the rising tide lifts all boats." -- the redistribution of the wealth up somehow will lift the standard of living of lower
strata of the population too. This was a false promise from the very beginning (like everything about neoliberalism, which is based
on lies and fake economics in any case). So anger accumulated and now became the key factor in elections. This anger is directed against
the neoliberal establishment. ..."
"... The anger toward immigrants is, in fact, a displaced and projected anger against the elimination of meaningful and well-paid
jobs and replacing them with McJobs, the process that was the key factor in lowering the standard of living of the bottom 80% of the
population. ..."
"... The other part of this anger is directed toward the USA financial oligarchy (personified by such passionately hated figures
as Lloyd "we are doing God's" Blankfein, private equity sharks, and figures like Wexner/Epstein) and "political establishment" the key
figures of which many people would like to see hanging from street lamp posts (remember "Lock her up" movement in 2016). ..."
"... That's why the neoliberal establishment was forced to use to dirty tricks like Russiagate to patch the cracks in the neoliberal
façade. ..."
"... In Marxist terms, the USA entered the period called the "revolutionary situation" when the ruling neoliberal elite couldn't
govern "as usual" and "the deplorable" do not want to live "as usual". The situation when according to Hegel, "quantity turns into quality,"
or as Marx said "ideas become a material force when they grip the mind of the masses." ..."
I am old enough to remember when many very serious people ascribed the rise of Donald Trump to economic anxiety. The hypthesis
never fit the facts (his supporters had higher incomes on average than Clinton's) but it has become absurd. The level of self reported
economic anxiety is extraordinarily low
Yet now the Democratic party has an insurgent candidate candidate in the lead. I hasten to stress that I am not saying Sanders
supporters have much in common with Trump supporters (young vs old, strong hispanic support vs they hate Trump etc etc etc). But
both appeal to anger and advocate a radical break with business as usual. Both reject party establishments. Also Warren if a little
bit less so.
Trump's 2016 angry supporters still support him *and* they are still angry. He remains unpopular in spite of an economy performing
very well (and perceived to be performing very well).
Whatever is going on in 2020, it sure isn't economic anxiety.
Yet there is clearly anger and desire for radical change.
I don't pretend to understand it, but I think it probably has a lot to do with relative economic performance and increased
inequality. I can't understand why the reaction of so many Americans to this would be to hate immigrants and vote for Trump,
but, then I don't watch Fox News.
Trump's 2016 angry supporters still support him *and* they are still angry.
Many Trump "angry supporters" in 2016 used to belong to "anybody but Hillary" class (and they included a noticeable percentage
of Bernie supporters, who felt betrayed by DNC) .
They are lost for Trump as he now in many aspects represents the "new Hillary" and the slogan "anybody but Trump" is growing
in popularity. Even among Republicans: Trump definitely already lost a large part of anti-war Republicans and independents. As
well as. most probably, a part of working class as he did very little for them outside of effects of military Keynesianism.
I suspect he also lost a part of military voters, those who supported Tulsi. They will never vote for Trump.
He also lost a part of "technocratic" voters resentful of the rule of financial oligarchy (anti-swampers), as his incompetence
is now an undisputable fact.
He also lost Ron Paul's libertarians, who voted for him in 2016.
How "Coronavirus recession", if any, might affect 2020 elections is difficult to say, but in any case this is an unfavorable
for Trump event.
EMichael , February 25, 2020 10:39 am
"I can't understand why the reaction of so many Americans to this would be to hate immigrants and vote for Trump, but, then
I don't watch Fox News."
Coming to you since 1965. It's just that immigrants are now added to blacks. Trump took 50 years of the Southern Strategy,
took the dogwhistles completely out of the closet and wore his racism right on his chest. Helped that he had over 50 years of
experience as a racist, it came naturally to him.
And he attracted a new rw base, those who were not satisfied with dog whistles and/or did not hear them.
likbez , February 25, 2020 12:19 pm
I don't pretend to understand it, but I think it probably has a lot to do with relative economic performance and increased
inequality.
It is actually very easy to understand: the middle class fared very poorly since 1991. See
https://www.cnbc.com/id/44962589 . Now "the chickens come home
to roost," so to speak.
The key promise of neoliberalism, which came to power in the USA in 1980 with the election of Reagan (aka "the Quiet Coup")
was that "the rising tide lifts all boats." -- the redistribution of the wealth up somehow will lift the standard of living of
lower strata of the population too. This was a false promise from the very beginning (like everything about neoliberalism, which
is based on lies and fake economics in any case). So anger accumulated and now became the key factor in elections. This anger
is directed against the neoliberal establishment.
The anger toward immigrants is, in fact, a displaced and projected anger against the elimination of meaningful and well-paid
jobs and replacing them with McJobs, the process that was the key factor in lowering the standard of living of the bottom 80%
of the population.
The other part of this anger is directed toward the USA financial oligarchy (personified by such passionately hated figures
as Lloyd "we are doing God's" Blankfein, private equity sharks, and figures like Wexner/Epstein) and "political establishment"
the key figures of which many people would like to see hanging from street lamp posts (remember "Lock her up" movement in 2016).
Resentment against spending huge amounts of money for wars for sustaining and enlarging the global USA-centered neoliberal
empire is another factor. In this sense, impoverishment and shrinking of the middle class in the USA is similar to the same impoverishment
during the last days of the British colonial empire.
That's why the neoliberal establishment was forced to use to dirty tricks like Russiagate to patch the cracks in the neoliberal
façade.
In Marxist terms, the USA entered the period called the "revolutionary situation" when the ruling neoliberal elite couldn't
govern "as usual" and "the deplorable" do not want to live "as usual". The situation when according to Hegel, "quantity turns
into quality," or as Marx said "ideas become a material force when they grip the mind of the masses."
In 2016 that resulted in the election of Trump.
Add to this the fact that the neoliberal establishment (represented by both parties) now is clearly anti-social (the fact
that a private equity shark Romney was a presidential candidate and then was elected as senator tells a lot about the level of
degradation) and is unwilling to solve burning problems with medical insurance, minimal wage and other "the New Deal" elements
of social infrastructure.
Democratic Party platform now is to the right of Eisenhower republicans.
That dooms the party candidates like CIA-democrat Major Pete, or "the senator from the credit card companies" Biden,
and create an opening for political figures like Sanders (which are passionately hated by DNC)
Following shocking reports from TheNew York Times and The Washington Post that Moscow is simultaneously
working to both re-elect Donald Trump and ensure the nomination of Vermont Senator Bernie
Sanders in the Democratic presidential primary race, NNC has obtained further information
confirming that nearly all candidates currently running for president are in fact covert agents
of the Russian government.
According to sources familiar with the matter, the lone candidate not literally conducting
espionage on behalf of the Russian government is Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South
Bend, Indiana.
"Intelligence has revealed that Mr. Buttigieg is at this time the only candidate who we can
count on not to place our nation's interests square in the hands of Vladimir Putin," an
anonymous source in the Central Intelligence Agency told NNC on Saturday.
"In fact Mr. Buttigieg is the only candidate running with the skill, the experience and the
multilingual relatability needed to bridge our nation's deep divisions and bring Americans
together in this time of uncontrolled hostility," the CIA source continued.
"Because in truth, the unity of our togetherness is in the freedom of our democracy," added
the source. "The long and winding road to the American flag was built upon the steps of our
founding fathers. You don't have to be a big shot Washington insider to see that the problems
our nation faces are tearing us apart at our own peril with radical divisive rhetoric saying
you need to burn down the establishment and voice a concrete foreign policy position. And
that's why I for one believe we don't have to choose between revolution and the status quo: we
can come together and find solutions that help the working class and
billionaires."
Experts say these new revelations on Russian election interference should consume one
hundred percent of all news coverage for the entirety of 2020, and that Democrats should
definitely spend all their time from now until November focusing solely on President Trump's
suspicious ties to the Russian government.
"I can't think of a single thing that could possibly go wrong if Democrats focused
exclusively on the possibility that the president conspired with Vladimir Putin in the lead-up
to the election in November," said Les Overton of the influential think tank Americans for an
American America. "If Democrats want to prevent another four years of Trump they should hit him
where they know it hurts: nonstop 24/7 Russia conspiracy theories. That's what Americans really
care about."
Asked if it's possible that undue emphasis on Russian collusion could prove a fruitless
endeavor given Trump's soaring approval rating after impeachment resulted in his acquittal and
the Mueller report failed to indict a single American for conspiring with the Russian
government, Overton disagreed and said this time will be "like, totally different."
"Democrats should definitely invest all of their mental and emotional energy in this
Trump-Russia scandal, because this time it's a sure thing," Overton said. "Put all your eggs in
this basket and get your hopes up very, very high. The big BOOM is coming any minute now, I
promise."
Overton then departed with an envelope full of cash which he said was his life savings,
reportedly to invest in lottery tickets.
"... This is the real meaning behind the rise of Pete Buttigieg to second place among caucus voters in Iowa (though narrowly leading there in the number of pledged delegates) and in New Hampshire, and of the dramatic decline of Senator Elizabeth Warren in both U.S. states. ..."
"... Klobuchar is 20 years younger than Warren, far more controlled in public and not prone to Warren's hysteria. ..."
"... In fact, in so far as Pete Buttigieg is typical of anything, it is not the Democratic Party, the American Midwest, the state of Indiana or the modest mini-city of South Bend he has so manifestly failed to run impressively. ..."
"... Instead, Buttigieg is the latest classic example of what in these columns a year ago (March 29, 2019) I described as the phenomenon of the "Boy Toys" apparently cloned by the CIA as supposedly harmless puppets to (pretend to) run the West. ..."
"Yesterday, upon a stair
"I met a man who wasn't there
"He wasn't there again today
"I wish, I wish he'd go away."
-Hughes Mearns
This year, the Democratic Party caucus-goers of Midwest, prosperous Iowa and the voters of
hard-scrabble, post-industrial, impoverished Granite State New Hampshire 1,342 miles (2,160
kilometers) away agreed on a historic decision:
They put the fantasy of a wonderful, First-Ever Lady President of the United States behind
them and significantly tilted towards embracing a First-Ever, Openly Gay President instead.
This is the real meaning behind the rise of Pete Buttigieg to second place among caucus
voters in Iowa (though narrowly leading there in the number of pledged delegates) and in New
Hampshire, and of the dramatic decline of Senator Elizabeth Warren in both U.S. states.
Warren tried out different suits of political clothes and public policies through her
endlessly promoted but always hollow and insubstantial campaign. None of them fitted
convincingly on her.
Warren tried to be the candidate of the fake populist, fraudulent left championing Those In
Need –a familiar trope.
She did not realize that Senator Bernie Sanders – significantly always a flinty
Independent outside the Democratic Party mainstream – retained his rock-solid hold on his
supporters from 2016.
By the time Warren – not at all the brightest of political light bulbs –
realized her crucial mistake and tried to cut back to the Democrats' so-called moderate center
(the terms are actually meaningless, but universally swallowed by gullible Americans), it was
too late.
In reality, there is a much stronger and far more plausible mainstream lady Democratic
potential candidate.
Senator Amy Klobuchar comes from Minnesota and is far more a daughter of the vast American
Heartland than Warren, who grew up in Ohio, but fled it to Massachusetts and the fake
intellectual distinction of Harvard as quickly as she could.
Klobuchar is 20 years younger than Warren, far more controlled in public and not prone to
Warren's hysteria.
In terms of policy there is in reality little to differentiate them. But Klobuchar knows how
to superficially talk to Heartland Americans without convincing them she regards them as dumb
little poodle dogs –an absolutely vital requirement for any presidential contender in the
21st century United States. Warren, like Hillary Clinton before her, could never master that
vital skill.
However, as the contest outcomes in radically contrasting Iowa and New Hampshire show,
instead of Klobuchar's genuinely solid record after 12 years in the United States Senate,
Democratic voters are tilting towards Pete Buttigieg: a man who only been mayor of tiny
(100,000 population) South Bend, Indiana – and a far from distinguished mayor at
that.
Far from being Mr. Clean, Buttigieg in fact has a mysterious background in U.S. Naval
Intelligence and an astonishing degree of public support from scores of senior officials
in the
Secret State .
In fact Buttigieg has never been what he appears to be. He was accepted to Pembroke College
at Oxford University in England on a Rhodes scholarship – an elite path previously
followed by President Bill Clinton, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and warmongering
neocon columnist the late Charles Krauthammer among others.
He went to Harvard. He has literally scores of endorsements from extraordinarily high level
officials in the CIA and throughout the U.S. intelligence community on his web site.
He was a successful employed consultant at McKinsey for three years. His career trajectory
closely parallels that of President Emmanuel Macron of France, the supposedly super-smart,
highly sheltered and arrogant little policy wonk always ready to ax the jobs and lives of
hundreds of thousands of ordinary families on the sacred altar of "efficiency."
Buttigieg served in the U.S. Navy Reserve in intelligence. He had a seven month deployment
in Afghanistan in 2014 for which he was awarded the Joint Service Commendation Medal. Yet he
never rose beyond the level of lieutenant – the bottom rank of officers. And he has all
these Deep State endorsements.
In fact, in so far as Pete Buttigieg is typical of anything, it is not the Democratic Party,
the American Midwest, the state of Indiana or the modest mini-city of South Bend he has so
manifestly failed to run impressively.
Instead, Buttigieg is the latest classic example of what in these columns a year ago (March
29, 2019) I described as the phenomenon of the "Boy Toys" apparently cloned by the CIA as
supposedly harmless puppets to (pretend to) run the West.
As I wrote at the time, there is an astonishing element of similarity to all these figures.
They are all in their forties or late 30s (Buttigieg is 38). They could all pass as teenagers.
They all project an attempted air of wholesomeness and earnest idealism which their records
reveal as utterly fraudulent. And none of them has any record of distinction in either domestic
or international affairs.
"Little Pete" Buttigieg fits this profile eerily: Like the rest of them, he was plucked from
nowhere on the basis of nothing more profound than his willingness to swallow the same old
internationalist, liberal, free trade party line to cover endless aggressions, fostered coups,
civil wars and other crimes against humanity.
Buttigieg, like his fellow Boy Toys is also a perfect candidate to be, in the wonderful
words with which Alice Roosevelt Longworth dismissed 1948 U.S. presidential candidate Tom
Dewey, the little toy man on top of a giant wedding cake.
The Mighty Mayor of South Bend is also a convincing candidate to be the Last Ever President
of the United States: For he is the natural successor to Romulus Augustulanus, the ludicrous
teenage last legal emperor of Rome (for less than a year) in 475-6 AD.
Rhodes Scholar. Afghan vet. Mayor. An impressive resume, to be sure, but to have made the
fantastic leap from local politics to the doorstep of the Oval Office – at the age of
just 38 – seems altogether impossible without some serious behind-the-scenes
connections.
Let's just cut right to the chase with a couple questions that the media has glaringly
failed to consider about the top-polling Democratic presidential candidate. First, the most
obvious one. How on earth does a young Midwestern mayor, regardless of his polished resume,
jump to the front of the serving line, past hundreds of veteran politicians who have quietly
nurtured presidential ambitions inside of the Beltway their entire lives?
As The Economist emphatically stated this week, "Mr Buttigieg is ridiculously young to be
doing so well."
Second, if the mayor of South Bend, Indiana (pop. 101,166) is now in serious contention to
challenge Donald Trump in November, what exactly does that say about the depth of the
Democratic bench, loaded as it is with Senators, House members, Governors and various state
officials with far more political experience and acumen?
Today, LGBTQ+ youth in America aren't just grappling with a crisis of belonging in their
communities, many are left without a home or a place to sleep. I am so proud of @PeteButtigieg 's
agenda for housing justice and what it means for vulnerable youth. https://t.co/btn2zKDrXd
While the Oval Office has seen its share of pretenders, and even actors, the great majority
of those men who made it to the pinnacle of power have spent at least some time in high
political office before contemplating a presidential run. Incidentally, it is on this
particular point, political experience, which could make a Trump-Buttigieg debate a very
interesting spectacle. Although Buttigieg has limited political experience, Trump had none
before he entered the White House, although certainly proving his abilities once in office.
For Pete's sake!
Born on January 19, 1982, Buttigieg graduated valedictorian from St. Joseph High School in
2000. That same year he won a JFK 'Profiles in Courage'
essay contest on the subject of none other than Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist
the incredibly rising mayor is competing against for the November nod. "Above all, I commend
Bernie Sanders for giving me an answer to those who say American young people see politics as a
cesspool of corruption, beyond redemption," Buttigieg wrote. His trip to Washington D.C. to
collect his prize included a meeting
with members of the Kennedy clan, an honor that must have left a deep impression on the 18 year
old.
Upon graduation from Harvard University, Buttigieg did a stint (2007-2010) at the Chicago
office of McKinsey & Co, the discreet U.S. management consulting firm. During his time
there, the young upstart took a trip to perhaps the most unlikely destinations in the world,
Somaliland, a self-proclaimed independent state in Africa that is struggling for international
recognition to this day. In other words, not a trip to Disneyland.
Just before embarking on his African adventure (Summer of 2008), Buttigieg was taken on as a
fellow with the Truman National Security Project, a neoliberal think tank that has been
described as "a
powerful and exclusive club for the best and brightest young progressives in the country."
Among its esteemed alumni is none other than Madeleine Albright, chief architect of NATO's
obliteration of Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, the founder of the Truman Project, Rachel Kleinfeld,
deserves some consideration.
Upon graduating from Oxford, Kleinfeld took up employment with Booz Allen Hamilton, the
private contractor that carried out a long list of services for the military. It has also been
described as "the world's most profitable spy organization." The head of the company at the
time was none other than James Woolsey, the neoconservative former CIA director who has
advocated
for a fiercely interventionist U.S. foreign policy, notably the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Back to Somaliland. In addition to Buttigieg's affiliation with the Truman Center, where he
now sits on the advisory board, his Somalian 'vacation' managed to garner special attention in
The New York Times, suggesting this was much more than your ordinary getaway.
"Somaliland is pursuing investment and support from China and Gulf countries," Buttigieg
wrote in the Times piece, co-authored by Nathaniel Myers, who also went along for the
joyride. "Such support might be enough to ensure Somaliland's survival and eventual growth, but
it will crowd out America's chance to win the gratitude of a potentially valuable ally in a
very troubled area."
Possibly more than just incidentally, Myers, a Harvard buddy of Buttigieg, now serves as
Senior Transition Advisor at USAID – Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI), which works
to
destabilize governments deemed unfavorable to U.S. interests.
Just over a year later, in September 2009, Buttigieg, and despite his participation in
anti-war rallies while at Harvard, signed up for the U.S. Navy Reserve. Due to his particular
"pedigree,"
writes Stars and Stripe magazine, he was sworn in as an ensign in naval intelligence
without any prior preparation, which is not the traditional route for enlistees. In 2014, he
was deployed to Afghanistan, which required Buttigieg to take a seven-month leave of absence
from his mayoral duties in South Bend. Here is where the political upstart's career begins to
look a little sketchy.
According to The Grayzone, Buttigieg "spent his six months in Afghanistan in 2014 with a
little-known unit that operated under the watch of the Drug Enforcement Administration. It was
the Afghanistan Threat Finance Cell (ATFC), according to his appointment papers."
What exactly did Special Officer Pete Buttigieg do in this unit, which was founded by none
other than the future CIA chief General David Patreaus, who at the time was the head of U.S.
Central Command? Well, that's hard to say because the job description that appears in his
discharge
papers is left conveniently blank. This, and the fact that the ATFC has direct links to
U.S. intelligence has fueled rumors with regards to who or what was responsible for placing the
mayor of South Bend, Indiana on the political fast lane.
But those sorts of connections alone cannot explain Buttigieg's meteoric rise in Washington,
D.C., especially when the young upstart spent the majority of his time in South Bend. No, Pete
Buttigieg would require boatloads of cash to earn such fame in such a short time. And as it
turns out, the money has been pouring into his coffers from some of the wealthiest families in
the country.
The spook's choice: Coup plotters and CIA agents fill Mayor Pete's list of national
security endorsers @Cancel_Sam looks at Buttigieg's new
roster of endorsements from high-ranking spies, regime-change architects, and global
financiers https://t.co/RBQTnDKu7g
According to federal election data, forty billionaires and their spouses have donated to
Pete Buttigieg's presidential campaign, putting his campaign war chest at around $52 million,
the most collected among all the Democratic candidates. An analysis of the contributions shows
that the majority of the billionaire donators came from the financial, media and technology
sectors.
In something that should surprise no one, Pete Buttigieg's Monday fundraiser in San
Francisco is sold out at the upper-most level ($2,800), which doesn't happen too often.
pic.twitter.com/6YFcbn2yfd
Of particular interest, however, is how much the tech titans of Silicon Valley have lavished
the democratic frontrunner with attention as well as infusions of hard cash. In December, for
example, Rex Reed, co-founder of Netflix, helped organize a fundraising dinner at a wine cellar
in Palo Alto, California, which gave Buttigieg's Democratic opponents a golden opportunity to
expose his billionaire connections.
"Billionaires in wine caves should not pick the next president of the United States,"
Elizabeth Warren told Buttigieg in a December debate.
Buttigieg responded that he was "literally the only person on this stage who is not a
millionaire or a billionaire," and that therefore Warren had failed the "purity test."
I find it "Ironic" that suddenly Wine Caves Are The Hot Topic On All News #WineCaves
The California winemakers who hosted a dinner at a "wine cave" for [D] Con Party
presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg are defending the fundraising event https://t.co/VjI26zj41a
It's not just billionaires, however, who are cracking open their wallets for the Indiana
native. The list includes more than 200 foreign policy and intelligence officials, including
Anthony Lake, national security adviser for President Clinton, former National Security Council
spokesman Ned Price, and former deputy CIA director David Cohen, among many others. Although
such support from the foreign policy and intelligence community doesn't prove cause and effect,
it has helped spawn a number of
online conspiracy theories that Buttigieg is something of a Manchurian candidate, propped
up by a deep state desperate to beat the swamp drainer Donald J. Trump.
Those ideas were brought to a boil during the Iowa caucus when the aptly named app Shadow,
designed to perform the simple task of reporting the polling results in a timely and efficient
manner, fizzled out just as Bernie Sanders had taken a commanding lead over Buttigieg. Would it
come as any surprise that Shadow Inc. has a very shadowy history?
"Shadow Inc. was picked in secret by the Iowa Democratic Party after its leaders consulted
with the Democratic National Committee on vetting vendors and security protocols for developing
a phone app used to gather and tabulate the caucus results," AP reported . "Shadow Inc. was launched
by ACRONYM, a nonprofit corporation founded in 2017 by Tara McGowan, a political strategist who
runs companies aimed at promoting Democratic candidates and priorities."
McGowan is married to none other than Michael Halle, a senior strategist for Pete
Buttigieg's presidential campaign, which records show has also paid Shadow Inc. $42,500 for the
use of software.
And people wonder why there are so many 'conspiracy theorists' running around these
days.
In any case, the glitch led to many days of debate as to who really won the Midwestern
state, a debate that continues today. Yet despite that state of mass confusion, Buttigieg
didn't miss an opportunity to seize victory from the claws of (possible) defeat,
announcing just hours after the technological breakdown that he had been "victorious" in
Iowa. Meanwhile, Sanders' supporters saw it as yet another brazen move by the DNC to sideline
the democratic socialist.
So how does one explain the incredible string of political success for the young star of the
Democratic Party? Is he really so politically talented and smart that there was no choice but
to let him move to the front of the pack? That seems hard to believe since his speeches come
off as hollow and scripted, a rhetorical trick that many politicians with far more experience
have perfected. And how about all those billionaires, former state officials and people from
the national security apparatus who have come forward to support him? A case of billionaire
grassroots democracy in action, or just more good luck for the South Bend native?
As it stands, Pete Buttigieg remains a great mystery, a proverbial dark horse on the U.S.
political scene. While there can be no question that he has a long future in American politics,
it is too early to tell if that will be a good thing for the American people. There is still a
lot of unpacking to do on the life and times of the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
A prominent health care activist called out South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg 's "Medicare for All who
want it" plan, arguing it merely preserves the status quo for the health care industry.
"It preserves the status quo to a large extent. It keeps the insurance industry fully in
charge of our health care system, and that is why we're having this debate in the first place,"
Wendell Potter, a former health care executive who now serves as president of Medicare for All
Now, said on Hill.TV's "Rising" Thursday.
"Pete's plan would thrill them because it lets them keep doing the things that they've been
doing and making profits off of all of us," he added of the former South Bend, Ind. mayor's
plan.
Health care has emerged as one of the chief fissures in the Democratic primary field, with
the candidates battling over how far to expand coverage for Americans.
Sen. Bernie Sanders
(I-Vt.), the leading progressive in the field, has proposed a "Medicare for All" plan that
would scrap private insurance and introduce a single-payer system.
Centrists like Buttigieg have instead introduced plans to expand the Affordable Care Act and
include a Medicare option for those who want it.
Moderates have slammed Sanders' plan as too expensive, though Sanders has said his proposal
would offset costs already besetting families, such as high premiums.
- His time at McKinsey was focused on "economic development" in Iraq/Afghanistan
- His own campaign materials advertise the time he has spent at "black sites" in Iraq
- His milquetoast policies are a perfect red herring for awful deep state policies
- Clearly is in possession of CIA-grade brainwashing tech ala-Men in Black. There is no other
plausible explanation for the recent "Mayor Pete" dance.
These are my thoughts. Discuss.
Finale Inventory / Eng huHG50 Mayor Pete is just a guy from a wealthy white family
that wants to stroke his own ego by running for president. his policy is to keep the status
quo and ramble on about how we need to come together to do nothing. No CIA/Deep state
conspiracy, just incompetence.
Finale Inventory / Eng huHG50 Pete isn't going to win the Mid West. I live in
mid west and grew up here. Plenty of homophobic people in rural areas. His plan is to
maintain status quo just like Hillary which is why she lost to Trump. In primary, Bernie
Sanders won pretty much every rural part of the state over Hillary and beat her in
Michigan overall. Bernie is our best shot at beating Trump. He pushes for change but is
more honest than Trump, people here will love that he wants to help the working
class.
Former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg is a rising star
in the Democratic Party. A mere year ago, few could have picked him out of a police lineup. Now he's the
presumptive front-runner of the centrist faction of the party and – for the moment, at least – the most likely
person for "Stop Bernie" forces to coalesce around.
But few know much about him, if anything. His personal biography seems to revolve
around two data points. First, that he's a gay Christian. Second, that he's a former Navy intelligence officer.
The latter of the two has not had any significant scrutiny. When "Mayor Pete's"
military record is subjected to even the slightest bit of observation, however, some disturbing facts and damning
questions begin to leap out. The question at the bottom continues to be: Who is Pete Buttigieg?
Mayor Pete likes to talk a lot about his deployment to Afghanistan (more on that
later), but he also spent some time in Iraq when he was working for McKinsey and Company as an energy, retail,
economic development, and logistics consultant. He makes a passing reference to having been in a "safe house in
Iraq" in 2007, in his memoir Shortest Way Home. Indeed, Buttigieg spent time in both Iraq and Afghanistan while he
was working with McKinsey and Company. This time period (2007-2010) also overlaps with his time as a Naval
intelligence officer (2009-2017).
McKinsey isn't just any global management consulting firm. They have a contract
with the Department of Defense as part of a broader Task Force on Business and Stability Operations. This project
was criticized by Minnesota Congresswoman Betty McCollum in 2011, as an inappropriate use of military resources.
Why, after all, is the military being used to create an attractive investment and growth environment for American
companies? One of the tasks carried out by the task force was to help Kate Spade source raw materials for her
handbags.
In 2009, McKinsey was given an $18.6 million contract that expanded their work from
Afghanistan into Iraq.
Pete refuses to answer questions about what he was doing with McKinsey during this
period, citing a non-disclosure agreement that's over 10 years old. What we do know, however, is that Buttigieg
was stationed in Herat Province for part of his resumé-building tour of duty, where McKinsey was also very active.
Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of dots to connect here, but the dots we have are
worth noticing. Just like it's worth noticing that Buttigieg found time to volunteer for Barack Obama's 2008
presidential campaign, Pat Bauer's Indiana gubernatorial campaign, and enlist in the United States Navy – all
while he was still working at his high-powered consulting gig with McKinsey. He finally left McKinsey in 2010,
when he launched his losing bid for Indiana State Treasurer.
Pete Buttigieg: Navy Intelligence Officer
How
exactly did Mayor Pete end up in the Navy? It's interesting for a man who touts his service so readily, that he's
reticent to discuss it in any detail. This is no doubt related to the classified nature of his work, but it's
probably also related to how he ended up in the Navy in the first place.
The Navy Reserve's
direct commission officer program
allows ambitious young professionals to pad their resumé with military
service (usually in intelligence and public affairs) without having to go through tedious processes like basic
training or officer candidate school. Indeed, the program has men like Buttigieg in mind: Those who want to serve,
but not so badly that they're going to put their civilian careers at risk to do so.
A highly competitive program, it receives thousands of applicants every year,
accepting around a quarter of them.
This program has become de rigueur for a certain type of politically inclined
social climber. Indeed, several senior members of the Trump Administration have used this program to add military
service to their resumés. Sean Spicer, Reince Pribus and Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie are just three
within the Administration who have benefitted from this program. It's also popular with the rich and politically
connected: George P. Bush, Hunter Biden, and Jimmy Pannetta are all alums.
The alums from this program form a tight-knit network within the government,
including at the CIA, with many officers having served at Guantanamo. Buttigieg's former commander was once the
chief linguist at Gitmo, according to his
LinkedIn page
.
Buttigieg likes to brag about his 119 trips outside the wire, but what was he
actually doing on those missions? It's difficult to say, especially when his
DD-214 was left blank
.
What we do know is that Buttigieg was assigned to the Afghan Threat Finance Cell,
whose ostensible purpose is combating the drug trade that exploded there after the American invasion in 2001.
According to Buttigieg, while there he worked closely with
every civilian intelligence alphabet agency
.
There are other strange bullet points on Buttigieg's CV. Like the time he stopped
off in Somaliland, a
de facto
independent state from Somalia, and spent 24 hours interviewing government
officials in 2008, before he was in the Navy. This escapade received a glowing, first-person report in the
New York Times
that reads more like a carefully crafted press release than real journalism or op-ed.
One doesn't simply just hop over to Somaliland on a whim. It's a difficult place to
get to, and once you get there, there's nothing going on. But Buttigieg made it in and was able to liaise with top
government officials who just happened to be offering up their main port to AFRICOM, a boon that would certainly
benefit the intelligence community Buttigieg later became cozy with.
Pete Buttigieg: Presidential Candidate
Buttigieg's
endorsements likewise raise questions. Why, for example, does a who's who of spooks and coup plotters want the
mayor of a small Indiana city to be the leader of the free world?
Former CIA Deputy Director David S. Cohen
is a big-time backer of Mayor Pete. Known as "the sanctions guru,"
he crafted the sanctions the Obama Administration levied on Iran, North Korea and Russia. Cohen continues to
appear before think tanks encouraging intervention in
Venezuela
. Other spook endorsements come from
Charlie Gilbert
, former deputy director of the CIA's
National Clandestine Service
, John Bair, former chief of staff of the CIA's Middle East Task Force, and
Dennis Bowden
, who spent 26 years in vaguely defined "executive leadership positions" in the CIA among other
CIA bigwigs.
Robert Stasio
, former chief of operations at the NSA Cyber Center,
Robin Walker
, former deputy intelligence officer of the Director of National Intelligence and
William Wechsler
, former deputy assistant secretary for special ops at the Department of Defense are three
spook backers of Mayor Pete outside of the CIA.
Why Mayor Pete? Because much like the spook community's previous favorite,
President Barack Obama
(whose partisans continue rear guard action against the Trump Administration through
the intel community), Pete is an empty slate with a thin resume and no convictions. His electoral appeal is mostly
an imagined yearning of middle America for a gay Christian president, a bizarre fever dream of the media class.
For what it's worth, Pete's backers, be they spooks or not, do not seem to be
taking "no" for an answer. Signs point toward the recent electoral debacle in Iowa as not the shambling disaster
of an incompetent Democratic Party, but as a naked power grab.
For anyone unaware, the results of the Iowa caucuses took the better part of a week
to resolve, thanks to technical difficulties stemming from an app used to tabulate and track voting.
Indeed, the debacle surrounding Shadow (the name of the app used to count and track
votes during the Iowa caucuses) has all the marks of a psyop. Rather than fudging the vote numbers (which there is
evidence for at the esoteric state delegate equivalent level
, where delegates are actually decided), perhaps
the goal was simply to allow Buttigieg to declare victory, reap the media whirlwind that results from winning the
Iowa caucuses and prevent his chief rival, Senator Bernie Sanders, from doing the same.
Buttigieg's campaign was invested in Shadow
to the tune of $42,500. Sadly for his campaign, New Hampshire's
elections are more straightforward, with hacking protections firmly in place and thus, much harder to steal.
It's not necessary for Mayor Pete to be a card-carrying CIA agent or a registered
asset with a handler straight out of a spy novel. It's simply sufficient for him to traffic in the same circles,
share the same values and be on board with the program.
You don't have to be a spook to do a spook's job. For those who spend enough time
in that world, it simply
becomes a matter of habit
.
Looking for all of your news in one place? Try
Whatfinger
,
your one-stop aggregator of news, opinion and everything else.
2 Responses to "Deep State Mayor Pete: Could Former Naval Intelligence Officer Pete Buttigieg
Be a CIA Asset?"
Rosemary
Friday, February 14, 2020 at 12:32 PM
Obama: Unknown on the national stage, one term senator who did nothing, Harvard Grad (?) smooth talker,
periods of disappearance from the country, birth place questionable, percieved as gay, fake parental parents,
maybe CIA etc
Mayor Pete: Unknown on national stage, no experience other than failed Mayor of city, maybe CIA, gay,
Harvard Grad, Rhodes Scholar, father known communist, Pete praised socialism in essay in high school (learned
by father ?) and awarded prize by Carolyn Kennedy, smooth talker, etc. Who is pushing and grooming these ppl to
run for office as DEMOCRATS?
This research raises a ton of questions. The motivations of those would commit time and resources to this
certainly need examination. I regard it as public knowledge that roughly 20 democrats elected to Congress in
the last round were former CIA members. What's up with that?
The more we learn about the CIA, the more we learn that they violated their mandate to stick to work outside
the country, a very very long time ago. So, you have a shadowy organization with privileged secrecy planting
journalists, producing all manner of misinformation and dysinformation, running sting operations, killing
people at will with no repercussions, compiling huge dossiers on individual Americans rivaling the collection
held by the FBI.
It makes you wonder. What is their goal? What is the desired end state which they wish to acheive? I don't
know, but like so many others, I don't trust them. Born "extra-constitutional" and that way they have stayed.
So, along comes this weirdo liberal who is articulate but feels phoney. Now comes the suggestion he is a CIA
asset. Problem is that once you slap that label on, everything gets called into question, including his bio.
Will he turn out to be another liar like Blumenthal? Will he turn out to be another exaggerating phoney like
John Kerry? That's the funny thing about misinformation and dysinformation. When they are walking down the
street and bump into Mr. Truth,there could be a problem or two for Mr. Buttigieg.
The Deep State has gone all-in on its preferred candidate to replace Donald Trump in 2020:
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg. If you're thinking that Buttigieg is just another
"flash in the pan," flavor-of-the-month frontrunner like John Edwards or Howard Dean of years
past well, you're probably right.
But until Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren cut his throat, "Mayor Pete" is now the
ostensible front-runner among the Democrats, having raised $7 million in Deep State
contributions during the first quarter of 2019.
Here's a conundrum: If Democrats are truly concerned that interference in our elections by
shady, corrupt Russian crime lords is the most serious problem America faces, then they should
be worried about Pete Buttigieg. Very worried.
Who is Pete Buttigieg and why does the Deep State love him so much? He has a perfect resume:
Rhodes scholar, Navy reservist, youngest mayor ever elected in South Bend, Indiana. No
scandals. Buttigieg is like a blank-slate CIA operative who appeared out of nowhere like Barack
Obama. But he's twice as gay! Democrats view Buttigieg as a two-for-one special: He's got all
the wacky socialist policies, but his personal lifestyle choice makes him King of all
Democrats.
"Oh, look! Mayor Pete has a 'husband!' That's so cute!"
They also think that because Buttigieg is a protected minority, it's as if he's somehow
criticism-proof. He has a built-in victimhood status, so no one would dare commit a
thought-crime against the guy by criticizing his policies.
Um Democrats have you heard of this guy who's running for reelection? Donald Trump? His
mouth has no "off" switch when it comes to verbal improprieties. That's why so many Americans
love President Trump, so don't think that Buttigieg's victimhood status is going to get him a
free pass on the debate stage.
The mainstream media – which is an integral part of the Deep State – all
received their Buttigieg talking points on the same day. This was hilarious to watch, because
no one had ever heard of the guy before that day. It was like watching Wolf Blitzer refer to
"Barack Osama bin uh Obama" all over again.
Watching news anchors stumble over "Butta Butta uh " over and over again was a real treat. A
couple of reporters who dashed in too quickly called him "Butt-gouge" and "Butt-tag" –
two unfortunate mispronunciations, given Mayor Pete's proclivities.
Anyway, who is this guy? How does a complete no-name like this come out of the woodwork and
have Joe Scarborough of MSNBC declaring him to be the most electrifying candidate he's seen
since Barack Obama?
Answer: Total Deep State.
You really have to do some digging to figure out the true story behind Buttigieg. One clue
is in Buttigieg's official bio:
"Pete worked for McKinsey & Company, a top consulting firm, where he was responsible for
advising senior business and government leaders on major decisions related to economic
development, energy policy, strategic business initiatives, and logistics. His work took him
around the country and the world "
The staff at McKinsey and Company reads like a veritable who's-who of the CIA Deep State
globalist elites. Past "executives" at McKinsey and Company have included such globalist
masters of the universe as Cheryl Sandberg of Facebook, Susan "Benghazi was caused by a YouTube
video" Rice and that vapid, airheaded child of privilege Chelsea Clinton.
Pete Buttigieg's former employer McKinsey and Company has a ton of ties to corrupt Russian
oligarchs, Russian crime lords, Russian banks and Russian energy companies. They developed the
"business strategy" of VEB Bank in Russia, a corrupt banking cartel that's under sanction by
the Trump administration and the State Department.
Numerous McKinsey executives have left the company and gone to work directly as lobbyists
for corrupt Russian companies that are under US sanction. We wouldn't be surprised to learn
that McKinsey was involved in Crooked Hillary's deal to sell America's nuclear reserves to
Uranium One in Russia.
McKinsey and Company has also worked on image consulting and helping to prop up Victor
Yanukovych. If that name sounds vaguely familiar, Yanukovych is the corrupt former pro-Russian
president of Ukraine – you know, the one who paid Paul Manafort under the table and ended
up getting him sent to prison?
The Kremlin absolutely loves Pete Buttigieg. He's made their business interests a lot
of money. That's where "Mayor Pete" really came from and who he really is. If you're really
concerned about Russian meddling in America's elections, keep an eye on Sneaky Pete. He's their
preferred candidate.
Buttigieg's campaign paid Shadow $42,500 for "software rights and subscriptions." They
had no role in the app used by the Iowa Democratic Party.
The presidential campaigns for former Vice President Joe Biden and U.S. Sen. Kirsten
Gillibrand, who has since dropped out of the race, also reported paying Shadow for services
in 2019.
..."The app that 'failed' in Iowa last night was developed by a software company called
Shadow," one such tweet said .
"Shadow was paid by Pete Buttigieg campaign last summer. Pete Buttigieg has now claimed victory
before any precincts have reported. What's that about election interference?"
The Iowa
Democratic Party failed to announce the winner of the state's Feb. 3 Democratic caucus thanks
to
what it called a "coding issue" in an app it planned to use to tabulate results, the New
York Times reported. People who were briefed on the app by the state party said that it wasn't
properly tested on a statewide scale, according to the paper, and reported only partial data.
"As part of our investigation, we determined with certainty that the underlying data
collected via the app was sound," said Iowa Democratic Party Chair Troy Price. "While the app
was recording data accurately, it was reporting out only partial data. We have determined that
this was due to a coding issue in the reporting system. This issue was identified and fixed.
The application's reporting issue did not impact the ability of precinct chairs to report data
accurately."
... ... ...
How is Pete Buttigieg involved?
Even though caucus results were delayed, Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg
was triumphant, tweeting early in the morning on Feb. 4 that he was heading "to New Hampshire
victorious." Later that day, during an interview with MSNBC, he seemed to
temper that announcement, saying that the campaign was reviewing internal numbers and began
to realize "something extraordinary had happened."
"Here you have a campaign that was really questioned when we got in for whether we even
oughta be here, whether we belonged in this race, and to not only establish that, but to reach
the position that we did was a clear victory for our campaign," he said.
On social media, some users started to speculate that what they interpreted as a victory
announcement was a sign of corruption. Conspiracy theories began to spread that the election
had been rigged in Buttigieg's favor because of his connection to Shadow.
Some claims, such as that the Iowa caucus app was funded by Buttigieg, mischaracterize what
we know.
Buttigieg's campaign, Pete for America, Inc., paid Shadow $42,500 for "software rights and
subscriptions."
Sean Savett, a spokesman for the campaign, told PolitiFact that they contracted with Shadow
for text messaging services to help them contact voters.
It was "totally unrelated" to the app Shadow built for the caucuses, he said; Buttigieg's
campaign wasn't involved in the app's development.
The world is on fire. But for an increasingly vocal segment of extremely online politicos,
there is a greater geopolitical concern hanging over the election: the fear that Pete
Buttigieg is secretly an asset, officer, or agent of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The conspiracy theory that Buttigieg is a CIA plant has been congealing in the internet's
fever swamps for as long as profiles of the young candidate have fixated on a biography that,
to the conspiracy-minded, seems almost suspiciously clean -- the perceived threats of
neoliberal imperialists and the "deep state" converging in the unlikely form of a dweebish
Midwestern mayor.
"He's one of the many intelligence community operators working in government," Steve
Poikonen, host of the YouTube vlog series Slow News Day, said confidently in an April episode
titled "Pete Buttigieg: CIA Democrat?" In a 13-minute video delineating the conspiracy
theory, Poikonen breaks down what he sees as Buttigieg's Harvard-to-Oxford educational
pipeline, his service as a Navy Intelligence officer in Afghanistan after a stint at McKinsey
& Co., his fellowship at the Truman National Security Project, and the more than 200
national security and intelligence figures who have endorsed his candidacy, including the
former head of the National Clandestine Service and the agency's former deputy director.
These, Poikonen told The Daily Beast, all amount to evidence that he's a perfect tool of
the intelligence community.
"Put together, a picture forms of an elite-educated, multi-language-speaking employee of
the CIA's consulting firm who currently serves as an intelligence officer in the naval
reserves," Poikonen told The Daily Beast. "If you created a CIA asset in a lab, you'd wind up
with Pete Buttigieg."
"He's talkin' to his gut like it's a person!!" -me
"dumpster diving isn't professional." - angelatc " When you are divided, and angry, and controlled, you target those 'different' from
you, not those responsible [controllers]" -Q
"Each of us must choose which course of action we should take: education, conventional
political action, or even peaceful civil disobedience to bring about necessary changes.
But let it not be said that we did nothing." - Ron Paul
In fairness, Buttigieg's own past offers material for conspiratorial pickings. At the consulting firm McKinsey, Buttigieg
helped advise on grocery pricing for the Canadian grocery giant Loblaws -- a company later implicated in an
industrywide price-fixing scheme for bread
. McKinsey has also been a favorite contractor for the CIA, although that
work was more about
reorganizing
the agency's bureaucracy than rigging elections.
After that, Buttigieg joined the Navy Reserve and deployed to Afghanistan, where he did intelligence work, among other
things. It's not quite clear where, in his work history, Buttigieg was supposedly recruited to work for the agency. Nor
can anyone seem to explain how his military role somehow switched over into work for the CIA, beyond both roles involving
intelligence. It's rare for an intelligence officer to use as his cover being an intelligence officer.
That hasn't mattered much for an audience that likes to see the CIA under every stone. It was likely
Chapo Trap House
-- a
very popular political comedy podcast, boasting over 35,000 paid subscribers and hundreds of thousands of listeners per
episode, that is fanatically supportive of Sanders -- that got #CIAPete trending on twitter. On the first episode of the podcast
after the delayed Iowa results were reported, one co-host, Will Menaker, concluded that the caucuses "had probably done
more to destroy the legitimacy of our democratic process than almost anything that happened in American history." Other
hosts chimed in with their agreement.
Menaker turned to Buttigieg, calling him, his campaign, supporters, and all involved in the Democratic Party "ratfuck
pieces of shit," concluding they were all guilty of electoral fraud.
Co-host Amber A'Lee Frost jumped in to add, "We would actually be sending in troops if we were a South American country
right now."
"Can you imagine if, in any Central or South American country, what happened last night took place?" Menaker agreed.
"Pete Buttigieg literally did the
Juan Guaidó
playbook. If
you don't think this guy is CIA-affiliated by now, I don't know what to tell you. This is straight out of the McKinsey-CIA
election-stealing ratfucking playbook. He declared himself the victor exactly like Juan Guaidó did with no support or evidence
for it."
... ... ...
Buttigieg did, indeed, declare victory in the Iowa caucuses before the results were in -- because the quirky rules of the
Iowa caucuses mean anyone can, roughly, count the results themselves....
Ludicrous as they are, the conspiracy theories are strangely apt for this primary season.
... ... ...
Virtually the whole field has taken the symbolic step to oppose America's engagement in so-called forever wars. But not
since Eugene McCarthy, who first pushed for congressional oversight of the CIA, and George McGovern, who helped
publicize
the assassination attempts on Cuba's Fidel Castro, has the party had a front-runner dove like Sanders.
Given that they are all too aware of America's actual history with political subterfuge abroad, it's not all that surprising
that Sanders's supporters, in particular, see coups behind every corner.
But fans of Sanders should really study up on the very cases he cites, because they offer a useful guide to the CIA playbook.
And they help explain why the idea of the agency putting its finger on the scale of the Iowa caucuses, at least with any
kind of success, is comical.
A frequent example of CIA coup involvement Sanders cites, 1973
ouster
of Chilean President Salvador Allende, is particularly instructive in showing just how flat-footed the CIA can
be.
The CIA spent much of the 1960s funding right-wing and Christian democratic groups in Chile in an effort to thwart a
socialist rise. They couldn't even do that properly, and in 1970 the left-wing Allende won in a three-way race.
"President Nixon informed the [director of central intelligence] that an Allende regime in Chile would not be acceptable
to the United States," reads a 2000 CIA
review
of the operation.
So the CIA dropped the subtle skullduggery and began providing weapons to anti-socialist elements in Chile -- factions of
which kidnapped and killed an army commander who refused to block Allende. Still, the CIA couldn't get a proper coup off
the ground, and Allende took office. The agency kept it up for the following three years, continuously communicating with
and providing intelligence to right-wing groups, including in the military. U.S. money indirectly supported a trucker strike,
which kept supermarkets bare, stoked unrest, and ultimately helped force Allende from power.
...His successor, Augusto Pinochet, would become one of the most brutal dictators in South America. Some
3,200 Chileans were killed or disappeared
during his 17-year rule. The CIA, generally satisfied to have an anti-communist
in power, cut off its aid to moderate and democratic activists.
The CIA's ham-fisted tactics were applied across Central and South America. Sanders
rattled off
a few examples in a foreign-policy interview with the
New York Times.
"The United States overthrew the government of Guatemala, a democratically elected government, overthrew the government
of Brazil," Sanders told the
Times.
"I strongly oppose U.S. policy, which overthrows governments, especially
democratically elected governments, around the world."
In 1954, the CIA ran an incredibly expensive and widespread campaign in Guatemala to prop up a right-wing, anti-communist
movement, largely through anti-communist media and propaganda. When that didn't take, the CIA chartered a private air force
to start bombing military installations. After that, an internal CIA cable instructed that it was time for "the surgeons
to step back and the nurses to take over the patient," according to Tim Weiner's history of the CIA,
Legacy of Ashes.
Through "brute force and blind luck," Weiner writes, the plot worked. Leftist President Jacobo Árbenz was out, and
military dictator Carlos Castillo Armas was in. His brutal regime would lead into the
36-year Guatemalan civil war.
The list of other examples is long. Mohammad Mossadeq was toppled in a
CIA-backed military coup in 1953
, over his nationalization of Iran's oil. João Goulart was overthrown in Brazil in 1964,
thanks in part to U.S. funds and arms
. The Reagan administration famously orchestrated a
scheme
to launder money to the far-right Contra rebels in Nicaragua by selling weapons to Iran -- there was no coup, but
tens of thousands of people died in the fighting before the left-wing Sandinista government lost power in 1990. All of these
were bloody, chaotic affairs in which the CIA role was either apparent at the time or rapidly emerged.
The history of U.S. covert operations is long and varied -- ordered by both Democrats and Republicans, targeting foreign
leaders both democratic and authoritarian -- but there are two things that tie virtually all of them together: CIA operations
are not subtle, and they don't stay secret for long.
Both of those factors slowly led to a decrease in CIA foreign operations.
Concerns about foreign coups led to the creation of the Church Committee, which, in 1976, offered a
clear and damning look at CIA meddling
. That led to an
executive order
banning the assassination of foreign leaders. The CIA whined about that legal barrier, complaining it
tied its hands as it tried to oust the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, once a CIA asset, in 1988 and 1989. Plans to
get rid of him were leaked, too, before they were put into action -- no matter, as Reagan ended up invading anyway. The assassination
ban has shifted over time, but the appetite for the swashbuckling days was evaporating.
Part of it was that nobody could keep their mouths shut. Emmanuel Constant, a Haitian paramilitary leader,
was outed as a CIA asset
after a 1991 coup in that country. Then he went on
60 Minutes
to discuss his role.
... ... ...
Sanders is right to be critical of U.S. involvement in coups and regime change -- and even today, oversight of intelligence
is a critical issue.
Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, speaks at a campaign
stop at the Merrimack American Legion on Thursday in Merrimack, N.H.
SOUTH BEND -- Conspiracy theories and rumors have always surrounded presidential campaigns, so
it shouldn't be a surprise that South Bend's former mayor has recently drawn his share.
For the past few days, The Tribune also has been drawn into the web of rumors surrounding the
campaign of Pete Buttigieg. They involve abused dogs, an "I can't breathe" T-shirt and even
the CIA.
They're also the latest proof of how information -- more precisely, disinformation -- spreads
on social media these days and, by the time it gets shared and circulated and passed along,
becomes accepted as true. The public then gets suspicious of attempts by media outlets to
debunk the rumors.
Case in point: A Twitter user this past weekend made a fake image of a supposed Aug. 30, 1998
Tribune front page reporting that a teen Buttigieg was arrested for a shocking crime
involving dogs. Everything about the image screamed bogus. It was generated through an online
program that creates fake newspaper clippings.
But even though that Twitter user admitted Sunday night he intended the fabrication as a
joke, The Tribune was still receiving calls and messages Monday afternoon hoping to verify
the story. Some thanked us for clarifying it; others angrily denounced us for "covering up
for Pete."
So let's just make this perfectly clear: The Tribune did not publish the story making the
rounds. The fake Aug. 30, 1998 Tribune front page gives several clues it isn't real.
• The masthead is a different font and style from what Tribune used in the 1990s.
• The Tribune would not have named anyone "arrested on suspicion" of the crimes in question
before that person was charged. That's especially true of a 16-year-old, Buttigieg's age on
that date.
• There's no age or hometown listed. There's also no byline or dateline.
• The headline goes over at least three columns of the fake page, which appears folded and
shows only the left side. But the second column says the story continues on A10. (It does so
in the wrong style, by the way.)
The phony Tribune front page is far from the only rumor or conspiracy theory circulating
about Buttigieg.
"Pete is CIA" is another meme generating coverage and many calls and messages to The Tribune,
with readers asking us to expose the truth. "Pete is a CIA agent" has also become a common
comment on our social media posts.
The Daily Beast did an
extensive exploration
of this theory, debunking some aspects (such as a security firm
working for the campaign with a name similar to another security firm reputedly tied to the
CIA, or a claim that Buttigieg admitted he sought a post with the agency).
Then there are aspects to the theory that are impossible to debunk, such as the candidate's
"mesmerizing, hypnotic blue eyes" giving away his secret agent status.
Buttigieg's strong showing in the Iowa caucuses last week drew out other conspiracies.
The idea that the Democratic National Committee may have refigured the caucus results to
avoid giving any share of victory to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders had support even among
mainstream sources. That includes Sanders himself asking for another recount.
But a murkier theory wrongly blames Buttigieg for a Shadow, Inc., smartphone app that
disastrously malfunctioned, delaying vote totals for days. The Buttigieg campaign did buy a
separate app from Shadow, as did fellow candidates Joe Biden and Kirsten Gillibrand, as well
as the Texas Democratic Party.
It was actually the Iowa Democratic Party that paid Shadow to develop the failed caucus app.
Nevada bought the same app but has said its caucus won't use it after seeing how it failed in
Iowa.
In another example, t
he
story
of the Notre Dame women's basketball team wearing shirts with the message "I can't
breathe," after the July 17, 2014, death of New York City resident Eric Garner after a police
officer's chokehold, has resurfaced.
Three South Bend council members have asked Mishawaka police officer Jason
Barthel to stop selling T-shirts he created in response to 'I Can't Breathe'
Recent accounts falsely report that a South Bend police officer created a shirt saying
"Breathe Easy: Don't break the law" in response to the basketball team's protest. It was
actually Mishawaka police officer Jason Barthel who created the shirts.
Some of the recent accounts also state Buttigieg supported the shirts. He actually tried to
avoid taking sides
.
Buttigieg's statement fearing citizens being asked to choose between supporting civil rights
for minorities or supporting police was criticized by many, including South Bend Common
Council members, at the time. But even that nuance is stripped from versions of the story now
making the rounds.
"As residents exercise their free speech rights, it is
important to be respectful of others' concerns,"
Buttigieg said in a statement at the time. "The sensitive
issues now being discussed across America deserve to be
taken seriously, and we as a community have a lot of work
to do in addressing them here at home."
"We cannot rest until all residents and all public safety
officers view each other in an authentic spirit of mutual
trust and respect."
On one social media post attacking Buttigieg over the
issue, one commenter linked to a Tribune story from 2014
and corrected the assertion South Bend police were
involved. The comment was deleted, and comments were
turned off altogether.
I think there probably is, because as things stand now it's all hands on the establishment
deck to figure out a way to thwart the campaign of Bernie Sanders from continuing to gather
momentum. I've been a Tulsi Gabbard supporter - and still am, both politically and
financially - since 2015, but right now Bernie (who coincidentally and unlike Tulsi wasn't
excluded from the debates and has not been treated as a persona non grata by the entire
spectrum of mainstream media) is the one to watch.
The Nevada Democratic party (misnomer much?) has hired a heretofore member of Pete
Buttigieg's campaign into the position of "defender of democracy" or some similarly
Orwellian-named position. I think it's safe to assume the fix is in (again), and as a
resident of New Hampshire I also believe - as in every election since I've been paying
attention in 2000 - manipulation of votes was done around the periphery to keep things
manageable. Move a little from column a into column b, a little from column a into column c,
a little from column d into column b, etc.
I listened to a part of Buttigig's speech last night. He is articulate, speaks well, and has
a nice voice. He's also Mr Clean and wears a nice suit. That makes for a very saleable
product. He is appealing to the muddled mediocre middle, but Christian fundamentalists will
never vote for a man married to another man. They would sooner vote for Putin.
I also heard part of Bernie's speech. Lots of promises of Free Stuff for Everyone! Joe and
Jane Sixpack know that nobody gets free stuff unless they are rich. Not a single word from
Bernie about putting the Empire up for sale and closing 800 military bases around the
world.
Bernie could maybe convince Joe and Jane if he pointed out that the trillion dollars a
year we are already paying to prop up the Empire would buy a lot of Free Stuff that we all
need, like basic infrastructure and real healthcare (medical insurance is not accurate
diagnosis and effective treatment, but nobody wants to talk about that). But he will never
call for all troops to return home immediately, since endless war is supported by nearly
everyone in DC.
Class unconscious Joe and Jane have only luke-warm support for "soaking the rich" because
they still want to hope that someday they will win Megabucks and have riches to pass on to
their offspring. Fifty years of slow decline should be enough to break through delusions of
MAGA, but for now the consent manufacturing machine still has the upper hand.
Buttigieg stepped into a doggie pile and is getting rightfully deserved flak for deceptive
comments he made meant to diss and undermine Bernie's medicare-for-all.
Association of Flight Attendants President Sara Nelson criticized former South Bend, Ind.,
Mayor Pete Buttigieg Wednesday for a tweet defending private health insurance, that
appeared to characterize the employer-provided health benefits as gains won by union
workers.
Buttigieg defended his proposed "Medicare for All Who Want It" plan, saying 14 million
union members have "fought hard for strong employer-provided health benefits" in a tweet
Wednesday morning.
Nelson, who played a key role in ending the federal government shutdown last year,
called the invocation of labor rights "offensive and dangerous."
"Stop perpetuating this gross myth. Not every union member has union healthcare plans
that protect them," Nelson tweeted. "Those that do have it, have to fight like hell to keep
it. If you believe in Labor then you'd understand an injury to one is an injury to
all."
MORE AND MORE I SUSPECT BUTTIGIEG OF BEING THE CULPRIT WHO GOT UNION LEADERS IN NEVADA TO
CIRCULATE FEAR-MONGERING PROPAGANDA ON BERNIE SANDERS ALLEGING THE GROSS LIE THAT MEMBERS
WILL LOSE HEALTH INSURANCE COVERAGE IF BERNIE BECOMES PRESIDENT.
Circe. More like paper bags with $ got Union Leaders to do the deed. You realize it speaks
really loudly as to the intelligence of union members in Nevada, that they would believe that
a so called socialist would do this. Mind you I guess if the info comes from a 'Trusted'
source might do the trick.
I hope im wrong but Bern is the perfect fall guy for a
Pete the Cheat is curiously dodging
foreign policy questions. Gee, I wonder why? Could it be that Mr. Neoliberal, centrist
Buttigieg has an unpopular interventionist point of view?
MayoCheat was not nice to the black community in South Bend, Ind. As a matter of fact he
was downright condescending and disrespectful to the Black Community.: (watch video Democracy
Now!)
Yep, Pete's an interventionist...read this from above link.
After college, the Democratic presidential hopeful took a gig with a strategic
communications firm founded by a former Secretary of Defense who raked in contracts with
the arms industry. He moved on to a fellowship at an influential DC think tank described by
its founder as "a counterpart to the neoconservatives of the 1970s." Today, Buttigieg
sits on that think tank's board of advisors alongside some of the country's most
accomplished military interventionists.
Buttigieg has reaped the rewards of his dedication to the Beltway playbook. He
recently became the top recipient of donations from staff members of the Department of
Homeland Security, the State Department, and the Justice Department – key cogs in the
national security state's permanent bureaucracy.
Feel free to read the rest on the ambitious mayor who was groomed by national security
state apparatchiks. (I need a shower after reading the rest of it!)
Why are so many intelligence veterans throwing their weight behind a young Indiana mayor with such a thin foreign policy resume?
These questions continue to loom large over the 2020 Democratic primary field: Who is Pete Buttigieg? And what is he doing here?
Seemingly overnight, the once obscure mayor of Indiana's fourth-largest city was vaulted to national prominence, with his campaign
coffers stuffed with big checks from billionaire benefactors.
The publication of a list of
218 endorsements from "foreign policy and national security professionals" by Buttigieg's campaign deepened the mystery of the
mayor's rise.
Buttigieg's new roster of endorsements from former high-ranking CIA officials, regime-change architects, and global financiers
should raise more questions about the real forces propelling his campaign.
Patriot Group is currently under contract w/the US military.
They provide "contractor-owned, contractor-operated intelligence, surveillance & reconnaissance aerial detection and monitoring
support inside & outside the U.S."
Buttigieg has offered precious few details about his policy plans, and foreign policy is no exception. His campaign website dedicates
just five sentences to international affairs, none
of which offers any substantive details.
Beyond a seven-month deployment to Afghanistan as a Naval Reservist in 2010, the 37 year-old mayor has no first-hand foreign policy
experience to speak of.
As The Grayzone's
Max Blumenthal reported , Buttigieg's enjoys a long relationship with the Truman National Security Project, a foreign policy
think tank in Washington, DC that advocates for "muscular liberalism." He has also taken a short, strange trip to Somaliland with
a Harvard buddy, Nathaniel Myers, who ultimately became a senior advisor to USAID's Office of Transitional Initiatives. Otherwise,
Buttigieg's foreign policy credentials are nil.
Buttigieg's lack of core principles are what might make him so attractive to military contractors and financial institutions,
two of the status quo's biggest beneficiaries.
Mayor Pete has effectively positioned himself as a Trojan Horse for the establishment, offering "generational change" that doesn't
challenge existing power structures in any concrete way.
A review of Pete for America's
FEC disclosures found that the campaign had paid $561,416.82 for "security" to a company called Patriot Group International (PGI),
from June 4 to September 9, 2019.
Buttigieg's August 29, 2019 payment of $179,617.04 to PGI represents the single largest security expenditure ever made by a presidential
candidate, according to the FEC.
While the exorbitant amount of money raises questions, it is PGI's status as a Blackwater-style mercenary firm that makes Buttigieg's
contract so remarkable.
PGI bills itself as a "global mission support provider with expeditionary
capabilities, providing services to select clients within the intelligence, defense, and private sector." According to the company's
website , it offers services
like counter-terrorism, counter-weapons of mass destruction, and drone surveillance.
PGI is currently under a
$26.5 million contract with the Department of Defense to provide "contractor-owned, contractor-operated intelligence, surveillance
and reconnaissance aerial detection and monitoring support inside and outside the U.S." It is a far cry from securing campaign events
held in New Hampshire community centers.
Besides contracting with Buttigieg, PGI's only other record of
political work was with Newt Gingrich's 2012 presidential campaign. In a 2016
Inc. Magazine profile , PGI founder Greg Craddock said his company stopped doing political work altogether, following a 2012
incident in which a PGI employee on Gingrich's security detail allegedly assaulted an overzealous Ron Paul supporter.
Why the mercenary firm chose to re-enter politics for the mayor of South Bend, Indiana remains an open question. Whatever the
reason, Buttigieg's willingness to line the pockets of military contractors as a candidate might offer further insight into why so
many in the national security state are lining up behind him.
The CIA hearts Mayor Pete
Buttigieg's lengthy roster of endorsements is loaded with former intelligence operatives, national security hardliners, regime-change
specialists, and vulture capitalists.
Among Buttigieg's most notable endorsers is
David S. Cohen , the deputy director of
the CIA from 2015 to 2017, and a former Treasury official under George W. Bush.
Cohen is regarded as a "
chief architect " of the crippling sanctions that the Obama administration imposed on Iran, Russia, and North Korea -- earning
him the ignominious nickname the "
sanctions guru. "
Since leaving government, Cohen has made various
think tank appearances
to advocate for continued use of sanctions in the aforementioned countries, as well as
Venezuela .
In his tenure at the Treasury Department, Cohen was also instrumental in
drafting the Patriot Act, which restricted civil
liberties and vastly increased the government's surveillance powers in response to 9/11.
Cohen has yet to speak publicly as to why he endorsed Buttigieg.
Buttigieg was likewise endorsed by Charlie Gilbert
, former deputy director of the National Clandestine Service, a top-ten leadership position at the CIA. Gilbert's role was to "conceive,
plan, and execute complex intelligence operations" against "hostile target [countries]."
Another Buttigieg endorser, John Bair , is the former
chief of staff for the CIA's Middle East Task Force.
Dennis Bowden , a 26-year CIA veteran, with
much of that time spent in unspecified "executive leadership positions," is also backing Mayor Pete.
The Buttigieg campaign has cited the support of former CIA senior analyst
Sue Terry , who made a "record number
of contributions to the President's Daily Brief," during her tenure from 2001 to 2008.
Two more CIA endorsements came from former senior intelligence officer
Martijn Rasser , and former senior analyst
Andrea Kendall-Taylor , who was also an officer at
the National Intelligence Council.
If you're thinking, "Wow, that's a lot of CIA endorsements for a relatively unknown, small-town mayor," you're right – and it's
just the tip of the iceberg.
More Buttigieg backers include
Ned Price , the career CIA analyst who resigned publicly in a February 2017 protest against "the way [Trump] has treated the
intelligence community." (Price was also a major Clinton donor, but insisted his resignation was non-partisan).
Another CIA Buttigieg endorser is Jeffrey Edmunds , who moonlighted
as a National Security Council member under Presidents Obama and Trump.
Buttigieg was also endorsed by Chris Barton ,
the CIA's assistant general counsel during the Clinton administration, and
Anthony Lake , whom Clinton nominated unsuccessfully to serve as CIA director in 1996.
Mayor Pete's list of spook supporters similarly includes non-CIA intelligence community professionals like
Robert Stasio , the former chief of operations at the NSA Cyber
Center, and William Wechsler , former deputy
assistant secretary for Special Ops at the Department of Defense.
Buttigieg also named Robin Walker , a former deputy intelligence
officer for the Director of National Intelligence, as a supporter. Walker now works for corporate weapons contractor Lockheed Martin.
Regime change hit-men and debt colonists jump on the bandwagon
Yet some of Mayor Pete's most troubling endorsements come from outside of the military-intelligence apparatus.
Buttigieg, for example, lists Fernando Cutz
as an endorser. For the first 16 months of the Trump administration, Cutz was the national security council director for South America,
where he led US policy on Venezuela and was credited with outlining regime-change plans for the president.
Revealing comments from @fscutz , one of the key
architects of the US coup in Venezuela, declaring that the goal of intervention is to "restore Venezuela's place as an upper middle
class country" https://t.co/jZsNLu5rWB pic.twitter.com/2IX8d1n41P
Another Buttigieg endorser is Jessica Reitz-Curtin , who
spent several years in leadership at USAID's Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI), working alongside Buttigieg's close friend,
Nathaniel Myers.
OTI is the de-facto
tip of the spear for USAID's regime change efforts. In the case of Venezuela, OTI has
bankrolled violent,
right-wing opposition forces for decades.
There is also plenty of excitement for Buttigieg at the commanding heights of international finance.
Matt Kaczmarek , vice president of BlackRock, the world's
largest investment manager, controlling nearly $7 trillion in assets, is listed as an endorser of the South Bend mayor.
Kaczmarek previously served as the NSC's director
of Brazil and Southern Cone affairs in the Obama administration, when the US backed a right-wing parliamentary coup against President
Dilma Roussef.
BlackRock has massive holdings in Brazilian agribusiness, and is a major factor in the environmental
degradation of the Amazon region. BlackRock's practices have been so destructive to the region that
AmazonWatch named
the financial behemoth the "world's largest investor in deforestation."
Kaczmarek is a perfect embodiment of the revolving door through which high-ranking government employees enter the private sector
and reap the rewards of policies they previously helped implement. In 2013, while Kaczmarek was crafting US economic policy towards
Brazil, then-Vice President Joseph Biden was
urging the country to open its economy further to foreign capital.
From 2014 to the present, BlackRock has substantially increased its investment in Brazil, according to the AmazonWatch report.
Now at the helm of the company, Kaczmarek stands to profit handsomely from the same economic liberalization policies that Brazil
was goaded into adopting at his direction.
Buttigieg's list of endorsers likewise includes Karen
Mathiasen , former acting executive US director at the World Bank; as well as
Julie T. Katzman , COO of the Inter-American Development
Bank (IDB). Both organizations have long histories of using debt to impose the will of US policymakers onto poor countries.
Mathiasen, who previously served as deputy assistant secretary for debt and development policy at the Treasury Department, was
intimately involved in the administration of what has been dubbed "
debt colonialism ." Under this cynical practice,
unsustainable levels of debt are used as a pretext to demand that debtor nations privatize government functions, impose austerity,
and allow greater exploitation by global capital.
The IDB where Katzman worked plays a similar role in enforcing the
Washington
Consensus across the Western hemisphere. Wielding debt as its weapon, IDB policies maintain "[Latin America's] subordinated place
in the global economy," argues Professor
Victor Sepúlveda , author of Industrial Colonialism in Latin America: The Third Stage .
Empire's empty vessel
Obscure presidential candidates don't typically garner hundreds of elite national security endorsements before a single vote is
cast. So what do these spooks and vulture capitalists see in Mayor Pete?
It can't be Buttigieg's foreign policy resume, because he doesn't have one. He hasn't proposed any notable policies to distinguish
himself from the other corporate-friendly candidates, so that can't be it either. Some have posited that Mayor Pete may be a CIA
asset himself, but the supporting evidence is circumstantial at best.
Perhaps the most reasonable conclusion is that they see Buttigieg as an empty vessel. Opportunistic and unmoored by ideology or
political goals beyond his advancing his career, Buttigieg is the ideal candidate for those who seek to maintain existing hierarchies.
Indeed, his national security endorsement list is filled with people who keep America's imperial machine humming along smoothly.
What is the thread that connects the CIA, USAID, and the World Bank? All three institution exist to prop up a grossly unequal
global order in which a tiny sliver of the population hordes unimaginable wealth, while the mass of people get by on next to nothing.
At a time when that order looks increasingly untenable, with anti-austerity protests breaking out from
Chile
, to France, to
Lebanon , Mayor
Pete makes perfect sense.
, the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor is riding a wave of press attention and a
potential polling surge . The American Legion hall hosting the event was at capacity, to
the chagrin of both a Dane and a Canadian waiting to see America's newest political celebrity.
Some of the media, too, found themselves on the outside looking in, trawling the line for
voters with something to say. Buttigieg briefly dismounted from his SUV convoy to thank the
supporters stuck outside, before pulling away to a back entrance to the building.
Inside, cameramen peeked around flag stands to get shots of the candidate as he unspooled a
message of doing right by America's veterans. Buttigieg extolled homecomings, better military
housing, and the unity in diversity he found in uniform ("task cohesion," in the parlance of
the sociologists). He rightly raised the issue of veterans
hamstrung by "bad paper" discharges for failings often linked to trauma they suffered
overseas.
Buttigieg occasionally found himself on more uncertain ground. As the technocrat's
technocrat, he is never more at ease than when explaining a problem that should be amenable to
a procedural fix -- like when "systems aren't talking to each other." Confronted with a human
issue, he contorts himself into phrases like "gender parity in the experience of serving this
country in uniform." If that means what it sounds like, reality will rudely intrude. Even the
Nordic countries, probably the most egalitarian nations on earth and all with at least a loose
conscription system on the books, are striving to get their militaries to 20 percent
female.
In a tidy 50 minutes with Buttigieg, foreign policy -- the actual ends to which American
servicemen are dedicated and sometimes sacrificed -- received scant attention. It was an odd
elephant in the room: Fawlty Towers' " don't mention the war! " rebooted, ongoing
conflicts that most American politicians would just as soon ignore. An Air Force veteran asked
the mayor what he learned in Kabul. Afghanistan itself, and what we're still doing there, was
all but absent from the long answer. There were more questions (one) about Brexit than
Iran.
The event was sponsored by VoteVets, a decade-old political action committee that endorsed
Buttigieg in December. Other veterans seem more inclined to be skeptical of a naval reservist
who appeared to punch a ticket with a short Afghan tour and then returned to climbing ladders
Stateside. Buttigieg advetizes early and often: loud noises become a springboard to a
brief, artful reference about what one "learns on deployment." He uses his time in uniform to
undercut Beto, level with Klobuchar, and attack Trump.
True, Buttigieg ventured "outside the wire" often (
and kept count when he did ), and the threat of an improvised explosive device lurked on
every Afghan road. But the mayor's descriptions of his service often have the ring of military
LARPing .
His stories of service dwell far more on convoy duty than on the presumably more valuable work
he was doing behind a desk in Kabul. He writes of "shipping out" -- a phrase surely last
deployed in a war movie. Buttigieg never internalized the enlisted rank structure (the Marine
Corps does not employ anyone who answers to "gunny sergeant"). And cringe-worthy posed war zone
photos drew
predictable heat online .
Buttigieg's military record would hardly be the least distinguished in presidential history.
Captain Ronald Reagan spent his war at the Army Air Force's First Motion Picture Unit in
California. Naval reservist Lyndon Baines Johnson received
a sham Silver Star despite never coming under fire. The problem is not Pete Buttigieg's
service: it is what he seems to have learned, or rather not learned, from his time in
Afghanistan.
Buttigieg's campaign-ready memoir, Shortest Way Home , gives the mayor's Afghanistan
deployment due weight. But why he served isn't really clear. What the eager young volunteer
learned in his five months in Afghanistan is even more opaque. In the book, Buttigieg refers to
John Kerry's apt formulation: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
All that the famously erudite, would-be Kerry 2.0 can offer is repeated platitudes about how
wars don't end anymore.
When the New York Times asked Democratic candidates about regime change wars and U.S.
support for coups, "Mr.
Buttigieg did not answer this question." Ditto for all of the Times' questions about
Afghanistan, the war upon which Buttigieg's claims to foreign policy expertise hinge. Buttigieg
remains essentially a cipher on foreign policy, sensible words about the AUMF aside. He sounds
the right progressive notes but refuses to be pinned down on much of substance. It is hard to
imagine him diverging much from the bipartisan foreign policy consensus that has wreaked so
much havoc, in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Ninety miles north in West Lebanon, just across the river from Vermont, the other veteran in
the race helmed a far smaller town hall. Clad in woodsman casual, Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard
spoke to an audience perhaps a quarter the size of Buttigieg's. The Hawaiian struck similar
notes to the Indianan: unity, bipartisanship, common sense. She decried tribalism and described
her successes in working across the aisle. (Note: Tulsi Gabbard is on the unpaid Council of
Advisors to the Center for the Study of Statesmanship. She and the author had not met prior to
Thursday night.)
Gabbard's crowd spoke to her cross-party appeal -- or her alienation from her own party.
Just five hands went up when she asked who in the crowd was a Democrat (seven claimed to be
Republicans). The vast majority in the room identified as independents or libertarians.
Several, and perhaps most, were Vermonters. One man asked Gabbard point-blank: "Have you ever
considered changing parties, or maybe re-affiliating somewhere?"
Though the Lebanon event did not focus on foreign policy, Gabbard's supporters, animated by
her lonely heresies on the subject, raised the issue. In a tone more healing than strident, the
congresswoman stuck to her guns. Though not fully dismissing humanitarian intervention, she
rightly noted that humanitarianism is often the guise under which intractable, unjustifiable
U.S.-led wars proceed. She vowed to reject "all these people" in the failed foreign policy
establishment. One feels confident that even Samantha Power, most sainted of the
she-hawks , would not be welcome in a Gabbard Administration.
Gabbard, last graced with a CNN town hall in March, soldiers on. Deval Patrick, the former
Massachusetts governor who will likely receive a tenth of the New Hampshire votes she does, got
his time on the big stage yesterday.
Polling indicates that Gabbard may receive over 5 percent of the vote in New Hampshire,
where she has focused most of her attention. Media dismissal and outright slander has
knee-capped Gabbard's campaign to be president. Her fellow millennial veteran provided a small
assist. Interviewed a week ago by Bill Maher, the late night host told Buttigieg, "You are the
only military veteran in this." "Yeah," replied the mayor, his sister-in-arms erased.
Tulsi Gabbard's next move will be interesting. Gabbard herself was vague on the subject last
night. She is not running for re-election to Congress; this will be her last campaign for the
moment. Despite appearing to burn her bridges with the Democratic Party, she could have a place
in a Sanders Administration. Regardless, one hopes her voice will remain a part of the national
conversation. Tulsi Gabbard has far more to offer than the conventionally hollow Mayor
Pete.
Gil Barndollar is a New Hampshire native and a fellow at the Catholic University of
America's Center for the Study of Statesmanship.
Gabbard has been "Ron Pauled" by the Dems. Ironically she gets better assistance and
hearing from the libertarian right than from her own Dem progressive antiwar wing. Go
figure.
If Sanders survives the DNC efforts to cast him aside, Gabbard would be a decisive
"and take that" VP choice. If not: A third party ticket of Tulsi and Amash could be very
interesting and throw a bit of consternation toward both camps.
Another corroboration that the DNC isn't at all interested in winning the election,
despite incessant litanies about stopping the Orange Man's Rule of Badness. They've (yet)
got Tulsi, who can reliably beat Trump, but prefer this bleak character, who won't have
much chances even against a half-decent conventional Republican, instead, advertizing him
as a "second Obama" for hell knows which reason.
Just the fact that Buttigieg would allow himself to be interviewed by the
Islamophobic, lying, and basically disgusting Bill Maher says a lot about his lack of
character and integrity.
A t the time of publication, 12 hours after voting in the Democratic Party's Iowa caucuses
ended, the results have not been announced. The delay in reporting is the result of a failed
app developed by a company appropriately named Shadow Inc.
This firm was staffed by Hillary Clinton and
Barack Obama campaign veterans and created by a Democratic dark-money nonprofit backed by
hedge fund billionaires including Seth Klarman. A prolific funder of pro-settler Israel lobby
organizations, Klarman has also contributed directly to Pete Buttigieg's campaign.
The delay in the vote reporting denied a victory speech to Sen. Bernie Sanders, the
presumptive winner of the opening contest in the Democratic presidential primary. Though not
one exit poll indicated that Buttigieg would have won, the former mayor South Bend, Indiana,
took to Twitter to confidently proclaim himself the victor.
Iowa, you have shocked the nation.
By all indications, we are going on to New Hampshire victorious. #IowaCaucuses
Though a dark money Democratic operation turned out to be the source of the disastrous app,
suspicion initially centered on former Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook and his
Russiagate-related elections integrity initiative.
Leveraging Russia Hysteria
While Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price refused to say who was behind the failed
app,
he told NPR that he "worked with the national party's cybersecurity team and Harvard
University's Defending Digital Democracy project ." Price did not offer details on his
collaboration with the Harvard group, however.
The New York Timesreported
that this same outfit had teamed up with Iowa Democrats to run a "drill of worst-case
scenarios" and possible foreign threats, but was also vague on details.
Robby Mook, the former campaign manager for Hillary Clinton's failed 2016 presidential
campaign, was the co-founder of Defending Digital Democracy. His initiative arose out of
the national freakout over Russian meddling that he and his former boss helped stir when
they blamed their loss on Russian interference. Mook's new outfit pledged to
"protect from hackers and propaganda attacks."
He founded the organization with help from Matt Rhoades, a former campaign manager for
Republican Mitt Romney whose public relations company was
sued by a Silicon Valley investor after it branded him "an agent of the Russian government"
and "a friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin." Rhoades's firm had been contracted by a
business rival to destroy the investor's reputation.
As outrage grew over the delay in Iowa caucus results, Mook publicly denied any role in
designing the notorious app.
Hours later, journalist Lee Fang reported that a previously
unknown tech outfit called Shadow Inc. had contracted with the Iowa Democratic Party to create
the failed technology. The firm was comprised of former staffers for Obama, Clinton and the
tech industry, and had been paid for services by the Buttigieg campaign.
FEC filings show the Iowa Democratic party and Buttigieg campaign paid Shadow Inc.
The Path to Mayor Pete's Wine Cave
Shadow Inc. was launched by a major
Democratic dark money nonprofit called Acronym, which also gave birth to a $7.7 million Super
PAC known as Pacronym.
According to Sludge
, Pacronym's largest donor is Seth Klarman. A billionaire hedge funder, Klarman also happens to
be a top donor to Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar.
Though he has attracted some attention for his role in the campaign, Klarman's prolific
funding of the pro-settler Israel lobby and Islamophobic initiatives has gone almost entirely
unmentioned .
Seth Klarman is the founder of the Boston-based Baupost Group hedge fund and a longtime
donor to corporate Republican candidates. After Donald Trump called for forgiving Puerto Rico's
debt, Klarman --
the owner of $911 million of the island's bonds -- flipped and began funding Trump's
opponents.
The billionaire's crusade against Trump ultimately led him to Mayor Pete's wine cave.
By the end of 2019, Klarman had
donated $5,600 to Buttigieg and pumped money into the campaigns of Senators Amy Klobuchar,
Cory Booker and Kamala Harris as well.
The billionaire's support for centrist candidates appears to be driven not only by his own
financial interests, but by his deep and abiding ideological commitment to Israel and its
expansionist project.
As I reported for
Mondoweiss , Klarman has been a top funder for major Israel lobby outfits, including those
that support the expansion of illegal settlements and Islamophobic initiatives.
Klarman was the principal funder of The Israel Project, the recently
disbanded Israeli government-linked propaganda organization that lobbied against the Iran
nuclear deal and backed the Israeli
settlement enterprise .
Klarman has heaped hundreds of thousands of dollars on the Middle East Media Research
Institute (MEMRI) and the American Jewish Committee. And he funded The David Project, which was
established to suppress Palestine solidarity organizing on campuses across the U.S. and battled
to block the establishment of a Muslim community center in Boston.
Through his support for the Friends of Ir David Inc, Klarman directly involved himself in
the Israeli settlement enterprise, assisting the U.S.-based tax exempt arm of the organization
that oversaw
a wave of Palestinian expulsions in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan.
Other pro-Israel groups reaping the benefits of Klarman's generosity include Birthright
Israel, the AIPAC-founded Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and the Foundation for the
Defense of Democracies (FDD), a neoconservative think tank that helped devise Trump's "maximum
pressure" campaign of economic warfare on Iran.
Klarman is the owner of the Times of Israel , an Israeli media outlet that once
published a call for
Palestinian genocide . (The op-ed was removed following public backlash).
In recent weeks, Buttigieg has
sought to distinguish himself from Sanders on the issue of Israel-Palestine. During a testy
exchange this January with a self-proclaimed Jewish supporter of Palestinian human rights, the
South Bend mayor backtracked on a previous pledge to withhold military aid to Israel if it
annexed parts of the West Bank.
NEW: The day after Trump unveiled his plan green-lighting Israeli annexation and
Netanyahu's announcement of a cabinet vote on annexation this Tuesday, @PeteButtigieg backtracked
on his repeated promise that the "U.S. will not foot the bill for annexation." #StopFundingOccupation
pic.twitter.com/dldyRnI5lo
Battling Bernie with Hedge Fund Money & Sexism Claims
Like Klarman, Donald Sussman is a hedge funder who has channeled his fortune into Pacronym.
He has given $1 million to the Super PAC and was also
top donor to Clinton in 2016.
His daughter, Democratic operative Emily Tisch Sussman, declared on MSNBC in September that
"if you still support Sanders over Warren, it's kind of showing your sexism."
MSNBC pundit says if you support Bernie Sanders over Elizabeth Warren it's "showing your
sexism." pic.twitter.com/fghFIqOF6C
As Democratic elites like the Sussmans braced for a Bernie Sanders triumph in Iowa, a
mysterious piece of technology spun out by a group they supported delayed the vote results,
preventing Sanders from delivering a victory speech. And the politician many of them supported,
Pete Buttigieg, exploited the moment to declare himself the winner. In such a strange scenario,
conspiracy theories write themselves.
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of books including best-selling
" Republican
Gomorrah ," " Goliath ," "
The
Fifty One Day War " and " The Management of
Savagery ." He has also produced numerous print articles for an array of publications, many
video reports and several documentaries including " Killing Gaza " and " Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie ." Blumenthal founded the Grayzone
Project in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America's state of perpetual war and its
dangerous domestic repercussions.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of
Consortium News.
Limert , February 7, 2020 at 02:34
How much confusion is it possible to create from counting votes in an election in a small
state? It is worrisome, to say the least, that we on Friday, four days after the event, still
don't have the final numbers. How difficult can it be? Worse still, we don't know exactly
what happened. How could Buttigieg, polling at ~15-20%, according to latest polls, suddenly
be ahead in most districts? Biden's under performing was not a big surprise, at least not to
me, but did all the votes that Biden didn't get go to Buttigieg? Did the way the caucuses
were managed, somehow direct a great number of people towards Buttigieg? Is there still a
discrepancy between the official results and Bernie Sanders' internal counts? According to
many reports from the caucuses, many questionable things happened that all tended to disfavor
Bernie Sanders, and most of them cannot simply be blamed on an app. Still 1% of the results
are missing, presumably from Bernie Sanders strongholds. It seems that counting votes to
Bernie Sanders must be extremely exhausting to DNC staffers.
Jeff Steinmetz , February 6, 2020 at 00:43
In a public statement Shadow Inc stated that they "contracted with the the Iowa Democratic
Party to build a caucus reporting mobile app" , so why don't they have an
expenditure/disbursement in the FEC filings?
See this link for the statement from Shadow Inc. See:
ktiv.com/2020/02/04/nevada-democratic-party-abandons-app-used-in-iowa-caucuses/
When you do a search on the FEC web site with IOWA DEMOCRATIC PARTY (C00035600) as the
spender and Shadow Inc. as the the RECIPIENT NAME OR ID you get a NOTHING.
Thank you for providing the link to the FEC web site. I spent some time on the site asking
a bunch of different questions.
1) What other presidential candidates paid Shadow Inc.?
GILLIBRAND 2020 paid a total of $37,400.00
PETE FOR AMERICA, INC. $42,500.00
BIDEN FOR PRESIDENT $ 1,225.00
However, when you look at who has spent money with Shadow Inc you won't see the Iowa
Democratic Party spent anything with Shadow Inc. So how did the Iowa Democratic Party get the
software? Who paid for it? How much was paid? Was it given to them? If there is no money to
track you can not follow the money. So how did the Iowa Democratic Party end up with the
software? You can see that NEVADA STATE DEMOCRATIC PARTY paid Shadow Inc $58,000.00, but it
seems the software just landed in lap of the Iowa Democratic Party.
robert e williamson jr , February 5, 2020 at 15:30
Patriot: It time to go to the tool shed and get the shovels and axes yet?
Billionaire: Oh Nooooo the markets are doing too well!
Trumpster Dumpster squatter: Oh Dog how I love this guy who is going to end up starving us
all to death!
Ole Bob; Ole Bob here, it's time for dirty pool and judo in the trenches.
It appears the entire power structure in the US is scared beyond all reason of a Bernie
Sanders win -- we voters are going to have to fight tooth-and-nail to guarantee our votes are
counted and recorded correctly!
While I don't have any real problem with Buttigieg he just seems a little too much like
Obama, and after 8 years of "Yes we can!" "But we're not going to." I want someone who isn't
two-faced, and Buttigieg ain't it!
Vera Gottlieb , February 5, 2020 at 11:41
Generally speaking, is it ever possible for anything to be done with honesty and integrity
in the US? Dishonesty flows through many an American vein and so many proud of it.
It seems that the Israel lobby is the one that will play the role of the "Russian
interference" in this election. I don't mean to condone their actions, but pointing the
attention on a single crook is a way to hide the failure of the whole system.
Before accepting to use an app in such a sensitive context the party should have setup an
independent group in charge of inspecting the code and conducting a thorough testing. Shadow
Inc. couldn't do all this damage without complicity at every level in the party and I suspect
that if the democrats don't carry out immediately a major cleanup of the high ranks in the
party the whole primaries will end up even more tainted that the ones that awarded the
nomination to Clinton.
R. Linn , February 4, 2020 at 22:14
Is there any connection between the the delay of the caucus results and the The Des Moines
Register and CNN decision not to release their poll of Monday's Iowa caucuses after a
potential error was brought to their attention by the campaign of Pete Buttigieg?
Buttigieg received the media spotlight 1 day prior, which may have given him an advantage
going into the caucus. Coincidence?
michael , February 5, 2020 at 17:42
Yesterday and today (62 and 74% counted) Buttigieg had a constant 6-7% lead, but Bernie
said his strongholds had not been counted. Supposedly the national DNC came in to "help"
count? Now 85% of the vote is in (from Bernie's strongholds?) and Mayor Pete's lead has
jumped to about 10%. A 3% jump may not seem like much, but when it occurs in only 10% of the
counted votes, Buttigieg would have had to receive 30% more votes than Bernie. Coincidence?
Bad optics at a minimum, given the DNC's predilection for corruption, very suspicious.
Jane , February 5, 2020 at 22:12
No coincidence. The DNC, via the Iowa Dems, via Mayor Cheat, are doing everything they can
to steal this election away from the people's choice. It WOULD have looked a little strange
to have had the Des Moines Register poll showing Bernie Sanders the obvious leader a day
ahead of the caucus, followed by Mayor Cheat winning it. Crooked. Crooked. Crooked. All of
it.
Daniel , February 6, 2020 at 14:40
Judging on his debate performances, donor-related flip flops on the issues and the general
smug tone of his Obam-ish politi-speak, I'd say Buttigieg's pretty well exposed himself as
the power monger that he is, willing to do or say anything to get what he wants. A terrible
candidate by every stretch. Considering his time on the national stage, it's easy to imagine
his deliberately sabotaging Iowa, thinking he'd get away with it. To my eye, there's
something off about the man, pathological perhaps; his brazen grasps for attention, his
casual disregard of the truth, his staggering arrogance. He may have stolen Iowa, but he'll
never get an ounce of support frome.
robert e williamson jr , February 4, 2020 at 21:40
No matter which major American political party it is, never underestimate the danger of
large groups of stupid people especially when they work with Israeli lobbyist.
I for one have seem plenty enough of the love dance of death ( dancing to the music of the
rapture ) between Natinyahoo and the large orange blob. And I damned sure don't want to the
culmination in my front yard.
But, hey, ain't the markets doing great!
Hans Zandvliet , February 4, 2020 at 21:13
Since we're now living in a post-evidence era, the actual voting results don't matter
anymore.
Anyone declaring himself the winner of an election, actually becomes the winner, if his claim
gets the support of the MSM presstitutes.
My advice to all Americans is to vote with your feet: stay at home! Preserve your own dignity
by turning down this voting scam. Refuse to vote. Show those swamp creatures that they've
lost all legitimacy with an election turnout of 0.00% of all voters
In any case, it does not matter anymore whoever gets to sit in that white house somewhere
in D.C.: Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, whoever; the wars will continue anyway, just like the
pillaging of the lower and middle classes.
So the best way to vote is to not vote at all.
Will , February 5, 2020 at 11:26
Yes, by all means stay home which is exactly what most Americans do and have been doing
for years .look how brilliantly it has worked!
DW Bartoo , February 5, 2020 at 14:34
So, Will, do you think that all U$ians of voting age should be required, by law, to
vote?
Would that not necessitate the option of "None of the Above"?
You know, in case the choices were appallingly awful and only promised "More of the $ame",
only reflected perpetual war, corporations as "people", money as "speech", a two-tiered
"legal" system where the poor went to jail and the rich, bankers for example, were bailed out
for committing fraud, and torture was held to be merely a "policy difference", where money
making money was taxed (if at all) at a much lower rate than "earned income, you know as the
result of actual work, where the media were corporate owned whores who dutifully
propagandized the lies used to take the nation to war or unleash its "beautiful" weapons and
so on?
Or would you simply insist that there was NO option but to vote for team blue or team
red?
With all those who do dutifully vote, have been dutifully partisan, have voted for lesser
(if more effective) evil candidates, for many years, for decades, how do you explain the
current state of affairs?
Clearly, if voting is the sole measure of democratic engagement, then it has not had much
capacity to change much of anything beyond what money and power has deemed to be in THEIR
best "interest", to their profit and dominance.
Perhaps, just perhaps, the real problem is that no actual democracy has heretofore really
existed in this exceptional and indispensable nation?
Perhaps it is all a sham and the "franchise" is a controlled and managed means of
manufacturing "consent" such that the few can have their way despite the cost and harm to the
many?
And, just perhaps, all those whose lack of "participation" you decry so vehemently have
come to understand that, as Mother Jones (or Helen Keller) pointed out, if voting could
change anything, if it could make a real difference, then it would be illegal
Indeed, if you really favor voting then why should there be any need of "representatives"
and the Founder's fear of "mob rule"?
Do not both those things get in the way of real, participatory democracy?
Of course, the problem with participatory democracy is that political saviors would go out
of vogue, for then each citizen would truly bear responsibility for the nature of society and
all that was done in their name.
Are we "there" yet?
Or are we just a "republic" and not a real "democracy", in fact simply a military empire
where citizens are meant to be but patriotic consumers of myth and bluster, of hegemony and
bombast, whose task, every two or four years, IS but to cheer and vote for more of the
same?
What bothers you about this nation that you blame those who you feel have not "bothered"
to vote?
Is it a politician, a political wing of the war and money party?
Or is it something larger?
Perhaps systemic failure?
Perhaps economic insanity?
Possibly the plight of the many?
What is your beef with those who consider that voting seems ineffective, or even useless
in terms of generating policies that would improve their lives and those of whom they
love?
Or is that something you would not be comfortable with?
Just curious.
Skip Scott , February 7, 2020 at 08:55
DW-
Excellent response to Will.
I do make it a point to vote, but only for a "peace" candidate, which usually means third
party by the General Election.
Mr Blumenthal makes it evident that the rich and powerful will be very active during this
election year, and that Mr.Sanders and Ms. Warren will be thwarted at every opportunity. The
only unknown are those young voters, who are not as vulnerable to MSM methods of persuasion.
I am hopeful that they have amassed the numbers to impact the selection of the Democratic
nominee or to empower a viable third party candidacy. It is highly unlikely that the
Democratic Party apparatus would be removed by anything less than an overwhelming popular
uprising.
Susan , February 5, 2020 at 04:44
I would go for the "overwhelming popular uprising". Solidarity, common cause and urgent
need for aloha and cooperation are needed in order for us to stand together for Justice and
guide her to course. Resist evil.
Will , February 5, 2020 at 11:30
Speaking of Warren pretty savvy of the NYTs to endorse Warren *and* Klobuchar in an
attempt to make sure neither Warren nor Sanders win. A kiss of death combined with a divide
and conquer
dean 1000 , February 4, 2020 at 20:39
If the guilty software was not given a couple of test runs the day before the caucus
something is terribly wrong.
How many test runs and how did the app preform in each test?
Whatever the outcome of the first tally there should be a hand recount where every ballot
is projected on a wall or screen so TV viewers can count the number of ballots and the tally
for each candidate, along with the official counters.
In every city that has cable TV there is a channel reserved for city council meetings.
Those TV stations can cover the recount from the first ballot to the last. The commercial
stations must make a living broadcasting advertisements but can give their viewers periodic
updates. Doesn't matter how long it takes. Accuracy is more important than speed. Especially
a recount. Iowa democrats you owe it to the country to do another count. If it serves no
other function it could deter future skullduggery and vote stealing. Don't leave voters
harboring suspicions. It could reduce democratic turnout.
Len , February 4, 2020 at 19:52
Who would have guessed!
Len
KiwiAntz , February 4, 2020 at 17:13
If you had any doubts that America & it's so called Democracy is nothing more than a
badly run, Banana Republic, the IOWA primary is a microcosm of this Political charade?
Shamelessly rigged by a desperate DNC, to sabotage Bernie Saunders campaign & minimise
his IOWA win result & the Media bump this would have given his Campaign, this disgusting
behaviour demonstrates that the fix was in, once again, to deny Bernie any chance of being
the preferred Presidential Candidate, starting in IOWA? And who better to blame but the
Democratic Party's "go to" bogeyman to explain away this public relations disaster by once
again claiming "It was RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA" who are responsible for this debacle? Pathetic
& sad. Bernie is being screwed again by the same idiots who lost the previous
Presidential race to a bankrupt Reality TV Star & are going to blow the 2020 Campaign as
well by picking another lousy Candidate? Bernie is the only man that can beat Trump! Stop the
nonsense DNC & listen to the voters who want Bernie, not Corporate stooges!
Aussidawg , February 5, 2020 at 17:00
That's the scary thing Kiwi, not only does the DNC not care about the wishes of the voters
the establishment Dems such as Pelosi, Schumer, Hoyer, et al don't care either as is more
often than not reflected in how they vote on important legislation. The establishment Dems
simply will not support anything that might endanger the flow of corporate/billionaire
campaign contributions into their re-election coffers. The bottom line is these people will
always vote the way that will personally benefit them country and constituents be damned.
Bernie Sanders poses a direct threat to that continued inflow of campaign donations since
much of his proposed legislation will take away tax cuts and impose progressive taxation that
the ruling elites have enjoyed and paid for via campaign donations (legal bribes) ever since
Reagan was elected. The whole reason the establishment politicians fear Bernie is because he
is honest, has integrity and can't be bought. He truly believes in representing his
constituents which makes him a rare politician that poses a true threat to the ruling
elites.
GO BERNIE SANDERS – 2020
Marko , February 4, 2020 at 16:34
" The delay in reporting is the result of a failed app ."
So far , I'd say the app has been wildly successful , and we still haven't seen the final
results. If the purpose was to dilute the impact of Bernie's victory , mission accomplished.
If the app was a man-in-the-middle mechanism designed to steal the election outright , it may
yet succeed at that , as well. Mayor Pete Guaido seems to think that will be the outcome.
Half the results will be announced today at 5 PM EST , ( I'd expect those results to show a
razor-close race between Bernie and Pete ) allowing time for evaluating public reaction to
see if a blatant theft would be accepted when final tallies are released.
Realist , February 4, 2020 at 15:50
Mayor B was just taking a page from Venezuela's "president" Juan Guaido, who got such good
advice from the CIA. If you can't win, just create some chaos and declare yourself in
charge.
Frankly, what this fiasco suggests to me is that, in the real world, Bernie won the actual
vote in a landslide and these are the "corrective" measures by the Democratic establishment.
However, if the coders did their jobs "right," no one will ever know. Plus it creates one
more malefaction to blame on Putin don'tcha know and more reason to prefer a war-mongering
hard right-wing Democratic Party. Meh, 2016 redux so far.
AnneR , February 5, 2020 at 09:13
These have pretty much been my thoughts on this whole imbroglio: Sanders was all too
clearly winning the IA primary and the DNC and its plutocratic supporters balked, so created
this "chaos" in order to deny him his win.
John Neal Spangler , February 4, 2020 at 15:03
Looks like fanatical pro-settler hard right pro-Israelis want to throw election to Trump.
When the app failed the Iowa dems had no back up methods of communicating, like emails,
telephones, or telegrams? Looks like the DNC brought out the clown car and said VOTE
TRUMP.
Skip Scott , February 4, 2020 at 14:52
Why would we need the Russians to meddle in our election process? This year's democratic
primaries are going to be something else. The party is in its death throes.
DW Bartoo , February 4, 2020 at 14:03
I was hoping that Consortium News would publish this article.
While it must be understood that much of what this article reveals will not reach the eyes
or ears, will not cross the thought threshold of most U$ians, it is nonetheless of very
significant import.
It points to the manipulation (the manufacturing) of "consent", it pulls the curtains from
the behind-the-scenes mechanations of Big Money and the petty jiggering of candidates within
the context of big-time political maneuvering in such a fashion that international
connections, influence peddling, and vested interests are exposed as ubiquitous and
"business" as usual, call it corruption, in an "electoral" process whose principal purpose is
convince the many that actual democracy exits, that voting makes a difference, that the many
matter, and that politicians actually care about the lives and well-being of those many.
We are told that the debacle in Iowa diminishes the "trust" that the many have of "the
system", of the political process, indeed of all the many myths of U$ exceptionalism, of U$
moral virtue and the righteousness of U$ military "intervention" for "humanitarian" purposes
and so on.
In 2016, the DNC made clear that the Democratic Party is a private club, that can change
its rules (as it recently has done for Bloomberg), can ignore the popular will and substitute
its own choices as candidates, and has NO obligation to conduct itself in a "fair", "open",
or even consistent fashion, that it can resort to "smoke-filled rooms" decisions whenever it
chooses and has every reason to assume that ALL who choose to consider voting for Democrats
fully comprehend that the process is "rigged", dishonest, and graft and grift driven.
The Dems are but one of the two right wings of the war and money party, the Republicans
the other.
Both wings exist to serve the donor class,
Not "their" donor class, but the whole international (globalist) financial class.
Would it not be wise to consider the very real likelihood that neither of these two wings
has any real interest in serving the many, here in the U$, or anywhere else in the world?
That is to say, given the current reality, who can possibly imagine that the many can or
may vote their way out of perpetual war, out of wealth inequality, out of for-profit
healthcare, or propagandistic media owned by the financial (corporate) class?
If voting is simply a rite, an empty ritual designed not to change anything in meaningful
fashion, but merely to provide the appearance but not substance of democracy, then how may it
be believed that voting is anything other than passive acquiescence to a tyranny of deceit
and population management, especially when leading intellectual "lights" admonish a third
party, the Green Party, to effectively neuter itself because only the existing sham is
possible?
We live in most interesting times, a time fraught with existential issues too long
ignored, and quite unlike any others time in human history.
Can or will a pretend democracy, a bogus electoral system owned by a mere handful of
"interests" of obscenely wealthy individuals and administered by sycophantic lap dogs, come
to any honest grips with environmental collapse or nuclear Armageddon when the owners and
their lackeys, as well as the upper "middle" class profit directly from those existential
threats?
Might it not be time to think beyond the two and four year spectacles, beyond the horse
race of personality, brand, spin, and media love-(and hate)-fest?
Might our time require more of us than dutifully going along to get along with the
insanity?
Might it not be time to ponder how we might build a sustainable and humane human society
that need not destroy the ability of the planet to support life simply to allow somewhat more
than two thousand individuals to live like tyrannical "royalty"?
Who still believes or thinks that we can vote our way out of corruption and destruction
when the only permitted choice is "More of the Same"?
Lesser weevil voting?
That only ensures that the "same" becomes more virulent, more vicious, and more
powerful.
Skip Scott , February 7, 2020 at 09:08
I think one of the most important things the average person can do to change the world is
to examine their consumer and investment choices. Everyone who pays a cable bill and sits
hypnotized for hours each day in front of the "idiot box" is feeding the beast and becoming a
compliant victim rather than an active citizen. Lifestyle choices matter.
I choose to vote each election because the Oligarchy loves low voter turnout as
confirmation of the masses feeling powerless and complacent to whatever the elite chooses. We
also have "propositions" here in Arizona that provide an opportunity for engaging in "direct"
democracy.
Daniel , February 4, 2020 at 14:03
Can this DNC ineptitude and the actions of Buttigieg, who is associated with and brazenly
trying to benefit from it, even be considered conspiracy theory anymore? When the net result
is the same? You'll never convince me that the Iowa debacle wasn't a purposeful event, or
that Buttigieg's complaint about the poll last week – whose results were thwarted as a
result – weren't coordinated efforts to squash Sanders' momentum.
We know from reliable reporting that Buttigieg sold his soul long ago (if he has one) to
the devils of Wall Street, the tech industry, and the intelligence agencies. And, whether he
participated in deliberate sabotage in the two instances above or not, his brazen attempt to
'shape the narrative' and benefit from them is sickening enough.
Buttigieg and the like are facilitating and benefitting from a new and dangerous marriage
between good old fashioned American propaganda and 21st century technological trickery to win
elections that, in any just system, they'd never come close to winning.
I pray to God we are nearing the moment when thinking people finally abandon these frauds,
hypocrites, thieves and charlatans en masse once and for all.
Eugenie Basile , February 4, 2020 at 13:34
The DNC has put all its know-how in the Impeachment of Trump and now they can't even count
300.000 votes anymore
Shooting yourself in the foot or rather in both feet while shouting Trump is unfit to be
president.
plantman , February 4, 2020 at 13:03
Excellent report!
The influence of private money in the Democratic party is shocking.
Forget Russia -- The problem is much closer to home.
Stan W. , February 4, 2020 at 12:58
But this is Iowa, the land of hard-working farmers and factory workers. Are we sure it's
not Chicago we're talking about?
Jeff Harrison , February 4, 2020 at 12:34
ROTFLMAO. And here I thought the Republicans were incompetent!
Drew Hunkins , February 4, 2020 at 12:19
They deprived Bernie of his moment.
This Iowa fiasco was all orchestrated by the corporate-Wall Street Dems to preempt Bernie.
The last thing they wanted was Bernie giving a raucous populist victory speech live to the
entire world. It would have focused solely on progressive-populist bread and butter issues
which would have fired up the entire nation. This is a theft that should not go
unpunished.
If Tom Perez has any integrity he'd resign by lunch time today.
Former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg seemed perfect, a man who defended the
principle of wine-based fundraisers with military effrontery. New York magazine made his case
in a cover story the magazine's Twitter account summarized as:
"Perhaps all the Democrats need to win the presidency is a Rust Belt millennial who's gay
and speaks Norwegian."
(The "Here's something random the Democrats need to beat Trump" story became an important
literary genre in 2019-2020, the high point being Politico's "Can the "F-bomb save Beto?").
Buttigieg had momentum. The flameout of Biden was expected to help the ex-McKinsey
consultant with "moderates." Reporters dug Pete; he's been willing to be photographed holding a
beer and wearing a bomber jacket, and in Iowa demonstrated what pundits call a "killer
instinct," i.e. a willingness to do anything to win.
Days before the caucus, a Buttigieg supporter claimed Pete's name had not been read out in a
Des Moines Register poll, leading to the pulling of what NBC called the "gold standard" survey.
The irony of such a relatively minor potential error holding up a headline would soon be laid
bare.
However, Pete's numbers with black voters (he polls at zero in many states) led to multiple
news stories in the last weekend before the caucus about "concern" that Buttigieg would not be
able to win.
Who, then? Elizabeth Warren was cratering in polls and seemed to be shifting strategy on a
daily basis. In Iowa, she attacked "billionaires" in one stop, emphasized "unity" in the next,
and stressed identity at other times (she came onstage variously that weekend to Dolly Parton's
"9 to 5" or to chants of "It's time for a woman in the White House"). Was she an outsider or an
insider? A screwer, or a screwee? Whose side was she on?
A late controversy involving a story that Sanders had told Warren a woman couldn't win
didn't help. Jaimee Warbasse planned to caucus with Warren, but the Warren/Sanders "hot mic"
story of the two candidates arguing after a January debate was a bridge too far. She spoke of
being frustrated, along with friends, at the inability to find anyone she could to trust to
take on Trump.
"It's like we all have PTSD from 2016," she said. "There has to be somebody."
... ... ...
What happened over the five days after the caucus was a mind-boggling display of
fecklessness and ineptitude. Delay after inexplicable delay halted the process, to the point
where it began to feel like the caucus had not really taken place. Results were released in
chunks, turning what should have been a single news story into many, often with Buttigieg "in
the lead."
The delays and errors cut in many directions, not just against Sanders. Buttigieg,
objectively, performed above poll expectations, and might have gotten more momentum even with a
close, clear loss, but because of the fiasco he ended up hashtagged as #MayorCheat and lumped
in headlines tied to what the Daily Beast called a "Clusterfuck."
Though Sanders won the popular vote by a fair margin, both in terms of initial preference
(6,000 votes) and final preference (2,000), Mayor Pete's lead for most of the week with "state
delegate equivalents" -- the number used to calculate how many national delegates are sent to
the Democratic convention -- made him the technical winner in the eyes of most. By the end of
the week, however, Sanders had regained so much ground, to within 1.5 state delegate
equivalents, that news organizations like the AP were despairing at calling a winner.
This wasn't necessarily incorrect. The awarding of delegates in a state like Iowa is
inherently somewhat random. If there's a tie in votes in a district awarding five delegates, a
preposterous system of coin flips is used to break the odd number. The geographical calculation
for state delegate equivalents is also uneven, weighted toward the rural. A wide popular-vote
winner can surely lose.
But the storylines of caucus week sure looked terrible for the people who ran the vote. The
results released early favored Buttigieg, while Sanders-heavy districts came out later. There
were massive, obvious errors. Over 2,000 votes that should have gone to Sanders and Warren went
to Deval Patrick and Tom Steyer in one case the Iowa Democrats termed a "minor error." In
multiple other districts (Des Moines 14 for example), the "delegate equivalents" appeared to be
calculated incorrectly, in ways that punished all the candidates, not just Sanders. By the end
of the week, even the New York Times was saying the caucus was plagued with "inconsistencies
and errors."
Emily Connor, a Sanders precinct captain in Boone County, spent much of the week checking
results, waiting for her Bernie-heavy district to be recorded. It took a while. By the end of
the week, she was fatalistic.
"If you're a millennial, you basically grew up in an era where popular votes are stolen,"
she said.
"The system is riddled with loopholes."
Others felt the party was in denial about how bad the caucus night looked.
"They're kind of brainwashed," said Joe Grabinski, who caucused in West Des Moines.
"They think they're on the side of the right they'll do anything to save their
careers.
An example of how screwed up the process was from the start involved a new twist on the
process, the so-called "Presidential Preference Cards."
In 2020, caucus-goers were handed index cards that seemed simple enough. On side one, marked
with a big "1," caucus-goers were asked to write in their initial preference. Side 2, with a
"2," was meant to be where you wrote in who you ended up supporting, if your first choice was
not viable.
The "PPCs" were supposedly there to "ensure a recount is possible," as the Polk County
Democrats put it. But caucus-goers didn't understand the cards.
Morgan Baethke, who volunteered at Indianola 4, watched as older caucus-goers struggled.
Some began filling out both sides as soon as they were given them.
Therefore, Baethke says, if they do a recount, "the first preference should be accurate."
However, "the second preference will be impossible to recreate with any certainty."
This is a problem, because by the end of the week, DNC chair Tom Perez -- a triple-talking
neurotic who is fast becoming the poster child for everything progressives hate about modern
Dems -- called for an "immediate recanvass." He changed his mind after ten hours and said he
only wanted "surgical" reanalysis of problematic districts.
No matter what result emerges, it's likely many individual voters will not trust it. Between
comical videos of apparently gamed coin-flips and the pooh-poohing reaction of party officials
and pundits (a common theme was that "toxic conspiracy theories" about Iowa were the work of
the Trumpian right and/or Russian bots), the overall impression was a clown show performance by
a political establishment too bored to worry about the appearance of impartiality.
"Is it incompetence or corruption? That's the big question," asked Storey.
@humphrey@humphrey
came bursting forth! "I can stand here and blow smoke up your ass and you don't even know
I'm doing it!" What a dumass! I can't even stand to hear his voice.
But it didn't work so well.
This is the single most important moment in the debate tonight.
In fact, I think it was the most brilliant moderator moment from ANY debate, thanks to
@LinseyDavis .
#3 #3
came bursting forth! "I can stand here and blow smoke up your ass and you don't even
know I'm doing it!" What a dumass! I can't even stand to hear his voice.
by saying that increased drug arrests were used to 'target' Black gang violence, which if
you think about it, is pretty much the same pretext Richard Nixon used to
START the Drug War in the first place.
At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask
Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. "You want to
know what this was really all about?" he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public
disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. "The Nixon campaign in
1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black
people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either
against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana
and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those
communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and
vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs?
Of course we did. "
Pete is continuing the corrosive Nixonian conflation of drugs, Black people and violence,
even as he calls for decriminalization of opioids for his poppy growing pals in
Afghanistan.
What a creep.
But it didn't work so well.
This is the single most important moment in the debate tonight.
In fact, I think it was the most brilliant moderator moment from ANY debate, thanks to
@LinseyDavis .
Bill Maher interviewed Pete Buttigieg a few days ago on January 31, 2019. Bill Maher said,
"You are the only military veteran in this."
Buttigieg nodded along and said, "Yeah."
It was a critical test of character for Mayor Pete, and Buttigieg showed his true colors.
Instead of acknowledging Major Tulsi Gabbard -- the first female combat veteran to ever run for
the presidency, who volunteered to deploy twice to the warzones of the Middle East at the
height of the war, who has served in the Army National Guard for 17 years and is still serving
today -- Buttigieg chose to allow the audience to believe the falsehood that he was the only
military veteran running for president because it benefits him politically.
Furthermore, when Buttigeig's campaign posted the interview on social media, they chose to
cut out the first part of Maher's statement (i.e.
"You are the only military veteran in this.") C'est un arriviste : mon opinion
Before I dive into Shortest Way Home's account of the life and career of Peter Buttigieg,
let me be up front about my bias. I don't trust former McKinsey consultants. I don't trust
military intelligence officers. And I don't trust the type of people likely to appear on "40
under 40" lists, the valedictorian-to-Harvard-to-Rhodes-Scholarship types who populate the
American elite. I don't trust people who get flattering reams of newspaper profiles and are
pitched as the Next Big Thing That You Must Pay Attention To, and I don't trust wunderkinds who
become successful too early. Why? Because I am somewhat cynical about the United States
meritocracy. Few people amass these kind of résumés if they are the type to
openly challenge authority. Noam Chomsky says that the factors predicting success in our
"meritocracy" are a "combination of greed, cynicism, obsequiousness and subordination, lack of
curiosity and independence of mind, [and] self-serving disregard for others." So when
journalists see "Harvard" and think "impressive," I see it and think "uh-oh."
Posted by: The Beaver |
07 February 2020 at 02:03 PM DNC and Media have black balled Gabbard.
Thrashing Kamala and Hillary is an unforgivable sin for the current DNC.
Democratic party is poorly served by DNC corruption and incompetence.
The top of their ticket reminds me of the decrepit party hacks the politburo put forward in the
early 80s.
Moral and intellectual bankrupt.
Noting that McCain and Romney were the previous GOP nominees does not inspire confidence
either
Posted by: sbin |
07 February 2020 at 02:23 PM I'm not normally into conspiracy theories, but I am suspicious
of his direct commission into Naval intelligence. His educational background and a few other
things makes me think he might be a CIA stooge.
And yes, pretty dishonest and arrogant to not mention Tulsi.
Posted by: Eric Newhill |
07 February 2020 at 02:36 PM I had heard Mayor Pete had been an engineer in the military
but in a The Atlantic interview he says he was Naval Intelligence. He also spent time as a
consultant for McKinsey in the Afghanistan but in neither case was he in much danger--unlike
Tulsi.
In his own words: "Four years later, Buttigieg would return to Afghanistan as a Naval
intelligence officer. He stayed on bases for the most part, venturing out only as an armed
escort on an occasional trip. On the McKinsey work, they were outside the wire more, but "there
was no moment of great adventure or danger for me, other than just the fact of we drove from
Kabul to Jalalabad. That was a little risky. But in Iraq we were on base, or at least in the
Green Zone, almost all the time."
How does a mayor of a small mid-west town wake up one day and decide he is qualified to run
for the highest political office in the land and believe he can win. He's either insane or has
friends inm high places. After the fudging of the numbers in Iowa in his favor, I'd say the
latter.
Posted by: optimax |
07 February 2020 at 02:41 PM I have a low opinion of his personal integrity. But then I
have a lot opinion of the President's personal integrity. Its probably time saving to say who
does appear to have integrity rather than doesnt. At the moment I am prepared to believe
Steyer, Gabbard, Sanders and Yang have some decency. But I could easily be wrong about any of
them.
Posted by: Harry |
07 February 2020 at 02:51 PM Gabbard should run as an
independent if she doesn't get the nomination. I believe Gabbard said she won't but I hope she
change her mind.
Posted by: Ian |
07 February 2020 at 03:01 PM Since my background is
strictly civilian, I cannot state . . . anything. But perhaps I can ask, could we refer to this
as " foam-rubber valor"? Or "cardboard-replica valor"?
And it confirms a new emerging nickname I am seeing here and there for Mayor Pete . . . Pete
the Cheat, Cheater Peter, Cheatin' Pete.. .
Buttigieg was Navy, and military rivalry with the CIA means he's not likely to be CIA.
Also, McKinsey is a political influence peddling outfit, which is not CIA. Working at NGOs,
maybe. Buttigieg is affiliated with the Truman Project...but the Truman Project centers on
the open admission that the Iraq war was an insanely stupid strategic and tactical mistake,
and imperialism needs to be done smarter. It is not, not, not yet a principle of the CIA that
the Iraq war was a signal failure on their part. Further, the CIA finds gays pretty much as
distasteful as the average barfly, even if they feel they should be discrete.
The closest thing to a reason to believe Buttigieg is CIA is that his further was an
avowed leftist who taught the works of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramscie, associated
with the journal Rethinking Marxism. That is an ideal bio for a fake leftist fighting
Leninist Communism. The thing there, of course, is that the CIA is not a hereditary
institution!
Buttigieg believes in capitalism, just like Warren. Thus he is no good, period. The rest
is largely homophobes losing their minds.
I think Buttigieg is the honest version of Warren, saying what she would actually do,
whatever she's pretending right now. I think it is always an offense to common sense and
common decency to abuse politicians when they tell the truth. It should be the opposite.
Loving them for their lies is Trumpery.
Why are so many intelligence veterans throwing their weight behind a young Indiana mayor with such a thin foreign
policy resume?
These questions continue to loom large over the 2020 Democratic primary field: Who
is Pete Buttigieg? And what is he doing here?
Seemingly overnight, the once obscure mayor of Indiana's fourth-largest city was
vaulted to national prominence, with his campaign coffers stuffed with big checks from billionaire benefactors.
The publication of a list of
218 endorsements
from "foreign policy and
national security professionals" by Buttigieg's campaign deepened the mystery of the mayor's rise.
Buttigieg's new roster of endorsements from former high-ranking CIA officials,
regime-change architects, and global financiers should raise more questions about the real forces propelling his
campaign.
Patriot Group is currently under contract w/the US military.
They provide "contractor-owned, contractor-operated intelligence, surveillance & reconnaissance aerial
detection and monitoring support inside & outside the U.S."
Buttigieg has offered precious few details about his policy plans, and foreign
policy is no exception. His campaign website dedicates just
five
sentences
to international affairs, none of which offers any substantive
details.
Beyond a seven-month deployment to Afghanistan as a Naval Reservist in 2010, the 37
year-old mayor has no first-hand foreign policy experience to speak of.
As
The Grayzone's Max Blumenthal reported
, Buttigieg's enjoys a long relationship with the Truman National Security
Project, a foreign policy think tank in Washington, DC that advocates for "muscular liberalism." He has also taken a
short, strange trip to Somaliland with a Harvard buddy, Nathaniel Myers, who ultimately became a senior advisor to
USAID's Office of Transitional Initiatives. Otherwise, Buttigieg's foreign policy credentials are nil.
Buttigieg's lack of core principles are what might make him so attractive to
military contractors and financial institutions, two of the status quo's biggest beneficiaries.
Mayor Pete has effectively positioned himself as a Trojan Horse for the
establishment, offering "generational change" that doesn't challenge existing power structures in any concrete way.
Eye-popping payments to a Blackwater-style mercenary firm
A review of Pete for America's
FEC disclosures
found that the campaign had
paid $561,416.82 for "security" to a company called Patriot Group International (PGI), from June 4 to September 9,
2019.
Buttigieg's August 29, 2019 payment of $179,617.04 to PGI represents the single
largest security expenditure ever made by a presidential candidate, according to the FEC.
While the exorbitant amount of money raises questions, it is PGI's status as a
Blackwater-style mercenary firm that makes Buttigieg's contract so remarkable.
PGI bills itself
as a "global mission support provider with expeditionary capabilities, providing services to select clients within
the intelligence, defense, and private sector." According to the company's
website
, it offers services like
counter-terrorism, counter-weapons of mass destruction, and drone surveillance.
PGI is currently under a
$26.5 million contract
with the Department
of Defense to provide "contractor-owned, contractor-operated intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aerial
detection and monitoring support inside and outside the U.S." It is a far cry from securing campaign events held in
New Hampshire community centers.
Besides contracting with Buttigieg, PGI's only other record of
political work
was with Newt Gingrich's 2012
presidential campaign. In a 2016
Inc. Magazine profile
, PGI founder Greg
Craddock said his company stopped doing political work altogether, following a 2012 incident in which a PGI employee
on Gingrich's security detail allegedly assaulted an overzealous Ron Paul supporter.
Why the mercenary firm chose to re-enter politics for the mayor of South Bend,
Indiana remains an open question. Whatever the reason, Buttigieg's willingness to line the pockets of military
contractors as a candidate might offer further insight into why so many in the national security state are lining up
behind him.
The CIA hearts Mayor Pete
Buttigieg's lengthy roster of endorsements is loaded with former intelligence operatives, national security
hardliners, regime-change specialists, and vulture capitalists.
Among Buttigieg's most notable endorsers is
David S. Cohen
, the deputy director of the
CIA from 2015 to 2017, and a former Treasury official under George W. Bush.
Cohen is regarded as a "
chief
architect
" of the crippling sanctions that the Obama administration imposed on Iran, Russia, and North Korea --
earning him the ignominious nickname the "
sanctions
guru.
"
Pete
Buttigieg backer and former CIA Deputy Director David S. Cohen
Since leaving government, Cohen has made various
think tank
appearances to advocate for
continued use of sanctions in the aforementioned countries, as well as
Venezuela
.
In his tenure at the Treasury Department, Cohen was also instrumental in
drafting
the Patriot Act,
which restricted civil liberties and vastly increased the government's surveillance powers in response to 9/11.
Cohen has yet to speak publicly as to why he endorsed Buttigieg.
Buttigieg was likewise endorsed by
Charlie
Gilbert
, former deputy director of the National Clandestine Service, a
top-ten leadership position at the CIA. Gilbert's role was to "conceive, plan, and execute complex intelligence
operations" against "hostile target [countries]."
Another Buttigieg endorser,
John
Bair
, is the former chief of staff for the CIA's Middle East Task Force.
Dennis Bowden
, a 26-year CIA veteran, with
much of that time spent in unspecified "executive leadership positions," is also backing Mayor Pete.
The Buttigieg campaign has cited the support of former CIA senior analyst
Sue Terry
, who made a "record number of
contributions to the President's Daily Brief," during her tenure from 2001 to 2008.
Two more CIA endorsements came from former senior intelligence officer
Martijn
Rasser
, and former senior analyst
Andrea Kendall-Taylor
, who was also an officer at the National Intelligence
Council.
If you're thinking, "Wow, that's a lot of CIA endorsements for a relatively
unknown, small-town mayor," you're right – and it's just the tip of the iceberg.
More Buttigieg backers include
Ned Price
, the career CIA analyst who
resigned publicly in a February 2017 protest against "the way [Trump] has treated the intelligence community." (Price
was also a major Clinton donor, but insisted his resignation was non-partisan).
Another CIA Buttigieg endorser is
Jeffrey Edmunds
,
who moonlighted as a National Security Council member under Presidents Obama and Trump.
Buttigieg was also endorsed by
Chris Barton
, the CIA's assistant general counsel during the Clinton
administration, and
Anthony Lake
, whom Clinton nominated
unsuccessfully to serve as CIA director in 1996.
Mayor Pete's list of spook supporters similarly includes non-CIA intelligence
community professionals like
Robert Stasio
, the former chief of
operations at the NSA Cyber Center, and
William Wechsler
, former deputy assistant
secretary for Special Ops at the Department of Defense.
Buttigieg also named
Robin
Walker
, a former deputy intelligence officer for the Director of National
Intelligence, as a supporter. Walker now works for corporate weapons contractor Lockheed Martin.
Regime change hit-men and debt colonists jump on the bandwagon
Yet some of Mayor Pete's most troubling endorsements come from outside of the
military-intelligence apparatus.
Buttigieg, for example, lists
Fernando Cutz
as an endorser. For the first 16 months of the Trump
administration, Cutz was the national security council director for South America, where he led US policy on
Venezuela and was credited with outlining regime-change plans for the president.
Revealing comments from
@fscutz
, one of the key
architects of the US coup in Venezuela, declaring that the goal of intervention is to "restore Venezuela's place
as an upper middle class country"
https://t.co/jZsNLu5rWB
pic.twitter.com/2IX8d1n41P
Another Buttigieg endorser is
Jessica
Reitz-Curtin
, who spent several years in leadership at USAID's Office of
Transition Initiatives (OTI), working alongside Buttigieg's close friend, Nathaniel Myers.
OTI is the de-facto
tip of the spear
for USAID's regime change
efforts. In the case of Venezuela, OTI has
bankrolled
violent, right-wing opposition
forces for decades.
There is also plenty of excitement for Buttigieg at the commanding heights of
international finance.
Matt Kaczmarek
, vice president of BlackRock,
the world's largest investment manager, controlling nearly $7 trillion in assets, is listed as an endorser of the
South Bend mayor.
Kaczmarek
previously served
as the NSC's director of Brazil and Southern Cone affairs
in the Obama administration, when the US backed a right-wing parliamentary coup against President Dilma Roussef.
Pete
Buttigieg endorser Matt Kaczmarek, a former US National Security Council official and now vice president of BlackRock
BlackRock has massive holdings in Brazilian agribusiness, and is a major factor in the
environmental
degradation of the Amazon
region. BlackRock's practices have been so destructive to the region that
AmazonWatch
named the financial behemoth the
"world's largest investor in deforestation."
Kaczmarek is a perfect embodiment of the revolving door through which high-ranking
government employees enter the private sector and reap the rewards of policies they previously helped implement. In
2013, while Kaczmarek was crafting US economic policy towards Brazil, then-Vice President Joseph Biden was
urging
the country to open its economy
further to foreign capital.
From 2014 to the present, BlackRock has substantially increased its investment in
Brazil, according to the AmazonWatch report. Now at the helm of the company, Kaczmarek stands to profit handsomely
from the same economic liberalization policies that Brazil was goaded into adopting at his direction.
Buttigieg's list of endorsers likewise includes
Karen Mathiasen
, former acting executive US director at the World Bank; as
well as
Julie T. Katzman
, COO of the Inter-American
Development Bank (IDB). Both organizations have long histories of using debt to impose the will of US policymakers
onto poor countries.
Mathiasen, who previously served as deputy assistant secretary for debt and
development policy at the Treasury Department, was intimately involved in the administration of what has been dubbed
"
debt
colonialism
." Under this cynical practice, unsustainable levels of debt are
used as a pretext to demand that debtor nations privatize government functions, impose austerity, and allow greater
exploitation by global capital.
The IDB where Katzman worked plays a similar role in enforcing the
Washington Consensus
across the Western hemisphere. Wielding debt as its weapon, IDB policies maintain "[Latin
America's] subordinated place in the global economy," argues Professor
Victor Sepúlveda
, author of
Industrial Colonialism in Latin America: The
Third Stage
.
Empire's empty vessel
Obscure presidential candidates don't typically garner hundreds of elite national
security endorsements before a single vote is cast. So what do these spooks and vulture capitalists see in Mayor
Pete?
It can't be Buttigieg's foreign policy resume, because he doesn't have one. He
hasn't proposed any notable policies to distinguish himself from the other corporate-friendly candidates, so that
can't be it either. Some have posited that Mayor Pete may be a CIA asset himself, but the supporting evidence is
circumstantial at best.
Perhaps the most reasonable conclusion is that they see Buttigieg as an empty
vessel. Opportunistic and unmoored by ideology or political goals beyond his advancing his career, Buttigieg is the
ideal candidate for those who seek to maintain existing hierarchies. Indeed, his national security endorsement list
is filled with people who keep America's imperial machine humming along smoothly.
What is the thread that connects the CIA, USAID, and the World Bank? All three
institution exist to prop up a grossly unequal global order in which a tiny sliver of the population hordes
unimaginable wealth, while the mass of people get by on next to nothing.
At a time when that order looks increasingly untenable, with anti-austerity
protests breaking out from
Chile
, to France, to
Lebanon
, Mayor Pete makes perfect sense.
I think the Democrat establishment has decided to throw Mayor Pete under the bus. This is
why Warren went after him and some donors appear to be stabbing him in the back. A
fascinating situation to watch.
Just read the same article a few minutes ago and thought of what Yves had said today of
those hired by Mckinsey, "the firm tries very hard to hire individuals who are very insecure
and want badly to do well, including at the firm."
Was driving cross country on debate day listening to NPR as much as I could stand. More
than the combined total of the last fifteen years. They played up Pete as if he were a sports
star about to wipe every opponent off the playing field. And they never mentioned Sanders by
name but included a clip of his voice saying something along the line of "of course taxes
will have to go up" at least a hundred times.
And their impeachment Dem/Donald derangement syndrome made me wonder just what kind of
drugs have they put in the coffee/water cooler.
Intentional dumbing-down of all who listen without question or nausea.
Mayor Pete's base is upper-middle-class, middle-aged, moderate-to-liberal-leaning, white
people. Which is pretty much NPR's core donor base. Their Buttimania could just be fan
service, like the most recent Star Wars movie.
It's painful for me to agree that the early efforts of so many journalists of integrity
have evolved into what you noticed today. I trusted Noah Adams despite him never pleading to
be my trusted news friend or emotional support in hard times.
so much of the bare language–nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and their linking
language is replicated by varying 'personalities' that I find it difficult to believe that
talking points are not circulated by NPR Editors hourly.
I am also increasingly agitated in my listening by being force fed soooo many stories about
Pop Culture 'hooked' to a 'news' item–like Hanukah Shopping events filed under
Religion.
Sympathy, Eureka Springs. We listen to NPR on long trips; usually the choices are
Religion, Country or NPR. Or Sports Talk Call-Ins. I invariably end up banging my head on the
dashboard (not while it is my turn to drive!) and/or screaming into thin air.
Yikes! You could get an old mp3 player and fill it up with your favorite music and
podcasts. It would completely transform your car travel experience. If you don't have a hook
up for the player to the stereo, you can get great FM transmitters for 20 dollars or so. Good
luck!
yeah.
i got out of the habit of listening to the radio a long while ago. we're in an in between
major markets place where if the wind is out of the north, we get stations from abilene and
san angelo out of the south, san antonio.
none very good reception.
only local stations(2, in different towns) are porter wagoner fans that at least have live
coverage of the ball games(for wife,lol. i can't stand it)
so i just got used to having music in my head when on the road, and literally forget that
there's a thing called "radio"..
When I was bicycling around the country, I carried a harmonica. Didn't play it while I was
riding, but boy, would I pull that thing out in campgrounds.
Never became a good player, but gawd, that little Hohner was fun!
Well when we drive the 2 hours each way to San Diego, usually at least once a week, my
wife reads the NC links and commentary. Sometimes she'll save the comments for the trip home
and get so excited when she refreshes the page and , "There are 243 comments, that should
keep us."
A two pack of Buttigieg stories, showing that all the Atlantic should be asking for
Christmas is a clue
First, they're confused about why
people in the Democratic pre-primary season aren't flocking to Mayo Pete when he's
enthusiastic about maintainjng establishment power and welcoming "former republicans" to the
fold. As if "Radical Centrism" hasn't passed its sell by date yet.
And then, they're confused about
why young people don't like Mayo Pete. Clearly it's jealousy for his success and not his
noxious ideas mixed bland centrism.
It's pretty clear Mayor Pete is running for President for two reasons. His own
gratification and to receive big payouts from donors after his time in office. He has nothing
substantial to offer to anyone. People in Indiana don't even like him enough to support him
for a state office. He hasn't done anything worthwhile in little South Bend to show any
promise for higher office either. His history and accomplishments vary between meritocratic
box checking and crude virtue signaling. He's the political equivalent of a bunch of old rich
men trying to create a boy band out of whole cloth. There's nothing there. And the people at
the Atlantic can't figure out why voters don't like him???
My interpretation of Mayo Pete is: identity politics for white, middle-aged,
middle-to-upper-class Americans.
NC linked to a poll the other day that showed that 97% of his supporters were white,
compared to around 47% for Bernie and around 70% for Klobuchar, the next highest after the
Mayor.
Most Democrats hate Republicans (true technically any vote will do when it comes to an
election, but it's often more emotional than rational and not going to be much of a selling
point to Dems, that you are attracting the other tribe they hate and kumbaya).
There is the problem of him not being qualified of course, and not likely to win. The
annoying part is centrists seem to have picked the least promising centrist candidates ever,
so if we are stuck with a centrist, it's going to be one that seems to have little shot of
winning.
Democrats hating republicans? Evidently not when they are DINOs, like Senator Peters
(MI).
But, seriously, I am tired of those in the grip of Trump derangement who say that they
will vote blue no matter who the nominee is. I just wish they would sit out the Democratic
primaries and leave the selection to people who actually follow and mull over issues.
I saw where some celebrity was defending him and his donors and described him as
"guileless ". I was flummoxed. Guileless? He may be over his head as mayor and as candidate,
but there is nothing real there.
I do look at records, but Buttigieg has always struck me as the smart kid B*ll Sh*tting
their way through an assignment when ever I hear him speak. Donors buying a Trojan horse I
get but I don't know how anyone sees sincerity.
I'd like to see a list of his accomplishments in office. What? There isn't one. Oh, wait,
apparently he was really good on fixing the potholes in the roads.
Kind of like Obama, when I encounter the faithful, I pretend to go along, and then ask
"what do you think were Obama's best three things he accomplished while in office?"
Squirming in chair, followed by vague platitudes, followed by "he would have done a lot if
he wasn't blocked by Republicans
I caught a TV news piece over the weekend that claimed Buttgag had been voted "most likely
to become president" (or something to that effect) when he was a senior in high school. That
got me thinking "Why does this not surprise me?"
Well because I had encountered exactly this type of person in some advanced placement
classes in my HS senior year who claimed that his goal was to one day become president of the
US. The word that comes to mind when I recall that guy is "insufferable". I had never
encountered anyone before that proudly displayed such naked ambition. I hadn't really thought
much about that fellow since then – until Buttgag came on the scene and I was
immediately reminded
Yes, the new Netflix series "The Politican" is exactly about one of these types (student
at a rich high school who plans to be president). Not sure yet exactly what angle they take
since I've only watched the pilot and other random bits, but it's at least interesting. As
with any good writing they seem to want to show complexities of the character.
That spec screenplay was considered one of the greatest unproduced films for many years
before it was finely shot.
Read it sometime, there are plenty of copies in circulation. It's simply brilliant.
The film differs slightly from the script, I suppose it was hard to do it exactly. There
are two different endings that I've seen. Neither is the one from the original script.
On my current tangent about proper language. I like that we are able to make fun of his
name and turn it into new nicknames. The guy's name has "butt" in it, after all. Let's free
our inner 12-year olds.
As a gay man, I call him Butt****, with all the derision normally associated with that
term. Theoretically that should be offensive to me.
Booty judge is a spook, Obama the phony pseudo-endorses Warren – the Democrat party
is going to nominate a Republican whether the plebes like it or not!
"The letter is interesting for what it says about Buttigieg's increasingly conventional
and hawkish foreign policy and the preferences of many Democratic foreign policy
experts."
Buttigieg presents himself as having had little to no impact . Buttigieg presents his
initial work, on a cost-cutting study for Blue Cross Blue Shield, as being about "rent, travel
costs, mail, and printing." Perhaps his little corner of data crunching focused on that, but
Buttigieg is being disingenuous in averting voter attention from the fact that the study was
almost certainly about cutting headcount.
In my day, McKinsey only reluctantly took on what it called "activity value" or "overhead
value" studies, which were its lingo for cost reduction assignments, because there was no way
to make much of a dent unless you got rid of bodies. 70% of most firm's costs are
employment-related and most costs, like rent, key off headcount. In other words, those
"overhead expenditures" that Buttigieg's team was tasked to reduce included employees.
McKinsey didn't like getting people at clients fired because it recognized it might be
creating future enemies, via axed professionals who eventually landed well and would likely do
what they could to prevent McKinsey from getting hired at their new home. And consultants hated
those studies too. They followed a cookbook, which meant they didn't allow the consultants to
develop or show off problem-solving skills, plus it was just plain depressing to go to client
when the people in the corridors correctly saw you as an executioner. 2
Buttigieg is proud of the monster data-crunching pricing exercise he did on his second study
for the Canadian store Loblaw's. There's a bizarre grandiosity in how he presented his role as
a still-wet-behind-the-ears consultant in the Atlantic interview: " .brought him in to figure
out how to do it in a way that would actually help the bottom line." Structuring the analysis
falls to the engagement manager. That isn't to say Buttigieg didn't improve considerably upon
the initial ideas, but it seems wildly implausible that someone who presents himself as having
to be taught spreadsheeting and doesn't have a degree in math, engineering, hard sciences, or
at least a solid knowledge of statistics, would be "brought in" as if he had pre-existing
expertise.
And oddly, he never says this big exercise was valuable to the client. There are acceptable
in McKinsey-speak ways of taking credit without violating the norm of giving the glory to the
client.
This part from the Atlantic interview is also grandiose:
By the time of the Loblaws project, Buttigieg was becoming known within the company for
being a particularly good McKinsey consultant..
This is ludicrous. He's merely nine months into the firm and he has yet to demonstrate any
client-related or project management skills. At most, Buttigieg might have gotten noticed
within the Chicago and/or Toronto offices as being a good number cruncher and quantitative
analyst.
Buttigieg also tries to depict his getting a foreign assignment as a badge of honor. In
reality, when an office can't staff a project from its own team (and Buttigieg was sent from
the Chicago office to work on an Iraq/Afghanistan project staffed out of the Washington
office), nearly all of the time, this is the project everyone else in the office turned down.
Only once in a great while is an office so busy that it can't even staff the good projects
internally. I made this mistake in accepting a London project. I got to the the office in St.
James and discovered that the partner to which I was now assigned was widely despised.
Mind you, Buttigieg no doubt learned a lot from this gig, even if it may not be want he
wanted to learn. But getting put on it didn't mean he was special.
Buttigieg doesn't adequately explain the anomaly of his bugging out to work on a campaign
.
How do we explain this?
I stepped away from the firm during the late summer and fall of 2008 to help full-time
with a Democratic campaign for governor in Indiana, returning after the election.
This is sufficiently unusual that I suspect those who have taken notice of it are likely to
have drawn the wrong inferences, so indulge me for a bit.
McKinsey, high-power professional firms, and most employers do not take well to employees
saying they want to take a disruptive break to pursue personal interests.
McKinsey is even less good about making accommodations for women partners who have children
than other top consultants; Bain by contrast has developed a reputation for being enlightened
on this front, so there's no reason to think they are habituated to being accommodating in
general .particularly for someone who has only been there a bit over a year.
Keep in mind that unlike other types of professional firms, where a young hire might join a
particular department, like the bankruptcy practice, and those partners could have the power to
run their own business and cut "their" staffers some slack, McKinsey non-partners are in a pool
and a assignment specialist (who even when not a partner has a lot of clout) negotiates with
partners as to who goes on what study. Even though the partners' interests are important, the
assignment specialist also pays attention to the so-called "development needs" of the
associates and managers, as well as other issues (like they were just on an out of town study
in a terrible location and putting them on another might result in them quitting).
Shorter: for the purpose of keeping peace among the partners, individual partners do not get
to act as godfathers with respect to associates or even engagement managers. 3
So how to make sense of this? Look at the timeframe again: Late summer-fall 2008.
The only thing I can fathom is that enough McKinsey clients saw the crisis unfolding and
stopped signing up for new work so as to create a lot of underutilization. The firm might have
let it quietly or not so quietly be known that it would consider requests for short-term leaves
of absence.
McKinsey was badly hit in the dot-bomb era and wound up reducing its staffing in North
America by nearly 50% in two years. With the benefit of hindsight, the firm might have come up
with other ways to reduce payroll when faced with sudden slack besides cutting hiring and
getting more aggressive about pushing weak performers out the door (both of which take time to
implement).
Why did Buttigieg leave? Buttigieg strongly suggests he was never serious about McKinsey,
that he was there to get his ticket punched. While that may be true, the firm tries very hard
to hire individuals who are very insecure and want badly to do well, including at the firm. And
if you really aren't that serious about your long-term career at the firm, it is hard to put up
with the indignities of being an associate, like insecure managers wanting you to do analysis
that is obviously a waste of time or who nag associates thinking that that will motivate them,
or alternatively the stereotypical bad consulting gig of being on the road all the time, worse
mainly in locations with not-good hotels and restaurants. 4
When I came to McKinsey, I was ambivalent but willing to be persuaded. I wasn't. I saw too
little evidence that McKinsey actually added value, to use its pet expression. Most clients
didn't seem to get better. Now it is true they might have gotten worse without McKinsey, but
that's hard to establish.
One fellow 'Zoid who left around when I did had these observations:
The problem with consulting is you are hired by the problem.
The most profitable clients are the most diseased.
So consulting seemed to me to be a lot like therapy, in a bad way, in that I knew too many
people who were in therapy, were convinced therapy was helping, yet there wasn't much objective
evidence that their lives were getting better (they didn't seem less anxious, or to be having
more success in their relationships or with whatever their presenting problem seemed to be).
5 At my remove, it looked as if in too many cases, the therapist had done a good job
of creating patient dependence. And I saw the same phenomenon at McKinsey.
By contrast, Buttigieg is he exhibits no reservations about what McKinsey does generally,
just some specific bad acts. From the
Atlantic interview :
He said he's disappointed in some of the work the company has done. "Since I've left," he
said, "there are at least four cases that I can think of where someone at McKinsey has done
something upsetting."
Of course, McKinsey partners have turned out to be important funding sources for Buttigieg,
so he has mercenary reasons for avoiding offending members of the firm. Nevertheless, it would
seem more genuine to come up with some reason why consulting wasn't a fit for him, even if that
reason wasn't the operative truth. But Buttigieg doesn't do genuine.
1 I don't consider Kennedy having worked for one month as a correspondent thanks
to his father arm-twisting William Randolph Hearst as "private sector experience." LBJ briefly
taught in public schools, again not a private sector position. Clinton decided at age 16 that
he wanted to be a public servant. He worked on some political campaigns and was a law professor
at the University of Arkansas (public school!) before he won his first race, for governor, at
the age of 32.
3 The dynamic can change later when a consultant has worked regularly on a core
client team. Then the client might actually start asking for a particular consultant to manage
or lead a study. The firm views that positively since consultants that get known at a client
will be contenders to take over the account later. But the earliest when clients start asking
for a specific person is at the engagement manager level, when Buttigieg was a mere
associate.
4 I was exceptionally lucky in getting way less of that than most associates
did.
5 Admittedly New York is very competitive and few people have friends that aren't
part of their professional circle. So the therapist might have filled an important role by
being a safe sounding board/sanity check.
Thanks Yves. In a few paragraphs you summed up the entire world of the big consulting
firm. It can be fun but there's a heck of a lot of misery, especially for the associates and
more junior managers. Getting assigned to a bad MD can set a career back for years and I've
seen at least a dozen times where it led to illness or leaving the firm. Or both.
The odd thing that I noticed about Buttigieg was that at times he sounds like he's trying
to oversell a flimsy resume of consulting experience and at other times sort of clumsily
hiding what he really worked on. I agree with you that he was probably told that his part of
the firm was "taking a break" before he went off to do campaign work. Otherwise it makes no
sense to lose
My basic feeling is that Buttigieg is a creation of the media. Some candidates, like Tulsi
Gabbard, Mike Gravel, or Sanders, are diminished by the press. Others, like Buttigieg, are
promoted. The hype about Buttigieg reminds me of the hype about George Bush giving Michelle
Obama some candy, or about Alito's wife crying during his confirmation hearing.
Here's a post on mgt consulting from awhile back that this post reminded me of. James Kwak
helped place the proper role of consulting projects into the right frame.
I think it helps compliment Yves' very valid questions.
The larger takeaway I'm getting is that Buttigieg doesn't come across as particularly
honest about much of anything on his resume. I know the elites of media and team dem really
want to push this guy, but he's really struggling to catch on with voters, not least because
he's hopelessly unqualified. There's no scenario where you can say:
"I was a low man on the totem pole at McKinsey" and then say, "I'm qualified to be
president" in the next breath.
The same is true with his record as Mayor of South Bend. He's admitted he's not understood
the black community and not represented them all that well, and yet, he wants a big
promotion.
This kind of resume-based critique seems appropriate to me because he's running as the
candidate who's trying to persuade the elite, PMC (prof mgr class) within the democratic
party that he's the man for the job (and tell the larger working class base of the democratic
party that they should just jump on board because he's electable) and he's not even qualified
from their own frame of reference.
What seems to me telling about Buttigieg is that he worked for the occupation and seems to
have bought the imperial cool-aid, which indicates to me that he is not that smart. Some
people, like Gabbard, have enlisted in the military, but were able to think independently and
critically about the wars.
"... On the trail, he has invoked his distinction as the openly gay mayor of a de-industrialized Rust Belt town, as well as his experience as a Naval reserve intelligence officer who now claims to oppose "endless wars". He insists that "there's energy for an outsider like me," promoting himself as "an unconventional candidate." ..."
"... Like Buttigieg, Gabbard was a military veteran of the 9/11 generation. But she had taken an entirely different set of lessons from her grueling stint in Iraq than "Mayor Pete." Her campaign had become an anti-war crusade, with opposition to destructive regime change wars serving as her leitmotif. ..."
"... After ticking off her foreign policy credentials, Gabbard turned to Buttigieg and lit into him for stating his willingness to send U.S. troops to Mexico to crack down on drug cartels. A visibly angry Buttigieg responded by accusing Gabbard of distorting his record, then quickly deflected to Syria, where he has argued for an indefinite deployment of occupying U.S. troops. ..."
"... According to John Kiriakou, a former CIA case officer, ex-senior investigator for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and celebrated whistleblower, Somaliland is an unusual destination for tourism. "There really is nothing going on in Somaliland," Kiriakou told The Grayzone . "To say you go to Somaliland as a tourist is a joke to me. It's not a war-torn area but nobody goes there as a tourist." ..."
"... Whether or not Buttigieg's trip was coordinated without the assistance of lobbyists, the trip offered him and Myers an opportunity to weigh in on international affairs on the pages of the supposed newspaper of record – and on an absolutely non-controversial issue. ..."
"... When Pete Buttigieg made his journey to Somaliland in 2008, he had just earned a fellowship at the Truman Center, a Washington-based think tank that provided a steppingstone for national security-minded whiz kids like him to leadership positions in the Democratic Party. ..."
"... Buttigieg likely earned the fellowship after answering an ad like the one the Truman Center published on the website of the Harvard Law School Student Government in 2010 . Soliciting applicants for its security fellowship, the center declared that it was seeking "exceptionally accomplished and dedicated men and women who share President Truman's belief in muscular internationalism, and who believe that strong national security and strong liberal values are not antagonistic, but are two sides of the same coin." ..."
"... Buttigieg blended a call to "end endless wars" with Cold War bluster directed at designated enemies. ..."
"... Before an auditorium packed with the national press, he rattled off one of the more paranoid talking points of the Russiagate era, blaming President Vladimir Putin for fueling racism inside the U.S. He then attacked Trump for facilitating peace talks in Korea, slamming the president for exchanging "love letters" with "a brutal dictator," referring to North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un. ..."
"... Trojan Horse cum Wolf in Sheep's Clothing #2. Fooled me twice, Obama; shame on me. ..."
I
n
his quest for front-runner status in the 2020 presidential campaign, Pete Buttigieg has crafted an image for himself as
a maverick running against a broken establishment.
On the trail, he has invoked
his distinction as the openly gay mayor of a de-industrialized Rust Belt town, as well as his experience as a Naval
reserve intelligence officer who now
claims to oppose "endless wars".
He insists that "there's energy for an outsider like me," promoting himself as "an unconventional candidate."
When former Secretary of State
John Kerry endorsed Joe Biden this December, Buttigieg
went full maverick
. "I have never been part of the Washington establishment," he proclaimed, "and I recognize
that there are relationships among senators who have been together on Capitol Hill as long as I've been alive and that
is what it is."
But a testy exchange between
the South Bend mayor and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard during a Nov. 20 Democratic primary debate had already complicated
Buttigieg's branding campaign.
Like Buttigieg, Gabbard was a
military veteran of the 9/11 generation. But she had taken an entirely different set of lessons from her grueling stint
in Iraq than "Mayor Pete." Her campaign had become an anti-war crusade, with opposition to destructive regime change
wars serving as her leitmotif.
After ticking off her foreign
policy credentials, Gabbard turned to Buttigieg and lit into him for
stating his willingness to send U.S. troops to Mexico
to crack down on drug cartels.
A visibly angry Buttigieg
responded by accusing Gabbard of distorting his record, then quickly deflected to Syria, where he has
argued
for an indefinite deployment of occupying U.S. troops.
Rehashing well-worn criticism
of Gabbard for meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during a diplomatic visit she took -- her trip was devoted
to de-escalating the U.S.-backed proxy war that had ravaged the country's population --
Buttigieg attacked the congresswoman
for engaging with a "murderous
dictator."
Throughout the exchange,
Buttigieg appeared shaken, as though his sense of inviolability had been punctured. Gabbard had clearly struck a
vulnerable point by painting the self-styled outsider as a conventional D.C.-style politician unconsciously spouting
interventionist bromides.
How could someone who served
in the catastrophically wasteful U.S. wars in the Middle East, and who had seen their human toll, be reckless enough to
propose sending U.S. troops to fight and possibly die in Mexico? "But Assad!" was the best response he could muster.
The remarkable dust-up
highlighted a side of the 37-year-old political upstart that has been scarcely explored in mainstream U.S. media
accounts of his rise to prominence. It revealed the real Buttigieg as a neoliberal cadre whose future was carefully
managed by the mandarins of the national security state since almost the moment that he graduated from Harvard
University.
After college, the Democratic
presidential hopeful took a gig with a strategic communications firm founded by a former secretary of defense who raked
in contracts with the arms industry. He moved on to a fellowship at an influential D.C. think tank described by its
founder as "a counterpart to the neoconservatives of the 1970s." Today, Buttigieg sits on that think tank's board of
advisors alongside some of the country's most accomplished military interventionists.
Buttigieg has reaped the
rewards of his dedication to the Beltway playbook. He recently became the
top recipient of donations
from staff members of the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department
and the Justice Department – key cogs in the national security state's permanent bureaucracy.
His Harvard social network has
been a critical factor in his rise as well, with college buddies occupying key campaign roles as outside policy advisers
and strategists. One of his closest friends from school is today the senior adviser of a specialized unit of the State
Department focused on fomenting regime change abroad.
That friend, Nathaniel "Nat"
Myers, was Buttigieg's traveling partner on a trip to Somaliland, where the two claimed to have been tourists in a July
2008 article they wrote for
The New York Times.
Their contribution to the
paper was not any typical travelogue detailing a whimsical safari. Instead, they composed a slick editorial that echoed
the Somaliland government's call for recognition from the U.S. government. It was Buttigieg's first foreign policy
audition before a national audience.
Short, Strange Trip to
Somaliland
Under public pressure for more
transparency about his work at the notoriously secretive McKinsey consulting firm, the Buttigieg campaign released some
background details this December. The disclosures included a
timeline of his work for various clients
that stated he "stepped away
from the firm during the late summer and fall of 2008 to help full-time with a Democratic campaign for governor in
Indiana."
How Buttigieg's "full-time"
role on that gubernatorial campaign took him on a nearly 8,000-mile detour to Somaliland remains unclear.
Buttigieg and Nathaniel Myers
spent only 24 hours in the autonomous region of Somaliland. In that short time, they interviewed unnamed government
officials and faithfully relayed their pro-independence line back to the readers of
The New York Times
in a
July 2008 op-ed
.
The column read as though
crafted by a public relations firm on behalf of a government client. In one section, the two travelers wrote that "the
people we met in Somaliland were welcoming, hopeful and bewildered by the absence of recognition from the West. They
were frustrated to still be overlooked out of respect for the sovereignty of the failed state to their south."
Since declaring its
independence from Somalia in 1991, Somaliland has campaigned for recognition from the U.S., EU, and African Union. It
even offered to hand its deep water port over to AFRICOM, the U.S. military command structure on the African continent,
in exchange for U.S. acceptance of its sovereignty.
Several months after Buttigieg
traveled to the autonomous region, Al Jazeera
reported
,
"The Somaliland government is trying to charm its way to global recognition."
Founded by a self-described
anarchist named Carne Ross, Independent Diplomat represents an array of non and para-state entities seeking recognition
on the international stage. Ross's client list has
included the Syrian Opposition Coalition
, which tried and failed to secure power through a Western-backed
war against the Syrian government
.
Independent Diplomat did not
respond to questions from
The Grayzone
about whether it had any role in facilitating the trip Buttigieg and
Myers took to Somaliland.
According to John Kiriakou, a
former CIA case officer, ex-senior investigator for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and celebrated whistleblower,
Somaliland is an unusual destination for tourism.
"There really is nothing going
on in Somaliland," Kiriakou told
The Grayzone
. "To say you go to Somaliland as a tourist is a joke to me. It's
not a war-torn area but nobody goes there as a tourist."
Kiriakou visited Somaliland in
2009 as part of an investigation for the Senate Intelligence Committee on what he described as the phenomenon of
"blue-eyed" American citizens converting to Islam, traveling to Somalia and Yemen for training with Salafi-jihadist
groups, then returning home on their U.S. passports.
To reach Somaliland, Kiriakou
said he took an arduous seven-hour journey from the neighboring state of Djibouti. His junket was coordinated by the
U.S. ambassador to Djibouti, a regional security officer of the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service and an embassy attaché.
"It is not the easiest place
to reach and there's no business to do there," Kiriakou said.
Whether or not Buttigieg's
trip was coordinated without the assistance of lobbyists, the trip offered him and Myers an opportunity to weigh in on
international affairs on the pages of the supposed newspaper of record – and on an absolutely non-controversial issue.
In his bio, Nathaniel Myers
identified himself simply as a "financial analyst based in Ethiopia." According to his resume, which is available online
at Linkedin, he was working at the time as a World Bank consultant on governance and corruption.
By 2011, Myers had moved on
from that neoliberal international financial institution to a specialized government at the center of U.S. regime change
operations abroad.
Pete
Buttigieg on a pre-graduation trip with his Harvard buddies. Nathaniel "Nat" Myers is to his immediate left.
Imperial Social
Network
Nathaniel Myers' relationship
with the presidential hopeful began at Harvard University. There, they formed two parts of
"The Order of Kong,"
a close-knit group of political junkies named jokingly for the Chinese restaurant they
frequented after intensive discussion sessions at the school's Institute of Politics.
Like most members of the
college-era "order," Myers and Buttigieg have remained close. When the mayor married his longtime partner in 2018,
Buttigieg chose him as his best man.
Myers
currently works
as a senior advisor for the United States Agency for International Development's Office of
Transition Initiatives (USAID-OTI) in Washington, D.C. The OTI is a specialized division of USAID that routinely works
through contractors and local proxies to orchestrate destabilization operations inside countries considered
insufficiently compliant to the dictates of Washington.
Wherever the U.S. seeks regime
change, it seems that USAID's OTI is involved.
The
Linkedin page of Nathaniel Myers, a close friend of Pete Buttigieg's.
In a 2015 op-ed arguing for a
loosening of bureaucratic restraints on USAID's participation in counter-terror operations, Myers revealed that he had
"specialized in programming in
places like Yemen and Libya
"
– two conflict zones destabilized by U.S.-led regime-change wars. (Myers was
working as a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations at the time, but would return to USAID's OTI the following
year.)
In Cuba, meanwhile, the
OTI attempted to stir up civil unrest
through a fake, Twitter-style
social media site called ZunZuneo, hoping to turn the public against the country's leftist government through
coordinated flash mobs. To populate the phony social media platform, the OTI contracted a D.C.-based firm called
Creative Associates that had illicitly obtained half a million Cuban cellphone numbers.
USAID and Creative Associates
attempted to
place ZunZuneo into
private hands
through a Miami foundation called Roots of Hope, which was founded by students at Harvard
University. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey was even
solicited
by the
State Department to operate the platform. (Roots of Hope board member Raul Moas, who personally trained ZunZuneo
employees, is today the
director of the Knight Foundation
.)
The devious operation and its
eventual exposure revealed the extent to which covert operations historically associated with the CIA had been
outsourced to private contractors and NGOs.
And the role of the
Harvard-founded "Roots of Hope" in the scheme demonstrated how much USAID and its contractors depended on the same Ivy
League talent pool that produced Buttigieg and Myers.
A lengthy paper Myers authored
for the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
in 2015 indicated that he had
special knowledge of the ZunZuneo scheme and had been invested in its success.
Myers took the journalists who
exposed the USAID-OTI program to task, claiming that "individual grants were pulled out of context and described as
failures without heed to their actual goals," provoking an unfair "Capitol Hill pillorying."
He lamented that the exposure
of covert programs like these had forced USAID officials to pursue "the opposite of the programming most likely to
produce real impact in a hard aid environment." In other words, fear of public scrutiny had complicated efforts to
subvert societies targeted by the U.S. for regime change – and he didn't like it one bit.
To Syracuse University
professor of African American studies Horace Campbell, youthful cadres like Myers were a symptom of the American
university's transformation into a neoliberal training ground.
"Many idealistic graduates
from elite centers such as the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, the Maxwell School of Citizenship of
Syracuse University or the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University among
others had been seduced" into careers with USAID contractors like Creative Associates, Chemonics, and McKinsey, Campbell
lamented in a lengthy 2014
survey of the OTI's sordid record
.
"It has been painful," the
professor wrote, "to see the ways in which the so called NGO initiatives have been refined over the past twenty years to
support neoliberalism and to depoliticize idealistic students."
Campbell's comments painted a
clear portrait of Myers, who earned his master's degree at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School on his way towards becoming
a "hard aid" specialist at USAID.
When Pete Buttigieg made his
journey to Somaliland in 2008, he had just earned a fellowship at the Truman Center, a Washington-based think tank that
provided a steppingstone for national security-minded whiz kids like him to leadership positions in the Democratic
Party.
Buttigieg likely earned the
fellowship after answering an ad like the one
the Truman Center published on the website of the Harvard Law School Student Government in 2010
.
Soliciting
applicants for its security fellowship, the center declared that it was seeking "exceptionally accomplished and
dedicated men and women who share President Truman's belief in muscular internationalism, and who believe that strong
national security and strong liberal values are not antagonistic, but are two sides of the same coin."
This was not the first time
Buttigieg had dipped his toes into Washington's national security swamp. After graduating from Harvard, he worked at the
Cohen Group, a consulting firm founded by former Secretary of Defense William Cohen that maintained an extensive
client list within the arms
industry
. (As
The Grayzone
reported
,
the Cohen Group has been intimately involved in the Trump administration's
bungling regime change attempt in Venezuela).
But it was Buttigieg's
fellowship at the Truman Center that placed him on the casting couch before the Democratic Party's foreign policy
mandarins.
A
Tablet
Magazine profile
of Truman Center founder Rachel Kleinfeld described her as a "gatekeeper and ringleader"
whose network of former fellows spanned Congress and the Obama administration's National Security Council. Her career
trajectory mirrored Buttigieg's.
She had earned degrees at
elite institutions (Yale and Oxford, where Buttigieg pursued his Rhodes scholarship) before accepting a job at a private
contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, that
performed an array of services for the U.S. military
and
private
spying
for intelligence agencies.
According to Tablet, "Woolsey
positioned Kleinfeld to work on sensitive government projects the company was pursuing in the wake of the Sept. 11
attacks, including one that involved working as a researcher for the military's Defense Science Board, investigating
information-sharing between intelligence and law-enforcement agencies."
When Kleinfeld founded her
think tank in 2005, she named it for the president who oversaw the detonation of nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities,
threats of another nuclear assault on North Korea and the
killing of 20 percent
of that country's population. The Truman doctrine, which called for "containing" the
Soviet Union through internal destabilization and relentless pressure on its periphery, was the basis of Washington's
Cold War policy. (Following Kleinfeld's lead,
Buttigieg named one
of his two pet dogs Truman
).
"We decided there really was a
need to create a movement of Democrats to stand up for these ideas and to really start to think about it, very much as a
counterpart to the neoconservatives of the 1970s," she
told
The Forward
at the time.
To fill the center's
board of advisers
,
Kleinfeld assembled a cast of Democratic foreign policy heavyweights whose accomplishments included the devastation of
entire countries through regime change wars.
Among the most notable Truman
advisors were Madeleine Albright, the author of NATO's destruction of Yugoslavia and president of
an influence-peddling operation
known as the Albright Stonebridge Group;
the late Council on Foreign Relations President Les Gelb, who once
proposed dividing Iraq
into three federal districts along sectarian lines; former Department of Homeland
Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who
oversaw
record levels of migrant deportations
; and Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former State Department policy planning
director who conceived the Responsibility To Protect (R2P) doctrine
deployed
by the Obama administration to justify NATO's disastrous intervention in Libya and drum up
another one
against Syria.
"The Truman Project mobilizes
Democrats who serve the conventional interventionist agenda," journalist Kelly Vlahos
wrote
.
"Beyond that, they are part of a broader orbit of not so dissimilar foot soldiers on the other side of the aisle."
Though he lost in a landslide,
Buttigieg won election as mayor of South Bend the following year. "Mayor Pete" had not only secured his future in the
Democratic Party, he had won a place in its foreign policy pantheon with
a seat on the Truman Center's advisory board.
Balancing Opposition to
Endless Wars
This July 11, Buttigieg rolled
out his foreign policy platform in a
carefully scripted
appearance
at Indiana University. Introduced by Lee Hamilton, a former Indiana congressman who was a fixture
on the House Foreign Affairs and Intelligence Committees, Buttigieg blended a call to "end endless wars" with Cold War
bluster directed at designated enemies.
Before an auditorium packed
with the national press, he rattled off one of the more paranoid talking points of the Russiagate era,
blaming President
Vladimir Putin for fueling racism inside the U.S.
He then attacked Trump for facilitating peace talks in
Korea, slamming the president for exchanging "love letters" with "a brutal dictator," referring to North Korean leader
Kim Jong-Un.
You will not see me exchanging love letters on White House letterhead with a brutal dictator
who starves and murders his own people
@PeteButtigieg
More recently, Buttigieg's
campaign
pledged
to "balance our commitment to end endless wars with the recognition that total isolationism is
self-defeating in the long run." This was the sort of Beltway doublespeak that defined the legacy of Barack Obama,
another youthful, self-styled outsider from the Midwest who campaigned on his opposition to the Iraq war, only to sign
off on more calamitous wars in the Middle East after he entered the White House.
On the presidential campaign
trail, "Mayor Pete" has done his best to paper over the instincts he inherited from his benefactors among the national
security state. But as the campaign drags on, his interventionist tendencies are increasingly exposed. Having padded his
resume in America's longest and most futile wars, he may be poised to extend them for a new generation to fight.
Max Blumenthal is an
award-winning journalist and the author of books including best-selling
"
Republican
Gomorrah
,"
"
Goliath
,"
"
The
Fifty One Day War
"
and
"
The
Management of Savagery
."
He has also produced numerous print articles for
an array of publications, many video reports and several documentaries including
"
Killing
Gaza
"
and
"
Je
Ne Suis Pas Charlie
."
Blumenthal founded
The
Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America's state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic
repercussions.
Before
commenting please read Robert Parry's
Comment
Policy
.
Allegations unsupported by facts, gross or misleading
factual errors and ad hominem attacks, and abusive or rude language toward other commenters or our writers will not be
published. If your comment does not immediately appear, please be patient as it is manually reviewed. For security
reasons, please refrain from inserting links in your comments, which should not be longer than 300 words.
"We decided there really was a need to create a movement of Democrats to stand up for these ideas and to
really start to think about it, very much as a counterpart to the neoconservatives of the 1970s."
Blumenthal, dissected Buttigeg down to the bare bones revealing how the security state targets and harvests
willing Ivy League specimens who once sufficiently groomed are launched onto the political stage
infiltrating the Democratic Party shilling when commanded for regime change wars.
occupy on!
,
December 21, 2019 at 13:46
Breathtaking! Thank you, Max Blumenthal, and please watch your back.
Punkyboy
,
December 21, 2019 at 10:43
Trojan Horse cum Wolf in Sheep's Clothing #2. Fooled me twice, Obama; shame on me. But, then, when given
choices between worse and worser or staying home on election day . . . The only candidate with a real chance
of beating Trump in 2020 is Sanders, yet the Dims would rather cut their collective throat. Gabbard would be
my choice, but she has no chance against The Dim Machine. I am so sick of these bastards and their games –
Russiagate, Ukrainegate, now Impeachmentgate – all because they have no platform, and no candidate that
gives a damn about this country and We the People. Shame on all you poseurs!
ML
,
December 21, 2019 at 15:59
Hear, hear, Punkyboy! I concur and applaud your way with words. Google George Carlin's monologue on why
he doesn't vote. Even a committed voter may crack a smile and surmise he may have had a point! And you
can laugh about this mess in the bargain. Might as well. Too many tears and fears these days and a little
levity, especially at the Winter Solstice makes for a lightness of being. Cheers, Punky!
From the interview with Military Times that is linked in the article:
Q After one year of your
administration, what size will the U.S. troop presence be in Afghanistan? In Syria and Iraq? In Europe?
A [first sentence] The size of troop presence in any theater depends on missions determined by overall
strategy and long-term goals, which are well-developed by our political, military, diplomatic and
intelligence leaders, not by "
-- --
This is somewhat recent. Before Trump became president, the problem of straying from the script
"well-developed by our political, military, diplomatic and intelligence leaders" did not arise. Perhaps
Carter had some weird ideas like pressuring satraps in Latin America to have a lighter hand in deploying
death squads, but he was brought to the fold and eliminated from "the mainstream" without such rhetoric.
To make it clear, I also think that Trump is driven by "arbitrary or capricious decisions based on
personal or political interests and executed on a whim." But the alternative in the form that is
"well-developed by blah blah blah" is not appealing at all.
I guess that I do not need to convince the other readers, but Afghanistan is a good example if you want a
talking point. Staying there follows "the well-developed strategy", but what is it?
improving human rights, education of women etc.
fostering honest competent government
fostering economic growth (apart from consuming profits from heroin and foreign donations)
training effective and honest national armed forces and police
One could add a few, but apparently, none of that was accomplished. Yet, "the well-developed strategy"
had to deliver something important to the "national interest", otherwise it would be a total waste. It is
actually not difficult to figure it out:
Afghanistan may be a total mess, but a mess where we have influence and freedom to operate. If we
withdraw, it will be simply a total mess.
It still begs a question why "we" want to have influence and freedom to operate. Perhaps to create a
total mess nearby. Whatever it is, an alternative is overdue, preferably not capricious and poorly executed.
Tulsi for the head of NSC, DoS or DoD.
Jerry Findlay
,
December 20, 2019 at 11:37
They are trying to repeat the Obama playbook, escorting a pretend outsider and identity-firster posing as a
liberal progressive, who as soon as he gets into office betrays everything he promised in favor of the
corporate state. Why not? It fooled a lot of people before, including myself, once or twice. Why not use it
again? Because American voters have awakened to the trick and don't have time for being fooled again.
Nathan Mulcahy
,
December 20, 2019 at 10:42
Great reporting. I have a simple filter. I instinctively put a black mark on and ignore any candidate being
promoted by the corporate presstitutes. First it was Kamala Who Harris, then the Beto Who and now Buttigieg
Who. Obviously I also do not follow this so called "debate" circus.
Tim Slattery
,
December 20, 2019 at 09:36
Rare, fascinating expose of how warmongers are made. Well done, Mr Blumenthal!
Pete Buttigieg makes me think of a product, a manufactured product. Everything about him from gestures to
words.
His is not an authentic political voice.
Nor does have much to say that's interesting or helpful to anyone.
Such are efforts on the election homefront in the declining days of American empire.
Drew Hunkins
,
December 19, 2019 at 16:47
Buttiejudge, Obama and others are such professional liars. They remind me of some of my fellow students
during my grad school days.
robert e williamson jr
,
December 19, 2019 at 15:59
Thanks Max, it's great to have you out and about.
A man who looks to the Homeland Security nut cases for
money to become president must have decided he was willing t0 give up his freedom for the promise of being
safe and secure. He must be a moderate republican at heart. The country don't need another false
representation buy someone seeking the highest office in the land.
I want one of these candidate to promise they will move to go back and debate the Patriot Act before
extending it again.
Julie
,
December 21, 2019 at 14:07
All you need to know about Mayor Pete can be found on Youtube: Meet the real Mayor Pete; E. Michael Jones
on PatrickCoffinMedia. Dr. Jones is the Mayor's neighbor. Reexaminging Mayor Pete and his years in office
on Peter Hellands channel; Black Pastors speak out against Mayor Pete; CCM; Investigating of Pete & SBPD
and there's more.
I
n
his quest for front-runner status in the 2020 presidential campaign, Pete Buttigieg has crafted an image for himself as
a maverick running against a broken establishment.
On the trail, he has invoked
his distinction as the openly gay mayor of a de-industrialized Rust Belt town, as well as his experience as a Naval
reserve intelligence officer who now
claims to oppose "endless wars".
He insists that "there's energy for an outsider like me," promoting himself as "an unconventional candidate."
When former Secretary of State
John Kerry endorsed Joe Biden this December, Buttigieg
went full maverick
. "I have never been part of the Washington establishment," he proclaimed, "and I recognize
that there are relationships among senators who have been together on Capitol Hill as long as I've been alive and that
is what it is."
But a testy exchange between
the South Bend mayor and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard during a Nov. 20 Democratic primary debate had already complicated
Buttigieg's branding campaign.
Like Buttigieg, Gabbard was a
military veteran of the 9/11 generation. But she had taken an entirely different set of lessons from her grueling stint
in Iraq than "Mayor Pete." Her campaign had become an anti-war crusade, with opposition to destructive regime change
wars serving as her leitmotif.
A visibly angry Buttigieg
responded by accusing Gabbard of distorting his record, then quickly deflected to Syria, where he has
argued
for an indefinite deployment of occupying U.S. troops.
Rehashing well-worn criticism
of Gabbard for meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during a diplomatic visit she took -- her trip was devoted
to de-escalating the U.S.-backed proxy war that had ravaged the country's population --
Buttigieg attacked the congresswoman
for engaging with a "murderous
dictator."
Throughout the exchange,
Buttigieg appeared shaken, as though his sense of inviolability had been punctured. Gabbard had clearly struck a
vulnerable point by painting the self-styled outsider as a conventional D.C.-style politician unconsciously spouting
interventionist bromides.
How could someone who served
in the catastrophically wasteful U.S. wars in the Middle East, and who had seen their human toll, be reckless enough to
propose sending U.S. troops to fight and possibly die in Mexico? "But Assad!" was the best response he could muster.
The remarkable dust-up
highlighted a side of the 37-year-old political upstart that has been scarcely explored in mainstream U.S. media
accounts of his rise to prominence. It revealed the real Buttigieg as a neoliberal cadre whose future was carefully
managed by the mandarins of the national security state since almost the moment that he graduated from Harvard
University.
After college, the Democratic
presidential hopeful took a gig with a strategic communications firm founded by a former secretary of defense who raked
in contracts with the arms industry. He moved on to a fellowship at an influential D.C. think tank described by its
founder as "a counterpart to the neoconservatives of the 1970s." Today, Buttigieg sits on that think tank's board of
advisors alongside some of the country's most accomplished military interventionists.
Buttigieg has reaped the
rewards of his dedication to the Beltway playbook. He recently became the
top recipient of donations
from staff members of the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department
and the Justice Department – key cogs in the national security state's permanent bureaucracy.
His Harvard social network has
been a critical factor in his rise as well, with college buddies occupying key campaign roles as outside policy advisers
and strategists. One of his closest friends from school is today the senior adviser of a specialized unit of the State
Department focused on fomenting regime change abroad.
That friend, Nathaniel "Nat"
Myers, was Buttigieg's traveling partner on a trip to Somaliland, where the two claimed to have been tourists in a July
2008 article they wrote for
The New York Times.
Their contribution to the
paper was not any typical travelogue detailing a whimsical safari. Instead, they composed a slick editorial that echoed
the Somaliland government's call for recognition from the U.S. government. It was Buttigieg's first foreign policy
audition before a national audience.
Short, Strange Trip to
Somaliland
Under public pressure for more
transparency about his work at the notoriously secretive McKinsey consulting firm, the Buttigieg campaign released some
background details this December. The disclosures included a
timeline of his work for various clients
that stated he "stepped away
from the firm during the late summer and fall of 2008 to help full-time with a Democratic campaign for governor in
Indiana."
How Buttigieg's "full-time"
role on that gubernatorial campaign took him on a nearly 8,000-mile detour to Somaliland remains unclear.
Buttigieg and Nathaniel Myers
spent only 24 hours in the autonomous region of Somaliland. In that short time, they interviewed unnamed government
officials and faithfully relayed their pro-independence line back to the readers of
The New York Times
in a
July 2008 op-ed
.
The column read as though
crafted by a public relations firm on behalf of a government client. In one section, the two travelers wrote that "the
people we met in Somaliland were welcoming, hopeful and bewildered by the absence of recognition from the West. They
were frustrated to still be overlooked out of respect for the sovereignty of the failed state to their south."
Since declaring its
independence from Somalia in 1991, Somaliland has campaigned for recognition from the U.S., EU, and African Union. It
even offered to hand its deep water port over to AFRICOM, the U.S. military command structure on the African continent,
in exchange for U.S. acceptance of its sovereignty.
Several months after Buttigieg
traveled to the autonomous region, Al Jazeera
reported
,
"The Somaliland government is trying to charm its way to global recognition."
Founded by a self-described
anarchist named Carne Ross, Independent Diplomat represents an array of non and para-state entities seeking recognition
on the international stage. Ross's client list has
included the Syrian Opposition Coalition
, which tried and failed to secure power through a Western-backed
war against the Syrian government
.
Independent Diplomat did not
respond to questions from
The Grayzone
about whether it had any role in facilitating the trip Buttigieg and
Myers took to Somaliland.
According to John Kiriakou, a
former CIA case officer, ex-senior investigator for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and celebrated whistleblower,
Somaliland is an unusual destination for tourism.
"There really is nothing going
on in Somaliland," Kiriakou told
The Grayzone
. "To say you go to Somaliland as a tourist is a joke to me. It's
not a war-torn area but nobody goes there as a tourist."
Kiriakou visited Somaliland in
2009 as part of an investigation for the Senate Intelligence Committee on what he described as the phenomenon of
"blue-eyed" American citizens converting to Islam, traveling to Somalia and Yemen for training with Salafi-jihadist
groups, then returning home on their U.S. passports.
To reach Somaliland, Kiriakou
said he took an arduous seven-hour journey from the neighboring state of Djibouti. His junket was coordinated by the
U.S. ambassador to Djibouti, a regional security officer of the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service and an embassy attaché.
"It is not the easiest place
to reach and there's no business to do there," Kiriakou said.
Whether or not Buttigieg's
trip was coordinated without the assistance of lobbyists, the trip offered him and Myers an opportunity to weigh in on
international affairs on the pages of the supposed newspaper of record – and on an absolutely non-controversial issue.
In his bio, Nathaniel Myers
identified himself simply as a "financial analyst based in Ethiopia." According to his resume, which is available online
at Linkedin, he was working at the time as a World Bank consultant on governance and corruption.
By 2011, Myers had moved on
from that neoliberal international financial institution to a specialized government at the center of U.S. regime change
operations abroad.
Pete
Buttigieg on a pre-graduation trip with his Harvard buddies. Nathaniel "Nat" Myers is to his immediate left.
Imperial Social
Network
Nathaniel Myers' relationship
with the presidential hopeful began at Harvard University. There, they formed two parts of
"The Order of Kong,"
a close-knit group of political junkies named jokingly for the Chinese restaurant they
frequented after intensive discussion sessions at the school's Institute of Politics.
Like most members of the
college-era "order," Myers and Buttigieg have remained close. When the mayor married his longtime partner in 2018,
Buttigieg chose him as his best man.
Myers
currently works
as a senior advisor for the United States Agency for International Development's Office of
Transition Initiatives (USAID-OTI) in Washington, D.C. The OTI is a specialized division of USAID that routinely works
through contractors and local proxies to orchestrate destabilization operations inside countries considered
insufficiently compliant to the dictates of Washington.
Wherever the U.S. seeks regime
change, it seems that USAID's OTI is involved.
The
Linkedin page of Nathaniel Myers, a close friend of Pete Buttigieg's.
In a 2015 op-ed arguing for a
loosening of bureaucratic restraints on USAID's participation in counter-terror operations, Myers revealed that he had
"specialized in programming in
places like Yemen and Libya
"
– two conflict zones destabilized by U.S.-led regime-change wars. (Myers was
working as a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations at the time, but would return to USAID's OTI the following
year.)
In Cuba, meanwhile, the
OTI attempted to stir up civil unrest
through a fake, Twitter-style
social media site called ZunZuneo, hoping to turn the public against the country's leftist government through
coordinated flash mobs. To populate the phony social media platform, the OTI contracted a D.C.-based firm called
Creative Associates that had illicitly obtained half a million Cuban cellphone numbers.
USAID and Creative Associates
attempted to
place ZunZuneo into
private hands
through a Miami foundation called Roots of Hope, which was founded by students at Harvard
University. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey was even
solicited
by the
State Department to operate the platform. (Roots of Hope board member Raul Moas, who personally trained ZunZuneo
employees, is today the
director of the Knight Foundation
.)
The devious operation and its
eventual exposure revealed the extent to which covert operations historically associated with the CIA had been
outsourced to private contractors and NGOs.
And the role of the
Harvard-founded "Roots of Hope" in the scheme demonstrated how much USAID and its contractors depended on the same Ivy
League talent pool that produced Buttigieg and Myers.
A lengthy paper Myers authored
for the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
in 2015 indicated that he had
special knowledge of the ZunZuneo scheme and had been invested in its success.
Myers took the journalists who
exposed the USAID-OTI program to task, claiming that "individual grants were pulled out of context and described as
failures without heed to their actual goals," provoking an unfair "Capitol Hill pillorying."
He lamented that the exposure
of covert programs like these had forced USAID officials to pursue "the opposite of the programming most likely to
produce real impact in a hard aid environment." In other words, fear of public scrutiny had complicated efforts to
subvert societies targeted by the U.S. for regime change – and he didn't like it one bit.
To Syracuse University
professor of African American studies Horace Campbell, youthful cadres like Myers were a symptom of the American
university's transformation into a neoliberal training ground.
"Many idealistic graduates
from elite centers such as the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, the Maxwell School of Citizenship of
Syracuse University or the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University among
others had been seduced" into careers with USAID contractors like Creative Associates, Chemonics, and McKinsey, Campbell
lamented in a lengthy 2014
survey of the OTI's sordid record
.
"It has been painful," the
professor wrote, "to see the ways in which the so called NGO initiatives have been refined over the past twenty years to
support neoliberalism and to depoliticize idealistic students."
Campbell's comments painted a
clear portrait of Myers, who earned his master's degree at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School on his way towards becoming
a "hard aid" specialist at USAID.
When Pete Buttigieg made his
journey to Somaliland in 2008, he had just earned a fellowship at the Truman Center, a Washington-based think tank that
provided a steppingstone for national security-minded whiz kids like him to leadership positions in the Democratic
Party.
Buttigieg likely earned the
fellowship after answering an ad like the one
the Truman Center published on the website of the Harvard Law School Student Government in 2010
.
Soliciting
applicants for its security fellowship, the center declared that it was seeking "exceptionally accomplished and
dedicated men and women who share President Truman's belief in muscular internationalism, and who believe that strong
national security and strong liberal values are not antagonistic, but are two sides of the same coin."
This was not the first time
Buttigieg had dipped his toes into Washington's national security swamp. After graduating from Harvard, he worked at the
Cohen Group, a consulting firm founded by former Secretary of Defense William Cohen that maintained an extensive
client list within the arms
industry
. (As
The Grayzone
reported
,
the Cohen Group has been intimately involved in the Trump administration's
bungling regime change attempt in Venezuela).
But it was Buttigieg's
fellowship at the Truman Center that placed him on the casting couch before the Democratic Party's foreign policy
mandarins.
A
Tablet
Magazine profile
of Truman Center founder Rachel Kleinfeld described her as a "gatekeeper and ringleader"
whose network of former fellows spanned Congress and the Obama administration's National Security Council. Her career
trajectory mirrored Buttigieg's.
She had earned degrees at
elite institutions (Yale and Oxford, where Buttigieg pursued his Rhodes scholarship) before accepting a job at a private
contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, that
performed an array of services for the U.S. military
and
private
spying
for intelligence agencies.
According to Tablet, "Woolsey
positioned Kleinfeld to work on sensitive government projects the company was pursuing in the wake of the Sept. 11
attacks, including one that involved working as a researcher for the military's Defense Science Board, investigating
information-sharing between intelligence and law-enforcement agencies."
When Kleinfeld founded her
think tank in 2005, she named it for the president who oversaw the detonation of nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities,
threats of another nuclear assault on North Korea and the
killing of 20 percent
of that country's population. The Truman doctrine, which called for "containing" the
Soviet Union through internal destabilization and relentless pressure on its periphery, was the basis of Washington's
Cold War policy. (Following Kleinfeld's lead,
Buttigieg named one
of his two pet dogs Truman
).
"We decided there really was a
need to create a movement of Democrats to stand up for these ideas and to really start to think about it, very much as a
counterpart to the neoconservatives of the 1970s," she
told
The Forward
at the time.
To fill the center's
board of advisers
,
Kleinfeld assembled a cast of Democratic foreign policy heavyweights whose accomplishments included the devastation of
entire countries through regime change wars.
Among the most notable Truman
advisors were Madeleine Albright, the author of NATO's destruction of Yugoslavia and president of
an influence-peddling operation
known as the Albright Stonebridge Group;
the late Council on Foreign Relations President Les Gelb, who once
proposed dividing Iraq
into three federal districts along sectarian lines; former Department of Homeland
Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who
oversaw
record levels of migrant deportations
; and Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former State Department policy planning
director who conceived the Responsibility To Protect (R2P) doctrine
deployed
by the Obama administration to justify NATO's disastrous intervention in Libya and drum up
another one
against Syria.
"The Truman Project mobilizes
Democrats who serve the conventional interventionist agenda," journalist Kelly Vlahos
wrote
.
"Beyond that, they are part of a broader orbit of not so dissimilar foot soldiers on the other side of the aisle."
Though he lost in a landslide,
Buttigieg won election as mayor of South Bend the following year. "Mayor Pete" had not only secured his future in the
Democratic Party, he had won a place in its foreign policy pantheon with
a seat on the Truman Center's advisory board.
Balancing Opposition to
Endless Wars
This July 11, Buttigieg rolled
out his foreign policy platform in a
carefully scripted
appearance
at Indiana University. Introduced by Lee Hamilton, a former Indiana congressman who was a fixture
on the House Foreign Affairs and Intelligence Committees, Buttigieg blended a call to "end endless wars" with Cold War
bluster directed at designated enemies.
Before an auditorium packed
with the national press, he rattled off one of the more paranoid talking points of the Russiagate era,
blaming President
Vladimir Putin for fueling racism inside the U.S.
He then attacked Trump for facilitating peace talks in
Korea, slamming the president for exchanging "love letters" with "a brutal dictator," referring to North Korean leader
Kim Jong-Un.
You will not see me exchanging love letters on White House letterhead with a brutal dictator
who starves and murders his own people
@PeteButtigieg
More recently, Buttigieg's
campaign
pledged
to "balance our commitment to end endless wars with the recognition that total isolationism is
self-defeating in the long run." This was the sort of Beltway doublespeak that defined the legacy of Barack Obama,
another youthful, self-styled outsider from the Midwest who campaigned on his opposition to the Iraq war, only to sign
off on more calamitous wars in the Middle East after he entered the White House.
On the presidential campaign
trail, "Mayor Pete" has done his best to paper over the instincts he inherited from his benefactors among the national
security state. But as the campaign drags on, his interventionist tendencies are increasingly exposed. Having padded his
resume in America's longest and most futile wars, he may be poised to extend them for a new generation to fight.
Max Blumenthal is an
award-winning journalist and the author of books including best-selling
"
Republican
Gomorrah
,"
"
Goliath
,"
"
The
Fifty One Day War
"
and
"
The
Management of Savagery
."
He has also produced numerous print articles for
an array of publications, many video reports and several documentaries including
"
Killing
Gaza
"
and
"
Je
Ne Suis Pas Charlie
."
Blumenthal founded
The
Grayzone
in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America's state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic
repercussions.
Before
commenting please read Robert Parry's
Comment
Policy
.
Allegations unsupported by facts, gross or misleading
factual errors and ad hominem attacks, and abusive or rude language toward other commenters or our writers will not be
published. If your comment does not immediately appear, please be patient as it is manually reviewed. For security
reasons, please refrain from inserting links in your comments, which should not be longer than 300 words.
"We decided there really was a need to create a movement of Democrats to stand up for these ideas and to
really start to think about it, very much as a counterpart to the neoconservatives of the 1970s."
Blumenthal, dissected Buttigeg down to the bare bones revealing how the security state targets and harvests
willing Ivy League specimens who once sufficiently groomed are launched onto the political stage
infiltrating the Democratic Party shilling when commanded for regime change wars.
occupy on!
,
December 21, 2019 at 13:46
Breathtaking! Thank you, Max Blumenthal, and please watch your back.
Punkyboy
,
December 21, 2019 at 10:43
Trojan Horse cum Wolf in Sheep's Clothing #2. Fooled me twice, Obama; shame on me. But, then, when given
choices between worse and worser or staying home on election day . . . The only candidate with a real chance
of beating Trump in 2020 is Sanders, yet the Dims would rather cut their collective throat. Gabbard would be
my choice, but she has no chance against The Dim Machine. I am so sick of these bastards and their games –
Russiagate, Ukrainegate, now Impeachmentgate – all because they have no platform, and no candidate that
gives a damn about this country and We the People. Shame on all you poseurs!
ML
,
December 21, 2019 at 15:59
Hear, hear, Punkyboy! I concur and applaud your way with words. Google George Carlin's monologue on why
he doesn't vote. Even a committed voter may crack a smile and surmise he may have had a point! And you
can laugh about this mess in the bargain. Might as well. Too many tears and fears these days and a little
levity, especially at the Winter Solstice makes for a lightness of being. Cheers, Punky!
From the interview with Military Times that is linked in the article:
Q After one year of your
administration, what size will the U.S. troop presence be in Afghanistan? In Syria and Iraq? In Europe?
A [first sentence] The size of troop presence in any theater depends on missions determined by overall
strategy and long-term goals, which are well-developed by our political, military, diplomatic and
intelligence leaders, not by "
-- --
This is somewhat recent. Before Trump became president, the problem of straying from the script
"well-developed by our political, military, diplomatic and intelligence leaders" did not arise. Perhaps
Carter had some weird ideas like pressuring satraps in Latin America to have a lighter hand in deploying
death squads, but he was brought to the fold and eliminated from "the mainstream" without such rhetoric.
To make it clear, I also think that Trump is driven by "arbitrary or capricious decisions based on
personal or political interests and executed on a whim." But the alternative in the form that is
"well-developed by blah blah blah" is not appealing at all.
I guess that I do not need to convince the other readers, but Afghanistan is a good example if you want a
talking point. Staying there follows "the well-developed strategy", but what is it?
improving human rights, education of women etc.
fostering honest competent government
fostering economic growth (apart from consuming profits from heroin and foreign donations)
training effective and honest national armed forces and police
One could add a few, but apparently, none of that was accomplished. Yet, "the well-developed strategy"
had to deliver something important to the "national interest", otherwise it would be a total waste. It is
actually not difficult to figure it out:
Afghanistan may be a total mess, but a mess where we have influence and freedom to operate. If we
withdraw, it will be simply a total mess.
It still begs a question why "we" want to have influence and freedom to operate. Perhaps to create a
total mess nearby. Whatever it is, an alternative is overdue, preferably not capricious and poorly executed.
Tulsi for the head of NSC, DoS or DoD.
Jerry Findlay
,
December 20, 2019 at 11:37
They are trying to repeat the Obama playbook, escorting a pretend outsider and identity-firster posing as a
liberal progressive, who as soon as he gets into office betrays everything he promised in favor of the
corporate state. Why not? It fooled a lot of people before, including myself, once or twice. Why not use it
again? Because American voters have awakened to the trick and don't have time for being fooled again.
Nathan Mulcahy
,
December 20, 2019 at 10:42
Great reporting. I have a simple filter. I instinctively put a black mark on and ignore any candidate being
promoted by the corporate presstitutes. First it was Kamala Who Harris, then the Beto Who and now Buttigieg
Who. Obviously I also do not follow this so called "debate" circus.
Tim Slattery
,
December 20, 2019 at 09:36
Rare, fascinating expose of how warmongers are made. Well done, Mr Blumenthal!
Pete Buttigieg makes me think of a product, a manufactured product. Everything about him from gestures to
words.
His is not an authentic political voice.
Nor does have much to say that's interesting or helpful to anyone.
Such are efforts on the election homefront in the declining days of American empire.
Drew Hunkins
,
December 19, 2019 at 16:47
Buttiejudge, Obama and others are such professional liars. They remind me of some of my fellow students
during my grad school days.
robert e williamson jr
,
December 19, 2019 at 15:59
Thanks Max, it's great to have you out and about.
A man who looks to the Homeland Security nut cases for
money to become president must have decided he was willing t0 give up his freedom for the promise of being
safe and secure. He must be a moderate republican at heart. The country don't need another false
representation buy someone seeking the highest office in the land.
I want one of these candidate to promise they will move to go back and debate the Patriot Act before
extending it again.
Julie
,
December 21, 2019 at 14:07
All you need to know about Mayor Pete can be found on Youtube: Meet the real Mayor Pete; E. Michael Jones
on PatrickCoffinMedia. Dr. Jones is the Mayor's neighbor. Reexaminging Mayor Pete and his years in office
on Peter Hellands channel; Black Pastors speak out against Mayor Pete; CCM; Investigating of Pete & SBPD
and there's more.
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Who will pay for Medicare for all. This is the question. Because 10% of most sick patient
consume 80of all funds it is not that simple quetion. Adter all any medical insurance is in
essence putting a value of human life. Is human life is invaluable you need infinite amount of
money.
So medical system in the USSR for example, where it cane be called Medicare for all in
reality was grossly unfair to old and very sick people. They have limited funds for unlimited
demand for their services. And they tried to save first those who they consider more valuable for
the society.
So while it is clear that Pete Buttigieg is a well spoken corporate tool, his stance on
Medicare for all is not completely obnoxious.
Pete Buttigieg burst on the national scene early this year as a new sort of presidential
candidate. But it turns out he's a very old kind -- a glib ally of corporate America posing as
an advocate for working people and their families. That has become apparent this fall as
Buttigieg escalates his offensive
against Medicare for All.
A not-so-funny thing has happened to Buttigieg on the campaign trail. As he kept collecting
big checks from corporate executives and wealthy donors, he went from being "
all for " a single-payer Medicare for All system
in January to trashing it
in the debate last week as a plan that would kick "150 million Americans off of their
insurance in four short years." The demagoguery won
praise from corporate media outlets.
Those outlets have often lauded Buttigieg for his fundraising totals this year without
scrutiny of the funding sources. They skew toward the wealthy -- and toward donors with a
vested interest in protecting the status quo.
"... On December 5, while the McKinsey story was gaining steam, Buttigieg's campaign triumphantly announced the endorsement of former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Austan Goolsbee. When former White House officials make early endorsements like these, they're often overtures toward getting their former jobs back. Especially since Goolsbee isn't backing Joe Biden, Obama's natural heir, he's likely angling for a senior position in the Buttigieg administration. Goolsbee said in his endorsement, "It has been a while since I have seen the kind of excitement on the ground in Iowa that Mayor Pete has generated, and the last time worked out pretty well." ..."
"... Buttigieg wants us to see his lack of national experience as an asset instead of a liability ..."
"... Why is Buttigieg jet-setting between Wall Street and Silicon Valley for funding, instead of talking to the average voters (who hate both finance and tech) he supposedly represents? How can a Harvard and Oxford-educated ex-McKinseyite who has never taken up arms against corporate corruption credibly claim to be anything other than elitist in the first place? ..."
"... And who better understands what a Buttigieg administration would actually do -- MSNBC pundits impressed by Buttigieg's down-to-earth persona, or revolving-door insider Austan Goolsbee? ..."
A senator from California, a senator from New York, and a nationally known Texan congressman
have all clocked out of the 2020 Democratic primary. Yet the little-known mayor of the
fourth-largest city in Indiana is not only staying alive, but thriving.
At least he was, until early December. Pete Buttigieg is currently receiving the media
scrutiny expected of a front-runner, and his multilingual Midwestern golden boy routine isn't
holding up very well. After a
horrific ProPublica-New York Times expose put the spotlight squarely on Buttigieg's old
employer McKinsey, he has
struggled to justify his silence on what exactly he did for the firm, and
squirmed under broader scrutiny of his corporate funders and bundlers. That's also
brought his
tight-lipped attitude toward his actual record in South Bend -- as well as
South Bend's racist policing , and Buttigieg's own
dismissive politicking toward African Americans -- back to the spotlight.
My organization, the Revolving Door Project at the Center for Economic and Policy
Research, was
one of the first to call out this election cycle's broad lack of bundler transparency,
but there's another, even simpler data point about the South Bend mayor that we're surprised
hasn't penetrated the broader discourse. Just look at the actual figures lining up behind the
South Bend mayor, and it becomes clear that he's an actor for the well-connected.
On December 5, while the McKinsey story was gaining steam, Buttigieg's campaign
triumphantly
announced the endorsement of former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Austan
Goolsbee. When former White House officials make early endorsements like these, they're often
overtures toward getting their former jobs back. Especially since Goolsbee isn't backing Joe
Biden, Obama's natural heir, he's likely angling for a senior position in the Buttigieg
administration. Goolsbee said in his endorsement, "It has been a while since I have seen the
kind of excitement on the ground in Iowa that Mayor Pete has generated, and the last time
worked out pretty well."
To hear Goolsbee recall Obama's campaign promises should make all voters groan, and the
Midwest seethe. On the 2008 campaign trail, Obama harshly criticized the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA) for hollowing out Rust Belt factories, and even agreed to consider
withdrawing the United States in a debate with Hillary Clinton. Yet at the same time,
Goolsbee sent a back-channel memo to the Canadian embassy that Obama's criticisms of NAFTA
were "more reflective of political maneuvering than policy." Later in office, as the
American auto industry crumpled under the recession, Goolsbee
favored letting Chrysler fail rather than "siphon market-share from Ford and GM,"
according to contemporaneous reports.
Goolsbee departed the White House in June 2011 to return to the University of Chicago. In
January 2013 -- while Obama was still in office -- he picked up a new job that should raise
even louder alarm bells about his priorities and worldview. While ostensibly a full-time
professor, Goolsbee now leads the Economic Intelligence practice at 32 Advisors, a firm
founded by fellow Obama alum Robert Wolf. What does 32 Advisors do? It does the two things
most revolving-door figures do to get rich: influencing and investing.
On influencing, 32 Advisors makes no effort to hide what it's up to. While Obama was still
in office, the 32 Advisors website
advertised that it "helps companies navigate the intricacies of government regulations
and develop strategies to build strong relationships." Goolsbee's Economic Advisory
department
advertised "unparalleled insights into the future of the economy and its influence on
businesses," including "Geo-Political Briefings & Ad-Hoc Email Insights." It's not your
average consultant who can offer geopolitical insights from a former Cabinet adviser and
longtime confidante of the then-sitting President of the United States. It also says
something about a person's character to offer that insider take to the highest bidder.
(Goolsbee was unlikely to starve on his salary as a professor at the University of Chicago
School of Business.)
Meanwhile, 32 Advisors also runs its own investing arm called 32 Ventures. This has
echoes of Bain and Company's relationship with Bain Capital, a
former Obama punching bag in the 2012 campaign. 32 Advisors' relationship with 32
Ventures is even closer: instead of separate firms, the consultancy and investment wing are
different divisions of the same company.
Nowadays, 32 Advisors' consulting arm is called Strategic Worldviews, which offers -- for
the right price -- insights from Goolsbee, Glenn Hubbard (a George W. Bush economic adviser
who's now on the board of private equity titan KKR), and others. Here's the twist:
Strategic Worldviews is "a joint venture between 32 Ventures and Anthony Scaramucci's
SALT Ventures."
Yes, that Anthony Scaramucci.
Other highlights from the 32 Ventures portfolio: Blade, a "digitally powered
short-distance aviation company" that puts more recreational planes in the air to gobble up
our carbon budget; the cannabis-related companies 14th Round and High Beauty, both of which
have white founders, and one of whom is
previously wealthy (read about the race and class issues in the legal cannabis industry
here ); and Chanticleer Holdings, the parent company of Hooters.
So we have a man who wanted to let the Rust Belt collapse, who revolved out to the
influence and investment industries, and who literally works with The Mooch, throwing his
support behind the Midwestern mayor. And the mayor is proud of this endorsement! The
whole thing speaks to a fundamental tension about Buttigieg.
He is an elitist's idea of a small-town Indiana mayor. Buttigieg wants us to see his
lack of national experience as an asset instead of a liability . Everyone hates
Washington, after all. But if he is truly alien to the Washington way of doing things, why is
a swamp figure like Goolsbee throwing support to Buttigieg instead of established moderates
like Amy Klobuchar or Cory Booker? If Buttigieg actually is -- to use a meaningless word
D.C.-types love -- "electable," what will he say to an Ohio autoworker wondering why he's
cozying up to the forces who were ready to leave him out in the cold in the recession?
Why is Buttigieg jet-setting between Wall Street and Silicon Valley for funding,
instead of talking to the average voters (who hate both finance and tech) he supposedly
represents? How can a Harvard and Oxford-educated ex-McKinseyite who has never taken up arms
against corporate corruption credibly claim to be anything other than elitist in the first
place?
And who better understands what a Buttigieg administration would actually do -- MSNBC
pundits impressed by Buttigieg's down-to-earth persona, or revolving-door insider Austan
Goolsbee?
Max Moran is a research assistant at the Center for Economic and Policy Research
(CEPR), which aims to increase scrutiny on executive branch appointments.
"My party's not known for worrying about the deficit or the debt too much but it's time
for us to start getting into that," Mayor Pete says in NH town hall in response to voter
anxious about debt. Says everything his campaign has proposed is paid for.
Mayor Pete expanded on this in the gaggle: "I believe every Presidency of my lifetime
has been an example of deficits growing under Republican government and shrinking under
Democratic government, but my party's got to get more comfortable talking about this
issue"
"And we shouldn't be afraid to demonstrate that we have the revenue to cover every cost
that we incur in the investments that we're proposing."
Looks like MMT is not a McKinsey-approved management tool.
Buttigieg (D)(2): "The trips to war zones that Pete Buttigieg rarely talks about" [ABC].
Missed this at the time: "But what the 37-year-old South Bend mayor didn't mention, and
virtually never discusses in his run for the nation's highest office, were other trips to
Afghanistan and Iraq years prior to his military deployment, when he was a 20-something
civilian contractor for the global consulting firm McKinsey & Company . Buttigieg worked
for McKinsey from 2007 to 2010, after completing post-graduate studies at Oxford. In his
memoir, 'Shortest Way Home,' he mentions his involvement in domestic projects for the firm like
doing energy efficiency research in the U.S., and goes into particular detail about one that
involved analyzing North American grocery prices. But when it comes to his work abroad with
McKinsey, he only drops hints about working on 'war zone economic development to help grow
private sector employment' in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also refers to a 'safe house' in
Baghdad. The book doesn't say exactly when or how long Buttigieg was in either country." •
So Mayo Pete was (?) a spook? No reporting on this; the story just disappeared.
He is definitely a "CIA democrat" like Obama before him
Notable quotes:
"... In the media, Buttigieg is described as a 37-year-old "boy wonder," an "intelligent and worldly man" who speaks seven languages, whose speeches on the campaign trail exude intelligence and thoughtfulness, a former Rhodes scholar and graduate of Harvard and Oxford, who, driven by the ideal of public service, returned to his humble Midwestern roots to become mayor of his impoverished hometown, and who single-handedly sparked a renaissance in South Bend after a half-century of urban decay. ..."
"... Buttigieg has distinguished himself by his reluctance to take concrete positions on major political questions. His campaign website initially had no reference to policies, speaking only of the need to restore "values." ..."
"... As the campaign has developed, Buttigieg has taken substantive political positions that demonstrate he is a thoroughly establishment figure, aligned more with the "moderate" wing of the Democrats headed by former Vice President Joe Biden, and flatly opposed to the policies identified with Sanders ..."
"... Buttigieg was talent-spotted early and has moved in the top circles of the US national security establishment from the time he left college. From 2004 to 2005 (when he was 22 and 23), he worked as a conference director for the Cohen Group, a Washington-based consultancy that advises clients on international investment strategies. ..."
"... This aspect of Buttigieg's resumé closely resembles that of Barack Obama, who worked for CIA-connected Business International at age 21-22, making connections within the national security apparatus that stood him in good stead during his meteoric political rise. ..."
"... From 2007 to 2010, the year before his first mayoral campaign, Buttigieg served as a consultant at McKinsey & Company, an international consulting firm with revenues of over $10 billion. ..."
"... Media comments suggest that the Democratic Party sees one of the functions of Buttigieg's campaign as preventing Bernie Sanders from winning the nomination. ..."
"... However, from the standpoint of the American ruling class, Buttigieg's most important credential by far is his military record. Between 2009 and 2017, Buttigieg was a lieutenant and naval intelligence officer in the Naval Reserve. ..."
"... According to a report in the Hill , "Buttigieg's reserve training took place at Naval Station Great Lakes in North Chicago, where he studied to become an intelligence officer. There, Buttigieg's background as a McKinsey consultant and his Rhodes scholar pedigree earned him a direct commission into the Navy." ..."
"... Two of the seven languages in which Buttigieg claims fluency are Arabic and Dari (the Afghan dialect of Persian, spoken by about one-third of the population). Such language skills are likely the product of intensive military-intelligence training. ..."
"... The presence of ex-military officers in the Democratic field is part of a larger process, the direct incorporation of military and intelligence figures into the leading personnel of the Democratic Party, a phenomenon the World Socialist Web Site identified among Democratic candidates for Congress in 2018 (see: The CIA Democrats ). ..."
The World Socialist Web Site has begun an occasional series of articles
profiling the major candidates for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in the 2020
elections.WSWSwriters will examine the political history and program of each
candidate, making the case for a socialist alternative for the working class to both the
Democrats and the Trump administration. The first article, onElizabeth Warren ,
appeared on July 11.
Over the past six months, Pete Buttigieg has emerged as a potential dark horse candidate
in the Democratic Party presidential primaries. The two-term mayor of South Bend, Indiana --
now referred to by the shorthand title "Mayor Pete" -- has gained extensive media coverage
and built a fundraising machine, raking in $24.8 million in the second quarter of 2019, the
most for any Democrat.
Buttigieg has been the most aggressive holder of high-dollar fundraisers, attending dozens
of such events, particularly in California and the northeast, and raising much of his money
from Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
His poll numbers have not responded in direct proportion to the build-up, however. He
regularly appears in fifth place, making him the lowest in the top tier of candidates. And
his campaign received a significant blow in mid-June with the killing of a black resident of
South Bend by a white cop, which forced Buttigieg to leave the campaign trail briefly to deal
with the crisis.
Three factors account for Buttigieg's rise. His age, 37, is in sharp contrast to the two
top candidates when he entered the race, Joe Biden, 76, and Bernie Sanders, 77, to say
nothing of the geriatric leadership of the House Democrats: Nancy Pelosi, 79, Steny Hoyer,
80, and Jim Clyburn, 79. He is the only openly gay candidate among the 24 primary
contestants, married to another gay man, Chasten Glezman. And most importantly -- from the
standpoint of his acceptability to the US ruling elite -- he is a veteran of naval
intelligence, having served a tour of duty in Afghanistan, where he helped identify targets
for assassination squads.
These attributes -- comparative youth, identity as a gay man and a background in military
intelligence, together with his public embrace of religion (he is a practicing Episcopalian)
-- make Buttigieg something of a made-to-order candidate from the standpoint of the
Democratic Party establishment. His candidacy ticks a number of boxes: anchoring the primary
campaign in a right-wing national security perspective; employing youth and identity to
appeal to the predominately youthful supporters of Sanders; and elevating a right-wing figure
as a "next-generation" leader of the Democrats, although perhaps a more likely candidate for
the vice presidency than the top job.
The American public could be forgiven for wondering why the mayor of a small Midwestern
city (306th largest in the country) has suddenly appeared on their television screens in
extensive and mostly favorable news reports that paint him as a serious candidate for the
Democratic nomination.
Buttigieg's only other foray into national politics was a failed 2017 bid for chair of the
Democratic National Committee (DNC), a position that attracts relatively little public
attention. A poll from late March found that 62 percent of respondents did not even know who
Buttigieg was, although extensive media coverage has caused that figure to fall rapidly.
In the media, Buttigieg is described as a 37-year-old "boy wonder," an "intelligent and
worldly man" who speaks seven languages, whose speeches on the campaign trail exude
intelligence and thoughtfulness, a former Rhodes scholar and graduate of Harvard and Oxford,
who, driven by the ideal of public service, returned to his humble Midwestern roots to become
mayor of his impoverished hometown, and who single-handedly sparked a renaissance in South
Bend after a half-century of urban decay.
As usual, the media depiction is largely at odds with reality.
One of the most noteworthy features of Buttigieg's campaign so far is its political
amorphousness. Even by the standards of American capitalist elections, where issues of
concern to the working class are systematically excluded from the public discussion,
Buttigieg has distinguished himself by his reluctance to take concrete positions on major
political questions. His campaign website initially had no reference to policies, speaking
only of the need to restore "values."
As the campaign has developed, Buttigieg has taken substantive political positions that
demonstrate he is a thoroughly establishment figure, aligned more with the "moderate" wing of
the Democrats headed by former Vice President Joe Biden, and flatly opposed to the policies
identified with Sanders. Buttigieg rejects the single-payer "Medicare for All" slogan
proposed by Sanders and taken up by many other Democrats in favor of the establishment of a
"public option" available on the health insurance exchanges set up under Obamacare.
One proposal that has garnered media attention is his plan to expand the Supreme Court to
15 judges, a cosmetic change that would not alter the fundamental character of the court as a
bastion of political reaction. He has also called for elimination of the Electoral College,
although this would require passage of a constitutional amendment, which is highly
unlikely.
Voters would certainly find little in Buttigieg's political record, consisting of a
two-term stint as mayor of South Bend, to inspire enthusiasm. In the press, Buttigieg is
touted as a "turnaround" mayor who has placed the ailing former factory town and site of the
University of Notre Dame on the road to economic recovery.
In actual fact, his main achievements include the bulldozing of hundreds of empty homes in
blighted working class neighborhoods, the sprucing up of the downtown area, and the
attraction of modest investment from IT corporations, measures whose impact is not to lift
working class residents out of poverty, but rather to gentrify the city and drive up real
estate values. Even a favorable review of "Mayor Pete's" time in office by an Indiana
economist was forced to admit that "other than sharing in the unemployment-rate reductions of
the national economic expansion, none of the top-line economic indicators for South Bend have
changed markedly over Buttigieg's mayoral stint."
The New York Times wrote in a profile: "Some of the data is dismal. Though the
overall poverty rate has fallen since Mr. Buttigieg took office, poverty among
African-Americans stubbornly remains almost twice as high as for African-Americans
nationwide. The city has one of the highest eviction rates in the country, which has doubled
under the mayor, according to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. In households with
working adults, 54 percent do not earn enough to meet a 'survival budget,' according to the
United Way."
A glaring spotlight was placed on the actual state of affairs in South Bend on June 16,
when a white policeman shot to death a 53-year-old black man, Eric Logan. The cop, who had
been previously linked to reports of brutality, was equipped with a body camera but did not
turn it on when he confronted Logan in a parking lot and shot him fatally, claiming that
Logan had menaced him with a knife.
Buttigieg had to leave the campaign trail and return to South Bend, appearing at town hall
meetings where he and the police force were loudly denounced. While police killings are not
primarily a racial issue -- the largest number of those killed by police are white, and
minority police shoot people just as frequently as white police -- there is clearly a large
element of racial injustice in South Bend. The city is 40 percent nonwhite, but under
Buttigieg's leadership the proportion of African-American police has fallen from 10 percent
in 2011 to only 5 percent today. At the Democratic debate in Miami, Buttigieg claimed to have
tried and failed to recruit a more diverse police force.
Given this mediocre record, what recommends "Mayor Pete" for promotion to the highest
levels of the American state? Clearly, other factors are driving his buildup in the
media.
Buttigieg was talent-spotted early and has moved in the top circles of the US national
security establishment from the time he left college. From 2004 to 2005 (when he was 22 and
23), he worked as a conference director for the Cohen Group, a Washington-based consultancy
that advises clients on international investment strategies.
The Cohen Group is headed by former Republican Senator William Cohen, who was secretary of
defense under Democratic President Bill Clinton. Its principals, besides Cohen, include Marc
Grossman, undersecretary of state for political affairs in the Bush administration and
special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan under Obama; retired General Joseph
Ralston, who concluded a 37-year Air Force career as chief of the European command and
supreme allied commander, Europe; and Nicholas Burns, US ambassador to NATO and Grossman's
successor as undersecretary of state for political affairs under Bush.
This aspect of Buttigieg's resumé closely resembles that of Barack Obama, who
worked for CIA-connected Business International at age 21-22, making connections within the
national security apparatus that stood him in good stead during his meteoric political
rise.
From 2007 to 2010, the year before his first mayoral campaign, Buttigieg served as a
consultant at McKinsey & Company, an international consulting firm with revenues of over
$10 billion.
Media comments suggest that the Democratic Party sees one of the functions of Buttigieg's
campaign as preventing Bernie Sanders from winning the nomination. An opinion piece in the
Washington Post headlined "Buttigieg might save the Democratic Party from Sanders,"
applauded Buttigieg's public criticism of Sanders' occasional use of the word "socialism."
Buttigieg said: "I think of myself as progressive. But I also believe in capitalism, but it
has to be democratic capitalism." The Post author commented: "In many ways, Buttigieg
is ideally suited to take on Sanders for the hearts, minds and political survival of the
Democratic Party."
While the Democrats know that Sanders poses no threat to American capitalism, they are
determined to prevent social opposition within the working class from finding even a
distorted reflection in their general election campaign, as in 2016, when the DNC attempted
to sabotage Sanders' primary campaign.
However, from the standpoint of the American ruling class, Buttigieg's most important
credential by far is his military record. Between 2009 and 2017, Buttigieg was a lieutenant
and naval intelligence officer in the Naval Reserve.
According to a report in the Hill , "Buttigieg's reserve training took place at
Naval Station Great Lakes in North Chicago, where he studied to become an intelligence
officer. There, Buttigieg's background as a McKinsey consultant and his Rhodes scholar
pedigree earned him a direct commission into the Navy."
"We had group of young, accomplished civilians -- assistant US attorneys and FBI agents,"
Thomas Gary, a senior petty officer at the Great Lakes station at the time, told the
Hill . "Pete fit right in."
In 2014, during his first term as mayor, Buttigieg was deployed to Afghanistan, where he
was a member of the Afghan Threat Finance Cell, a counter-terrorism group established in 2008
by then-commanding General David Petraeus. Through his work in this task force, Buttigieg was
involved in activities that placed individuals on the US military's "kill or capture list,"
targeting these opponents of the US occupation for assassination or extraordinary rendition
to a CIA black site.
Two of the seven languages in which Buttigieg claims fluency are Arabic and Dari (the
Afghan dialect of Persian, spoken by about one-third of the population). Such language skills
are likely the product of intensive military-intelligence training.
The presence of ex-military officers in the Democratic field is part of a larger process,
the direct incorporation of military and intelligence figures into the leading personnel of
the Democratic Party, a phenomenon the World Socialist Web Site identified among
Democratic candidates for Congress in 2018 (see: The CIA Democrats ).
Buttigieg is also on the board of directors of the Truman Center, an imperialist foreign
policy group. Other board members include former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and
Leon Panetta, former CIA director and secretary of defense. The Truman Center is a veritable
training center for CIA Democrats, offering workshops and messaging guidelines for
up-and-coming politicians. It boasts on its website: "Our community includes more than 1,700
post-9/11 veterans, frontline civilians, policy experts, and political professionals who
share a common vision of US leadership abroad."
Buttigieg's relative silence on foreign policy issues cannot be explained by a disinterest
or lack of knowledge. It can be explained only as a deliberate attempt to avoid airing views
he knows are widely unpopular, but which are mainstream within the Democratic Party.
When he finally delivered a significant foreign policy address, in May, it was at the
Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University, which is
named in honor of former Democratic Congressman Lee H. Hamilton and former Republican Senator
Richard G. Lugar, both pillars of the foreign policy establishment.
Buttigieg denounced China for "authoritarian capitalism" and a poor record on human
rights, citing in particular the plight of Muslim Uighurs in Sinkiang, a longtime target of
CIA efforts to destabilize the Beijing regime. He called for stepped-up US investment in
infrastructure and education in order to "compete for the global economic future." And he
referred sarcastically to Trump's dealings with Moscow, calling Russia "not a real estate
opportunity but an adversarial actor."
In 2018, the Truman Center released a messaging pamphlet for elected officials and
candidates that completely coincides with the Democrats' right-wing campaign against Trump
over foreign policy. The first section, for example, declares Russia an "historic adversary"
of the United States and asserts that the intelligence community (which is directly
represented on the Truman Center's board) has "decisively confirmed" that Russia "interfered"
in the 2016 elections.
In light of Buttigieg's national security background, his campaign proposal for the
establishment of a "national service" program has particularly ominous implications.
Buttigieg argues that such a program is necessary to promote a feeling of unity and "social
cohesion" within the American population. In reality, such a program would amount to a return
to the draft, combined perhaps with labor conscription, which could be used to suppress wages
and living standards in the working class.
Whether or not Buttigieg ultimately wins the nomination, and at this point the possibility
seems remote, his sudden elevation in advance of the primaries flows from definite political
considerations within the Democratic Party itself. Whoever ultimately wins the nomination
must be acceptable to the corporate aristocracy and the military apparatus the Democrats
represent. However, the debacle of the Hillary Clinton campaign revealed, much to the
Democrats' surprise, that any figure publicly identified with social inequality and war is
liable to be deeply hated, particularly within the working class.
Within this context, Buttigieg has emerged as a figure whose particular combination of
personal characteristics -- his youth, his sexual identity as a gay man, his association with
the industrial Midwest where Clinton was wiped out by Trump, his media-concocted reputation
for intelligent public speaking, and, above all, his lack of a well-known political track
record -- might serve as a more suitable package for the same brand of politics.
One gets the sense that the Democratic Party is attempting replicate its success with
Barack Obama, whose formless demagogy about "hope" and "change" was able to divert popular
hostility to the political establishment, allowing the voters to see in him what they wanted
to see. Buttigieg's status as the first gay man to become a serious presidential hopeful
would thus parallel Obama's role as the "first black president."
In the context of popular disillusionment with eight bitter years under Obama, however, it
is unlikely the Democrats will be able to pull off the same trick twice.
The Last but not LeastTechnology is dominated by
two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt.
Ph.D
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How
exactly did Mayor Pete end up in the Navy? It's interesting for a man who touts his service so readily, that he's
reticent to discuss it in any detail. This is no doubt related to the classified nature of his work, but it's
probably also related to how he ended up in the Navy in the first place.
Buttigieg's
endorsements likewise raise questions. Why, for example, does a who's who of spooks and coup plotters want the
mayor of a small Indiana city to be the leader of the free world?
Gabbard should run as an
independent if she doesn't get the nomination. I believe Gabbard said she won't but I hope she
change her mind.
Since my background is
strictly civilian, I cannot state . . . anything. But perhaps I can ask, could we refer to this
as " foam-rubber valor"? Or "cardboard-replica valor"?
Samuel D. Finkelstein
Sam Finkelstein is a political activist, writer, and student at Seton Hall Law School. Follow him on Twitter
at
@Cancel_Sam
.
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