TO READ AND PONDER – CHRIS HEDGES: America’s Suicide Pact

 

 

America’s Suicide Pact

 

America’s suicidal march began long before Donald Trump. Trump and the buffoons around him are the inevitable final chapter of the decaying empire.

 

Chris Hedges

 

May 08, 2026

 

 

 

Our suicidal march began long before Donald Trump and his bizarre court of buffoons, sycophants, grifters and Christian fascists took power. It began when the ruling class, especially under the Reagan and Clinton administrations, set out to harvest the country and empire for personal profit.

There is a word for these people. Traitors.

 

17 Apr, 2022 20:47

Republicans have Hunter Biden's laptop – congressman

Rep. Darrell Issa said the president’s son’s computer is a “treasure trove” of incriminating information

FILE PHOTO: Hunter Biden waits for the start of Joe Biden's debate at Center College in Danville, Kentucky, October 11, 2012 © AP / Martinez Monsivais

California Republican Darrell Issa told Fox News on Sunday that his party is in possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop, and is poring over the “treasure trove” of data within it. Meanwhile, GOP leaders are already laying plans to investigate the contents of the device – which the White House initially wrote off as “Russian disinformation” – if they return to power in November.

“It’s gotta be followed all the way back to the big guy,” Issa said, referring to an email from the laptop that described a business deal in China where “the big guy,” apparently a reference to Joe Biden, would stand to gain 10%. 

“We’re going to need a special prosecutor, but in the meantime we’re investigating it,” he continued. “We have the laptop, and the laptop is a treasure trove of obviousness.”

Issa said that the computer contains evidence of direct communication between Joe and Hunter Biden while the former was serving as vice president, evidence that Joe Biden was making “sure his business deals went forward,” including in Russia and China, and evidence of Hunter’s drug use that could have made the VP’s son vulnerable to blackmail by foreign intelligence agencies.

Read more

 Moscow wants US to comment on Hunter Biden’s alleged link with Ukrainian biolabs

Joe Biden has repeatedly denied communicating with his son about his overseas business ventures.

The contents of the laptop were first reported on by the New York Post before the 2020 US presidential election, and at the time were dismissed by the Biden campaign and a number of US intelligence figures and media outlets as part of a “Russian disinformation” operation aimed at getting Donald Trump re-elected. Major social media companies, including Twitter and Facebook, forbade the sharing of reports on the laptop.

However, the authenticity of the laptop, which Hunter allegedly abandoned in a Delaware repair shop, has since been independently verified, and the New York Times and Washington Post now admit that its contents are genuine.

Emails from the laptop detail Hunter Biden’s involvement in numerous foreign business ventures, including a highly-paid stint on the board of a Ukrainian energy firm, multimillion-dollar deals in China that hinged on his introducing partners to his father, and an alleged scheme to arrange funding for a Pentagon contractor to study hazardous biological agents in Ukraine. Photographs reportedly sourced from the laptop also detail Hunter’s sexual proclivities and drug use.

The Department of Justice is currently probing Hunter’s overseas dealings, reportedly focusing on the Biden family’s ties to Chinese energy executives. However, Republicans want to go further.

House Republican Conference chairwoman Rep. Elise Stefanik (New York) promised earlier this month that should the GOP retake the House in November’s midterm elections, “we will serve as a check on the failed Biden administration, and that starts with subpoenaing Hunter Biden.”

“The House Oversight Committee is going to be all over Hunter Biden,” Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky) told Politico. “We’re going to focus on Hunter Biden not for political reasons, but because we feel he’s a national security threat.”

ERIC ZUESSE -- The Path to Corruption in France

 

The Path to Corruption in France

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at The Duran

 

Whereas Germany takes an extremely libertarian approach to corruption, and even allows foreigners to donate secretly and in any amount to support a candidate, France has one of the world’s best anti-corruption legal systems, so that virtually the only pathway by which a person can legally perpetrate corruption of the French Government is indicated by the IDEA.int site’s question-answer set on its question # “26. Is there a ban on donors to political parties/candidates participating in public tender/procurement processes? No.”  That’s even worse than in America (which is famously controlled by the owners of its arms-producers and “MIC”), where the published answer is “No data.”

 

In other words: military procurement — selling (mainly) military products-weapons or services (the types of things that constitute the bulk of governmental purchases) to the French Government — is allowed by French laws to be corrupt. A prospective seller to the French Government is allowed to donate not only to a candidate but to a political party. (Obviously, this gives those government contractors immense influence over French foreign policies, and especially over ‘defense’ policies, including how much and which corporation’s weapons to buy.) However in order to be able to contribute lots of money to a particular candidate or party, a coordinated operation that might include many cooperating donors from a given weapons-producer might be necessary. By contrast, in the United States, which nominally prohibits almost every type of corruption, the fine-print exceptions allow massive donations from any billionaire or mega-corporation via PACS and other allowed tricks. On balance, therefore, France seems to be less corrupt than America, and far less corrupt than Germany, according to these legal yardsticks. And if military procurement were not an issue, then France would appear to be significantly less corrupt than America, as well as vastly less corrupt than Germany.

 

ERIC ZUESSE -- President Biden’s Corruption Already Pervades His Administration

 President Biden’s Corruption Already Pervades His Administration

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at Strategic Culture

That didn’t take long. He’s not even in office, and he has already surrounded himself, as the incoming President, with individuals who derive their wealth from (and will be serving) America’s top defense contractors and Wall Street. The likelihood that these Government officials will be biting the hands that feed them is approximately zero. Great investigative journalists have already exposed how corrupt they are. For that to be the case so early (even before taking office) is remarkable, and only a summary of those reports will be provided here, with links to them, all of which reports are themselves linking to the incriminating evidence, so that everything can easily be tracked back to the documentation by the reader here, even before there are any ‘Special Prosecutors’ (as if those were serving anyone other than the opposite Party’s political campaigns, and, ultimately, the opposite Party’s billionaires).

First up, is the independent investigative team of David Sirota and Andrew Perez. On December 4th, they bannered “The Beltway Left Is Normalizing Corruption And Corporatism”, and reported that “A month after the election, Biden’s nominations make clear that the president-elect is most focused on trying to fulfill his promise to donors that nothing fundamentally changes. And yet, that tacit admission may have stunned those who keep hearing from liberal and progressive groups in Washington that, in fact, the left has been notching monumental victories in Biden’s cabinet appointments.” 

ERIC ZUESSE -- How Michael Bloomberg’s ‘Journalists’ Propagandize for More U.S. Aggressions

How Michael Bloomberg’s ‘Journalists’ Propagandize for More U.S. Aggressions

Eric Zuesse

 

January 21, 2020

© Photo: Wikipedia

This will be exposing typical U.S.-regime propaganda. That’s propaganda favoring U.S. imperialism, which actually violates the intentions of America’s Founders, and the spirit of the U.S. Constitution.

The U.S. regime’s propaganda doesn’t come from the Government directly, but instead from the 607 billionaires who control the regime, via their corrupt control over the successful politicians (in both Parties), financing their careers, and by their owning (and otherwise controlling) the regime’s ‘news’-media, which are privately owned and which carry the same propaganda as the Government’s ‘publicly owned’ ‘news’-media do — all of America’s mainstream ‘news’-media being in favor of the U.S. Government’s sanctioning (economic-blockading) and trying to overthrow by means of coup or sometimes outright invasion, countries (such as Iraq, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Libya, etc.) that had never invaded, nor even threatened to invade, the United States. U.S. imperialism is commonly called “neoconservatism,” but it is basically the same as other imperialistic regimes throughout history — it is controlled by the given invading nation’s aristocracy, which deceives in its propaganda regarding the reasons why “regime change” is supposedly needed in the targeted countries. By means of these lies, the nation’s public are made willing to fund these invasions in their taxes and can even think that it is their patriotic duty, instead of being a massively criminal enterprise that they’ve been fooled into supporting with their dollars and sometimes with their very bodies.

Eric Zuesse -- How Most Americans Favor Corruption

How Most Americans Favor Corruption

Eric Zuesse  

October 6, 2019

© Photo: PxHere

Americans don’t do it voluntarily, but mainly because they don’t understand the way the US system works. Part of that is the nation’s legal system; part of it isn’t, but is instead international.

Regardless of whether or not today’s United States is a democracy, our legal system possesses two features that make corruption especially difficult to prosecute to conviction, and this difficulty is extreme and makes such convictions extremely rare at the top, amongst members of Congress, and Presidents, and former federal officials, and billionaires, so that people at that level need to be extremely stupid in order to be convictable for whatever corruption they might do. (And such extreme stupidity is virtually non-existent amongst that elite, most powerful, group. So, they get away with it. There is absolutely nothing to stop them.) Consequently, corruption is rampant at the top in America.

Both of these two domestic, US, features apply also to some lesser extent in every other country; and, at the end, I’ll describe the exacerbating factor that makes the situation especially bad in the United States — the international factor, which intensifies America’s corruption-problem.

Reason Number One why Americans favor corruption is that (especially at the top) corruption is, to a large extent — and very unlike lower-class crimes of direct violence — a judgment-call, largely political, and therefore specifically a partisan matter to judge. Anything that’s “partisan” is especially difficult to produce a unanimous verdict, which is what would be required for a conviction. Consequently, an individual of high status within the elite will be granted by his group or “party” every benefit of every possible doubt. This is likely to protect any elite person from being convicted.

Take, for example, the latest “CBS News poll: Majority of Americans and Democrats approve of Trump impeachment inquiry”. On the question of impeachment, 87% of Democrats approve, while 77% of Republicans disapprove. There’s nothing even approaching unanimity. However, since impeachment is not entirely an issue which is based solely on the possibility of there having been corruption, a better indicator here is the poll’s other main question, of whether Trump deserves to be impeached over Ukraine. That question concerns not only the possibility that Trump might have acted corruptly in this matter, but also the questions of whether Hunter Biden did, and of whether his father Joe Biden did. Consequently, it measures only on corruption (abuse-of-office), not at all on other impeachment-issues; so, this is an ideal measure, for our purpose. Of course, Trump is a Republican but the latter two are Democrats, and Joe aims to replace Trump if Trump doesn’t become impeached by the House and then convicted in the Senate, and Joe aims to replace Mike Pence if Trump does become convicted in the Senate and replaced there by his Vice President. Though corruption is the issue on both sides (Republicans versus Democrats), it is an extremely partisan issue and therefore plays extremely to each side’s political prejudices. 75% of Democrats believe that Trump deserves to be impeached over the issue of Ukraine, and 8% believe that he doesn’t. 70% of Republicans think that he doesn’t deserve to be impeached over Ukraine, and 16% believe that he does. Consequently, the single issue of Ukraine accounts for almost all of the beliefs on both sides regarding whether or not Trump deserves to be impeached, and this issue of Ukraine is virtually 100% an issue about corruption.

In a court of law, whenever a particular issue is politically charged, unanimous verdicts are virtually impossible to attain. Neither impeachment nor removal from office requires anything even close to any such unanimity as judgment in a court-case does, because neither the House nor the Senate would be voting anything like jurors do in a courtroom, and the rules are extremely different; and, so, any corruption trial that’s in a court of law  faces an almost impossible barrier against conviction (because the standards of evidence and the other rules in a court-case are far stricter). So, this is one way in which most Americans favor corruption. (Like everywhere, Americans are prejudiced — i.e., partisan.)

Reason Number Two for this almost invulnerability at the top in America is that America’s elite, even more than in other countries, normally possess the financial wherewithal to hire enough lawyers of enough excellence in order to crush the prosecution’s case. Furthermore, there are a multitude of fine points in our laws that were written precisely in order to enable almost any of these people to be able to avoid being convicted. That’s one of the main things they buy politicians for — to get those types of “fine points” into the laws. It’s how the American system functions.