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One of the most gifted politicians in the Democratic Party — and fastest-rising — is the 37-year-old Eric Swalwell, whose first elective office was as a member of the Dublin, California, City Council in 2010, and who stepped up from there to his current seat in the US Congress, in 2013. His main financial backers are the military industries, including Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Wall Street — and the nonprofits and service-firms that represent them.
On Sunday, August 12th, Political Wire, which is the main news-aggregator for Democratic Party activists, headlined “Swalwell Travels to Iowa” and reported that,
Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) — who was born in Iowa — told the San Jose Mercury News that his visit to Iowa “was focused on helping Democrats retake the House in 2018, including by winning competitive races,” but he also said he isn’t ruling out a presidential run in 2020.
Said Swalwell:
“Right now my focus is to win at home, earn my way back to Washington to represent my constituents, help other candidates win so we can change the country, and then I’ll make decisions after November about my future.”
Swalwell is movie-star handsome; furthermore, his five-year record in Congress has shown him to be an extraordinarily resourceful career-builder and self-promoter, whose special leadership in the Party has been in their effort to impeach the Republican Party President Donald Trump and (though unmentioned) to replace Trump by the Republican Party Vice President Mike Pence, who is even more conservative than is Trump.
Typical in this effort to place Pence into the White House, is an MSNBC youtube titled “Rep. Eric Swalwell: President Donald Trump Is ‘Perilously Close’ To Obstruction Charge | MSNBC”, in which the issue of whom the President would be if Trump gets impeached is very skillfully ignored entirely, both by the interviewer and by the interviewee. Billionaires control both Parties; and the ones who control the Democratic Party (and MSNBC) are apparently convinced (perhaps by private polling) that the Democratic nominee in 2020 will have a much better chance of winning the White House if Pence is the President, than if Trump is. For whatever reason, almost all of the discussions about impeaching Trump, on Democratic Party sites, avoid even mentioning Pence.
But the same is true also on Republican Party sites. Swalwell is being heavily pumped by virtually all media that cover national politics. For example, on 21 May 2018, Fox News posted to YouTube “Calif. lawmaker makes his case for Russian collusion”, where Tucker Carlson debated Swalwell for 9 minutes, and though the actual subject was whether Trump should be impeached, none of the consequences of impeaching him (such as Pence replacing Trump) were even so much as mentioned. The billionaires in both Parties are apparently very taken with Swalwell, not only because he’s phenomenally gifted (as is clear from his ability to hold his own even against the formidable Carlson in that tough debate), but because if any Democrat replaces Trump in 2020, Swalwell would seem to be their dream for achieving that — and he’d probably be preferred by more of them in the general election than Trump would be.
Of course, both Parties claim to represent the public and not the billionaires; and, in this regard, while the standard Republican Party tactic to appeal to the ‘populist’ vote is to promise to “reduce waste, fraud, and abuse,” by eliminating or weakening the regulatory agencies (which the billionaires are determined to shrink or else eliminate if they can’t outright control them), the standard Democratic Party tactic to appeal to the ‘populists’ is to try to build a coalition of feminists, LGBT, Blacks, Hispanics, and other groups whom Republicans treat as being inferior to themselves. Consequently, in order to win the White House as a Democrat, Swalwell has joined the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, and the Congressional LGBT Caucus, neither of which minority-groups includes himself. Unknown, as of yet, is whether he has applied for membership in the Congressional Black Caucus, but according to Fact Check, as posted in 2008 and never since revised, the Congressional Black Caucus “has never had a white member in its 36-year history” (and, today, that would be never in its 46-year history), so that if he were to apply to join and then be turned down by them, and this were to become public, then the resultant bad publicity for that Caucus would likely reduce, instead of increase, Swalwell’s support by black voters. Consequently, he probably won’t apply to join that Caucus. But perhaps he will seek to join the Bipartisan Congressional Women’s Caucus. They have never had any men, but, between 1981 and 1995, their official policy was to invite male Representatives to join; so, if he were to give it a try, then perhaps they would allow him in, and he then would be able to say that he’s the first-ever man to join the Women’s Caucus. (In 2015, a Men For Women Caucus was formed in the House, but it still hasn’t announced an agenda, and it has done nothing.)
A prominent article on Swalwell’s House website is “Russia: Not Our Friend”, in which is provided a timeline, since 2007, of 13 events that he summarizes outside their context (so his brief accounts there constitute propaganda instead of history), events in which the Russian Government did or was accused of having done allegedly bad things. Typical is the most recent event listed, which is
December 2016: Germany’s domestic security agency DfV announced that there was growing evidence that Russians were attempting to influence the upcoming September 2017 federal election.
Linked-to in that, is a New York Times article, from 8 December 2016, headlined “After a Cyberattack, Germany Fears Election Disruption”, and it provided speculation but no evidence, at all. For example:
“Based on the prevailing Russian strategy of hybrid influence and destabilization, which we have observed over time and for which we have facts, the government, officials and some political parties have become sensitized to this form of conflict,” said Wilfried Jilge, an expert on Ukraine and Eastern Europe with the German Council on Foreign Relations.
“Such suspicions are the result of observation and experience over the past year and a half,” Mr. Jilge said.
The Wikipedia article about the “German Council on Foreign Relations” states
“The association was founded in 1955 in Bonn. The model for the foundation was in many respects the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and the Chatham House in London.”
Both of those groups, in turn, had been founded by, respectively, American and British billionaires and ‘nobles’ in order to advance the design by the 19th Century British aristocrat, Cecil Rhodes, for a reunification of the then-emergent US empire, back into the then-declining British empire, for a joint US-UK empire, including over Germany, and, ultimately, over Russia and the entire world. Consequently, both the CFR and Chatham House are pro-NATO, and this means that they support conquest of Russia, and this urge for global conquest extends even up to their rejecting the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction or “M.A.D.” that the function of nuclear weapons is in order to prevent World War III, and their replacing that by the idea of “Nuclear Primacy” that the function of nuclear weapons is instead to win WW III. This ceaseless nuclear buildup, of course, means ever-increasing US military budgets, which also means soaring profits for firms such as Lockheed Martin and the rest of what Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex,” such as had, in 2016, financed, above all other US politicians, Hillary Clinton, to whom they donated three times as much as they did to Donald Trump. Trump as President has been trying to satisfy those companies; and, consequently, his biggest achievement yet has been the all-time-record-shatteringly huge $400 billion sale of US weapons and training on how they’re used, to the Saudi armed forces. On 21 May 2017, I headlined “US $350 Billion Arms-Sale to Sauds Cements US-Jihadist Alliance” and reported that the day before, “US President Donald Trump and the Saud family inked an all-time record-high $350 billion ten-year arms-deal.” Then, on 21 March 2018, CNBC bannered “Trump wants Saudi Arabia to buy more American-made weapons. Here are the ones the Saudis want”, and reported what Trump had just negotiated with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman al-Saud, which was a step-up in that record-shattering $350 billion arms-sale, to $400 billion. (Note: that’s “billion,” not “million.”) So: this is Trump’s American jobs-plan, and it probably tops what a President Swalwell would be able to achieve. Trump will push beyond any limit in order to overcome a possible competitive challenge.
If Rep. Swalwell does enter the 2020 Democratic Party primaries for the Presidency, the distinction between himself and Joe Biden would be his youth, handsomeness, and giftedness as a debater, versus Biden’s experience; but, otherwise, they both would be splitting the Democratic “centrist” vote in the primaries, since these two men would be competing for the same segments of the Party’s electorate — the segments who had voted in 2016 for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. Whereas Trump might be able to defeat Biden, I think that his defeating Swalwell would be considerably less likely. So: Republican operatives would probably prefer for Democrats to nominate Biden, over Swalwell.
Swalwell is the biggest rising star in the Democratic Party since Obama in 2004. Four years later, Obama became elected President. Swalwell’s prominence now is comparable to Obama’s in 2004, but 2020 is only two years away, not four. I think that as a public speaker, Swalwell is less skilled than Obama, but that as a debater, he’s more skilled than Obama. Perhaps billionaires will buy-off Biden to not enter the primary contests, so as to help ease the way for Swalwell to become the Democratic nominee. Maybe Swalwell’s challenge would motivate Trump to try even harder to please them. From the billionaires’ standpoint, Swalwell v. Trump would be just as much a win-win situation as was Clinton v. Trump.
Republican operative Bill Whalen, writing at The Hill, on May 23rd, listed 7 California Democrats who might be serious contenders to win the 2020 Democratic Party nomination, and Swalwell wasn’t on the list, which was: Kamala Harris, Eric Garcetti, Gavin Newsom, Tom Steyer, Ro Khanna, Oprah Winfrey, and Jerry Brown. Whalen titled his article“What’s wrong with the Democratic Party? Just look at California.” He closed: “Isn’t that what America expects from California? Entertainment?” Maybe he excluded Swalwell as being not sufficiently “entertaining” (even if better-looking than those he did list).
On 15 January 2016, early in the Republican primaries, Whalen, then writing at Fox News, had analyzed the contenders, and he said that the choice would ultimately come down to Trump versus Cruz, and: “A word of caution here for the Cruz Crew: Jeb Bush tangled with Trump; his candidacy cratered. The same is true of Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, Thursday’s lone debate holdout. Like falling into a black hole or marrying a Kardashian, the contact sport that is extended sparring with The Donald is a ticket to oblivion.” That was Whalen’s veiled endorsement of Trump. Whalen still prefers Trump.
Does Whalen not know that Swalwell is one of the top Democrats pushing for Trump to be replaced by Pence, and so belongs on his list of leading contenders from California? Likelier is: Whalen fears that Swalwell could handle the challenge of beating Trump — and thus of transferring control of America away from Republican Party billionaires, and toward Democratic Party ones. It’s all really just a feud amongst the aristocracy. It’s a bipartisan aristocracy, who fight ferociously between themselves. Everybody else is merely ‘collateral damage’; they don’t actually count.
The idea that Swalwell and his ilk peddle, that what has ended American democracy is ‘the Russians’ instead of America’s own aristocrats, isn’t merely false; it is proven false, as the former Democratic US President Jimmy Carter has acknowledged.
Anything will be done to sell more weapons. Apparently, that’s the bottom line.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
