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The Hill newspaper today published a full-page ad in its print edition (on page 7) calling for a progressive Democrat to step forward with a primary challenge to President Biden, who has said he intends to run for re-election.

The ad, which appears under a big “Help Wanted” headline, says that a “historic position” is available for an “articulate and principled Democrat willing to show political courage on behalf of party and country.”

The notice goes on: “Qualifications include a record of progressive advocacy, effective leadership and proven integrity. Capacity to withstand intensive pressure from corporate interests and the Biden White House a must.”

The ad was placed by the Don’t Run Joe campaign, which is sponsored by the activist group RootsAction.
Available for interviews:

KAREN BERNAL, nekochan99@hotmail.com, @Roots_Action
Bernal is a Don’t Run Joe organizer and former three-term chair of the California Democratic Party’s Progressive Caucus.

She notes that recent polls by CNBC and CNN found that nearly 60 percent of Democrats nationwide do not want Biden to be the party nominee in 2024.

“A presidential nomination should not be a coronation,” RootsAction national director Norman Solomon said. “Voters in the Democratic presidential primaries next year should not simply be told to rubber stamp a choice handed down from on high.” (Solomon is also IPA’s executive director.)

The organization’s co-founder Jeff Cohen said Thursday: “A healthy political party requires healthy political debate about its future. President Biden should not be enabled to coast to renomination without such a debate, especially in light of recent polling that shows most Democrats don’t want him to seek a second term.”

The Hill newspaper today published a full-page ad in its print edition (on page 7) calling for a progressive Democrat to step forward with a primary challenge to President Biden, who has said he intends to run for re-election.

The ad, which appears under a big “Help Wanted” headline, says that a “historic position” is available for an “articulate and principled Democrat willing to show political courage on behalf of party and country.”

The notice goes on: “Qualifications include a record of progressive advocacy, effective leadership and proven integrity. Capacity to withstand intensive pressure from corporate interests and the Biden White House a must.”

The ad was placed by the Don’t Run Joe campaign, which is sponsored by the activist group RootsAction.

Available for interviews:

KAREN BERNAL,nekochan99@hotmail.com, @Roots_Action

Bernal is a Don’t Run Joe organizer and former three-term chair of the California Democratic Party’s Progressive Caucus.

She notes that recent polls by CNBC and CNN found that nearly 60 percent of Democrats nationwide do not want Biden to be the party nominee in 2024.

“A presidential nomination should not be a coronation,” RootsAction national director Norman Solomon said. “Voters in the Democratic presidential primaries next year should not simply be told to rubber stamp a choice handed down from on high.” (Solomon is also IPA’s executive director.)

The organization’s co-founder Jeff Cohen said Thursday: “A healthy political party requires healthy political debate about its future. President Biden should not be enabled to coast to renomination without such a debate, especially in light of recent polling that shows most Democrats don’t want him to seek a second term.”

Rights Groups and Newspapers Call on Biden to Finally Drop Assange Prosecution

Twelve years after relying on WikiLeaks to publish “Cablegate” documents, the New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, DER SPIEGEL and El Pais just published “An Open Letter from Editors and Publishers: Publishing is Not a Crime,” calling for the Biden administration to stop its prosecution of Julian Assange.

Consortium News reports: “Daniel Ellsberg has called on the U.S. to indict him for having the same unauthorized possession of classified material as Julian Assange.” Consortium News also highlights protests on Saturday for Human Rights Day.

CHIP GIBBONS, chip@RightsAndDissent.org, @ChipGibbons89
Gibbons is policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent. They, along with the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Committee to Protect Journalists and over a dozen other groups, just sent a letter to President Biden: “It is more than a year since our coalition sent a joint letter calling for the charges against Assange to be dropped. In June, then U.K. Home Secretary Priti Patel approved Assange’s extradition to the United States, a decision that Assange’s legal team is in the process of appealing. Today, we repeat those concerns, and urge you to heed our request. We believe that the prosecution of Assange in the U.S. would set a harmful legal precedent and deliver a damaging blow to press freedom by opening the way for journalists to be tried under the Espionage Act if they receive classified material from whistleblowers. …
“It is time for the Biden administration to break from the Trump administration’s decision to indict Assange — a move that was hostile to the media and democracy itself. Correcting the course is essential to protect journalists’ ability to report freely on the United States without fear of retribution.”
Gibbons just wrote the piece “Former CIA Director’s Institute Hosts Event On The Assange Case (And Madness Ensues)”

See from the British National Union of Journalists: “CIA reportedly plotted to kidnap and assassinate Julian Assange.”

Biden has called on Congress to block a potential railroad strike.

MEL BUER, mel@therealnews.com @mel_buer
Based in Omaha, Nebraska, Buer is an editor at The Real News Network and has been covering the potential railroad strike.

MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ, max@therealnews.com
Alvarez is editor-in-chief of The Real News and author of The Work of Living.

He also hosts the Working People Podcast and said today: “Two things everyone needs to understand: 1) It is BECAUSE they always counted on Biden/Congress forcing a deal down workers’ throats that rail carriers saw no reason to bargain in good faith for 2-plus years or to change the profit-maximizing practices that have blown up the supply chain.

“So, if you just started caring about the crisis on the railroads and were hand wringing about striking workers hurting the supply chain, I got news for you: Biden just gave a big thumbs up to the people who have already run the supply chain into the ground.

“You’re already paying for their corporate malfeasance. Demolishing their workforce, making trains longer/more dangerous, risking more derailments, price gouging shippers (a lot of businesses have no choice but to use rail, no one is out here building new rail lines, so the rail carriers can do whatever they want. They have essentially formed a non-competitive oligopolistic cartel.) They’re making more money than ever and you’re paying the costs passed onto consumers while workers’ lives are obliterated and people quit in record numbers.

“You just never cared about it until now. Personally, as someone who’s covered this story all year by talking to workers, I think it’s because our media have failed to cover this accurately (or at all) for years.

“The second thing to understand: This whole process has been a dismal example of workers having their voices silenced. Again, railroaders have gone three years without a new contract and the carriers never bargained seriously with unions because they expected this result would save them.”

MOHAMAD BAZZI,  mohamad.bazzi@nyu.edu, @BazziNYU
Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and a journalism professor at New York University. He is also a non-resident fellow at Democracy for the Arab World Now, which was founded by Jamal Khashoggi.

Bazzi just wrote the piece “Biden’s decision to grant Saudi crown prince immunity is a profound mistake.” He writes: “The Biden administration told a U.S. judge last week that Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, should be granted immunity in a civil lawsuit over his role in the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. That decision effectively ends one of the last efforts to hold the prince accountable for Khashoggi’s assassination by a Saudi hit team inside the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul in October 2018. …

“Thanks to the Biden administration’s immunity decision, Prince Mohammed now has a level of protection from U.S. legal actions that even Trump did not offer him. …

“With the prince now shielded from legal action stemming from his regime’s human rights abuses, he will feel far more comfortable traveling to the U.S. and Europe – anywhere he could have faced judicial accountability. And he will be emboldened to crack down more brutally on Saudi dissidents and political opponents, both at home and abroad.

“In fact, instead of showing leniency or accommodating his critics, Prince Mohammed has followed the same playbook since he rose to power with his father’s ascension to the Saudi throne: he seeks to assert his strength and brutal authority, even after he gets what he wants. …

“Biden continues to abandon his stated principles in the hopes of appeasing an autocrat who disdains him. Biden has failed to live up to his promise to put human rights at the center of his foreign policy, and a pledge during the 2020 presidential campaign to seek accountability for Khashoggi’s murder, when he declared: ‘Under a Biden-Harris administration, we will reassess our relationship with the Kingdom, end U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, and make sure America does not check its values at the door to sell arms or buy oil.’

“Today, after nearly two years in power, the Biden administration is still providing weapons and military support to Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. has now shielded the crown prince from any meaningful accountability for Khashoggi’s killing.”

President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping are meeting Monday on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Indonesia.

JAMES BRADLEY, ‪[currently in Vietnam], james@jamesbradley.com, Skype: JamesOnSound
Bradley is author of several bestsellers focused on U.S. policy in the Pacific and Asia, including The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia — see NPR report on that book. He is perhaps most well known for his book Flags of Our Fathers.

He said today: “Take the G20, subtract the G7 and it equals the BRICS. The eastern winds are predominant, the petrodollar is leaking and it will be a cold winter in the West.”

Bradley is prominently featured in John Pilger’s noted documentary “The Coming War on China.”

He has produced numerous episodes of the “Untold Pacific” podcast including “China Rising” and “U.S. Military: ‘War with China Inevitable.’”

He recently said: “The business of China is business. The business of America is war. Will the U.S. make a business-like deal with China over Taiwan? Or will the U.S. insist upon the Taiwan question being settled as a matter of war? It’s not China that’s aggressive — it’s the U.S. government that invades Iraq and Afghanistan and puts a fleet on China’s doorstep.

“The U.S.’s history in China is disastrous. One of the first war lobbies in the U.S. was to get the U.S. to pour millions into supporting Chiang Kai-shek against Mao when Chiang Kai-shek had much, much less popular support.”

See his interview with Covert Action Magazine on the U.S. military encirclement of China.

The Pentagon recently released the Nuclear Posture Review [PDF].

JACKIE CABASSO, wslf@earthlink.net, @jackiecabasso

Cabasso is executive director of the Western States Legal Foundation. See her piece on the August 2022 Review Conference of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, “A Four-Week Festival of Double Standards: Hypocrisy; Outright Lying by Nuclear-armed States.”

See Twitter thread by Stephen Young of the Union of Concerned Scientists who called the Review “a terrifying document.” He states: “The NPR abandons the pledge Biden made on the campaign trail to support a ‘no first use’ policy.” The U.S. government has long had a nuclear stance that asserts it might initiate a nuclear war. Russia had a no first use policy until 1993.

Cabasso said today: With the Russian government’s alarming nuclear threats in Ukraine and the world closer to nuclear war than at any time since the darkest days of the Cold War, the Biden administration’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) could be read as pouring gas on the fire. Rather than issuing a clarion call for diplomacy, military restraint and new, non-nuclear global security arrangements, the new NPR doubles down on the centrality of nuclear deterrence — the threatened use of nuclear weapons — in U.S. national security policy. While giving lip service to ‘a renewed emphasis on arms control,’ it declares, ‘For the foreseeable future, nuclear weapons will continue to provide unique deterrence effects that no other element of U.S. military power can replace. …’ To this end, ‘The United States is committed to modernizing its nuclear forces, nuclear command, control, and communications (NC3) system, and production and support infrastructure. …’

“The NPR retains all three legs of the ‘strategic triad’ of delivery systems — ground based Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), Sea Launched Ballistic Missile Submarines, and strategic bombers, and describes plans to replace them all with upgraded models, accompanied by a suite of modernized warheads. It also states: ‘As long as nuclear weapons exist, NATO will remain a nuclear alliance.’

“Explicitly rejecting the options of a declaratory policy of No First Use or Sole Purpose, the NPR somewhat ambiguously declares, ‘The United States would only consider the use of nuclear weapons in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or our Allies and partners.’

“The 2022 NPR is largely a recapitulation of previous NPRs. While it drops ‘hedge against an uncertain future’ as a formal role for nuclear weapons, it identifies with apparent certainty, Russia in the near term and China in the longer term as posing growing nuclear threats to the United States, its allies and partners. The NPR states: ‘By the 2030’s, the United States will, for the first time in history, face two major nuclear powers as strategic competitors and potential adversaries.’ It also identifies North Korea and Iran as lesser potential threats, warning that ‘Any nuclear attack by North Korea on the United States or its Allies and partners is unacceptable and will result in the end of that regime,’ and stating that, ‘Iran will not be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon.’

“In fact, U.S. national security policy has been remarkably consistent in the post-World War II and post-Cold War eras — despite dramatically changed geopolitical conditions and very different Presidential styles. ‘Deterrence’ has been reaffirmed as the ‘cornerstone’ of U.S. national security by every President, Republican or Democrat, including Obama — since 1945, when when President Harry Truman, a Democrat, oversaw the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Russia and other would-be superpowers have increasingly modeled their own national security policies (and their economies) on the U.S.

“President Harry Truman, a Democrat, oversaw the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Russia and other would-be superpowers have increasingly modeled their own national security policies (and their economies) on the U.S. With festering nuclear flashpoints in Ukraine, Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula, South Asia, and the Middle East, if we survive, the Biden administration’s NPR is a recipe for nuclear weapons forever and ever-present nuclear dangers. It’s time to go back to the drawing board. For starters we need a bold vision for a different kind of future, where human security takes precedence over ‘national’ security and where, as Gandhi said, nations ‘will want to live as much for other nations as for [themselves].’ There is no place in that future for nuclear weapons.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, David Zupan,

October 31, 2022

Institute for Public Accuracy
accuracy.org * ipa@accuracy.org
@accuracy * ipaccuracy

Biden said Wednesday, addressing oil company executives: “You’re sitting on record profits and we’re giving you more certainty, so you can act now to increase oil production now. … You should not be using your profits to buy back stock or for dividends — not now.”

WILLIAM LAZONICK, william.lazonick@gmail.com
Lazonick is a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts. Earlier this year, he wrote the piece “Where Did You Go, Vice President Joe?” for the Institute for New Economic Thinking. The piece contrasts Biden’s prior rhetoric on policies on stopping stock buybacks with his inaction as president.

Lazonick said today: “In announcing the plan to release 15 million barrels of oil from the strategic reserve to bring down prices, President Biden commented that the major oil companies should use their profits to increase domestic production, not to distribute cash to shareholders in the form of buybacks and dividends. The oil companies have a long history of doing buybacks in addition to dividends to boost their stock prices while Americans are burdened with high oil prices. For example, in 2005-2015 Exxon Mobil distributed $224 billion in buybacks on top of $101 billion in dividends (a combined 86 percent of net income). As Vice President, Biden was an outspoken critic of stock buybacks, and he should know that an executive order that bans buybacks is the only way in which the oil companies will cease using the profits from high oil prices to pump up their stock prices. Decisive policy, not deferential pleading, is what we need now.”

Lazonick is president of the Academic-Industry Research Network and has written several papers for the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

He is co-author of Predatory Value Extraction: How the Looting of the Business Corporation Became the U.S. Norm and How Sustainable Prosperity Can Be Restored (Oxford University Press, 2020).

STEPHEN ZUNES, zunes@usfca.edu
Professor of politics at the University of San Francisco, Zunes wrote the piece “The U.S. Hypocrisy on Ukraine.” Regarding the U.S. government’s recent condemnation of Putin’s annexation of Ukrainian territory, Zunes notes that the U.S. government is the “only government to recognize Israel’s illegal annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights and Morocco’s illegal annexation of Western Sahara.”

His latest piece — “As Iraq War Vote Anniversary Nears, Don’t Forget Who Was Responsible” — notes that Biden and other prominent Democrats voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq in October 2002 — and have lied about their records.

On Oct. 7, 2002 just ahead of the Congressional vote, Bush put forward the case for war in a speech in Cincinnati, which IPA immediately critiqued in detail, citing Zunes and other analysts.

The Bush administration had begun the push for invasion one year after 9/11. See video clips of Dick Cheney and Bush making numerous false and deceptive statements.

Biden in his speech for war 20 years ago claimed Saddam Hussein “possesses chemical and biological weapons” and “is seeking nuclear weapons” and “for years he has prevented the UN inspectors from uncovering those weapons.”

Biden has claimed: “From the moment ‘shock and awe’ started, from that moment, I was opposed to the effort.”

But Zunes notes: “Biden defended the imminent launch of the invasion by saying, ‘I support the president. Diplomacy over avoiding war is dead. … I do not see any alternative. It is not as if we can back away now.’ He added, ‘Let loose the dogs of war. I’m confident we will win.’

“Soon after the launch of the invasion, despite the fact that four months of unfettered inspections had revealed none of the chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear programs or sophisticated delivery systems he claimed Iraq possessed, Biden insisted that ‘there was sufficient evidence to go into Iraq.'”

Some public health experts expressed outrage this week after President Biden repeatedly asserted on CBS’s 60 Minutes that “the pandemic is over.” 

JOSH BAROCAS, MD; joshua.barocas@cuanschutz.edu, @jabarocas
    Barocas is an infectious disease doctor and the director of the Social Determinants of Health and Disparities Modeling Unit at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz School of Medicine. 

On Tuesday, Barocas wrote: “In the last few days it has been incredibly difficult to remain quiet. Biden’s declaration was extremely harmful on multiple levels.” Barocas said that he “understands that most Americans aren’t wearing masks” and that “most Americans are tired of the pandemic.” But from a “global perspective,” Barocas warns, “this was the wrong thing to say. Trump was criticized for being an isolationist––and rightfully so––but Biden’s declaration was the ultimate in isolationism. By declaring that the pandemic is ‘over,’ Biden signaled to global partners that the [U.S.] would no longer be involved in responses to a global pandemic. He disregarded the words of the WHO [World Health Organization].”

On Wednesday, Barocas told the Institute for Public Accuracy: “It appears that the Biden Administration is treating an infectious pandemic like a war. Infectious disease pandemics do not operate like global conflicts: A President does not have the authority to declare a global pandemic “over.” The virus simply doesn’t care what the President declares. Moreover, the President’s words have implications for how other countries respond and for the response within our own country.

“By essentially suggesting that ‘[the U.S. is] doing alright,’ the unstated part of that sentence is ‘and I’m sorry if your under-resourced country isn’t, but we’re stepping out of this.'”