Hopefully Harris and Walz can start doing good work and being decent when they are in office... I guess the issue is how can we make them reverse awful policies and start with needed reparations..
.> At home, Carter embraced Neo-Liberalism, pro-business economic policies, deregulation, and, ultimately, austerity. While Governor of Georgia he was introduced to corporate leaders from Coca-Cola and other companies and then mentored by David Rockefeller, who brought him into the Trilateral Commission and took him on junkets to various countries where Carter received his education in global politics. While Governor of Georgia he was introduced to corporate leaders from Coca-Cola and other companies and then mentored by David Rockefeller, who brought him into the Trilateral Commission and took him on junkets to various countries where Carter received his education in global politics.
.> As president, Carter was not as friendly to organized labor as Democrats had historically been (in 1977, when the Youngstown mills shut down and a coalition of local activists led by Staughton Lynd and ecumenical leaders tried to find a way for the workers to gain a say in company decisions and keep the plants open, Carter offered no help).
.> ... his policies upended Nixon-era détente, abandoned arms control progress, increased military spending, and led to an interventionist foreign policy with the U.S. funding armed, militant right-wing groups in Afghanistan, Central America, and Africa.
.> In the immediate post-Vietnam era U.S. military budgets naturally decreased, but in 1978 Carter put a halt to that and began giving the Pentagon more money, again providing a transition for the immense spending of the Reagan years.
.> ... the Carter administration provided heavy support—military, financial, diplomatic—to Jakarta. Indonesian troops in East Timor “were armed roughly 90 per cent with our equipment,” the Department of State acknowledged. As they ran out of military materiel with their escalating operations, Carter authorized additional arms sales of $112 million for 1978, and Vice-President Walter Mondale visited Jakarta to announce new arms sales. Throughout, the Carter administration denied that the situation in East Timor was dangerous.
.> President Carter, cooperating with China, made a deal to provide UNITA—led by the notorious warlord Jonas Savimbi, a one-time member of the MPLA with Maoist roots—with 800 tons of weapons to fight against the new popular government in battles which included conventional warfare, air attacks, and raids on SWAPO refugee camps, as well as a massacre at Kassinga in 1978 where U.S.-backed forces killed 800 people. Though the UN called for an end to Pretoria’s intervention and Namibian statehood, Carter and the incoming Reagan administration continued to send weapons to South African and UNITA forces,
.> Carter said that the U.S. had no obligation to help Vietnam after the war because “the destruction was mutual” in one of his first press conferences in 1977, and continued to assault the new socialist government in Hanoi, blocking its attempts to get promised reparations from the U.S. or aid from international agencies like the IMF or World Bank. After Vietnam intervened in Kampuchea to oust the murderous Pol Pot/Khmer Rouge government, Carter began cooperating with China, again, to do something about it. In a January 29, 1979 conversation with Deng Xiaoping, Carter expressed his desire to punish Vietnam by encouraging other nations to reduce aid to Hanoi “as long at the Vietnamese are the invaders,” increasing military aid to Thailand, reaching out to Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) members to unite against the SRV, and warning the Soviet Union that continued support of Vietnam would harm relations with America.
.> Though the Contra War and U.S. destruction in Nicaragua was mostly a Ronald Reagan product, Carter set the stage for later intervention in the summer of 1979, when the Sandinista Revolution made its final push to take over Managua and then deposed Somoza in July... Once the FSLN took over on July 19th and began receiving aid from other socialist states Carter authorized the CIA to support resistance forces in Nicaragua, the genesis of the Contras.
.> In Carter’s most militarist, hawkish, and ultimately consequential, move, he intervened heavily in Afghanistan after Soviet intervention there at Christmas 1979. He took a hard line on Soviet involvement in Afghanistan, which removed the bloody Hafizullah Amin government in favor of the more reformist Babrak Karmal faction, in spite of the likes of George Kennan and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal urging caution, comparing Moscow’s relation with Kabul to the American role in Guatemala. ... as Islamic fundamentalists from throughout the region poured into Pakistan to fight against the Soviet-backed government in Kabul, he began funding these mujahadeen groups and famously sent Brzezinski to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border where he told the fighters there that “God is on your side” and that they would defeat the Karmal government. This of course led to the most stark example of “Blowback” in the era—the ultimate creation of al Queda and the Taliban.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/03/02/jimmy-carter-is-a-liberal-saint-now-was-a-war-criminal-then__ #
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