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[Sep 25, 2020] The West has used against Russia the same memes and tropes the German Nazis used against Jews, the Soviet Union, and Slavic peoples.

Sep 25, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Erelis , Sep 23 2020 0:26 utc | 45

Somewhat a side note, but has some relevance. The West has used against Russia the same memes and tropes the German Nazis used against Jews, the Soviet Union, and Slavic peoples. The great Jewish conspiracy to destroy German is being regurgitated as Putin wants to destroy American democracy. But the second half the Nazi attack was the Jews wanted to destroy European civilization, and not just Germany. This is where the crap about "rules based order" comes in. Some also used the term "liberal democracies". Same theme: Russian wants to destroy the entirety of the Western order--not just making sure Hillary lost the election (and now Biden).

But here is the thing. The West with American leadership looks at this struggle over a rules based order as a life and death struggle. It is not just about economic competition and dominance. The underlying propaganda base is rather deadly.

[Sep 25, 2020] The End Of The 'Rules Based International Order'

Notable quotes:
"... Accompanying this overwhelmingly dominant political and economic ideology was an American geopolitical vision equally grandiose in ambition and equally blind to the lessons of history. This was summed up in the memorandum on "Defence Planning Guidance 1994-1999," drawn up in April 1992 for the Bush Senior administration by Under-Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis "Scooter" Libby ..."
"... In the early 2000s, when its influence reached its most dangerous height, military and security elites would couch it in the terms of "full spectrum dominance." ..."
"... Bhadrakumar describes how the 'west', through its own behavior, created a mighty block that now opposes its dictates. He concludes ..."
"... Quintessentially, Russia and China contest a set of neoliberal practices that have evolved in the post-World War 2 international order validating selective use of human rights as a universal value to legitimise western intervention in the domestic affairs of sovereign states. On the other hand, they also accept and continuously affirm their commitment to a number of fundamental precepts of the international order -- in particular, the primacy of state sovereignty and territorial integrity, the importance of international law, and the centrality of the United Nations and the key role of the Security Council. ..."
"... The rules are follow the dictates of our western neo-colonial institutions like the World Bank, the IMF et all. ..."
"... Its a pretty simple concept backed by the attack dog of the US military. ..."
"... 'Rules based order' was always a euphemism for exceptionalism of one kind or another. The term was invented to avoid having to say 'rule of law', which invited criticism because even the most minimal amount of law (such as Geneva conventions, ICC etc) was rejected in practice and in policy by the leading members of the actually existing world order. ..."
"... Rumor says the "Wolfowitz Doctrine" also envisioned the balkanization of Russia (the document is still classified, but it leaked to a NYT journalist at the time, who published a report on it). ..."
"... It is not over in the sense that the West hasn't given up in its attempts to take over the world. But as the "exceptionalist" western countries decline, they will go even crazier and crazier and there will be full blown hysteria. ..."
"... In this sense, the rule based order will be over as there will be only disorder and animalistic, crazed western rage and bullying. The West is like a trapped animal. It will start pouncing, raging and snarling like a wild animal. This is the real nature of the West. A hungry wild animal that needs to feed. ..."
"... But behind the liberal mask, there are hateful eyes and gnashing teeth, and hunger and greed for other people's resources. ..."
"... Expressed in words, the West's face says "I'm the best and you are nothing! Give me your stuff! And this is how it will forever be!" ..."
"... As Putin has said, the US is no longer agreement capable. ..."
"... Instead of bringing Russia into the Western liberal democracies (with the threat of major nuclear war now drastically reduced) the now Anglo-Zionist Empire just looted it. ..."
"... Actually the Trump Administration has done far more against Russia than all US administrations from the last 30 years. Do not listen what they say, look at what they do. Right now the US in a full blown Cold War with Russia with ever increasing attacks ..."
"... Rules based international order .... the U.S. functions as the the Supreme Court for the U.N. , 'we have invoked snapback sanctions and extended the arms embargo on Iran indefinitely and are enforcing it'. UN, 'but your vote failed'. ..."
"... Rules based International Order is the dog whistle for global private finance controlled economies. It is sad that we are in a civilization war with China/Russia about who runs international finance going forward and yet there is no discussion of the subject but instead all sorts of proxy conflicts. ..."
"... The US is not just facing relative decline -- the fact that others are catching up in key ways. The US is also facing absolute decline -- the fact that it is suffering a degradation of capacities and is losing competitive battles in key areas. Examples of absolute decline include the Russian and Chinese military-technological revolutions based on anti-ship and hypersonic missiles and air defense systems; Chinese 5G; China's demonstrative success in suppressing COVID and its overall manufacturing power; the declining quality of life for most Americans; and the collapse of American institutional competence. ..."
"... Related to this, we can't separate these dynamics from the political economy of the states in question. China, in particular, is showing that an interventionist state, with high levels of public ownership, is essential to qualitative power, human security, and economic and social development. ..."
"... Psssst, learning Russian is easier than Chinese and we already know a few Russian words, such as novichok. ..."
"... Russia after the Cold War was a shambles and today it remains a weak economy with a limited role on the world stage, concerned mainly with retaining some of its traditional areas of influence. China is a vastly more formidable competitor. If the US (and the UK, if as usual we tag along) approach the relationship with Beijing with anything like the combination of arrogance, ignorance, greed, criminality, bigotry, hypocrisy and incompetence with which western elites managed the period after the Cold War, then we risk losing the competition and endangering the world. [my emphasis] ..."
"... It is not over in the sense that the West hasn't given up in its attempts to take over the world. ..."
"... The contest between the Empire and the upstarts is not over by a long shot. What the West HAS lost is the "inevitability" argument. But for the upstarts to actually prevail in their "multi-lateral" vision, they have to actually entice countries to join them despite threats and intimidation from the Empire. ..."
"... The Empire's power-elite KNOW that Russia, China, and allies of Russia-China don't want to be subject to their "rules-based order". The Empire is actively working to undermine, subvert, and divide the countries that oppose it. While also securing their own territories/population via intimidation and propaganda. ..."
"... On rules based disorder and the capitulation of Merkel and her BND lapdogs to the 'hate Russia' fulminations of the UKUSA morons. I see that the German Parliament has NOT TAKEN its red pills these days and is reluctant to swallow the BS. ..."
"... My late father as an army officer prosecuted Japanese war criminals for their atrocities now the Anglo-Zionists are the pre-eminent war criminals and their leaders loudly proclaim "our values" as a pathological and propagandistic form of projection. Is it possible they are unaware of their blatant hypocrisy ? ..."
"... There is no "international law" and no "international order." There is only relative power. And when those powers clash, as seems inevitable, the world is in for a major nuclear war, and probably preceded by several more regional wars. Meanwhile, the US internally is collapsing into economic disaster, social unrest, political and social oppression, infrastructure failure, and medical disasters. We'll probably be in martial law sometime between November 3 and January 21 if not beyond that period, just for starters. ..."
"... America's "Rules-Based International Order" is a Goebbelsian euphemism for a Lies-Based Imperial Order, led by the USA and its war criminal allies (aka the self-styled Free World). ..."
"... The true nature of this America-led order is exposed by the USA's war of aggression against Iraq (which violated international law and had no United Nations sanction) and its decades-long War on Terrorism, which have murdered hundreds of thousands of people and maimed, immiserated, or refugeed millions of more people. ..."
"... The Empire is very much alive and dangerous. Ask Iran, ask Syria, as the Palestinians, ask the Russians, ask the Chinese. Ask numerous African nations. Even Pangloss was not so stupidly naive. ..."
"... quite right. 'Rules based order' was always a euphemism for exceptionalism of one kind or another. ie US and its "allies" is basically asking the rest of the world to finance their (the US et al) version of a welfare state. ..."
"... China and rest of the worlds foreign central banks stopped growing their foreign exchange reserves (on net) in 2014 leaving the US in a sort of limbo. ..."
"... "Major powers maintaining cooperation, at least not engaging in Cold War-style antagonism, is the important foundation of world peace. China is committed to maintaining cooperation among major powers, as well as being flexible in the balance of interests acceptable to all parties. The problem is the Trump administration is hysterically shaping decoupling and confrontation between Beijing and Washington, and has been mobilizing more forces to its side at home and abroad. Those US policymakers are deliberately splitting the world like during the Cold War. ..."
"... The first 'Cold War' was entirely contrived. The US knew the Soviet Union was weak and had no agenda beyond maintaining security and its own reconstruction after WW2. There was no threat of a Western European invasion, or of the USSR spreading revolution globally. All that Cold War ideology is a lie. And the same lying is taking place about China today. No difference. ..."
"... It's good to see discussion here of the nefarious role of the American far-right neocon warmongers in the State Department, intelligence services and military leadership just before the turn of the new century. What I have never seen clearly explained, however, is the connection between these very dangerous forces and the equally cynical and reactionary Israeli politicians and the Mossad, as well as Saudi Arabian officials. ..."
Sep 25, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

The 'western' countries, i.e. the United States and its 'allies', love to speak of a 'rules based international order' which they say everyone should follow. That 'rules based order' is a way more vague concept than the actual rule of law:

The G7 is united by its shared values and commitment to a rules based international order. That order is being challenged by authoritarianism, serious violations of human rights, exclusion and discrimination, humanitarian and security crises, and the defiance of international law and standards.

As members of the G7, we are convinced that our societies and the world have reaped remarkable benefits from a global order based on rules and underscore that this system must have at its heart the notions of inclusion, democracy and respect for human rights, fundamental freedoms, diversity, and the rule of law.

That the 'rules based international order' is supposed to include vague concepts of 'democracy', 'human rights', 'fundamental freedoms', 'diversity' and more makes it easy to claim that this or that violation of the 'rules based international order' has occurred. Such violations can then be used to impose punishment in the form of sanctions or war.

That the above definition was given by a minority of a few rich nations makes it already clear that it can not be a global concept for a multilateral world. That would require a set of rules that everyone has agreed to. We already had and have such a system. It is called international law. But at the end of the cold war the 'west' began to ignore the actual international law and to replace it with its own rules which others were then supposed to follow. That hubris has come back to bite the 'west'.

Anatol Lieven's recent piece, How the west lost , describes this moral defeat of the 'west' after its dubious 'victory' in the cold war:

Accompanying this overwhelmingly dominant political and economic ideology was an American geopolitical vision equally grandiose in ambition and equally blind to the lessons of history. This was summed up in the memorandum on "Defence Planning Guidance 1994-1999," drawn up in April 1992 for the Bush Senior administration by Under-Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and subsequently leaked to the media. Its central message was:
...
While that 1992 Washington paper spoke of the "legitimate interests" of other states, it clearly implied that it would be Washington that would define what interests were legitimate, and how they could be pursued. And once again, though never formally adopted, this "doctrine" became in effect the standard operating procedure of subsequent administrations. In the early 2000s, when its influence reached its most dangerous height, military and security elites would couch it in the terms of "full spectrum dominance." As the younger President Bush declared in his State of the Union address in January 2002, which put the US on the road to the invasion of Iraq: "By the grace of God, America won the Cold War A world once divided into two armed camps now recognizes one sole and pre-eminent power, the United States of America."

But that power has since failed in the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, during the 2008 financial crisis and now again in the pandemic. It also created new competition to its role due to its own behavior:

On the one hand, American moves to extend Nato to the Baltics and then (abortively) on to Ukraine and Georgia, and to abolish Russian influence and destroy Russian allies in the Middle East, inevitably produced a fierce and largely successful Russian nationalist reaction. ...

On the other hand, the benign and neglectful way in which Washington regarded the rise of China in the generation after the Cold War (for example, the blithe decision to allow China to join the World Trade Organisation) was also rooted in ideological arrogance.

Western triumphalism meant that most of the US elites were convinced that as a result of economic growth, the Chinese Communist state would either democratise or be overthrown; and that China would eventually have to adopt the western version of economics or fail economically. This was coupled with the belief that good relations with China could be predicated on China accepting a so-called "rules-based" international order in which the US set the rules while also being free to break them whenever it wished; something that nobody with the slightest knowledge of Chinese history should have believed.

The retired Indian ambassador M.K. Bhadrakumar touches on the same points in an excellent series about the new Chinese-Russian alliance:

Bhadrakumar describes how the 'west', through its own behavior, created a mighty block that now opposes its dictates. He concludes:

Quintessentially, Russia and China contest a set of neoliberal practices that have evolved in the post-World War 2 international order validating selective use of human rights as a universal value to legitimise western intervention in the domestic affairs of sovereign states. On the other hand, they also accept and continuously affirm their commitment to a number of fundamental precepts of the international order -- in particular, the primacy of state sovereignty and territorial integrity, the importance of international law, and the centrality of the United Nations and the key role of the Security Council.

While the U.S. wants a vague 'rules based international order' China and Russia emphasize an international order that is based on the rule of law. Two recent comments by leaders from China and Russia underline this.

In a speech in honor of the UN's 75th anniversary China's President Xi Jinping emphasized law based multilateralism :

China firmly supports the United Nations' central role in global affairs and opposes any country acting like boss of the world, President Xi Jinping said on Monday.
...
"No country has the right to dominate global affairs, control the destiny of others or keep advantages in development all to itself," Xi said.

Noting that the UN must stand firm for justice, Xi said that mutual respect and equality among all countries, big or small, is the foremost principle of the UN Charter.

No country should be allowed to do whatever it likes and be the hegemon or bully, Xi said. "Unilateralism is a dead end," he said.
...
International laws should not be distorted or used as a pretext to undermine other countries' legitimate rights and interests or world peace and stability, he added.

The Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov went even further by outright rejecting the 'western rules' that the 'rules based international order' implies:

Ideas that Russia and China will play by sets of Western rules under any circumstances are deeply flawed , Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with New York-based international Russian-language RTVI channel.

"I was reading our political scientists who are well known in the West. The following idea is becoming louder and more pronounced: it is time to stop applying Western metrics to our actions and stop trying to be liked by the West at any cost . These are very reputable people and a rather serious statement. It is clear to me that the West is wittingly or unwittingly pushing us towards this analysis. It is likely to be done unwittingly," Lavrov noted. "However, it is a big mistake to think that Russia will play by Western rules in any case, just like thinking this in terms of China."

As an alliance China and Russia have all the raw materials, energy, engineering and industrial capabilities, agriculture and populations needed to be completely independent from the 'west'. They have no need nor any desire to follow dubious rules dictated by other powers. There is no way to make them do so. As M.K. Bhadrakumar concludes :

The US cannot overwhelm that alliance unless it defeats both China and Russia together, simultaneously. The alliance, meanwhile, also happens to be on the right side of history. Time works in its favour, as the decline of the US in relative comprehensive national power and global influence keeps advancing and the world gets used to the "post-American century."

---
P.S.
On a lighter note: RT , Russia's state sponsored international TV station, has recently hired Donald Trump (vid). He will soon host his own reality show on RT . The working title is reportedly: "Putin's Apprentice". The apprenticeship might give him a chance to learn how a nation that has failed can be resurrected to its former glory.

Posted by b on September 22, 2020 at 17:59 UTC | Permalink


Kali , Sep 22 2020 18:18 utc | 1

The Liberal International Order or Pax Americana are synonyms for The Rules Based Order. The plan that was followed for years was the outline given by Zbigniew Brzezinski and the Trilateral Commission in The Grand Chessboard to "contain" the ambition of Russia, China, and Iran over their interest to expand into Central Asia and the Middle East. Brzezinski changed in 2016, so did Kissinger, Brzezinski wrote that it was time to make peace and to integrate with Russia, China and Iran. But the elites had changed by then, newer people had taken over and no longer followed Brzezinski.
circumspect , Sep 22 2020 18:27 utc | 2
The rules are follow the dictates of our western neo-colonial institutions like the World Bank, the IMF et all. We will own you and you will do what we say and those are the rules. Any challenge to our authority will lead to war, economic ruin or both.

Its a pretty simple concept backed by the attack dog of the US military.

ptb , Sep 22 2020 18:37 utc | 3
'Rules based order' was always a euphemism for exceptionalism of one kind or another. The term was invented to avoid having to say 'rule of law', which invited criticism because even the most minimal amount of law (such as Geneva conventions, ICC etc) was rejected in practice and in policy by the leading members of the actually existing world order.
Patrick Armstrong , Sep 22 2020 18:52 utc | 4
Can't resist tooting my own horn.
https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2017/04/29/the-west-actually-lost-the-cold-war-it-turned-victory-into-defeat/
vk , Sep 22 2020 19:05 utc | 5
Rumor says the "Wolfowitz Doctrine" also envisioned the balkanization of Russia (the document is still classified, but it leaked to a NYT journalist at the time, who published a report on it).

.. .. ..

Passer by , Sep 22 2020 19:43 utc | 9
It is not over in the sense that the West hasn't given up in its attempts to take over the world. But as the "exceptionalist" western countries decline, they will go even crazier and crazier and there will be full blown hysteria.

In this sense, the rule based order will be over as there will be only disorder and animalistic, crazed western rage and bullying. The West is like a trapped animal. It will start pouncing, raging and snarling like a wild animal. This is the real nature of the West. A hungry wild animal that needs to feed.

All the liberalism is just self-congratulation about how exceptionalist it is. It is born out of narcisism and self-obsession during the "good times" of the West.

But behind the liberal mask, there are hateful eyes and gnashing teeth, and hunger and greed for other people's resources.

The real face of it is hateful and snarling. And it will be fully exposed during the next 10 years, as the West goes crazy and it becomes a hungry wild animal that desperately needs to feed.

Expressed in words, the West's face says "I'm the best and you are nothing! Give me your stuff! And this is how it will forever be!"

Countries need to stay out from the wild animal and carry a big stick just in case, until it succumbs from its internal hatreds and contradictions.

gepay , Sep 22 2020 19:44 utc | 11

As Putin has said, the US is no longer agreement capable. As b. outlines. the US elites no longer follow the rule of law. This is even true within the US. The US inherited the role formerly played by the British Empire after WW2.

The national security apparatus of both the US and the Soviet Union kept the Cold War going. Notice how soon after JFK was assassinated Khrushchev was deposed. Gorbachev rightly stopped the Soviets superpower regime. As Dmitri Orlov points out - Empire hollowed out the Soviet Union and he sees it doing the same to the US.

Instead of bringing Russia into the Western liberal democracies (with the threat of major nuclear war now drastically reduced) the now Anglo-Zionist Empire just looted it. The life expectancy of Russians fell 7 years in a decade until rescued by Putin.

It can now be seen that the Nixon-Kissinger opening up to China was not to gain access to its large market potential but to gain access to hundreds of millions of cheap, disciplined, and educated workers. The elites starting in the 70s became greedier. Jet travel,electronic communication, and computers allowed the outsourcing of manufacture.

The spread of air conditioning allowed even the too hot south to be a location. First in the US as the factories began their march through the non union southern states onto Mexico. Management from the north could now live in air conditioned houses, drive air conditioned cars and work in air conditioned offices.

The 70s oil inflation led to stagnation as the unionized labor were powerful enough to get cost of living raises. With the globalization of labor union power in the US has been destroyed. As Eric X Li points out China's one party rule actually changes policies easier than the Western democracies.

So China's government hasn't joined in with the West in just creating wealth for the top 1% and debt for the real economy.

As b. pointed out, the Anglo Zionist policies created the mutual benefit partnership of Russia and China. The Chinese belt and road initiative appears to be intent on creating a large trading zone that could benefit those involved. The US is just using sanctions and the military to turn sovereign functioning countries that don't go along with it into failed states and their infrastructure turned to rubble

Roy G , Sep 22 2020 20:11 utc | 13
Now, the US is forced into puppeteering the UN in order to maintain the illusion of the 'rules based order,' even as it slides further and further away from any meaningful international cooperation:

Fortunately for the world, the United States took responsible action to stop this from happening. In accordance with our rights under UNSCR 2231, we initiated the snapback process to restore virtually all previously terminated UN sanctions, including the arms embargo. The world will be safer as a result.

The United States expects all UN Member States to fully comply with their obligations to implement these measures. In addition to the arms embargo, this includes restrictions such as the ban on Iran engaging in enrichment and reprocessing-related activities, the prohibition on ballistic missile testing and development by Iran, and sanctions on the transfer of nuclear- and missile-related technologies to Iran, among others. If UN Member States fail to fulfill their obligations to implement these sanctions, the United States is prepared to use our domestic authorities to impose consequences for those failures and ensure that Iran does not reap the benefits of UN-prohibited activity.

https://www.state.gov/the-return-of-un-sanctions-on-the-islamic-republic-of-iran/

Passer by , Sep 22 2020 20:15 utc | 16
Any type of enmity btw the two countries under Trump is pure theater.

Posted by: NemesisCalling | Sep 22 2020 20:07 utc | 10

Actually the Trump Administration has done far more against Russia than all US administrations from the last 30 years. Do not listen what they say, look at what they do. Right now the US in a full blown Cold War with Russia with ever increasing attacks.

foolisholdman , Sep 22 2020 20:22 utc | 17
Pompeo talks more or less continually about "China's bullying behaviour". To me it is wonderful that he can say this with a straight face. (Perhaps it is a result of his lessons in the CIA on "how to lie better".)All the countries that have engaged with China have benefitted from it, whether as salesmen or as recipients of aid or loans at advantageous rates. The countries that have engaged with America have mostly (All?) lost. (The fifty+ countries invaded and wrecked since WW2 or the NATO "allies" or the countries attacked with sanctions.) Either their economies were destroyed or billions upon billions of dollars were paid to the US MIC. The NATO member countries have got what from their membership? Formerly, they had "Protection" from an imaginary Soviet threat, more recently "Protection" from an equally imaginary Russian threat! Some bargain, that!
Christian J. Chuba , Sep 22 2020 20:38 utc | 18
Rules based international order .... the U.S. functions as the the Supreme Court for the U.N. , 'we have invoked snapback sanctions and extended the arms embargo on Iran indefinitely and are enforcing it'. UN, 'but your vote failed'.

U.S, 'we have the right to seize cargo between any two countries transported in international waters based on U.S. federal appeals court decision even though the transaction in no way involves the U.S. We call this Freedom of Navigation and why we need to have aircraft carriers in the South China Sea and Arabian Gulf'

We are completely and totally insane.

psychohistorian , Sep 22 2020 20:41 utc | 19
Rules based International Order is the dog whistle for global private finance controlled economies. It is sad that we are in a civilization war with China/Russia about who runs international finance going forward and yet there is no discussion of the subject but instead all sorts of proxy conflicts.

Thanks for the posting b as it gets to the core myths around the global private finance jackboot on the neck of countries in the West.

profk , Sep 22 2020 20:59 utc | 22
The US is not just facing relative decline -- the fact that others are catching up in key ways. The US is also facing absolute decline -- the fact that it is suffering a degradation of capacities and is losing competitive battles in key areas. Examples of absolute decline include the Russian and Chinese military-technological revolutions based on anti-ship and hypersonic missiles and air defense systems; Chinese 5G; China's demonstrative success in suppressing COVID and its overall manufacturing power; the declining quality of life for most Americans; and the collapse of American institutional competence.

Related to this, we can't separate these dynamics from the political economy of the states in question. China, in particular, is showing that an interventionist state, with high levels of public ownership, is essential to qualitative power, human security, and economic and social development.

Capitalism might enrich a few, but it is the primary cause of America's relative and absolute decline.

jayc , Sep 22 2020 21:01 utc | 23
US and allied military analysts have been talking over the last year or so of the need to enter a single focus and total "wartime" posture throughout our societies, with all financial and industrial output directed to the "war". This has influenced the information/ propaganda efforts, but also the uptick in military manoeuvres around Taiwan and renewed NATO pressure directed at Russia (including the recent provocative B52 flights). Don't think Russia/China can be tricked into over-reacting, but some kind of loss-of-life military confrontation may be what the rules-based side is looking for as the population at large will probably not accept a "wartime sacrifice" regimen without such.
Kiza , Sep 22 2020 21:26 utc | 26
Very well written article.

Whilst Russia and China are creating a truly new, unique and creative alliance and a market of everything, in Australia the "authorities" are sicking their police dogs on poor grannies sitting on park benches. This image of five brainless armed state goons in a show of force over two quiet little grannies really puts things into perspective. It must be that New World Order that Soros and puppets always talked about.

Psssst, learning Russian is easier than Chinese and we already know a few Russian words, such as novichok.

Leser , Sep 22 2020 21:42 utc | 29
Great analysis b and connecting the dots.

The post scriptum stopped the clock for me. Has our host slipped into our drink there a profound prophecy, disguised as jesting?

Many agree something big will happen (break?) soon, possibly with the elections. The other thing is the Americans' ability to change course, drop all baggage, and run off in a new, even the opposite direction with unfettered enthusiasm (and ferocity). No people has a greater capacity for almost instant renewal, once it chooses to.

I also notice that the spoof takes good aim at The Donald's peculiarities, though in a fair and human way. The proverbial Russian warmth, or a humorous invitation?

Meanwhile, I enjoy my newfound optimism in these dark times. Thanks b!

uncle tungsten , Sep 22 2020 21:59 utc | 32
Thanks b and on Anatol Lieven in the Prospect story (fairy story?)...
Russia after the Cold War was a shambles and today it remains a weak economy with a limited role on the world stage, concerned mainly with retaining some of its traditional areas of influence. China is a vastly more formidable competitor. If the US (and the UK, if as usual we tag along) approach the relationship with Beijing with anything like the combination of arrogance, ignorance, greed, criminality, bigotry, hypocrisy and incompetence with which western elites managed the period after the Cold War, then we risk losing the competition and endangering the world. [my emphasis]

Lieven simply does not see it. Has it ever occurred to Lieven that colonialism just might be rejected by both Russia and China and that there might be no competition? Does Lieven watch too much football?

What is it that endangers the world in Lieven's petite cortex? This verbose Lieven tosh is littered with fancy sentences trawled from here and there but always presented to us from a narrow dimensional mind with limited analysis and seemingly zero interrogation.

again:- "then we risk losing the competition and endangering the world"...

So Lieven thinks the current behaviour of the US hegemon and its collaborator the UK is innocuous? These were the two nations that blithely squandered the "peace dividend" from the end of cold war as he describes and have led us to this time of perpetual war. A perpetual war that he does not mention, does not allude to, does not treat as an important driver behind the current global mistrust and disengagement from the USUK drive for global dominance.

Lieven is putting lipstick on his pig and screaming about losing the competition to the imagined wolf outside his prison.

Beneath contempt.

Jackrabbit , Sep 22 2020 22:09 utc | 33
Passer by @Sep22 19:43 #8
It is not over in the sense that the West hasn't given up in its attempts to take over the world.
I agree. The contest between the Empire and the upstarts is not over by a long shot. What the West HAS lost is the "inevitability" argument. But for the upstarts to actually prevail in their "multi-lateral" vision, they have to actually entice countries to join them despite threats and intimidation from the Empire.

_________________________________

Passer by @Sep22 20:15 #14

Right now the US in a full blown Cold War with Russia with ever increasing attacks.
Yes. We still see the narratives like of Trump as Putin-lover despite the debunking of Russiagate and the clear evidence of Cold War tensions. The incessant propaganda reeks of desperation.

<> <> <> <> <> <>

Some seem to think that the Empire is cornered.

Aha! We've got you now, you scoundrels!

LOL.

The Empire's power-elite KNOW that Russia, China, and allies of Russia-China don't want to be subject to their "rules-based order". The Empire is actively working to undermine, subvert, and divide the countries that oppose it. While also securing their own territories/population via intimidation and propaganda.

!!

uncle tungsten , Sep 22 2020 22:53 utc | 36
On rules based disorder and the capitulation of Merkel and her BND lapdogs to the 'hate Russia' fulminations of the UKUSA morons. I see that the German Parliament has NOT TAKEN its red pills these days and is reluctant to swallow the BS. It would be satisfying to see the collective wisdom of the Parliament to exceed that of the BND. But then that is a low bar.
karlof1 , Sep 22 2020 22:55 utc | 37
An excellent look into the seemingly mundane but important business of negotiating arms control agreements is offered here: Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov's interview with the newspaper Kommersant, published on September 22, 2020 . Excerpt:

"For our part, we more than once described a balanced and mutually acceptable framework for future agreements in this sphere during our contacts with the American negotiators. Aware of the difficulties on the path forward in light of how widely different our approaches are, we proposed extending the New START as it was originally signed.

"We do not want any unilateral advantages, but we will not make any unilateral concessions either. A deal may be possible if the United States is ready to coordinate a new document on the basis of the balance of interests, parity and without expecting Russia to make unilateral concessions. But this will take time. We can have time to do this if the treaty is extended."

As predicted, the Outlaw US Empire makes an offer it knows will be refused so it can then blame Russia for being an unreliable negotiating partner--a trick we've all seen before.

Lavrov conducted a short interview with Sputnik mostly about Belarus and Ukraine and much of which is a rehash.

Passer by , Sep 22 2020 23:07 utc | 39
@Jackrabbit | Sep 22 2020 22:09 utc | 31

I agree. The contest between the Empire and the upstarts is not over by a long shot. What the West HAS lost is the "inevitability" argument. But for the upstarts to actually prevail in their "multi-lateral" vision, they have to actually entice countries to join them despite threats and intimidation from the Empire.

Yes, the big question remaining is to predict what will happen and when. This is what the real deal is. And I'm sure they are working on that in the Intel agencies. It can certainly be predicted that the US and the EU will be significantly weaker in 2030 that today. Will this be enough is the question.

We now have some new information about US long term health as published by CBO. Very interesting numbers.

They predict lower population growth and lower GDP growth for the US than previously estimated, as well as higher debt rates. US federal debt is to reach 195 % of GDP by 2050 under best case scenario.

http://www.crfb.org/papers/analysis-cbos-2020-long-term-budget-outlook

Analysts also seem to agree that the Covid 19 crisis further weakened the US vis a vis China, as the Chinese economy significantly outperformed almost everyone else this year, more than expected before the crisis.

I will also mention two important recent numbers. This year:

1. China, for the first time, became the biggest trading partner for the EU, beating the US.

2. China's retail market overtook the one of the US.

kiwiklown , Sep 22 2020 23:41 utc | 41
Posted by: vk | Sep 22 2020 19:05 utc | 4 -- "....Eurasia is where most of human civilization lives, it's the "World Island" - the world island not in the military sense, but in the economic sense. Every path to human prosperity passes through Eurasia - that's why the USA can't "let it alone" in the first place, while the reverse is not true, that is, Eurasia can give to the luxury of letting the Americas alone."

Excellent observation, VK.

Even if the World Island (thanks for your formulation) trades with itself, within itself, there is sufficient mass to last a century, during which the arrogantly exceptional West might just wake up from their Century of Humiliation.

Meanwhile, inertia alone will ensure that the West forgets that their vaunted "civilisation" was fed, watered, enriched by the Silk Route that came from the East -- from the Middle Kingdom (China) and from the Middle East (which is "middle", as you pointed out above, because all wealth passes through that region).

Paul , Sep 23 2020 0:02 utc | 43
Yes there are rules which are observed more by their breach than their observance: The Geneva Conventions. Just ask Julian Assange.

I find it incredible that the Anglo-Zionist captive nations can sign, ratify, incorporate into domestic law and then sign the additional protocol, making themselves high contracting parties, which requires them to report all and any breaches to Geneva, then ignore all the above commitments. One of these commitments includes educating their citizens on the basic provisions of the conventions. Again they haven't bothered, that could expose their hypocrisy to the public.

Even the bandit statelet signed but I am yet to see just one example of its application in the seventy plus years of its barbaric and bloodthirsty occupation of Palestine.

Interestingly, the conventions prohibit the occupied from signing away one iota of their territory to the occupier. So much for what Claude Pictet's Commentary to the Fourth Geneva Convention calls "alleged annexations." This book is available from the ICRC.

My late father as an army officer prosecuted Japanese war criminals for their atrocities now the Anglo-Zionists are the pre-eminent war criminals and their leaders loudly proclaim "our values" as a pathological and propagandistic form of projection. Is it possible they are unaware of their blatant hypocrisy ?

It seems the New World Order has some familiar and unsurprising antecedents:

https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/452693/New-world-order-pledged-to-Jews-80-years-ago

Hold on tight, hubris is always fatal:

https://asiatimes.com/2020/09/pompeo-threatens-to-light-the-fuse-in-persian-gulf/

Jen , Sep 23 2020 0:09 utc | 44
Uncle Tungsten @ 30:

Anatol Lieven comes from an educated and cultured family in Britain's upper middle class layer. His older siblings - he is the youngest of five children - include a High Court judge (Dame Natalie Lieven), a Cambridge University professor / historian (Dominic Lieven) and a psychologist / linguistics researcher (Elena Lieven). They haven't done badly for a family from the old Baltic German aristocratic elite that used to serve the Russian empire as administrators for the Livonia governorate.

The British Lievens might see themselves as gatekeepers and interpreters of what the ruling classes desire (or appear to desire) and communicate that down to us. Hence their positions in intellectual and academic occupations - no engineers, technicians or academics in the physical or biological sciences among their number.

Anatol Lieven is right though about "competition", in the sense I believe he is using it: it is "competition" for supposed global leadership and influence as only the British and Americans understand it. Life as British and American elites understand it is the annual football competition writ large; there can only be one winner and the worst position to be in is second place and every other place below it. Never mind that what Russia and China have in mind is a vision of the world with multiple and overlapping leadership roles dispersed among nations according to various criteria: this ideal is simply too much for the Anglosphere elites to understand, let alone digest and accept.

Still, I wonder why Anatol Lieven is teaching in a university in Qatar of all places. Family influence and reputation must only go so far.

Richard Steven Hack , Sep 23 2020 0:54 utc | 47
Posted by: lizard | Sep 22 2020 21:59 utc | 29

if you aren't at least a little prepared for a disruption in critical supplies, and choose instead to waste time commenting on online forums, it won't matter how up to date you are on "rules based international order" vs. "international law". at that point the reality will be something like this: if you aren't holding it, you don't have it, and if you can't defend it, you won't be keeping it for long.

Got that absolutely right.

There is no "international law" and no "international order." There is only relative power. And when those powers clash, as seems inevitable, the world is in for a major nuclear war, and probably preceded by several more regional wars. Meanwhile, the US internally is collapsing into economic disaster, social unrest, political and social oppression, infrastructure failure, and medical disasters. We'll probably be in martial law sometime between November 3 and January 21 if not beyond that period, just for starters.

This month is National Preparedness Month. I recommend watching the following videos from well-known "preppers" who have been warning about this stuff for years.

78 Days Will Determine the Fate of America
5 Things You Need To Do Before the U.S. Election

A playlist of 23 videos for National Preparedness Month:
30 Days of Preparedness Collaboration - 2020

And this one from The Urban Prepper, an IT guy who is exceptionally well organized and logical in his videos. I recommend subscribing to his channel. He avoids most of the excessive "doom and gloom" hype that afflicts a lot of prepper channels and is oriented more about urban survival than "backwoods bushcraft" since most people live in cities.
Prepping 101: Prepping Architecture Diagram for Gear Organization

And if you don't watch anything else, watch this one from Canadian Prepper - he's absolutely right in this one and it specifically applies to the barflies here:
What is Really Going On? Its WORSE Than You Think

Jun , Sep 23 2020 1:06 utc | 48
Meanwhile, inertia alone will ensure that the West forgets that their vaunted "civilisation" was fed, watered, enriched by the Silk Route that came from the East -- from the Middle Kingdom (China) and from the Middle East (which is "middle", as you pointed out above, because all wealth passes through that region).
Posted by: kiwiklown | Sep 22 2020 23:41 utc | 39

============================================================================================

Thereby we have the answer to America's longest war:

https://twitter.com/danieldumbrill/status/1290456155286900737?lang=en

Richard Steven Hack , Sep 23 2020 1:19 utc | 50
Oh, and this one from Canadian Prepper in which he muses about whether and why we actually *want* the SHTF situation to occur. This one would resonate with a lot of the commentary here about the social malaise and the psychological reasons for it. Maybe nothing really new for some, but definitely relevant.

Society is Collapsing: Prepare for the Next Phase

uncle tungsten , Sep 23 2020 1:47 utc | 51
Jen #42
Still, I wonder why Anatol Lieven is teaching in a university in Qatar of all places. Family influence and reputation must only go so far.

Thank you that backgrounder explains a lot. Perhaps like Englanders before him he finds Qatar, safe and rewarding PLUS mounds of finest hashish and titillating company. From my understanding it is a grotesque abuser of human rights and everyone has a price.

ak74 , Sep 23 2020 2:15 utc | 52
America's "Rules-Based International Order" is a Goebbelsian euphemism for a Lies-Based Imperial Order, led by the USA and its war criminal allies (aka the self-styled Free World).

The true nature of this America-led order is exposed by the USA's war of aggression against Iraq (which violated international law and had no United Nations sanction) and its decades-long War on Terrorism, which have murdered hundreds of thousands of people and maimed, immiserated, or refugeed millions of more people. These crimes against humanity have been justified by Orwellian American lies about "Weapons of Mass Destruction," "fighting terrorism," or the curious events of Sept. 11th.

This America "Rules-Based" order is one drenched in the blood of millions of people--even as it sanctimoniously disguises itself behind endless propaganda about defending liberal democracy or the rule of law.

Truly, America and its allies can take their malignant Rules-Based Disorder back to Hell, where they all belong.

Two decades of US "war on terror" responsible for displacing at least 37 million people and killing up to 12 million
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/09/cost-s09.html?view=print

Erelis , Sep 23 2020 3:01 utc | 53
Posted by: karlof1 | Sep 23 2020 0:50 utc | 44

"Thus your "side note" has no "relevance" whatsoever."

You sound like some podunk UN official from a podunk country trying to impress a waitress in a NYC bar. The Empire is very much alive and dangerous. Ask Iran, ask Syria, as the Palestinians, ask the Russians, ask the Chinese. Ask numerous African nations. Even Pangloss was not so stupidly naive.

uncle tungsten , Sep 23 2020 3:02 utc | 54
Jun #46

Thank you - YES that is the answer and always has been PLUS there will be no pipeline from Iran through Afghanistan to Pakistan and on to China. There will be NO overland pipeline or rail route to sound the death knell to the maritime mafia.

milomilo , Sep 23 2020 3:33 utc | 55
Please vote for trump 2020. no president destroy America from inside like what trump did. The goal is to accelerate American empire destruction and grip in this world. What better way to put such clown along his circus in white house. he will make a mess of everything and will definitely bring America down

i hope he win 2020 and America explode into civil war and chaos. With America destroyed internally , they wont have time to invade Venezuela or Iran

milomilo , Sep 23 2020 3:37 utc | 56
Remember , if Biden win 2020 , American foreign policy will revert into normalcy that means seeking alliance with EU and 5 eyes in a more meaningful way , aka giving them preferential treatment on trade..

all that to box in china and russia , reenable TPP , initiate the delayed venezuela overt invasion other than covert

this is dangerous for the whole world , not that it will save US in the long run but it will increase real shooting conflict with china and russia.. So focus on trump victory in 2020 , the more controversial the win the better , lets push america into chaos

defaultcitizen , Sep 23 2020 3:41 utc | 57
I appreciate the time and thought that goes into a post like this; all without a popup ad trying to sell me ANOTHER item I just bought via Amazon, in spite of the fact that I am among the least likely to want another right now. Voice of reason crying in the wilderness and all that.

The rule The Capitalist Ogres promote as the heart of Civilization is simply the age-old Golden Rule. Those with the gold, make the rules.

j. casey , Sep 23 2020 12:28 utc | 75
In the very short-term (3 months?) what is the outcome of US/Nato seizure of ships and cargo in international water?
chris m , Sep 23 2020 13:42 utc | 79
@ptb
quite right. 'Rules based order' was always a euphemism for exceptionalism of one kind or another. ie US and its "allies" is basically asking the rest of the world to finance their (the US et al) version of a welfare state.

as US et al can no longer fund their own unaffordable welfare promises made to their own electorates, they have to call on the rest of the world to do so (China has been effectively funding the US budget deficit since they entered the WTO.
and the EU (mainly Germany) was doing the same before China's entry into WTO)

China and rest of the worlds foreign central banks stopped growing their foreign exchange reserves (on net) in 2014
leaving the US in a sort of limbo.

chris m , Sep 23 2020 13:47 utc | 80
PS addendum: if you've ever wondered who has been financing the GWOT since 2001; it was the Chinese.
karlof1 , Sep 23 2020 15:21 utc | 82
chris m @80--

Well, you're sorta correct; it was all those nations including China that bought Outlaw US Empire debt. China certainly knows better now and for almost a decade now it's purchases--and those of the rest of the world -- of said debt have declined to the point where a huge crisis related to the debt pyramid threatens all those aside from the 1% living within the Outlaw US Empire. The Judo involved was very instructive.

karlof1 , Sep 23 2020 16:21 utc | 85
"Trump's UN address censured" headlines Global Times article that reviews yesterday's UNGA. Domestic BigLie Media didn't like what it heard from Trump:

"Commenting on the US' performance, many Western media tended to view US as being 'isolated,' and its unilateral efforts 'widely derided....'

"Some US media outlets cannot stand Trump's accusations. A WSJ report said many Democrats blamed Trump for "isolating the US and diluting American influence in the WHO or other bodies."

It went on to say Trump's threat of withdrawal is often used as leverage to "influence partner countries, or get allies to pay more for shared defense."

"Some US media linked Trump's address to his widely blamed effort to re-impose sanctions on Iran, saying his address came as 'UN members push back against Washington,' AP reported.

"Wednesday's Washington Post article reported that the Trump administration walked on a 'lonely path' at the UN where the US attacked WHO, and embarked on the 'widely derided' effort to snap back Iran sanctions.

"A week before the UN General Assembly, US media NPR predicted that the US 'appeared to be isolated' at this year's General Assembly, saying that Trump's 'America First' agenda left him out of sync with America's traditional allies as it has a long record of pulling out of international agreements, including one meant to tackle the world's climate crisis."

So, Trump's attack on China's environmental record was beyond hypocritical and ought to be termed psychopathic prevarication. The best comment from the article well describes the Trumptroll @53:

"'Trump's smears and attacks against China were apparently aimed at campaigning for his reelection. Only his die-hard fans - those who do not care about truth but support him - will buy his words ,' Ding Yifan, a researcher at the Institute of World Development of the Development Research Center of the State Council, told the Global Times." [My Emphasis]

And isn't that really the basic issue--the truth? 75 years of lies by the Outlaw US Empire to cover it's continuous illegalities and subversion of its own fundamental law while killing and displacing tens of millions of people. Guardian of the Free World my ass! More like Guardian of the Gates of Hell.

vk , Sep 23 2020 16:40 utc | 86
More on the situation of the "rules based international order":

The Eurozone economy stopped recovering and stagnated in September (PMI)

And here's a more general picture on the state of global capitalism today:

The 90% world economy (UNCTAD report)

karlof1 , Sep 23 2020 16:45 utc | 87
Yes, I'm biased, but anyone seeking truth and invoking the Rule of Law would find themselves at odds with the Outlaw US Empire. Today's Global Times Editorial makes the following key observations:

"Major powers maintaining cooperation, at least not engaging in Cold War-style antagonism, is the important foundation of world peace. China is committed to maintaining cooperation among major powers, as well as being flexible in the balance of interests acceptable to all parties. The problem is the Trump administration is hysterically shaping decoupling and confrontation between Beijing and Washington, and has been mobilizing more forces to its side at home and abroad. Those US policymakers are deliberately splitting the world like during the Cold War.

"The impulse to promote a cold war is the ultimate version of unilateralism, and shows dangerous and mistaken arrogance that the US is almighty. Everyone knows that the US is declining in its competitiveness under the rules-based international system the US itself initiated and created. It wants to build a new system more beneficial to itself, and allow the US to maintain its advantage without making any effort. This is simply impossible."

My research is pointing me to conclude the First Cold War was contrived so the Outlaw US Empire could impose privately owned finance and corporations and the political-economies connected to them upon the world lest the collective forces that were the ones to actually defeat Fascism gain control of their national governments and shape their political-economies into the public/collectively owned realm where the benefits would flow to all people instead of just the already powerful. That's also the intent of imposing a Second Cold War. Some seem to think there's no ideological divide at play, but as I've ceaselessly explained there most certainly is, thus the intense demonization of both Russia and China--the Strategic Competition also is occurring in the realm of Ideas. And the only tools available for the Outlaw US Empire to use are lies, since the truths involved would encourage any neutral nation to join the Win-Win vision of China and Russia, not the Zero-sum bankruptcy pushed by the Parasites controlling the Empire.

psychohistorian , Sep 23 2020 17:07 utc | 88
@ karlof1 | Sep 23 2020 15:56 utc | 84 and forward with the links and quotes...thanks

I do like the confirmation Pepe quote, thanks

It is sad to understand that much of the US population does not have the mental clarity to see that Trump is no different than Biden when it comes to fealty to the God of Mammon. Way too many Americans think that replacing Trump with Biden will make things all better.

The end of the rules based international order/global private finance cannot end soon enough, IMO

Timothy Hagios , Sep 23 2020 17:19 utc | 90
farm ecologist @ 89

Patrick Armstrong publishes the sitreps (and other content) at https://patrickarmstrong.ca/

karlof1 , Sep 23 2020 18:07 utc | 92
psychohistorian @88--

Thanks for your reply! As I discussed with the Missus last night, IMO only the people regaining control over the federal government can rescue themselves from the multiple dilemmas they face--the most pressing being the Debt Bomb and control of the monetary and fiscal systems by private entities as exemplified by the Federal Reserve and Wall Street, both of which employ the Financial Parasites preying on the nation's body-politic. Undoing all the past wrongs requires both Congress and the Executive be captured by The People who can then write the laws to end the wrongs while arresting and prosecuting those responsible for the last 20+ years of massive fraud. The biggest components would be ending the Federal Reserve, Nationalizing all the fraudster banks, writing down the vast majority of debt, and disbanding NATO thus ending the overseas empire. Those are the most fundamental steps required for the USA to avoid the coming calamity brought about by the Neoliberals. I also have finally developed my thesis on where, why and how that philosophy was developed and put into motion.

profk , Sep 23 2020 18:16 utc | 94
karlof,

The first 'Cold War' was entirely contrived. The US knew the Soviet Union was weak and had no agenda beyond maintaining security and its own reconstruction after WW2. There was no threat of a Western European invasion, or of the USSR spreading revolution globally. All that Cold War ideology is a lie. And the same lying is taking place about China today. No difference.

The key issues for the US were:

1. it needed western european capitalist states to buy US manufactured exports. Those states had to remain capitalist and subordinate to the US, i.e. to avoid what Acheson called 'neutralism' in world politics.

2. the US wanted gradual decolonization of the British and French empires so that US firms could access markets and resources in those same territories. but the US feared revolutionary nationalism in the colonies and the potential loss of market access by the former colonial powers, which would need resources from the post-colonial world to rebuild after WW2.

The key event which cemented the 'Cold War' in Europe was the division of Germany, which Carolyn Eisenberg shows was entirely an American decision, in her important book, Drawing the Line.

The driving force of all this, though, was the economic imperatives of US capitalism. The US needed to restore and save capitalism in Western Europe and Japan, and the Cold War was the ideological framework for doing so. The Cold War ideology also allowed the US to frame its meddling in Korea, Guatemala, Iran, etc.

The late historian Gabriel Kolko wrote the best analyses of these issues. His work is much better than the New Left 'revisionist' US historians.

karlof1 , Sep 23 2020 20:01 utc | 96
profk @94--

I agree with your recap and second your appraisal of Gabriel Kolko. Eisenberg's work somehow escaped my view but will no longer thanks to your suggestion.

But I see more to it all as the First Cold War had to occur to promote the financialization of the USA's industrial Capitalism which began within the USA in 1913 and was abruptly interrupted by the various market crashes, the failure of the international payments system and subsequent massive deflation and Great Depression. A similar plan to outsource manufactures to its colonies and commonwealth and financialize its economy was began in the UK sometime after the end of the US Civil War. At the time in England, the school of Classical Political-Economists and their political allies (CPE) were attempting to rid the UK and the rest of Europe of the last vestiges of Feudalism that resided in the Rentier and Banking Classes, the former being mostly populated by Royalty and its retainers. Land Rent was the primary source of their income while it was the stated intent of the CPE to change the tax burden from individuals and businesses to that of Land Rent and other forms of Unearned Income. That movement came swiftly on the heels of the abolition of the Slave Trade which was a vast source of Royal income. Recognizing this threat to the basis of their wellbeing, the Royals needed to turn the tables but in such a manner where their manipulation was secret because of the vast popularity of the CPE's agenda. Thus began the movement to discredit the CPE and remove their ideas from discourse and later completely from the history of political-economy. And there was another problem--German Banks and their philosophy inspired by Bismarck to be totally supportive of German industry, which provided the impetus for its own colonial pursuits primarily in Africa.

Within that paragraph is my thesis for the rise of Neoliberalism, much of which Dr. Hudson documents but hasn't yet gotten to/revealed the root cause of the counter revolution against the CPE. IMO, that reactionary movement underlies far more, particularly the growing animosity between the UK and Germany from 1875 to 1914. As Eisenberg's research proves, there's much more past to be revealed that helps to resolve how we arrived at the times we now face.

karlof1 , Sep 23 2020 20:16 utc | 97
CitizenX @95--

Indeed, as Hudson and Max Keiser ask: Why pay taxes at all since the Fed can create all the credit required. I've written about the pros and cons of Secession here before which are quite similar to those existing in 1861. In Washington for example, how to deal with all the Federal property located there. Just as Ft. Sumter didn't belong to South Carolina, the many military bases there don't belong to Washington. Trying to seize it as the South Carolinians attempted in 1861 merely creates the casus belli sought by Trump. Now if you could get the vast majority of the military stationed in Washington to support your cause, your odds of resisting would greatly improve.

IMO, trying to regain public control over the Federal government would be much easier.

uncle tungsten , Sep 23 2020 21:21 utc | 98
karlof1 #85

Thank you brother karlof1, YES, the minotaur indeed but where is Theseus and Ariadne when we need them? Please don't tell me that Biden and Harris are the 'chosen ones' - that would mock the legend and prove that the gods are truly crazy :))

karlof1 , Sep 23 2020 22:48 utc | 101
ooops *elicit* uncle tungsten @98--

Well, they've clearly been chosen; they're just not THE CHOSEN and IMO would never qualify.

By contrast, here's Maduro's UNGA statement , a man clearly superior in all respects to either Biden or Trump or any of their vassals.

karlof1 , Sep 24 2020 0:31 utc | 103
It seems to me that a review is required, that we need to turn back the clock to an earlier analysis whose veracity has only been boosted by subsequent events. So here from 2011: "On November 3, 2011, Alan Minsky interviewed me on KPFK's program, 'Building a Powerful Movement in the United States' in preparation for an Occupy L.A. teach-in." Here's a brief excerpt to remind people what this is all about:

"Once people realize that they're being screwed, that's a pre-revolutionary situation. It's a situation where they can get a lot of sympathy and support, precisely by not doing what The New York Times and the other papers say they should do: come up with some neat solutions. They don't have to propose a solution because right now there isn't one – without changing the system with many, many changes. So many that it's like a new Constitution. Politics as well as the economy need to be restructured. What's developing now is how to think about the economic and political problems that are bothering people. It is not radical to realize that the economy isn't working. That is the first stage to realizing that a real alternative is needed. We've been under a radical right-wing attack – and need to respond in kind. The next half-year probably will be spent trying to spell out what the best structure would be."

Billosky , Sep 24 2020 6:19 utc | 104
It's good to see discussion here of the nefarious role of the American far-right neocon warmongers in the State Department, intelligence services and military leadership just before the turn of the new century. What I have never seen clearly explained, however, is the connection between these very dangerous forces and the equally cynical and reactionary Israeli politicians and the Mossad, as well as Saudi Arabian officials.

Like many others, I have been slowly won over to the position that the attacks of 9-11, and especially the totally unprecedented collapses of the three WTC towers, could only have been caused by the precisely timed explosion of previously installed demolition materials containing nanothermite. But if one accepts that position the immediately subsequent question is "Who planned and carried out the attacks?" Many people have claimed it was the Mossad, others that it was the Mossad in concert with the US neocons etc., -- many of whom were Israeli/US dual citizens -- but even now, so many years after the horrific events, I can find no coherent account of how such conspirators, or any others for that matter, might actually have carried out WTC building demotions. Do any of you know of sources on the matter that have made good progress on connecting the dots and explaining what precisely happened -- the easier part -- and how exactly it was carried out, by whom, and how they have managed to get away with it for all this time?

Piotr Berman , Sep 24 2020 14:04 utc | 106
Lieven: If the US (and the UK, if as usual we tag along) approach the relationship with Beijing with anything like the combination of arrogance, ignorance, greed, criminality, bigotry, hypocrisy and incompetence with which western elites managed the period after the Cold War, then we risk losing the competition and endangering the world.[my emphasis]

Uncle Tungsten: Lieven simply does not see it. Has it ever occurred to Lieven that colonialism just might be rejected by both Russia and China and that there might be no competition? Does Lieven watch too much football?

What is it that endangers the world in Lieven's petite cortex?
-------
It is clear to me that Tungsten does not understand Lieven because Lieven does not cross all t's and dot all i's. There can be two reasons for Lieven style: (1) a British style, leaving some conclusions to the reader, it is not elegant to belabor the obvious (2) Lieven works in a pro-Western feudal state and that particular piece appeared in a neo-liberal outfit where it is already a clear outlier toward (what I see as) common sense. Neo-liberals view themselves as liberals, "tolerating a wide spectrum of opinion", but with clear limits about the frequency and content for the outliers of their tolerance.

Back to "endangering the world", how "loosing competition to China" can result in huge mayhem? I guess that Tungsten is a little dense here. The sunset of Anglo-Saxon domination can seem like the end of the world for the "members" of that domination. But a longer historical perspective can offer a much darker vision of the future. First, there is a clash of two blocks, one with superior industrial production, domination of markets of assorted goods -- both as importer and exporter, etc, the other with still superior military technology and combative spirit.

Recall (or check) the situation in east Asia ca. 1240 AD. One of the major power was Song China, after a calamitous defeat roughly 300 years later, diminished Song China succeeded in developing all kinds of practical and beautiful goods and vibrant commerce while having quite inept military. The second major power was the Mongols. You can look up the rest.

USA stresses the military types of pressures, and seeing its position slipping too far, they may resort to a series of gigantic "provocations" -- from confiscation of property by fiat, like they did to Venezuela, to piracy on open seas, no cargoes can move without their approval and tribute, from there things can escalate toward nuclear war.

More generally, western decline leads to decrease of wealth affecting the lower classes first but gradually reaching higher, enmity toward competitors, then hatred, such processes can have dire consequences.

Importantly, these are speculations, so stopping short of spelling them out is reasonable. However, give some credit to Lieven for "the combination of arrogance, ignorance, greed, criminality, bigotry, hypocrisy and incompetence with which western elites managed the period after the Cold War".

Noirette , Sep 24 2020 16:24 utc | 108
On the rule-based world order. Scattered thoughts.

The article by Lieven was good in one aspect: it at least mentioned the crazy economic template aka imho 'religion' that lead to a part of this mess. For the rest, hmm. The 'rules based international order' was always pretty much a phoney scaffold, used for presentation to hide, cover up, legitimised many goings on (after WW2 I mean.)

Like a power-point extolling xyz product, with invented or 'massaged' charts and all., with tick boxes for what it positive or followed. (Fairness, Democracy, etc. etc. as 'Natural' 'Organic' etc. Total BS.)

In these kinds of discussions I am always reminded of the 'rights of the child' which in CH are taught in grade 3-5, with a boiled down text, logo type pix, etc. It is very tough on teachers, and they often only pretend to push the content. There are many immigrant children in CH and the natives know that the 'rights' are not respected and not just in 'jungles' (anarchist / animalistic hot spots) as they say. The kids go nuts - as they still more or less believe that they 'have a voice' as it called -- the parents follow the kids, lotsa troubles. OK, these are aspirations - but 'democracy' (purposely used as a calling card following advice from a well-know ad agency..) is so as well. And presenting aspirations that can't possibly be achieved in any way, when not a smiley joke about meeting God or flying to Mars, and is socially important, is not well received.

Anyway, since the invasion of Iraq (totally illegal according to any standards) leading to the biggest demos in the world ever, a loud indignant cry, which invasion the UN condoned, ppl (in my experience, in CH, F, It) no longer have a shred of belief in 'international rules'. Which of course makes them more 'nationalist' in the sense of acting in the community, close at hand, as the Intl order is a shit-scene.

Passer by , Sep 24 2020 20:06 utc | 109
Do you have sources for the last two facts, about China overtaking the US as main trading partner to Europe and as retail market?

Posted by: fx | Sep 24 2020 11:41 utc | 105

China becomes EU's top trading partner from Jan-July: Eurostat

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202009/17/WS5f63070da31024ad0ba7a2fa.html

China retail market expected to overtake US this year

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-overtake-u-world-largest-135614391.html

https://www.asiatimesfinancial.com/we-will-be-top-economy-by-year-end-china-media-outlet-says

[Sep 25, 2020] US standard "negotiating" techniques

Highly recommended!
Sep 25, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Ashino , Sep 23 2020 9:23 utc | 67

http://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2020/09/russia-steals-everything.html
Comment by Reader Dark Fate
EXCERPTs

Following a long line of very arrogant american imperial "negotiators", mr oblivion billingslea used standard "negotiating" techniques like

(a) accusing the other side of crimes Americans have committed first and forever, eg, extreme lying, bad faith argumentation, military aggression, foreign government security breaching, assassination and poisoning [as in american presidents and independent thinkers], and of course, electoral cheating;

(b) putting the opponent in the "negotiation process" on the defensive or back foot by stating false news allegations amplified by the media controlled by the american empire;

(c) offering nothing useful or commitable to be done by the empire, and yet "magnanimously" demanding the moon as opponents' concessions, eg, russian, iranian and chinese nuclear weapons limits, but not for nato's development and deployment, and; (d) after making impossible demands, the imperials accuse the opponents of hostility and unwillingness to "negotiate".

The russians can skillfully agree by stating that they only require the americans to reduce their nukes to 320 pieces like china, and in less than five years.

This is why it is very important for sovereign nations to read the guidebook, called the "idiot's guide on running the american empire", and developing deep and lasting solutions.

As for the other american imperial military "advantages", eg, constellation of "aggression" satellites, andrei forgot to mention that these can be shot or burned down in minutes easily by russia, china and even iran, as these stations cannot hide or run away in earth orbits.

Replenishment of weapons and military supplies after 3 months is rather doomed as the cheap, mass production and manufacturing facilities do not exist. Which must be re-created somehow but now
American lands are the targets. Much, Much Different Than WW2 !!

And of course, russia can always nuke down the USA and its vassal countries, and thus permanently ruin their economies for a decade or more, they don't know how to run defense -- this was always the fatal weakness of all bullies - if they'll have enough time to "learn it"... let's see... I doubt this.

Let's see americans try to start and conduct a nuclear war after too many spy, internet and gps satellites are shot down. Russia can even do this today using conventional explosives, and the world will be shocked how helpless the american military and economy can be made even without using russian nukes.

There are countries still immune to the numerous american imperial diseases that are already documented daily in zerohedge postings. The better countries still have lots of parents telling their kids to study and work hard so they can have better lives than their ancestors.

In oregon and california, they teach unemployable kids to burn something or somebody sometime before dinner.

CdVision • 11 hours ago
I was about to say that what now comes out of the US & Trump's mouth in particular, is Orwellian. But that credits it with too much gravitas. The true comparison is Alice in Wonderland:
"Words mean whatever I want them to mean".

Ashino , Sep 23 2020 9:29 utc | 68
Reminiscence of the Future.. ( http://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2020/09/russia-steals-everything.html)
Russia "Steals Everything" !! (Not just China, oops... ???!!!!)
And Jesus Christ was an American and was born in Kalamazoo, MI. It is a well-known fact. So Donald Trump, evidently briefed by his "utterly competent and crushingly precise aids", knows now that too! !!! LOL

Time For Daily Auto-Hypnosis, Comrades. !!!

https://vz.ru/news/2020/9/19/1061259.html
https://www.Путин-сегодня.ru/archives/108431
https://vk.com/deebeepublic?w=wall-197487820_23447
(Digital Translation)

> US President Donald Trump claims that Russia developed hypersonic weapons after allegedly stealing information from the United States.

> According to him, "Russia received this information from the Obama administration," Moscow "stole this information." Trump said that "Russia received this information and then created" the rocket, reports TASS.

> "We have such advanced weapons that President Xi, Putin and everyone else will envy us. They do not know what we have, but they know that it is something that no one has ever heard of. "

->We are the foremost and always number one. Everything is invented only by us, the rest can only either steal, or be gifted with our developments for good behavior. This situation is eternal, unchanging, everyone lags behind American Tikhalogii at least 50 years (the time frame was chosen so that even a 20-year-old would lose heart, "what's the point of trying to catch up, it won't work anyway, in my lifetime"). It was, is, and will be, this is the natural course of events.

All this is delivered in the format of the classic Sunday sermon of the American provincial Protestant church, coding the parishioners for further deeds and actions. And it worked effectively, creating in some basalt confidence "we are better because we are better", in others - "I don't mind anything for joining this radiant success, I'm ready for anything, I'll go for any hardships and crimes, if only There".

Only now it worked. In a situation where the frequency of pronouncing such mantras is more and more, emotions are invested in them too, but in fact everyone understands that this is what autohypnosis does not work.

The poor have stolen from the United States, if you look at it, literally everything. And 5G and the superweapon of the gods. Moreover, a pearl with a characteristic handwriting is not copy / paste, but move / paste, you bastards. Therefore, the United States does not even have any traces of developments left - the guys just sit in an empty room, shrug their hands, "here we have a farm of mechanical killer dolls, with the faces of Mickey Mouse overexposed, and now look - traces of bast shoes and candy wrappers from "Korkunov" only, ah-ah-ah, well, something like that, ah. "

At the same time, there are no cases of sabotage, espionage - whole projects were simply developed, developed, brought to a working product, and then the hob - and that's it, and disappeared. And this became noticeable only after years. And all the persons involved are like "wow, wow."

Psychiatric crazy fool of the head, no less.

But due to the fact that all of the above theses are driven very tightly into the template for the perception of the world, both those who voiced these theses and the listeners are satisfied.

Because the post-American post-hegemonic world is not terrible because in some ratings another country will be higher there, and Detroit will never be rebuilt "as it was". It is scary because it is not clear how to live for people who had no support in the form of global goals, faith, philosophy of life, and all this was replaced by narcissism on the basis of "successful success is my second self".

This means that the moment when this issue has to be resolved must be delayed to the last. Leaving the whole topic on the plane "we were offended, we are offended, we were dishonest, which means we have the right to any action" is not a bad move.

It's a pity that it doesn't really affect the essence of what is happening.

< >

[Sep 25, 2020] Andre Vltchek was a great warrior, the world was kept informed by this wonderful spirit and passionate mind. I am very sad to hear of his passing.

Sep 25, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

uncle tungsten , Sep 22 2020 22:15 utc | 34

Colm O' Toole #26
Andre Vltchek whose done some great reporting on China, Russia, and the Middle East over the years was found dead today in Turkey.

Vale great warrior, the world was kept informed by this wonderful spirit and passionate mind. I am very sad to hear of his passing.

His works.

David G , Sep 22 2020 22:23 utc | 35
Colm O' Toole | Sep 22 2020 21:41 utc | 26:

I learned about places I've never been reading Vltchek. He will be missed by many.

Jen , Sep 22 2020 23:03 utc | 38
Colm O'Toole @ 26, Uncle Tungsten @ 32, David G @ 33:

I am also sad to hear of Andre Vltchek's passing. He used to be an occasional contributor to Off-Guardian.org.

His death is being treated as suspicious by Turkish police authorities. I myself am rather puzzled by the decision to travel overnight by car from Samsun to Istanbul, given his state of health (according to the report that Colm O'Toole linked to) and the length of the car journey (about nine hours) when he could have travelled by plane.

willie , Sep 23 2020 7:20 utc | 64
R.I.P DR.Stephen Cohen.

R.I.P. Andre Vitchek.

Maybe his latest outcry hindered some :

https://www.opednews.com/articles/Now-West-Should-Sit-On-Its-by-Andre-Vltchek-Brainwashing_China_Colonialism_Denial-200912-597.html

[Sep 24, 2020] How a Senate Inquiry Revealed the Israeli Surveillance Industry's Role in Orchestrating Russiagate

Thos intelligence nets are becoming more and more sophisticated. They essentially represent a hidden political force that influences the elections.
From comments: "This is so convoluted and Byzantine and no one is offering documentation, just allegations."
Notable quotes:
"... Rarely in the news, however, is the role played by Israeli cybersecurity startups in the creation of the Russiagate narrative itself. Incubated within the Israeli military apparatus and benefiting from an uninterrupted stream of billions in U.S. taxpayer dollars, these "private Mossads" have been present behind the scenes throughout the numerous Russia-related scandals fomented by the mainstream press to sow partisan discord among the American electorate and line the pockets of network executives. ..."
"... The Senate's inquiries uncovered a consistent thread of IDF-linked cybersecurity firms and intelligence assets coordinating and facilitating meetings between the coterie of Russian characters that make up the Russiagate universe and the Trump campaign, including protagonists like Guccifer 2.0, the hacker who released Hilary Clinton's infamous emails to Wikileaks via a cell phone registered in Israel. ..."
"... "These guys came out of the military intelligence army unit, and it's like coming out with a triple Ph.D. from MIT. The amount of knowledge these guys have in terms of cybersecurity, cyber-intelligence [is] just so beyond what you could get [with] a normal education that it's just unique there are hundreds and hundreds of Israeli start-up companies that the founders are guys who came out of this unit." ..."
"... Michael Flynn, who was himself also working in an advisory capacity with the "consortium of cyber-spy companies run by former Israeli intelligence officers" known as the NSO Group, that is comprised of several of the Israeli startups summoned before the committee for voluntary, closed-door testimony. ..."
"... One of the NSO companies questioned by the Senate committee in relation to Russian interference, Psy-Group, is currently under investigation in California, where it was caught red-handed actually trying to rig a local election for a paying customer. ..."
"... Butina's former lover, Paul Erickson joked about being a CIA asset and had built a phony reputation as a man of staunch moral Christian values. Erickson worked for several Republican campaigns dating back to the late '80s, including a stint as national policy director for Pat Buchanan's '92 White House run. He first achieved international notoriety as Mobutu Sese Seko's lawyer, reportedly accepting a $30,000 lobbying contract to obtain a U.S. visa for the African despot, which was ultimately denied. ..."
"... It was Erickson's long-standing ties to the NRA and the organization's former president David Keene, which set the stage for the Maria Butina story as a Russian infiltrator looking for " access to U.S. political organizations ." Erickson had worked with Keene as a registered foreign agent since the 1990s and formed part of the NRA's efforts to forge closer ties to Israel since at least 2011. ..."
"... A con-artist by most accounts, Erickson is described by a Republican legislator as "the single biggest phony I've ever met in South Dakota politics." South Dakota was where Yale-educated Erickson came up in the political arena and where he's left a long trail of burned business associates and friends. In 2019, Erickson pled guilty to wire fraud and money laundering , admitting he had bilked 78 people of $2.3 Million over 22 years and was sentenced this past July to seven years in federal prison. ..."
Sep 23, 2020 | www.blacklistednews.com

HOW A SENATE INQUIRY REVEALED THE ISRAELI SURVEILLANCE INDUSTRY'S ROLE IN ORCHESTRATING RUSSIAGATE Published: September 13, 2020
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SOURCE: MINT PRESS

A Senate investigation reveals that a consortium of Israeli hacking and surveillance firms coordinated and facilitated meetings between Trump campaign operatives and Russia during the 2016 campaign, but they don't really want to talk about it.

Alleged Russian interference in the 2020 presidential election is headline news, once again, as a Ukrainian lawmaker is charged by the Trump administration "in a sweeping plot to sow distrust in the American political process," reports the Associated Press. Microsoft also made claims that it detected "hacking attempts targeting U.S. political campaigns, parties and consultants" by agents from Russia, China, and Iran. In a September 10 blog post , Microsoft's Tom Burt, Corporate Vice President of Customer Security & Trust, listed three groups from each region that Microsoft "observed" carrying out their cyber operations.

Rarely in the news, however, is the role played by Israeli cybersecurity startups in the creation of the Russiagate narrative itself. Incubated within the Israeli military apparatus and benefiting from an uninterrupted stream of billions in U.S. taxpayer dollars, these "private Mossads" have been present behind the scenes throughout the numerous Russia-related scandals fomented by the mainstream press to sow partisan discord among the American electorate and line the pockets of network executives.

Evidence of their activities has been exposed -- though not pursued -- in the latest volume of a U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee investigation on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, which shows how then-candidate Donald Trump personally embarked on a parallel campaign on behalf of Israel to block a UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Originally submitted by Egypt, UNSCR 2334 strips Israeli settlements beyond the 1967 borders of any " legal validity " in the eyes of the international community and brands them a "flagrant violation under international law." Russia, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, had refused all of the advances made by Trump's operatives to use its veto power against the measure, and Trump himself would prevail upon Egyptian President al-Sisi -- whom Trump calls his " favorite dictator " -- to withdraw the declaration . Together with Israeli pressure, UNSCR 2334 seemed destined to languish in obscurity as Egypt acquiesced and delayed the vote to "permit them to conduct an additional meeting of the Arab League's foreign ministers to work on the resolution's wording."

The Senate's inquiries uncovered a consistent thread of IDF-linked cybersecurity firms and intelligence assets coordinating and facilitating meetings between the coterie of Russian characters that make up the Russiagate universe and the Trump campaign, including protagonists like Guccifer 2.0, the hacker who released Hilary Clinton's infamous emails to Wikileaks via a cell phone registered in Israel.

George Birnbaum, a former chief of staff to Benjamin Netanyahu and GOP operative, told the committee how Trump aide Rick Gates had inquired about using "Israeli technology" to collect dirt on opponent Hillary Clinton at a March 2016 meeting, explaining to the senators what would be so attractive about Israeli companies, specifically:

"These guys came out of the military intelligence army unit, and it's like coming out with a triple Ph.D. from MIT. The amount of knowledge these guys have in terms of cybersecurity, cyber-intelligence [is] just so beyond what you could get [with] a normal education that it's just unique there are hundreds and hundreds of Israeli start-up companies that the founders are guys who came out of this unit."

The unit Birnbaum is referring to is the IDF's Unit 8200, where these "hundreds and hundreds" of tech startups are born right in the bowels of the Israeli national security state and propagate throughout the world and the United States, in particular.

Described as " private Mossads " for hire, many of the Israeli hacking and surveillance firms that moved behind the scenes, brokering meetings between Trump's people and Russian oligarchs like Oleg Deripaska during the height of the so-called Russian "collusion," were working through a "key middle man" with close ties to then-Trump National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn, who was himself also working in an advisory capacity with the "consortium of cyber-spy companies run by former Israeli intelligence officers" known as the NSO Group, that is comprised of several of the Israeli startups summoned before the committee for voluntary, closed-door testimony.

While the American public was fed one Russophobic scandal after another, and Robert Mueller held court in the press for two years straight, no one -- especially Mueller -- was paying attention to this perverse network of Israeli surveillance companies who operated the virtual scaffold upon which the Russiagate narrative was being constructed and whose fellow Unit 8200 graduates in other subsectors of the cybersecurity industry are deeply ensconced in highly questionable activities surrounding the coming 2020 election.

THE NSO GROUP

The NSO Group gained notoriety when it was identified as the developer of Pegasus, the iPhone spyware that was found installed on slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi's phone in the days leading up to his gruesome death. NSO's cell phone tracking technology has been associated with other ghastly events, such as the scandal involving Pegasus in Mexico, where a team of international investigators looking into the disappearance of 43 students in Ayotzinapa was targeted by the spyware, as well as Mexican journalists and their families.

One of the NSO companies questioned by the Senate committee in relation to Russian interference, Psy-Group, is currently under investigation in California, where it was caught red-handed actually trying to rig a local election for a paying customer. Another, Circles, was founded by a former Israeli intelligence officer and is "known for covertly intercepting phone calls, text messages, and tracking locations of unaware citizens," according to a report by Forensic News .

In 2018, Haaretz published an expose on the company disclosing the extent to which Circles and the Israeli espionage industry is helping "world dictators hunt dissidents and gays," among other nefarious opportunities available in the "global commerce" of surveillance technologies.

An NSO rep peddles software services at annual European Police Congress in Berlin, April 28, 2020. Hannibal Hanschke | Reuters

The middle man the Senate investigation identified is Walter Soriano; singled out for his association with several Russian oligarchs like Oleg Deripaska and Dmitry Rybolovlev, who bought Trump's West Palm Beach mansion in 2008. The Senate report accuses Soriano and Israeli cybersecurity companies of coordinating "between the Trump Campaign and Russia," but fails to pursue the matter beyond that.

The UN resolution denouncing Israeli settlements would pass on December 23, 2016, after four temporary Security Council members, Malaysia, New Zealand, Senegal, and Venezuela reportedly took matters into their own hands and moved the vote forward. UNSCR 2334 became official as a result of a historic breach of established pro-Israel policy by the United States, which abstained from the vote. Widely reported as Obama's " parting shot " to Netanyahu and the incoming administration, the passing of the resolution went against Obama's own record of using U.S.' veto power to banish similar proposals .

President-elect Donald Trump would take office in a matter of weeks and the Mueller investigation kicked off the barrage of Russophobic content peddled over the digital airwaves night after night. Stories like Maria Butina's were plastered all over the media to buttress the Russiagate narrative.

THE LEGEND OF MARIA BUTINA

Butina's former lover, Paul Erickson joked about being a CIA asset and had built a phony reputation as a man of staunch moral Christian values. Erickson worked for several Republican campaigns dating back to the late '80s, including a stint as national policy director for Pat Buchanan's '92 White House run. He first achieved international notoriety as Mobutu Sese Seko's lawyer, reportedly accepting a $30,000 lobbying contract to obtain a U.S. visa for the African despot, which was ultimately denied.

It was Erickson's long-standing ties to the NRA and the organization's former president David Keene, which set the stage for the Maria Butina story as a Russian infiltrator looking for " access to U.S. political organizations ." Erickson had worked with Keene as a registered foreign agent since the 1990s and formed part of the NRA's efforts to forge closer ties to Israel since at least 2011.

Prosecutors would paint Butina as a seductress, ensnaring Erickson in a "duplicitous relationship," but it was the cunning GOP operative who first spotted Butina during a 2013 trip to Moscow with Keene. Butina and Erickson would meet again in Israel one year later where they would begin their 'love affair' during which he would become "integral to Butina's activities," assisting the Russian gun enthusiast "in developing relationships with individuals and organizations involved in U.S. politics," according to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Maria Butina poses for a photo at a shooting range in Moscow, April 22, 2012. Pavel Ptitsin | AP

A con-artist by most accounts, Erickson is described by a Republican legislator as "the single biggest phony I've ever met in South Dakota politics." South Dakota was where Yale-educated Erickson came up in the political arena and where he's left a long trail of burned business associates and friends. In 2019, Erickson pled guilty to wire fraud and money laundering , admitting he had bilked 78 people of $2.3 Million over 22 years and was sentenced this past July to seven years in federal prison.

The NRA has been forging ties to the Israeli security state for years now. In 2013, Trump's former National Security Adviser, John Bolton, joined a delegation of 30 in Jerusalem for a 10-day tour of Israel's police institutions. The honorary NRA member stated on that occasion, that Israel could "serve as a model for American security." The legend of Maria Butina, itself, was seeded in Israel that same year when an "obscure" Israeli gun-rights group posted on Facebook that she had announced to have signed a cooperation agreement with the NRA and "neighboring countries" to promote gun rights at a meeting with its members.

Butina would meet with Erickson and Keene two weeks later in Moscow, along with Alexander Torshin, former deputy governor of Russia's central bank and lifetime NRA member. Torshin, who has been targeted by U.S. sanctions, traveled with Butina to the United States to "discuss U.S.-Russian economic relations" in April 2015. The pair met with several senior American officials, like Federal Reserve vice chairman and former Israel central bank chief, Stanley Fischer; the Treasury undersecretary for international affairs, Nathan Sheets and others in a meeting " moderated " by AIG CEO Maurice "Hank" Greenberg. The details of the high-level meeting, two months before Donald Trump made his announcement to run for president, have never been made public.

Feature photo | Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., speaks during a Senate Judiciary Committee business meeting to consider authorization for subpoenas relating to the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, the code name for the counterintelligence investigation undertaken by the FBI in 2016 and 2017 into links between Trump and Russian officials, June 11, 2020. Carolyn Kaster | AP

Raul Diego is a MintPress News Staff Writer, independent photojournalist, researcher, writer and documentary filmmaker.


Billo 9 days ago ,

I always said it was Israeli influence not Russian. How obvious can it get. But we have Trump constantly kissing the Israeli ass while being kicked in the teeth and Congress bending over backwards pedaling lies about Russia for Israeli benefit.
Is there anyone on our side in DC?

Hasin Ascomstein • 9 days ago ,

Ok, so we have the israelis, synonymous with deep state, responsible for wtc '93, wtc 9/11, the arab spring, the afghan conflict, the iraq conflict, problems with Iran, training antifa/blm, equipping and training the messican cartels, the farc, and tupac amaru. Being the worlds controlling supplier of MDMA. As well as giving U.S. technology to the chinese, and direct involvement with the release of covid 19. And hiring osama bin laden to build a highway in the sudan, then embezzling $800 million from bin ladens project, and blaming it on the U.S. It's time for the world to put their collective heads back into where the sun does shine.

Ann Hagan 8 days ago ,

This is so convoluted and Byzantine and no one is offering documentation, just allegations.

[Sep 24, 2020] 'Bizarre deeply disturbing': MSM think that RT's Trump deepfake parody is ADMISSION he is 'Putin's pawn'

Sep 24, 2020 | www.rt.com

A satirical video using "deepfake" technology to show US President Donald Trump as coming to work for RT after the November election was taken very seriously by 'Russiagate' peddlers at the Daily Beast and the Lincoln Project.

[Sep 24, 2020] We have lost a real giant (Stephen F. Cohen has died)! by Saker

Notable quotes:
"... Cohen had the courage to take on the entire ruling elites of this country and their messianic supremacist ideology by himself, almost completely alone. ..."
"... He opposed the warmongering nutcases during the Cold War, and he opposed them again when they replaced their rabid hatred of the Soviet Union with an even more rabid hatred of everything Russian. ..."
Sep 24, 2020 | thesaker.is

First, he was a man of immense kindness and humility . Second, he was a man of total intellectual honesty . I can't say that Cohen and I had the same ideas or the same reading of history, though in many cases we did, but here is what I found so beautiful in this man: unlike most of his contemporaries, Cohen was not an ideologue , he did not expect everybody to agree with him, and he himself did not vet people for ideological purity before offering them his friendship.

Even though it is impossible to squeeze a man of such immense intellect and honesty into any one single ideological category, I would say that Stephen Cohen was a REAL liberal , in the original, and noble, meaning of this word.

I also have to mention Stephen Cohen's immense courage . Yes, I know, Cohen was not deported to GITMO for his ideas, he was not tortured in a CIA secret prison, and he was not rendered to some Third Word country to be tortured there on behalf of the USA. Stephen Cohen had a different kind of courage: the courage to remain true to himself and his ideals even when the world literally covered him in slanderous accusations, the courage to NOT follow his fellow liberals when they turned PSEUDO-liberals and betrayed everything true liberalism stands for. Professor Cohen also completely rejected any forms of tribalism or nationalism, which often made him the target of vicious hatred and slander, especially from his fellow US Jews (he was accused of being, what else, a Putin agent).

Cohen had the courage to take on the entire ruling elites of this country and their messianic supremacist ideology by himself, almost completely alone.

Last, but most certainly not least, Stephen Cohen was a true peacemaker , in the sense of the words of the Holy Gospel I quoted above. He opposed the warmongering nutcases during the Cold War, and he opposed them again when they replaced their rabid hatred of the Soviet Union with an even more rabid hatred of everything Russian.

I won't claim here that I always agreed with Cohen's ideas or his reading of history, and I am quite sure that he would not agree with much of what I wrote. But one thing Cohen and I definitely did agree on: the absolute, number one, priority of not allowing a war to happen between the USA and Russia. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Stephen Cohen dedicated his entire life towards this goal.

... ... ...

[Sep 24, 2020] Stephen F. Cohen, 1938–2020 - The Nation

Sep 24, 2020 | www.thenation.com

first "met" Steve through his 1977 essay "Bolshevism and Stalinism." His cogent, persuasive, revisionist argument that there are always alternatives in history and politics deeply influenced me. And his seminal biography, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution , challenging prevailing interpretations of Soviet history, was to me, and many, a model of how biography should be written: engaged and sympathetically critical.

At the time, I was too accepting of conventional wisdom. Steve's work -- and soon, Steve himself -- challenged me to be critical-minded, to seek alternatives to the status quo, to stay true to my beliefs (even if they weren't popular), and to ask unpopular questions of even the most powerful. These are values I carry with me to this day as editorial director of The Nation , which Steve introduced me to (and its editor, Victor Navasky) and for which he wrote a column ("Sovieticus") from 1982 to 1987, and many articles and essays beginning in 1979. His last book, War with Russia? was a collection of dispatches (almost all posted at thenation.com ) distilled from Steve's weekly radio broadcasts -- beginning in 2014–on The John Batchelor Show .

T he experiences we shared in Moscow beginning in 1980 are in many ways my life's most meaningful. Steve introduced me to realms of politics, history, and life I might never have experienced: to Bukharin's widow, the extraordinary Anna Mikhailovna Larina, matriarch of his second family, and to his eclectic and fascinating circle of friends -- survivors of the Gulag, (whom he later wrote about in The Victims Return ) dissidents, and freethinkers -- both outside and inside officialdom.

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From 1985 to 1991, when we lived frequently in Moscow, we shared the intellectual and political excitement, the hopes and the great achievements of those perestroika years. We later developed a close friendship with Mikhail Gorbachev, a man we both deeply admired as an individual and as a political leader who used his power so courageously to change his country and the world. Gorbachev also changed our lives in several ways.

Our marriage coincided with perestroika . In fact, Steve spent the very first day after our wedding, our so-called honeymoon, at the United Nations with Gorbachev and the news anchor Dan Rather (Steve was consulting for CBS News at the time). Then, on our first anniversary, in 1989, we were with President Bush (the first) and Gorbachev on Malta when they declared the end of the Cold War. And we think of our daughter, Nika, now 29 years old, as a perestroika baby because she was conceived in Russia during the Gorbachev years, made her first visit to Moscow in July 1991 and since then has been back some 40 times. In a moving moment, a year after Raisa Maksimovna died, Gorbachev remarked to Steve that our marriage and partnership reminded him of his with Raisa because we too seemed inseparable.

Steve has often regretted that many of the Russian friends he made after 1985 did not know about his earlier Moscow life. He first visited the Soviet Union in 1959. But it was those pre- perestroika years, 1975 to 1982, that gave Steve what he once told me was his "real education. Not only in Russian society but in Russian politics, because I began to understand the connection between trends in society, trends in the dissident movement, and trends in the nomenklatura." They were "utterly formative years for me."

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They also informed his writings, especially his pathbreaking book Rethinking the Soviet Experience , which was published at the very time Gorbachev came to power. "There was a lot of tragedy," Steve used to say, "but also a lot of humor and warmth when people had little more that personal friendships and ideas to keep them company." From 1980, when I first traveled to Moscow with Steve, to 1982 when neither of us could get a visa (until 1985 when Gorbachev became leader), we lived in that Russia, spending many nights in friends' apartments and kitchens drinking into the night, and listening to uncensored, often pessimistic, thinking about the present and future of Russia.

I later became Steve's collaborator in smuggling samizdat manuscripts out of Russia to the West, and bringing samizdat books back to Russia and distributing them. By the time I joined him, Steve had managed to send dozens of such books to Moscow, and satisfying friends with a selection ranging from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov, George Orwell, and Robert Conquest to the Kama Sutra and, of course, the samizdat version of Steve's own book on Bukharin. I learned from Steve that one had to keep forbidden documents and manuscripts on one's person at all times, knowing that the KGB frequently searched apartments and hotel rooms. At a certain point, Steve's shoulder bag became so heavy that he developed a hernia on his right side. After surgery, he started carrying his bag on his left side, but developed a second hernia there, as well. He liked to say that the worst the KGB ever did to him was to cause him two hernias!

In fact, it was samizdat manuscripts that first brought us together. In 1978, Steve heard that I had a diplomatic passport, which would have exempted me from a customs search, and was about to travel to Moscow. (At the time my father was the United States representative to the United Nations in Geneva.) Through a mutual friend, Steve asked if I would bring out samizdat documents being held for him in Moscow. I would have been happy to do so, but Steve had been misinformed. I didn't have a diplomatic passport.

S teve could sometimes seem like a tough guy, but those who won his trust knew he was a person of great generosity, loyalty, and kindness. He was known in our New York City neighborhood on the Upper West Side as an impresario/organizer and longtime supporter of basketball tournaments for local, often poor, kids. In the United States and Russia, Steve mentored and supported young scholars. In the last decade, he set up fellowships for young scholars of Russian history at the several universities where he'd he studied and taught: Indiana University, Princeton, New York University, and Columbia. He lent his support to the establishment of Moscow's State Museum of the History of the Gulag -- and to its young director and team.

Life with Steve was never boring. He was supremely independent, the true radical in our family, unfailingly going to the root of the problem. He spoke his mind. He had a CD with a dozen variations of "My Way" -- from Billy Bragg to Frank Sinatra. And as The Chronicle of Higher Education subtitled its 2017 profile of Steve, he "was the most controversial Russia expert in America."

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Through all our years together, Steve was my backbone, fortifying me for the battles Nation editors must wage (often with their own writers, sometimes including Steve!), and giving me the personal and political courage to do the right thing. But never more so than when we entered what might be called the "Russiagate era."

While Steve liked to say it's healthy to rethink, to have more questions than answers, there was a wise consistency to his political analysis. For example, as is clear from his many articles in The Nation in these last decades, he unwaveringly opposed American Cold War thinking both during the Cold War and since the end of the Soviet Union. He was consistent in his refusal to sermonize, lecture, or moralize about what Russia should do. He preferred to listen rather than preach, to analyze rather than demonize.

This stance was no recipe for popularity, which Steve professed to care little about. He was courageous and fearless in continuing to question the increasingly rigid orthodoxies about the Soviet Union and Russia. But in the last months, such criticism did take its toll on him. Along with others who sought to avert a new and more dangerous Cold War, Steve despaired that the public debate so desperately needed had become increasingly impossible in mainstream politics or media. Until his death he'd been working on a short article about what he saw as the "criminalization of détente." The organization he established, the American Committee on East-West Accord, tried mightily to argue for a more sane US policy toward Russia.

He fared better than I often did confronting the controversies surrounding him since 2014, in reaction to his views on Ukraine, Putin, election interference, and more. Positions he took often elicited slurs and scurrilous attacks. How many times could he be labeled "Putin's puppet"? "Putin's No.1 American apologist"? Endlessly, it seemed. But Steve chose not to respond directly to the attacks, believing -- as he told me many times when I urged him to respond -- that they offered no truly substantive criticism of his arguments, but were merely ad hominem attacks. What he did write about -- he was increasingly concerned about the fate of a younger generation of scholars -- was the danger of smearing those who thought differently about US policy toward Russia, thereby silencing skeptics and contributing to the absence of a needed debate in our politics, media, and academy.

M ikhail Gorbachev often told Steve how deeply influenced he was by his writings, especially his biography of Bukharin. Steve first met Gorbachev in 1987 at the Soviet Embassy in Washington. It was a reception for America's "progressive intelligentsia" -- which Steve found funny, because he considered himself a maverick and didn't like labels. But he was there that day, and within a few minutes a Kremlin aide told Steve that the general secretary wanted to talk to him. Minutes later, Mikhail Sergeevich approached and asked Steve, assuming the author of Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution must be eminent and of a "serious" age: " Deistvitelno [really] -- you wrote the book, or was it your father?"

Steve finally achieved that "serious" age Gorbachev spoke of! But his heart, spirit and mind remained youthful till the very end. Maybe it's because of his love of Jerry Lee Lewis's rock and roll, or New Orleans blues or Kentucky bluegrass, or his passion for basketball (shared with our daughter Nika and his 16-year-old grandson, Lucas), or his quest for a good anecdote (his annual anecdote lectures at Princeton and later NYU drew large crowds). Maybe it's because we continued our walks in nearby Riverside Park for as long as was possible -- walks full of loving and spirited argument and talk. Perhaps it's because, while Steve was a very serious person, he didn't take himself seriously.

O n Saturday, Mikhail Gorbachev sent these words about Steve:

Dear Katrina,
Please accept my sincere condolences on Steve's passing. He was one of the closest people to me in his views and understanding of the enormous events that occurred in the late 1980s in Russia and changed the world.
Steve was a brilliant historian and a man of democratic convictions. He loved Russia, the Russian intelligentsia, and believed in our country's future.
I always considered Steve and you my true friends. During perestroika and all the subsequent years, I felt your understanding and unwavering support. I thank you both.
Dear Katrina, I feel deep sympathy for your grief and I mourn together with you and Nika.
Blessed memory for Steve.
I embrace you,
Mikhail Gorbachev
19.09.20

F or 40 years, Steve was my partner, companion, co-conspirator, best friend, fellow traveler, mentor, husband (for 32 years), co-author. I will be forever grateful to him for introducing me to The Nation , to Russia, for a life that has been full of shared adventure, friendship and passion, and for our beloved daughter, Nika. MOST POPULAR 1

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Katrina vanden Heuvel TWITTER Katrina vanden Heuvel is editorial director and publisher of The Nation , America's leading source of progressive politics and culture. She served as editor of the magazine from 1995 to 2019.


Herbert Weiner says:

September 22, 2020 at 11:53 pm

My condolences for the passing of Stephen who fought the post Cold War policies against Russia with a balanced analysis--so contradictory to the intellectuals who gloat in our victory and are unrealistic to the "threat" posed by Russia which desperately needs peace and friendship with the West and, especially, us. He has shown that you can criticism and condemn Stalinism while also condemning our anti-Soviet policies. He walked that tightrope which I applaud. May his memory be a blessing.

Erwin Borda says: September 22, 2020 at 10:44 pm

Dear Katrina, at this time of America's political confusion, pain and intellectual despair, the lost of Steve is really big. He has been a source of inspiration to many, and the true defender of Russia in the middle of political adversity. Steve being an intellectual giant always exposed his ideas in a humble and honest way. What a lost for America and for the world!
Rest in Peace Steve! And for you Katrina and Nika my most sincere condolences!
God Bless you all!

Valera Bochkarev says: September 22, 2020 at 8:56 am

Boots, Applebaums, Kristols and Joffes of this world will come and go as specks of dirt clogging up our civilization while never measuring up to courageous moral and intellectual giants like Professor Cohen. His intellect, insight and humility will always be a shining beacon for those that have high hopes for humanity. Rest in peace, Steve Cohen. You've led a righteous and honorable life, Sir.

Pierre Guerlain says: September 22, 2020 at 2:43 am

I started reading Steve's articles in connection with the conspiracy theory that Russiagate is and then I watched many videos of him in interviews. I came to admire such a courageous man who was slandered by people who knew nothing, nothing about Russia, the country Steve knew so well but also nothing about geopolitics, international relations and the tricks of intel services. Always competent and with a gift for clear exposition, Steve warned about what is one of the gravest dangers: war with Russia. I too admired Gorbachev and saw how he was hoodwinked by people who unknowingly prepared Putin's rise. A great courageous thinker is gone and we miss him.

Ann Wright says: September 21, 2020 at 7:53 pm

I admired Steve's perspective from 1992 when I was in the second group that wasIn the US Embassy in Tashkent, Uzbekistan and two years later with the Us Embassy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan for two years from 1994-1996. I've been back to Russia twice in the past three years and I agree totally with His view of the stupidity of another Cold War!!!

John Stewart says: September 21, 2020 at 5:12 pm

Katrina, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts. I took two courses with Professor Cohen at Princeton in 1973 and 1974, and he was without question the best lecturer I had in seven years of higher education. He became my intellectual mentor, although I was too shy to ever really talk with him. I graduated in Politics and Russian Studies in 1977, and he was an inspiration. I am especially saddened by his death because I have been thinking of picking up Russian studies soon when I retire and I wanted his advice on where I should do a Masters degree, with whom, and what topics needed someone to pick up. He was a great man, and a voice of sense about Russia. He will be greatly missed.

John Connolly says: September 21, 2020 at 3:10 pm

Dear Katrina: Thank You for this personal sharing of Your life with Stephen Cohen; and sincere condolences to You, Nika and Lucas.
I really appreciate Your clarity and candor about the unique position Steve occupied in the academic, intellectual and political firmament ... never completely clear to me until Your explication. Steve regularly engaged and sometimes enraged me with some of his positions -- some of them seeming to me ill-considered defenses of cloddish Stalinist bureaucrats or malevolent Russian authoritarians ... but I read everything he wrote in 'The Nation' and anywhere else I came across him. As a longtime Trotskyist/ Socialist I could find plenty to argue about with Brother Cohen, but also found great appreciation for the fact that almost no one else was currently thinking and writing about Russia or the Soviet experience with the rigor, insight, depth of experience and skill that Stephen owned and shared with us all. It goes without saying he will be missed by You his dearest and closest ones; but he will be sorely missed too by those of us in Your extended 'Nation' Family, and the Progressive millions he so widely taught and influenced to 'think different'.

[Sep 23, 2020] How fake media actually works: reporter are given the narrative and they should rehash their stories to fit it

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The blogger Caitlin Johnstone accurately states that these most of these mainstream corporate journalists are really *narrative managers* in that their primary role is to peddle the official narrative of the US corporate/political establishment for any given topic. ..."
"... I would add that the managing editors of these "journalists"/narrative managers would be more honestly described as "handlers," to use the parlance of spooks. ..."
"... Waste of time. They control the media. The Internet may have lots of influence, but it still does not set "consensus reality" - that remains with the MSM. The MSM issues one coordinated narrative. The Internet is all over the place. Without one coordinated narrative, you can't set "reality". ..."
"... In addition, those who issue the narrative and control the MSM have the power. People want to believe those in power, due to cognitive dissonance - otherwise they'd have to accept that everyone ruling their lives is a corrupt liar. The electorate may *say* they understand that their rulers are corrupt - but they can't act* on that realization without compromising their own internal belief systems. So again, waste of time to try ..."
Sep 23, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

snake , Sep 22 2020 0:59 utc | 22 can we not invent a method that can counter this tactic of using propaganda to control the narrative?

1) Hack them. Release their planning documents, emails, phone calls, etc. showing how the scam was set up.

2) Waste of time. They control the media. The Internet may have lots of influence, but it still does not set "consensus reality" - that remains with the MSM. The MSM issues one coordinated narrative. The Internet is all over the place. Without one coordinated narrative, you can't set "reality".

3) In addition, those who issue the narrative and control the MSM have the power. People want to believe those in power, due to cognitive dissonance - otherwise they'd have to accept that everyone ruling their lives is a corrupt liar. The electorate may *say* they understand that their rulers are corrupt - but they can't act* on that realization without compromising their own internal belief systems. So again, waste of time to try.

snake , Sep 22 2020 10:19 utc | 36

time2wakeupnow , Sep 21 2020 23:36 utc | 20

Well....as always, and especially if it involves anything even remotely relating to 'Russia', or Iran, or whatever adversarial operational target of the day might be -- one can reliably count on our very own "Izvestia on the Hudson" to faithfully execute their officially sanctioned nation security state propaganda mission by dutifully steno-graphing as much dis/mis-information as their NSA/CIA/Pentagon handlers request (require) from them.

Petri Krohn , Sep 21 2020 22:50 utc | 18

A former editor and correspondent of the The New York Times , Michael Cieply describes how the newspaper works:
Stunned By Trump, The New York Times Finds Time For Some Soul-Searching

It was a shock on arriving at the New York Times in 2004, as the paper's movie editor, to realize that its editorial dynamic was essentially the reverse. By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called "the narrative." We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.

Reality usually had a way of intervening. But I knew one senior reporter who would play solitaire on his computer in the mornings, waiting for his editors to come through with marching orders. Once, in the Los Angeles bureau, I listened to a visiting National staff reporter tell a contact, more or less: "My editor needs someone to say such-and-such, could you say that?"

The bigger shock came on being told, at least twice, by Times editors who were describing the paper's daily Page One meeting: "We set the agenda for the country in that room.

ak74 , Sep 22 2020 0:14 utc | 22
The blogger Caitlin Johnstone accurately states that these most of these mainstream corporate journalists are really *narrative managers* in that their primary role is to peddle the official narrative of the US corporate/political establishment for any given topic.

I would add that the managing editors of these "journalists"/narrative managers would be more honestly described as "handlers," to use the parlance of spooks.

In fact, it would be apt to described venerable institution of journalism itself as an intelligence operation.

THE CIA AND THE MEDIA

http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php

Richard Steven Heck , Sep 22 2020 4:01 utc | 28

@snake | Sep 22 2020 0:59 utc | 22 can we not invent a method that can counter this tactic of using propaganda to control the narrative?

1) Hack them. Release their planning documents, emails, phone calls, etc. showing how the scam was set up.

2) Waste of time. They control the media. The Internet may have lots of influence, but it still does not set "consensus reality" - that remains with the MSM. The MSM issues one coordinated narrative. The Internet is all over the place. Without one coordinated narrative, you can't set "reality".

3) In addition, those who issue the narrative and control the MSM have the power. People want to believe those in power, due to cognitive dissonance - otherwise they'd have to accept that everyone ruling their lives is a corrupt liar. The electorate may *say* they understand that their rulers are corrupt - but they can't act* on that realization without compromising their own internal belief systems. So again, waste of time to try.

[Sep 23, 2020] The deviousness of Russians is completly off the charts.

Highly recommended!
Sep 23, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Steverino , Aug 9 2020 13:35 utc | 53

I'll tell you what's really going on here.

Those sneaky Russians are well aware Biden is doing a good enough job of subverting his own campaign.

They know he, like his opponent, offers no relief from the constant militarism and forever wars that the American public is fed up with.

They know he, like his opponent, is corrupt and represents corporate interests and that the American public sees him as out of touch and incapable of offering anything in terms of substantive change.

They know that so long as Biden doesn't offer any kind of viable alternative to the status quo his candidacy is going to be weak and ineffectual and that there isn't much of anything they could do that could possibly enhance that effect.

So, they're content to sit back and let nature take its course. In other words, they realize the best way to interfere in the American elections... is by NOT interfering with them.

And how could the Americans possibly counter such a strategy? The deviousness is off the charts. Damn those Russians!

LOL

[Sep 22, 2020] Stephen F. Cohen -- In Memoriam by Gilbert Doctorow

Unfortunately in his brilliant analysis of USA-Russia relations Stephen Cohen never pointed out that the USA policy toward Russia is dictated by the interests of maintaining global neoliberal empire and the concept of "Full Spectrum Dominance" which was adopted by the USA neoliberal elite after the collapse of the USSR.
Like British empire the USA neoliberal empire is now overextended, metropolia is in secular stagnation with deterioration standard of living of the bottom 80% of population, so the USA under Trump became more aggressive and dangerous on the international arena. Trump administration behaves behaves like a cornered rat on international arena.
Notable quotes:
"... On Friday, 18 September, professor Steve Cohen passed away in New York City and we, the "dissident" community of Americans standing for peace with Russia – and for peace with the world at large – lost a towering intellectual and skillful defender of our cause who enjoyed an audience of millions by his weekly broadcasts on the John Batchelor Show, WABC Radio. ..."
"... from the start of the Information Wars against Russia during the George W. Bush administration following Putin's speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007, no voice questioning the official propaganda line in America was tolerated. Steve Cohen, who in the 1990s had been a welcome guest on U.S. national television and a widely cited expert in print media suddenly found himself blacklisted and subjected to the worst of McCarthyite style, ad hominem attacks. ..."
"... the opposition to Steve was led by experts in the Ukrainian and other minority peoples sub-categories of the profession who were militantly opposed not just to him personally but to any purely objective, not to mention sympathetic treatment of Russian leadership in the territorial expanse of Eurasia. ..."
"... Almost no one outside our 'dissident' community is concerned about the possibility of Armageddon in say two years' time due to miscalculations and bad luck in our pursuing economic, informational and military confrontation with Russia and China. ..."
"... My point in this discussion is that in the last decade of his life Stephen Cohen became one of the nation's most fearless and persistent defenders of the right to Free Speech. ..."
"... It was forced upon him by The New York Times, The Washington Post and other major media who pilloried him or blacklisted him over his unorthodox, unsanctioned, nonconformist views on the "Putin regime." It was forced upon him by university colleagues who sought to deny his right to establish graduate school fellowships in Russian affairs bearing his name and that of his mentor at Indiana University, Professor Tucker. ..."
"... In the face of vicious personal attacks from these McCarthyite forces, in the face of hate mail and even threats to his life, Steve decided to set up The American Committee and to recruit to its governing board famous, patriotic Americans and the descendants of the most revered families in the country. In this he succeeded, and it is to his credit that a moral counter force to the stampeding bulls of repression was erected and has survived to this day. ..."
Sep 22, 2020 | gilbertdoctorow.com

On Friday, 18 September, professor Steve Cohen passed away in New York City and we, the "dissident" community of Americans standing for peace with Russia – and for peace with the world at large – lost a towering intellectual and skillful defender of our cause who enjoyed an audience of millions by his weekly broadcasts on the John Batchelor Show, WABC Radio.

A year ago, I reviewed his latest book, War With Russia? which drew upon the material of those programs and took this scholar turned journalist into a new and highly accessible genre of oral readings in print. The narrative style may have been more relaxed, with simplified syntax, but the reasoning remained razor sharp. I urge those who are today paying tribute to Steve, to buy and read the book, which is his best legacy.

From start to finish, Stephen F. Cohen was among America's best historians of his generation, putting aside the specific subject matter that he treated: Nikolai Bukharin, his dissertation topic and the material of his first and best known book; or, to put it more broadly, the history of Russia (USSR) in the 20 th century. He was one of the very rare cases of an historian deeply attentive to historiography, to causality and to logic. I understood this when I read a book of his from the mid-1980s in which he explained why Russian (Soviet) history was no longer attracting young students of quality: because there were no unanswered questions, because we smugly assumed that we knew about that country all that there was to know. That was when our expert community told us with one voice that the USSR was entrapped in totalitarianism without any prospect for the overthrow of its oppressive regime.

But my recollections of Steve also have a personal dimension going back six years or so when a casual email correspondence between us flowered into a joint project that became the launch of the American Committee for East West Accord (ACEWA). This was a revival of a pro-détente association of academics and business people that existed from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, when, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the removal of the Communist Party from power, the future of Russia in the family of nations we call the 'international community' seemed assured and there appeared to be no further need for such an association as ACEWA.

I hasten to add that in the original ACEWA Steve and I were two ships that passed in the night. With his base in Princeton, he was a protégé of the dean of diplomats then in residence there, George Kennan, who was the leading light on the academic side of the ACEWA. I was on the business side of the association, which was led by Don Kendall, chairman of Pepsico and also for much of the 1970s chairman of the US-USSR Trade and Economic Council of which I was also a member. I published pro-détente articles in their newsletter and published a lengthy piece on cooperation with the Soviet Union in agricultural and food processing domains, my specialty at that time, in their collection of essays by leaders in the U.S. business community entitled Common Sense in U.S.-Soviet Trade .

The academic contingent had, as one might assume, a 'progressive' coloration, while the business contingent had a Nixon Republican coloration. Indeed, in the mid-1980s these two sides split in their approach to the growing peace movement in the U.S. that was fed by opposition in the 'thinking community' on university campuses to Ronald Reagan's Star Wars agenda. Kendall shut the door at ACEWA to rabble rousing and the association did not rise to the occasion, so that its disbanding in the early '90s went unnoticed.

In the re-incorporated American Committee, I helped out by assuming the formal obligations of Treasurer and Secretary, and also became the group's European Coordinator from my base in Brussels. At this point my communications with Steve were almost daily and emotionally quite intense. This was a time when America's expert community on Russian affairs once again felt certain that it knew everything there was to know about the country, and most particularly about the nefarious "Putin regime." But whereas in the 1970s and 1980s, polite debate about the USSR/Russia was entirely possible both behind closed doors and in public space, from the start of the Information Wars against Russia during the George W. Bush administration following Putin's speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007, no voice questioning the official propaganda line in America was tolerated. Steve Cohen, who in the 1990s had been a welcome guest on U.S. national television and a widely cited expert in print media suddenly found himself blacklisted and subjected to the worst of McCarthyite style, ad hominem attacks.

From my correspondence and several meetings with Steve at this time both in his New York apartment and here in Brussels, when he and Katrina van der Heuvel came to participate in a Round Table dedicated to relations with Russia at the Brussels Press Club that I arranged, I knew that Steve was deeply hurt by these vitriolic attacks. He was at the time waging a difficult campaign to establish a fellowship in support of graduate studies in Russian affairs. It was touch and go, because of vicious opposition from some stalwarts of the profession to any fellowship that bore Steve's name. Allow me to put the 'i' on this dispute: the opposition to Steve was led by experts in the Ukrainian and other minority peoples sub-categories of the profession who were militantly opposed not just to him personally but to any purely objective, not to mention sympathetic treatment of Russian leadership in the territorial expanse of Eurasia. In the end, Steve and Katrina prevailed. The fellowships exist and, hopefully, will provide sustenance to future studies when American attitudes towards Russia become less politicized.

At all times and on all occasions, Steve Cohen was a voice of reason above all. The problem of our age is that we are now not only living in a post-factual world, but in a post-logic world. The public reads day after day the most outrageous and illogical assertions about alleged Russian misdeeds posted by our most respected mainstream media including The New York Times and The Washington Post . Almost no one dares to raise a hand and suggest that this reporting is propaganda and that the public is being brainwashed. Steve did exactly that in War With Russia? in a brilliant and restrained text.

Regrettably today we have no peace movement to speak of. Youth and our 'progressive' elites are totally concerned over the fate of humanity in 30 or 40 years' time as a consequence of Global Warming and rising seas. That is the essence of the Green Movement. Almost no one outside our 'dissident' community is concerned about the possibility of Armageddon in say two years' time due to miscalculations and bad luck in our pursuing economic, informational and military confrontation with Russia and China.

I fear it will take only some force majeure development such as we had in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis to awaken the broad public to the risks to our very survival that we are incurring by ignoring the issues that Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Princeton and New York University was bringing to the airwaves week after week on his radio program.

Postscript

In terms of action, the new ACEWA was even less effective than its predecessor, which had avoided linking up with the peace movement of the 1980s and sought to exert influence on policy through armchair talks with Senators and other statesmen in Washington behind closed doors of (essentially) men's clubs.

However, the importance of the new ACEWA, and the national importance of Stephen Cohen lay elsewhere.

This question of appraising Stephen Cohen's national importance is all the more timely given that on the day of his death, 18 September, the nation also lost Supreme Justice Ruth Ginsburg, about whose national importance no Americans, whether her fans or her opponents, had any doubt.

My point in this discussion is that in the last decade of his life Stephen Cohen became one of the nation's most fearless and persistent defenders of the right to Free Speech. It was not a role that he sought. It was thrust upon him by the expert community of international affairs, including the Council on Foreign Relations, from which he reluctantly resigned over this matter.

It was forced upon him by The New York Times, The Washington Post and other major media who pilloried him or blacklisted him over his unorthodox, unsanctioned, nonconformist views on the "Putin regime." It was forced upon him by university colleagues who sought to deny his right to establish graduate school fellowships in Russian affairs bearing his name and that of his mentor at Indiana University, Professor Tucker.

In the face of vicious personal attacks from these McCarthyite forces, in the face of hate mail and even threats to his life, Steve decided to set up The American Committee and to recruit to its governing board famous, patriotic Americans and the descendants of the most revered families in the country. In this he succeeded, and it is to his credit that a moral counter force to the stampeding bulls of repression was erected and has survived to this day.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2020

[If you found value in this article, you should be interested to read my latest collection of essays entitled A Belgian Perspective on International Affairs, published in November 2019 and available in e-book, paperback and hardbound formats from amazon, barnes & noble, bol.com, fnac, Waterstones and other online retailers. Use the "View Inside" tab on the book's webpages to browse.]

[Sep 22, 2020] The New US-Russian Cold War -- Who is to Blame

It was all about Full Spectrum Domination. McFaul is not intellectual, he is a propagandist. Actually mediocre, obnoxious propagandist. In like Professor Cohen, intellectually he is nothing with academic credentials.
The level and primitivism lies about Ukraine would name any serious academic flash. It was about encircling Russia.
McFaul was behind Magnitsky which in best conspiracy tradition raises questions whether he works for MI6? We now know who Browder was and suspicious that he was Magnitsky killer or facilitator/financer (by hiring the jail doctor who traded Magnitsky) are very strong in view of "cui bono" question.
Notable quotes:
"... He is definitely not at the same level as Stephen F.Cohen. This is very alarming for the US, that people like him could have any power decision on Foreign Policy, and could explain the slow decline of the USA. ..."
"... McFaul is intellectually incoherent and disingenuous. Cohen wasted him ..."
"... We all know the truth... US economy heavily dependent on producing weapons and ammunition ..."
"... Mc Faul is clearly not supposed to have been in the positions of power, where he was. Something is fundamentally wrong with America. I think there is a crisis of personnel. Where are all these incredibly smart, high IQ people Harvard, Princeton, and the Ivy Leagues are supposedly pumping out? ..."
Sep 22, 2020 | www.youtube.com

TheInstallations , 2 years ago

McFaul is definitely not an academic, but much more a mediocre high civil servant. He is also very post modern in his approach. He is here to sell his book, not to argue ideas. He is incapable of building a rhetorical argument, and of having any political vision or strong analytical intelligence.

He is definitely not at the same level as Stephen F.Cohen. This is very alarming for the US, that people like him could have any power decision on Foreign Policy, and could explain the slow decline of the USA.

Confronted to people like Putin who is obviously an Old fashion politician like de Gaulles or Churchill, the Cold War can only lead us to catastrophe.

Yevgeny Goncharov , 2 years ago

Great facts from Prof. Cohen. Faulty logic from McFaul ("you cannot use those variables..."). McFaul will not get far in understanding Russia with this twisted approach, ie pretending like nothing (NATO, missile treaty, regime changes) happens.

The Maverick Historian , 2 years ago

Very informative debate! I think McFaul has only contributed to the new cold war with the treaties he helped write and the ill-informed advice he provided to the neoconservative Obama administration. Mr. Stephen Cohen is brilliant and I only wish he was more influential in shaping today's foreign policy. Though thankfully, McFaul is also no longer influential in shaping U.S. foreign policy.

Yevgeny Goncharov , 2 years ago

Very low from McFaul. Bringing personal attacks on him from social media as "facts" and "arguments" ("McFaul is a pedophile") . This not a level of academic argument from McFaul. He is no match to Cohen.

Aleksandar Mali , 1 year ago

It's so easy to understand! Russia is doing same thing usa will do when china starts to open military bases in latin America. Its not hard to imagine and in decade or to you will not have to imagine you will have that reality. Many Latin America countries will be interconnected with china with economic and military agreements than one day they will try to brig Mexico in China's sphere of influence if they refuse china can let's say "help" opposition to come in power and sign everything China wants.

I would like to see what American "experts" will say. How many of them will think that Mexico as a sovereign natio have right to sign any agreement it wants maybe even Russia can open military base and bring nuclear weapons to border of USA. So what it's their democratic right, isn't it?

Peace and Love , 2 years ago

McFaul is intellectually incoherent and disingenuous. Cohen wasted him

Salam Ahmed , 10 months ago

1:13:33 - 1:13:58 I swear by the all-powerful Albert Einistine that you are lying AND YOU KNOW IT. Russians said A BILLION times that U.S.A slowly but SURELY preparing for what they called "a calamitous war" by moving its lethal weapons nearer and nearer to the Russian territories.

We all know the truth... US economy heavily dependent on producing weapons and ammunition but the very very very main reason [for harassing Russia and the rest of world] is because the Rothschild family wants GLOBAL DOMINATION. SOLD FACT (ask ANY Russian intelligence officer about it and you will see what i mean).

SvendBosanvovski , 1 year ago (edited)

I have read Professor Cohen's last two works ("Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives" and "War with Russia?") and found them very informative and persuasive, but seeing him here expanding upon his key arguments is even more rewarding.

He shouldn't have to be brave to hold to his position, given his reputation as a scholar, but regrettably he is made to appear out of step with the critical mass of opinion makers who see more value promoting conflict with Russia than working towards a sensible accommodation.

rd264 , 2 years ago

I'm not an "expert" from Stanford, but as I recall the USSR imploded and the US [CIA etc] was totally surprised -so called pundits and experts in the US did not see it coming, then the next thing we get is US mainstream media claimed victory in the cold war, just blanket assertions that US won the cold war because the US is virtuous and clean and good, and we did it by the clear superiority of US way of life or some such crap.

Charles Krauthammer, for example. Now so called media and historians try to convince us that Reagan lead disarmament, but as I recall he blocked it at most points, for example, it was Gorbachev not Reagan who was out front and did all the leading at Reykjavik, and Reagan threw away Gorbachev's historic offer to totally disarm on the grounds that Star Wars was a more important priority, on Richard Perle's advice.

Now we are seeing something similar under Trump in which the US is again uninterested in peace and far more interested in wars by proxies and drones and global hegemony and control running the 7 seas and space to boot.

Dmitriy A , 1 year ago

Michael Foley is a liar of course US was involved I was me in US Army force and my friends used to travel to Georgia way before 2008 and of course everybody knows 2008 Russia and Georgia went to war with each other but our soldiers US government soldiers were teaching Georgians fighting with the NATO forces and all orange resolutions and Geo like him involved in Overturning government was famous Victoria Nuland

a 19 , 9 months ago

Mcfaul should have stayed in Montana

Larry Galearis , 2 years ago

Interesting debate and I hope Cohen is right, and is not the first of its kind. But still the FIRST EVER free debate about the New Cold War in the United States is (so far) still on Youtube. While listening to the two professors I found myself noting the difference in the presentation of facts from a career oriented politician/academic who is influenced by a forced narrative (McFaul) and one (Cohen) who is an academic historian who is in dissent and can speak freely (he is retired).

Keep in mind that Prof. McFaul has a career to worry about. It shows a LOT! Here we can see how political pressure can influence a debate. McFaul is still quite deserving of accolades for his courage to even say what he did in this debate.

And note how much free speech is missing in American society in the fact that this sort of thing is very difficult to achieve in a collapsed democracy. Note also that McFaul also stuck to "the Narrative" big lies like the so-called Crimea "annexation" when he would have known the truth of it....There are other examples. Americans are denied the fact that the public vote taken in Crimea was over 90% IN FAVOUR of joining Russia (again). This fact is simply too large for McFaul to be unaware of and yet most Americans are wallowing in this fake news. Or censored omissions. FWIW, Galearis

blackjackpinoko , 1 year ago

McFaul sounded like Pompeo

Steven Bishop , 2 months ago

The Monroe Doctrine. Has McFly read it?

Davide Sinigoi , 1 year ago

Prof. McFaul is a partisan. He bases his opinion of detailed facts, so detailed that he misses the bigger picture. The bigger picture is that he claims to be a sovereigns, but only when it comes to the US sovereignty. How about Russia's sovereignty?

Or Ukraine's whose government has been toppled by a (among others) US sponsored coup? How about Syria sovereignty? He furthers the view that the US had a fair posture towards Russia, which is not. This is also demonstrated by his personal deep dislike of Putin, which is something that both a real statesman or a real scholar should not influence opinions and actions.

McFaul's perspective is also flawed by the conflation of his (and Obama's) wishes and reality: that is that they don't like Putin and think to deal with Russia as if Putin was not there, but he is. You deal with the reality, not with your wishes. Putin is legitimate and strong Russia's president, whether McFaul likes him or not. A real respect for sovereignty demands respect for the head of the state you deal with. You don't question his legitimacy, as well as they don't questioned Clinton's, Bush's, Obama or Trump legitimacy. His point of view is that everything goes on in the world should have the US sanction, otherwise is not good.

This is imperial hubris, this is arrogance. This flaws his opinion in so far everything is measured upon american likes and dislikes. THis is not statesmanship, this is not scholarship, this is partisanship. He is also intellectually dishonest because he confuses a debate on right and wrong, which should be based on certain assumptions, with a debate on party interests, which has nothing to do with right and wrong, and is based on different assumptions. Indeed he is the less fit person in a debate on responsibility for the New Cold War because he was involved in its development and acquisition.

Partisanship is admitted, but shouldn't be disguised as neutrality or given any relevance just because of knowledge of technical details he knows - much of them are, frankly, irrelevant. His points are weak and inconsistent with geopolitical and a realist view of the international relations, they are biased by universal-liberal ideology, they are US-centric, he forgets too many essential points about the whole story. For instance he talks about the missed chance for Russian democracy (here a debate about what democracy is: his assumption is that the US democracy is .... please, don't make me laugh), but he doesn't mention that Soviet people voted in referenda and overwhelmingly wanted the USSR to keep on existing, but he forgets this "detail".

He forgets how the so much beloved Elcin sent the tanks against the parliament, many people were killed, how he allowed the pillaging of Russian people and resources by criminal oligarchs (many of them happily hosted by the UK and presented as political dissidents), and how the Russian 1996 were HEAVILY rigged and meddled by the US in order to reconfirm Elcin as a president. He complains about Putin being appointed by Elcin out of nothing. Well I can't recall any American complaints at that time, maybe because they thought he could be an alcoholic puppet like Elcin and that was clearly something the US liked and supported. So what about Obama (fake) words about wishing a strong Russia?

Obama spoke derogatory words about Russia. The only American interests about Russia is that is a militarily and strategically weak provider of cheap natural resources and that is not in tne position of competing for anything. I will stop here, although I could write pages and pages about McFlaws .... ooops! McFaul's inconsistency both as a scholar and even more as a statesman's advisor, but the debate was among a great intellectual with a clear vision of the world, and a small professor taken with insignificant details and too much love for Obama and blind believe in liberal universal ideology.

Alex P. , 9 months ago

Mc Faul is clearly not supposed to have been in the positions of power, where he was. Something is fundamentally wrong with America. I think there is a crisis of personnel. Where are all these incredibly smart, high IQ people Harvard, Princeton, and the Ivy Leagues are supposedly pumping out?

Bob Trajkoski , 1 year ago

McFaul believes in his own propaganda, irrational person and dangerous at that

Adam Rihak , 3 months ago

Prof. Cohen astonishing realpolitik ingenuity when asked "what the security interests of Ukraine and Georgia are" ( 1:16:21 ) unveils to me his understanding of politics as kind of imperialistic chess game where the US stands against the USSR (or RF for that matter). I have experienced the same feelings from his other debates (I remember one memorable at Munk Debates in 2015) - as if the historic fears, desires and dreams (of NATO or EU membership as the only effective shield against Russian military power) of so many ex-soviet countries means absolutely nothing - as if they were mere puppets of US "regime". As though the legitimate wishes of these sovereign countries means nothing at all. He is so surprised by that question he suddenly can't retrieve even the definition of what security interests of a country actually means - a rather strange quality in a historian. Ultimately he comes up with "they should make peace with their neighbors" - say this to countries that were along their history subjects of Soviet violent repression, military invasions, ethnic genocides and such. "I don't think Russian is a threat to them". Absolutely ridiculous.


Jean-Pierre Delorraine
, 8 months ago (edited)

This Michael McFaul individual is such severe laughing-stock completely out of touch with reality. Stephen Cohen's version of the "new cold war" is much closer to reality and we should not forget the nefarious entities that pull the strings in D.C. U.S. covert involvement throughout eastern Europe and especially the Ukraine is more than evident. Putin and Russia in general is not stupid and see right through U.S. covert meddling on Russia's border. And those "peaceful demonstrators" in Syria that MacFaul dearly praises are mere agents of the CIA/Mossad complex. Where are they now?


Nikhilesh Surve
, 4 months ago

Monroe doctrine doesn't care about the democratic rights of countries in the western hemisphere to enter into any alliance or partnership with USA's rival. Also, there's still no evidence of Russian hacking which is basis of their religion of RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA !

Pink Question , 3 months ago

Sure, since in Ukraine you guys didn't push money in mysterious organisations that would support the "democratic" narrative. I don't like NATO in my country and I see nato presence as an existential threat for Russia! Look back at the Cuba crisis it's exactly the SAME! You no good morally and ethically corrupt poor excuses of mouth pieces

Ser Korz , 2 years ago

Interesting how USA wants democracy for (all) others , but USA wants capitalist aristocracy for it self ( Jimmy Carter Tells Oprah America Is No Longer a Democracy, Now an Oligarchy https://mic.com/articles/125813/jimmy-carter-tells-oprah-america-is-no-longer-a-democracy-now-an-oligarchy#.AFxvdOCIa ).


Preben Soe
, 9 months ago

Either that Faul person is delusional or he is outright lying - Did Turkey not get threatened with sanctions when they decided to trade with Russia on anti missile weapons.

Eamonn Wright555 , 1 year ago

You know Obama is a straight faced liar . Furthermore , we genocided innocent Christians and Muslims in three countries and created a diaspora of migrants to Europe. So , we are supposed to believe that all those PhDs did not foresee that , most people think that it was your intentional outcome all along . So it goes now in Venezuela. Mcfaul is one of many who just carry the water and carry out orders . It's almost as if , the powers that be want the USA to fall . Because they can not be this stupid .

Paul Srochenski , 1 year ago

Call Cohen tells the truth the other guy just lying a United States started that whole thing in Syria they backed up Isis they backed up all the terrorists and because they want to split the country up and give Israel that major part of it cuz they want the natural resources the oil out of there and everything else because that's what they do everywhere they go they want a natural Resorts and they don't care how many people they kill

Eamonn Wright555 , 1 year ago

You know Obama is a straight faced liar . Furthermore , we genocided innocent Christians and Muslims in three countries and created a diaspora of migrants to Europe. So , we are supposed to believe that all those PhDs did not foresee that , most people think that it was your intentional outcome all along . So it goes now in Venezuela. Mcfaul is one of many who just carry the water and carry out orders . It's almost as if , the powers that be want the USA to fall . Because they can not be this stupid .

Davide Sinigoi , 1 year ago

Prof. McFaul is a partisan. He bases his opinion of detailed facts, so detailed that he misses the bigger picture. The bigger picture is that he claims to be a sovereignist, but only when it comes to the US sovereignty. How about Russia's sovereignity? Or Ukraine's whose government has been toppled by a (among others) US sponsored coup? How about Syria sovereignty? He furthers the view that the US had a fair posture towards Russia, which is not. This is also demonstrated by his personal deep dislike of Putin, which is something that both a real statesman or a real scholar should not influence opinions and actions. McFaul's perspective is also flawed by the conflation of his (and Obama's) wishes and reality: that is that they donì't like Putin and think to deal with Russia as if Putin was not there, but he is. You deal with the reality, not with your wishes. Putin is legitimate and strong Russia's president, whether McFaul likes him or not. A real respect for sovereignty demands respect for the head of the state you deal with. You don't question his legitimacy, as well as they don't questioned Clinton's, Bush's, Obama or Trump legitimacy. His point of view is that everything goes on in the world should have the US sanction, otherwise is not good. This is imperial hubris, this is arrogance. This flaws his opinion in so far everything is measured upon american likes and dislikes. THis is not statesmanship, this is not scholarship, this is partisanship. He is also intellectually dishonest because he confuses a debate on right and wrong, which should be based on certain assumptions, with a debate on party interests, which has nothing to do with right and wrong, and is based on different assumptions. Indeed he is the less fit person in a debate on responsibility for the New Cold War because he was involved in its development and acutisation. Partisanship is admitted, but shouldn't be disguised as neutrality or given any relevance just because of knowledge of technical details he knows - much of them are, frankly, irrelevant. His points are weak and inconsistent with geopolitical and a realist view of the international relations, they are biased by universal-liberal ideology, they are US-centric, he forgets too many essential points about the whole story. For instance he talks about the missed chance for Russian democracy (here a debate about what democracy is: his assumption is that the US democracy is .... please, don't make me laugh), but he doesn't mention that Soviet people voted in referenda and overwhelmingly wanted the USSR to keep on existing, but he forgets this "detail". He forgets how the so much beloved Elcin sent the tanks against the parliament, many people were killed, how he allowed the pillaging of Russian people and resources by criminal oligarchs (many of them happily hosted by the UK and presented as political dissidents), and how the Russian 1996 were HEAVILY rigged and meddled by the US in order to reconfirm Elcin as a president. He complains about Putin being appointed by Elcin out of nothing. Well I can't recall any American complaints at that time, maybe because they thought he could be an alcoholic puppet like Elcin and that was clearly something the US liked and supported. So what about Obama (fake) words about wishing a strong Russia? Obama spoke derogatory words about Russia. The only American interests about Russia is that is a militarly and strategically weak provider of cheap natural resources and that is not in tne position of competing for anything. I will stop here, although I could write pages and pages about McFlaws .... ooops! McFaul's inconsistency both as a scholar and even more as a statesman's advisor, but the debate was among a great intellectual with a clear vision of the world, and a small professor taken with insignificant details and too much love for Obama and blind believe in liberal universal ideology.

Alex P. , 9 months ago

Mc Faul is clearly not supposed to have been in the positions of power, where he was. Something is fundamentally wrong with America. I think there is a crisis of personnel. Where are all these incredibly smart, high IQ people Harvard, Princeton, and the Ivy Leagues are supposedly pumping out?

Rufus Leaking , 1 week ago

I won't, for a second, try to justify the expansion of N.A.T.O. up to the borders of Russia. But I simply cannot get past the belief that the N.A.T.O. expansion was fueled by a (not implausible) fear that a non-Soviet Russia would eventually try to surround its borders with Moscow-friendly governments, just as Stalin did before, during, and after WWII. Russia has been invaded from the west so many times that the lingering fear of it is almost in the Russian people's genetic code. What the rest of the world sees as Soviet & post-Soviet Russian paranoia and expansionism could plausibly be seen by the Russians as a prudent precaution against further western aggression. I don't AGREE with this, but I can imagine how the Russian psyche might be so inclined. I don't agree with the N.A.T.O. expansion, but I can also see how western paranoia about Russian expansionism would fuel the resulting western "encroachment". Ask people in Latvia, Lithuania & Estonia (and, for that matter, Finland) who were alive in WWII if their fear of Russian expansion is based in reality, or is merely paranoia. Be prepared for "VERY STRONG" answers.

Virgocygni56 , 9 months ago

What is the date of this debate Anyone can suggest?

Bob Trajkoski , 1 year ago

McFaul believes in his own propaganda, irrational person and dangerous at that

Alyson Mc Vitty , 1 year ago

2nd speaker - mcfaul - is and idiot sort of manic.

Jsmes Oercy , 1 year ago

Wow the second guy is such a schmuck ,,z,,trying to be funny and failing

Charles DuBois , 6 months ago

Why does 'our' US/Euro left leave me a pronounced impression that they have some special axe grinding on Russia? Is my take on this wrong? And try as I may to ignore it, my gut reaction to our younger author is highly unfavorable. I shall re-watch tomorrow hoping to listen more obectively.

James Registe , 4 months ago

Who ELSE is to blame, Russia has been making overtures since Kruschev

popiedo , 1 year ago

Mcfaul just rambles and tries to crack jokes.

Colonel Chuck , 1 year ago

McFaul sure runs his mouth about nothing.

Adam Rihak , 3 months ago

Prof. Cohen astonishing realpolitik ingenuity when asked "what the security interests of Ukraine and Georgia are" ( 1:16:21 ) unveils to me his understanding of politics as kind of imperialistic chess game where the US stands against the USSR (or RF for that matter). I have experienced the same feelings from his other debates (I remember one memorable at Munk Debates in 2015) - as if the historic fears, desires and dreams (of NATO or EU membership as the only effective shield against Russian military power) of so many ex-soviet countries means absolutely nothing - as if they were mere puppets of US "regime". As though the legitimate wishes of these sovereign countries means nothing at all. He is so surprised by that question he suddenly can't retrieve even the definition of what security interests of a country actually means - a rather strange quality in a historian. Ultimately he comes up with "they should make peace with their neighbors" - say this to countries that were along their history subjects of Soviet violent repression, military invasions, ethnic genocides and such. "I don't think Russian is a threat to them". Absolutely ridiculous.

Jean-Pierre Delorraine , 8 months ago (edited)

This Michael McFaul individual is such severe laughing-stock completely out of touch with reality. Stephen Cohen's version of the "new cold war" is much closer to reality and we should not forget the nefarious entities that pull the strings in D.C. U.S. covert involvement throughout eastern Europe and especially the Ukraine is more than evident. Putin and Russia in general is not stupid and see right through U.S. covert meddling on Russia's border. And those "peaceful demonstrators" in Syria that MacFaul dearly praises are mere agents of the CIA/Mossad complex. Where are they now?

varro We , 2 years ago (edited)

I think it's fair to say that the US won the cold war, the eastern block was broke, there soviet union was a nightmare for humanity, the west was seen as a bright light and it was. So let's put aside propaganda, ask anyone from the eastern block and they will tell you that what Russia created was a genocide. Just look how fast all of those counties jumped to enter NATO. Soviet union collapsed. It's a very nice discussion and I learn a lot from this, there are a lot of things that US and Russia could have done to prevent another cold war, I think what we are with is with a belief in human wisdom, if there is any left.

[Sep 21, 2020] Stephen F. Cohen- The Ukrainian Crisis - It s not All Putin s Fault

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... There is no chance of mending relations and even less of achieving some security partnership between US and Russia. The rift will only keep on widening as US political and financial elites are growing increasingly desperate (and thus even more aggressive) while Russia abandons its attempts to please the haters and moves its focus on to its future prospective partners who have genuine interest in cooperating with Russia and achieving common goals.... including opposing the common enemy if you like! Well at least I hope so: the only reason why US wish to get closer to Russia would be to stab it in the back... one more time! ..."
Sep 21, 2020 | www.youtube.com

Gerry Cooney , 3 years ago (edited)

Speaking as an Independent, I say that our country, the USA, has engineered past confilcts and wars in order to feed the military industrial complex. Not so much that it results in a nuke-shooting war, but in a regular non-nuke shooting war. The solution? Send the sons and daughters of the politicians into direct combat, every time they approve another war. That should keep things a bit more peaceful.

Playthell Benjamin , 3 years ago

Professor Cohen is this nation's most objective and therefore most valuable thinker on Russia! The charge that his views are "not patriotic" is a compliment rather than the insult they intended. A scholar's views are only valuable to the public and, more importantly, policy makers, if they are OBJECTIVE!!! Which is to say that he follows the FACTS wherever they lead!

Stratus Blue , 4 years ago

Any "discussion" with no mention of the supranational central bank cartel is intentional deceptive omission. The "brass ring" is forced use of petro-dollars. The central bank stock holders and bankers loaning all dollars into existence as national debt, do not care who owns land. They care who pays off national debts and interest on debt. Civil war is their racket. There are no sovereign nations. No genuine nations that create their medium of exchange publicly. No national people. Just participants in an extortion or its victims. The "Elite" collect on money they created as loans in their central banking accounts. All others are only human numbers assigned billing addresses.

Maria Schick , 4 years ago

Welcome to the New World Order ....where Multinational corporations rule & their profits are what are most important..... NOT nation states it's the 99.9% against the .01% and they use MSM propaganda & fear to control the DUMB masses thinking

Madaleine , 9 months ago

Global mafia in the background! Shut down funding cia ET Al

keepinitreal , 2 years ago

So infuriating that videos that carry the truth have 57k views, while nasty lying propaganda has millions!

SJ R , 4 years ago

I just discovered John Batchelor Show on which Cohen has a guest spot- I just was drawn to this man's thinking, probably because I had made up my mind about Russia during the Ukraine crises. Seeing the US has ruin every country we have gone into- I'm on Russia's side, especially where Russia and Ukraine has a history, on that side of the world.

Santos D , 4 years ago (edited)

38:49 - Apologies for the somewhat Utopian question here. I agree with everything Cohen has said, but regarding cause of jihadist terrorism ( ie implosion of the economies in the region), does it make sense to discuss primarily this game of terrorist whack a mole (bombing, invading and crushing Jihadist insurgencies)? Is there any point in talking about a pro active policy of recreating sustainable, stable economies in the region? What would that even look like?

Cezanne Monet , 11 hours ago

Brilliant scholar. RIP Prof Cohen. Watch if you want to understand today's geopolitical situation. The whole situation.

No Names , 4 years ago (edited)

Not very many average Americans would be able to easily access and watch this. Average Americans still consume mainly mainstream media. Too bad, because this lecture would have opened their eyes and have blown up their brain-contaminated minds by the CNN, the New York Times and alike.

Chris Bowers , 4 years ago

I agree wholeheartedly Loane. Have always been extremely impressed with and appreciative of Cohen's carefully & thoughtfully considered contribution. We in the US have gone a bit off the deep end when it comes to this deeply embedded belief in exceptionalism and superiority, and have been extremely rude to much of the rest of the world in the process. It amazes me how patient Russia has been with us, waiting for us to come around to a more sober understanding of the world we live in today. I have to conclude that what we are experiencing here in the US is a perennial phenomenon that comes with the end of all empires throughout history, the mission creep of over-extending resources and the big one, seemingly blind hubris.

M Ch , 4 years ago

There is no chance of mending relations and even less of achieving some security partnership between US and Russia. The rift will only keep on widening as US political and financial elites are growing increasingly desperate (and thus even more aggressive) while Russia abandons its attempts to please the haters and moves its focus on to its future prospective partners who have genuine interest in cooperating with Russia and achieving common goals.... including opposing the common enemy if you like! Well at least I hope so: the only reason why US wish to get closer to Russia would be to stab it in the back... one more time!

Raf Zam , 3 years ago (edited)

NATO'S reason to exist ended when the Warsaw Pact was demolished. It was created to confront the socialist Warsaw Pact but today ALL of the members of the pact are part of NATO, except Russia. So why is it still operating? Who are they confronting? They are a bunch of bureaucrats looking for a reason to stay employed in an organization that lost its excuse to be. However, their behavior has gone from increasing security to actually becoming a menace to trigger a nuclear war to destroy life on earth.

Donald Watts , 4 years ago

It will take a Republican President to turn our relationships with hostile nations around. For some irrational reasoning, the current administration refuses negotiation with it's enemies. Somehow this is going to create understanding. and a less dangerous world. I don't see a continuation of this Administrations policy anything but reckless . I am assuming this policy has been one determined through Clinton, and will remain so. Clinton has said on a number of occasions, it is the Obama Administration's policies that will be hers as well. As an ex cold warrior, who has spent a lot of time chasing Soviet boomers in the North Atlantic, I am not willing to gamble my children and grand children's lives . It is a dangerous and ego driven pissing match. Let us start talking , This administration and families can climb into their luxury nuclear bomb proof bunkers...... My family and most Americans don't have that luxury.

William Carr , 3 years ago

Dr. Cohen, so Putin gave the Northern Alliance to the USA after 911 to bludgeon Afghanistan for hiding Bin Laden? Paul Craig Robert, David Ray Griffin and a growing list of Americans believe 911 was a total bamboozle. If that is true which it looks increasingly like it was, does that mean Putin was playing along with the our Reichstag fire? What does that make Putin? NATO should have been totally remade after 1986, but it wasn't and we simply missed a huge opportunity not for worldwide U.S. hegemony, but for a new umbrella of security by super powers in alliance. Obviously, the proliferation of ethno-religious groups was in Putin's mind when he welcomed us into Afghanistan, but damn it man, tell people EXACTLY why we and the Russians want to be in the Golden Crescent besides the extraction of minerals.

[Sep 21, 2020] Stephen Cohen at the AJC 2017 Forum, about Russia and Terrorism

Highly recommended!
This was a really bright mind
Julia Ioffe is a joke -- she is essentially a typical "national security parasite" and of the level that surprisingly, is lower that Max Boor, although previously I thought this is impossible. Julia Ioffe is very typical of the anti-Russian thinking in the West.
Jun 23, 2017 | www.youtube.com

Stephen Cohen at the American Jewish Committee Forum 2017, about Russia and Terrorism. Full debate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0rtr...


alo1, 3 years ago

And again, Cohen smashed these government employers singlehandedly.

Drew Hunkins, 3 years ago

This incessant Russophobia constantly being trumpeted by the Washington militarist imperialists must stop. It's putting the world on the brink of nuclear war.

Stephen Cohen's a godsend along with a handful of the other intellectuals out there speaking and writing the truth that penetrates the miasma of disinformation, half-truths and exaggerations emanating from the state-corporate nexus in the American mass media.

Cohen, along with John Pilger, James Petras, Robert Parry, Michael Parenti, John Pilger, Eva Bartlett, Diana Johnstone and Paul Craig Roberts must be read widely in order for folks to get a grasp of where the Washington imperialist ruling class is driving the world.

mitrovdan, 3 years ago

at 25:40 he just destroys her totally. what a point he made, amazing!! "thank you professor" the guy on the left wants to end Cohen's carnage of the so called experts. Cohen made minced meat out of em. Fact after fact...stonewalled em both. Listen to her, ISIS doesn't have nuke's, she obviously doesn't have a clue.

MrWebster, 3 years ago

Cohen is always cogent and convincing. One area I wish some historian would look into is how "Russia-gate" is not echoing Cold War themes, but echoing themes from the German Nazis in particular their belief about a great Jewish conspiracy against Europe.

Even Putin recently remarked on all these accusations: "It reminds me of anti-Semitism, A dumb man who can't do anything would blame the Jews for everything." Look at how Putin is drawn and pictured on major outlets. The NYTimes blamed resistance to TPP on Putin.

The Russians like the Jews are behind every social problem. Popular culture shows and speaks of Russia in the same way Nazi propagandists wrote about Russia.

Undermining Western liberal democracies, Jews were compared to spiders catching people in the webs. Same with Putin. Pick up Hitler's speech after the invasion of the Soviet Union justifying it., Echos? Accidental rhetoric of conspiracies ?

DSCdaP, 3 years ago

"to look past a long list of transgressions and abuses..." this is what I absolutely hate about America, they are all so stupid and ignorant to their own countries misdeeds it is unbelievable, infuriating beyond belief. The US is currently fighting 7 wars simultaneously, which it all started itself under false pretences and hid the real reason beneath a thick layer of BS propaganda and misinformation.

The secession of Crimea is the least egregious event of the entire conflicts history. The EU and US have pumped billions of dollars into the coup which took place weeks before the Crimean referendum, on the 20th of February 2014, 2 weeks prior to that, an intercepted phone conversation between Victoria Nuland (Assistant Secretary of State of the United States to Europe) and Geoffrey Pyatt (US Ambassador to the Ukraine) was leaked on February 4th, 2014. In this phone conversation, they describe key positions within the Ukrainian government being filled by Klitshko and Yatz... fast forward a few weeks, who do we see? Klitsh and Yatz! It was the most obvious sponsored coup in history.

Putin snatched the Crimean peninsula from NATO, who wanted to seize Russias military harbour in Sevastopol (which the Russians have used to supply Syria, this was one and a half years before they entered the conflict directly, apart from being a very important strategic harbour in general), by suggesting a referendum to the local government and they accepted.

Why? Because they were ethnic Russians and knew who gained power in Kiev, the neo-Nazi, Bandera-worshipping OUN, which the US has nourished, supported and developed for the last 100 years within the Ukrainian territory. These Nazis hate Russians, they have a deep seeded hatred of all things Russian which has been indoctrinated and drilled into them by the CIA for decades, the first thing they did after seizing power was to demote the Russian language from the official list of languages of the Ukraine.

They have since honoured Ukrainian Nazi-collaborators from WWII by erecting statues, renaming streets, creating new holidays etc. This is just one example of US misinformation and propaganda, nothing they say accurately describes the truth, nothing, not one thing has it's bases in reality. Be it about Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and what have you, it's all lies and propaganda to mask their intentions.

North Korea is another example. North Korea is a hornets nest they kick once in a while to scare the Japanese and South Koreans into tolerating US occupation longer. Everything North Korea does is a direct response to threats and intimidations by the US. They staged a drill off the coast of North Korea which they called "Decapitation" for F's sake.

They have ratcheted up the tension again these past few months to sneak in their THAAD weapons stations, before the new President was chosen. And these THAAD systems have absolutely nothing to do with North Korea, it's against China and Russia, North Korea is a pretext.

The still active war, which has merely been under a seize fire for decades, against North Korea, could have been ended before there was colour television, but the US needs North Korea to exist in order to justify their occupation of S.Korea and Japan.

MrRondonmon , 1 day ago

And by the way, the CrowdStrike guy testified in 2017 that there was ZERO PROOF that the Russians hacked the DNC, but Schiff hid that for 2 years until John Ratcliff threatened to declassify it, then Schiff's sorry ass released the interviews. So, this man was 100 percent right, there is ZERO PROOF the Russians or anyone hacked the DNC. Its a damned lie, and it was always a lie.

Patty Rogers , 3 years ago

As usual, the journalists and leftist have nothing to offer- no facts, no forensic evidence, no truth. Only speculation hyperbole and hysteria. I don't believe Russia are the good guys but give me a break in all this crap!

beija flor , 2 years ago (edited)

why did cohen tell everyone even potential 'terrorists' that there is too much of exactly what 'terrorists' wish to get their hands on in the former soviet states?!!? if he is 'so afraid' of 'terrorism...' WHY did he say THAT?!!? not very bright... or perhaps he is FOS. idk?! wth?! SMH. maybe e is trying to inform people who r not 'terrorists,' so that people know n can figure out how to address the issues...?

Yet, for any terrorists who wanted to know how to get materials he spoke of, now they may know a region where they could potentially go to attain the materials... maybe in 'terrorists' circles they all know this already? it just seems concerning, is all...

Beth Lemmon, 2 years ago (edited)

Love Stephen Cohen, he is spot on and right about most if not all points, he's fair, wicked smart and sober minded. However he isn't right about POTUS Trump. If anyone has been watching this type of discourse about world geopolitics it looks like the NWO wants wars to depopulate the earth, set up a OWG and a utopia. It's so blatantly obvious to those who are honest and not ideologically possessed.

They recruit their stupid Antifa army and zombie possessed minions to do their dirty work in the streets. They want send our amazing military to do the fighting wars that are just to feed the MIC, and does nothing for America's good.

[Sep 21, 2020] Stephen Cohen Has Died. Remember His Urgent Warnings Against The New Cold War by Caitlin Johnstone

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God
"... In a world that is increasingly confusing and awash with propaganda, Cohen's death is a blow to humanity's desperate quest for clarity and understanding. ..."
Sep 19, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

Stephen F Cohen, the renowned American scholar on Russia and leading authority on US-Russian relations, has died of lung cancer at the age of 81.

As one of the precious few western voices of sanity on the subject of Russia while everyone else has been frantically flushing their brains down the toilet, this is a real loss. I myself have cited Cohen's expert analysis many times in my own work, and his perspective has played a formative role in my understanding of what's really going on with the monolithic cross-partisan manufacturing of consent for increased western aggressions against Moscow.

In a world that is increasingly confusing and awash with propaganda, Cohen's death is a blow to humanity's desperate quest for clarity and understanding.

I don't know how long Cohen had cancer. I don't know how long he was aware that he might not have much time left on this earth. What I do know is he spent much of his energy in his final years urgently trying to warn the world about the rapidly escalating danger of nuclear war, which in our strange new reality he saw as in many ways completely unprecedented.

The last of the many books Cohen authored was 2019's War with Russia? , detailing his ideas on how the complex multi-front nature of the post-2016 cold war escalations against Moscow combines with Russiagate and other factors to make it in some ways more dangerous even than the most dangerous point of the previous cold war.

"You know it's easy to joke about this, except that we're at maybe the most dangerous moment in US-Russian relations in my lifetime, and maybe ever," Cohen told The Young Turks in 2017. "And the reason is that we're in a new cold war, by whatever name. We have three cold war fronts that are fraught with the possibility of hot war, in the Baltic region where NATO is carrying out an unprecedented military buildup on Russia's border, in Ukraine where there is a civil and proxy war between Russia and the west, and of course in Syria, where Russian aircraft and American warplanes are flying in the same territory. Anything could happen."

Cohen repeatedly points to the most likely cause of a future nuclear war: not one that is planned but one which erupts in tense, complex situations where "anything could happen" in the chaos and confusion as a result of misfire, miscommunication or technical malfunction, as nearly happened many times during the last cold war.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/kqQbK_6meM8?feature=oembed

"I think this is the most dangerous moment in American-Russian relations, at least since the Cuban missile crisis," Cohen told Democracy Now in 2017. "And arguably, it's more dangerous, because it's more complex. Therefore, we -- and then, meanwhile, we have in Washington these -- and, in my judgment, factless accusations that Trump has somehow been compromised by the Kremlin. So, at this worst moment in American-Russian relations, we have an American president who's being politically crippled by the worst imaginable -- it's unprecedented. Let's stop and think. No American president has ever been accused, essentially, of treason. This is what we're talking about here, or that his associates have committed treason."

"Imagine, for example, John Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis," Cohen added. "Imagine if Kennedy had been accused of being a secret Soviet Kremlin agent. He would have been crippled. And the only way he could have proved he wasn't was to have launched a war against the Soviet Union. And at that time, the option was nuclear war."

"A recurring theme of my recently published book War with Russia? is that the new Cold War is more dangerous, more fraught with hot war, than the one we survived," Cohen wrote last year . "Histories of the 40-year US-Soviet Cold War tell us that both sides came to understand their mutual responsibility for the conflict, a recognition that created political space for the constant peace-keeping negotiations, including nuclear arms control agreements, often known as détente. But as I also chronicle in the book, today's American Cold Warriors blame only Russia, specifically 'Putin's Russia,' leaving no room or incentive for rethinking any US policy toward post-Soviet Russia since 1991."

"Finally, there continues to be no effective, organized American opposition to the new Cold War," Cohen added. "This too is a major theme of my book and another reason why this Cold War is more dangerous than was its predecessor. In the 1970s and 1980s, advocates of détente were well-organized, well-funded, and well-represented, from grassroots politics and universities to think tanks, mainstream media, Congress, the State Department, and even the White House. Today there is no such opposition anywhere."

"A major factor is, of course, 'Russiagate'," Cohen continued. "As evidenced in the sources I cite above, much of the extreme American Cold War advocacy we witness today is a mindless response to President Trump's pledge to find ways to 'cooperate with Russia' and to the still-unproven allegations generated by it. Certainly, the Democratic Party is not an opposition party in regard to the new Cold War."

"Détente with Russia has always been a fiercely opposed, crisis-ridden policy pursuit, but one manifestly in the interests of the United States and the world," Cohen wrote in another essay last year. "No American president can achieve it without substantial bipartisan support at home, which Trump manifestly lacks. What kind of catastrophe will it take -- in Ukraine, the Baltic region, Syria, or somewhere on Russia's electric grid -- to shock US Democrats and others out of what has been called, not unreasonably, their Trump Derangement Syndrome, particularly in the realm of American national security? Meanwhile, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has recently reset its Doomsday Clock to two minutes before midnight."

https://www.youtube.com/embed/owbMRxC382A?feature=oembed

And now Stephen Cohen is dead, and that clock is inching ever closer to midnight. The Russiagate psyop that he predicted would pressure Trump to advance dangerous cold war escalations with no opposition from the supposed opposition party has indeed done exactly that with nary a peep of criticism from either partisan faction of the political/media class. Cohen has for years been correctly predicting this chilling scenario which now threatens the life of every organism on earth, even while his own life was nearing its end.

And now the complex cold war escalations he kept urgently warning us about have become even more complex with the addition of nuclear-armed China to the multiple fronts the US-centralized empire has been plate-spinning its brinkmanship upon, and it is clear from the ramping up of anti-China propaganda since last year that we are being prepped for those aggressions to continue to increase.

We should heed the dire warnings that Cohen spent his last breaths issuing. We should demand a walk-back of these insane imperialist aggressions which benefit nobody and call for détente with Russia and China. We should begin creating an opposition to this world-threatening flirtation with armageddon before it is too late. Every life on this planet may well depend on our doing so.

Stephen Cohen is dead, and we are marching toward the death of everything. God help us all.

medium.com

lay_arrow

novictim , 55 minutes ago

People are just now starting to realize that possible alternate path. But the Demoncrats in the USA must first be put down, politically euthanized, along with their neocon never-Trump Republican partners. And that cleaning up is on the way. Trump's second term will be the advancement of the USA-Russia initiative that is so long overdue.

PerilouseTimes , 48 minutes ago

Putin won't let western billionaires rape Russia's enormous natural resources and on top of that Putin is against child molesters, that is what this Russia bashing is all about.

awesomepic4u , 1 hour ago

Sad to hear this.

What a good man. It is a real shame that we dont have others to stand up to this crazy pr that is going on right now. Making peace with the world at this point is important. We dont need or want another war and i am sure that both Europe and Russia dont want it on their turf but it seems we keep sticking our finger in their eye. If there is another war it will be the last war. As Einstein said, after the 3rd World War we will be using sticks and stones to fight it.

Clint Liquor , 44 minutes ago

Cohen truly was an island of reason in a sea of insanity. Ironic that those panicked over climate change are unconcerned about the increasing threat of Nuclear War.

thunderchief , 41 minutes ago

One of the very few level headed people on Russia.

All thats left are anti Russia-phobic nut jobs.

Send in the clowns.

Stephen Cohen isn't around to call them what they are anymore.

Eastern Whale , 55 minutes ago

cooperate with Russia

Has the US ever cooperated with anyone?

fucking truth , 3 minutes ago

That is the crux. All or nothing.

Mustafa Kemal , 49 minutes ago

Ive read several of his books. They are essential, imo, if you want to understand modern russian history.

Normal , 1 hour ago

The bankers created the new CCP cold war.

evoila , 19 minutes ago

Max Boot is an effing idiot. Tucker wiped him clean too. It was an insult to Stephen to even put them on the same panel.

RIP Stephen.

Gary Sick is the equivalent to Stephen, except for Iran. He too is of an era of competence which is and will be missed as their voices are drowned out by neocon warmongers

thebigunit , 17 minutes ago

I heard Stephen Cohen a number of time in John Bachelor's podcasts.

He seemed very lucid and made a lot of sense.

He made it very clear that he thought the Democrat's "Trump - Russia collusion schtick" was a bunch of crap.

He didn't sound like a leftie, but I'm sure he never told me the stuff he discussed with his wife who was editor of the left wing "The Nation" magazine.

Boogity , 9 minutes ago

Cohen was a traditional old school anti-war Liberal. They're essentially extinct now with the exception of a few such as Tulsi Gabbard and Dennis Kucinich who have both been ostracized from the Democrat Party and the political system.

[Sep 20, 2020] Democratic-Defense-Against-Disinformation-2.0.pdf by Alina Polyakova and Daniel Fried

Counter disinformation network can't revive the dead chicken of neoliberal ideology.
Neoliberal elite lost legitimacy and as such has difficulties controlling the narrative. That's why all this frantic efforts were launched to rectify the situation.
Anti-Russian angle of Atlantic council revealed here quite clearly
Sep 20, 2020 | www.brookings.edu

The paper's biggest single recommendation was that the United States and EU establish a Counter-Disinformation Coalition, a public/private group bringing together, on a regular basis, government and non-government stakeholders, including social media companies, traditional media, Internet service providers (ISPs), and civil society groups. The Counter-Disinformation Coalition would develop best practices for confronting disinformation from nondemocratic countries, consistent with democratic norms. It also recommended that this coalition start with a voluntary code of conduct outlining principles and agreed procedures for dealing with disinformation, drawing from the recommendations as summarized above.

In drawing up these recommendations, we were aware that disinformation most often comes from domestic, not foreign, sources. 8 While Russian and other disinformation players are known to work in coordination with domestic purveyors of disinformation, both overtly and covertly, the recommendations are limited to foreign disinformation, which falls within the scope of "political warfare." Nevertheless, it may be that these policy recommendations, particularly those focused on transparency and social resilience, may be applicable to combatting other forms of disinformation.

[Sep 20, 2020] CJ Hopkins Exposes The Final Act In 'The War On Populism'

Highly recommended!
These sociopaths are messed up world again.
Sep 20, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored (mostly satirically) by CJ Hopkins via The Consent Factory,

So, it appears the War on Populism is building toward an exciting climax. All the proper pieces are in place for a Class-A GloboCap color revolution , and maybe even civil war. You got your unauthorized Putin-Nazi president, your imaginary apocalyptic pandemic, your violent identitarian civil unrest, your heavily-armed politically-polarized populace, your ominous rumblings from military quarters you couldn't really ask for much more.

OK, the plot is pretty obvious by now (as it is in all big-budget action spectacles, which is essentially what color revolutions are), but that won't spoil our viewing experience. The fun isn't in guessing what is going to happen. Everybody knows what's going to happen. The fun is in watching Bruce, or Sigourney, or "the moderate rebels," or the GloboCap "Resistance," take down the monster, or the terrorists, or Hitler, and save the world, or democracy, or whatever.

[Sep 19, 2020] The Kremlin Plans to Modernize Russia, Again - The Nation

Sep 19, 2020 | www.thenation.com

Putin's quest for a transformed nation and his own legacy. By Stephen F. Cohen FEBRUARY 21, 2020 fb tw mail Print Flag of Russian Federation with gilded coat of arms waving on the dome of Senate Palace of Moscow Kremlin

(Vladimir Zhupanenko / Shutterstock)

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T he US media's three-year obsession with the mostly fictitious allegations of "Russiagate" has all but obscured, even deleted, important, potentially historic, developments inside that nation itself, still the world's largest territorial country. One of the most important is the Putin government's decision to invest $300-to-$400 billion of "rainy day" funds in the nation's infrastructure, especially in its vast, underdeveloped provinces, and on "national projects" ranging from education to health care and family services to transportation and other technology. If successfully implemented, Russia would be substantially transformed and the lives of its people significantly improved.

Not surprisingly, however, the plan has aroused considerable controversy and public debate in Russia's policy elite, primarily for two reasons. The funds were accumulated largely due to high world prices for Russia's energy exports and the state's budgetary austerity during the decade after Putin came to power in 2000, and they have been hoarded as a safeguard against Western economic sanctions and/or a global economic depression. (Russia's economic collapse in the Yeltsin 1990s, perhaps the worst modern-day depression in peacetime, remains a vivid memory for policy-makers and ordinary citizens alike.)

There is also the nation's long, sometimes traumatic, history of "modernization from above," as it is termed. In the late 19th century, the czarist regime's program to industrialize the country, "to catch up" with other world powers, had unintended consequences that led, in the accounts of many historians, to the end of czarism in the 1917 revolution. And Stalin's "revolution from above" of the 1930s, based on the forced collectivization of the peasantry, which at the time accounted for more than 80 percent of the population, along with very rapid industrialization, resulted in millions of deaths and economic distortions that burdened Soviet and post-Soviet Russia for decades.

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Nor are Russia's alternative experiences of modernization from below inspiring or at least instructive. In the 1920s, during the years known as the New Economic Policy, or NEP, the victorious Bolsheviks pursued evolutionary economic development through a semi-regulated market economy. It had mixed -- and still disputed -- results, and it was brutally abolished by Stalin in 1929. Decades later, Yeltsin's "free-market reforms" were widely blamed for the ruination and widespread misery of the 1990s, which featured many aspects of actual de-modernization.

With all this "living history" in mind, Putin's plan for such large-scale (and rapid) investment has generated the controversy in Moscow and resulted in three positions within the policy class. One fully supports the decision on the essentially Keynesian grounds that it will spur Russia's annual economic growth, which has lagged below the global average for several years. Another opposes such massive expenditures, arguing that the funds must remain in state hands as a safeguard against the US-led "sanctions war" (and perhaps worse) against Russia. And, as usual in politics, there is a compromise position that less should be invested in civilian infrastructure and less quickly.

Running through the discussion is also Russia's long history of thwarted implementation of good intentions. To paraphrase a prime minister during the 1990s, Viktor Chernomyrdin , "We wanted things to turn out for the best, but they turned out as usual." In particular, it is often asked, what will be the consequences of putting so much money into the hands of regional and other local officials in provinces where corruption is endemic? How much will be stolen or otherwise misdirected?

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Nonetheless, Putin seems to be resolute. He is also insistent that his ambitious plan to transform Russia requires a long period of international peace and stability. Here again is plain evidence that those in Washington who insist Putin's primary goal is "to sow discord, divisions, and instability" in the world, especially in the West, where he hopes to find "modernizing partnerships," do not care about or understand what is actually unfolding inside Russia -- or Putin's vision of his own historical role and legacy.

Listen to the podcast here .

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Stephen F. Cohen Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University. A Nation contributing editor, his most recent book, War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate , is available in paperback and in an ebook edition. His weekly conversations with the host of The John Batchelor Show , now in their seventh year, are available at www.thenation.com .

[Sep 19, 2020] Stephen F. Cohen, Influential Historian of Russia, Dies at 81 - The New York Times

Sep 19, 2020 | www.nytimes.com

By Robert D. McFadden

Stephen F. Cohen, an eminent historian whose books and commentaries on Russia examined the rise and fall of Communism, Kremlin dictatorships and the emergence of a post-Soviet nation still struggling for identity in the 21st century, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 81.

His wife, Katrina vanden Heuvel, the publisher and part owner of The Nation, said the cause was lung cancer.

From the sprawling conflicts of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and the tyrannies of Stalin to the collapse of the Soviet Union and Vladimir V. Putin's intrigues to retain power, Professor Cohen chronicled a Russia of sweeping social upheavals and the passions and poetry of peoples that endured a century of wars, political repression and economic hardships.

A professor emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University, he was fluent in Russian, visited Russia frequently and developed contacts among intellectual dissidents and government and Communist Party officials. He wrote or edited 10 books and many articles for The Nation, The New York Times and other publications, was a CBS-TV commentator and counted President George Bush and many American and Soviet officials among his sources.

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In Moscow he was befriended by the last Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who invited him to the May Day celebration at Red Square in 1989. There, at the Lenin Mausoleum, Professor Cohen stood with his wife and son one tier below Mr. Gorbachev and the Soviet leadership to view a three-hour military parade. He later spoke briefly on Russian television to a vast audience about alternative paths that Russian history could have taken.

Loosely identified with a revisionist historical view of the Soviet Union, Professor Cohen held views that made him a controversial public intellectual. He believed that early Bolshevism had held great promise, that it had been democratic and genuinely socialist, and that it had been corrupted only later by civil war, foreign hostility, Stalin's malignancy and a fatalism in Russian history.

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A traditionalist school of thought, by contrast, held that the Soviet experiment had been flawed from the outset, that Lenin's political vision was totalitarian, and that any attempt to create a society based on his coercive utopianism had always been likely to lead, logically, to Stalin's state terrorism and to the Soviet Union's eventual collapse.

Professor Cohen was an enthusiastic supporter of Mr. Gorbachev, who after coming to power in 1985 undertook ambitious changes to liberate the nation's 15 republics from state controls that had originally been imposed by Stalin. Mr. Gorbachev gave up power as the Soviet state imploded at the end of 1991 and moved toward beliefs in democracy and a market economy.

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Mr. Cohen first came to international attention in 1973 with his biography of Lenin's protégé Nikolai Bukharin.

A prolific writer who mined Soviet archives, Professor Cohen first came to international attention in 1973 with "Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution," a biography of Lenin's protégé Nikolai Bukharin, who envisioned Communism as a blend of state-run industries and free-market agriculture. Critics generally applauded the work, which was a finalist for a National Book Award. Editors' Picks Who Gets Hurt When the World Stops Using Cash Films Hit Festivals Trying to Create Buzz Without a Crowd A Timely Collection of Vital Writing by Audre Lorde Continue reading the main story

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"Stephen Cohen's full-scale study of Bukharin is the first major study of this remarkable associate of Lenin," Harrison Salisbury's wrote in a review in The Times. "As such it constitutes a milestone in Soviet studies, the byproduct both of increased academic sophistication in the use of Soviet materials and also of the very substantial increase in basic information which has become available in the 20 years since Stalin's death."

After Lenin's death, Mr. Bukharin became a victim of Stalin's Moscow show trials in 1938; he was accused of plotting against Stalin and executed. His widow, Anna Mikhailovna Larina, spent 20 years in exile and in prison camps and campaigned for Mr. Bukharin's rehabilitation, which was endorsed by Mr. Gorbachev in 1988.

Ms. Larina and Professor Cohen became friends. Given access to Bukharin archives, he found and returned to her the last love letter that Mr. Bukharin wrote her from prison.

In "Rethinking the Soviet Experience" (1985), Professor Cohen offered a new interpretation of the nation's traumatic history and modern political realities. In his view, Stalin's despotism and Mr. Bukharin's fate were not necessarily inevitable outgrowths of the party dictatorship founded by Lenin.

Richard Lowenthal, in a review for The Times, called Professor Cohen's interpretation implausible. "While I do not believe that all the horrors of Stalinism were 'logically inevitable' consequences of the seizure of power by Lenin and his Bolshevik Party," Mr. Lowenthal wrote, "I do believe that Stalin's victory over Bukharin was inherent in the structure of the party's system."

As Professor Cohen and other scholars pondered Russia's past, Mr. Gorbachev's rise to power and his efforts toward glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) cast the future of the Soviet Union in a new light, potentially reversing 70 years of Cold War dogma.

[Sep 19, 2020] Stephen F. Cohen, pre-eminent contemporary American scholar of Russia USSR, friend of Gorbachev advisor to Bush, dies at 81 -- RT Russia Former Soviet Union

Sep 19, 2020 | www.rt.com

19 Sep, 2020 11:44 / Updated 4 hours ago Get short URL Stephen F. Cohen, pre-eminent contemporary American scholar of Russia & USSR, friend of Gorbachev & advisor to Bush, dies at 81 Prof. Stephen F. Cohen © Getty Images via AFP / Eugene Gologursky 118 Follow RT on RT Stephen F. Cohen, the leading American Russia expert of his generation and a celebrated historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, who became a vocal critic of Washington's "new Cold War" with Moscow, has died at the age of 81.

Cohen succumbed to lung cancer at his home in Manhattan, on Friday, according to his wife Katrina vanden Heuvel, who is also the part-owner and publisher of The Nation magazine, where he worked as a contributing editor.

A native of Kentucky, he was a prolific and prominent scholar in his field, serving as a professor emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University. As a frequent visitor to Russia, Cohen became well-connected among leading Soviet dissidents, politicians and thinkers in the 1980s, even befriending Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev.

Cohen also advised former US President George Bush, senior, in the late 1980s, and assisted Anna Larina, the widow of Nikolai Bukharin, to rehabilitate her husband's name during the Soviet era. He had earlier written a biography of the journalist and politician, which argued that had Bukharin succeeded Vladimir Lenin as Bolshevik leader, rather than Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union would have enjoyed greater openness, and perhaps even democracy.

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Breaking with many American academics and political commentators, Cohen was highly critical of Washington's approach to Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union. He warned of the dangers of NATO expansion and argued that much of the economic devastation seen in Russia during the 1990s could be traced to bad-faith policies and advice from the United States.

His principled, and patriotic stand, led to smears from members of the think tank racket and both liberal and neoconservative interventionists, keen to stoke tensions with Moscow. Cohen was labelled a Putin apologist. He responded by saying that he saw him as being "in the Russian tradition of leadership, getting Russia back on its feet."

READ MORE Will the Mueller report make the New Cold War even worse? (by Stephen Cohen) Will the Mueller report make the New Cold War even worse? (by Stephen Cohen)

After the election of Donald Trump, Cohen found himself in the crosshairs of the mainstream media for challenging the now-debunked Russiagate narrative, which he said was being used to sabotage bilateral relations and trigger a "new Cold War" with Moscow.

The unsubstantiated claim that Trump's presidential campaign "colluded" with the Kremlin would likely make a US-Russia detente "impossible" and could even help fuel an actual war between the two nations, Cohen argued. He lamented that Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe into the conspiracy theory, which found no evidence of collusion, would do little to tone down the fiery rhetoric and anonymously sourced media hysteria concerning Russia and its alleged influence over the US political system.

The author of numerous books and countless articles, Cohen was a frequent guest on RT, where he often used his air time to sound the alarm over the dangerous state of US-Russia relations, lamenting that the hostility was both unnecessary and potentially calamitous.

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[Sep 17, 2020] FBI director says Russia is engaged in 'very active efforts' to sink Biden rehashes 2016 claims but provides no evidence

Sep 17, 2020 | www.rt.com

Bondibeach 4 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 04:32 PM

The USA political establishment is seeking confirmation of its insanity using lies, more lies then more lies. Democracy is dead in the USA and is replaced with perjury, violence, nationwide corruption and full blown insanity. All politicians need the rope.
WakeUpGoyim 4 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 05:03 PM
During Obamas 2nd run for president (see YouTube) he openly said Russia was not hostile & Mitt Romney said Russia was an enemy - Romney got hammed for saying this. Today if Trump says Russia is Americas friend, the media then say he is an agent. People have short memories, or so the media thinks so, actually most people do, most cant even remember why countries went on lock-down.
NoJustice WakeUpGoyim 4 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 05:17 PM
No. He said Russia wasn't the number one threat.
apothqowejh 4 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 04:31 PM
The CIA was founded by the same fascists who tried to enlist Smedley Butler to overthrow FDR. During the post-war period, they smuggled their ideological brethren out of Germany with operation Paperclip. Their founding fathers included Prescott Bush, a Nazi, whose son and grandson went on to become US Presidents. They have never stopped hating Russia, nor have they ever stopped lying to the American Public.
FFII 2 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 06:45 PM
OMG.... Biden is a perfect candidate for Russia. Old, dumb and predictable. With a cart load of corruption evidence from Ukraine sources, regarding his dealing with Poroshenko personaly and his son with Ukrainian gas company, earning millions
___RICHLAND__ 2 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 07:00 PM
As an Australian i've seen Biden's handywork in Ukraine, trust me, the guy's an Expert in Over-throwing an Elected Government"
frankfalseflag 49 minutes ago 17 Sep, 2020 08:52 PM
Did you know that the FBI takes its orders from the CIA?
mumbojumbo272 2 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 07:41 PM
Oh, Wray forced out of comfort zone following is ''gang'' being sub-poena by senate to divert attention on Russia. Interesting !
NotARussianBot 1 hour ago 17 Sep, 2020 08:20 PM
Did he wipe his phone clean before testifying? 😀

[Sep 17, 2020] America: Land of the Free and FBI Conspiracy Nuts

Those clever and evil Russians are at the top of their game again. For less then 20 millions dollars they dispose Hillary in 2016 and now intend to dispose Creepy Joe. Wait, is that this a valuable service to the nation?
The collapse of neoliberalism forces the US neoliberal elite to deploy desperate measures to preserve the unity of the nation and the US-controlled world neoliberal empire. Neo-McCarthyism in one of those dirty tricks. The pioneer in this dirty game was Hillary, but now it is shared by both parties.
According to FBI director Christopher Wray you need to be Russian to understand that Biden as a Presidential Candidate is DOA. And that decision of DNC to prop him instead of Sanders or Warren was pretty idiotic, and was based on the power the neoliberal wing (aka Clinton mafia) still holds within the Party. You have to be pretty delusional to believe Biden has all his marbles.
And by "interference" he means reporting in the news and expressing own opinion. Like in 2016 looks like FBI again crossed the line and had become the third political party, which intends to be the kingmaker of the Presidential elections. So here's a suggestion: call in UN observers to the elections.
Russian media influence is actually very easy to prove -- just ask yourself, do you trust RT more than CNN? But if a person laugh every time Joe Biden talks and it has nothing to do with Russia.
And if this nonsense again comes from the FBI Director, the legitimate question is "What next?" The claim that Putin ordered the assassination of Abraham Lincoln?
Look at all those hapless intelligence agencies, helplessly watching Russian hackers stealing election. But, wait a minute, we are talking about arguably the largest, best equipped, best financed and most devious intelligence agencies on the Earth. So it is natural to assume that people who want to steal the election are those who cry most loudly about the Russian influence.
Actually If Russia really wanted to "sink" Biden all that it would need to do is noisily support him openly. The rabid Russophobia would do the rest: Unfortunately most of of Americans are spoon fed neoliberal propaganda and don't care much about if it's real or not. That reminds me the USSR where the life of people was difficult enough not to pay attention to Communist Party slogans and propaganda.
Notable quotes:
"... According to the FBI director, the Russians' primary goal seems to be not only to " sow divisiveness and discord ," but to trash Democratic nominee Joe Biden – along with " what the Russians see as a kind of anti-Russian establishment " – through social media, " use of proxies ," state-run media, and " online journals ." ..."
"... Former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats even suggested Congress create another election integrity body to supervise the vote in November, apparently concerned the existing authorities – all 54 of them, one for each state plus four federal entities tasked with keeping meddlers, foreign and domestic, shut out – weren't enough. ..."
"... "Crowd pleasing claims" is spot on the money. Sounds like the FBI has been tasked to lay some groundwork for the "after party". He knows what he is doing. ..."
"... Nothing new from the man who was Comey's assistant AG when Comey was Deputy Attorney General. ..."
Sep 17, 2020 | rt.com

Russia is reprising its still-unproven 2016 election meddling efforts, this time targeting Democratic challenger Joe Biden, according to FBI Director Christopher Wray, who gave no evidence to support his crowd-pleasing claims.

Wray told the House of Representatives that Russia is taking a " very active " role in the 2020 US election, claiming Moscow " continues to try to influence our elections, primarily through what we call malign foreign influence " during a Thursday hearing on national security threats.

ALSO ON RT.COM Damned if you do, damned if you don't? US intel director warns all election outcomes may be driven by Russia, China or Iran

According to the FBI director, the Russians' primary goal seems to be not only to " sow divisiveness and discord ," but to trash Democratic nominee Joe Biden – along with " what the Russians see as a kind of anti-Russian establishment " – through social media, " use of proxies ," state-run media, and " online journals ."

Wray contrasted 2020's alleged meddling with that of 2016, which he claimed involved " an effort to target election infrastructure ," presenting no evidence to back up either current or past claims – other than that the FBI or other intelligence agencies had made the same claims in the past. There is no actual evidence that Russia interfered with election infrastructure in 2016.

While four years of similarly flavored conspiracy theories blaming Russia for Donald Trump's 2016 win have come up empty-handed, the paucity of real-world evidence for 'Russian meddling' has not stopped Wray and other US intel officials from hyping it up as a major threat to the integrity of the democratic process.

The National Counterintelligence and Security Center suggested last month that, while Russia would interfere in the election in favor of Trump, China and Iran would meddle on behalf of Biden – implying Americans couldn't vote at all without doing the bidding of a foreign nation.

Former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats even suggested Congress create another election integrity body to supervise the vote in November, apparently concerned the existing authorities – all 54 of them, one for each state plus four federal entities tasked with keeping meddlers, foreign and domestic, shut out – weren't enough.


TWOhand 5 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 03:49 PM

"Crowd pleasing claims" is spot on the money. Sounds like the FBI has been tasked to lay some groundwork for the "after party". He knows what he is doing.
danko79 4 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 04:22 PM
Can't feel anything but sympathy for those that are so easily influenced. If/when Biden loses, perhaps blaming his lack of ability to string a few words together might be more relevant than any kind of imaginary foreign interference.
Terry Ross 4 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 04:43 PM
Nothing new from the man who was Comey's assistant AG when Comey was Deputy Attorney General. Wray made it clear when sworn in for position of FBI head that he believed Russia had interfered to help Trump win 2016 election. The only question that remains is why Trump picked him for the job.

[Sep 17, 2020] FBI director rehashes 2016 claims but provides no evidence

Notable quotes:
"... The CIA was founded by the same fascists who tried to enlist Smedley Butler to overthrow FDR. During the post-war period, they smuggled their ideological brethren out of Germany with operation Paperclip. Their founding fathers included Prescott Bush, a Nazi, whose son and grandson went on to become US Presidents. ..."
Sep 17, 2020 | www.rt.com

apothqowejh 4 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 04:31 PM

The CIA was founded by the same fascists who tried to enlist Smedley Butler to overthrow FDR. During the post-war period, they smuggled their ideological brethren out of Germany with operation Paperclip. Their founding fathers included Prescott Bush, a Nazi, whose son and grandson went on to become US Presidents.

They have never stopped hating Russia, nor have they ever stopped lying to the American Public.

[Sep 16, 2020] Fake News About Iran, Russia, China Is U.S. Journalism's Daily Bread

Notable quotes:
"... But CNN has and will continue to repeat the allegations as fact, so it's mission accomplished for the deep state. As another poster said on this board about manufacturing consent: "It is important to discuss the story, not its credibility, the more the discussion, the more the reaction and the more it reinforces the narrative." ..."
"... In the 1920s (or 30s), far-rightist Karl Popper coined the concept of systematic manipulation of "public opinion". This would become a hallmark of Western Civilization in the post-war. The public opinion theory states that the masses don't have an opinion for themselves or, if they have, it is sculpting/flexible. The dominant classes can, therefore, guide the masses like a shepherd, to its will. ..."
"... It is an insult to the noble profession, to call what the mainstream media in the west, especially in the USA do, journalism. In my opinion what they do is propaganda and stenography on behalf of those who are in power. I am not sure who coined the term but "presstitution" is not a bad attempt at describing their profession. ..."
"... While the western corporate media lie on a continuous basis - and that has the predictable effect - what is more insidious is not these acts of commissions ( meaning lies), but their acts of omission (meaning excluding or deemphasizing important contextual information) leading people to make the wrong conclusions. NPR in the US is an excellent example of such presstitution. ..."
"... Why are the US promoting conflict with China, with Russia? Why are they beating Europe, maybe with the intention to destroy it? Why is a new civil war in the US promoted? ..."
"... Normal (geopolitically interested) people would think: against China it is better to come together and unite, at least US & Europe, but eventually Russia included. For instance take the population of these three together: far less than China's. ..."
"... Journalism in the US is so superficial, it is a drop above the uppermost wavy comb. Not worth to pay attention to it. ..."
"... Other than few independent blog site such as this, every media outlet is in the service of its home government or foreign sponsors. Only born-suckers take the corporate media at face value. Modern journalism is nothing but an aggressive propaganda racket. ..."
"... Using lies (bearing false witness) to cause murder and theft are not exactly a new phenomenon. These 'groups of individuals', which are employing these fabricated deceptions, are doing nothing less than trying to commit murder and theft. ..."
"... Everything that was accomplished (albeit incompletely or moderately) through the New Deal and then the abortive Great Society absolutely spooked the oligarchy. Lifting much of the working class out of absolute wage slavery to the point where the next rung on Maslow's ladder was at least visible. And when it all culminated in the late 60's and early 70's with the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, the Surface Mining act, and various labor protection measures, the wealthy owner class decided the proles had gained too much power to influence "their" captive government. ..."
"... What differs, however, is the presentation. Trump is criticized (not praised) for being allegedly soft on Russia and Biden criticized for being allegedly soft on China. This clever trick ensures that just about everybody is onboard the bash-China-and-Russia train. ..."
"... In a violently polarized society, with red-blue antagonism reaching ridiculous heights, people tend to act exclusively in contradiction to the cult figure they hate so much. ..."
"... I've been saying for years here to watch the documentary - Century of the Self. If you want to learn about and understand America, its all here. Government, Corporations, Consumerism, Militarism, Deep State, Psychology, Individual selfishness and mental illness. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s ..."
Sep 16, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Every few days U.S. 'intelligence' and 'officials' produce fake claims about this or that 'hostile' country. U.S. media continue to reproduce those claims even if they bare any logic and do not make any sense.

On June 27 the New York Times and the Washington Post published fake news about alleged Russian payments to the Taliban for killing U.S. troops.

The stories ran on the outlets' front pages.

Two week later the story was shown to have no basis :

[T]hat the story was obviously bullshit did not prevent Democrats in Congress, including 'Russiagate' swindler Adam Schiff, to bluster about it and to call for immediate briefings and new sanctions on Russia .

Just a day after it was published the main accusation, that Trump was briefed on the 'intelligence' died. The Director of National Intelligence, the National Security Advisor and the CIA publicly rejected the claim. Then the rest of the story started to crumble. On June 2, just one week after it was launched, the story was declared dead .
...
The NYT buried the above quoted dead corpse of the original story page A-19.

Despite that the Democrats continued to use the fake story for attacks on Donald Trump.

Yesterday the commander of the U.S. forces in the Middle East drove a stake though the heart of the dead corpse of the original story:

Two months after top Pentagon officials vowed to get to the bottom of whether the Russian government bribed the Taliban to kill American service members , the commander of troops in the region says a detailed review of all available intelligence has not been able to corroborate the existence of such a program.

"It just has not been proved to a level of certainty that satisfies me," Gen. Frank McKenzie, commander of the U.S. Central Command, told NBC News. McKenzie oversees U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

But as one fake news zombie finally dies others get resurrected. Politico's 'intelligence' stenographer Natasha Bertrand produced this nonsensical claim :

The Iranian government is weighing an assassination attempt against the American ambassador to South Africa, U.S. intelligence reports say, according to a U.S. government official familiar with the issue and another official who has seen the intelligence.

News of the plot comes as Iran continues to seek ways to retaliate for President Donald Trump's decision to kill a powerful Iranian general earlier this year, the officials said. If carried out, it could dramatically ratchet up already serious tensions between the U.S. and Iran and create enormous pressure on Trump to strike back -- possibly in the middle of a tense election season.

U.S. officials have been aware of a general threat against the ambassador, Lana Marks, since the spring, the officials said. But the intelligence about the threat to the ambassador has become more specific in recent weeks. The Iranian Embassy in Pretoria is involved in the plot, the U.S. government official said.

Ambassador Lana Marks is known for selling overpriced handbags and for her donations to Trump's campaign. To Iran she has zero political or symbolic value. There is no way Iran would ever think about an attack on such a target. Accordingly the South African intelligence services do not believe that there is such a threat:

South African Minister of State Security Ayanda Dlodlo said the matter was "receiving the necessary attention" and that the State Security Agency (SSA) was "interacting with all relevant partners both in the country and abroad, to ensure that no harm will be suffered by the US Ambassador, including any other Diplomatic Officials inside the borders of our country."

However, an informed intelligence source told Daily Maverick that although the "matter has been taken seriously as we approach all such threats, specifically, there appears to be, from our perspective, no discernible threat. Least of all from the source that it purports to emanate from.

There was "no evidence or indicator", the source said, so the plot was "not likely to be real". The "associations made are not sustainable on any level but all precautions will be put in place".

The source suggested this was an instance of the "tail wagging the dog", of the Trump administration wielding a "weapon of mass distraction" to divert attention from its failures in the election campaign running up to President Donald Trump's re-election bid on November 3.

The spokesperson for the Iranian ministry of foreign affairs, Saeed Khatibzadeh, strongly denied the allegation in the Politico report which he called "hackneyed and worn-out anti-Iran propaganda".

In January the U.S. assassinated the Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad. Soleimani led the external campaigns of the Iranian Quds Forces. He was the one who orchestrated the campaign that defeated the Islamic State. His mythic-symbolic position for Iran and the resistance in the Middle East is beyond that of any U.S. figure.

There is simply no one in the U.S. military or political hierarchy who could be seen as his equal. Iran has therefore announced that it will take other ways to revenge the assassination of Soleimani.

As an immediate response to the assassination of Soleimani Iran had launched a precise missile attack against two U.S. bases in Iraq. It has also announced that it will make sure that the U.S. military will have to leave the Middle East. That program is in full swing now as U.S. bases in Iraq are again coming under daily missile attacks :

More than eight months after a barrage of rockets killed an American contractor and wounded four American service members in Kirkuk, Iraq, militia groups continue to target U.S. military bases in that country, and the frequency of those attacks has increased.

"We have had more indirect fire attacks around and against our bases the first half of this year than we did the first half of last year," Gen. Frank McKenzie, the commander of the U.S. Central Command, said. "Those attacks have been higher."
...
McKenzie's comments came just hours after he announced the United States would be cutting its footprint in Iraq by almost half by the end of September, with about 2,200 troops leaving the country .

Just hours agon two Katyusha rockets were fired against the U.S. embassy in Baghdad's Green Zone. Two British/U.S.convoys also came under attack . U.S. air defense took the missiles down but its anti-missile fire is only further disgruntling the Iraqi population.

These attacks are still limited and designed to not cause any significant casualties. But they will continue to increase over time until the last U.S. soldier is withdrawn from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and other Middle East countries. That, and only that, is the punishment Iran promised as revenge for Soleimani's death.

The alleged Iranian thread against the U.S. ambassador to South Africa is just another fake news propaganda story. It is useful only for lame blustering:

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump - 3:04 UTC · Sep 15, 2020

According to press reports, Iran may be planning an assassination, or other attack, against the United States in retaliation for the killing of terrorist leader Soleimani, which was carried out for his planning a future attack, murdering U.S. Troops, and the death & suffering...
...caused over so many years. Any attack by Iran, in any form, against the United States will be met with an attack on Iran that will be 1,000 times greater in magnitude!

The danger of such fake stories about Russia or Iran is that they might be used to justify a response in the case of a false flag attack on the alleged targets.

Should something inconvenient happen to Ambassador Lana Marks the Trump administration could use the fake story as an excuse to respond with a limited attack on Iran.

It is well known by now that U.S. President Donald Trump is lying about every time he opens his mouth. Why do U.S. journalists presume that the agencies and anonymous officials who work under him are more truthful in their utterings than the man himself is hard to understand. Why do they swallow their bullshit?

Posted by b on September 15, 2020 at 11:50 UTC | Permalink


jo6pac , Sep 15 2020 12:01 utc | 1

Amerikas propaganda machine never sleeps and sadly to many people believe the BS
Sunny Runny Burger , Sep 15 2020 12:27 utc | 2
US and European journalists are also lying constantly, that's why. Even when they make embarrassing attempts at "being unbiased" or "factual". Do they understand it? Many might not, but some do, perhaps fewer than anyone would think reasonable.

Btw a lot of these "journalists" in Europe in particular openly self-identify to "the left" or even as socialists and communists or "greens". So much for ideology as some kind of solution: entirely worthless and superficial.

Christian J. Chuba , Sep 15 2020 12:44 utc | 3
But CNN has and will continue to repeat the allegations as fact, so it's mission accomplished for the deep state. As another poster said on this board about manufacturing consent: "It is important to discuss the story, not its credibility, the more the discussion, the more the reaction and the more it reinforces the narrative."

Just for laughs, I looked at the reviews of Gordon Chang's book, 'The Coming Economic Collapse of China' to see if I could figure out the reasoning and one of the reviewers said that China weakens because they lack a free press to hold their govt accountable. I had a good laugh at that one.

vk , Sep 15 2020 12:54 utc | 4
There's an objective explanation for that.

In the 1920s (or 30s), far-rightist Karl Popper coined the concept of systematic manipulation of "public opinion". This would become a hallmark of Western Civilization in the post-war. The public opinion theory states that the masses don't have an opinion for themselves or, if they have, it is sculpting/flexible. The dominant classes can, therefore, guide the masses like a shepherd, to its will.

Friedrich von Hayek - a colleague of Popper and father of British neoliberalism (the man behind Thatcher) - then developed on the issue, by proposing the institutionalization of public opinion. He proposed a system of three or four tiers of intellectuals which a capitalist society should have. The first tier is the capitalist class itself, who would govern the entire world anonymously, through secret meetings. These meetings would produce secret reports, whose ideas would be spread to the second tier. The second tier is the academia and the more prominent politicians and other political leaderships. The third tier is the basic education teachers, who would indoctrinate the children. The fourth tier is the MSM, whose job is to transform the ideas and opinions of the first tier into "common sense" ("public opinion").

Therefore, it's not a case where the Western journalists are being fooled. Their job was never to inform the public. When they publish a lie about, say, Iran trying to kill an American ambassador in South Africa, they are not telling a lie in their eyes: they are telling an underlying truth through one thousand lies. The objective here is to convince ("teach") the American masses it is good for the USA if Iran was invaded and destroyed (which is a truth). They are like the modern Christian God, who teach its subjects the Truth through "mysterious ways".

Nathan Mulcahy , Sep 15 2020 12:56 utc | 5
It is an insult to the noble profession, to call what the mainstream media in the west, especially in the USA do, journalism. In my opinion what they do is propaganda and stenography on behalf of those who are in power. I am not sure who coined the term but "presstitution" is not a bad attempt at describing their profession.

Unfortunately they have been amazingly successful in brainwashing people. One current example, from numerous ones that could be cited, is the public's opinion on Julian Assange. .

While the western corporate media lie on a continuous basis - and that has the predictable effect - what is more insidious is not these acts of commissions ( meaning lies), but their acts of omission (meaning excluding or deemphasizing important contextual information) leading people to make the wrong conclusions. NPR in the US is an excellent example of such presstitution.

What I am saying is nothing new to the bar flies here. But I am extremely distressed when I see how poorly informed (propagandized, brainwashed) the vast majority of the people I know are. Let's say a decade ago, ideological polarization was the main reason why it was so difficult to have an open discussion on important issues the US. Today it has become even more difficult because, thanks to the success of the presstitutes, people also have different sets of "facts". And most alarmingly, after successfully creating a readership who believe in alternative "facts", the mainstream presstitutes are moving on to creating a logic-free narrative. Examples include Assad supposedly gassing his people when he was winning (even though that was guaranteed to produce western intervention against him). A more recent example is the Navalny affair. Sadly, very sadly, way too many people are affected.

Gerhard , Sep 15 2020 13:07 utc | 6
Hi, thanks, and sorry, but: why does nobody look behind the curtain?

Why are the US promoting conflict with China, with Russia? Why are they beating Europe, maybe with the intention to destroy it? Why is a new civil war in the US promoted?

Are these random developments of history? Are laws of history behind that?
NO!! Surely not!

Normal (geopolitically interested) people would think: against China it is better to come together and unite, at least US & Europe, but eventually Russia included. For instance take the population of these three together: far less than China's.

If something is going against the common sense, then there should be a reason behind. This reason I recommend You, with due respect, to find - and to uncover the plan.

Journalism in the US is so superficial, it is a drop above the uppermost wavy comb. Not worth to pay attention to it.

The actual demand is to understand and to show the forces playing deep underwater.
And to preview where these forces are determined to strike against.

Kind regards, Gerhard

DG , Sep 15 2020 13:30 utc | 7
They are all Judith Miller now.
morongobill , Sep 15 2020 13:39 utc | 8
Like the famed slogan of septic tank pumpers, the Gray Lady's masthead should read, "Your shit is our bread and butter!"
ptb , Sep 15 2020 13:53 utc | 9
Yep. We're into some pretty overt 1984 territory now... It's really a shame.
Richard Steven Hack , Sep 15 2020 14:37 utc | 10
Gareth Porter's latest on "Russian hacking"...

Dark Web Voter Database Report Casts New Doubts on Russian Election Hack Narrative

A new report showing that US state-level voter databases were publicly available calls into question the narrative that Russian intelligence "targeted" US state election-related websites in 2016.

The problem with these sorts of accusations about "state-sponsored" hacking is they assume that because a target has some connection to a state or some political activity that it means the hackers are "nation-state". In reality, personal identification information (PII) is a commodity on the black market, along with intellectual property - and *any* hacker will target *any* such source of PII. So the mere fact that it is an election year, and that voting organizations are loaded with PII, makes them an obvious target for any and every hacker.

"Oregon's chief information security officer, Lisa Vasa, told the Washington Post in September 2017 that her team blocks 'upwards of 14 million attempts to access our network every day."'

This is the usual ridiculous claim from almost every organization. They treat every Internet packet that hits their firewall as being an "attempt to access" the network (or worse, a "breach" - which it is not.) Which is technically true, but would only be relevant if they had *no* firewall - a setup which no organization runs these days. By definition, 99.99999% of those attempts are random mass scans of a block of IP addresses by either a hacker or some malware on someone else's machine - or even a computer security researcher attempting to find out how many sites are vulnerable.

Hoarsewhisperer , Sep 15 2020 14:52 utc | 11
"It just has not been proved to a level of certainty that satisfies me," Gen. Frank McKenzie, commander of the U.S. Central Command, told NBC News. McKenzie oversees U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Barflies should write Gen Frank McKenzie inside the back cover of their diaries, and count the days until we hear of/from him again. I've a feeling he's crossed a line and knows precisely what he's doing and why. Imo, the Swamp has just been put on notice.

Sakineh Bagoom , Sep 15 2020 14:54 utc | 12
Posted by: vk | Sep 15 2020 12:54 utc | 4
In the 1920s (or 30s), far-rightist Karl Popper coined the concept of "public opinion".

vk, I can't find anything regarding this coinage. Could you please provide a link.
Wiki is specially devoid of it and it goes back to 16 century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_opinion The term public opinion was derived from the French opinion publique which was first used in 1588 by Michel de Montaigne in the second edition of his Essays

juliania , Sep 15 2020 15:12 utc | 13
Thank you, b. In this world of illusion that mainstream press provides it is forgivable that we cannot even convince members of our own families that are dear to us of the underlying truths behind what these masters of deception continue to print. Surely they only do so because livelihoods are threatened, and the public perceptions are reaching a critical point where belief in what they write, read by the diminishing numbers of faithful few, reaches a pinnacle of perception and spills chaotically down into a watershed of realization.

I remember when we were told what happens on the top floor of the New York Times. It opened my eyes. And perhaps here also, b is providing a chink through which we may glimpse what is happening in military circles in fields of operation where facts collide with fiction:

"We have had more indirect fire attacks around and against our bases the first half of this year than we did the first half of last year," Gen. Frank McKenzie, the commander of the U.S. Central Command, said. "Those attacks have been higher."
...
McKenzie's comments came just hours after he announced the United States would be cutting its footprint in Iraq by almost half by the end of September, with about 2,200 troops leaving the country.
vk , Sep 15 2020 15:13 utc | 14
@ Posted by: Sakineh Bagoom | Sep 15 2020 14:54 utc | 12

On Hayek's "tiering", google "IHS model" ("pyramid of social change") and his book "The Intellectuals and Socialism".

On Popper's conception of "public opinion", see "The Open Society and Its Enemies" (1945). Yes, the term itself is not Popper's invention - he never claimed to have done so. But he gave it a "twist", and we can say nowadays every Western journalist's conception of "public opinion" is essentially Popper's.

Kooshy , Sep 15 2020 15:36 utc | 18
Why do swallow their bullshit?

because on matters related to Iran, China and Russia, they are not independent, there is no real difference between the two camps in US, Biden' foreign policy which is endorsed and supported by NYT and WP is not that different than Trump's, if not more radical. There is no free press in US, as matter of fact, as long as this United Oligarchy of America exist there will be no free press.

Sakineh Bagoom , Sep 15 2020 15:50 utc | 20
OK, I admit it. I read this rag, just because Paul Pillar posts there. And yes, there is an "Iran derangement" syndrome in US, where people go to sleep and dream Iran. They wake up from wet dream of bloody Iranian babies, asking, have we sanctioned Iran today? https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2020/09/14/when-it-comes-to-iran-how-many-failures-is-enough-for-pompeo/
jayc , Sep 15 2020 16:01 utc | 22
As well, this fake news propaganda barrage continues in the context of determined censorship of alternative media and social media - a campaign which has been largely promoted by the liberal intelligentsia in the US, in the name of reducing "fake news." Having to live within an ever-widening swamp of utter BS is wearying and mind-numbing - also to the point, one may assume.
Kooshy , Sep 15 2020 16:19 utc | 23
Posted by: Nathan Mulcahy | Sep 15 2020 12:56 utc | 5

Yes, I agree, IMO/observation, the US Government, the political parties and their supportive media are rapidly ideologically polarizing their constituencies to two hard entrenched ideological camps (which as you say has become hard shelled impenetrable). Except on one common ideological point, which almost all the population has been and is being brain washed as young as first grade, this common used term, which shield you from needing to investigate or form any other opinion is: US has always been, is and will be a "force for good" by its constitution, no matter what she has done or will do. This sentence when fully believed and carved in one' mind from childhood is very difficult to erase and crack. These two ideologically opposing camps about 70% of the population will not want to hear any fact or not, other than what they are told and believed all their life.

Noirette , Sep 15 2020 16:59 utc | 31
Re. K. Popper and topic above:

"Unlike utopian engineering, piecemeal social engineering must be "small scale," Popper said, meaning that social reform should focus on changing one institution at a time. Also, whereas utopian engineering aims for lofty and abstract goals (for example, perfect justice, true equality, a higher kind of happiness), piecemeal social engineering seeks to address concrete social problems (for example, poverty, violence, unemployment, environmental degradation, income inequality). It does so through the creation of new social institutions or the redesign of existing ones. These new or reconfigured institutions are then tested through implementation and altered accordingly and continually in light of their effects. Institutions thus may undergo gradual improvement overtime and social ills gradually reduced. Popper compared piecemeal social engineering to physical engineering. Just as physical engineers refine machines through a series of small adjustments to existing models, social engineers gradually improve social institutions through "piecemeal tinkering." In this way, "[t]he piecemeal method permits repeated experiments and continuous readjustments" (Open Society Vol 1., 163).

Only such social experiments, Popper said, can yield reliable feedback for social planners. In contrast, as discussed above, social reform that is wide ranging, highly complex and involves multiple institutions will produce social experiments in which it is too difficult to untangle causes..."

from: https://iep.utm.edu/popp-pol/

So Top-Down with a vengeance, but softly, softly, hunting for 'good results', for what and how these are defined is left out entirely, and who exactly runs the process...? (Btw China sorta follows this approach with 'social experiments' gathering data that is analysed etc. to improve governance.)

Biswapriya Purkayast , Sep 15 2020 17:16 utc | 33
Don't forget that the only time the Amerikastani Empire's warmongering imperialist media called Trump "presidential" was when he launched missiles at Syria on false pretences in support of al Qaeda.
David G , Sep 15 2020 17:16 utc | 34
The statement by praetor McKenzie probably won't do much to remove the "Russian bounties" tale from the received Beltway belief structure, where it lodged immediately upon publication, any more than earlier refutations, or its inherent implausibility, did. I see the bounties regularly referred to by Dems and Dem-adjacent media as established fact.

In the same light, it's worthwhile to read the Politico article on the alleged Iranian designs on the purse princess and try to spot other fictions included as supposedly factual background, some qualified as being American assertions, but others presented as undisputed fact, such as:

This new one about the plot to get the ambassador in Pretoria may be too trivial to get sustained attention, but it will show up as background in some future Politico article or the like, joining the rest in the Beltway's version of reality, which at this point is made almost entirely of these falsehoods encrusting on each other, decade after decade, creating the phony geopolitical mindscape these people live in.

Mere factual refutation – even from otherwise establishment-approved sources – won't remove these barnacles. For instance, in February the NY Times itself published a debunking of the initial account that it was an Iran-backed Shia militia, as opposed to Salafist I.S.-affiliated forces, that killed that U.S. contractor last December. But the good (if delayed) reporting is forgotten; the lie persists. The same fate awaits McKenzie's dismissal of the Russian bounties nonsense.

conspiracy-theorist , Sep 15 2020 18:04 utc | 37
The thoughtful reader would at this point stop and ponder. "Fake News About Iran, Russia, China Is U.S. Journalism's Daily Bread". I agree with this statement. But not just U.S. Journalism. Minimally U.K. Journalism is on-board, if not tutoring the Yanks in the art of Journalism. And then there is Europe herself, she too has armies of Journalists and many Journals. They too mostly fake around in general.

Now then, that leave Journalism in "Iran, Russia, China". It is fine trait to root for underdogs but Journalism in these states is also subject to a highly controlled and managed environment. It is disingenuous to ignore these facts.

Given this congregation of "fakers", worldwide, it is very reasonable to question the very "fight" that these "fakers" keep telling us is on between the "adversaries".

vinnieoh , Sep 15 2020 18:24 utc | 40
Good to see so many being able to name the operation of the official narrative. It serves also another purpose, witnessed by one of the most consequential actions of all, the wanton abandonment of international law and accountability - the GWOT and the launching of same in Afghanistan and Iraq. That other purpose is to create cover for those, elected in our name, to avoid responsibility.

"Who knew?" asked the soulless Rumsfeld. And the refrain returned from the hollowed out halls of the Greatest Democracy On Earth (tm) - "We were misled!", "Look it says so right there in the official narrative, REMEMBER?" But the misleaders are never rounded up and never face any consequences, cause truth be told all that voted for the AUMF belong in the pokey. And the congressional class of '02-'03 would do the same thing all over again, 'cause the narrative's got their back.

karlof1 , Sep 15 2020 18:34 utc | 41
Despite the future grimness predicted by 1984 , the ability and effectiveness of Media Structures to openly lie and thus herd the public to embrace the preferred Narrative hasn't turned out quite the way Orwell thought it might. Former authoritarian blocs learned the hard way that it's better to tell their citizens the truth and actively engage them in governance, while the Anglo-Imperial powers have gone in the opposite direction, thus the question why? IMO, the longstanding Narrative related to the mythical Dream has greatly eroded in the face of Reality, while at the same time the Rentier Class and the Duopoly it controls needs to try and obfuscate what it's doing. And thus we've seen the rise of BigLie Media to be used for the purpose of Divide and Rule. There're numerous works detailing how and why; two of the more important are Manufacturing of Consent and J is for Junk Economics . Part of the overall process of dumbing-down populations is the deliberate destruction of the educational process, particularly in the areas of philosophy and political-economy/history, which are essentially connected as one when considering the History of Ideas or a sub-area like the Philosophy of Science.

Such a dumbing-down of a nation's populous can be measured, the USSR and its Warsaw Bloc being the most evident, but also The Inquisition and its affect on the advancement of science within the regions it ruled, and the inward turning of China during the Ming Dynasty which allowed for its subjugation by Western forces beginning in the 16th Century. Most recently, this is evident in China's passing the Outlaw US Empire in terms of geoeconomics and thus overall geopolitical power. An explanation for India's inability to match China's development can be found in its refusal to do away with its semi-feudal caste system and not educate its masses so they can become a similar collective dynamo as in China. At the beginning of his brief tenure, JFK noted the Knowledge Gap that existed between a USSR that was nearing its intellectual heights (although that wasn't known then) and the USA whose educational system effectively excluded @60% of students from having the opportunity to advance. There would never have been a Dot.Com economy without JFK's initiative to improve educational outcomes. There seems to be a notion within the Outlaw US Empire's elite that an well educated populace presents a danger to their rule and they can get by using AI and Robotics to further their future plans. Here I'd refer such thinkers to the lessons provided by the failure of Asimov's Galactic Empire in his Foundation series of books--particular their reliance on AI, robotics, dumbing-down the populace to the point where no one recalls how atomics functioned. The sort of balance sheet being constructed by the Fed cannot repair or replace crumbling infrastructure or train the engineers needed to perform the work.

So, what continual BigLie Media lies tell us is the continued downward spiral of the West's intellectual abilities will continue while an East that values the Truth and Discovery moves on to eclipse it, mainly because the West has stopped trying, thinking it's found a better way based on the continual amassing of Debt, which is seen as wealth on their balance sheets. Ultimately, the West thinks the one person holding all the assets as the winner of its Zero-sum Monopoly Game is a better outcome than having millions of people sharing the winnings of a Win-Win system that promotes the wellbeing of all. I can tell you now which philosophy will triumph, but you all ought to be capable of reasoning that outcome.

Steve , Sep 15 2020 18:59 utc | 43
After a sound and an in-depth analysis, b sometimes confounds me with his credulity. Take this sentence for example: "Why do U.S. journalist presume that the agencies and anonymous officials who work under him are more truthful in their uttering than the man himself is hard to understand. Why do swallow their bullshit?" Of course there is no daylight between the US, and indeed the whole Western governments, and its Press. Other than few independent blog site such as this, every media outlet is in the service of its home government or foreign sponsors. Only born-suckers take the corporate media at face value. Modern journalism is nothing but an aggressive propaganda racket.

Mark2 , Sep 15 2020 19:13 utc | 45

You only have to look at who owns the media and who their close friends are, to understand why the media says what it says or lies what it lies ! It's an industry promoting the elites self-interest, creating fictioous enemy countries to feed the arms industry and create US domestic mass paranoia. The Israeli lobby groups are at the wheel of the whole dam clown car.
chet380 , Sep 15 2020 19:45 utc | 46
Even more admiration for coining 'Vichy Press'.
uncle tungsten , Sep 15 2020 20:39 utc | 49
Biden is outed in his coup machinations by Fort Russ a tale told with a bit of media spin.
Josh , Sep 15 2020 20:40 utc | 50
Using lies (bearing false witness) to cause murder and theft are not exactly a new phenomenon. These 'groups of individuals', which are employing these fabricated deceptions, are doing nothing less than trying to commit murder and theft.
Josh , Sep 15 2020 20:41 utc | 51
These acts happen to constitute real crimes, or at least attempted criminal acts, in reality.
Yeah, Right , Sep 15 2020 22:07 utc | 53
No doubt the two propaganda streams will merge until we will be told that the CIA now believes that Iran will attempt plausible deniability by funnelling the money through Putin, who will offer it to the Taliban by way of a bounty on the Ambassador's head.

The CIA's wet dream: the Taliban does it, Putin arranged it, but it was all Iran's fault, leading to:
A) infinite occupation of the poppy fie.... sorry, Afghanistan
B) even more sanctions on Russia
C) war with Iran

What's not to like?

spindoctor , Sep 15 2020 23:18 utc | 56
Posted by: vk | Sep 15 2020 12:54 utc | 4
In the 1920s (or 30s), far-rightist Karl Popper coined the concept of "public opinion".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystallizing_Public_Opinion published 1923.

spindoctor , Sep 15 2020 23:25 utc | 57
Posted by: vk | Sep 15 2020 12:54 utc | 4

From the link just cited:

'"Public opinion", according to Bernays, is an amorphous group of judgments which are not well elaborated even in the head of a single average individual. He extracts a quotation from Wilfred Trotter, which states that this average man has many strong convictions whose origin he can't explain (Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, p. 36). People's minds have "logic-proof compartments" which must be approached by means beyond the rational. (pp. 61–68).'

vk , Sep 16 2020 1:12 utc | 58
@ Posted by: spindoctor | Sep 15 2020 23:18 utc | 56

Yes, I forgot to mention this very important book. If I'm not mistaken (and I may be), Popper got the term from Bernays.

Popper, von Hayek... these guys are the fathers of neoliberalism. I'm not mentioning backyard intellectuals here. They shaped the West as we know it today and, if you're a Westerner and wants to understand the civilization you live in, you have to know what they formulated.

Just to clear that off: I don't agree with Popper's (or Bernays, for that matter) conception on "public opinion". The Marxist conception of ideology is much more complete and precise scientifically.

ptb , Sep 16 2020 1:35 utc | 59
@karlof1 41

Speaking of education (although of science/tach, rather than critical thinking)...

Add in the migration of top-level educated individuals. In the US, an underdeveloped primary/secondary school system creates room at the university/grad level to absorb talent from the rest of the world. For many years, this was a source of competitive advantage -- imported human capital is better than home grown, because if you import, you take it away from someone else. Clever!

It was not that big a deal for the US if social mobility of native born lower and middle classes was stifled somewhat. (and I would say it still would not be a big deal if the resources of the country were not so grossly mismanaged/wasted/stolen).

But in the current century, or certainly the decade now ending, China alone can fill every US grad school science/tech program and still have people to spare for itself. Other parts of the world are right up there as well.

And then you have computers. Sometime between 2000 and 2010, computers became pretty much cheap enough that you could give one to a every kid, even in families of limited means. Provided the primary/secondary education system is there to support it, a country could develop as much tech talent as they had population. The first generation of kids whose childhood took place under this condition is now coming out of university - I would think vastly greater in numbers than any amount the US (or Euro) higher educational system can absorb. Should be a pretty serious shifting of gears in how human capital is distributed worldwide.

But none of this is about critical thinking. Few systems of organizing society actually promote that ... it tends to happen in spite of the organizing principles, rather than because of them. Nor are the most educated (regardless of country of origin) any less susceptible to the propaganda - if anything they are more so, due to the design of the message, because it is more important that they receive it. You want a book recommendation that talks about that, check out 'Disciplined Minds' by Jeff Schmidt (though perhaps with an overly pessimistic outlook -- people can recognize the reality he describes and deal with it... it is only the more naive/idealistic types who fall extra hard for the mythology and then find themselves in a conflict they can't handle). There are lots of other avenues to take too... about the psychology of self-discovery, discovery of self-vs-social-organism etc....

uncle tungsten , Sep 16 2020 4:34 utc | 61
Conspiracy-theorist #37

Exactly that and yet we are constantly fed a diet from the bottom of the barrel. NYT? WAPO? They are rags. Gutter press peddling drivel. Surely there are more erudite and critical publications in this world than these USA drivel sheets. I am aware of good journalism in Switzerland and elsewhere but currently separted from a device adequate to translate and quote.

Thank you Conspiracy-theorist it I way past time we escaped the neverending story of BS + HATE.

Greg L , Sep 16 2020 6:12 utc | 62
And this tidbit? Deep state is as deep state does... Trump Claims He Wanted To Assassinate Syrian President Assad, But Mattis Opposed It
vato , Sep 16 2020 7:49 utc | 63
A propos fake news, John Helmer reports on the Navalny saga and was lately on the Gorilla radio podcast with Chris Cook to discuss the newest events. It's a one-hour-talk but very enjoyable listening to Helmer. You can also follow his reports on his blog Dances With Bears .
vinnieoh , Sep 16 2020 12:55 utc | 64
karlof1 | Sep 15 2020 18:34 utc | 41

Try this on for size. This is a conclusion I arrived at several decades ago, wrote about several times, but not recently.

Everything that was accomplished (albeit incompletely or moderately) through the New Deal and then the abortive Great Society absolutely spooked the oligarchy. Lifting much of the working class out of absolute wage slavery to the point where the next rung on Maslow's ladder was at least visible. And when it all culminated in the late 60's and early 70's with the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, the Surface Mining act, and various labor protection measures, the wealthy owner class decided the proles had gained too much power to influence "their" captive government.

The princes and barons of industry and finance were very open about their complaints. The advance of regulation on their ability to pollute and to exploit must stop or they would take their bundles of riches and go elsewhere. It is what Saint Ronny was ALL about. And so all that got fat and filthy rich during the real American Century took their wealth where regulation and labor fairness and justice didn't exist to continue their exorbitant profit taking.

And then they imported those cheap products here to wreak what was left of our industrial base and to impress on all of us that they remain the boss, the real power. Drive down wages, destroy pensions and safety nets and put US proles back into wage slavery. Remember the 80's and 90's when Wal-Mart basically told established and storied US manufacturers "either you produce the goods we want for what our Asian suppliers can make them for, or you're finished." And that is exactly what happened. Wal-Mart was just the vanguard, it is now ubiquitous. Another aspect of this assault was forcing us proles into the stock market through our pensions and retirement funds so as to make us all sympathetic to de-regulation - so as not to hurt OUR bottom line. Many labor unions became just a sick symbiosis with the industries they "served."

Incomplete and observational, I am not erudite or lettered, but I think it is an accurate narrative.

Edward , Sep 16 2020 13:05 utc | 65
There is a curious schizophrenia where the U.S. press will treat presidential claims about foreign affairs as a sacred truth but treat claims denying adultery, such as in the Lewinski affair, as dismissible.
Geoff , Sep 16 2020 13:20 utc | 66
Living in the USA (Steve Miller classic) has always seemed to me about dealing with falsehood and deception. US highschool seemed like he time for me when the formidable pressure to conform became completely nonsensical, perhaps because it was so utterly cruel, but also because it seemed untruthful. You basically were required to accept modes if behavior and thought that seemed alien to human behavior, but were presented as the sine quo non of how to be. How to succeed, how to live. It seems to me that if you were attempting to retain truthfulness, this conformity was rife with logical fallacies of every sort which if you tried to deal with them, or confront them, you were ostracized or at worst outcast.

In the many years since, it seems like everything else, once a person adopts untruthful behavior, it is next to impossible to change course, so you deal with all kinds of people who have doubled down on their personal deceptions. Marriages based on financial success come to mind, and are like any deception, the cause of incredible dis ease and misey.

There is a philosophical concept I came upon called parrhesia that Foucault gives a fantastic series of lectures on which can be found by searching the web, that investigates the perils implicit in telling truth to falsehood, and the many disasters and tragedies that have befallen human kind in the attempts to do so.

I've come to think that humans by nature are basically incapable of avoiding whatever it is that is "truth." Because over and over life seems to present situations that are the unswervingly the same to everyone. Youth and aging, for example, and the end result never varies, like illness, death, and dying. And everyone has their own similar story navigating the human predicaments and facing an inalterable "truth," which might be in this example, death.

My wonder as I observe life as I age, is what is the damage done to those not only who try their honest best to remain truthful, but what is the damage done to those who cannot escape an adopted untruth and refuse to let go of it. I suppose in this moment of history, you need only look at pandemic, wildfires, and conflicts to see how far human beings have digressed from an Eden. But there must be a purpose to it all? Like, trying to cling to any kind of integrity.

Old and Grumpy , Sep 16 2020 13:31 utc | 67
You think international fake news is just a Trump thing? Just off the top of my head we have thins like Tonkin Bay, Kuwait babies being massacred by Iraqi troops, my personal favorite Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and a multiple of mean Assads killing their people with poison. That is just a bipartisan few. We have one political party, who serves the deep state. The deep state serves the interests of Wall Street and more importantly the Rothschild world banking system. Give the spooks a lot of credit they let us have two "choices" while controlling both. Think of it as a neo fascism kinda thing that ironically finances the anti fascists. The press is just a means to an end. Assume everything is an agenda, and read the independents for some actual thought. I may not agree with you all the time, but I do love you MoA. Thank you for all your work.
ptb , Sep 16 2020 14:02 utc | 68
@64 vinnieoh

'spooked oligarchy...reforms..culminated in ..70s'

Yep. When committed Dem's go off on Trump, it's deeply felt but kindof a ritual rant. Bring Ralph Nader into the conversation, just mention him in passing, and the response becomes live! Betrayal, danger of being shown up again!

William Gruff , Sep 16 2020 14:12 utc | 69
Old and Grumpy @67 has a good point. Anyone suggesting that fake news is in any way related to Trump being President are big parts of the problem for why fake news persists in the first place. Suggesting that it is because of Trump, and thus implying that the fake news will go away when Trump does, is either profoundly ignorant, or profoundly deceitful, though probably both. Trump ranting about fake news exposed the problem and forced it into the public discourse. Those rants did not create the problem.
ptb , Sep 16 2020 14:36 utc | 70
Re: @Geoff 66

"You basically were required to accept modes if behavior and thought that seemed alien to human behavior ... ... forced to double down"

I had short but deeply influential conversation right out of college with a recruiter/HR manager from Raytheon, of all places. He talked about exactly what you said. He spoke, in a hypothetical third person, about a mid-career guy with a mortgage and family who finds themselves questioning the defense industry. How that isn't the best place to be in, mentally. I changed my career plans that day, forever thankful for the encounter.

However, regarding people being able to avoid unpleasant realities, he was of the opinion that for most people, it is possible to do so. Even beneficial. (Except of course for the recipients of his company's products. I didn't say that but I think he figured out that I was thinking it). The issue, from the point of view of running an effective organization, is what happens if the doubters and believers start to mix? Part of his assigned task was to simply keep out people curious enough to ask too many questions. That's one of the "benefits" of really polarizing politics too.

William Gruff , Sep 16 2020 15:33 utc | 71
Geoff @66:

"My wonder as I observe life as I age, is what is the damage done to those not only who try their honest best to remain truthful, but what is the damage done to those who cannot escape an adopted untruth and refuse to let go of it."

That's what modern pharmaceuticals are for, and why one in six Americans (officially) are prescribed them. If we include the numbers of Americans who self-medicate with alcohol and/or grey/black market pharmaceuticals, then the proportion would be a bit (quite a bit) larger. People who succeed at being truthful (mostly to themselves) are not confronted with cognitive dissonance mind-quakes; however, such individuals are confronted with experiencing the retch reflex when consuming mass media.

Is being truthful vs embracing the lies then half-dozen of one and six of the other? I find satisfactory peace of mind from being truthful and simply avoiding the primary vector of deception; the mass media. Noble individuals like our host and some of the posters here will slog through that vile cesspool of lies and fish out the little nuggets of truth that leak out. It is selfish of me to leave such dirty work to others, but at least I am not hermetically isolated on a mountain somewhere.

J Swift , Sep 16 2020 16:12 utc | 74
Kooshy @ 23

An interesting thought. I have long had the feeling that a large part of the obviously orchestrated drive to almost define both of the two US parties with really incredibly unimportant issues like bathroom preferences were designed to split the voters as equally as possible, so that to swing elections one had only to control the votes of a very small number of tie breakers. I still think this is likely true, but I do think you make an important point that a lot can be learned about what is truly important to the PTB by reflecting on the topics that aren't being argued over.

Compare the "two" US political parties, and you will note that while they seem to be getting ever more extreme and irreconcilable and quasi-religious in their differences, these differences are always on the periphery. Both parties are being indoctrinated with certain common beliefs they will take for granted because they are never talked about -- because these points are not allowed to be in contention. So while even something like climate change can be a big divider (no worries, there's money to be made on both sides of that issue, and means of control); but you will never hear debate about

1. America is the greatest ever!

2. America is always and unquestionably a force for good, and even it's proven bad things (kidnapping, rendition, and torture programs) are done "for the greater good."

3. Unbridled capitalism is the only way, and the privatization and unwinding of any vestiges of social programs, like education, social security, and even utilities and infrastructure, is always a good thing deserving of priority.

4. Individualism is the best, if not only, way. To be a hero you must strike alone against the bad guys/the system/the government; someone who rallies others, causes forces to be gathered and united, unionized, whatever are discouraged or ignored.

5. "Leadership" in the affairs of others around the world is American right, responsibility, and destiny. Having the largest, almost entirely offensively oriented military on earth is essential; and having it, we must use it to get our money's worth.

6. Omnipresent "intelligence" services equal safety and are absolutely required for life to be normal. I'm sure there are other examples of "universally agreed" doctrines in the US, but these are some that leap out.

Noirette , Sep 16 2020 16:32 utc | 75
These crazy MSM lies Anecdote. Last Sat (Geneva, Switz.) I spoke to 20 ppl whom I know somewhat, all know I like to discuss news etc. I said, weird news this week, making no mention of Navalny. 18/20 believed Putin poisoned Navalny and brought it up spontaneously! There is something so appealing and narratively 'seductive' about spies and 'opponents' (Skripal ) and mysterious poisons used by evil doers etc. that fiction just flows smoothly into fact or whatever is 'real.'

I had to mention Assange myself to most, but there the reaction was very mixed, most thought Assange was being persecuted, or it was 'not right', and took this story seriously in one way or another - 4 ppl claimed not to know the latest news. Here, NGOs, Leftists and Others have made demands for him to be offered asylum in Switz, so he has been front page.

In F.

https://www.lematin.ch/story/l-asile-pour-julian-assange-est-demande-a-la-suisse-327216661898

Besides that (I'm always interested in from-the-ground view-points, experiences, so post some myself) what is going on is monopoly consolidation:

Mega MSM in cahoots with the MIC, Big Pharma, Big Agri, Finance, and so on. Corporations joining up their positions bit by bit while also competing in some ways, bribing and owning the Pols. who are front-men and women tasked with providing a lot of drama, manufactured agitation, etc., which in turn is fodder for the MSM, etc.

Overall, the most important sector to watch is the GAFAM, 1, the reign of the middle men is close at hand (control information, both the channels and the content, and commerce up to a point.) All this leaves out energy considerations, another vital topic left aside.

1. google apple facebook amazon microsoft

karlof1 , Sep 16 2020 17:02 utc | 78
ptb @59--

Thanks for your reply! I've touched on the topic of human capital and its development occasionally here, positing it's the #1 asset of all nations. Those nations who neglect to develop their own human capital are bound to become deficient when it comes to basic comparative advantages with other nations, particularly as political-economy shifts from being materialistic to knowledge-based; thus Pepe Escobar agreeing wholeheartedly with my comment about India. (He added this article to his FB timeline and I posted my comment there.)

From 1999-2003, I was involved in developing distance learning platforms for the rapidly advancing ability to learn outside of a school's four walls. The other educators I worked with and myself had great hopes for the virtual classroom and what it might do to aide both teachers and students. At the time we thought this development would provide a great opportunity for the third member of the educational team--parents--to play a greater role in the process since active parental involvement was proven to generate better student outcomes. But for that to be properly implemented, equitable funding for all school districts became an even greater issue than it was already. This issue highlighted the huge problems related to financing education at a moment when BushCo Privatizers began to seriously threaten what was already in place. And that problem has only worsened, the vast disparities being very evident thanks to COVID-forced distance learning. The primary reason good teachers can't be retained is the entire system's a massive Clusterfuck. And computers aren't substitutes for even poor teachers. And parents are even more aloof from becoming involved in the process than ever before.

The dumbing-down I mention is now entering its third generation. The educational structure needs to be completely refitted nationally, but I wouldn't give that task to any of the fuckwits employed by the past three administrations--Yes, I'm arguing education needs to be a completely federal program instead of the 53 different school systems in states and territories; and yes, I'm aware of the pitfalls and potential corruption that poses, which is a microcosm of all the problems at the federal level of government. This problem is yet another very basic reason why the Duopoly and its backers need to be ousted from government and kept as far away as possible as the structure is torn down and rebuilt--The USA will never be great again until that is done.

jared , Sep 16 2020 17:16 utc | 79
@ J Swift | Sep 16 2020 16:12 utc | 74

I suggest that the reason that the media focus on the ridiculous is to convince the public that there is nothing important happening - except where the MSM wants the participation of the public as in with anti-Russia, anti_China, anti-Socialism, etc. Good to get the public participation directed at harmless targets.

They've got to fill the papers with something. The public must be kept warm, comfortable, semi-comatose, watching cat videos...

Last thing anybody wants is the involvement of the public, they will only screw everything-up or try anyway.

karlof1 , Sep 16 2020 17:40 utc | 80
vinnieoh @64--

Thanks for your reply! Your explanation sadly is correct, but it was put into motion prior to Reagan becoming POTUS. The tools used to undo the New Deal were put into place before FDR became POTUS. And FDR's unwillingness to prosecute those who attempted to overthrow his government provided that faction to infiltrate government and eventually attempt to undo the good that was done prior to WW2. When looked at closely, American society was generally quite Liberal in the positive aspects of that term and during the Depression was becoming ever more Collectivist with the war advancing that even further. At the war's end, it was paramount for the forces taking control of the nation to push the public to the right and away from its collectivist proclivities. Where we find ourselves today thus is not an accident of history but an engineered outcome. You may recall voices on the Right accusing Liberals and their organizations of engaging in Social Engineering. Those accusations were projections since it was actually forces on the Right that were maneuvering society to the Right while assiduously applying the principle of Divide and Rule to create a condition where they would be immune from political challenge, which is where we are now.

A few understand this ugly truth and how we arrived here. What's missing is scholarship that links the changes that began in the 1870s with today's situation. Yes, there're good examinations of various pieces of the overall puzzle. But it appears that only Hudson and those in his small circle have figured it out; yet, they haven't produced a complete history that encapsulates it all. And for us to have a realistic chance to undo what's been done, we need to know how it all transpired.

robin , Sep 16 2020 17:56 utc | 81
Antonym @ 60
"There are big differences between Trump and Biden regarding their foreign policies: Trump is hard on Xi-China and soft on Putin Russia, while Biden is the reverse."

I don't share your view. The current administration's foreign policy is very much aligned with that of past administrations and the diplomatic circus surrounding the Skripal affair alone is evidence that nobody is soft on Russia.

What differs, however, is the presentation. Trump is criticized (not praised) for being allegedly soft on Russia and Biden criticized for being allegedly soft on China. This clever trick ensures that just about everybody is onboard the bash-China-and-Russia train.

In a violently polarized society, with red-blue antagonism reaching ridiculous heights, people tend to act exclusively in contradiction to the cult figure they hate so much.

If a Trump hater hears the criticism that the president is too soft on Russia, he will readily grab the bash-Russia stick hoping to score a few hits on Trump. The same person's reaction to a criticism on Biden will be either indifference or angry denial. In either case, he will not be opposed to the bash-Russia nor the bash-China movement.

The dem hater's reaction is similar. Indifference to the soft-on-Russia claim (ie. no opposition to the bash-Russia movement) and active support for the China-bashing.

Curmudgeon , Sep 16 2020 18:13 utc | 82
The article and subsequent discussion brings to mind Dawkins discussion of Memes and Memetics. Not those pesky internet memes. The propaganda war is fierce, and almost without exception the people here are poking and prodding perhaps without being able to put the finger on the "EZ button". This is war, baby, so one thinks the following link may be useful:

https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Memetic+warfare%3a+the+future+of+war.-a0263040903

Wherein: " Ideally the virus of the mind being targeted will be overwritten with a higher fidelity, fecundity, and longevity memeplex in order to assure long term sustainability. When this is not practical, it is still possible to displace a dangerous memeplex, by creating a more contagious benign meme utilizing certain packaging, replication, and propagation tricks."

The lie is irrelevant, whether true or false, it must be believable, and it must successfully replicate.

J Swift , Sep 16 2020 20:34 utc | 85
karlof1 @ 80

You are right, the early FDR days were, in hindsight, one of the most important in setting the course of the US for the next century, and unfortunately Big Business won, taking us on a long, ugly road to the right. I agree this would be a most fascinating history book if some of those respected, genuinely knowledgeable people you often cite could collaborate on an opus.

Yes, most people do not know that the wide ranging labor laws implemented at that time were actually not meant to empower organized labor, but to limit it. Perhaps FDR thought it was the best he could do for the working class, but I tend to think it was more a case of him thinking that by outlawing general strikes, wildcat strikes, strikes in support of other unions, and setting up an NLRB with a lot of political control by business, the powers who had so recently let it be known they were ready to actively try to overthrow the government might be mollified. I think he feared the US was at the cusp of a revolution, and perhaps it was. Whether or not if would have been better had that been allowed to proceed is the big question.

lulu , Sep 16 2020 20:58 utc | 86
Anti-China activists funded by NED & Co make up all sorts of horrid stories online, which are then picked up by MSM and political NGOs to spoon feed world audiences/viewers. Viola, you have "fact-based" anti-China news!

Here is an example how an Uyghur activist in Canadian continue to her make-up-to-believe "1 million Uyghurs in concentration camp" is caught on Twitter red handed .

This is literally what these overseas Uyghur activists do all day. Putting a random caption on a video they ripped down from a medical worker's tiktok in China. And people believe it. They'd even believe if the follow up rebuttal is that this is a forced labour doctor.

Another one: There's a guy (Arslan Hidayat, Aussie Uighur) on Twitter who takes footage of ordinary people doing ordinary things, sets them in China and invents a fantastical and sinister scenario.

His twitter functions as the aggregator of fake anti-China propaganda from the past few years.

CitizenX , Sep 16 2020 21:11 utc | 87
Ed Bernays (Freuds Nephew)

Glad to see his name mentioned here. I've been saying for years here to watch the documentary - Century of the Self. If you want to learn about and understand America, its all here. Government, Corporations, Consumerism, Militarism, Deep State, Psychology, Individual selfishness and mental illness.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s

karlof1 , Sep 16 2020 21:34 utc | 88
j Swift @85--

Thanks for your reply! JK Galbraith in his American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power lamented what you recap in your 2nd paragraph and that there was thus no power capable of offsetting Big Business although one was sorely needed. As I wrote, some very sharp minds have written about small segments of the overall movement toward totalitarianism since the 1870s, Galbraith's 1952 book being one that's still worth reading.

[Sep 12, 2020] Nineteen years since 9/11 Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman attempt to Infects Readers With 9/11 Dementia

Sep 12, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

psychohistorian , Sep 11 2020 16:05 utc | 2

The price for the worst tweet of the year goes to Paul Krugman .


bigger

In the real world the U.S. reacted to 9/11 by doing extremely bad and ridiculous things as well as this :

In the days, weeks, and months immediately following the 9/11 attacks, Arab-Americans, South Asian-Americans, Muslim-Americans, and Sikh-Americans were the targets of widespread hate violence. Many of the perpetrators of these acts of hate violence claimed they were acting patriotically by retaliating against those responsible for 9/11.
...
Just after September 11, numerous Arabs, Muslims, and individuals perceived to be Arab or Muslim were assaulted, and some killed, by individuals who believed they were responsible for or connected to the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The first backlash killing occurred four days after September 11.

Balbir Singh Sodhi was shot to death on September 15 as he was planting flowers outside his Chevron gas station. The man who shot Sodhi, Frank Roque, had told an employee of an Applebee's restaurant that he was "going to go out and shoot some towel heads." Roque mistakenly thought Sodhi was Arab because Sodhi, an immigrant from India, had a beard and wore a turban as part of his Sikh faith. After shooting Sodhi, Roque drove to a Mobil gas station a few miles away and shot at a Lebanese-American clerk. He then drove to a home he once owned and shot and almost hit an Afghani man who was coming out the front door. When he was arrested two hours later, Roque shouted, "I stand for America all the way."

The next two killings were committed by a man named Mark Stroman. On September 15, 2001, Stroman shot and killed Waquar Hassan, an immigrant from Pakistan, at Hassan's grocery store in Dallas, Texas. On October 4, 2001, Stroman shot and killed Vasudev Patel, an immigrant from India and a naturalized U.S. citizen, while Patel was working at his Shell station convenience store. A store video camera recorded the killing, helping police to identify Stroman as the killer. Stroman later told a Dallas television station that he shot Hassan and Patel because, "We're at war. I did what I had to do. I did it to retaliate against those who retaliated against us."

Beyond these killings, there were more than a thousand other anti-Muslim or anti-Arab acts of hate which took the form of physical assaults, verbal harassment and intimidation, arson, attacks on mosques, vandalism, and other property damage.

Instead of "calming prejudice" the GB Bush administration institutionalized hate crimes:

First, in the weeks immediately following the September 11 attacks, the government began secretly arresting and detaining Arab, Muslim, and South Asian men. Within the first two months after the attacks, the government had detained at least 1,200 men.
...
Second, in November 2001, the Department of Justice began efforts to "interview" approximately 5,000 men between the ages of 18 and 33 from Middle Eastern or Muslim nations who had arrived in the United States within the previous two years on a temporary student, tourist, or business visa and were lawful residents of the United States. Four months later, the government announced it would seek to interview an additional 3,000 men from countries with an Al Qaeda presence.
...
Third, in September 2002, the government implemented a "Special Registration" program also known as NSEERS (National Security Entry-Exit Registration System), requiring immigrant men from 26 mostly Muslim countries to register their name, address, telephone number, place of birth, date of arrival in the United States, height, weight, hair and eye color, financial information and the addresses, birth dates and phone numbers of parents and any foreign friends with the government.

Besides all that a rather useless security theater was installed at U.S. airports which has costs many billions in lost time and productivity ever since. The Patriot Act was introduced which allowed for unlimited spying on private citizens. Wars were launched that were claimed to be justified by 9/11. These were "mass outbreaks of anti-Muslim sentiment and violence. Many were killed and maimed in them. People were tortured and vanished. All of this happened largely to applause of a majority of the U.S. people which were glued to 24 and dreamed of being "terrorist hunters".

Anyone with a functional memory knows that the U.S. reaction to 9/11 was anything but "pretty calm". It is ridiculous that Krugman is claiming that.

Posted by b at 15:46 UTC | Comments (73)

I find it a bit humorous b that you are critical of Krugman for his 911 dementia when for years many of us finance types have railed about how morally corrupt the logic and thinking of Paul Krugman is.

Paul Krugman is to economics what Bernie Sanders has become for the purported "left" side of the "right wing" uni-party....a sheep dog for the easily led.

Paul Krugman is an acolyte for the God of Mammon/global private finance elite.


Clueless Joe , Sep 11 2020 16:11 utc | 3

Paul is getting old. Looks like senile dementia isn't limited to Biden nowadays.

Red Ryder , Sep 11 2020 16:44 utc | 11

While spreading anger and hate toward Arab people, The Bush Administration rescued the many members of the Kingdom's family from all around the US and escorted their flights out of the US to safety in Saudi Arabia.

Distracting the public big time was Dick Cheney, VP, who insisted from the very next day that the plot to hit the Twin Towers was Saddam's plot.

So, the historical record and US response was skewed from the getgo. AQ and Bin Laden didn't concern the neocons. They wanted the US to go to Iraq again, and this time start a wide war that would spread to Syria and Lebanon and Iran.

It was easy times to spread fear and hate, and Cheney and the war mongers of CENTCOM were riding high. Americans were scared of all Arabs, all Sunnis, all Shiites, from anywhere. They were all the same in the public's mind. Enemies.

It was perfect and has led to 19 years of endless wars. Add ISIS and al Nusra and the Taliban and you have an endless soup of enemies.

Jackrabbit , Sep 11 2020 17:01 utc | 13

I'm coining a new term: "Empire apologist".

!!

michaelj72 , Sep 11 2020 19:59 utc | 35

krugman is a terrible shill for the neo-cons and liberal-interventionists of the 21st century

at my age, I shouldn't really be surprised any more by what american "intellectuals" and "nobel prize winners" say about anything..... but I am.

He's neo-liberal interventionist moron of the first rank, and saying what he did actually normalizes the war mania and war-mongering which has become so staple in mainstream thought and the "think tanks" and is now practically part of the american DNA and "culture".
shame on krugman

Hoarsewhisperer , Sep 11 2020 20:08 utc | 36

...
It appears the Deep State has attacked the USA's people twice in two decades--on 911 and with the decision to let as many die as possible by deliberately not doing anything to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 and allowing the real economy to atrophy so even more will die in the long run.
Posted by: karlof1 | Sep 11 2020 19:40 utc | 34

Talking about tilting at windmills - I'll never forget Robert Fisk angrily pointing out that the Yankees knew where to find Al CIA-duh because they extended the cave complex at Tora Bora to help Al CIA-duh, equipped with 10,000 US Stinger Missiles, kick the Russians out of Afghanistan in the 1980s!!!

(The Yankees had to wait for 10+ years to invade Afghanistan because it takes that long for Stingers to pass their Use By date)

Rob , Sep 11 2020 20:08 utc | 37

@michaelj72. "krugman is a terrible shill for the neo-cons and liberal-interventionists of the 21st century"

Actually, Paul Krugman was a strong and outspoken opponent of the Iraq War since early 2003 and possibly earlier. He was amongst the few mainstream liberal commentators to take that stand.

Jen , Sep 11 2020 21:02 utc | 44

If MoA readers and commenters were to read the entire series of Krugman's tweets, six in all, they will see mention of how the Bush govt began exploiting the events of 11 September 2001 almost immediately. Though the example Krugman actually uses would make most people cringe at what it suggests about the bubble he lives in and how far removed it is from most people's lives and experiences, and his reference to a "horrible war" does not mention either Afghanistan or Iraq.

It has to be said that Twitter is not designed very well for the kind of informal conversational commentary that people often use it for. But then you would think Krugman would use something other than Twitter to discuss and compare 9/11 with the impact of COVID-19.

The real issue I have with Krugman's Tweet is that he is revising history and bending over backwards to apologise for Dubya in a way to criticise Donald Trump's performance as President.

uncle tungsten , Sep 11 2020 22:13 utc | 50
b " Anyone with a functional memory knows that the U.S. reaction to 9/11 was anything but "pretty calm". It is ridiculous that Krugman is claiming that. "

Careful with that axe b, you are talking about Biden's chief economic adviser and likely appointee as Chair of the Fed. How does this look?
Volker
Greenspan
Bernanke
Yellen
Powell
Krugman

What could go wrong?

Prof K , Sep 11 2020 22:15 utc | 51
From 2019, Krugman de facto admits he was wrong his whole life. What a tool.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-10/inequality-globalization-and-the-missteps-of-1990s-economics

David G , Sep 11 2020 22:34 utc | 54

uncle tungsten | Sep 11 2020 22:13 utc | 50:

Reading Krugman's columns in 2016, I had a strong to overwhelming sense that this was a person revving up for a spot in Hillary's White House or cabinet. For some reason it isn't hitting me as strongly this time around – he may not have as close connections in Biden's circle – but it certainly would not be a surprise to see him take a turn through the media/government revolving door if Trump loses (though, fwiw, I don't think it will be a job at the Fed).

Et Tu , Sep 11 2020 22:48 utc | 55

Yep. Pretty staggering how a few disgruntled ex-CIA contractors managed to, deliberately or not, help the US Gov't launch the biggest world war operation right under the noses of the brainwashed masses.

99% of Westerners still are clueless as to explaining the last 20 years in a broader geopolitical context.

Russ , Sep 11 2020 22:48 utc | 56

Posted by: Caliman | Sep 11 2020 22:15 utc | 52

#28: "The antiwar protests in the US were small and insignificant."

No they were not. Millions of people demonstrated against the planned war, in the US, in the UK, and around the world...

We mustn't forget how the vast majority of those who allegedly were anti-war suddenly went totally pro-war silent upon Obama coming in.

But that pales compared to the vile spectacle of all the self-alleged "anti-authoritarians", "anti-propagandists" "dissidents", who suddenly regard the government media as the literal voice of God, where their alleged God speaks of Covid.

Prof K , Sep 11 2020 22:55 utc | 57

His book, End this Depression Now, is pretty weak. He has no theory of why the crash occurred. He critiques the austerity agenda but doesn't understand that government spending CAN create tax liabilities for capital down the road and eat into profits, thus blocking expanded investments and growth. Moronic libertarians hate Krugman just because they are right wing assholes who think, like fairies, that a free market without the state will work fine and self correct. Marx debunked this fairy tale thoroughly in Capital Volume 1, showing that, even if we start with the mythical free market of libertarian morons, capitalism will still operate according to the general law by which concentration and centralization lead to class polarization. In any case, in volume 3 of Capital, Marx develops his laws of crisis, showing that the cycles of expansion and depression under capitalism follow the movements of the rate of profit, which itself is determined by the ratio of the value of sunk capital in production technologies to the rate of exploitation (profits/wages). If the former rises more than the latter, the rate of profit sinks, along with investment, output and employment. Financial crises then set in.

The empirical evidence in the data bears out Marx's theory, not Krugman's dumb notion of aggregate demand, or the stupid libertarian focus on interest rates.

vk , Sep 12 2020 0:16 utc | 64

We could discuss here all day about the sociological subject of the American people's true positioning in the aftermath of 9/11. It would be, sincerely, a waste of time.

The important thing to grasp over this episode - from the point of view of History - is this: it was a strategic victory for al-Qaeda . The USA took the bait (all scripted?) and went into a quagmire in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a few years, the surplus the USA had accumulated with the sacking and absorption of the Soviet space during Bill Clinton evaporated and became a huge deficit in the Empire's accounts. Not long after, the 2008 financial meltdown happened, burying Bushism in a spectacular way.

There's a debate about the size of the hole the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan cost the American Empire. Some put it into the dozens of billions of USDs; others put it into the trillions of USDs range. We will never know. What we know is that the hole was big enough to both erase the American surplus and to not avoid the financial meltdown of 2008.

Either the expansion through the Middle East wasn't fast and provided riches enough to keep up with the Empire's voracious appetite or the invasion itself already represented a last, desperate attempt by the Empire to avoid its imminent collapse. We know, however, that POTUS Bush had a list of countries he wanted to invade beyond Iraq (the "Axis of Evil") which contained a secret country (Venezuela). He was conscious Iraq and Afghanistan wouldn't be enough. Whatever the case, he didn't have the time, and the financial meltdown happened in his last year in the White House.

uncle tungsten , Sep 12 2020 1:15 utc | 65

michaelj72 #38
karlof1 at #12

great stuff from M. Hudson, one of my favorite reads these days. Hudson has krugman's number. thanks again for those snippets and the links!

Steve Keen also has his number and Keen is pro capitalist

Krugman is a moron dressed as a weasel sounding like a squawking hen, with the vision of a hemorrhoid.

Antonym , Sep 12 2020 1:26 utc | 66

The main harsh reaction of G.W. Bush after 9/11 was the formation of DHS and laws to legalize mass national and international spying on anybody with electronic traffic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Homeland_Security#History

They knew who the perps of 9/11 were: their "own" Saudi irregulars in the CIA's US main land training camps, who started practicing on the "wrong"- domestic American- targets. These guys were officially entered without any background checks.
The Bush and Bin Laden families go way back in money making. That is why George had to ponder so long in that Florida kindergarten after hearing about the attacks: he had a suspicion. The Saudi only fly out after 9/11 confirms that.

Kay Fabr , Sep 12 2020 2:30 utc | 69

Paul Krugman Is a pro. Completely owned by Deep State. His purpose is to deflect discussion and prevent questioning the official version of 9/11 , and get people chasing something completely irrelevant. Well done Paul, most have taken the bait.

[Sep 11, 2020] MSM's attempts to spin Trump's attacks on senseless wars as disrespect for military at large are a dismal distortion of reality -- RT Op-ed

Notable quotes:
"... By Tony Cox , a US journalist who has written or edited for Bloomberg and several major daily newspapers. ..."
"... "Trump has lost the right and authority to be commander in chief," ..."
"... "despicable comments" ..."
"... "Killing generals could get to be a habit with me." ..."
"... "right and authority" ..."
"... "when it's required for national security and a last resort." ..."
"... "pattern of public statements ..."
"... Like this story? Share it with a friend! ..."
Sep 11, 2020 | www.rt.com

MSM's attempts to spin Trump's attacks on senseless wars as disrespect for military at large are a dismal distortion of reality 11 Sep, 2020 12:06 Get short URL © Getty Images / David Dee Delgado 29 Follow RT on RT

By Tony Cox , a US journalist who has written or edited for Bloomberg and several major daily newspapers. The New York Times and CNN are desperate to paint Donald Trump as an enemy of the military, due to his desire not to get involved in pointless wars. But this is simply not true, and Trump has the backing of many soldiers.

Someone should tell the New York Times, CNN and other mainstream media outlets that soldiers don't actually like getting killed or maimed for no good reason. Nor do they like generals and presidents who spill their blood in vain.

Alas, ignorance of these obvious truths probably isn't the issue. This is likely just another case of the biggest names in news pretending to not get the point so they can take the rest of us along for a ride in their confidence game of alternative reality.

The latest example is the New York Times spinning President Donald Trump's critique this week of Pentagon leadership and the military industrial complex as disrespect for the military at large. "Trump has lost the right and authority to be commander in chief," the Times quoted retired US Marines General Anthony Zinni as saying. Zinni cited Trump's alleged "despicable comments" about the nation's war dead – reported last week by The Atlantic , citing anonymous sources – as one of the reasons Trump "must go."

ALSO ON RT.COM After Trump helps crush ISIS, end Korea nuke tests and avoid new wars, Republican haters warn he 'imperiled America's security'

Never mind that Trump and all on-the-record administration sources denied The Atlantic's report. The Times couldn't resist when the pieces seemed to fit so well together for the military's latest propaganda campaign against Trump. First the president disses the troops, calling them "losers" and "suckers," then he has the temerity to say Pentagon leaders want to fight wars to keep defense contractors happy.

Except the pieces don't fit. The many people who occupy so-called boots on the ground don't have the same interests as the few people who send them to war. In fact, combat troops are given reason to hate the generals who send them to die when there's not a legitimate national security reason for the war they're fighting. And the US has fought a long line of wars that didn't serve the nation's national security interests. Even when a war is justified, the interests of top brass and front-line soldiers often clash.

Remember that great 1967 war movie, ' The Dirty Dozen' ? A group of 12 soldiers who were condemned to long prison sentences or execution in military prison for their crimes were sent on a 1944 suicide mission to kill high-ranking German officers at a heavily defended chateau far behind enemy lines. After succeeding in the mission and escaping the Germans, the lone surviving convict, played by tough-guy actor Charles Bronson, told the mission leader, "Killing generals could get to be a habit with me."

ALSO ON RT.COM NATO cannot survive a second Trump term

So no, New York Times, speaking out against ill-advised wars does not equal bashing the military. And sorry, General Zinni, but generals, defense contractors and their media mouthpieces don't get to decide who has the "right and authority" to be commander in chief. The voters decided that already, and they expressed clearly that they don't want senseless and endless wars and foreign interventions.

The Times cited General James McConville, the Army's chief of staff, as saying Pentagon leaders would only recommend sending troops to combat "when it's required for national security and a last resort." And no, it wasn't a comedy skit. What's the last US war or combat intervention that measured up to that standard? Let's just say the late Bronson, who died in 2003 at the age of 81, was a young man the last time that happened.

CNN tried a similar ploy on Sunday, while trying to sell the "losers" and "suckers" story in an interview with US Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie. Host Dana Bash said the allegations fit a "pattern of public statements " by the president because Trump called US Senator John McCain a "loser" in 2015 and said McCain shouldn't be considered a hero for being captured in the Vietnam War. She repeatedly suggested to Wilkie, who didn't take the bait, that Trump's attacks on McCain, who died in 2018, showed disrespect for the troops.

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Apparently, this follows the same line of propagandist thought which told us that saying there are rapists among the illegal aliens entering the US from Mexico – which is undeniably true – equals saying all Mexicans are rapists. In CNN land, a bad word about McCain is a bad word about all soldiers.

McCain was a warmonger who didn't mind getting US troops killed or backing terrorist groups in Syria. If he had his way , many more GIs would be dead or disabled, because the intervention in Syria would have been escalated and the US might be at war with Iran. Soldiers wouldn't want their lives wasted in such conflicts.

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All wars are hard on the people who have to fight them, but senseless wars are spirit-crushing. An average of about 17 veterans commit suicide each day in the US, according to Veterans Administration data . Veterans account for 11 percent of the US adult population but more than 18 percent of suicides.

The media's deceiving technique of trying to pretend that ruling-class chieftains and front-line grunts are in the same boat reflects a broader campaign of top-down revolution against populism. The military is just one of several pro-Trump segments of the population that must be turned against the president. Other pro-Trump segments, such as police , are demonized and attacked.

Trump has managed to keep the US out of new wars and has drawn down deployments to Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan – despite Pentagon opposition. His rival, Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden, can be expected to rev up the war machine if he takes charge. His foreign policy adviser, Antony Blinken, lamented in a May interview with CBS News that Trump had given up US "leverage" in Syria.

Trump also has turned around the VA hospital system, ending decades of neglect that left many veterans to die on waiting lists.

Like past campaigns to oust Trump, the notion that he's not sufficiently devoted to the troops might be a tough sell. No matter how good their words may sound, the people who promote endless wars without clear objectives aren't true supporters of the rank and file.

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[Sep 09, 2020] Proof of collusion at last! - IRRUSSIANALITY

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The Guardian ..."
"... BNE Intellinews ..."
"... bne IntelliNews ..."
"... The idea, therefore, that Paul Manafort was an agent of influence for the Russian government flies against everything we know about what he actually did. As for Kilimnik, maybe he is a Russian intelligence agent – I'm not in a position to say. But if he is, he's a very weird one, who spent years actively pushing the Ukrainian government to pursue a policy which directly contradicted Russian interests. ..."
"... None of this, needless to say, appears in the US Senate report. Instead, the report chooses to focus on the apparently shocking revelation that Manafort shared Trump campaign polling data with Kilimnik, as if this sharing of private information was in some ways a massive threat to national security and proof that Manafort was working for the Russians. The fact that both Manafort and Kilimnik spent years doing their damnedest to undermine Russia is simply ignored. Go figure! ..."
Sep 09, 2020 | irrussianality.wordpress.com

PROOF OF COLLUSION AT LAST! SEPTEMBER 2, 2020 PAULR 18 COMMENTS

Despite the secondary roles played some bit part actors in the Russiagate drama, the central figure in allegations that Donald Trump colluded with the Russian government to be elected as president of the United States has always been Trumps' onetime campaign manager Paul Manafort. The recent US Senate report on Russian 'interference' in the 2016 presidential election thus started off its analysis with a long exposé of Manafort's comings and goings.

Simply put, the thesis is as follows: while working in Ukraine as an advisor to 'pro-Russian' Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich, Manafort was in effect working on behalf of the Russian state via 'pro-Russian' Ukrainian oligarchs as well as Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska (a man with 'close ties' to the Kremlin). Also suspicious was Manafort's close relationship with one Konstantin Kilimnik, whom the US Senate claims is a Russia intelligence agent. All these connections meant that while in Ukraine, Manafort was helping the Russian Federation spread its malign influence. On returning to the USA and joining the Trump campaign, he then continued to fulfill the same role.

The fundamental flaw in this thesis has always been the well-known fact that while advising Yanukovich, Manafort took anything but a 'pro-Russian' position, but instead pressed him to sign an association agreement with the European Union (EU). Since gaining independence, Ukraine had avoided being sucked either into the Western or the Russian camp. But the rise of two competing geopolitical projects – the EU and the Russia-backed Eurasian Union – was making this stance increasingly impossible, and Ukraine was being put in a position where it would be forced to choose. This was because the two Unions are incompatible – one can't be in two customs unions simultaneously, when they levy different tariffs and have different rules. Association with the EU meant an end to the prospect of Ukraine joining the Eurasian Union. It was therefore a goal which was entirely incompatible with Russian interests, which required that Ukraine turn instead towards Eurasia.

Manafort's position on this matter therefore worked against Russia. Even The Guardian journalist Luke Harding had to concede this in his book Collusion , citing a former Ukrainian official Oleg Voloshin that, 'Manafort was an advocate for US interests. So much so that the joke inside [Yanunkovich's] Party of Regions was that he actually worked for the USA.'

If anyone had any doubts about this, they can now put them aside. On Monday, the news agency BNE Intellinews announced that it had received a leak of hundreds of Kilimnik's emails detailing his relationship with Manafort and Yanukovich. The story they tell is not at all what the US Senate and other proponents of the Trump-Russia collusion fantasy would have you believe. As BNE reports:

Today the Yanukovych narrative is that he was a stool pigeon for Russian President Vladimir Putin from the start, but after winning the presidency he actually worked very hard to take Ukraine into the European family. As bne IntelliNews has already reported, Manafort's flight records also show how he crisscrossed Europe in an effort to build support in Brussels for Yanukovych in the run up to the EU Vilnius summit.

On March 1, his first foreign trip as newly minted president was to the EU capital of Brussels. The leaked emails show that Manafort influenced Yanukovych's decision to visit Brussels as first stop, working in concert with his assistant Konstantin Kilimnik In a memorandum entitled 'Purpose of President Yanukovych Trip to Brussels,' Manafort argued that the decision to visit Brussels first would underscore Yanukovych's mission to "bring European values to Ukraine," and kick start negotiations on the Association Agreement.

The memorandum on the Brussels visit was the first of many from Manafort and Kilimnik to Yanukovych, in which they pushed Yanukovych to signal a clear pro-EU line and to carry out reforms to back this up.

To handle Yanukovych's off-message antics, Manafort and Kilimnik created a back channel to Yanukovych for Western politicians – in particular those known to appreciate Ukraine's geopolitical significance vis-à-vis Russia. In Europe, these were Sweden's then foreign minister Carl Bildt, Poland's then foreign minister Radosław Sikorski and European Commissioner for Enlargement Stefan Fule, and in the US, Vice President Joe Biden.

"We need to launch a 'Friends of Ukraine' programme to help us use informal channels in talks on the free trade zone and modernisation of the gas transport system," Manafort and Kilimnik wrote to Yanukovych in September 2010. "Carl Bildt is the foundation of this informal group and has sufficient weight with his colleagues in questions connected to Ukraine and the Eastern Partnership. ( ) but he needs to be able to say that he has a direct channel to the President, and he knows that President Yanukovych remains committed to European integration."

Beyond this, the emails show that Manafort and Kilimnik also tried hard to arrange a meeting between Yanukovich and US President Barack Obama, and urged Yanukovich to show leniency to former Prime Minister Yuliia Timoshenko (who was imprisoned for fraud).

It is noticeable that the members of the 'back channel' Manafort and Kilimnik created to lobby on behalf of Ukraine in the EU included some of the most notably Russophobic European politicians of the time, such as Carl Bildt and Radek Sikorski. Moreover, nowhere in any of what they did can you find anything that could remotely be described as 'pro-Russian'. Indeed, the opposite is true. As previously noted, Ukraine's bid for an EU agreement directly challenged a key Russian interest – the expansion of the Eurasian Union to include Ukraine. Manafort and Kilimnik were therefore very much working against Russia, not for it.

The idea, therefore, that Paul Manafort was an agent of influence for the Russian government flies against everything we know about what he actually did. As for Kilimnik, maybe he is a Russian intelligence agent – I'm not in a position to say. But if he is, he's a very weird one, who spent years actively pushing the Ukrainian government to pursue a policy which directly contradicted Russian interests.

None of this, needless to say, appears in the US Senate report. Instead, the report chooses to focus on the apparently shocking revelation that Manafort shared Trump campaign polling data with Kilimnik, as if this sharing of private information was in some ways a massive threat to national security and proof that Manafort was working for the Russians. The fact that both Manafort and Kilimnik spent years doing their damnedest to undermine Russia is simply ignored. Go figure!

[Sep 06, 2020] Oh, look, no masks! And you thought that Obama official dirty tricks will be unmasked up by the investigation done by the Mueller team?

Sep 06, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

... ... ...

And in the nation's capital - Play it again, Sam.

Oh, look, no masks! And you thought that got covered up by the investigation done by the Mueller team? Let's go over this one more time:

The document declassified by DNI Grenell shows that there were 14 unique days when the NSA received requests to "unmask"--the first was on 30 November 2016 by UN Ambassador Samantha Power and the last came on 12 January from Joe Biden. There were two separate requests on the 14th of December by Samantha Power, which indicates two separate NSA reports. Samantha Power would not have to submit two requests for the same document.

[Sep 06, 2020] Polymerase test specificity and NYT articles

Highly recommended!
Sep 06, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

lay_arrow


naro , 15 hours ago

NYTimes article last week suggested that only 10% of Covid positive PCR tests are clinically significant and infectious.

I Write Code , 15 hours ago

NYTimes articles that are significant is much less than 10%.
1 play_arrow

naro , 15 hours ago

Like a broken clock it is occasionaly right.

I Write Code , 15 hours ago

I don't know, as soon as they print it, I think it becomes false.

[Sep 03, 2020] Suggesting that Biden mental health is deteriorating to an alarming degree is now classified by neoliberal MSM as the insunuation driven by Russia

Bolshevism repeats first as a tragedy, second as a farce.
Notable quotes:
"... "so basically, any legitimate grievance or concern of citizens is a Russian plot ." ..."
Sep 03, 2020 | www.rt.com

"so basically, any legitimate grievance or concern of citizens is a Russian plot ." Other commenters tweeted that they didn't need any help from Moscow to clearly see that Biden's mind is failing .

See also: Russia now also to blame for US protests & Covid-19 disinformation – latest conspiracy from former intel head turned CNN analyst

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper went on CNN to accuse Russia of interfering in US affairs including the Covid-19 pandemic, Portland and Kenosha protests, and election meddling while giving no real evidence.
Clapper, who has previously said Russians are "typically, almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever," was more than happy to push more xenophobic Russia conspiracy theories during a Monday CNN interview when prompted by anchor Alisyn Camerota.

[Sep 02, 2020] Media offers new weapon to protect Biden- Suggesting his mental health is failing means you're part of a Russian conspiracy -- RT USA News

Sep 02, 2020 | www.rt.com

The US Department of Homeland Security reportedly blocked the distribution of a July intelligence bulletin warning of a Russian plot to promote "misinformation" that the Democratic presidential candidate is in poor mental health.

The report by ABC News on Wednesday cited internal emails, and the media outlet said a DHS spokesperson confirmed that distribution of the bulletin to federal, state and local law enforcement agencies had been delayed. The spokesperson said the bulletin didn't meet quality standards, including having sufficient evidence and context, for dissemination, ABC said.

ALSO ON RT.COM Trump and Dems take turns playing 'Russian card' – which only proves it's the joker

Democrats will likely pounce on the report to allege that the DHS blocked the warning to help President Donald Trump win the November election and that the Trump campaign's criticism of Biden's mental state is part of the Russian misinformation effort. Twitter users are already promoting the new collusion theory, asking " which 'homeland' does DHS serve?" and saying, " Trump and Putin are one."

The ABC report downplayed portions of the intelligence bulletin unrelated to Russia, including warnings that Iranian and Chinese state media outlets are promoting suggestions that Trump "suffers from psychosis" and may be in poor physical health. It also sets up the argument that any future criticism of the Democrat's mental soundness is Russian misinformation.

One Twitter user said the report is "laying the groundwork for 'anyone commenting on Joe's decline is in league with Russia' takes," while another inferred, "so basically, any legitimate grievance or concern of citizens is a Russian plot ." Other commenters tweeted that they didn't need any help from Moscow to clearly see that Biden's mind is failing .

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Online speculation has grown over Biden's expanding series of infamous gaffes, such as welcoming his audience to the wrong place and then trying to pass it off as a joke when he gave a July speech in his home state of Delaware.

The Democrat has also stumbled in unscripted moments to know where he is , such as praising the beauty of Vermont when he was actually campaigning last year in New Hampshire, and whom he's with, such as mistaking his wife for his sister in a primary victory speech in March. He bragged in February that he negotiated the 2016 Paris Climate Agreement with Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. Deng died in 1997.

READ MORE RT is accused of supporting QAnon. But with Russiagate back for 2020, who are the real state-funded conspiracy theorists?

Democrats have tried to revive the Trump-Russia collusion narrative despite the failure of special prosecutor Robert Mueller to prove that the Trump campaign worked with Moscow to win the 2016 presidential election.

When the Office of the Director of National Intelligence informed congressional committees last week that intelligence briefings on election security issues would no longer be done in person, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff issued a statement saying, "The American people have both the right and the need to know that another nation, Russia, is trying to help decide who their next president should be."

The statement ignored the fact that Russia isn't the only country that has been accused of using disinformation and other means to influence the 2020 US elections. A US intelligence report last month warned that Russia, China and Iran, among others, have sought to influence voters and that mass use of voting by mail will make it easier for foreign countries to interfere. China and Iran also allegedly sought to discredit Trump, according to the intelligence warnings.

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[Sep 02, 2020] The CIA, Organized Crime, the Media and Elections -- A Guide by Doug Valentine

Dec 08, 2016 | washingtonbabylon.com
By - 0

Doug Valentine's new book, The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World , is a compilation of newly updated articles and recent interviews. The book, which discusses a part of history that is rarely mentioned nowadays but is vital to understand as we enter the Trump era, is divided into four sections. The first covers the CIA's Phoenix program in Vietnam; the second looks at how the agency manages the War on Drugs; the third reviews how the Phoenix program became the model for Homeland Security and the War on Terror; and the fourth takes a look at the the CIA's influence on the media.

The CIA created the Phoenix program in South Vietnam in 1967 as a means of identifying, capturing, detaining, interrogating and assassinating the civilian leaders of the insurgency. As detailed in the book, the program has become the template for Homeland Security, as well as for waging the War on Terror and the War on Drugs.

The following edited excerpt, which focuses on the CIA's illegal domestic spying program, Chaos, was omitted from the book. It is taken from an interview Valentine did with Guillermo Jimenez in November 2014, originally titled "The CIA Has Become the Phoenix."

Cloaked in secrecy, the CIA is rarely written about and poorly understood. But while researching the infamous Phoenix program, Valentine managed to penetrate the agency and interview dozens of agency officers. His Phoenix research materials are available to the public at the National Security Archive. His interviews with several CIA officers are available online here and here .

GUILLERMO JIMENEZ: The Phoenix Program has recently been republished by Open Road Media as part of their Forbidden Bookshelves series. Would you mind sharing with us how your book was chosen for the series? What do you make of this new-found interest in Phoenix; what the CIA was up to in Vietnam; and what the CIA is up to generally?

VALENTINE: When the book came out in 1990, it got a terrible review in The New York Times . Morley Safer, who'd been a reporter in Vietnam, wrote the review. Safer and the Times killed the book because in it I said Phoenix never would have succeeded if the reporters in Vietnam hadn't covered for the CIA.

Several senior CIA officers said the same thing, that "So and so was always in my office. He'd bring a bottle of scotch and I'd tell him what was going on." The celebrity reporters knew what was going on, but they didn't report about it in exchange for having access. I said that in the book specifically about The New York Times . So I not only got the CIA angry at me, I also got the Vietnam press corps angry at me too.

Between those two things, the book did not get off to an auspicious start. The Times gave Safer half a page to write his review, which was bizarre. The usual response is just to ignore a book like The Phoenix Program . But The New York Times Book Review serves a larger function; it teaches the media elite and "intelligentsia" what to think and how to say it. So Safer said my book was incoherent, because it unraveled the bureaucratic networks that conceal the contradictions between policy and operational reality. It exposed Bill Colby [who ran Phoenix for the agency and later became CIA director] as a liar. Safer was upset that I didn't portray his friend and patron as a symbol of the elite, as a modern day Odysseus.

Luckily, with the Internet revolution, people aren't bound by the Times and network news anymore. They can listen to Russia Today and get another side of the story. So Mark Crispin Miller and Philip Rappaport at Open Road chose The Phoenix Program to be the first book they published. And it's been reborn. Thanks to the advent of the e-book, we've reached an audience of concerned and knowledgeable people in a way that wasn't possible 25 years ago.

It's also because of these Internet developments that John Brennan, the director of CIA, thought of reorganizing the the agency. All these things are connected. It's a vastly different world than it was in 1947 when the CIA was created. The nature of the American empire has changed, and what the empire needs from the CIA has changed. The CIA is allocated about $30 billion a year, so the organizational changes are massive undertakings. If you want to understand the CIA, you have to understand how it's organized.

JIMENEZ: I want to talk to you about that but first I'd like to touch upon the CIA's infiltration of the US media. I find it curious, because the way that you describe it, it's not so much a deliberate attempt to censor the media. There's a lot of self-censorship as a result of that already existing relationship. Is that how you see this?

VALENTINE: Yes. The media organizes itself the way the CIA does. The CIA has case officers running around the world, engaged in murder and mayhem, and the media has reporters covering them. The reporter and the case officer both have bosses, and the higher you get in each organization, the closer the bosses become.

The ideological guidelines get more restrictive the higher up you go. To join the CIA, you have to pass a psychological assessment test. They're not going to hire anybody who is sympathetic towards poor people. These are ruthless people who serve capitalist bosses . They're very rightwing, and t he media's job is to protect them. Editors only hire reporters who are ideologically pure, just like you can't get into the CIA if you're a Communist or think the CIA should obey the law.

It's the same thing in the media. You can't get a job at CNN if you sympathize with the Palestinians or report how Israel has been stealing their land for 67 years. The minute you say something that is anathema or upsets the Israelis, you're out. The people who enforce these ideological restraints are the editors and the publishers. For example, while covering the merciless Israeli bombardment of civilians in Gaza in 2014, Diana Magnay was harassed and threatened by a group of bloodthirsty Israelis who were cheering the slaughter. Disgusted, Magnay later referred to them as "scum" in a tweet. She was forced to apologize, transferred to Moscow, and banished forever from Israel.

In a similar case, NBC correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin was playing soccer with four young boys in Gaza when Israel shelled the playing field. Mohyeldin witnessed their murders, which he reported in a series of tweets. Without ever providing a reason, NBC pulled Mohyeldin from Gaza and prevented him from ever returning. NBC replaced Mohyeldin with Israeli sympathizer Richard Engel.

Any dictator would be happy with the way American media is organized. The minute you step out of the box, they fire you or send you off to Siberia . It's a homogenous system. Not just the media and CIA, but politicians too. As the 2016 primaries proved, you can't be a candidate for either party unless you pass the ideological test. You must be a freewheeling capitalist. You must support Israel with billions of tax payer dollars. You must give the military whatever weapons it wants. That's the nature of the American state. These things naturally work together because that is the way it has been structured for 240 years.

JIMENEZ: We've seen pseudo alternatives emerge in the Internet posing as adversarial or anti-establishment when they're anything but. We've seen this growing trend, and it's something to be mindful of as we look for these sources on the Internet.

VALENTINE: The Internet is a free for all, so you have to approach it the way any enlightened person approaches every part of America, which is buyer beware. Capitalism is not designed to protect poor people or make sure people lead healthy, fulfilling lives. It's designed to make sure the super-rich can steal from the poor. There's only so much wealth and the rich want it.

The rich want to monopolize information too. Is a particular piece of information on the Internet coming from a reliable source? Who knows? Just because some of it is true doesn't mean that all of it is true. To be able to discern whether the information is accurate or complete, you must be grounded in the reality that the capitalist system are organized to oppress you, keep you in the dark and off balance as much as possible. It's a game of wits and you've got to be smart about it. Buyer beware.

JIMENEZ: Now I'd like to talk about the recent organizational changes in the CIA. It stems from an article in The Washington Post by Greg Miller. The headline is "CIA Director John Brennan Considering Sweeping Organizational Changes." What the article is saying is that Brennan wants to restructure the CIA using the model of their Counterterrorism Center; merging different units and divisions, combining analysts with operatives into hybrid teams that will focus on specific regions of the world. This sounds to me like the organizational changes that were born out of Phoenix and that were exported to other parts of the world over the years. The CIA appears to be applying the same structure to all of its operations. Is that how you read this?

VALENTINE: Yes, and it's something that, from my perspective, was predictable, which is why The Phoenix Program was re-released now, because what I predicted 25 years ago has happened. And you can only predict accurately if you know the history.

The CIA initially, and for decades, had four directorates under an executive management staff: Administration, Intelligence, Operations, and Science and Technology. Executive management had staff for congressional liaison, legal issues, security, public relations, inspections, etc. Administration is just that: staff for finance, personnel, and support services like interrogators, translators and construction companies. Science and Technology is self-explanatory too, but with a typical CIA twist – science for the CIA means better ways to kill and control people, like the MKULTRA program. And now there's a fifth directorate, Digital, that keystrokes and hacks foreign governments and corporations.

The Operations people overthrew foreign governments the old fashioned way, through sabotage and subversion. The Operations Directorate is now the National Clandestine Service. The Intelligence Directorate, which is now called Analysis, studied political, economic and social trends around the world so that executive management could mount better operations to control them.

The Operations Directorate was divided into several branches. The Counterintelligence (CI) branch detected foreign spies. Foreign Intelligence (FI) staff "liaison" officers worked with secret policemen and other officials in foreign nations. They collected "positive intelligence" by eavesdropping or by recruiting agents. The Covert Action branch engaged in deniable political action. The Special Operations Division (now the Special Activities Division) supplied paramilitary officers. There was also a Political and Psychological branch that specialized in all forms of propaganda.

These branches and directorates were career paths for operations officers (operators) assigned to geographical divisions. An FI staff officer might spend his or her entire career in the Far East Asia Division. The managers could move people around, but those things, generally speaking, were in place when the CIA began. The events that led to the formation of the current Counterterrorism Center began in 1967, when US security services began to suspect that the Cubans and the Soviets were infiltrating the anti-war movement. Lyndon Johnson wanted to know the details, so his attorney general, Ramsay Clark, formed the Interdepartmental Intelligence Unit (IDIU) within the Department of Justice. The IDIU's job was to coordinate the elements of the CIA, FBI and military that were investigating dissenters. The White House wanted to control and provide political direction to these investigations.

The Phoenix program was created simultaneously in 1967 and did the same thing in Vietnam. It brought together 25 agencies and aimed them at civilians in the insurgency. It's political warfare. It's secret. It's against the rules of war. It violated the Geneva Conventions. It's what Homeland Security does in the US: bringing agencies together and focusing them on civilians who they think look like terrorists.

The goal of this kind of bureaucratic centralization is to improve intelligence collection and analysis so reaction forces can leap into the breach more quickly and effectively. In 1967, the CIA already had computer experts who were traveling around by jet. The world was getting smaller and the CIA, which had all the cutting edge technology, was way out in front. It hired Ivy Leaguers like Nelson Brickham to make the machine run smoothly.

Brickham, as I've explained elsewhere, was the Foreign Intelligence staff officer who organized the Phoenix program based on principles Rensis Likert articulated in his book New Patterns of Management . Brickham believed he could use reporting formats as a tool to shape the behavior of CIA officers in the field. In particular, he hoped to correct "the grave problem of distortion and cover-up which a reporting system must address."

Likert organized industries to be adaptable, and the CIA organized itself the same way. It was always reorganizing itself to adapt to new threats. And in 1967, while Brickham was forming Phoenix to neutralize the leaders of the insurgency in South Vietnam, James Angleton and the CIA's Counterintelligence staff were creating the MHCHAOS program in Langley, Virginia, to spy on members of the anti-war movement, and turn as many of them as possible into double agents.

Chaos was the codename for the Special Operations Group within Angleton's Counterintelligence staff. The CIA's current Counterterrorism Center, which was established in 1986, is a direct descendent of Chaos.

The CIA's CT Center evolved from the Chaos domestic spying mechanism into the nerve center of the CIA's clandestine staff. Same thing happened with the CIA's Counter-Narcotics Center at the same time. Both are modeled on Phoenix, and both are wonderful tools for White House cadres to exercise political control over the bureaucracies they coordinate. These "centers" are the perfect means for policing and expanding the empire; they make it easier than ever for the CIA to track people and events in every corner of the world. The need for the old-fashioned directorates is fading away. You don't need an entire directorate to understand the political, social and economic movements around the world anymore, because the United States is controlling them all.

The US has color revolutions going everywhere. It's got the World Bank and the IMF strangling countries with debt, like the banks are strangling college students and home owners here. The War on Terror is the best thing that ever happened to US capitalists and their secret police force, the CIA. Terrorism is the pretext that allows the CIA to coordinate and transcend every government agency and civic institution, including the media, to the extent that we don't even see its wars anymore. Its control is so pervasive, so ubiquitous; the CIA has actually become the Phoenix.

JIMENEZ: Right.

VALENTINE: It's the eye of god in the sky; it's able to determine what's going to happen next because it's controlling all of these political, social and economic movements. It pits the Sunnis against the Shiites. It doesn't need slow and outdated directorates. These Phoenix centers enable it to determine events instantaneously anywhere. There are now Counterterror Intelligence Centers all over the world. In Phoenix they were called Intelligence Operations Coordinating Centers. So it's basically exactly the same thing. It's been evolving that way and everybody on the inside was gearing themselves for this glorious moment for 30 years. They even have a new staff position called Targeting Officers. You can Google this.

JIMENEZ: Right, right, exactly.

VALENTINE: The centers represent the unification of military, intelligence and media operations under political control. White House political appointees oversee them, but the determinant force is the CIA careerists who slither into private industry when their careers are over. They form the consulting firms that direct the corporations that drive the empire. Through their informal "old boy" network, the CIA guys and gals keep America at war so they can make a million dollars when their civil service career is over.

JIMENEZ: The Washington Post and subsequent articles frame it as if these changes are drastic. But to hear you, it's a natural progression. So what does this announcement mean? Is the CIA putting out its own press release through the Washington Post just to give everyone the heads up?

VALENTINE: Well, everybody in the CIA was worried that if the directorates were reorganized, it would negatively affect their careers. But executive management usually does what its political bosses tell them to do, and Brennan reorganized in 2015. He created a fifth directorate, the Directorate for Digital Innovation (DDI) ostensibly as the CIA's "mantelpiece". But, as the Washington Times reported, "it is the formation of the new 'mission' centers – including ones for counterintelligence, weapons and counter-proliferation, and counterterrorism – that is most likely to shake up the agency's personnel around the world."

The CIA's "ten new Mission Centers" are designed to "serve as locations to integrate capabilities and bring the full range of CIA's operational, analytic, support, technical and digital skill sets to bear against the nation's most pressing national security problems."

This modernization means the CIA is better able to control people politically, starting with its own officers, then everyone else. That's the ultimate goal. Politicians, speaking in a unified voice, create the illusion of a crime-fighting CIA and an America with a responsibility to protect benighted foreigners from themselves. But they can't tell you what the CIA does, because it's all illegal. It's all a lie. In order for the politicians to hold office, they have to cover for the CIA. Their concern is how to explain the reorganization and exploit it. They squabble among themselves and cut the best deals possible.

[Sep 01, 2020] How Democrats and Republicans made deals to pass Magnitsky Act by Lucy Komisar

Highly recommended!
The foreign policy elite dislikes Russia, always has, and will do anything to keep this "adversary" front and center because their prospects for prestige, power and position depend upon the presence of an enemy. As an example see Strobe Talbot and Michael McFaul.
Notable quotes:
"... Ben Cardin agreed to be the cosponsor of a Magnitsky Act in the Senate. He sought a Republican cosponsor, John McCain, a Russophobic senator who never met a war he didn't like. ..."
"... It wasn't the first time McCain helped a fraudster. McCain was one of the corrupt "Keating Five" senators who improperly intervened in 1987 on behalf of Charles H. Keating, Jr., corrupt chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which collapsed in 1989 at a cost of $3.4 billion to the federal government (and thus taxpayers). Many investors lost their life savings. ..."
"... To get to McCain and others, Browder hired lobbyist Juleanna Glover, who had been Vice President Dick Cheney's press secretary and then Attorney General John Ashcroft's senior policy adviser. She went with Ashcroft when he left government to run the Washington office of his law firm, the Ashcroft Group. ..."
"... She got Browder a meeting with McCain who agreed to sponsor the Magnitsky Act. It fit with his Russophobia and friendship with fraudsters. ..."
"... On September 29, 2010, Senators Ben Cardin, John McCain, Roger Wicker (Republican of Mississippi) and Joe Lieberman (Democrat of Connecticut) introduced the bill in the Senate. Anyone involved in the false arrest, torture or death of Sergei Magnitsky, or the crimes he uncovered, would be publicly named, banned from entering the United States, and have their U.S. assets frozen. ..."
"... Remember again that a few months later Browder would tell the San Diego law school he didn't know how Magnitsky died. ..."
"... How the Browder-Magnitsky hoax law got passed in a trade deal ..."
"... Browder got Senator Joe Lieberman, conservative Democrat from Connecticut, to agree to block Jackson-Vanik repeal unless the administration stopped blocking his Magnitsky Act. ..."
"... Lieberman and the other cosponsors of the Magnitsky Act sent a letter to Montana Democratic Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. The letter said, "In the absence of the passage of the Magnitsky leg­islation, we will strongly oppose the lifting of Jackson-Vanik." ..."
"... The final count December 6, 2012 was 92-4. Levin and three other Democrats – Bernie Sanders as well as Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse, both of Rhode Island – were the only Senators to vote against it. Elizabeth Warren was not yet in the Senate. ..."
"... It was signed by Obama a week later. Read Title IV of the law to see how it is based on the fake claims the chief sponsors would not, could not prove. Including "he was beaten by 8 guards with rubber batons on the last day of his life" based on zero evidence, just Browder's lies. (I also wrote to Cardin's office and got no reply.) ..."
Aug 19, 2020 | www.thekomisarscoop.com

As the Democratic Convention is in progress, it is fitting to look at how Democrats in Congress and the White House, with Republican collaboration, were responsible for the Magnitsky Act , the law that protects tax fraudster William Browder and his henchman Mikhail Khodorkovsky by erecting a wall against their having to face justice for their financial crimes. And ramps up hostility against Russia.

The fraudster William Browder .

This is a half-hour interview about this I did today on this subject for Fault Lines . And a 15-minute interview for The Critical Hour . Here is an expanded version of what I said.

William Browder in the mid-1990s became manager of the Hermitage Fund, set up with $25 million from Lebanese-Brazilian banker Edmond Safra and Israeli mining investor Beny Steinmez to buy shares in Russian companies.

He says he started the fund, but that is a lie. He was brought in to manage other people's money. But after some years, when the two investors either died or confronted major financial problems, Browder gained control.

Browder doesn't like paying taxes.

Browder was an American who traded his citizenship for a UK passport in 1998 so he could avoid paying U.S. taxes on his stock profits. ( CBS called him a tax expatriate.)

He didn't like paying Russian taxes either. In an early rip-off, he and his partners billionaire Kenneth Dart of Dart cups and New York investor Francis Baker bought a majority of Avisma, a titanium company, that produces material used in airplanes. They cheated minority investors and the Russian tax collector of profits by using transfer pricing.

Corrupt Russian "oligarch" Mikhail Khodorkovsky, photo Lucy Komisar.

You sell your production to a fake company at a low price, then your fake company sells it at the world price. You book lower dividends to cheat minority shareholders, report lower taxes to cheat the Russian people.

Browder and partners bought Avisma from infamous oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky on the basis of continuing his transfer pricing scam. It was revealed by documents in a lawsuit when Browder and partners sued another infamous guy, Peter Bond, the Isle of man crook handling the rake-offs for not passing on the full amount of the skim. (No honor among thieves!) The legal documents where Browder admits to the scam are linked in this story .

Browder cheats bigtime on Russia taxes

Browder's next corruption was to cheat the Russians of taxes from his stock buys in Russia, to the tune of about $100million. That included claiming as deductions disabled workers who didn't work for him, local investments he never made, profits from stock buys of Gazprom the Russian energy conglomerate that non-Russians were not allowed to buy in Russia.

Investigations started in the early 2000s for $40 mil in evaded takes and led to legal judgments in 2004. When he refused to pay, in November 2005 he was denied a Russian visa and in 2006 he moved all his assets out of Russia. But the Russian tax evasion investigations continued.

Browder's accountant Sergei Magnitsky was arrested for investigation of the tax evasion in 2008, and the European Commission on Human Rights ruled last year that was correct because of the evidence and because he was a flight risk. Browder's fake narrative was that Magnitsky, who he lied was his lawyer , had been arrested because he blew the whistle on a scheme by Russian officials to embezzle money from the Russian Treasury. In his own U.S. federal court deposition , Browder admits Magnitsky didn't go to law school or have a law license. See his brief video on that.

Browder gives speeches that he didn't know how Magnitsky died

Then Magnitsky died of heart failure exacerbated by stomach disease which forensic reports say was not properly treated. Browder first said (in talks at the British foreign policy association Chatham House , London, a month after he died, and San Diego Law School -- video at minute 6:20 -- a year later) he didn't know how Magnitsky died, but after a few years he invented a story that he had been beaten to death.

Jonathan Winer, who helped Browder with his scam.

That story was developed by Jonathan Winer, a former assistant to Senator John Kerry and then a State Department official. Winer was working for APCO, an international public relations company one of whose major clients was the same Mikhail Khodorkovsky. They correctly assumed the western media would do no research. Or at least would not be allowed to report it. And the mainstream media never did, except much later Der Spiegel in Germany, which the rest of the western press ignored.

The plan was to get a U.S. law that would in effect block the Russians from going after certain Americans who had cheated on taxes. They would be Browder and Khodorkovsky, who is actually named in the law.

Khodorkovsky would spend several hundred thousand dollars to buy Congressional support for the Magnitsky Act, clearly money well spent. He duly reported it as lobbying expenses.

Here is how the Democrats and Republicans colluded in the Browder Magnitsky hoax. Much of this comes from Browder's own writings in his mostly fake book "Red Notice." Note the corruption of both parties.

Magnitsky died in November 2009. Only four months later in March 2010, Browder was plotting his Magnitsky hoax, attacking Russians he would claim were responsible for Magnitsky's death. But the bizarre part of the story is that he continued throughout 2010 to say he didn't know how Magnitsky died, including in a videoed Dec 2010 San Diego law school talk. He obviously assumed U.S. media and politicians would not notice or care about the contradictions.

Ben Cardin, senator who signed on to Browder hoax.

Browder got Maryland Democratic Senator Ben Cardin to send a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in March 2010 urging her to ban visas for 60 people Browder had listed (without evidence) as complicit in Magnitsky's death. (Remember 9 months later in a videoed talk at San Diego Law School Browder says he didn't know how Magnitsky died.)

The letter to Hillary Clinton, written (Browder says in his book) by Browder acolyte Kyle Parker, a staffer at the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said, I "urge you to immediately cancel and permanently withdraw the U.S. visa privileges of all those involved in this crime, along with their dependents and family members." Immediately? No due process, not even for children and grandparents? Cousins?

Attached to the letter was the list of the sixty officials Browder accused, without evidence, of involvement in Magnitsky's death and a tax fraud against the Treasury.

Browder's fake tax refund fraud

The tax refund fraud was a scheme in which shell companies were set up to sue Browder's Hermitage companies claiming contract violations and damages of $1billion. The Hermitage companies immediately agreed to pay (no evidence of actual bank transfers), then demanded the Treasury pay a tax refund of $230million because they now had zero profits.

Viktor Markelov, tried and jailed for the scam, said he worked with a Sergei Leonidovich, which is Magnitsky's name and patronymic. Other evidence, including an inexplicable delay of months between Browder learning about the his companies being re-registered in other names and him reporting that as "theft," indicates he was part of the scam too.

Note this: Hermitage trustee HSBC filed a financial document in July 2007 saying it was putting aside $7 million for legal costs that might be required to get back the companies. This was five months before the tax refund fraud occurred. Albert Dabbah, chief financial controller for HSBC, confirmed the document's authenticity in U.S. federal court. But Browder and Magnitsky (in his testimony ) said they didn't learn about the "theft" till October 2007.

Theft of his companies? The best defense is a good offense. Accuse others of the crime you committed.

Senator Cardin was requesting that all sixty of Browder's accused have their U.S. travel privileges permanently revoked.

But Hillary didn't buy it. Then House staffer Parker arranged for Browder to testify about the Magnitsky case May 6 th at the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, not an official House body but a pressure group set up in the name of a Russophobic former congressman from Hungary.

Congressman Jim McGovern would not send the evidence he promised, because he couldn't. There wasn't any.

The commission chairman was Massachusetts Democratic congressman Jim McGovern, who runs liberal but is a Russophobe who pretends to be a human rights advocate.

Now what is really interesting is that seven months after this May 6 testimony, on December 6, 2010, Browder was telling the San Diego law school (video 6:20 in) that "they put him in a straight jacket, put him in an isolation room and waited outside the door until he died." Nothing about torture or killing. Had Browder forgotten his dramatic beating story?

McGovern at the Lantos Commission hearing asked for no evidence. He said he would introduce legislation, put the 60 names Browder cited in it, move it to the committee and make a formal recommendation from Congress, then pass it on the floor.

McGovern lies about sending evidence

Kimberly Stanton, who runs a propaganda operation and refused to provide evidence.

In July 2019, almost a decade later, I saw McGovern when he spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations. I asked if he would send me evidence backing the claim that Magnitsky was tortured and killed. He agreed and introduced me to an aide. The aide referred me to Kimberly Stanton, director of the Lantos Commission, who refused in an email to provide any information. And said evidence against targeted people is not required!

I also wrote McGovern's press secretary Matt Bonaccorsi and legislative director Cindy Buhl. They ignored repeated requests, never sent me anything. I conclude that Jim McGovern, who pretends to be a liberal civil rights promoter, is a fake and a fraud.

McGovern introduces a Magnitsky bill in the House.

John McCain, he loved fraudsters and wars.

Ben Cardin agreed to be the cosponsor of a Magnitsky Act in the Senate. He sought a Republican cosponsor, John McCain, a Russophobic senator who never met a war he didn't like.

It wasn't the first time McCain helped a fraudster. McCain was one of the corrupt "Keating Five" senators who improperly intervened in 1987 on behalf of Charles H. Keating, Jr., corrupt chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which collapsed in 1989 at a cost of $3.4 billion to the federal government (and thus taxpayers). Many investors lost their life savings.

Keating was the target of a regulatory investigation. With powerful senators like McCain advocating his cause, the regulator backed off taking action against Lincoln. Though Keating went to jail. McCain was cited only for exercising "poor judgment." Helping a crook doesn't get you thrown out of the Senate.

To get to McCain and others, Browder hired lobbyist Juleanna Glover, who had been Vice President Dick Cheney's press secretary and then Attorney General John Ashcroft's senior policy adviser. She went with Ashcroft when he left government to run the Washington office of his law firm, the Ashcroft Group.

Juleanna Glover, former aide to Dick Cheney. She can buy you a bill .

She got Browder a meeting with McCain who agreed to sponsor the Magnitsky Act. It fit with his Russophobia and friendship with fraudsters.

On September 29, 2010, Senators Ben Cardin, John McCain, Roger Wicker (Republican of Mississippi) and Joe Lieberman (Democrat of Connecticut) introduced the bill in the Senate. Anyone involved in the false arrest, torture or death of Sergei Magnitsky, or the crimes he uncovered, would be publicly named, banned from entering the United States, and have their U.S. assets frozen.

Remember again that a few months later Browder would tell the San Diego law school he didn't know how Magnitsky died.

Now here is how the law got passed. The Jackson-Vanick amendment put in place in the mid-1970s imposed trade sanctions on the Soviet Union to punish it for not allowing Soviet Jews to emigrate. Well, nobody could emigrate. Eventually 1.5 million Jews were allowed to leave the country.

How the Browder-Magnitsky hoax law got passed in a trade deal

Thirty-seven years later the Soviet Union no longer existed, and everybody could emigrate, but Jackson-Vanik was still on the books. It blocked American corporations from enjoying the same trade benefits with Russia as the world's other WTO members.

So, the U.S. business community said Jackson-Vanik had to go, and the Obama administration agreed. So did John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. They needed an act of Congress.

Meanwhile, Kerry opposed the Magnitsky Act which he considered untoward interference in Russia (is that like saying meddling?) and had been delaying bringing it to vote in committee.

Browder got Senator Joe Lieberman, conservative Democrat from Connecticut, to agree to block Jackson-Vanik repeal unless the administration stopped blocking his Magnitsky Act.

Lieberman and the other cosponsors of the Magnitsky Act sent a letter to Montana Democratic Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. The letter said, "In the absence of the passage of the Magnitsky leg­islation, we will strongly oppose the lifting of Jackson-Vanik."

John Kerry had good instincts, forced to make bad compromise.

So, Kerry stopped his opposition to the Magnitsky Act.

The two bills were combined. First the bill would be brought up at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to pass Magnitsky, then it would go before the Finance Committee to repeal Jackson-Vanik, and then, it would go before the full Senate for a vote.

Kerry called for a meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in June 2012, with the purpose of approving the Magnitsky Act.

At the hearing, Kerry said that America was not a perfect country, and that the people in that room should be "very mindful of the need for the United States not to always be pointing fingers and lecturing and to be somewhat introspective as we think about these things." (Such nuance would obviously not be allowed today.)

He was "worried about the unintended consequences of requiring that kind of detailed reporting that implicates a broader range of intelligence." He didn't have to worry. Reporting? Intelligence? Actual evidence would never be required! The U.S. was setting up a kangaroo court and calling it a human rights tribunal!

The bill passed the House 365 to 43 on November 16, 2012. Voting "No" were 37 Democrats and 6 Republicans. Among them Maxine Waters and Ron Paul. And surprisingly New York Democrat Jerrold Nadler who since then became a Russophobe. Tulsi Gabbard had not yet been elected.

Kyle Parker told Browder, "There are a number of senators who are insisting on keeping Magnitsky global instead of Russia-only." One was Cardin, but also Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan – a political giant who spent many years fighting, holding hearings, about offshore tax evasion and must have known very well how Browder was a poster child for offshore tax-evading crooks. Also Jon Kyl, Republican from Arizona. Of course, Browder wanted "Russia only," because the purpose of the law was to attack Russia, not to promote global human rights. Cardin withdrew his objection, and the bill was "Russia only."

The Senate vote

The final count December 6, 2012 was 92-4. Levin and three other Democrats – Bernie Sanders as well as Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse, both of Rhode Island – were the only Senators to vote against it. Elizabeth Warren was not yet in the Senate.

It was signed by Obama a week later. Read Title IV of the law to see how it is based on the fake claims the chief sponsors would not, could not prove. Including "he was beaten by 8 guards with rubber batons on the last day of his life" based on zero evidence, just Browder's lies. (I also wrote to Cardin's office and got no reply.)

It was the first pillar of Russiagate, where Cold Warrior Democrats joined forces with Cold Warrior Republicans. The result would be to build a wall against Russia bringing Browder to justice, including getting Interpol to refuse to issue a red notice that would require other countries to arrest him. He would name his book Red Notice as a jab at the Russians.

And the crooks Browder and Khodorkovsky, protected from the rule of law, laughed all the way to their offshore banks. Here's the link to Browder's Mossack Fonseca (on Panama Papers fame) bank.

(Speaking of the rule of law, it doesn't apply to offshore banks, with secret owners of companies and accounts. They are largely run by western banks that make big profits from laundering the money of the world's crooks. Note on any SEC filing where banks have their subsidiaries: Caymans, Isle of Man, Guernsey, BVI, etc. No local clients, just financial fakery: letterbox companies, tax evasion. It's okay. When there's corruption, only the little people go to jail. In the offshore system, the corrupt financial oligarchy rules.)

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[Aug 31, 2020] Russiagate without end- US appeals court REVERSES earlier decision to end Flynn criminal case -- RT USA News

Aug 31, 2020 | www.rt.com

A full-bench US federal appeals court has reversed an earlier decision to dismiss the 'Russiagate' case against former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, returning it to the judge who refused to let the charges be dropped.

In a 8-2 ruling on Monday, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Judge Emmet Sullivan, and sent the case back to him for review. Sullivan had been ordered by a three-judge panel in June to drop the case against Flynn immediately, but hired an attorney and asked for an en banc hearing instead.

Flynn's attorney Sidney Powell said the split was "as expected" based on the tone of the oral arguments, pointing to a partisan divide on the bench, and added it was a "disturbing blow to the rule of law."

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The former top lawyer for the Barack Obama administration, Neal Katyal, hailed the decision as "an important step in defending the rule of law" and argued the case should not be dismissed because Flynn had pleaded guilty.

Flynn had indeed pleaded guilty to one charge of lying to the FBI, but Powell moved to dismiss the charges due to the failure of his previous attorneys – a law firm with ties to the Democrats – and the government to disclose evidence that could set him free. After producing documents revealing that the FBI set out to entrap Flynn, had no valid cause to interview him in the first place, and the prosecutors improperly extorted him into a plea by threatening to charge his son, the Justice Department moved to drop all charges.

ALSO ON RT.COM End of Russiagate? DOJ drops case against Trump adviser Flynn that started 'witch hunt'

Sullivan had other ideas, however. In a highly unusual move, he appointed a retired judge – who had just written a diatribe about the case in the Washington Post – to be amicus curiae and argue the case should not be dropped. It was at this point that Powell took the case to the appeals court, citing Fokker, a recent Supreme Court precedent that Sullivan was violating.

Ignoring the fact that Sullivan had appointed the amicus and sought to prolong the case after the DOJ and the appeals court both told him to drop it, the en banc panel argued the proper procedure means he needs to make the decision before it can be appealed.

One of the judges, Thomas Griffith, actually argued in a concurring opinion that it would be "highly unusual" for Sullivan not to dismiss the charges, given the executive branch's constitutional prerogatives and his "limited discretion" when it came to the relevant federal procedure, but said that an order to drop the case is not "appropriate in this case at this time" because it's up to Sullivan to make the call first.

ALSO ON RT.COM 'Russiagate' case against ex-Trump adviser Michael Flynn effectively OVER, as DC appeals court orders to close it

The court likewise rejected Powell's motion to reassign a case to a different judge.

Conservatives frustrated by the neverending legal saga have blasted the appeals court's decision as disgraceful. "The Mike Flynn case is an embarrassing stain on this country and its 'judges'," tweeted TV commentator Dan Bongino. "We don't have judges anymore, only corrupted politicians in black robes."

While Flynn was not the first Trump adviser to be charged by special counsel Robert Mueller's 'Russiagate' probe, he was the first White House official pressured to resign over it, less than two weeks into the job.

With Mueller failing to find any evidence of "collusion" between President Donald Trump's campaign and Russia, Democrats have latched onto Flynn's case as proof of their 'Russiagate' conspiracy theory. The latest argument is that the effort to drop the charges against Flynn is politically motivated and proof of Attorney General Bill Barr's "corruption."

Barr is currently overseeing a probe by US attorney John Durham into the FBI's handling of the investigation against Trump during and after the 2016 election, with the evidence disclosed during the Flynn proceedings strongly implicating not just the senior FBI leadership but senior Obama administration figures as well.

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[Aug 27, 2020] Eva Barlett: Being a Russian propagandist, a Kremlin agent doesn't actually pay but speaking truth in the face of mountains of lies is a moral thing to do human lives are at stake

Aug 27, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

JULIUS SKOOLAFISH August 27, 2020 at 2:36 am

Just letting all you contributors know how much I appreciate the links and key points to the various hot topics in, particularly involving Belarus/President Lukashenko (and what's-er-name) and the antics of Navalny et al. I have followed the Skripal case and it is an absolute face palmer that the 'victims' remain in solitary confinement unable to tell their 'story' while the 'perpetrators' (allegedly Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov) still have not run out of toothpaste, cereal and toilet paper and continue to elude Britain's finest

Since I had a hand in triggering this thread I Just wanted to get back to the intrepid Eva K Bartlett for a moment.

At 40:16 of her talk in the video below Eva says (first part tongue in cheek)

**"Being a Russian propagandist, a Kremlin agent, a DPRK stooge doesn't actually pay but speaking truth in the face of mountains of lies is a moral thing to do – human lives are at stake."**

I shared this elsewhere in the context of the events in Victoria, Australia and posed: "You might ask "What has Eva K Bartlett got to do with Andrews, Morrison, Hurley et al?"

Elsewhere I saw a meme featuring Andrews with a Kim Jong Un haircut. I commented that such a meme should more appropriately feature Lenin or Trotsky – or in (Daniel) Andrews' case, lower ranked henchmen such as Kaganovich or Beria.

Consider for example the narrative they [Andrews, Morrison, Hurley] have been spewing in recent years with regard to Syria and the DPRK (etc)

It comes as no surprise to me then that these supporters of terrorism, advocators of genocide and protectors of child trafficking and paedophilia would inevitably turn on 'their own people'.

• Eva Bartlett speaks on North Korea & Syria (FULL)

https://www.youtube.com/embed/tR5hjJzyN1Y?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

[Aug 27, 2020] Navalny's 'Poisoning' false flag. Accompinized by b's excellent analyses of the novichokked navalny

The way Merkel and other politicians immediately jumped on the poisoning thesis is reminiscent of May's reaction in the Skripal case. It is difficult not to become suspicious. Looks like they like to reuse the same propaganda memes over and over. Russian bounties to the Taliban become Iranian bounties to the Taliban, Novichok becomes cholinesterase inhibitor, rinse and repeat.
Aug 27, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
CitizenX , Aug 25 2020 17:52 utc | 45

Russia did it. Evil Putin ordered it. Horrible China sponsored it. Iran backed it. Hezbollah played a hand as well.

Thank Glorious God for the Indispensable Nation of American Exceptionalism. Rescuing the world from evil dictators and conspiring theorists plots. Evil doers who hate OUR way of life stand no chance against the Glorious Christians and their Honorable Zionist gatekeepers.

Thanks and Glory to American Gods that Juan Guaido is now the President of Venezuela. Soon the Zionist will offer their Chosen Ones to replace Evil Dictators.

Thanks and praise to MOA for shining Gods Light and dancing on Western narratives giving them validity against the Evil doers of Poison and injustice.

Trump and Pence are "Men of the Bible" seeking out injustice and filling the world with Christian values of Bro Love and world Peace. May all you Christians take a knee and pray for these Mens souls and the Soul of America for leading the way to righteousness. Oh yeah- and pray for whatever the fuck his name is Nirvany Nalvinny poisoned guy.


Nathna Mulcahy , Aug 25 2020 18:39 utc | 58

As the collective west, including Germany, proceed to fabricate another "highly likely" Putin play...

William Gruff , Aug 25 2020 18:49 utc | 62

CHRIS ZELL @60 True.

If the Russians are really trying to assassinate, why do it in so theatrical a manner? Just shoot him twice in the back of the head and call it suicide like the Americans do.

[Aug 27, 2020] The Back And Forth About Navalny's 'Poisoning'

Notable quotes:
"... Navalny fell ill on August 20 during a flight from Tomsk in Siberia to Moscow. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk where he was transferred to a hospital. Navalny fell into a coma. The doctors diagnosed a sharp drop in his blood sugar. Navalny has diabetes and his symptoms as described were consistent with a diabetic shock. We therefore (somewhat prematurely) concluded that Navalny was not poisoned . ..."
"... The wording of the Charité statement seems to imply that the laboratory results point to the potential effects of a cholinesterase inhibitors, not to a specific substance itself. This is consistent with a statement by the clinic in Omsk which insists that no cholinesterase inhibitors, i.e a 'poison', were found: ..."
"... We can be quite sure that a trained toxicologist would recognize a Cholinergic crisis . There is however a documented case from India in which an organophosphate poisoning was falsely interpreted as diabetic ketoacidosis (hat tip Bernd Neuner ): ..."
"... If Navalny was poisoned - which is not established - the next question must be how Navalny came into contact with a cholinesterase inhibitor. Was the contact caused by himself or by someone else? Was it intentionally or unintentionally? ..."
"... Navalny's spokeswomen has insisted that the only substance Navalny ingested that morning was a tea from an airport bar. A CCTV video from the airport shows that the tea was brought from the bar by a person that then sits down with Navalny. They presumably traveled together. How would the airport barkeeper, if he supposedly poisoned Navalny, knew for whom the tea was? ..."
"... next page " the poison theory constructors are creating a colorful james bond style movie script. It captures the imagination. If the exciting, easily visualised, movie script is solidly imprinted in the imagination, then dull, tedious, evidence based reality doesn't get a look-in. ..."
"... Besides, this doesn't explain the almost immediate poisoning accusation by Merkel and then, the next day (today), by top EU ideologue Josep Borrell. The German State (at least the BND) must be involved - the fact that the Charité is owned by the State itself only strengthens this hypothesis. ..."
"... Someone on the web (might even be here) mentioned that cholinesterase inhibitors can be used against Cocaine dependence. Is this true or not? I do not have any other information and I am not a Medecin/doctor or user. But these days I am naturally cynical about any "official" statements, whoever makes them. ..."
"... The way Merkel and other politicians immediately jumped on the poisoning thesis is reminiscent of May's reaction in the Skripal case. It is difficult not to become suspicious. ..."
"... Due to Navalny's dealings in Tomsk, this smells more of a bid to leave the country. Orchestrations set in place by Germany suggests an asset that has run his course, but they can't leave him in country to deal with any complications of him being taken by someone else. ..."
Aug 27, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

The case of the alleged 'poisoning' of the Russian rabble rouser Alexey Navalny is becoming more curious.

Navalny fell ill on August 20 during a flight from Tomsk in Siberia to Moscow. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk where he was transferred to a hospital. Navalny fell into a coma. The doctors diagnosed a sharp drop in his blood sugar. Navalny has diabetes and his symptoms as described were consistent with a diabetic shock. We therefore (somewhat prematurely) concluded that Navalny was not poisoned .

After a day and a half in the Omsk hospital the patient stabilized. On request of his family he was flown to Berlin and admitted to the Charité hospital. The Charité is a very large (14,000 employees) state run university clinic that is leading in many medical fields. Its laboratories found effects consistent with the ingestion of, or contact with, a cholinesterase inhibitor:

Following his admission, Mr. Navalny underwent extensive examination by a team of Charité physicians. Clinical findings indicate poisoning with a substance from the group of cholinesterase inhibitors. The specific substance involved remains unknown, and a further series of comprehensive testing has been initiated. The effect of the poison – namely, the inhibition of cholinesterase in the body – was confirmed by multiple tests in independent laboratories.

As a result of this diagnosis, the patient is now being treated with the antidote atropine.

Cholinesterase is needed in the human nerve system to break down acetylcholine which is a signaling substance between synapses. Inhibitors of cholinesterase are used in the therapy of Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, anxiety disorder and other illnesses. Cholinesterase inhibitors can be found in certain plant extracts or synthesized. There are two types of cholinesterase inhibitors, carbamates and organophosphates. Both types are also widely used as pesticides. During World War II organophosphates were developed as chemical weapons (tabun, sarin, soman) but not widely used.

The wording of the Charité statement seems to imply that the laboratory results point to the potential effects of a cholinesterase inhibitors, not to a specific substance itself. This is consistent with a statement by the clinic in Omsk which insists that no cholinesterase inhibitors, i.e a 'poison', were found:

"When Alexey Navalny was admitted to the in-patient clinic, he was examined for a wide range of narcotics, synthetic substances, psychedelic drugs and medical substances, including cholinesterase inhibitors. The result was negative," said Sabayev, chief of the acute poisoning unit at the Omsk emergency care hospital where Navalny was treated before being airlifted to Germany.

"Besides, he did not have a clinical picture, specific for poisoning with substances from the group of cholinesterase inhibitors," Sabayev, who is also the top toxicologist in the Omsk Region and the Siberian Federal District, added.

We can be quite sure that a trained toxicologist would recognize a Cholinergic crisis . There is however a documented case from India in which an organophosphate poisoning was falsely interpreted as diabetic ketoacidosis (hat tip Bernd Neuner ):

We present a 15-year-old girl who was initially treated for "diabetic ketoacidosis" with further worsening of her general condition. This delayed recovery, coupled with focused investigations, finally led us to a diagnosis and the appropriate management of an intentional overdose with organophosphorous (OP) pesticide, presenting as diabetic ketoacidosis.

But according to Kremlin spokesman Dimitry Peskov the Russian doctors made the right diagnosis and applied the correct therapy (machine translation):

The statement by German doctors on the diagnosis of FBK founder Alexei Navalny is nothing new for Russian specialists, Dmitry Peskov, press secretary of the Russian President, told reporters.

"We have not yet learned anything new from this statement. We specifically contacted our doctors and asked how, from a professional point of view, we can relate to what was written. The fact is that the fact of this lowered cholinesterase was established in the first hours by our doctors in a hospital in Omsk. And the atropine, which the Germans are talking about and which is now being given to the patient, began to be administered during the first hour of the patient's stay in intensive care, " said Peskov.

The presidential spokesman stressed that the level of cholinesterase may decrease for a variety of reasons, including from taking a number of medications. At the same time, German doctors did not identify a toxic substance in Navalny's analyzes.

"Therefore, it is very important here to find out what caused the decrease in cholinesterase levels. And neither our doctors, nor the Germans have yet been able to establish the cause . At least, this follows from the statement of our German doctors' colleagues. There is no substance, unfortunately, it cannot be established, analyzes do not show it," Peskov explained.

He stressed that the analytical data of Russian and German doctors are the same, but the conclusions are different.

"We do not understand why our German colleagues are in such a hurry, using the word "poisoning". You know, this version was among the first that our doctors considered, but I repeat once again: the substance has not yet been established. Maybe the Germans have some data," said Peskov, noting that Russian doctors are ready to provide samples of the first tests.

If Navalny was poisoned - which is not established - the next question must be how Navalny came into contact with a cholinesterase inhibitor. Was the contact caused by himself or by someone else? Was it intentionally or unintentionally?

Navalny's spokeswomen has insisted that the only substance Navalny ingested that morning was a tea from an airport bar. A CCTV video from the airport shows that the tea was brought from the bar by a person that then sits down with Navalny. They presumably traveled together. How would the airport barkeeper, if he supposedly poisoned Navalny, knew for whom the tea was?

As 'western' media continue with their "Putin poisoned Navalny" nonsense it is important to again point out that other people have more reason to harm Navalny than the Kremlin does:

During the last years Navalny has made some enemies by uncovering corruption cases. His latest one was about the local governor of Tomsk. It was also the reason why he had flown there. Should Navaly become the victim of a crime the suspects should be sought there.

Posted by b on August 25, 2020 at 11:57 UTC | Permalink


mijj , Aug 25 2020 12:19 utc | 1

next page " the poison theory constructors are creating a colorful james bond style movie script. It captures the imagination. If the exciting, easily visualised, movie script is solidly imprinted in the imagination, then dull, tedious, evidence based reality doesn't get a look-in.
vk , Aug 25 2020 12:39 utc | 2
The India girl case is an interesting case if you're a doctor, but it is too over the top to claim they are common. The important thing to consider here is that the Russian doctor who treated him (and saved his life) discarded that possibility.

It is only the doctor that can diagnose his/her patient. Hunting for exotic cases around the world is not diagnosis.

Besides, this doesn't explain the almost immediate poisoning accusation by Merkel and then, the next day (today), by top EU ideologue Josep Borrell. The German State (at least the BND) must be involved - the fact that the Charité is owned by the State itself only strengthens this hypothesis.

vk , Aug 25 2020 12:47 utc | 3
Here's food for thought:

German economy contracts at record pace, recovery hinges on consumers

The numbers consolidate last month's preview. It's bad, and Germany is officially in an economic depression (2009-2020).

Uniting this data with my previous speculation on the "Prussian" and the "double-header" hypotheses, I'm inclined to think the Belarus-Navalny operations are a gambit by the EU to expand further to the East (Russia) and, ultimately, to dispute with China over the control of Eurasia in the 21st/22nd Centuries.

gadzooks , Aug 25 2020 12:57 utc | 5
I am a great fan of MOA, a refugee from ZH which is now an almost unreadable and tainted by its anti-China drumbeat.

However, with all due respect I find that our host tends to come to conclusions a bit too quickly... Navalny could well have been poisoned, but by whom? Guaido and her female clone Tikhanovskaya better watch out - their handlers in the CIA may see them more useful as martyrs than as "legitimate opposition".

As for other topics, I also find b to have way, way too quickly dismissed the Beirut blast as anything other than AM.
As in, too quickly because the ramifications were too terrible to contemplate, as in the ascendence of unspeakable evil on the part of the shitty little state. As to whether the blast was nuclear or conventional, that is a minor point.

vk , Aug 25 2020 13:03 utc | 7
Kremlin sees no grounds to launch criminal probe into Navalny's condition
"If the substance is established and if it is established that this is poisoning, then, of course, this will be a cause for investigation," he [Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov] said.
Stonebird , Aug 25 2020 13:10 utc | 8
Someone on the web (might even be here) mentioned that cholinesterase inhibitors can be used against Cocaine dependence. Is this true or not? I do not have any other information and I am not a Medecin/doctor or user. But these days I am naturally cynical about any "official" statements, whoever makes them.

This (anti-cocaine use) might equally be "disinformation", but with its' widespread use in "elite" circles, it is not inconcievable. Navalny being in the toilets rather than having an immediate reaction to the tea at the airport, could be an indication that something happened in there.

Robert , Aug 25 2020 13:21 utc | 10
The Russians caused the hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico in a plot to meddle with the U.S. elections by causing disruptions in Texas which may vote Democrat in November. Considering this it is plausible to think Putin poisoned Nav' in an attempt to take over the world.
mpn , Aug 25 2020 13:52 utc | 12
From 3/3 on twitter thread:

https://twitter.com/elenaevdokimov7/status/1298208566281527296

3/3 Though a doctor from another region of Russia, who did not treat Navalny, wrote that in his practice, cholinesterase inhibitors Proserin &Ubretid are allegedly widely used to prevent disorders developing in patients placed on mechanical ventilation.

Paco , Aug 25 2020 13:59 utc | 13
Posted by: vk | Aug 25 2020 12:39 utc | 2

Josep Borrell as the top ideologue of the EU is overestimating a gray functionary belonging to the Felipe González group, a group that somehow preceded the false center left of Blair in the UK or Clinton in the USA.

From that same group of politicians that first campaigned against Spain joining NATO back in the '80s with the slogan "De entrada no", something like to start with NO, well one of those socialists later became NATO's secretary general and lead the organization during its sinister days of the Yugoslavia bombings, handsomely rewarded monetarily later became Mister Pesc, a strange definition for the sort of foreign minister of the EU, the place than Borrell has been rewarded with nowadays, which means he has rendered the required services to the empire. Those guys true ideology is personal advancement and nothing else, so it kind of sounds funny to think he is the top ideologue of the EU, but then again, he could be, which is a true mesure of what the EU is worth politically, a pitiful colony.

William Gruff , Aug 25 2020 14:14 utc | 15
Stonebird @8: Cholinesterase inhibitors for cocaine addiction

Note that this is an off-label use of cholinesterase inhibitors, so an American doctor would not likely prescribe it. Someone who has a supply of cocaine sufficient enough to become an addict, on the other hand, probably would not have difficulty obtaining a cholinesterase inhibitor like Galantamine, though. Navalny's CIA/State Department handlers who keep him on coke could probably get him anything he asked for, though if I were in his shoes I wouldn't put anything from them up my nose.

somebody , Aug 25 2020 14:49 utc | 20
Posted by: vk | Aug 25 2020 12:47 utc | 3

Unlikely. Europe hardly survived WW2. Russia plus China are a lot of people to make angry.

It's more likely some projects continuing because someone has forgotten to stop them or because they still have got money left. You would have to carry Europe to fight and even then they would not fight.

As is, Europe's south has been bought up by Chinese investment. They invest strategically not for short term returns.

Noone will climb a tree before knowing the results of US elections.

BM , Aug 25 2020 15:00 utc | 21
There is however a documented case from India in which an organophosphate poisoning was falsely interpreted as diabetic ketoacidosis

So what? Doctors make false diagnoses all the time. It is called medical error. A significant proportion of deaths in hospitals worldwide are due to medical error. India? Now, if somebody is going to suggest that medical error never happens in India I am going to say either they are a liar or an idiot. Medical errors also happen in German hospitals, by the way, including Charité - plenty of them! Including both with and without intent.

This whole Navalny "poisoning" fantasy stinks to high heaven. It differs very little in essential essence from the Skripal fantasy so far, and I am quite sure it is headed on the same path.

Orage , Aug 25 2020 15:16 utc | 22
But have we missed a point here? Is this not just trying to round the anti-Russia circle started by the Skripal poisoning? Will not everyone now assume that Navalny was poisoned with Novichok and that this proves beyond doubt that this is the preferred way for getting rid of Kremlin enemies? You don't really have to prove anything more, it is now all out there, like Russia gate, the dog whistle has been blown.
Orage , Aug 25 2020 15:19 utc | 23
Somebody 16
The findings of low cholineesterase was the same in Omsk and Berlin but the conclusions are different. There is no problem here.
MarkU , Aug 25 2020 15:21 utc | 24
@ BM (21)

Re: "This whole Navalny "poisoning" fantasy stinks to high heaven. It differs very little in essential essence from the Skripal fantasy so far, and I am quite sure it is headed on the same path."

I agree completely. The whole script is so old and tired one would have to have spent the last few decades living under a rock not to see through it, throw enough shit and hope some of it sticks. It is probably just another ploy to put pressure on the German government to cancel Nordstream 2.

John Gilberts , Aug 25 2020 15:36 utc | 25
An accompaniment to b's excellent analyses of the novichokked navalny:

Cartalucci: 'Poisoned' Kremlin Critic Flown to Germany as German-Russian Nord Stream 2 Nears Completion

https://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2020/08/poisoned-kremlin-critic-flown-to.html

Peter AU1 , Aug 25 2020 15:59 utc | 28
Circe 19

In his previous Navalny article, b referenced this in the update.
https://www.intellinews.com/doctors-deny-navalny-poisoned-but-refuse-to-let-him-leave-190208/
"Navalny said himself that he suffered from diabetes in 2019, giving some credence to this explanation."

This is the source a few other articles on the net also quote from, but where did it come from. I spent some time searching for other earlier references to Navalny having diabetes but could not find any.

c1ue , Aug 25 2020 16:20 utc | 31
@vk #3
Why do you believe that the EU and/or Germany wish to expand eastward when their economy is in deep recession and they already have 45 million Ukrainians for cheap labor?

I would note that even East Germany is lagging West Germany in terms of economic progress since reunification, which itself was incredibly expensive. Ukraine isn't a great example either of neither economic progress nor contributing integration into the EU.

Gary , Aug 25 2020 16:35 utc | 32
From southfront:
The air travel between Russia and Germany is mostly suspended due to coronavirus limitations. The flight to Germany was organized by the Berlin-based Cinema for Peace Foundation. The flight was paid by businessman Boris Zimin. Boris Zimin is the son of Dmitry Zimin – the founder of VimpelCom (Beeline telecommunications brand).

PJSC VimpelCom is the third-largest wireless and second-largest telecom operator in Russia. It is wholly owned by VEON Ltd. through which it is linked to Mikhail Fridman, Russian Western-linked business magnate. Fridman's Alfa Group Consortium is among the main shareholders of VEON Ltd.

These persons and entities represent the Russian influence group linked to the global finance. The very same group has links and support work of think tanks affiliated with the Higher School of Economics, the center of the Alma Mater of the liberal economic block of the Russian government. Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobanin and Chairwoman of the Bank of Russia Elvira Nabiullina also could be considered a part of the global finance in Russia.

In Russian media, this network of Western-linked persons, organizations, influence groups and top officials is often described as the 'liberal tower' of the Kremlin. Thus, despite the image of the opposition figure, Navalny receives support from the highest levels of the Russian governance and business systems.

William Gruff , Aug 25 2020 16:37 utc | 33
c1ue @31

Capitalists are desperate for markets, not cheap labor.

vk , Aug 25 2020 16:45 utc | 34
@ Posted by: c1ue | Aug 25 2020 16:20 utc | 31

1) the plan was never to make the DDR prosperous. On the contrary: too much people living prosperously is damaging to capitalist expansion;

2) that's the pattern of recent EU expansion, with the latest great batch of new members coming from ex-Yugoslavia and the Iron Curtain (why not, for example, insisting on the accession of Norway and Switzerland, which are much richer and culturally alike countries?);

3) besides the huge pool of cheap and relatively well-educated labor power (which can be imported to Germany proper, thus rising unemployment rates, thus eroding the power of the mighty German unions), there's the pot of gold of the old communist infrastructure (water, electricity, communications, education, healthcare), which is already centralized and thus would result in monopolistic rent for the German capitalists who will inevitably buy them in a privatization process (as happened with Slovakia);

4) Belarus is the natural springboard to invade Russia, thus increasing Germany's leverage within NATO.

Stonebird , Aug 25 2020 16:58 utc | 35
William Gruff | Aug 25 2020 14:14 utc | 15

Thanks for the reply. - Even if Navalny was suffering from a "manque" of his favourite substance, the Germans and others would not mention it. He would not have had (much ?) trace in his blood either.

pnyx , Aug 25 2020 17:25 utc | 38
Esteemed B, I am still waiting for a source reference for Navalnys diabetes. It is still important to get the information confirmed. His environment says that he did not consume anything except the tea. That would be a very risky behavior for a diabetic in itself.
Whether a diabetic shock can be ruled out due to the cholinesterase problem, which can probably be considered certain after it has been confirmed by two hospitals, I cannot judge. You seem to assume that.

The way Merkel and other politicians immediately jumped on the poisoning thesis is reminiscent of May's reaction in the Skripal case. It is difficult not to become suspicious.

Virgile , Aug 25 2020 17:25 utc | 39
I am sure there are more effective ways to assassinate a diabetic man. Who ever did it is an amateur.
karlof1 , Aug 25 2020 17:26 utc | 40
I dwell on the words Navalny spoke in Tomsk to his crew, about him becoming a martyr and it not helping Putin, then his trauma on the following day. Yes, the observation about the tea at the airport is of great importance. The time between its ingestion and boarding the plane is similarly important IF he was administered a toxic agent via that tea. And if he's diabetic or even pre-diabetic, there's a suite of meds he'd need to take daily if not requiring insulin, and those meds must be ingested with food--I know.

I imagine all security camera footage of his time at Tomsk airport has been scrutinized, the result being the Kremlin's ruling no investigation's warranted. That decision's good enough for me.

Peter AU1 , Aug 25 2020 17:32 utc | 41
karlof1

navalny's words the day before about being a hero if Putin killed him is I think key. Russia seems to produce a few Rasputin types - like the clown that nailed his balls to the pavement.
Seen some photos of Navalny when he was younger and his eyes looked normal. Those wide open staring eyes in selfies and so forth in recent years give more than a hint of madness.

Clueless Joe , Aug 25 2020 17:37 utc | 42
I agree with Karlof1. If Navalny is diabetic, he seems a bit careless to me to just drink a tea all morning. He should eat something according to his diet and probably take some meds as well (if the disease isn't at a very early stage).
Beibdnn , Aug 25 2020 17:38 utc | 43
@ Gadzooks 5

Nuclear or conventional ' a minor point '.

That has to be one of the most absurd, ill considered and ridiculous comments I've ever read.

IF the explosion had been caused by a nuclear weapon, the world would very possibly be in a Niclear winter right now.

Not to mention there wouldn't be much of Lebanon and surrounding area left...

Paco , Aug 25 2020 17:50 utc | 44
Posted by: Peter AU1 | Aug 25 2020 17:32 utc | 41

To compare Pavlensky to Rasputin is not proportional. The monk was the victim of the British services and has been thoroughly discredited and demonized, by the same guys that killed him. Check out the movie about Rasputin's life with no other than Gerard Depardieu. Rasputin had the Tsarina's ear and he was against Russia going to war, the first world war, and that was the main motive to eliminate him.
Pavlensky on the other hand is a freak useful to the empire propaganda on a condom basis, use and throw away, just like the Pussy Riots, always referred to as the punk group, a group that never issued a first album, save for a couple of clips on youtube after leaving Russia. Freaks of that caliber are a dime a dozen everywhere, but since they are useful to discredit Russia, well then they are endowed with media attention, and even Hillary receiving one of the Riots member, Tolokonnikova, the one that being pregnant engaged in a public orgy, another one of the group hits was introducing a frozen chicken into a members vagina. Pavlensky was hailed as a hero for burning the FSB building entrance door, the feared Lyubianka. He tried the same trick with the gates of the Bank of France, and he was sent to a psychiatric ward, with no media noise at all. If that would have occurred back in Moscow we would be still hearing and reading about psychiatric torture back to the good old days of the Soviet Union.

CitizenX , Aug 25 2020 17:52 utc | 45
Russia did it. Evil Putin ordered it. Horrible China sponsored it. Iran backed it. Hezbollah played a hand as well.

Thank Glorious God for the Indispensable Nation of American Exceptionalism. Rescuing the world from evil dictators and conspiring theorists plots. Evil doers who hate OUR way of life stand no chance against the Glorious Christians and their Honorable Zionist gatekeepers.

Thanks and Glory to American Gods that Juan Guaido is now the President of Venezuela. Soon the Zionist will offer their Chosen Ones to replace Evil Dictators.

Thanks and praise to MOA for shining Gods Light and dancing on Western narratives giving them validity against the Evil doers of Poison and injustice.

Trump and Pence are "Men of the Bible" seeking out injustice and filling the world with Christian values of Bro Love and world Peace. May all you Christians take a knee and pray for these Mens souls and the Soul of America for leading the way to righteousness. Oh yeah- and pray for whatever the fuck his name is Nirvany Nalvinny poisoned guy.

pretzelattack , Aug 25 2020 18:19 utc | 49
they like to reuse the same propaganda memes over and over. Russian bounties to the Taliban become Iranian bounties to the Taliban, Novichok becomes cholinesterase inhibitor, rinse and repeat.
Nathna Mulcahy , Aug 25 2020 18:39 utc | 58
As the collective west, including Germany, proceed to fabricate another "highly likely" Putin play, may I ask what they have been doing while the collective west has buried Julian Assange alive? Hypocricy is a much too weak word for it.
CHRIS ZELL , Aug 25 2020 18:43 utc | 60
I find fault with this poison idea. Whether Skripals or this guy, why can't Russians competently kill somebody? It can't be that difficult.

Also, did his aide give him the tea? How was the poisoning supposedly engineered?

vk , Aug 25 2020 18:49 utc | 61
@ Posted by: Circe | Aug 25 2020 18:36 utc | 57

Navalny's still alive.

--//--

@ Posted by: Clueless Joe | Aug 25 2020 17:37 utc | 42

There's an extreme treatment for diabetics type 2, where you live in a near state of starvation for months. In some mild cases, it is stated to cure diabetes.

Navalny could be going through this treatment, hence just a cup of tea (there are many teas famous for cutting the appetite) in the morning.

William Gruff , Aug 25 2020 18:49 utc | 62
CHRIS ZELL @60 True.

If the Russians are really trying to assassinate, why do it in so theatrical a manner? Just shoot him twice in the back of the head and call it suicide like the Americans do.

Richard Steven Hack , Aug 25 2020 18:52 utc | 63
August 24, 2020 Expert reaction to statement from Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin hospital that Alexei Navalny may have been poisoned with a substance from the group of cholinesterase inhibitor

I've seen this site before - they post statements from various medical people on matters of public medical interest, such as the pandemic. Useful for people who want some background on the chemicals involved.

Posted by: Circe | Aug 25 2020 16:14 utc | 29

Yup. Just ran across that piece while searching for anything on Navalny having diabetes. Found nothing so far beyond that. b's source appears to be the only one mentioning any diabetes in Navalny's medical history. Apparently his personal doctor has denied this, saying that the "diabetes" issue appears to have more a "description" of his medical condition rather than an actual diagnosis.

Posted by: karlof1 | Aug 25 2020 17:26 utc | 40 And if he's diabetic or even pre-diabetic, there's a suite of meds he'd need to take daily if not requiring insulin, and those meds must be ingested with food--I know.

Yes, Metformin is the preferred drug. I started on twice a day, then once I lost 45 pounds, the doctor dropped me to one a day. In fact, now I could stop taking it, but I continue to do so because it has alleged anti-aging properties. The only real negative is that it leeches vitamin B-12 from the body - but I take tons of B-12 anyway, so doesn't concern me. Metformin usually needs to be taken with food because otherwise it tends to give you "the runs".

I found an article that says the following:

Russian news agency Interfax later quoted officials in Omsk as saying tests had identified the presence of an industrial chemical in his body.

Russia's Ministry of Internal Affairs told the agency that since the substance they claim was present is commonly used to increase plasticity in products, "it is possible that it could appear in surface washings through the contact of Alexei Navalny with similar objects, for example, through a plastic cup".

Studies have previously shown that the chemical officials were referring to - 2-ethylhexyl diphenyl phosphate - does not have a strong toxic effect on humans.

So it appears from the articles so far that initially the police detected that specific chemical, but medical experts ruled it out as a cause, merely a by-product of having drunk from a plastic cup.

This article discusses the term "metabolic disease", clarifying that it doesn't necessarily mean diabetes.

Bottom line: There is no evidence Navalny had diabetes, although he might well have had either Type 2 or Type 1 diabetes but never diagnosed. However, if he was in a diabetic coma, that should have been detected almost immediately, even by first responders in the ambulance. Beyond that, it appears that whatever chemical was the cause of his condition, it's likely undetectable now.

So another "nothing-burger" which will be seized on to drum up hysteria against Russia. And I've spent *way* too much time on this irrelevant crap.

Peter AU1 , Aug 25 2020 19:05 utc | 64
Richard Steven Hack

At your age, you should take an interest in dissecting and studying insects. Re coma from undiagnosed diabetes. From what I can find, that would be due to high blood sugar, whereas a diagnosed patient taking meds can be hit with low blood sugar if carbohydrates and insulin are not matched.

karlof1 , Aug 25 2020 19:13 utc | 65
We need a timeline showing when tea drunk; when airplane boarded; when Navalny went to loo on plane. Video showing his demeanor as he boarded would be great. It's been said his stomach was empty except for the tea, so anything in that tea presumably would have acted quickly, prior to his boarding. Or there was nothing in the tea and Navalny injured himself -- or was injured by someone during the walk in the jet-way from the terminal to the plane. Security Video?
Peter AU1 , Aug 25 2020 19:37 utc | 68
karlof1

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8654453/Pictured-Vladimir-Putins-arch-foe-Alexei-Navalny-minutes-collapsing-suspected-poisoning.html
"The opposition leader posed with the female supporter moments before taking his seat on a flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow on Thursday."

"Mr Navalny drank a cup of tea at a cafe inside Tomsk airport, which his supporters suspect had been poisoned because it was all he ate or drank that morning."

"The saleswoman, who did not want to be identified, said one of Mr Navalny's entourage bought the tea at the counter and took it to him at the table."

Lurk , Aug 25 2020 20:18 utc | 76
The long delay between administration of the poison and the onset of effects AND the apparent nonlethatity are clear evidence of novichok. Case closed.
William Gruff , Aug 25 2020 20:25 utc | 77
Lurk @77

Precisely four hours between contact with novichok and onset of symptoms, regardless of victim age, weight, health, and quantity of novichok contacted. It is a truly amazing chemical weapon, though not very practical for battlefield use.

cj , Aug 25 2020 20:29 utc | 78
Hi B,

testing for circulating cholinesterase activity is very simple-- a chromogenic assay with acetyl thiocholine and DTNB. So its the first thing you would do in a case like this. In the case of a nerve agent there should be no circulating activity. The Russians must have known this.

So the question is now -- is there anything stuck to the active site serine of the enzyme-- an adduct. This one for Porton Down -- they will find it probably by immunoprecipitation and mass spectrometry and they ought to get the mass and some structural data on the toxin. Clinically, he should have had a bradycardia and excess secretions and pupils constricted. Doesn't sound like that. The question is can we trust the West to be truthful here. After various OPCW fiascos I doubt it.
CJ

William Gruff , Aug 25 2020 20:46 utc | 80
jared @80

Whenever Navalny does end up dying the Russian government will be blamed anyway, so if they wanted him dead then why not just blow him up with some missiles like the US did with General Soleimani? Why not just arrest him, claim he resisted arrest, then shoot him like happens with so many people in the US?

This talk about him being targeted by the Russian government using obscure toxins that don't work is beyond silly.

Digital Spartacus , Aug 25 2020 21:04 utc | 81
Due to Navalny's dealings in Tomsk, this smells more of a bid to leave the country. Orchestrations set in place by Germany suggests an asset that has run his course, but they can't leave him in country to deal with any complications of him being taken by someone else. This doesn't feel like state acting....or at least not the Russian state. Gruff is right, this isn't targeting by the Russians. Navalny hasn't been relevant in Russian circles since at least 2012-13 if he was even then.
vk , Aug 25 2020 21:05 utc | 82
I don't understand why people commenting here still insist on playing CSI Miami. The Russian doctors have already publicly stated their own lab results showed absolutely no signs of Cholinesterase Inhibitors. As in evidence of zero CI - not zero evidence of CI:

Russian Doctors Deny Navalny Had Traces, Symptoms of Cholinesterase Inhibitors Poisoning

"Upon his admission to the [Omsk] hospital, Alexey Navalny was tested on a wide range of narcotics, synthetic substances, psychodiletics and medicinal substances, including cholinesterase inhibitors -- all tests came back negative ," Sabayev said in a press statement, as quoted by the Omsk Ministry of Health.

No cholinesterase inhibitors were used, according to the Russian lab results. It's not that they didn't test Navalny for the substances - they did and they came out negative.

Sabayev even called the Germans' bluff:

"Additionally, Navalny lacked symptoms specific of the poisoning with cholinesterase inhibitors substances . As we said earlier, we are ready to share Alexey Navalny's samples with our German colleagues for examination ," the health official [Sabayev] added.

MoA's own German source state the lab tests in Germany were carried out by "independent laboratories". They most likely are in BND's control, in one way or the other. Many Western European nations have constitutional clauses that allow their respective governments (usually, at the discretion of the executive) to intervene directly on the private sector in specific occasions, normally under "national security" reasons. The executive of the British government, for example, has a legal device that allows it to outright censor (without the need for legislative approval) any specific information from all the British media outlets. I'm sure modern Germany also has many constitutional clauses that allow its government and intelligence agencies to intervene anywhere, anytime in the German economy instantly and covertly, under the umbrella of national security.

As I predicted, the Russians aren't that stupid. They stored some blood samples from Navalny, and they know, for sure, that he wasn't poisoned with CIs. That's why Peskov was so direct, so sudden and so confident when he declared the Kremlin was in no hurry - because they saw no reason - to initiate an investigation on Navalny's sudden health problems. And he also called the German bluff ("If the substance is established and if it is established that this is poisoning, then, of course, this will be a cause for investigation", i.e. there won't be an investigation because there's no poison).

farm ecologist , Aug 25 2020 22:13 utc | 89
It is known that activation of acetylcholine receptors (specifically M3 muscarinic receptors) in the pancreas promotes insulin release into the bloodstream, which consequently would tend to decrease blood glucose.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11588141/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1550413106001598?via%3Dihub

It's therefore possible that hypoglycemia could be triggered by increased acetylcholine levels (drug-induced or otherwise). This would be less likely to occur in diabetics, as such individuals would be deficient in either the ability to produce (type 1 diabetes) or respond (type 2 diabetes) to insulin.

Jen , Aug 25 2020 23:07 utc | 92
From Ekonomika Segodnya:
Anastasiya Brotskaya (24 August 2020): "Charite suspected of unprofessionalism because of conclusions on Navalny"

Dmitri Petrovsky, a doctor of medical sciences, a surgeon and deputy of the municipality of Yaroslavl, questioned the competence of German doctors who said that blogger Alexei Navalny had been poisoned.

Doctors [treating] Navalny [at] the German clinic "Charité" reported on Monday, August 24, about the presence in the body of the blogger substance, part of the group of inhibitors cholinesterase. According to them, this indicates the poisoning of the head of the Anti-Corruption Foundation (recognized as a foreign agent).

Dmitri Petrovsky, M.D., surgeon and deputy of the municipality of Yaroslavl, commented on the statement of German medics.

"What they found in Navalny cholinesterase inhibitors after being in intensive care is normal. They should be in the man who was in intensive care and was on ventilator. And if the doctor finds them in the analysis of the person after a stay in the operating room and concludes that he was poisoned, then the conclusion is: either it is a political order, or an illiterate doctor," the expert said.

According to public figure Ernest Makarenko, the hospitalization of Navalny in ["Charité"] is nothing but a political matter. Omsk doctors coped perfectly with the blogger's treatment, but to make Navalny a "victim", he had to be defiantly taken to the West, the expert added.

Readers will need to use Google Translate.

In other words, if Navalny had not been found to have cholinesterase inhibitors in his body after being treated in an ICU with intubation, then the doctors at the Omsk hospital who initially treated him hadn't been doing their job properly.

Jen , Aug 25 2020 23:21 utc | 94
Aha - found MPN's comment @ 12, clicked on the link to Elena Evdokimova's tweets and then clicked on a link she provides and here is another article (from Zhurnalistskaya Pravda)
on Dmitri Petrovsky's comments about Navalny's treatment in Germany.

"Dmitry Petrovsky: Charite Clinic shows amateurism in conclusions on Navalny"

What they found in Navalny cholinesterase inhibitors after being in intensive care is normal. They should be in the man who was in intensive care and was on ventilator. If they weren't there, it would be strange, I'd be surprised.

Tonight, doctors of the German clinic "Charite" found in the blood of blogger Alexei Navalny substance, which, in their opinion, could provoke his illness, and hastened to announce the poisoning. However, in Russian practice, this substance is widely used to prevent disorders that developing in patients on ventilator.

German doctors found in Navalny substance - cholinesterase inhibitor.

"The effect of the toxin, i.e. the inhibition of cholinesterase in the body, has been proven several times in independent laboratories. According to the diagnosis, the patient is treated with an antidote to atropine. The outcome of the disease remains unsafe and the subsequent effects, especially in the nervous system, cannot be ruled out at this time," the statement obtained by Izvestia reads.

Deputy of the municipality of Yaroslavl, M.D., surgeon Dmitry Petrovsky commented on this "find" of German colleagues.

"Cholinesterase inhibitors are widely used medicines in medicine. Basically, they are used in the postoperative management of patients, when transferring to independent breathing. That's what Navalny had. He was first on ventilator and when trying to translate it, could use the drug Proserin. It is a cholinesterase inhibitor that is officially administered to all patients when transferred to independent breathing. It must be used. I think it was used. But I also understand that, most likely, he had to shine as Proserin's German colleagues. Perhaps used not Proserin in its pure form, but another drug, more rare - Ubretide, which is also an absolutely official drug, which is used in intensive care, in postoperative practice to prevent bladder atony, to prevent bowel atony and, accordingly, widely used. But, I admit, it can be used little in Germany, and it was not in the toxicology kit, so they could be surprised, and because of this all the cheese-bor.

What they found in Navalny cholinesterase inhibitors after being in intensive care is normal. They should be in the man who was in intensive care and was on ventilator. If they weren't there, it would be strange, I'd be surprised.

When a person breathes with the help of the ventilator, various disorders develop, including respiratory, cardiovascular, with the intestines, with the bladder. Various drugs are used to prevent these disorders, including cholinesterase inhibitors. And if the doctor finds them in the analysis of the person after a stay in the operating room and concludes that he was poisoned, then the conclusion is: either it is a political order, or an illiterate doctor."

Perhaps next time Navalny is in Russia and has a seizure or a collapse requiring IC treatment and intubation, hospital staff should just arrange to send him to the closest international airport and phone Charité to collect him as he is.

Thanks MPN for the link to Evdokimova's tweets.

karlof1 , Aug 25 2020 23:52 utc | 96
Jen @93 & 95--

Thanks for providing those! IMO, sometime after the Skripal kidnapping a memo was sent to all Russian medical personnel about the handling of known dissidents -- to use kid gloves and a fine tooth comb whilst saving all fluids taken for testing and using an impeccable evidence chain, for that's what's related by the doctor. I'd like to think such attention to detail is usual practice in Russia.

Thom Prentice , Aug 25 2020 23:55 utc | 97
He has diabetes. He ate nothing but tea. Ergo diabetic shock. Qed.
james , Aug 26 2020 0:59 utc | 98
i recommend a new ''military grade chemical agent" Novichok in honour of Alexey Navalny... maybe alexeychok is better... it has a nice malevolent russian ring to it!

[Aug 27, 2020] US Senator demonizes Russia 'as supporting thugs' and 'undermining democracy' in bid to lure India closer to US and its Quad alliance

Aug 27, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

ET AL August 26, 2020 at 1:32 am

Vis earlier posts about the US pressuring India to limit ties with Russia:

Asia Times: US aiming to break Russia's hold on India
https://asiatimes.com/2020/08/us-aiming-to-break-russias-hold-on-india/

US Senator demonizes Russia 'as supporting thugs' and 'undermining democracy' in bid to lure India closer to US and its Quad alliance

The Nikkei Asian Review, well known for its anti-China reportage, featured an article 0n the weekend titled "India should ignore Putin's offer to broker accord with China."

The author is none other than Marco Rubio, the high-flying Republican senator from Florida and the acting chairman of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, co-chairman of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China and a ranking member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. ..
####

Rubio, Rubio, you're the big boob-io!

Is Modhi too polite to tell the US to f/o and the US takes this as encouragement to keep making 'suggestions'? I wonder at which point the penny will drop and Washington will stop this stupid behavior?

MARK CHAPMAN August 26, 2020 at 2:54 pm

Rubio is high, I'll give him that; I don't know about high-flying. It has become political gold in America to say something insulting about Russia or its leader, or both, and much of the drooling electorate responds positively. America being the nation of the shortsighted and the instant-gratification fans, it is hard to see down the road to here such behavior might cost it, and for right now it sure is fun.

Washington obviously thinks it is irreplaceable as a trade partner, because it keeps dangling the "If you want to do business with us, you'll do as we say" ultimatum, which it evidently believes is persuasive. It remains to be seen if other countries are going to abase themselves for money. They might; it is a powerful incentive. But the USA is defining 'loyalty' in a whole new context, suspiciously like the collecting of 'vassals' as described by Putin. Saying you will do as you are told by Washington now implies that you will stay bought, no matter how wiggy American policies become.

I think most traditional US allies will stay on the fence for as long as they can, hoping for some idea of the direction the USA intends to take. But its debt is dragging it down and down, and its squalling that it must do every deal so that it is to America's advantage makes it less and less a desirable commercial partner.


[Aug 27, 2020] Everything that happens which the west finds irritating or uncomfortable to explain is the work of Russian hackers or bots. Simple.

Aug 27, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

ET AL August 25, 2020 at 10:52 am

Euractiv mit Neuters: Russian-backed organisations amplifying QAnon conspiracy theories, researchers say
https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/eu-calls-for-independent-transparent-probe-into-navalny-case/

Russian government-supported organisations are playing a small but increasing role amplifying conspiracy theories promoted by QAnon, raising concerns of interference in the November US election.
####

Yes, yet again new data/analytics shitpad Graphika (where Ben 'Russia is Evil' Nimmo an expert at the Atlantic Council* shakes his butt) is being used as a source.

I haven't bothered to look at the timing of the cycles when the western propaganda efforts decide to bring on stream a new bs site to peddle their rubbish, but I suppose that now Bell-End Cat is more widely known to be NATO affiliated/whatever, an opening for another 'honest' data/fact driven organization that the PPNN can quote laundered fake intel is required. One thing in common is that they are all new but have some old hands on deck.

* https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/expert/ben-nimmo/

https://graphika.com/posts/graphika-welcomes-industry-expert-ben-nimmo-to-the-team/

https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Ben_Nimmo

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/498911-rt-accused-qanon-msm-conspiracy/

counts among its ranks such luminaries as Ben Nimmo, perhaps best known for baselessly accusing British and Finnish citizens of being Russian bots. Nimmo, who remains a senior non-resident fellow at pro-war NATO-backed think tank Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab and has also worked with the UK government's secretive Integrity Initiative, was hired by Graphika last year as its Head of Investigations, suggesting the company values a vivid imagination over factual accuracy

MARK CHAPMAN August 25, 2020 at 3:21 pm

Yawn. Everything that happens which the west finds irritating or uncomfortable to explain is the work of Russian hackers or bots. Simples.

[Aug 27, 2020] 2020 elections will be China against Russia

Aug 27, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Commenting on the spotlight that U.S. intelligence officials have placed on both countries' interference efforts (along with Iran's), Pelosi and Schiff declared that the analysis "provided a false sense of equivalence to the actions of foreign adversaries by listing three countries of unequal operational intent, actions, and capabilities together."

In particular, they charged, the actions of Kremlin-linked actors seeking to undermine Vice President Biden, and seeking to help President Trump" were glossed over.

Pelosi stated subsequently, "The Chinese, they said, prefer (presumptive Democratic nominee Joe) Biden -- we don't know that, but that's what they're saying, but they're not really getting involved in the presidential election."

... ... ...

Also alleging that Chinese agents are increasingly active on major social media platforms -- a study from research institute Freedom House, which reported that :

"[C]hinese state-affiliated trolls are apparently operating on [Twitter] in large numbers. In the hours and days after Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted in support of Hong Kong protesters in October 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported, nearly 170,000 tweets were directed at Morey by users who seemed to be based in China as part of a coordinated intimidation campaign. Meanwhile, there have been multiple suspected efforts by pro-Beijing trolls to manipulate the ranking of content on popular sources of information outside China, including Google's search engine Reddit,and YouTube."

Last year, a major Hoover Institution report issued especially disturbing findings about Beijing's efforts to influence the views (and therefore the votes) of Chinese Americans, including exploiting the potential hostage status of their relatives in China. According to the Hoover researchers:

"Among the Chinese American community, China has long sought to influence -- even silence -- voices critical of the PRC or supportive of Taiwan by dispatching personnel to the United States to pressure these individuals and while also pressuring their relatives in China. Beijing also views Chinese Americans as members of a worldwide Chinese diaspora that presumes them to retain not only an interest in the welfare of China but also a loosely defined cultural, and even political, allegiance to the so-called Motherland."

In addition: "In the American media, China has all but eliminated the plethora of independent Chinese-language media outlets that once served Chinese American communities. It has co-opted existing Chinese language outlets and established its own new outlets."

Operations aimed at Chinese Americans are anything but trivial politically. As of 2018, they represented nearly 2.6 million eligible U.S. voters, and they belonged to an Asian-American super-category that reflects the fastest growing racial and ethnic population of eligible voters in the country.

Most live in heavily Democratic states, like California, New York, and Massachusetts, but significant concentrations are also found in the battleground states where many of the 2016 presidential election margins were razor thin, and many of which look up for grabs this year, like Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

More broadly, according to the Hoover study:

"In American federal and state politics, China seeks to identify and cultivate rising politicians. Like many other countries, Chinese entities employ prominent lobbying and public relations firms and cooperate with influential civil society groups. These activities complement China's long-standing support of visits to China by members of Congress and their staffs. In some rare instances Beijing has used private citizens and companies to exploit loopholes in US regulations that prohibit direct foreign contributions to elections."

But even more thoroughly overlooked than these narrower forms of Chinese political interference is a broader, much more dangerous type of Chinese meddling that leaves Moscow's efforts in the dust. For example, U.S.-owned multinational companies, which have long profited at the expense of the domestic economy by offshoring production and jobs to China, have just as long carried Beijing's water in American politics through their massive contributions to U.S. political campaigns. The same goes for Wall Street, which hasn't sent many U.S. operations overseas, but which has long hungered for permission to do more business in the Chinese market.

These same big businesses continually and surreptitiously inject their views into American political debates by heavily financing leading think tanks -- which garb their special interest agendas in the raiment of objective scholarship.

Hollywood and the rest of the U.S. entertainment industry has become so determined to brown nose China in search of profits that it's made nearly routine rewriting and censoring material deemed offensive to China.

... ... ...

Alan Tonelson is the founder of RealityChek, a public policy blog focusing on economics and national security, and the author of The Race to the Bottom .

[Aug 25, 2020] An Open Letter to Strobe Talbott About RussiaGate by Tom Couser

RussiaGate is about MIC, Intelligence agencies and Dem leadership need to have an enemy to milt taxpayers and retain power and military budget. Nothing personal, strictly business.
Aug 25, 2020 | www.antiwar.com

Tom Couser Posted on August 20, 2020

I met Strobe Talbott in 1968 when he and I were graduate students at Magdalen College, Oxford. I liked him and respected him, and after we lost touch as friends, I followed his career at Time , the State Department, and the Brookings Institution with admiration. In recent years, however, I've become disillusioned with the foreign policy he advocated with regard to Russia and was disturbed to learn of his involvement in the genesis of the Russiagate narrative.

August 3, 2020

Dear Strobe,

It has been a long time – a very long time – since we've been in touch, but I assume you remember me from 1968, when we met at Magdalen College, Oxford. Having just graduated from Yale, you were there on a Rhodes Scholarship; I was on a Reynold Scholarship granted by my alma mater, Dartmouth. Despite your three-barreled WASP name (Nelson Strobridge Talbott) and your distinguished pedigree (son of a Yale football captain, Hotchkiss alum, etc.) you were unpretentious, and we made friends quickly.

Despite assurances from my draft board that I would not be drafted that year, I got an induction notice on Nixon's inauguration day. You were the first person I consulted. Safe from the draft, like most Rhodes Scholars, you listened sympathetically. We were together in our opposition to the War if not in our vulnerability to the draft.

You and I played the occasional game of squash. And when my Dartmouth fraternity brother and Rhodes Scholar John Isaacson injured your eye with his racket, I visited you in the Radcliffe Infirmary during your convalescence. I was reading Tristram Shandy as part of my program, and one day I read some bits to you. You seemed to share my amusement; I can still see you smiling in your hospital bed with a big patch on one eye. When your father came from Ohio to visit you, he invited me, along with your Yale classmate Rob Johnson out to dinner at the Bear.

You had majored in Russian at Yale and were writing a thesis on some topic in Russian literature, Mayakovsky, perhaps? At any rate, you seemed committed to Russian studies. (Little did I know.) When I chose to take a student tour behind the Iron Curtain during the spring vac, you gave me some reading suggestions and advised me to dress warmly. Having packed for England's relatively mild climate, I lacked a warm enough coat; you generously loaned me your insulated car coat, which served me well in Russia's raw spring cold.

You likely debriefed me after my travels; I must have passed on to you my sense of the Soviet Union as a very drab place with a demoralized, often drunk, population, and a general sense of repression. Which is not to say that I didn't enjoy my trip – just that I was struck by the stark differences at the time between the West and the East. How lucky I was to have been born in the "free world."

The tour returned from Moscow and St. Petersburg via Ukraine and Czechoslovakia. In Prague, just after the brutal suppression of Prague Spring, we were acutely aware of how hated the Russians were. This just reinforced my distaste for what Ronald Reagan later termed the Evil empire – perhaps the only thing he said I ever agreed with. So, like you, I was staunchly anti-Communist at the time.

The next year, you got a gig polishing the text of Nikita Krushchev's memoirs, which had been smuggled out of Russia. The publisher put you up in an "undisclosed location," which you let on was the Commodore Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts; we met for coffee in Harvard Square with friends of yours, possibly including Brooke Shearer whom you later married, and one of her brothers, Cody or Derek. It may have been then that I drove you to the school where I was teaching on a deferment, Kimball Union Academy in central New Hampshire; you stayed overnight before returning to civilization.

Your second year, you moved into a house with Bill Clinton and two other Rhodes Scholars.

During the next few years – the early 70s – you and I exchanged occasional letters. After that, the rest is history: your illustrious career – as a journalist at Time , then as a Russia hand and Deputy Secretary of State Department in the Clinton administration, and then as president of the Brookings Institution – was easy to follow in the media.

Eventually our paths diverged, I lost touch with you, with one exception.

In the mid-1990s, while you were serving at State, a close friend asked me to ask you to do her a favor. I hate asking for favors, even for myself, and resent those who use connections to advance themselves. But all my friend needed was for a senior State official to sign off on a job application of some sort. I phoned your office from mine. I got a frosty reception from your administrative assistant, who was justifiably protective of your time, but she put me through. You recognized my voice, sounded glad to be in touch, and granted the favor. It never came to anything, but I remember how pleased I was even to have such a brief task-oriented phone encounter with you after a lapse of two decades.

In any case, over the next several decades I followed your career with interest and was pleased with your success.

As I was by that of another member of the Oxford cohort, Bob Reich, another fraternity brother of mine. We were not close, and I saw him less often in Oxford than I saw you. But you and he both wound up in the Clinton administration – the Oxford troika, I like to call you. You and Bob were doing what Rhodes Scholars were supposed to do: go into professions, network, and perform public service. The Rhodes to success. Never a whiff of scandal about either of you. You, Strobe, were very much what we Dartmouth men referred to as a straight arrow.

So why am I writing you now, after all these years? And why a public letter?

In part, because I have become progressively more critical of the foreign policy that you have advocated. Early on you were advocating disarmament. Good. And closer relations with the Soviet Union. Also good. Indeed, you were regarded as something of a Russophile (never a compliment). But while you initially resisted the expansion of NATO, you eventually went along with it. Like George Kennan, I consider that decision to be a serious mistake (and a breach of a promise not to expand NATO "one inch" to the east after Germany was reunited).

When the Cold War ended, the Warsaw Pact dissolved. NATO did not; instead, it expanded eastward to include former Warsaw Pact members and SSRs until today it borders Russia. Russia resistance to this is inevitably denounced in the West as "Russian aggression." Hence the tension in Ukraine today. You're not personally responsible for all of this of course. But you are deeply implicated in what seems to me a gratuitously provocative, indeed imperialistic, foreign policy.

Two old friends could amicably agree disagree on that, as I disagree with virtually all my liberal friends.

But your loyalty to the Clintons has apparently extended to involvement in generating the Russiagate narrative, which has exacerbated tensions between Russia and the USA and spread paranoia in the Democratic establishment and mainstream media. I am always disturbed by the hypocrisy of Americans who complain about foreign meddling in our elections, when the USA is the undisputed champ in that event. Indeed, we go beyond meddling (Yeltsin's reelection in 1996) to actual coups, not to mention regime-change wars.

My concern about this has come to a head with the recent revelation of your complicity in the dissemination of the Steele dossier, whose subsource, Igor Danchenko, was a Russian national employed by Brookings.

I don't know which is worse: that you and your colleagues at Brookings believed the dossier's unfounded claims, or that you didn't but found it politically useful in the attempt to subvert the Trump campaign and delegitimize his election. I suspect the latter. But doesn't this implicate you in the creation of a powerful Russophobic narrative in contemporary American politics that has demonized Putin and needlessly ramped up tension between two nuclear powers?

A lifelong Democrat who voted for Bill twice and Hillary once, I am no fan of Trump or of Putin. But Russiagate has served as a distraction from Hillary's responsibility for her catastrophic defeat and from the real weaknesses of the neoliberal Democratic Party, with its welfare "reform," crime bill, and abandonment of its traditional working-class base.

Moreover, in and of itself, the Russiagate story represents what Matt Taibbi has called this generation's WMD media scandal. The narrative, challenged from the beginning by a few intrepid independent journalists like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Aaron Maté, and the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, is now being further undermined by the declassification of documents by the Senate. If, as I have recently read, you were active in disseminating the Steele dossier, you have contributed to the mainstream media's gas-lighting of the American public – liberals, at least (like most of my friends). Ironically, then, you have given credence to Trump's often, but not always, false charge: "Fake News." Once described as a Russophile, you now seem complicit in the creation of a nation-wide paranoid and hysterical Russophobia and neo-McCarthyism.

Say it ain't so, Strobe!

So long, old friend,

Tom Couser

[Aug 24, 2020] Announcement- Half a Pulitzer Prize to the Wall Street Journal by Ron Unz

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Wall Street Journal ..."
"... It therefore appears that elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency were aware of the deadly viral outbreak in Wuhan more than a month before any officials in the Chinese government itself. ..."
Aug 24, 2020 | www.unz.com

Half a Pulitzer Prize to the Wall Street Journal RON UNZ AUGUST 23, 2020 1,800 WORDS 11 COMMENTS REPLY Tweet Reddit Share Share Email Print More RSS

For forty years I carefully read the New York Times in hard copy each and every morning, eager to discover what had transpired since the previous day. But just in the last few months, my commitment has begun to flag, and my eyes often only lightly glance at half or more of the articles and their columnar headlines.

I'd never thought much of Donald Trump, but can't seem to work up the enthusiasm to read yet another article headlining the "lies" of our Great Satan or his coterie of lesser Satans. The endless villainies of his Luciferian ally Vladimir Putin have grown dull to my mental tongue. The diabolical wickedness of China, whom Trump had supposedly so recently courted, elicits little interest. Closer to home, my eyes skip over another "social distancing" advice column about Covid-19, or further explanations of how "peaceful protesters" had recently set a government building on fire in Portland, Oregon, or destroyed Chicago's wealthiest downtown shopping district.

The Business Section reports that the worst disease outbreak in a century, the worst unemployment since the Great Depression, and the worst national rioting in two generations has produced unprecedented gains in share prices on Wall Street, but the staff writers have apparently forgotten the word "bubble." Many days the Arts Section seems to have become almost monochromatically black. So my daily regular morning ritual now takes much less time than it did in the past.

I can't exactly plot the trajectory of this sharp drop in my recent interest. But I certainly noticed the change not longer after a Twitter-mob forced the Times to summarily purge for insufficient "wokeness" its highly-regarded Editorial Page Editor, widely considered a leading contender to run the paper, perhaps suggesting that the journalists changed their coverage and writing style to avoid a similar fate. I had always read my morning newspapers at a local coffee-shop, but the Coronavirus outbreak ended that possibility, thereby disrupting my routine. And my years of denouncing the dishonesty of "Our American Pravda" in my own articles may have finally begun to register in my own mind.

There are occasional exceptions to this pattern. Earlier this month the Times carefully tabulated our national mortality figures and determined that our "excess deaths" from early March to the end of July had already exceeded 200,000 , indicating that the American body-count from our Covid-19 epidemic was considerably larger than generally assumed, and might even reach the half million mark by the end of the year. But examples of such solid reporting seem few and far between these days.

The obvious decline of the Times is especially apparent to me each morning when I compare it with the rival Wall Street Journal , which I read immediately afterward. After Rupert Murdoch acquired the Journal in 2007, most observers predicted a sad fate at the hands of the proprietor whose early Fleet Street media empire had been built upon on the frontal nudity of the Page Three Girls of his tabloid Sun . But Murdoch totally confounded those skeptics, providing his new flagship broadsheet with huge financial backing and a hands-off editorial policy, thereby elevating it from a business-focused publication to a near-peer rival to the Gray Lady at a time when so many other papers were about to begin shriveling from massive loss of advertising. Within a couple of years, even such inveterate Murdoch-haters as The Nation acknowledged this surprising reality .

Superb journalist resources unshackled by extreme "political correctness" allow an outstanding product, and this has certainly been demonstrated by the Journal 's regular front-page investigative reports. A few days ago, our continuing Covid-19 disaster prompted yet another of these, which I think lacked only a few crucial elements to be worthy of a Pulitzer Prize.

Numerous publications have documented America's severe mistakes in combating the disease, but this 4,500 word WSJ report focused upon the serious mishandling of the original outbreak by Chinese authorities.

The article revealed that top public health officials at China's Center for Disease Control only became aware of the situation on December 30th, when they learned that at least 25 suspected cases of a mysterious illness had already occurred in Wuhan during that month. But as the writers noted, the outbreak had certainly begun somewhat earlier:

Even a fully empowered China CDC would likely have missed the very first cases of the coronavirus, which probably began spreading around Wuhan in October or November, most likely in people who never showed symptoms, or did but never saw a doctor, researchers say.

All of this new information seems quite consistent with what had previously been discovered by America's leading media outlets. But the Journal writers seem to have missed one additional fact that could have elevated this important story from a mundane investigation to a sensational expose. Although they documented that the Chinese government only learned of the Wuhan outbreak at the end of December, they seemed unaware that more than a month earlier American intelligence officials had distributed a secret report to our military allies describing the "cataclysmic" disease outbreak then underway in Wuhan.

A few months ago, I had noted the clear implications of this bizarre discrepancy in timing:

For obvious reasons, the Trump Administration has become very eager to emphasize the early missteps and delays in the Chinese reaction to the viral outbreak in Wuhan, and has presumably encouraged our media outlets to direct their focus in that direction.

As an example of this, the Associated Press Investigative Unit recently published a rather detailed analysis of those early events purportedly based upon confidential Chinese documents. Provocatively entitled "China Didn't Warn Public of Likely Pandemic for 6 Key Days" , the piece was widely distributed, running in abridged form in the NYT and elsewhere. According to this reconstruction, the Chinese government first became aware of the seriousness of this public health crisis on Jan. 14th, but delayed taking any major action until Jan. 20th, a period of time during which the number of infections greatly multiplied.

Last month, a team of five WSJ reporters produced a very detailed and thorough 4,400 word analysis of the same period, and the NYT has published a helpful timeline of those early events as well. Although there may be some differences of emphasis or minor disagreements, all these American media sources agree that Chinese officials first became aware of the serious viral outbreak in Wuhan in early to mid-January, with the first known death occurring on Jan. 11th, and finally implemented major new public health measures later that same month. No one has apparently disputed these basic facts.

But with the horrific consequences of our own later governmental inaction being obvious, elements within our intelligence agencies have sought to demonstrate that they were not the ones asleep at the switch. Earlier this month, an ABC News story cited four separate government sources to reveal that as far back as late November, a special medical intelligence unit within our Defense Intelligence Agency had produced a report warning that an out-of-control disease epidemic was occurring in the Wuhan area of China, and widely distributed that document throughout the top ranks of our government, warning that steps should be taken to protect US forces based in Asia. After the story aired, a Pentagon spokesman officially denied the existence of that November report, while various other top level government and intelligence officials refused to comment. But a few days later, Israeli television mentioned that in November American intelligence had indeed shared such a report on the Wuhan disease outbreak with its NATO and Israeli allies, thus seeming to independently confirm the complete accuracy of the original ABC News story and its several government sources.

It therefore appears that elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency were aware of the deadly viral outbreak in Wuhan more than a month before any officials in the Chinese government itself. Unless our intelligence agencies have pioneered the technology of precognition, I think this may have happened for the same reason that arsonists have the earliest knowledge of future fires.

An entirely new disease that spreads in silent, asymptomatic fashion can easily escape initial detection, and we should not be surprised that no one in China noticed the Wuhan outbreak when it first began in October or November. But America's intelligence operatives were entirely aware of what was happening from the very beginning, and began informing all our allies. This seems about as close to a "smoking gun" as we can ever likely to encounter in the annals of the murky world of intelligence operations.

Moreover, I have also noted the very unusual international pattern the deadly disease immediately began to follow:

As the coronavirus gradually began to spread beyond China's own borders, another development occurred that greatly multiplied my suspicions. Most of these early cases had occurred exactly where one might expect, among the East Asian countries bordering China. But by late February Iran had become the second epicenter of the global outbreak. Even more surprisingly, its political elites had been especially hard-hit, with a full 10% of the entire Iranian parliament soon infected and at least a dozen of its officials and politicians dying of the disease, including some who were quite senior . Indeed, Neocon activists on Twitter began gleefully noting that their hatred Iranian enemies were now dropping like flies.

Let us consider the implications of these facts. Across the entire world the only political elites that have yet suffered any significant human losses have been those of Iran, and they died at a very early stage, before significant outbreaks had even occurred almost anywhere else in the world outside China. Thus, we have America assassinating Iran's top military commander on Jan. 2nd and then just a few weeks later large portions of the Iranian ruling elites became infected by a mysterious and deadly new virus, with many of them soon dying as a consequence. Could any rational individual possibly regard this as a mere coincidence?

So if the journalists at the WSJ had merely taken note of what had previously been reported by ABC News and confirmed by Israeli television, they would surely have earned themselves a Pulitzer Prize. But earning and receiving are two separate matters, and they might easily have instead been purged for treading upon such touchy national security matters. After all, our own webzine was banned by both Facebook and Google just days after we raised these same matters.

Such retaliation helps explain why our American mainstream media has long since concluded that discretion is the better part of valor.

AnonStarter , says: August 23, 2020 at 9:48 pm GMT

Such retaliation helps explain why our American mainstream media has long since concluded that discretion is the better part of valor.

Rapier-sharp allusion given the context in which it first appeared.

[Aug 23, 2020] Western celebs politicians are falling over themselves to condemn racism, yet, Russophobia Sinophobia remain acceptable -- RT Op-ed

Notable quotes:
"... "Moscow-Jewish mafia" ..."
"... "Corbyn was thoroughly delegitimised as a political actor from the moment he became a prominent candidate and even more so after he was elected as party leader, with a strong mandate." ..."
"... "chose not to" ..."
"... Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! ..."
Aug 23, 2020 | www.rt.com

Western celebs & politicians are falling over themselves to condemn racism, yet, Russophobia & Sinophobia remain acceptable Tomasz Pierscionek Tomasz Pierscionek is a medical doctor and social commentator on medicine, science, and technology. He was previously on the board of the charity Medact and is editor of the London Progressive Journal. 23 Aug, 2020 06:51 Get short URL Counter protesters wave signs during a far-right rally on August 15, 2020 near the downtown of Stone Mountain, Georgia © Getty Images / Lynsey Weatherspoon 162 Follow RT on RT Censorship is democracy, fake news is truth, submission is freedom. Western propaganda requires acceptance of contradictory dogmas alongside an impressive array of mental gymnastics to reconcile logical fallacies.

George Orwell's novel '1984' depicts life within Oceania, a totalitarian society strictly controlled by an omnipresent Party whose three simple yet contradictory slogans are: war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. Citizens of Oceania were forced to accept that two plus two may equal five if the Party deemed it so.

Akin to the Snake game found on old Nokia mobile phones, woke movements become increasingly illogical and harder to control before eventually tying themselves in knots or crashing into the walls of logic, sowing the seeds of their own destruction. Modern feminist movements are having the wind taken out of their sails by other woke factions who argue that children should be taught boys can have periods , so as not to distress transgender students, or that terms like mother and father should be replaced with parent 1 and parent 2. Even the main UK doctors' union sent an internal memo advising its staff to use the term 'pregnant people' rather than 'expectant mothers' to avoid causing offense.

One could argue that campaigns designed to remove the concept of male and female is a threat to women and their historical struggles. By eliminating the 'existence' of women, it not only airbrushes out women's vast contribution to history but also removes the whole notion of feminism – if womanhood does not exist, then the whole idea of misogyny becomes irrelevant. Perhaps one day someone will decide that race is simply a construct and can be changed at will, thus making all debates about racism and oppression irrelevant. Thus future woke cultists might argue themselves into a corner in which racism and thus 'white privilege' does not exist.

READ MORE Russia wants neither 'rethink' nor 'reset' if it means restoring American supremacy & returning to Cold War diplomacy

In the West you are free to choose any gender or sexuality, transition between these at whim, or perhaps create your own, but you are not supposed to question the foundations of capitalism or liberalism. Likewise, the much lauded concept of human rights and democracy – one of the key pillars on which Western 'cultural superiority' rests and from which it sneers at 'undemocratic' and 'uncivilised' countries – is used to justify the destruction, occupation and economic enslavement of other peoples.

Whether it is Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen or Palestine we see that non-white lives do not matter when there are no political points to score. Indeed, condemning the slaughter of Palestinians could be enough to get you labeled an anti-Semite by those who remain suspiciously silent when real anti-Semitism rears its ugly head.

For example, far right and neo-nazi militias in Ukraine, some of whom take their symbols and ideology from the 1930-1940s , have operated with relative impunity and perpetuated human rights abuses upon the people of the Donbass region. These groups were part of the Maidan movement, visited by Western politicians and praised by liberals, that violently overthrew elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Some of the leaders of this movement included far right elements who had no qualms being amidst white power logos and neo-nazi flags, or had in the past claimed that a "Moscow-Jewish mafia" controls Ukraine. Neither Western nor Israeli politicians seemed too interested in such developments, despite Israeli newspaper Haaretz reporting that weapons sent by Israel to Ukraine were ending up in the hands of far right militias, such as the Azov battalion. Paradoxically, copious effort and resources were allocated to make people believe that the UK Labour Party, led by left wing leader Jeremy Corbyn, had a serious problem with anti-Semitism.

As soon as a party leader like Jeremy Corbyn began to offer something outside the narrowly defined political bandwidth and stood up for the rights of Palestinians, he was demonized by politicians as well as their media allies and big business handlers. A study conducted by the London School of Economics and Political Science examined UK newspaper coverage of Corbyn in the months following his election as Labour Party leader and found evidence of media bias such that "Corbyn was thoroughly delegitimised as a political actor from the moment he became a prominent candidate and even more so after he was elected as party leader, with a strong mandate."

It is welcome that recent events in the US have highlighted racism faced by African Americans. Yet frequent murders of African Americans by a militarized police force did not suddenly appear when Trump came to power. Many Democratic Party politicians who nowadays make sure everyone knows they unquestioningly support the Black Lives Matter movement had few issues with the status quo before the killing of George Floyd, and will probably regain their apathy if Biden wins the election.

Furthermore, little is said about the role the Obama administration played only a few years ago in the destruction of Libya, formerly one of Africa's richest and most stable nations, and its relinquishment to warlords and Al-Qaeda affiliated groups. Some of these groups were quick to imprison and murder citizens from sub-Saharan Africa who had migrated to Libya in search of a better life. Slave markets selling sub-Saharan Africans now exist in the new post-Gaddafi Libya.

ALSO ON RT.COM Caitlin Johnstone: MSM smear merchants target critics of Establishment China narratives

The UK Conservative Party, traditionally not fans of refugees or migrants, were responsible for the Windrush scandal which saw Caribbean immigrants who had arrived in the UK decades earlier being threatened with deportation despite having lived, worked, and paid taxes in this country for many years. The same party is now thinking of allowing nearly three million Hong Kong citizens the opportunity to reside in the UK and later apply for citizenship . When it comes to sticking two fingers up to China, we hear no talk about how the NHS and welfare system cannot afford to absorb refugees and migrants.

These days many people, especially celebrities, politicians and media figures, are falling over themselves to condemn racism and make sure everyone is aware of their anti-racist credentials. The only remaining forms of racism deemed acceptable in the West include Russophobia and Sinophobia. The media devotes endless hours hyping up the threat from Russia and China and in doing so surreptitiously promotes animosity toward these nations and their peoples. The shadowy hand of the Russian government is deemed to be behind every calamity or undesired election result. We are frequently reminded that a vague and poorly defined threat from Russia and China looms large, though hard evidence is often sketchy, open to interpretation or questionable. At the same time NATO troops encroach upon Russia's borders, yet the latter is deemed the aggressor, whilst the US sails warships through contested seas near China's borders . Whereas the UK seeks to provoke Russia for no logical reason, the US is determined to pick a fight with China and claims it "chose not to" stop coronavirus from spreading beyond its borders.

The waning US empire and its allies within the disintegrating EU prefer to attack their rivals Russia and China to deflect their own populations' attention away from domestic problems with some good old-fashioned xenophobia. The UK, in particular, would do well to try and improve its relationships with Russia and China as it is on track to have a lonely time post Brexit.

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.


[Aug 23, 2020] Catapulting Russian-Meddling Propaganda by Ray McGovern

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The fresh orgy of anti-Russian invective in the lickspittle media (LSM) has the feel of fin de siècle . The last four reality-impaired years do seem as though they add up to a century. And no definitive fin is in sight, as long as most people don't know what's going on. ..."
"... The LSM should be confronted: "At long last have you left no sense of decency?" But who would hear the question -- much less any answer? ..."
"... Thus the reckless abandon with which The New York Times is leading the current full-court press to improve on what it regards as Special Counsel Robert Mueller's weak-kneed effort to blame the Russians for giving us Donald Trump. The press is on, and there are no referees to call the fouls. ..."
"... Incidentally, Mueller's report apparently was insufficient, only two years in the making, and just 448 pages. The Senate committee's magnum opus took three years, is almost 1,000 pages -- and fortified. So there. ..."
"... is a good offense, and the Senate Intelligence Committee's release of its study -- call it "Mueller (Enhanced)" -- and the propaganda fanfare -- come at a key point in the Russiagate/Spygate imbroglio. It also came, curiously, as the Democratic Convention was beginning, as if the Republican-controlled Senate was sending Trump a message. ..."
"... The cognoscenti and the big fish themselves may be guessing that Trump/Barr/Durham will not throw out heavier lines for former FBI Director James Comey, his deputy Andrew McCabe, CIA Director John Brennan, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, for example. But how can they be sure? What has become clear is that the certainty they all shared that Hillary Clinton would be the next president prompted them not only to take serious liberties with the Constitution and the law, but also to do so without taking rudimentary steps to hide their tracks. ..."
"... The incriminating evidence is there. And as Trump becomes more and more vulnerable and defensive about his ineptness -- particularly with regard to Covid-19 -- he may summon the courage to order Barr and Durham to hook the big fish, not just minnows like Clinesmith. The neuralgic reality is that no one knows at this point how far Trump will go. To say that this kind of uncertainty is unsettling to all concerned is to say the obvious. ..."
"... None of that takes us much beyond the Mueller report and other things generally well known -- even in the LSM. Nor does the drivel about people like Paul Manafort "sharing polling data with Russians" who might be intelligence officers. That data was "mostly public" the Times itself reported , and the paper had to correct a story that the data was intended for Russian oligarchs, when it was meant for Ukrainian oligarchs instead. That Manafort was working to turn Ukraine towards the West and not Russia is rarely mentioned. ..."
"... On the Steele Dossier, the committee also missed a ruling by a British judge against Christopher Steele, labeling his dossier an attempt to help Hillary Clinton get elected. Consortium News explained back in October 2017 that both CrowdStrike and Steele were paid for by the Democratic Party and Clinton campaign to push Russiagate. ..."
"... the description of #WikiLeaks ' publishing activities by this #SenateIntelligenceCommittee 's Report appears a true #EdgarHoover 's disinformation campaign to make a legitimate media org completely radioactive ..."
"... And that's not the half of it. In September 2018, Mazzetti and his NYT colleague Scott Shane wrote a 10,000-word feature, "The Plot to Subvert an Election," trying to convince readers that the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) had successfully swayed U.S. opinion during the 2016 election with 80,000 Facebook posts that they said had reached 126 million Americans. ..."
"... That turned out to be a grotesquely deceptive claim. Mazzetti and Shane failed to mention the fact that those 80,000 IRA posts (from early 2015 through 2017, meaning about half came after the election), had been engulfed in a vast ocean of more than 33 trillion Facebook posts in people's news feeds – 413 million times more than the IRA posts. Not to mention the lack of evidence that the IRA was the Russian government, as Mueller claimed. ..."
"... "Liberals are embracing every negative claim about Russia just because elements of the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency produced a report last Jan. 6 that blamed Russia for 'hacking' Democratic emails and releasing them to WikiLeaks ." ..."
Aug 23, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Catapulting Russian-Meddling Propaganda


by Tyler Durden Sat, 08/22/2020 - 23:20 Twitter Facebook Reddit Email Print

Authored by Ray McGovern via ConsortiumNews.com,

The New York Times is leading the full-court press to improve on what it regards as Special Counsel Robert Mueller's weak-kneed effort to blame the Russians for giving us Donald Trump...

The fresh orgy of anti-Russian invective in the lickspittle media (LSM) has the feel of fin de siècle . The last four reality-impaired years do seem as though they add up to a century. And no definitive fin is in sight, as long as most people don't know what's going on.

The LSM should be confronted: "At long last have you left no sense of decency?" But who would hear the question -- much less any answer? The corporate media have a lock on what Americans are permitted or not permitted to hear. Checking the truth, once routine in journalism, is a thing of the past.

Thus the reckless abandon with which The New York Times is leading the current full-court press to improve on what it regards as Special Counsel Robert Mueller's weak-kneed effort to blame the Russians for giving us Donald Trump. The press is on, and there are no referees to call the fouls.

The recent release of a 1,000-page, sans bombshells and already out-of-date report by the Senate Intelligence Committee has provided the occasion to "catapult the propaganda," as President George W. Bush once put it.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/VxnegxNEDAc

As the the Times 's Mark Mazzetti put it in his article Wednesday:

"Releasing the report less than 100 days before Election Day, Republican-majority senators hoped it would refocus attention on the interference by Russia and other hostile foreign powers in the American political process, which has continued unabated."

Mazzetti is telling his readers, soto voce : regarding that interference four years ago, and the "continued-unabated" part, you just have to trust us and our intelligence community sources who would never lie to you. And if, nevertheless, you persist in asking for actual evidence, you are clearly in Putin's pocket.

Incidentally, Mueller's report apparently was insufficient, only two years in the making, and just 448 pages. The Senate committee's magnum opus took three years, is almost 1,000 pages -- and fortified. So there.

Iron Pills

Recall how disappointed the LSM and the rest of the Establishment were with Mueller's anemic findings in spring 2019. His report claimed that the Russian government "interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion" via a social media campaign run by the Internet Research Agency (IRA) and by "hacking" Democratic emails. But the evidence behind those charges could not bear close scrutiny.

You would hardly know it from the LSM, but the accusation against the IRA was thrown out of court when the U.S. government admitted it could not prove that the IRA was working for the Russian government. Mueller's ipse dixit did not suffice, as we explained a year ago in "Sic Transit Gloria Mueller."

The Best Defense

is a good offense, and the Senate Intelligence Committee's release of its study -- call it "Mueller (Enhanced)" -- and the propaganda fanfare -- come at a key point in the Russiagate/Spygate imbroglio. It also came, curiously, as the Democratic Convention was beginning, as if the Republican-controlled Senate was sending Trump a message.

Durham

One chief worry, of course, derives from the uncertainty as to whether John Durham, the US Attorney investigating those FBI and other officials who launched the Trump-Russia investigation will let some heavy shoes drop before the election. Barr has said he expects "developments in Durham's investigation hopefully before the end of the summer."

FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith already has decided to plead guilty to the felony of falsifying evidence used to support a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to surveillance to spy on Trump associate Carter Page. It is abundantly clear that Clinesmith was just a small cog in the deep-state machine in action against candidate and then President Trump. And those running the machine are well known. The president has named names, and Barr has made no bones about his disdain for what he calls spying on the president.

The cognoscenti and the big fish themselves may be guessing that Trump/Barr/Durham will not throw out heavier lines for former FBI Director James Comey, his deputy Andrew McCabe, CIA Director John Brennan, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, for example. But how can they be sure? What has become clear is that the certainty they all shared that Hillary Clinton would be the next president prompted them not only to take serious liberties with the Constitution and the law, but also to do so without taking rudimentary steps to hide their tracks.

The incriminating evidence is there. And as Trump becomes more and more vulnerable and defensive about his ineptness -- particularly with regard to Covid-19 -- he may summon the courage to order Barr and Durham to hook the big fish, not just minnows like Clinesmith. The neuralgic reality is that no one knows at this point how far Trump will go. To say that this kind of uncertainty is unsettling to all concerned is to say the obvious.

So, the stakes are high -- for the Democrats, as well -- and, not least, the LSM. In these circumstances it would seem imperative not just to circle the wagons but to mount the best offense/defense possible, despite the fact that virtually all the ammunition (as in the Senate report) is familiar and stale ("enhanced" or not).

Black eyes might well be in store for the very top former law enforcement and intelligence officials, the Democrats, and the LSM -- and in the key pre-election period. So, the calculation: launch "Mueller Report (Enhanced)" and catapult the truth now with propaganda, before it is too late.

No Evidence of Hacking

The "hacking of the DNC" charge suffered a fatal blow three months ago when it became known that Shawn Henry, president of the DNC-hired cyber-security firm CrowdStrike, admitted under oath that his firm had no evidence that the DNC emails were hacked -- by Russia or anyone else.

(YouTube)

Henry gave his testimony on Dec. 5, 2017, but House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff was able to keep it hidden until May 7, 2020.

Here's a brief taste of how Henry's testimony went: Asked by Schiff for "the date on which the Russians exfiltrated the data", Henry replied, "We just don't have the evidence that says it actually left."

You did not know that? You may be forgiven -- up until now -- if your information diet is limited to the LSM and you believe The New York Times still publishes "all the news that's fit to print." I am taking bets on how much longer the NYT will be able to keep Henry's testimony hidden; Schiff's record of 29 months will be hard to beat.

Putting Lipstick on the Pig of Russian 'Tampering'

Worse still for the LSM and other Russiagate diehards, Mueller's findings last year enabled Trump to shout "No Collusion" with Russia. What seems clear at this point is that a key objective of the current catapulting of the truth is to apply lipstick to Mueller's findings.

After all, he was supposed to find treacherous plotting between the Trump campaign and the Russians and failed miserably. Most LSM-suffused Americans remain blissfully unaware of this, and the likes of Pulitzer Prize winner Mazzetti have been commissioned to keep it that way.

In Wednesday's article , for example, Mazzetti puts it somewhat plaintively:

"Like the special counsel the Senate report did not conclude that the Trump campaign engaged in a coordinated conspiracy with the Russian government -- a fact that the Republicans seized on to argue that there was 'no collusion'."

How could they!

Mazzetti is playing with words. "Collusion," however one defines it, is not a crime; conspiracy is.

'Breathtaking' Contacts: Mueller (Enhanced)

Mark Mazzetti (YouTube)

Mazzetti emphasizes that the Senate report "showed extensive evidence of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and people tied to the Kremlin," and Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the intelligence committee's vice chairman, said the committee report details "a breathtaking level of contacts between Trump officials and Russian government operatives that is a very real counterintelligence threat to our elections."

None of that takes us much beyond the Mueller report and other things generally well known -- even in the LSM. Nor does the drivel about people like Paul Manafort "sharing polling data with Russians" who might be intelligence officers. That data was "mostly public" the Times itself reported , and the paper had to correct a story that the data was intended for Russian oligarchs, when it was meant for Ukrainian oligarchs instead. That Manafort was working to turn Ukraine towards the West and not Russia is rarely mentioned.

Recent revelations regarding the false data given the FISA court by an FBI lawyer to "justify" eavesdropping on Trump associate Carter Page show the Senate report to be not up to date and misguided in endorsing the FBI's decision to investigate Page. The committee may wish to revisit that endorsement -- at least.

On the Steele Dossier, the committee also missed a ruling by a British judge against Christopher Steele, labeling his dossier an attempt to help Hillary Clinton get elected. Consortium News explained back in October 2017 that both CrowdStrike and Steele were paid for by the Democratic Party and Clinton campaign to push Russiagate.

Also missed by the intelligence committee was a document released by the Senate Judiciary Committee last month that revealed that Steele's "Primary Subsource and his friends peddled warmed-over rumors and laughable gossip that Steele dressed up as formal intelligence memos."

Smearing WikiLeaks

The Intelligence Committee report also repeats thoroughly debunked myths about WikiLeaks and, like Mueller, the committee made no effort to interview Julian Assange before launching its smears. Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi, who partnered with WikiLeaks in the publication of the Podesta emails, described the report's treatment of WikiLeaks in this Twitter thread :

2. the description of #WikiLeaks ' publishing activities by this #SenateIntelligenceCommittee 's Report appears a true #EdgarHoover 's disinformation campaign to make a legitimate media org completely radioactive

3. Clearly, to describe #WikiLeaks and its publishing activities the #SenateIntelligenceCommittee's Report completely rely on #US intelligence community+ #MikePompeo's characterisation of #WikiLeaks. There is not even any pretense of an independent approach

4. there are also unsubstantiated claims like:
– "[WikiLeaks'] disclosures have jeopardized the safety of individual Americans and foreign allies" (p.200)
– "WikiLeaks has passed information to U.S. adversaries" (p.201)

5. it's completely false that "#WikiLeaks does not seem to weigh whether its disclosures add any public interest value" (p.200) and any longtime media partner like me could provide you dozens of examples on how wrong this characterisation [is].

Titillating

Mazzetti did add some spice to the version of his article that dominated the two top right columns of Wednesday's Times with the blaring headline: "Senate Panel Ties Russian Officials to Trump's Aides: G.O.P.-Led Committee Echoes Mueller's Findings on Election Tampering."

Those who make it to the end of Mazzetti's piece will learn that the Senate committee report "did not establish" that the Russian government obtained any compromising material on Mr. Trump or that they tried to use such materials [that they didn't have] as leverage against him." However, Mazzetti adds,

"According to the report, Mr. Trump met a former Miss Moscow at a party during one trip in 1996. After the party, a Trump associate told others he had seen Mr. Trump with the woman on multiple occasions and that they 'might have had a brief romantic relationship.'

"The report also raised the possibility that, during that trip, Mr. Trump spent the night with two young women who joined him the next morning at a business meeting with the mayor of Moscow."

This is journalism?

Another Pulitzer in Store?

The Times appends a note reminding us that Mazzetti was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on Donald Trump's advisers and their connections to Russia.

And that's not the half of it. In September 2018, Mazzetti and his NYT colleague Scott Shane wrote a 10,000-word feature, "The Plot to Subvert an Election," trying to convince readers that the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) had successfully swayed U.S. opinion during the 2016 election with 80,000 Facebook posts that they said had reached 126 million Americans.

That turned out to be a grotesquely deceptive claim. Mazzetti and Shane failed to mention the fact that those 80,000 IRA posts (from early 2015 through 2017, meaning about half came after the election), had been engulfed in a vast ocean of more than 33 trillion Facebook posts in people's news feeds – 413 million times more than the IRA posts. Not to mention the lack of evidence that the IRA was the Russian government, as Mueller claimed.

In exposing that chicanery, prize-winning investigative reporter Gareth Porter commented :

"The descent of The New York Times into this unprecedented level of propagandizing for the narrative of Russia's threat to U.S. democracy is dramatic evidence of a broader problem of abuses by corporate media Greater awareness of the dishonesty at the heart of the Times' coverage of that issue is a key to leveraging media reform and political change."

Nothingburgers With Russian Dressing: the Backstory

The late Robert Parry.

"It's too much; it's just too much, too much", a sedated, semi-conscious Robert Parry kept telling me from his hospital bed in late January 2018 a couple of days before he died. Bob was founder of Consortium News .

It was already clear what Bob meant; he had taken care to see to that. On Dec. 31, 2017 the reason for saying that came in what he titled "An Apology & Explanation" for "spotty production in recent days." A stroke on Christmas Eve had left Bob with impaired vision, but he was able to summon enough strength to write an Apologia -- his vision for honest journalism and his dismay at what had happened to his profession before he died on Jan. 27, 2018. The dichotomy was "just too much".

Parry rued the role that journalism was playing in the "unrelenting ugliness that has become Official Washington. Facts and logic no longer mattered. It was a case of using whatever you had to diminish and destroy your opponent this loss of objective standards reached deeply into the most prestigious halls of American media."

What bothered Bob most was the needless, dishonest tweaking of the Russian bear. "The U.S. media's approach to Russia," he wrote, "is now virtually 100 percent propaganda. Does any sentient human being read The New York Times ' or The Washington Post 's coverage of Russia and think that he or she is getting a neutral or unbiased treatment of the facts? Western journalists now apparently see it as their patriotic duty to hide facts that otherwise would undermine the demonizing of Putin and Russia."

Parry, who was no conservative, continued:

"Liberals are embracing every negative claim about Russia just because elements of the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency produced a report last Jan. 6 that blamed Russia for 'hacking' Democratic emails and releasing them to WikiLeaks ."

Bob noted that the 'hand-picked' authors "evinced no evidence and even admitted that they weren't asserting any of this as fact."

It was just too much.

Robert Parry's Last Article

Peter Strzok during congressional hearing in July 2018. (Wikimedia Commons)

Bob posted his last substantive article on Dec. 13, 2017, the day after text exchanges between senior FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were made public. (Typically, readers of The New York Times the following day would altogether miss the importance of the text-exchanges.)

Bob Parry rarely felt any need for a "sanity check." Dec. 12, 2017 was an exception. He called me about the Strzok-Page texts; we agreed they were explosive. FBI Agent Peter Strzok was on Special Counsel Robert Mueller's staff investigating alleged Russian interference, until Mueller removed him.

Strzok reportedly was a "hand-picked" FBI agent taking part in the Jan 2017 evidence-impoverished, rump, misnomered "intelligence community" assessment that blamed Russia for hacking and other election meddling. And he had helped lead the investigation into Hillary Clinton's misuse of her computer servers. Page was Deputy Director Andrew McCabe's right-hand lawyer.

His Dec. 13, 2017 piece would be his fourth related article in less than two weeks; it turned out to be his last substantive article. All three of the earlier ones are worth a re-read as examples of fearless, unbiased, perceptive journalism. Here are the links .

Bob began his article on the Strzok-Page bombshell:

"The disclosure of fiercely anti-Trump text messages between two romantically involved senior FBI officials who played key roles in the early Russia-gate inquiry has turned the supposed Russian-election-meddling "scandal" into its own scandal, by providing evidence that some government investigators saw it as their duty to block or destroy Donald Trump's presidency.?

"As much as the U.S. mainstream media has mocked the idea that an American 'deep state' exists and that it has maneuvered to remove Trump from office, the text messages between senior FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok and senior FBI lawyer Lisa Page reveal how two high-ranking members of the government's intelligence/legal bureaucracy saw their role as protecting the United States from an election that might elevate to the presidency someone as unfit as Trump."

Not a fragment of Bob's or other Consortium News analysis made any impact on what Bob used to call the Establishment media. As a matter of fact, eight months later during a talk in Seattle that I titled "Russia-gate: Can You Handle the Truth?", only three out of a very progressive audience of some 150 had ever heard of Strzok and Page.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ngIKjpucQh8

And so it goes.

Lest I am accused of being "in Putin's pocket," let me add the explanatory note that we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity included in our most explosive Memorandum for President Trump, on "Russian hacking."

Full Disclosure: Over recent decades the ethos of our intelligence profession has eroded in the public mind to the point that agenda-free analysis is deemed well nigh impossible. Thus, we add this disclaimer, which applies to everything we in VIPS say and do: We have no political agenda; our sole purpose is to spread truth around and, when necessary, hold to account our former intelligence colleagues.

We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any resemblance between what we say and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental. The fact we find it is necessary to include that reminder speaks volumes about these highly politicized times.

somecallmetimmah , 1 hour ago

Only brain-washed losers read the new york times. Garbage propaganda for garbage people.

AtATrESICI , 43 minutes ago

"developments in Durham's investigation hopefully before the end of the summer." What summer? The summer of 2099.

Mouldy , 1 hour ago

So in a nutshell.. They just called half the USA too stupid to make an informed decision for themselves.

ominous , 1 hour ago

the disagreement is over which half is the stupid half

homeskillet , 25 minutes ago

The MIC's bogey man. What a crock of **** this whole country has become. Pravda puts out more truth than our MSM. I trust Putin more than the Dem leaders at this point.

Demeter55 , 1 hour ago

The Globalist/New World Order/Deep State/Elitists (or whatever other arrogant subsection of the psychopaths among us you wish to consider) have one great failing which will defeat them utterly in the end:

They do not know when to cut their losses.

As a result of that irrational stubbornness, born of a "Manifest Destiny" assumption of an eternal lock on the situation, they will go too far.

Even if they systematically try to destroy us, they will not have the ability unless we are complicit in our own destruction. While there are many who have "taken the knee" to these tyrants in training, there are more who have no intention of doing so.

Most nations are not so buffaloed as to fall for this propaganda, but the United States especially was created with the notion that all men are created equal, and this is ingrained in the national character. We don't buy it.

And our numbers are growing daily, as people wake up and realize they have to take a side for themselves, their families, their communities.

The global covid-panic was a masterful attack, but it will fail. Indeed, it has failed already. The building counter-attack will take out those who chose to declare war on humanity. There really is no alternative for us, the humans. Live Free or Die, as they say in New Hampshire.

And despite the full support of the MSM and the DNC, the Would-Be Masters of the Universe will not succeed.

sborovay07 , 1 hour ago

Sad Assange wasn't granted immunity to testify and was silenced just prior to the release of the Mueller report. Little has been heard since except his health is horrific. Now, all the Deep State figures on both sides are just throwing as much mud against Trump as possible to hide the truth. If Durnham does not indict the Deep State figures who participated in the Obama led coup, all is for not. Only the foot soldiers marching in lock step will be charged.

wn , 1 hour ago

To sum it up.

Conclusion of the Democrats.

Americans need Russian brains to decide their leader in order to move forward.

nokilli , 25 minutes ago

Once the MO for "Russian hacking" is published to the international intelligence community, any (((party))) can pose as a "Russian hacker."

This is the way computers work. Sybil is eponymous.

KuriousKat , 35 minutes ago

Mazzeti looks like the typical Gopher boy for the CIA Station Chiefs around the world..they retire or become contributors to NewsWeek Wapo or NYT. ..not Any major network w/o one...Doing **** like this is mandatory..not elective.

[Aug 23, 2020] Bright future lies ahead of NYT it can soon match and even exceed the caliber of jornalism of the "National Inquirer"

Highly recommended!
Aug 23, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

J S Bach , 58 minutes ago

I hope I live to see the day when the "New York Times" is deemed the same caliber of "journalism" as the "National Inquirer". Of course, those with two brain cells to rub together already know that this is the case. However, by "deemed", I mean by the one-brain-celled masses.

homeskillet , 23 minutes ago

The National Enquirer actually has many more believable articles.

Pernicious Gold Phallusy , 20 minutes ago

The National Enquirer broke the story of Presidential candidate John Edwards cheating on his wife, who was undergoing breast cancer treatment at the time. Other media organizations, including the NYT, knew about it and refused to cover it.

Stu Pedassle , 1 hour ago

Glad to see Operation Mockingbird is still going strong after 60 years

[Aug 19, 2020] Final Senate Intelligence Report on Russiagate a 'Snoozer' - RPI's Daniel McAdams

Aug 19, 2020 | ronpaulinstitute.org

rpi staff wednesday august 19, 2020
RPI Director Daniel McAdams was interviewed on RT about the release of the fifth and final volume of the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation into the "Russiagate" claims that President Trump colluded with the Russians to get elected or at least had election help from Russian President Vladimir Putin. As McAdams points out in the interview, this is yet another "nothingburger" even as the die-hard Russiagaters poke and prod looking for any sign of life. McAdams makes the point that a Russian influence operation to "undermine America's faith in democracy" would be ultra high-risk and what would be the rewards? How would Russia benefit? Watch the interview here:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/bcaHTeIXWPA

[Aug 19, 2020] Taibbi- The Press That Cried Wolf -

Aug 19, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post are now following the same script with the Trump panics. The pattern is consistent. Day one involves spectacular claims of corruption. By day two, placard-bearing protesters are hitting the streets (" You can't fire the truth !" a protester in Times Square proclaimed in the Sessions affair), celebrities are taping video appeals , and experts are quoted suggesting Trump is already guilty of crime: OPEN TREASON in Helsinki, " bribery " in Ukraine, or in this case, election interference (some are already speculating that Trump could get a year for the mail slowdown).

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-1&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1018994921796194304&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Ftaibbi-press-cried-wolf&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=223fc1c4%3A1596143124634&width=550px

Almost always, by day three or four, key claims are walked back: maybe there was no direct " promise " to a foreign leader, or the CIA doesn't have " direct evidence " of Russian bounties, or viral photos of children in cages at the border were from 2014 , not 2017. By then it doesn't matter. A panic is a panic, and there are only two reportable angles in today's America, total guilt and total innocence. Even when the balance of the information would still look bad or very bad for Trump, news outlets commit to leaving out important background, so as not to complicate the audience response.

That's the situation with this story, where the postal slowdown is probably more serious than other Trump scandals, but people pushing it are also not anxious to remind readers of their own histories on the issue.

Take the New York Times, currently cranking out about a feature an hour about the U.S.P.S. Paul Krugman is now telling us "The Postal Service facilitates citizen inclusion. That's why Trump hates it." Apparently, until recently, all decent Americans had bottomless affection for the communal spirit of the Postal Service and supported it without hesitation. Yet in April, 2012, in the middle of the Obama presidency, the Times ran a very different house editorial .

The paper argued mounting losses necessitated swift action to reduce costs. The Times worried that "lawmakers in both houses" would "procrastinate as usual," and blasted the Senate for devising a bill that "timorously aims at part-time 'downsizing,' not closing, lightly used post offices." The paper added that decreased revenue thanks to email could mean losses of "more than $20 billion a year by 2016," and hoped that, so long as "courage trumps procrastination," the U.S.P.S. could be granted the "flexibility of a modern business."

If you look back, you'll find the overwhelming consensus in both the Bush and Obama years was that a fully-staffed post office was a money pit, and " flexibility " was needed to allow the service to budget-slash its way back to relevance in the Internet age.

For a significant period – between the mid-2000s and the Trump years – it was hard to find a big-name politician who would talk about the post office at all. An exception was Bernie Sanders, whose office labored to get major news media organizations interested ( I got some of those calls ) in an alternative narrative about the post office.

During the Bush years, the U.S.P.S. was put on the "high risk" list by the General Accounting Office, headed at the time by a future Pete Peterson foundation CEO named David Walker who would later come out in favor of privatizing the post office . The GAO recommended cuts and other measures to address the "rapidly deteriorating" financial situation of the U.S.P.S.

But when an analysis by the Office of Personnel Management was released in November, 2002, it turned out the U.S.P.S. had a "more positive picture" than was believed. The U.S.P.S. was massively over- paying into its retirement fund, headed for a $70 billion surplus. Then in 2003 the Postal Pension Funding Reform Act was passed, which among other things forced the U.S.P.S. to pay the pension obligations of employees who had prior military service.

A few years after that, in 2006, the " Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act " passed with overwhelming support in both houses, forcing a series of incredible changes, the biggest being a requirement that the U.S.P.S. fully fund 75 years worth of benefits for its employees. The provision cost $5.5 billion per year and was unique among government agencies. "No one prefunds at more than 30%," said Anthony Vegliante, the service's executive vice president, at the time.

The bill also prevented the post office from offering "nonpostal services" as a way to compete financially. This barred it from establishing a postal banking service, but also nixed creative ideas like Internet cafes, copy services, notaries, even allowing postal workers to offer to wrap Christmas presents. Coupled with the pre-funding benefit mandate and other pension changes, this paralyzed the post office financially, making it look ripe for reform.

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By 2012, those took the form of calls for the U.S.P.S. to eliminate 3,700 post offices (a first step toward eventually closing as many as 15,000) and 250 mail processing centers. Sanders, along with other Senators with large rural constituencies like Jon Tester and Claire McCaskill, managed to change the bill and save a lot of the mail processing centers. The Senate that year also cut the amount of required pre-funding for benefits and began refunding the U.S.P.S. for about $11 billion in overpayment for retirement costs.

A few years after that, in 2015, the Post Office Inspector General issued a blistering report about CBRE , the company that had served as sole real estate broker to the U.S.P.S. from 2011 on. The report found that CBRE had been selling and/or leasing post office properties at below-market prices, often to clients of CBRE – a company chaired by Richard Blum , the husband of California Senator Dianne Feinstein. This chronic problem had a financial impact on the Postal Service, and would have become a much bigger problem had the U.S.P.S. been forced earlier on to sell off a massive quantity of infrastructure through that broker, as originally hoped.

The thread running through all of these stories was that panic over the financial condition of the U.S.P.S. was often a significantly artificial narrative, caused by a bipartisan mix of stupidity, greed, and corruption. This high-functioning civil service organization, which provided tremendous value to the public through everything from subsidized news deliveries in the Pony Express years to the well-maintained public meeting places built in remote rural locations, has not had real backers in either party for most of the last thirty or forty years.

None of this means the Trump-DeJoy story isn't serious. It just means that Trump is not the first person to try to gut the U.S. Postal Service. Going back decades, it's been stuck with impossible funding mandates, used as a piggy bank by both parties in congress (which refused to let it stop making massive retirement overpayments for fear of the " adverse" impact on the federal budget), artificially prevented from expanding or innovating by lobbyists, and ripped off by connected contractors.

Combine that with the maddening sloppiness of these panic stories – one wild report after another of mailboxes ripped from the streets " right before our eyes " in a "plan to steal the election" turns out later to be another old photo or a shot of a routine maintenance operation – and it becomes increasingly difficult for nonpartisan news audiences to know what they're dealing with.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-2&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1295360446795583491&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Ftaibbi-press-cried-wolf&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=223fc1c4%3A1596143124634&width=550px

Is this unprecedented corruption, something a little worse than normal, or just the usual undisguised? If press outlets never dial back excesses, we may miss it when we're actually supposed to panic.


2banana , 3 hours ago

Conspiracy after Conspiracy...

You would think after a while, it would get old. And, it does.

Here is real life.

America had an in person voting process that worked and got results in a few hours.

Democrats want to change that to an untested fraud ridden system that may get results in a few weeks.

And that ain't a conspiracy - that is fact.

Hal n back , 2 hours ago

not only did it work, it emphasized the importance of getting out and voting.

As I walk into my voting place, I say hello to neighbors working there , flip out my drivers license and sign the proper form. If my signature does not look the same (which happens after a period of time) the folks behind the table ask me to sign again even if they know me because its protocol and it is important to get it right. And then I get my ballot and fill it in and I get to place it in the electronic machine inside a card so my neighbors do not know which way I am voting.

Which they already know since the neighborhood while aging, is vibrant and has constant debates on politics especially now as we gather on driveways socially distanced shooting the bull over the whole thing.

we will not know how many ballots will be filled in by somebody other than the right person.

why not just save money and give proxies to the Democrats.

slightlyskeptical , 2 hours ago

Electronic machines is the first step in bungled elections.

Four chan , 21 minutes ago

we all know the dems plan to fucckup the election using mail in

votes, what are these democrat gollum going to try next covid 20?

Unknown User , 2 hours ago

There is so much to steal and privatize in America, a Neoliberal paradise.

stacking12321 , 54 minutes ago


"America had an in person voting process that worked"

oh, it worked, did it?

is that why there's endless wars, a ballooning out of control deficit, a pay for play political system, unconstitutional laws passed constantly, a system of wealth extraction where the little wealth that people have is squeezed out of the, and given to the elites?

face the facts, the American political system is an abject failure, the very concept of government is an abject failure. A violent gang of thugs being enabled to take power over everyone should be recognized as a crime - all government is a crime against the people it claims to rule over.

Things will continue getting worse, not better, thanks to your "working" system of government.

government is not here to help, they are servants of your enemy, the elites.

Tenshin Headache , 3 hours ago

Easy rule of thumb: If you learned it from the fake news, it's fake news.

seryanhoj , 1 hour ago

The basic thing about government and media today is, truth and facts have nothing to do with their job.

Words are there to mould people's minds to their purpose so they don't make a nuisance of themselves by having diverse opinions Facts are never allowed to get in the way. What about when Bush 2 and Blair outright fabricated evidence of Baghdad .WMD...the dodgy dossier? Oh says they, I saw intelligence reports . Yes .intelligence reports they pressured them to write. Result. A million dead and Iraq in chaos.

And what happened to Bush 2. Re elected! At that point it was over.

[Aug 19, 2020] If you can't compete, cheat- Twitter's shadow-banning of RT other state-linked media proves the US narrative doesn't measure up -- RT Op-ed

Aug 19, 2020 | www.rt.com

Helen Buyniski Helen Buyniski

is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23 19 Aug, 2020 16:39 Get short URL © Twitter / Screenshot 8 Follow RT on RT With less than three months before US elections, Twitter has all but memory-holed RT and other state-run media – even searching their handles draws a blank. For a supposedly free-market country, the US sure hates competition.

The official Twitter accounts for RT, Xinhua, and other media outlets owned by certain governments the US doesn't like are being pushed into the shadows, confirming that Twitter is getting serious about its role as one of the chief enforcers of US informational supremacy. But deploying the memory-hole against Washington's rivals is tacitly admitting that the same informational supremacy would be doomed without such heavy-handed censorship.

ALSO ON RT.COM Twitter labels RT & Sputnik but NOT BBC, NPR & VOA as it launches blitz on state media staff & govt officials

Not only will Twitter refuse to auto-complete searches for the official accounts of RT, Sputnik, Xinhua, Global Times, and a handful of other outlets owned by Russia and China – typing in their handles with the @ symbol yields no results for users who don't already follow these accounts. The platform has essentially made it impossible for the average Twitter user to accidentally stumble across their posts.

Turning off the " hide sensitive content " function in search settings allows state media accounts to surface under " people " – if their handle is searched exactly, with the @ symbol – tagged with the " state-affiliated media " warning Twitter has casually referred to as an " election label ." But posts from these outlets remain missing everywhere but in their own feeds. Running the accounts through Shadowban.eu confirms they're subject to a " search suggestion ban. "

While Twitter announced earlier this month that it would remove state-run media accounts from any 'recommended' screens, including the home screen, notifications, and search, the new policy's wording left room for interpretation. Even employees at some of these organizations thought – perhaps naively – that Twitter wouldn't go so far as to block searches for RT from turning up, well, RT.

[Aug 19, 2020] Forget 'Kremlin meddling', sowing discord distrust in US democracy is all homegrown and burgeoning by Finian Cunningham

Notable quotes:
"... How fitting therefore that this time around the discord and distrust on display is patently US-style homegrown – without an iota of Russian input. Recent US intelligence claims of Russian interference seem more threadbare than usual. ..."
"... It is what it always has been: a crisis in legitimacy of American democracy owing to a fractured, self-alienated nation encumbered by endemic social problems. ..."
"... US-style internal discord has become even more magnified and glaring to the point where invoking "foreign malign influence" just looks absurd in its irrelevance. ..."
Aug 18, 2020 | www.rt.com
It's the most important election ever, according to Republicans and Democrats alike. With such vital billing it is all the more ominous that even before ballots are cast the very legitimacy of the presidential result is in doubt.

This week, a sprawling US Senate intelligence report again casts aspersions on the Trump election in 2016, alleging "extensive sabotage" by the Kremlin to get him elected. The report seems more a redux of previous unsubstantiated claims of Russian meddling, which Moscow has always categorically rejected as false.

Then there are looming doubts stemming from the mechanics of mail-in or absentee voting which is set to take an outsized role in the election amid social distancing over coronavirus public health fears. Like the concerns about the disease itself there is sharp partisan divide over the merits of mail-in voting. For some it is a necessary precaution, for others it is a ruse built upon an exaggerated health scare.

On top of that division you have the extreme partisan stakes being piled up.

Republican President Donald Trump says if "radical left" rival Joe Biden and running mate Kamala Harris win in November then the US will be plunged into Venezuela-like "socialist" disaster (as if Washington's regime-change machinations have had nothing to do with the latter).

For the Democrats, four more years of Trump will be akin to living under a dictatorship.

One could say it's all electioneering hyperbole. But still the divisive passions are running like a fever. There is a lot at stake for the participants in this election from the torrid way they have depicted the choice. The partisan discord could hardly be more acrimonious from the extremely polarized way each side views the other.

Throw into the political maelstrom accusations and counter-accusations of "cheating" over the election and then we have a cauldron of contention which ruptures the public trust in voting. The very legitimacy of US democracy is being split asunder.

Trump has set the pace for undermining the presidential election by saying it could be the most rigged ever in history. He has repeatedly claimed that mail-in voting is rife with fraud and has suggested that the Democrats are using the coronavirus pandemic and absentee voting as a cover for stealing the White House.

Several studies have shown that fraud from mail-in voting in the US is negligible. Many other countries seem to manage a system of absentee voting without much concern for voter misconduct. Nevertheless, Trump has succeeded in planting the notion among his supporters that mail-in voting is the death knell for democracy. He has already hinted that he may not accept the result in November if it goes against him. For millions of diehard Trump supporters that is tantamount to a call to arms in an echo of the anti-lockdown rebellion that the president advocated earlier this year.

For Democrats and anti-Trumpers, they see this president as deliberately sabotaging the US Postal Service from his appointment of a political donor as postmaster general in May. The subsequent cost-cutting and cutbacks in services under Louis DeJoy has put in doubt the adequate delivery of voting ballots in time for the election for many states. Trump has even brazenly admitted that he held back emergency funding for the postal service in order to curb mail-in voting.

So if Trump manages to pull off victory despite failing poll numbers, millions of voters will view his re-election as the product of his rhetorical maneuvers and maligning of mail-in voting. In the 2016 election, nearly a quarter of all ballots were cast by absentee voting. This time around, it is estimated that nearly half of 200 million registered voters in the US will use the mail-in system due to health concerns of going to polling stations in person at a time of pandemic risk.

There you have it. Whatever way this election turns out, there will be a gulf of divisiveness and doubt among US citizens about the legitimacy of the next administration. The bitter partisan wrangling that has gone on – seemingly interminably – for the past four years is set to continue with even more corrosive consequences for American democracy.

"Sowing discord and distrust" has been a stock phrase used in US media in regard to allegations that Russia has somehow been sponsoring malign influence among Americans. Those claims have always been overblown and unfounded, bordering on paranoia. Ironically, the anti-Russia allegations were a product of deep inherent discord among Americans over the controversial election of maverick Donald Trump.

How fitting therefore that this time around the discord and distrust on display is patently US-style homegrown – without an iota of Russian input. Recent US intelligence claims of Russian interference seem more threadbare than usual.

It is what it always has been: a crisis in legitimacy of American democracy owing to a fractured, self-alienated nation encumbered by endemic social problems.

US-style internal discord has become even more magnified and glaring to the point where invoking "foreign malign influence" just looks absurd in its irrelevance.

READ MORE

[Aug 19, 2020] NYT degenerates into a gossip magazine for girls, publish a "best and worse moments" on the Democrat Convention

The silver lining to a second Trump win would be watching crazy Democrats go Rabidly Crazy.
Aug 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
vk , Aug 19 2020 11:26 utc | 19

NYT degenerates into a gossip magazine for girls, publish a "best and worse moments" on the Democrat Convention:

Democratic Convention: Best and Worst Moments of Night 2

It's not every time we can see the whole circus assembled. Enjoy the reading.

[Aug 19, 2020] The Anger Campaign Against China by Larry Romanoff

Aug 19, 2020 | www.unz.com

If 'liberal' dogs can't bark at Jews and Deep State, they bark at Russia.

The Origins of Mass Manipulation of the Public Mind

Many years ago, the American political commentator Walter Lippmann realised that political ideology could be completely fabricated, using the media to control both presentation and conceptualisation, not only to create deeply-ingrained false beliefs in a population, but also to entirely erase undesirable political ideas from the public mind. This was the beginning of not only the American hysteria for freedom, democracy and patriotism, but of all manufactured political opinion, a process that has been operative ever since. Lippmann created these theories of mass persuasion of the public, using totally fabricated "facts" deeply insinuated into the minds of a gullible public, but there is much more to this story. An Austrian Jew named Edward Louis Bernays who was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, was one of Lippmann's most precocious students and it was he who put Lippmann's theories into practice. Bernays is widely known in America as the father of Public Relations, but he would be much more accurately described as the father of American war marketing as well as the father of mass manipulation of the public mind.

Bernays claimed "If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind" it will be possible "to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it". He called this scientific technique of opinion-molding the 'engineering of consent', and to accomplish it he merged theories of crowd psychology with the psychoanalytical ideas of his uncle Sigmund Freud. [10] [11] Bernays regarded society as irrational and dangerous, with a "herd instinct", and that if the multi-party electoral system (which evidence indicates was created by a group of European elites as a population control mechanism) were to survive and continue to serve those elites, massive manipulation of the public mind was necessary. These elites, "invisible people", would have, through their influence on government and their control of the media, a monopoly on the power to shape thoughts, values, and responses of the citizenry. His conviction was that this group should flood the public with misinformation and emotionally-loaded propaganda to "engineer" the acquiescence of the masses and thereby rule over them. According to Bernays, this manufactured consent of the masses, creating conformity of opinion molded by the tool of false propaganda, would be vital for the survival of "democracy". Bernays wrote:

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. People are governed, their minds molded, their tastes formed, their ideas suggested, largely by men they have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner . In almost every act of our daily lives we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind." [12]

In his main work titled 'Propaganda', [13] which he wrote in 1928, Bernays argued that the manipulation of public opinion was a necessary part of democracy because individuals were inherently dangerous (to the control and looting of the elites) but could be harnessed and channeled by these same elites for their economic benefit. He clearly believed that virtually total control of a population was possible, and perhaps easy to accomplish. He wrote further that:

"No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any wise idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and clichés and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders. Fortunately, the politician is able, by the instrument of propaganda, to mold and form the will of the people. So vast are the numbers of minds which can be regimented, and so tenacious are they when regimented, that [they produce] an irresistible pressure before which legislators, editors, and teachers are helpless. "

And it wasn't only the public masses that were 'inherently dangerous', but a nation's leaders fit this description as well, therefore also requiring manipulation and control. Bernays realised that if you can influence the leaders of a nation, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you can control the government and the country, and that is precisely where he set his sights. Bernays again:

"In some departments of our daily life, in which we imagine ourselves free agents, we are ruled by dictators exercising great power. There are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. It is not generally realized to what extent the words and actions of our most influential public men are dictated by shrewd persons operating behind the scenes. Nor, what is still more important, the extent to which our thoughts and habits are modified by authorities. The invisible government tends to be concentrated in the hands of the few because of the expense of manipulating the social machinery which controls the opinions and habits of the masses."

And in this case, the "few" are the wealthy industrial elites, their even wealthier banker friends, and their brethren who control the media, publishing and entertainment industries.

Until the First World War, these theories of creating an entirely false public opinion based on misinformation, then manipulating this for population control, were still only theories, but the astounding success of propaganda by Bernays and his group during the war laid bare the possibilities of perpetually controlling the public mind on all matters. The "shrewd" designers of Bernays' "invisible government" developed a standard technique for what was essentially propaganda and mind control, or at least opinion control, and infiltrated it throughout the US government, its departments and agencies, and its leaders and politicians. Coincident with this, they practiced infecting the leaders of every identifiable group – fraternal, religious, commercial, patriotic, social – and encouraging these men to likewise infect their supporters.

Many have noted the black and white mentality that pervades America. Much of the blame must be laid on Bernays' propaganda methods. Bernays himself asserted that propaganda could produce rapid and strong emotional responses in the public, but that the range of these responses was limited because the emotional loading inherent in his propaganda would create a kind of binary mentality, eventually forcing the population into a programmed black and white world – which is precisely what we see in the US today. This isn't difficult to understand. When Bernays flooded the public with fabricated tales of Germans shiskababbing babies, the range of potential responses was entirely emotional and would be limited to either abhorrence or perhaps a blocking of the information. In a sense, our emotional switch will be forced into either an 'on' or 'off' position , with no other reasonable choices.

The elite few, as Bernays called them, realised early on the potential for control of governments, and in every subsequent US administration the president and his White House staff, the politicians, the leaders of the military and intelligence agencies, all fell prey to this same disease of shrewd manipulation. Roosevelt's "intense desire for war" in 1939 [14] [15] [16] was the result of this same infection process and, once infected, he of course approved of the infection of the entire American population. Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.

Bernays – Marketing War

In the discovery of propaganda as a tool of public mind control and in its use for war marketing, it is worthwhile to take a quick look at the historical background of Bernays' war effort. At the time, the European Zionists had made an agreement with England to bring the US into the war against Germany, on the side of England, a favor for which England would grant them the possession of Palestine as a location for a new homeland. [19] Palestine did not 'belong' to England, it was not England's to give, and England had no legal or moral right to make such an agreement, but it was made nevertheless.

US President Wilson was desperate to fulfill his obligations to his handlers by putting the US into the First World War as they wished, but the American population had no interest in the European war and public sentiment was entirely against participating. To facilitate the desired result, Wilson created the Committee on Public Information (The Creel Commission), [20] to propagandise the war by the mass brainwashing of America, but Creel was merely the 'front' of a group that consisted of specially hand-picked men from the media, advertising, the movie industry, and academia, as well as specialists in psychology. The two most important members were Walter Lippman, whom Wilson described as "the most brilliant man of his age", and Bernays who was the group's top mind-control expert, both Jews and both aware of the stakes in this game. Bernays planned to combine his uncle Freud's psychiatric insights with mass psychology blended with modern advertising techniques, and apply them to the task of mass mind control. It was Bernays' vast propaganda schemes and his influence in promoting the patently false idea that US entry to the war was primarily aimed at "bringing democracy to all of Europe", that proved so successful in altering public opinion about the war. Thanks to Edward Bernays, American war marketing was born and would never die.

Note to Readers: Some portion of the immediately following content which details the specifics of the propaganda of Lippman and Bernays for World War I is not my own work. It was extracted some years ago from a longer document for which I cannot now locate the original source. If a reader is able to identify this source, I would be grateful to receive that information so I can properly credit the author for his extensive research.

"Wilson's creation of the CPI was a turning point in world history, the first truly scientific attempt to form, manipulate and control the perceptions and beliefs of an entire population." With Wilson's authority, these men were given almost unlimited scope to work their magic, and in order to ensure the success of their program and guarantee the eventual possession of Palestine, these men and their committee carried out "a program of psychological warfare against the American people on a scale unprecedented in human history and with a degree of success that most propagandists could only dream about".

Having received permission and broad authority from the US President and the White House to "lead the public mind into war" [21] and, with their success threatened by widespread anti-war sentiment among the public, these men determined to engineer what Lippman called "the manufacture of consent" . The committee assumed the task to "examine the different ways that information flowed to the population and to flood these channels with pro-war material". Their effort was unparalleled in its scale and sophistication, since the Committee had the power not only to officially censor news and withhold information from the public, but to manufacture false news and distribute it nationally through all channels. In a very short time, Lippman and Bernays were well enough organised to begin flooding the US with anti-German propaganda consisting of hate literature, movies, songs, media articles and much more.

... ... ...

Everything we have read above about the marketing of war during preparation for the two World Wars, is from a template created by Lippman and Bernays exclusively to support the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine and to promote the agenda of Zionism. That template has been in constant use by the US government (as the Bankers' Private Army) since the Second World War, 'engineering consent and ignorance' in the American and Western populations to mask almost seven decades of atrocities, demonising innocent countries and peoples in preparation for 60 or 70 politically-inspired color revolutions or 'wars of liberation' fought exclusively for the financial and political benefit of a handful of European bankers using the US military as a private army for this purpose, resulting in the deaths and miseries of hundreds of millions of innocent civilians.

... ... ...

We can easily think of George W. Bush's demonisation of Iraq, the sordid tales of mass slaughters, the gassing of hundreds of thousands and burial in mass graves, the nuclear weapons ready to launch within 15 minutes, the responsibility for 9-11, the babies tossed out of incubators, Saddam using wood shredders to eliminate political opponents and dissidents. We can think of the tales of Libyan Viagra, all proven to have been groundless fabrications – typical atrocity propaganda. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran and dozens of other wars and invasions followed this same template to get the public mind onside for an unjustified war launched only for political and commercial objectives.

Fast Forward to 2020

We are at the same place today, with the same people conducting the same "anger campaign" against China in preparation for World War III. John Pilger agrees with me , evidenced in his recent article "Another Hiroshima is coming – unless we stop it now." [43] And so does Gordon Duff . [44] The signs now are everywhere, and the campaign is successful. It is necessary to point out the need for an 'anger campaign' as opposed to a 'hate campaign'. We are not moved to action from hate, but from anger. I may thoroughly despise you, but that in itself will do nothing. It is only if I am moved to anger that I want to punch your lights out. And this, as Lippman and Bernays so clearly noted, requires emotionally-charged atrocity propaganda of the kind used so well against Germany and being so well used against China today. Since we need atrocity propaganda to start a war, there seems to be no shortage.

... ... ...

Then, Mr. Pompeo tells us, "The truth is that our policies . . . resurrected China's failing economy, only to see Beijing bite the international hands that were feeding it." [55] Further, that (due to COVID-19) China "caused an enormous amount of pain, loss of life," and the "Chinese Communist Party will pay a price". [56] Of course, we all know that "China" stole the COVID-19 virus from a lab in Winnipeg, Canada, then released it onto the world – and Pompeo has proof [57] , and even "A Chinese virologist has proof" that "China" engaged in a massive cover-up while contaminating the world [58] and then "fleeing Hong Kong" because "I know how they treat whistle-blowers." [59] And of course, "China needs to be held accountable for Covid-19's destruction" [60] which is why everyone in the US wants to sue "China". "Australia" demands an international criminal investigation of China's role in COVID-19. [61] What a surprise.

And of course we have an almost unlimited number of serious provocations , from Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, the South China Seas, to Chinese consulates, media reporters, students, researchers, visa restrictions, spying, Huawei, the trade war, all done in the hope of making the Chinese leaders panic and over-react, the easiest way to justify a new war.

The list could continue for several hundred pages. Never in my life have I seen such a continuous, unabating flood of hate propaganda against one nation, surely equivalent to what was done against Germany as described above to prepare for US entry into the First World War. And it's working, doing what it is intended to do. Canada, Australia, the UK, Germany, India, Brazil, are buying into the war-mongering and turning against China. More will follow. The Global Times reported "Mutual trust between Australia and China at all-time low". [62]

"Boycott China" T-shirts and caps are flooding India, Huawei is being increasingly banned from Western nations, Chinese social media APPs like Tik-Tok are being banned, and Bryan Adams recently slammed all Chinese as "Bat-eating, wet-market-animal-selling, virus-making, greedy bastards". [63] [64] In a recent poll (taken because we need to measure the success of our handiwork in the same way Bernays and the Tavistock Institute did as noted earlier), half of all ethnic Chinese in Canada have been threatened and harassed over COVID-19.

About 45% of Chinese in Canada said they had been " threatened or intimidated in some way", fully 50% said they had recently been insulted in public, 30% said they had experienced . . . "some kind of physical altercation", and 60% said the abuse was so bad "they had to reorganise their daily routine to avoid it". One woman in her 60s said a man told her and her daughter "Every day I pray that you people die". [65]

... ... ...

Several years ago, CNN was sued by one of their news anchors for being ordered to lie in the newscasts. CNN won the case. They did not deny ordering the news anchor to lie. Their defense was based simply on the position that American news media have "no obligation to tell the truth". And RT recently reported that nearly 9 out of 10 Americans see a "medium or high" bias in all media coverage, [65] yet, as we can see, most of those same people, and a very large portion of the population of many nations still succumb to the same hate propaganda.

... ... ...

[Aug 19, 2020] The Committee Intelligence Committee relied on the same intelligence sources that fabricated the Russiagate scenario in the first place

Aug 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Rob , Aug 19 2020 19:19 utc | 53

Actually, after only a quick review of some of the news reports, it appears that the Senate Committee placed great importance on the "fact" that Russia was involved in the "hacking" of emails from the DNC. This suggests that the Committee relied on the same intelligence sources that fabricated the Russiagate scenario in the first place. I guess that the Republicans on the Committee have not kept up with revelations that there is no evidence of any such hacking. Hence, the Committee's conclusions are likely based on the same old disinformation and can be readily dismissed.

[Aug 18, 2020] Caitlin Johnstone- According to US Intelligence, if Trump wins Russia did it, If Biden wins it was China and Iran -- RT Op-ed

Aug 18, 2020 | www.rt.com

10 Aug, 2020

Mass media throughout the western world are uncritically passing along a press release from the US intelligence community, because that's what passes for journalism in a world where God is dead and everything is stupid.

[Aug 18, 2020] Rules for thee but not for me: Pompeo denounces proposed Russian law that would require labeling of propaganda content

Notable quotes:
"... "This decree will impose new burdensome requirements that will further inhibit RFE/RL's and VOA's ability to operate within Russia," ..."
"... "vital sources of independent news and information for the people of Russia" ..."
"... "more than 70 years." ..."
"... "be consistent with the broad foreign policy objectives of the United States" ..."
"... "provide a surge capacity to support United States foreign policy objectives during crises abroad." ..."
"... "foreign agents" ..."
"... "feel like criminals, or believe that they are in danger when they watch or read our materials." ..."
"... "state-affiliated," ..."
Aug 18, 2020 | www.rt.com

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has voiced his opposition to a proposed Russian rule that would require labeling of propaganda content, saying it would burden "independent" information work by outlets such as Voice of America.

"This decree will impose new burdensome requirements that will further inhibit RFE/RL's and VOA's ability to operate within Russia," Pompeo said Monday, commenting on the draft rule published by the media regulator Roskomnadzor.

Pompeo called VOA and its sister outlet Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty "vital sources of independent news and information for the people of Russia" for "more than 70 years."

Far from independent, however, they were both established as US propaganda outlets at the dawn of the Cold War. They are fully funded by the government, and the charter of their parent organization – now known as US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) – mandates that they "be consistent with the broad foreign policy objectives of the United States" and "provide a surge capacity to support United States foreign policy objectives during crises abroad."

The 1948 law that established these outlets outright prohibited their content from being broadcast in the US itself, until the Obama administration amended it in 2013.

The proposed rule would require all content produced by designated "foreign agents" in the Russian Federation to be clearly labeled. When the draft of it was made public last month, acting RFE/RL president Daisy Sindelar protested that its purpose was to "intimidate" her audience and make them "feel like criminals, or believe that they are in danger when they watch or read our materials."

Yet the Russian regulation is the mirror image of the requirement imposed under the US Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) on RT, Sputnik and China Global Television Network (CTGN) since 2017, which only a handful of groups such as the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) condemned as an attack on free speech. The USAGM remained conspicuously silent even as the designated outlets were denied credentials to access government press conferences.

US-based social media companies have also bowed to political pressure and labeled Russian- and Chinese-based outlets as "state-affiliated," while refraining from using that descriptor for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), German outlet Deutsche Welle, the French AFP, Turkish TRT, or any of the USAGM outlets, once again showcasing the double standard.


jangosimba 10 August, 2020

He cheats, he lies, he murders, he steals.
Zogg jangosimba 11 August, 2020
That's a small part of CIA job description.
Harbin

William Johnson 1 hour ago

Mike reminds me that character from "Godfather" series, the old , dumb henchman ready to follow any order...

[Aug 17, 2020] Who's Afraid of QAnon- by Gregory Hood

Highly recommended!
Is not Q-anon a disinformation operation run by intelligence againces?
From comments: "Being a true believer in "Q" is literally no different than being a true believer in the Democrat-Republican kosher sandwich." and "After almost four years of Trump's presidency, QAnon is an attempt to explain the President's failure to "Make America Great Again.""
Notable quotes:
"... This doesn't mean there's a Satanic cabal running the government. It does mean some bureaucrats opposed or even sabotaged President Trump's agenda. They investigated his subordinates or leaked information to the press. If we substitute "the permanent bureaucracy" for the more ominous sounding term "Deep State," this "conspiracy theory" becomes plausible. ..."
"... What is truly implausible about QAnon is the idea that President Trump knows about everything and will destroy this vast conspiracy. ..."
"... If you desperately want to believe something, you'll find evidence for it . This is confirmation bias at best, schizophrenia at worst. If President Trump truly is about to reveal a vast Satanic conspiracy, he's taking his time. ..."
"... What is especially dangerous about QAnon is not that it promotes dangerous extremism, but that it urges complacency. Its core message is that Donald Trump knows all about the secret conspiracy running the world and has the power to crush it; after all, he's President. ..."
"... After almost four years of Trump's presidency, QAnon is an attempt to explain the President's failure to "Make America Great Again." ..."
"... QAnon isn't dangerous. Conspiracy theories are as old as the Anti-Masonic Party , maybe older. Some unstable people may latch on to them, but they are not notably violent. If anything, if they really believe a Satanic cabal runs the world, they are showing remarkable restraint. ..."
"... I suspect the real reason journalists don't like QAnon is because at its core, it tells people the media are lying. It encourages independent investigation and citizen journalism. ..."
"... Journalists promote a conspiracy far more dangerous and deadly than QAnon. That is the "white privilege" conspiracy theory . ..."
"... Liberals are right to think QAnon is dangerous, but not in the way they think. QAnon is dangerous to whites. It tells them that everything is under control, that an evil conspiracy will be exposed, and that we just need to trust President Trump. We can't be under any illusions that President Trump will save us . "The Storm" is not coming, the cavalry won't ride over the hill, and there isn't a secret military force ready to scoop up our foes and liberate America. It's up to us. ..."
"... The Qanon phenomenon exploits the most fundamental psychological need which is hope, that hope dies last. The hope in order not to die will accept and forgive anything including the greatest nonsense. The hopeful ones can be strung along for ever because hope wants to last as it is the last to die. You just have to keep giving them a dose and keep stringing them alone. ..."
"... Sadly, the author is pretty much on-the-money. If Trump is for real, that is, if he believes what he says, he has been completely incompetent at accomplishing anything. ..."
"... I came late to the QAnon crap and saw it was the same soup as Black Lives Matter. Why, in fact, wouldn't the same crooks behind the one not foment the other? One says "blacks gonna make you kneel and take away all your stuff" while the other says, "don't worry, the least effective president in history has got us covered." ..."
"... They're all in show biz and Americans just happen to be an unusually gullible audience. ' ..."
"... I believe Trump is just another minion of the Deep State and is acting in accordance with their wishes. He is helping play out a charade a good cop (Trump) against a bad cop (Deep State). At any rate, he is not fulfilling his promises to those that elected him whether through incompetence or scheme. ..."
"... The logic of Hood's article is hard to beat either way. Trump/QAnon are just there for show, dangling hope in front of people that there's some person or entity that cares about them. It's the same as the infamous Pentagon Papers fifty years ago: Even after Americans knew the fix was in, the Vietnam War didn't stop until the plutocrats were good and ready to end it. ..."
"... The first sign of trouble was back when they adopted that ridiculous slogan, 'Trust the plan.' Sorry: this is politics. And in politics, I trust no one. The Q ought to be putting pressure on Trump (and the Republican Party generally), not sitting around waiting for them to grow a pair and save the country. ..."
"... The school system is promoting liberal indoctrination, and a whole bunch of kids are dropping out. Why? Because they like weed and don't like math. I see QAnon the same way. Sure, the media can't be trusted. But the enemy of my enemy is not my friend. ..."
"... I'm not prepared to defend the Qanon thing but, clearly, it is more than a pysop. It has revealed enormous amounts of sordid detail about what really goes on this country/ world and who many of the crooks are. The vast majority of the readers would not have learned that info any other way. Period. ..."
"... Great article. It covers the good and the bad and the hopelessly implausible very well. In times of a pandemic of lying generated by the USA Media Leviathan, the vulture capitalism of Wall Street, the exponentiating hate-Whitey rhetoric, the economy-killing Covid Scamdemic,the dwindling Euro-demographic numbers, along with a vurulent virus called Cultural Marxism, "extremism is no vice" ..."
"... A very insightful analysis and I think I now understand Q Anon. This seems to be an evolution from the people who early on were claiming that Trump was playing 4 (or 5 or 6) dimensional chess. I never supported him and don't now. He couldn't play one dimensional checkers if he wanted to and he probably doesn't. ..."
"... It has taken on a life of its own, constantly adapting to changes in situation. I kind of follow it as an unintentional experiment in human psychology. It's also interesting that it has absorbed a great deal of Christian mythology without actually being a Christian religion. ..."
Aug 17, 2020 | www.unz.com

What is QAnon? This question is harder to answer than you might think. There are several books about QAnon, including QAnon and The Great Awakening by Michael Knight, QAnon: An Invitation to The Great Awakening by "WWG1WGA," and Revolution Q by "Neon Revolt." After reading these and other books and websites, I'd identify three main points.

The initial post that spawned "Q" could have been made by anyone. Further "drops" by "Q" or people in the movement could also be made by anyone. There is no way to verify any of their claims, except through vague references to key phrases that will supposedly be uttered in the days following the posts. For example, before President's rally in Tulsa, Eric Trump posted an American-flag QAnon meme with the #WWG1WGA (this is supposed to stand for "Where We Go One, We Go All") at the bottom to Instagram. Does this mean anything, or was Eric Trump simply passing along an image he liked?

QAnon is so popular it has spawned its own "watchdog" groups. NPR's Michael Martin interviewed Travis View, the co-host of the QAnon Anonymous podcast. Mr. Martin prepped the audience by calling QAnon "a group of people who adhere to some far-right conspiracies and believe a number of absurd things." Mr. View obliged by saying that according to QAnon, "The world is controlled by a Satanic cabal of pedophiles that they believe control everything like the media, politics and entertainment." He adds that QAnon also thinks President Trump knows all about this and will "defeat this global cabal once and for all and free all of us." "QAnon Anonymous" host Travis View added that it is a "domestic extremist movement" and said President Trump had "tweeted or retweeted QAnon accounts over 160 times." However, he also admitted "no one in the current administration has ever done anything to endorse QAnon."

Nevertheless, it seems that at least some of President Trump's advisors know about the movement and are playing to it. President Trump has directly retweeted memes from accounts linked to QAnon. Republican congressional candidate Angela Stanton-King tweeted , " THE STORM IS HERE ." Tess Owen, Vice's reporter on the "far right" beat, wrote , "Welp, the GOP Now Has 15 QAnon-Linked Candidates on the November Ballot."

NBC news says ,

"There is no evidence to these claims" about a "cabal of criminals run by politicians like Hillary Clinton and the Hollywood elite."

However, after Jeffrey Epstein's alleged "suicide" and news that powerful figures such as former President Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew were part of Epstein's strange network, it's hardly absurd to claim there could be sick stuff going on among the political and cultural elite.

Jimmy Saville was a well-known British media personality, knighted, and honored by many institutions including the Vatican and the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. After his death, it emerged that he had sexually abused children ; some suggested hundreds of them. Most honors were rescinded posthumously.

A jury recently convicted Harvey Weinstein, once the most powerful producer in Hollywood, of sexual crimes. Several actresses including Allison Mack were alleged to be part of a bizarre sexual cult called NXIVM, and she pleaded guilty to racketeering . During the 2016 election, Wikileaks released email tying John Podesta's brother to "artist" Marina Abramovic and her bizarre, occult performance piece "Spirit Cooking."

If a crazy man approached you in the street raving about these plots, you'd run, but these things happened. Non-whites sexually abused thousands of young women in Rotherham, England. Police and local government officials did nothing because they didn't want to be called racists. This is a sick world, and evildoers often get away with evil. It's not absurd to think powerful men and women are no better than middling Labour politicians who looked the other way instead of stopping rape and sex slavery.

Is there a "Deep State" opposing President Trump? In 2019, the New York Times ran an editorial called " The 'Deep State' Exists to Battle People Like Trump. " In 2018, an anonymous official wrote, " I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration ." Recent evidence suggests that the FBI bullied General Michael Flynn, President Trump's former national security advisor, and made him confess he had lied to agents after they threatened his son. The Department of Justice recently concluded that the interview of General Flynn was not "conducted with a legitimate investigative basis."

This doesn't mean there's a Satanic cabal running the government. It does mean some bureaucrats opposed or even sabotaged President Trump's agenda. They investigated his subordinates or leaked information to the press. If we substitute "the permanent bureaucracy" for the more ominous sounding term "Deep State," this "conspiracy theory" becomes plausible. Incidentally, General Flynn recently posted a video that uses QAnon slogans.

What is truly implausible about QAnon is the idea that President Trump knows about everything and will destroy this vast conspiracy. The proof for such assertions lies in gestures, vague statements, or even the background of where he is speaking. For example, in QAnon and the Great Awakening, the author says that President Trump's phrases "this is the calm before the storm" and "tippy top," his supposed circular motions with his hands, and occasional pointing towards supposed Q supporters are proof that he is on to it. "Q offers hundreds of data points that demonstrate Q is indeed linked to the Trump Administration," the book says.

If you desperately want to believe something, you'll find evidence for it . This is confirmation bias at best, schizophrenia at worst. If President Trump truly is about to reveal a vast Satanic conspiracy, he's taking his time.

What is especially dangerous about QAnon is not that it promotes dangerous extremism, but that it urges complacency. Its core message is that Donald Trump knows all about the secret conspiracy running the world and has the power to crush it; after all, he's President. All we have to do is wait. "Nothing can stop what is coming," says one popular slogan. If this were true, President Trump and his followers have already won, and there's no reason to do anything but scour the internet for clues about what's coming next.

After almost four years of Trump's presidency, QAnon is an attempt to explain the President's failure to "Make America Great Again." It's true that he's hobbled by powerful elites. However, President Trump's biggest personnel problems, from John Bolton to Anthony Scaramucci, were people he appointed himself. No one forced him to make Reince Priebus his chief of staff, expel Steve Bannon, or pick a fight with Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Indeed, according to QAnon, Attorney General Sessions was the one who was supposed to rout the evildoers .

QAnon assures Trump supporters that he has everything well in hand and that justice is coming. It's far more terrifying to realize that he doesn't. He is politically isolated, surrounded by foes, and losing the presidential campaign to a confused and combative man who occasionally forgets what office he's running for or where he is . President Trump's not mustering his legions. Instead, his own defense secretary publicly opposed his plans to use soldiers to suppress riots. The brass overruled his wishes to leave bases named after Confederate heroes alone. Unless President Trump has a Praetorian Guard we don't know about (perhaps the Space Force?), there's nothing he can use against domestic opponents.

The real question is why reporters fear QAnon. Some of its supporters have allegedly committed crimes. One alleged QAnon believer killed a Gambino mob boss. In February, another blocked a bridge with an armored vehicle. Two others had family troubles, which may or may not be related to their QAnon beliefs. If these people did those things, they are criminals, but this is hardly a wave of violence. All together, this would be a peaceful weekend in Chicago .

QAnon isn't dangerous. Conspiracy theories are as old as the Anti-Masonic Party , maybe older. Some unstable people may latch on to them, but they are not notably violent. If anything, if they really believe a Satanic cabal runs the world, they are showing remarkable restraint.

I suspect the real reason journalists don't like QAnon is because at its core, it tells people the media are lying. It encourages independent investigation and citizen journalism. This occasionally leads to absurdities, such as building a worldview around 4chan posts. However, it's healthy to distrust elites. Sometimes, journalists lie , stretch the truth , or hide it entirely . Sometimes, they demand citizens be silenced . Ordinary Americans looking for truth are a threat. I believe mainstream journalists truly regard themselves as a Fourth Estate, an independent political power . They think they have the right to determine what Americans should and should not be allowed to hear or say. Their efforts to censor and suppress QAnon only fuel the movement.

Journalists promote a conspiracy far more dangerous and deadly than QAnon. That is the "white privilege" conspiracy theory . Many journalists and academics tell non-whites that racist whites hold them down. This implicitly justifies protests, shakedowns, and even anti-white violence. When George Floyd died, Americans weren't allowed to see the bodycam videos . Instead, many journalists told a fable about a white policeman murdering an innocent black man. This was the spark, but journalists had soaked the country in gasoline years before with endless sensationalist coverage of race and "racism." Now, riots are destroying cities, ruining businesses, probably spreading disease, and creating a huge crime wave . I blame journalists for inciting this violence. It's not QAnon spreading a violent conspiracy theory, but journalists at CNN , the New York Times , the Washington Post, and others who manufactured a fake crisis .

Liberals are right to think QAnon is dangerous, but not in the way they think. QAnon is dangerous to whites. It tells them that everything is under control, that an evil conspiracy will be exposed, and that we just need to trust President Trump. We can't be under any illusions that President Trump will save us . "The Storm" is not coming, the cavalry won't ride over the hill, and there isn't a secret military force ready to scoop up our foes and liberate America. It's up to us.

Liberals should be thankful for a conspiracy theory that urges complacency. Our message is more urgent: Our people, country, and civilization are at stake. You don't need to pore through websites to see what's happening; just walk down any city street. Time is running out. You have a duty to resist . Don't look for a savior. Instead, join us, and be worthy of our ancestors .


utu , says: August 15, 2020 at 1:26 am GMT

You got it right.

"What is especially dangerous about QAnon is not that it promotes dangerous extremism, but that it urges complacency . "

"We can't be under any illusions that President Trump will save us. "The Storm" is not coming, the cavalry won't ride over the hill, and there isn't a secret military force ready to scoop up our foes and liberate America."

The Qanon phenomenon exploits the most fundamental psychological need which is hope, that hope dies last. The hope in order not to die will accept and forgive anything including the greatest nonsense. The hopeful ones can be strung along for ever because hope wants to last as it is the last to die. You just have to keep giving them a dose and keep stringing them alone.

There is is a blogger Benjamin Fulford that precedes Qanon and uses exactly the same technique and very similar narratives of hidden forces of Good and Evil fighting for the dominance and the forces of Good always being very close to the final victory to give you enough hope to keep you interested till the next installment.. There is a mixture of Free Masons, Rockefellers, Rothschild, Zionists, Trump, Pope Sabbatean mafia, Khazarian mafia and Asian Secret Societies. The latter are on the side of Good in Fulford's universe. Fulford, I think, is located somewhere in Asia, most likely Japan. Fulford missed his calling of being a script writer of the never ending TV series and dramas like TWD and so on. But I suspect he makes some money from his series about the world in battle between forces of Good and Evil and the victory being just around the corner.

From August 10, 2020. Benjamin Fulford installment:

https://benjaminfulford.net

"The Khazarian mafia is preparing the public for some form of alien disclosure or invasion scenario as they struggle to stay in power, Pentagon and other sources claim. The most likely scenario for this autumn is the cancellation of the U.S. Presidential election followed by a UFO distraction, the sources say. U.S. President Donald Trump himself is saying the election needs to be called off even as he continues to promote a "Space force.""

Or from August 3 installment:

"The P3 Freemasons are saying the Covid-19 campaign is only going to intensify until an agreement is reached to set up a "World Republic." Certainly, the P3 lodge involvement is easier to spot in Japan and Korea where all positive test results are being traced to either Christian (P3) sects or Khazarian Mafia hedge funds."

"The other big theme being pushed by the Zionists is an escalating conflict between the U.S. and China. The U.S. State Department propaganda machine is pushing a doctored document known as "The Secret Speech of General Chi Haotian," which claims to contain secret Chinese plans to invade the U.S., kill women and children and use biological warfare."

"Of course, the opposite is true, since everybody who read the Project for a New American Century knows the Zionist regime has been touting race-specific or ethnic-specific biological warfare as a "useful political tool." "

Or from July 27:

"The rest of the world, especially the main creditors Japan and China, are willing to write off the debt but they want a change in management first. In other words, they want the Americans to free themselves from the Babylonian debt slavery of the Khazarian mafia.

That process has started with arrests and extra-judicial killings of top Khazarian, Satan-worshipping elites. The Bush family is gone, the Rockefellers lost the presidency when Hillary Rockefeller was defeated, and many politicians and so-called celebrities have vanished.

However, the situation is still like a lizard shaking off its tail in order to escape. The real control of the United States is still in the hands of "

ENJOY!

Fidelios Automata , says: August 15, 2020 at 3:21 am GMT

Sadly, the author is pretty much on-the-money. If Trump is for real, that is, if he believes what he says, he has been completely incompetent at accomplishing anything. As for the media, I'd disagree that they sometimes lie; they lie pretty much ALL the time.

Exile , says: August 15, 2020 at 4:58 am GMT

What is especially dangerous about QAnon is not that it promotes dangerous extremism, but that it urges complacency.

So does Trump and the GOP in general. The GOP, MAGA and NeverTrump alike, exists only to sap our will, acclimate us to defeat and put us to sleep with the comforting illusion that some authority or institution is fighting for us.

Until the American Right realizes this, it will never gain back one inch of ground. And no one worth marching with or behind will join their ranks or rise from them.

Franz , says: August 15, 2020 at 5:24 am GMT

Very excellent article.

I came late to the QAnon crap and saw it was the same soup as Black Lives Matter. Why, in fact, wouldn't the same crooks behind the one not foment the other? One says "blacks gonna make you kneel and take away all your stuff" while the other says, "don't worry, the least effective president in history has got us covered."

There's no war in heaven. They're all in show biz and Americans just happen to be an unusually gullible audience.
'

The Alarmist , says: August 15, 2020 at 1:06 pm GMT

What is especially dangerous about QAnon is not that it promotes dangerous extremism, but that it urges complacency.

Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Give that man a prize! QAnon is a psyop.

Realist , says: August 15, 2020 at 2:36 pm GMT
@Fidelios Automata

If Trump is for real, that is, if he believes what he says, he has been completely incompetent at accomplishing anything.

That is the dilemma. I believe Trump is just another minion of the Deep State and is acting in accordance with their wishes. He is helping play out a charade a good cop (Trump) against a bad cop (Deep State). At any rate, he is not fulfilling his promises to those that elected him whether through incompetence or scheme.

SocraticGadfly , says: August 15, 2020 at 9:04 pm GMT

Uhhh, Donald Trump as well as Slickster Billy Bob was part of the Epstein network. This piece jumps the shark and the rails right there at the start and goes further into PR turd-polishing land after that.

Franz , says: August 16, 2020 at 9:18 am GMT
@Wyatt ockquote>

The logic of Hood's article is hard to beat either way. Trump/QAnon are just there for show, dangling hope in front of people that there's some person or entity that cares about them. It's the same as the infamous Pentagon Papers fifty years ago: Even after Americans knew the fix was in, the Vietnam War didn't stop until the plutocrats were good and ready to end it.

The truth sets nobody free. Power is a vehicle to find truth and do something about it. Truth without power just equals more frustration. And the world's full to bursting with frustration already.

Digital Samizdat , says: August 16, 2020 at 10:34 am GMT

What is especially dangerous about QAnon is not that it promotes dangerous extremism, but that it urges complacency. Its core message is that Donald Trump knows all about the secret conspiracy running the world and has the power to crush it; after all, he's President. All we have to do is wait.

Yup. The first sign of trouble was back when they adopted that ridiculous slogan, 'Trust the plan.' Sorry: this is politics. And in politics, I trust no one. The Q ought to be putting pressure on Trump (and the Republican Party generally), not sitting around waiting for them to grow a pair and save the country.

Anonymous [134] Disclaimer , says: August 17, 2020 at 3:52 am GMT

The school system is promoting liberal indoctrination, and a whole bunch of kids are dropping out. Why? Because they like weed and don't like math. I see QAnon the same way. Sure, the media can't be trusted. But the enemy of my enemy is not my friend.

These guys are mostly mentally unstable white knights and while I'm not much concerned that they will actually harm Justin Beiber by baselessly accusing him of rape, their behavior contributes to the culture of white knighting and social media witch hunts I mean citizen journalism which only strengthens the feminist movement.

Icy Blast , says: August 17, 2020 at 4:27 am GMT

"You have a duty to resist." The QAnon people, intellectual and moral descendants of the Scofield Reference Bible, don't want to hear this. They just want to eat and watch TV. After all, Ben Franklin and George Washington will save us just in time!

Yukon Jack , says: August 17, 2020 at 4:57 am GMT

QAnon is just another Zionist-pro Israeli psyop. Q never talks about the Israel conspiracy or how AIPAC controls America. Trump is always, about ready, to bring the hammer down on the deep state, but never does as he appoints Neocon after Neocon, the latest is Elliott Abrams, as bad or worse than John Bolton.

Remember back when Hillary was in chains, or Obama went to Gitmo and got executed? QAnon is false hope being served up to Trump's conservative base who want the criminal government exposed and prosecuted. But that never happens under Trump.

According to many researchers, including me, Beirut got nuked, and that story is already gone, swept under the Jewmedia rug, written off as a fertilizer accident. Where's Q on that one? No where to be found because Q is Jew protecting Israel at every turn.

You all listen to Q at your own peril. And oh yeah, have you noticed the world going to hell? Where's Trump's secret plan you all? It's fake, Q Anon led you all into a blind alley, it pacified you as your nation was stolen right in front of your eyes. Q is a pied piper for adults who think like children. Q Anon was the latest hopium injected into the body politic, Trump is the swamp, he is working for Israel, he is selling you out, he is the snake who betrays you. But the q followers can't see that or even hear it because they need hope, and the opposition is worse than Trump.

The Real World , says: August 17, 2020 at 5:31 am GMT
@Oldtradesman t-text">

I'm not prepared to defend the Qanon thing but, clearly, it is more than a pysop. It has revealed enormous amounts of sordid detail about what really goes on this country/ world and who many of the crooks are. The vast majority of the readers would not have learned that info any other way. Period.

Now that a fair amount is exposed, it's up to Trump and Barr to indict and convict a slew of high level people. If they don't then they are worthless and can go fvck themselves for jerking the public around and not sealing the deal.

The Real World , says: August 17, 2020 at 5:38 am GMT
@Digital Samizdat

The Christians in the Repub Party are so easy to play. They are taught to 'follow the leader' from Day 1 of their lives and Trump has provided himself as their golden savior to worship and trust. God sent him to us, you know. (lol)

That segment of the Repub Party doesn't have a pair to grow. So, it won't happen. Marxism is in our future, it's only a matter of time.

Anon [102] Disclaimer , says: August 17, 2020 at 5:40 am GMT

In the final 15 seconds of this Flynn Video the General and his family acknowledge they are part of the Qanon IIA

https://www.youtube.com/embed/pDq7nud2-C4?feature=oembed

Q is Trumps softcore equivalent of Bidens Shadownet contract operations

utu , says: August 17, 2020 at 6:04 am GMT
@Anon

The hope that there are "good guys" dies last.

Amon , says: August 17, 2020 at 7:51 am GMT
@Fidelios Automata

Trump may gave been for real, but I also think he's just a well dressed actor who is doing what his handlers demand of him these days.

If Q-Anon is feared for something, it's that it urges people to look, listen and think for themselves instead of just doing what they are told.

Z-man , says: August 17, 2020 at 8:58 am GMT

Very good. A close friend of mine who I didn't consider too interested in these matters mentioned QAnon to me while I was telling him how Trump is being sabotaged by some of his own people. I was surprised he knew, probably more than me.

PS. I would wear a Q tee shirt except that I'm old school and 'Q' connotes queer. So maybe an Anon one might do. (Big grin)

Tom , says: August 17, 2020 at 9:08 am GMT

Great article. It covers the good and the bad and the hopelessly implausible very well. In times of a pandemic of lying generated by the USA Media Leviathan, the vulture capitalism of Wall Street, the exponentiating hate-Whitey rhetoric, the economy-killing Covid Scamdemic,the dwindling Euro-demographic numbers, along with a vurulent virus called Cultural Marxism, "extremism is no vice"

dimples , says: August 17, 2020 at 9:40 am GMT

After laughing themselves silly over the gullible idiots who ran with their 911 'no-planes' psychological operation, the CIA bugmen cooked up a new one. They're laughing themselves silly all over again.

Stephen Paul Foster , says: Website August 17, 2020 at 11:28 am GMT

"Journalists promote a conspiracy far more dangerous and deadly than QAnon. That is the "white privilege" conspiracy theory. Many journalists and academics tell non-whites that racist whites hold them down."

This is the "systemic racism" conspiracy that's taken hold of Woke-America. http://fosterspeak.blogspot.com/2020/08/systematic-racism-defining-deviancy-down.html

Kirt , says: August 17, 2020 at 11:51 am GMT

A very insightful analysis and I think I now understand Q Anon. This seems to be an evolution from the people who early on were claiming that Trump was playing 4 (or 5 or 6) dimensional chess. I never supported him and don't now. He couldn't play one dimensional checkers if he wanted to and he probably doesn't.

jxy , says: August 17, 2020 at 12:43 pm GMT
@Wyatt

...it has awakened something of a frustration in a lot of people.

It has taken on a life of its own, constantly adapting to changes in situation. I kind of follow it as an unintentional experiment in human psychology. It's also interesting that it has absorbed a great deal of Christian mythology without actually being a Christian religion. In the end though it is people trying to feel they have some control (and indeed, considering the fear in the media) that might be true.

[For fun, dig up and read Asimov's "I Spell My Name with an S" from 1958.]

threestars , says: August 17, 2020 at 1:12 pm GMT
@art guerrilla

There is no indication that anyone forced Trump into making any of the bad decisions mentioned. Your first point is asking Hood to weave some fanciful alternative to what is outright obvious. No serious author does that. If he were to have used "most likely" before giving his sensible opinion, would that have satisfied you? The Easter Bunny holding a gun to Trump's head and telling him to disavow Session is also a possibility, you know, but not a likely one.

Frankly, I think you are the one who's intellectually deficient.

G J T , says: August 17, 2020 at 1:18 pm GMT
@Anon

People who actually have good instincts but just cannot bring themselves to face the harsh reality in front of them.

The deplatforming of QAnon crap is not due to "Q" itself, but where "Q" supporters might find themselves next, once this psyop has run its course. They wanna kill it now to keep the delusion itself alive, lest all these "Q" true believer stumble into some anti-semitism and other truths that actually challenge the status quo.

Being a true believer in "Q" is literally no different than being a true believer in the Democrat-Republican kosher sandwich.

G J T , says: August 17, 2020 at 1:22 pm GMT
@Amon

Correct. And when we're talking about the "Deep state," organized pedophilia, human trafficking, etc, many of these "Q" people will inevitably find their way to the Rabbi behind the curtain. It is the natural destination if one does not self-censor or cling to their priors. There is no other destination, in fact.

[Aug 12, 2020] Have to wonder at the re-emergence of Russiagate. Seems a major reason for its emergence is to shame voters into voting for Biden

Aug 12, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Erelis , Aug 10 2020 19:51 utc | 28

Have to wonder at the re-emergence of Russiagate. Seems a major reason for its emergence is to shame voters into voting for Biden. If you do not vote for Biden, you are Putin's useful idiot. In particular aimed at African Americans. Recently a NYT reporter claimed that it was Russian mean tweets, etc that caused a very dramatic drop in African American turn out in 2016. See screen shot by Aron Mate as the NYT reporter deleted the tweets.

https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/1292637512813481984/photo/1

Looks like the DNC may be very nervous about Black turnout after Biden's many racial gaffes. Imagine Black turnout if he chooses Susan Rice as his VP. The DNC may have to go to Putin to ask for his help.



librul , Aug 10 2020 20:50 utc | 35

Spawn of the Dossier

Were you aware that the Steele dossier had a significant other?

"Rep Devin Nunes:

"You may remember that the State Department was involved and there were additional
dossiers that weren't the Steele dossier- except that they mirrored the Steele dossier.
And we think there is a connection between the [former] president of Brookings
and those dossiers that were given to the State Department."
"
...
Also from article:

"
The "additional dossiers that weren't the Steele dossier" addressed by Nunes
is a reference to a lesser known dodgy dossier produced by Brookings-affiliated
journalist Cody Shearer (brother-in-law of Strobe Talbott) which was crafted
explicitly to validate the wildly unsupported claims found in Steele's dossier.
"

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/08/10/the-brookings-hand-behind-russiagate-points-back-to-rhodes-trust-coup-on-america/

Jackrabbit , Aug 10 2020 21:03 utc | 38

I know it sounds wacky to those of you who still put some store in MSM nonsense, but I still believe that what we know as "Russiagate" was a carefully planned operation to:

  1. initiate a new anti-Russia McCarthyism -
    after Trump's election, MSM repeated Russigate accusations about Russian meddling every night for months;
  2. elect MAGA Nationalist (Trump, not Hillary!) -

    as Kissinger had called for in his Aug 2014 WSJ Op-Ed;

  3. discredit Wikileaks/Assange;
  4. lead to a vindictive settling of scores with Assange, Flynn, Manafort.

Also: It's likely that Skripal was the true "primary sub-source" and that he was drugged because he planned to flee back to Russia because he realised that he knew too much. He knew that the "dirty dossier" was meant to be untrue and easily debunked. It would never actually tarnish Trump - only Russia. Not surprisingly, Trump's MAGA Nationalism has been strengthened by Russiagate allegations while the anti-Russia sentiment remains.

!!

[Aug 09, 2020] Russia, China and Iran seeking to influence US ahead of elections, top intelligence official says - US elections 2020 by David Smith

Aug 07, 2020 | www.theguardian.com

Russia is backing Donald Trump, China is supporting Joe Biden and Iran is seeking to sow chaos in the US presidential election, a top intelligence official has warned in a sobering assessment of foreign meddling.

The statement on Friday by William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, raises fears of a repeat of the 2016 election, when Russia manipulated social media to help Trump and hurt his opponent Hillary Clinton.

"Russia is using a range of measures to primarily denigrate former Vice President Biden and what it sees as an anti-Russia 'establishment'," Evanina said. "This is consistent with Moscow's public criticism of him when he was Vice President for his role in the Obama Administration's policies on Ukraine and its support for the anti-Putin opposition inside Russia."

Evanina identified Andriy Derkach, a pro-Russia Ukrainian politician, as "spreading claims about corruption – including through publicized leaked phone calls" to attack Biden's campaign. The Washington Post reported that Derkach has met repeatedly with Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who has pushed conspiracy theories about the former vice-president.

US Postal Service announces cost-saving changes amid vote-by-mail fears Read more

Evanina also warned that some "Kremlin-linked actors" were spreading false claims about corruption to undermine Biden, while others were trying to "boost President Trump's candidacy via social media and Russian television".

Evanina, the top intelligence official monitoring threats to the election, is a Trump appointee. His statement lists China before Russia but presents less specific evidence of direct interference by Beijing.

"We assess that China prefers that President Trump – whom Beijing sees as unpredictable – does not win re-election," Evanina said. "China has been expanding its influence efforts ahead of November 2020 to shape the policy environment in the United States, pressure political figures it views as opposed to China's interests, and deflect and counter criticism of China."

He added: "Beijing recognizes that all of these efforts might affect the presidential race."

Evanina highlighted China's criticism of Trump's handling of the coronavirus pandemic, the closure of China's consulate in Houston and the White House responses to Chinese actions in Hong Kong and the South China Sea. On Friday, the US imposed sanctions on Hong Kong's chief executive, Carrie Lam, and 10 other senior officials. Trump has also ordered crackdowns on the Chinese owners of the popular apps TikTok and WeChat.

Iran, meanwhile, was seeking to undermine US democratic institutions and Trump, and to divide the country ahead of the 2020 elections, Evanina's statement said.

"Iran's efforts along these lines probably will focus on on-line influence, such as spreading disinformation on social media and recirculating anti-US content. Tehran's motivation to conduct such activities is, in part, driven by a perception that President Trump's reelection would result in a continuation of US pressure on Iran in an effort to foment regime change."

Trump pulled the US out of a nuclear deal agreed by Barack Obama and imposed various sanctions on Tehran.

The anti-Trump pressure group National Security Action denied that China's public actions rose to the level of Russia's covert election interference. "Jarringly, the statement attempted to minimize what Russia is doing – again attacking our democracy in a bid to secure Trump's reelection – by comparing it to China's public criticism of the administration's recent punitive measures against Beijing," a spokesperson, Ned Price, said. "Any interference in our democracy is unacceptable, but there is no equivalence between the two efforts."

In a press conference at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, on Friday evening, Trump reacted to the assessment by insisting: "I think that the last person Russia wants to see in office is Donald Trump because nobody's been tougher on Russia than I have, ever.

"China would love us to have an election where Donald Trump lost to 'Sleepy' Joe Biden. They would own our country. If Joe Biden was president, China would own our country ... Iran would love to see me not be president."

The president added: "I'll make this statement. If and when we win, we will make deals with Iran very quickly. We'll make deals with North Korea very quickly. Whatever happened to the war in North Korea? You haven't seen that, have you?"

A hacking and social media campaign by Russia in 2016 is credited by US intelligence with helping Trump to victory. It triggered the special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, which described Russian meddling but did not conclude that there had been direct collusion by Trump or his campaign.

The November election is already under siege from the coronavirus pandemic, concerns over whether the system can handle a surge in mail-in voting and constant attacks by Trump on the integrity of the process.

Evanina warned that foreign adversaries may try to interfere with election systems by trying to sabotage the voting process, stealing election data or questioning the validity of results: "Foreign efforts to influence or interfere with our elections are a direct threat to the fabric of our democracy."

The report raised concern on Capitol Hill. Marco Rubio and Mark Warner, the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, said they "encourage political leaders on all sides to refrain from weaponizing intelligence matters for political gain".

Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate majority leader, said: "It is no surprise our adversaries have preferences in our elections. Foreign nations have tried to influence our politics throughout American history. As Director Evanina's statement makes clear, Russian malign influence efforts remain a significant threat. But it would be a serious mistake to ignore the growing threats posed by China and Iran."

[Aug 09, 2020] There is little incentive for the Times and their intelligence-community "sources" to spin more elaborate lies when the media-political-intellectual culture has degraded to the point that no one thinks beyond the level of the naked meme. The sole lesson for the Beltway establishment from 2003 Iraq-WMD fiasco is to try to avoid lies specific enough that they can be disproven.

Aug 09, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

David G , Aug 8 2020 21:23 utc | 30

What MoA is focusing on here – that the body of the NY Times article lacks any specific allegations to back up the scare headline – closely parallels the "Russian bounties" story from a few weeks ago.

In that case as well, someone who actually read the initial, supposedly blockbuster piece, found nothing to support the headline or provide details beyond the lead sentence or two of the piece. And I'm speaking in objective terms: leaving aside whether a reader might or might not find any specific alleged findings credible, they simply weren't there.

The follow-up "Russian bounties" articles added a very few specific allegations. These were unconvincing, but more to the point, nobody paid attention to them or seemed to feel they were needed, and they ceased within a few days. This was because the initial article had served its purpose simply by putting this one sentence out there: "Russia is paying bounties to the Taliban to kill U.S. soldiers."

That one bare assertion is now established as a meme (in more like the original sense of the word than the funny pictures everyone sends around) that impersonates as an established fact, and now regularly appears in establishment narratives, such as remarks by members of Congress, and other corporate media pieces, e.g. this week's interview of Trump by Jonathan Swan, which itself got a lot of coverage: ("Trump didn't bring up the bounties in his phone conversation with Putin!").

The Times article MoA tries to examine today, only to find it doesn't actually exist in substance beyond the headline, serves the same purpose, but for this sentence: "Russian meddling in U.S. elections continues in 2020." This is necessary for the narrative managers so that they aren't limited to referring to "meddling" as a mere historic event from 2016, and can treat it as a live – and established as true – threat now. (Of course, the meddling in 2016 was itself a phony story, and this shows how these manufactured memes can be stacked one on top of the other to create the false edifice that the Beltway consensus successfully purveys as the real world to most people in the U.S.)

There is little incentive for the Times and their intelligence-community "sources" to spin more elaborate lies when the media-political-intellectual culture has degraded to the point that no one thinks beyond the level of the naked meme. They thus avoid two problems associated with staging more elaborate hoaxes: (1) it's more work; (2) specific falsehoods can be disproven with facts. The sole major lesson the Beltway establishment took from the 2003 Iraq-WMD fiasco is to try to avoid lies specific enough that they can be disproven.


Richard Steven Hack , Aug 9 2020 2:28 utc | 52

"Nowadays that seems to be their main purpose."

That's always been the purpose of intelligence agencies - in every nation throughout history.

Government agencies work for their own benefit, without exception. And the leaders of government always work the same way, regardless of the actual "national interests" or "public interest".

The problem is that everyone believes the fantasy that somehow they can "elect" leaders and government workers who don't do this. But all elections are manipulated by the political elites themselves to insure that no one gets into power who might the remotest notion of upsetting the profitable apply cart. And if any movement arose that sought to prevent the manipulation of elections - say, a "third party" or some movement to de-fund parties by elites - that movement itself would be deflected or undermined or taken over.

It's a circus and you all are the circus animals. Get used to it.

J W , Aug 9 2020 2:07 utc | 51

Posted by: JC | Aug 9 2020 0:45 utc | 47

I don't know where the idea that China wants Biden to win came from. The consensus I get from reading actual PRC media in native Chinese is certainly the opposite: They are 100% sure the Cold War 2.0 is going to escalate either way, so they will rather have Trump's outward incompetence than another Obama-like knife-behind-the-smile schemer.

Paul , Aug 9 2020 0:58 utc | 48

It is the rulers themselves and those who rule the rulers, who are fearful of losing control of the levers of power. I recall the British in Egypt boasting: 'we don't rule Egypt, we rule the rulers.'

It is not the accumulation of power for its own sake that is the intoxicating elixir of the ruling elite. It is furthering their objectives, both open and hidden.

To understand their primary objectives one should ask: just what is the single most bi partisan policy objective of US presidents, since Woodrow Wilson, with a few minor differences of opinion and emphasis from Eisenhower and Kennedy? Just what was the first priority item on the agenda at both the 1919 Paris 'Peace' Conference and the first United Nations meetings at Lake Success?

It was amending the title deeds of Palestine and attempting to confer some kind of quasi legitimacy on the new title deed holders.

The rulers are very afraid the future of the Zionist project is slipping away from their control. So in their rabid and delusional minds anything goes from now on in the furtherance of that self inflicted nightmare and the elimination of anyone or any country that inhibits that objective. Watch out.

[Aug 09, 2020] NYT as an amplifier for the mislabeled US 'Intelligence' Agencies rumor and baseless claims about foreign interferences in US elections

The first and the most important fact that there will no elections in November -- both candidates represent the same oligarchy, just slightly different factions of it.
Look like NYT is controlled by Bolton faction of CIA. They really want to overturn the results of 2020 elections and using Russia as a bogeyman is a perfect opportunity to achieve this goal.
Neocons understand very well that it is MIC who better their bread, so amplifying rumors the simplify getting additional budget money for intelligence agencies (which are a part of MIC) is always the most desirable goal.
Notable quotes:
"... But a new assessment says China would prefer to see the president defeated, though it is not clear Beijing is doing much to meddle in the 2020 campaign to help Joseph R. Biden Jr. ..."
"... The statement then claims: "Ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections, foreign states will continue to use covert and overt influence measures in their attempts to sway U.S. voters' preferences and perspectives, shift U.S. policies, increase discord in the United States, and undermine the American people's confidence in our democratic process." ..."
"... But how do the 'intelligence' agencies know that foreign states want to "sway preferences", "increase discord" or "undermine confidence" in elections? ..."
"... But ascribing motive and intent is a tricky business, because perceived impact is often mistaken for true intent. [...] Where is the evidence that Russia actually wants to bring down the liberal world order and watch the United States burn? ..."
"... Well there is none. And that is why the 'intelligence' agencies do not present any evidence. ..."
"... Is there a secret policy paper by the Russian government that says it should "increase discord" in the United States? Is there some Chinese think tank report which says that undermining U.S. people's confidence in their democratic process would be good for China? ..."
"... If the 'intelligence' people have copies of those papers why not publish them? ..."
"... Let me guess. The 'intelligence' agencies have nothing, zero, nada. They are just making wild-ass guesses about 'intentions' of perceived enemies to impress the people who sign off their budget. ..."
"... Nowadays that seems to be their main purpose. ..."
Aug 08, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
No Evidence Of Foreign Interference In U.S. Elections, U.S. Intelligence Says

Yesterday the mislabeled U.S. 'Intelligence' Agencies trotted out more nonsense claims about foreign interferences in U.S. elections.

The New York Times sensationally headlines:

Russia Continues Interfering in Election to Try to Help Trump, U.S. Intelligence Says
But a new assessment says China would prefer to see the president defeated, though it is not clear Beijing is doing much to meddle in the 2020 campaign to help Joseph R. Biden Jr.

But when one reads the piece itself one finds no fact that would support the 'Russia Continues Interfering' statement:

Russia is using a range of techniques to denigrate Joseph R. Biden Jr., American intelligence officials said Friday in their first public assessment that Moscow continues to try to interfere in the 2020 campaign to help President Trump.

At the same time, the officials said China preferred that Mr. Trump be defeated in November and was weighing whether to take more aggressive action in the election.

But officials briefed on the intelligence said that Russia was the far graver, and more immediate, threat. While China seeks to gain influence in American politics, its leaders have not yet decided to wade directly into the presidential contest, however much they may dislike Mr. Trump, the officials said.

The assessment, included in a statement released by William R. Evanina, the director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, suggested the intelligence community was treading carefully, reflecting the political heat generated by previous findings.

The authors emphasize the scaremongering hearsay from "officials briefed on the intelligence" - i.e. Democratic congress members - about Russia but have nothing to back it up.

When one reads the statement by Evanina one finds nothing in it about Russian attempts to interfere in the U.S. elections. Here is the only 'evidence' that is noted:

For example, pro-Russia Ukrainian parliamentarian Andriy Derkach is spreading claims about corruption – including through publicizing leaked phone calls – to undermine former Vice President Biden's candidacy and the Democratic Party. Some Kremlin-linked actors are also seeking to boost President Trump's candidacy on social media and Russian television.

After a request from Rudy Giuliani, President Trump's personal attorney, a Ukrainian parliamentarian published Ukrainian evidence of Biden's very real interference in the Ukraine. Also: Some guest of a Russian TV show had an opinion. How is either of those two items 'evidence' of Russian interference in U.S. elections?

The statement then claims: "Ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections, foreign states will continue to use covert and overt influence measures in their attempts to sway U.S. voters' preferences and perspectives, shift U.S. policies, increase discord in the United States, and undermine the American people's confidence in our democratic process."

But how do the 'intelligence' agencies know that foreign states want to "sway preferences", "increase discord" or "undermine confidence" in elections?

As a recent piece in Foreign Affairs noted :

The mainstream view in the U.S. media and government holds that the Kremlin is waging a long-haul campaign to undermine and destabilize American democracy. Putin wants to see the United States burn, and contentious elections offer a ready-made opportunity to fan the flames.

But ascribing motive and intent is a tricky business, because perceived impact is often mistaken for true intent. [...] Where is the evidence that Russia actually wants to bring down the liberal world order and watch the United States burn?

Well there is none. And that is why the 'intelligence' agencies do not present any evidence.

Even the NYT writers have to admit that there is nothing there:

The release on Friday was short on specifics, ...

and

Intelligence agencies focus their work on the intentions of foreign governments, and steer clear of assessing if those efforts have had an effect on American voters.

How do 'intelligence' agencies know Russian, Chinese or Iranian 'intentions'. Is there a secret policy paper by the Russian government that says it should "increase discord" in the United States? Is there some Chinese think tank report which says that undermining U.S. people's confidence in their democratic process would be good for China?

If the 'intelligence' people have copies of those papers why not publish them?

Let me guess. The 'intelligence' agencies have nothing, zero, nada. They are just making wild-ass guesses about 'intentions' of perceived enemies to impress the people who sign off their budget.

Nowadays that seems to be their main purpose.

Posted by b on August 8, 2020 at 18:08 UTC | Permalink

[Aug 08, 2020] The New York Times has finally woken up to the fact that Seattle s CHOP was a complete disaster – a month after it was disbanded by Guy Birchall

Somalia in Seattle ;-)
It would be interesting to see how many of inhabitants of CHAZ zone, who experinced the "summer of love" will vote for Trump in Novemebr.
Notable quotes:
"... The land of soy milk and honey was disbanded on July 1 and was duly eulogised by the usual suspects as basically an extended block party. A month on, the NY Times finally got around to sending a reporter to speak to the people who lived and worked in the area before the protestors moved in and produced an admittedly excellent piece of reportage on the situation. ..."
"... The piece, as journalist Michael Tracey observed on Twitter, would have been dismissed as right-wing propaganda just a month ago and shows that this little experiment in anarcho-communism was a million miles away from paradise. ..."
"... The picture painted by the residents is one of gangs of armed thugs running protection rackets and widespread vandalism. The first person mentioned in the piece, a gay man of Middle Eastern extraction named Faizel Khan, reveals that to get to the coffee shop he runs he had to get permission from "gun wielding white men" who at one point barricaded him and all his customers in the store. ..."
"... In his pre-CHOP days, Mr Hearns was a security guard for many years, but after the police vacated the area (their precinct was taken over by protesters and then promptly set on fire) he became part of the "Black Lives Matter Community Patrol". This patrol had locals "pay for their protection." ..."
"... It doesn't sound like they were particularly good at ensuring community cohesion either, considering six people were shot under their jurisdiction and two of them died. ..."
"... Observers also noted that rather than being a multi-racial melting pot of equality, the CHOP turned into a "white occupation" as the numbers of Antifa activists began to outnumber the BLM protesters. They also established "black only segregated areas" within the CHOP, making it frightening similar to the Confederacy, which also, coincidentally, seceded from the union. ..."
"... The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT. ..."
Aug 08, 2020 | www.rt.com

Following an investigative report the paper of record has revealed that business owners who were stuck in the Capitol Hill Organised Protest 'aren't so sure about abolishing the police'. No sh*t Sherlock.

The New York Times has done something distinctly out of character and actually produced some decent journalism. Taking a break from getting editors sacked for allowing Republican senators to write op-eds and forcing out the few remaining sane people on their staff for not quaffing the identity politics Cool-Aid enthusiastically enough, they dispatched a reporter to Seattle to pick through the remnants of the CHOP , a month after it closed.

The Capital Hill Organised Protest, formally CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone), was the area of the city that, for 23 glorious days, declared independence from the United States. A bunch of Black Lives Matter and Antifa radicals hoofed out the police and decided to try and run the area as some sort of Marxist utopia. What they actually established was a gang run hellhole that made the Wild West look like Switzerland.

It wasn't described as such at the time of course. Seattle's mayor said the city was in for a "summer of love" and most of the left-wing press would have had you believe that it was pretty much a hippy commune full of free vegan food and urban collective farms.

The land of soy milk and honey was disbanded on July 1 and was duly eulogised by the usual suspects as basically an extended block party. A month on, the NY Times finally got around to sending a reporter to speak to the people who lived and worked in the area before the protestors moved in and produced an admittedly excellent piece of reportage on the situation. It was headlined, "Abolish the Police? Those Who Survived the Chaos in Seattle Aren't So Sure." The piece, as journalist Michael Tracey observed on Twitter, would have been dismissed as right-wing propaganda just a month ago and shows that this little experiment in anarcho-communism was a million miles away from paradise.

To say they "aren't sure" has to be the understatement of the year. The picture painted by the residents is one of gangs of armed thugs running protection rackets and widespread vandalism. The first person mentioned in the piece, a gay man of Middle Eastern extraction named Faizel Khan, reveals that to get to the coffee shop he runs he had to get permission from "gun wielding white men" who at one point barricaded him and all his customers in the store.

Mr Khan's experiences during these three and a bit weeks of lawlessness were so horrendous that he and a host of other small business owners, described as "lonely voices in progressive areas," are suing Seattle after the local police force refused to respond to their calls for the duration of the CHOP. And as the litany of horrors they were subjected to is laid bare in the NY Times article, it is not hard to see why.

Another character we meet in this saga is Rick Hearns. In his pre-CHOP days, Mr Hearns was a security guard for many years, but after the police vacated the area (their precinct was taken over by protesters and then promptly set on fire) he became part of the "Black Lives Matter Community Patrol". This patrol had locals "pay for their protection." Now what other organisation does that remind you of? If you can't think of it, may I suggest you watch virtually any Martin Scorsese movie and I think you'll get the picture.

It doesn't sound like they were particularly good at ensuring community cohesion either, considering six people were shot under their jurisdiction and two of them died. Interestingly, since they were replacing the "institutionally racist" police force, (run by a black woman incidentally but why let facts spoil it) one of the victims was a black teenager.

Observers also noted that rather than being a multi-racial melting pot of equality, the CHOP turned into a "white occupation" as the numbers of Antifa activists began to outnumber the BLM protesters. They also established "black only segregated areas" within the CHOP, making it frightening similar to the Confederacy, which also, coincidentally, seceded from the union. Oh, and they had a Warlord, Raz from CHAZ, too, just as an icing on the cake.

Quite why these so-called activists felt the need to see how anarchy turns out in a world where Somaila exists is beyond me, and frankly any sane person who is even vaguely aware of history. I'm sure if they'd managed to get hold of the port it wouldn't have been long before they decided to give piracy on the high seas a try, but alas they didn't have the time.

This just makes the tone of the NY Times piece all the more baffling. While it does chart the horrors of the zone well, framing the notion of "abolishing the police" as anything other than irredeemably stupid is frankly ridiculous. I suppose they do deserve praise for finally telling the story, but in no way does it make up for the way they have fomented and given succour to the absurd and dangerous ideas that gave rise to the CHOP for so long.

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

Guy Birchall, British journalist covering current affairs, politics and free speech issues. Recently published in The Sun and Spiked Online. Follow him on Twitter @guybirchall 7 Aug, 2020 22:11 Get short URL CHAZ/CHOP protesters remove man for bothering them, June 13, 2020

[Aug 08, 2020] Russia Continues Interfering in Election to Try to Help Trump, U.S. Intelligence Says

Aug 08, 2020 | www.msn.com

Russia Continues Interfering in Election to Try to Help Trump, U.S. Intelligence Says Julian E. Barnes 4 hrs ago


Trump falsely claims coronavirus is "disappearing" and Russia Coronavirus updates: School district says 100 students, staff positive for COVID-19 The New York Times logo Russia Continues Interfering in Election to Try to Help Trump, U.S. Intelligence Says

WASHINGTON -- Russia is using a range of techniques to denigrate Joseph R. Biden Jr., American intelligence officials said Friday in their first public assessment that Moscow continues to try to interfere in the 2020 campaign to help President Trump.

a group of people standing next to a person in a suit and tie: Joseph R. Biden Jr. last week in Wilmington, Del. A new intelligence assessment said Russia continues to interfere in the election on President Trump's behalf, while China prefers Mr. Biden. © Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times Joseph R. Biden Jr. last week in Wilmington, Del. A new intelligence assessment said Russia continues to interfere in the election on President Trump's behalf, while China prefers Mr. Biden.

At the same time, the officials said China preferred that Mr. Trump be defeated in November and was weighing whether to take more aggressive action in the election.

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But officials briefed on the intelligence said that Russia was the far graver, and more immediate, threat. While China seeks to gain influence in American politics, its leaders have not yet decided to wade directly into the presidential contest, however much they may dislike Mr. Trump, the officials said.

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The assessment, included in a statement released by William R. Evanina, the director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, suggested the intelligence community was treading carefully, reflecting the political heat generated by previous findings.

The White House has objected in the past to conclusions that Moscow is working to help Mr. Trump, and Democrats on Capitol Hill have expressed growing concern that the intelligence agencies are not being forthright enough about Russia's preference for him and that the agencies are introducing China's anti-Trump stance to balance the scales.

a group of people posing for a picture: Trump supporters in Ohio on Thursday, during the president's visit to a factory in Clyde. © Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times Trump supporters in Ohio on Thursday, during the president's visit to a factory in Clyde.

The assessment appeared to draw a distinction between what it called the "range of measures" being deployed by Moscow to influence the election and its conclusion that China prefers that Mr. Trump be defeated.

It cited efforts coming out of pro-Russia forces in Ukraine to damage Mr. Biden and Kremlin-linked figures who "are also seeking to boost President Trump's candidacy on social media and Russian television."

China, it said, has so far signaled its position mostly through increased public criticism of the administration's tough line on China on a variety of fronts.

An American official briefed on the intelligence said it was wrong to equate the two countries. Russia, the official said, is a tornado, capable of inflicting damage on American democracy now. China is more like climate change, the official said: The threat is real and grave, but more long term.

Democratic lawmakers made the same point about the report, which also found that Iran was seeking "to undermine U.S. democratic institutions, President Trump, and to divide the country" ahead of the general election.

"Unfortunately, today's statement still treats three actors of differing intent and capability as equal threats to our democratic elections," Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Representative Adam B. Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a joint statement.

Asked about the report during a news conference on Friday night at his golf club in New Jersey, Mr. Trump said, "The last person Russia wants to see in office is Donald Trump because nobody's been tougher on Russia than I have." He said that if Mr. Biden won the presidency, "China would own our country."

Aides and allies of Mr. Biden assailed Mr. Trump, saying that he had repeatedly sided with President Vladimir V. Putin on whether Russia had intervened to help him in 2016 and that he had been impeached by the House for trying to pressure Ukraine into helping him undercut Mr. Biden.

"Donald Trump has publicly and repeatedly invited, emboldened and even tried to coerce foreign interference in American elections," said Tony Blinken, a senior adviser to the former vice president.

It is not clear how much China is doing to interfere directly in the presidential election. Intelligence officials have briefed Congress in recent days that much of Beijing's focus is on state and local races. But Mr. Evanina's statement on Friday suggested China was on weighing an increased effort.

"Although China will continue to weigh the risks and benefits of aggressive action, its public rhetoric over the past few months has grown increasingly critical of the current administration's Covid-19 response, closure of China's Houston Consulate and actions on other issues," Mr. Evanina said.

Mr. Evanina pointed to growing tensions over territorial claims in the South China Sea, Hong Kong autonomy, the TikTok app and other issues. China, officials have said, has also tried to collect information on the presidential campaigns, as it has in previous contests.

The release on Friday was short on specifics, but that was largely because the intelligence community is intent on trying to protect its sources of information, said Senator Angus King, the Maine independent who caucuses with the Democrats.

"The director has basically put the American people on notice that Russia in particular, also China and Iran, are going to be trying to meddle in this election and undermine our democratic system," said Mr. King, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Intelligence officials said there was no way to avoid political criticism when releasing information about the election. An official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said that the goal was not to rank order threats and that Russia, China and Iran all pose a danger to the election.

Fighting over the intelligence reports, the official said, only benefits adversaries trying to sow divisions.

While both Beijing and Moscow have a preference, the Chinese and Russian influence campaigns are very different, officials said.

Outside of a few scattered examples, it is hard to find much evidence of intensifying Chinese influence efforts that could have a national effect.

Much of what China is doing currently amounts to using its economic might to influence local politics, officials said. But that is hardly new. Beijing is also using a variety of means to push back on various Trump administration policies, including tariffs and bans on Chinese tech companies, but those efforts are not covert and it is unclear if they would have an effect on presidential politics.

Russia, but not China, is trying to "actively influence" the outcome of the 2020 election, said the American official briefed on the underlying intelligence.

"The fact that adversaries like China or Iran don't like an American president's policies is normal fare," said Jeremy Bash, a former Obama administration official. "What's abnormal, disturbing and dangerous is that an adversary like Russia is actively trying to get Trump re-elected."

Russia tried to use influence campaigns during 2018 midterm voting to try to sway public opinion, but it did not successfully tamper with voting infrastructure.

Mr. Evanina said it would be difficult for adversarial countries to try to manipulate voting results on a large scale. But nevertheless, the countries could try to interfere in the voting process or take steps aimed at "calling into question the validity of the election results."

The new release comes on the heels of congressional briefings that have alarmed lawmakers, particularly Democrats. Those briefings have described a stepped-up Chinese pressure campaign, as well as efforts by Moscow to paint Mr. Biden as corrupt.

"Ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections, foreign states will continue to use covert and overt influence measures in their attempts to sway U.S. voters' preferences and perspectives, shift U.S. policies, increase discord in the United States, and undermine the American people's confidence in our democratic process," Mr. Evanina said in a statement.

The statement called out Andriy Derkach, a pro-Russia member of Ukraine's Parliament who has been involved in releasing information about Mr. Biden. Intelligence officials said he had ties to Russian intelligence.

Intelligence officials have briefed Congress in recent weeks on details of the Russian efforts to tarnish Mr. Biden as corrupt, prompting senior Democrats to request more information.

A Senate committee led by Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, has been leading an investigation of Mr. Biden's son Hunter Biden and his work for Burisma, a Ukrainian energy firm. Some intelligence officials have said that a witness the committee was seeking to call was a witting or unwitting agent of Russian disinformation.

Democrats had pushed intelligence officials to release more information to the public, arguing that only a broad declassification of the foreign interference attempts can inoculate voters against attempts by Russia, China or other countries to try to influence voting.

In meetings on Capitol Hill , Mr. Evanina and other intelligence officials have expanded their warnings beyond Russia and have included China and Iran, as well. This year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence put Mr. Evanina in charge of election security briefings to Congress and the campaigns.

Intelligence and other officials in recent days have been stepping up their releases of information about foreign interference efforts, and the State Department has sent texts to cellphones around the world advertising a $10 million reward for information on would-be election hackers.

How effective China's campaign or Russia's efforts to smear Mr. Biden as corrupt have been is not clear. Intelligence agencies focus their work on the intentions of foreign governments, and steer clear of assessing if those efforts have had an effect on American voters.

The first reactions from Capitol Hill to the release of the assessment were positive. A joint statement by the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee praised it, and asked colleagues to refrain from politicizing Mr. Evanina's statement.

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, the acting Republican chairman of the committee, and Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the Democratic vice chairman, said they hoped Mr. Evanina continued to make more information available to the public. But they praised him for responding to calls for more information.

"Evanina's statement highlights some of the serious and ongoing threats to our election from China, Russia, and Iran," the two men's joint statement said. "Everyone -- from the voting public, local officials, and members of Congress -- needs to be aware of these threats."

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from New York.


[Aug 08, 2020] Russia Hoax- Are We All Being Played- Put Up Or Shut Up! - Zero Hedge

Highly recommended!
Aug 08, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

by Tyler Durden Fri, 08/07/2020 - 21:05 Twitter Facebook Reddit Email Print

Authored by Sara Carter via SaraACarter.com,

Many people have asked me why I haven't written a book since the start of my reporting on the FBI's debunked investigation into whether President Donald Trump's campaign conspired with Russia.

I haven't done so because I don't believe the most important part of the story has been told: indictments and accountability. I also don't believe we actually know what really happened on a fundamental level and how dangerous it is to our democratic republic. That will require a deeper investigation that answers the fundamental questions of the role played by former senior Obama officials, including the former President and his aides.

We're getting closer but we're still not there.

Still, the extent of what happened during the last presidential election is much clearer now than it was years ago when trickles of evidence led to years of what Fox News host Sean Hannity and I would say was peeling back the layers of an onion. We now know that the U.S. intelligence and federal law enforcement was weaponized against President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign and administration by a political opponent. We now know how many officials involved in the false investigation into the president trampled the Constitution.

I never realized how terrible the deterioration inside the system had become until four years ago when I stumbled onto what was happening inside the FBI. Those concerns were brought to my attention by former and current FBI agents, as well as numerous U.S. intelligence officials aware of the failures inside their own agencies. But it never occurred to me when I first started looking into fired FBI Director James Comey and his former side kick Deputy Director A ndrew McCabe that the cultural corruption of these once trusted American institutions was so vast.

I've watched as Washington D.C. elites make promises to get to the bottom of it and bring people to justice. They appear to make promises to the American people they never intended to keep. Who will be held accountable for one of the most egregious abuses of power by bureaucrats in modern American political history? Now I fear those who perpetuated this culture of corruption won't ever really be held accountable.

These elite bureaucrats will, however, throw the American people a bone. It's how they operate.

They expect us to accept it and then move on.

https://lockerdome.com/lad/13084989113709670?pubid=ld-dfp-ad-13084989113709670-0&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com&rid=www.zerohedge.com&width=890

One example is the most recent decision by the Justice Department to ask that charges be dropped on former national security advisor Michael Flynn. It's just a bone because we know now these charges should have never been brought against the three-star general but will anyone on former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team have to answer for ruining a man's life. No, they won't. In fact, Flynn is still fighting for his freedom.

Think about what has already happened? From former Attorney General Jeff Session's appointment of Utah Prosecutor John Huber to the current decision by Attorney General William Barr to appoint Connecticut prosecutor John Durham to investigate the malfeasance what has been done? Really, nothing at all. No one has been indicted.

The investigation by the FBI against Trump was never predicated on any real evidence but instead, it was a set-up to usurp the American voters will. It doesn't matter that the establishment didn't like Trump, in 2016 the Americans did. Isn't that a big enough reason to bring charges against those involved?

His election was an anomaly for the Washington elite. They were stunned when Trump won and went into full gear to save their own asses from discovery and target anyone who supported him. The truth is they couldn't stand the Trump and American disruptors who elected him to office.

Now they will work hand in fist to ensure that this November election is not a repeat win of 2016. We're already seeing that play out everyday on the news.

But Barr and Durham are now up against a behemoth political machine that seems to be operating more like a steam roller the closer we get to the November presidential elections.

Barr told Fox News in June that he expects Durham's report to come before the end of summer but like always, it's August and we're still waiting.

Little is known about the progress of Durham's investigation but it's curious as to why nothing has been done as of yet and the Democrats are sure to raise significant questions or concerns if action is taken before the election. They will charge that Durham's investigation is politically motivated. That is, unless the charges are just brought against subordinates and not senior officials from the former administration.

I sound cynical because I am right now. It doesn't mean I won't trying to get to the truth or fighting for justice.

But how can you explain the failure of Durham and Barr to actually interview key players such as Comey, or former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, or former CIA Director John Brennan. That is what we're hearing from them.

If I am going to believe my sources, Durham has interviewed former FBI special agent Peter Strzok, along with FBI Special agent Joe Pientka, among some others. Still, nothing has really been done or maybe once again they will throw us bone.

If there are charges to be brought they will come in the form of taking down the subordinates, like Strzok, Pientka and the former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith , who altered the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act application against short term 2016 campaign advisor Carter Page.

Remember DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz's report in December, 2019: It showed that a critical piece of evidence used to obtain a warrant to spy on Page in 2016 was falsified by Clinesmith.

But Clinesmith didn't act alone. He would have had to have been ordered to do such a egregious act and that could only come from the top. Let's see if Durham ever hold those Obama government officials accountable.

I don't believe he will.

Why? Mainly because of how those senior former Obama officials have behaved since the troves of information have been discovered. They have written books, like Comey, McCabe, Brennan and others, who have published Opinion Editorials and have taken lucrative jobs at cable news channels as experts.

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It's frankly disgusting and should anger every American. We would never get away with what these former Obama officials have done. More disturbing is that the power they wield through their contacts in the media and their political connections allows these political 'oligarchs' unchallenged power like never before.

Here's one of the latest examples.

Former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's top prosecutor Andrew Weissmann just went after Barr in a New York Times editorial on Wednesday. He went so far as to ask the Justice Department employees to ignore any direction by Barr or Durham in the Russia investigations. From Weissmann's New York Times Opinion Editorial:

Today, Wednesday, marks 90 days before the presidential election, a date in the calendar that is supposed to be of special note to the Justice Department. That's because of two department guidelines, one a written policy that no action be influenced in any way by politics. Another, unwritten norm urges officials to defer publicly charging or taking any other overt investigative steps or disclosures that could affect a coming election.

Attorney General William Barr appears poised to trample on both. At least two developing investigations could be fodder for pre-election political machinations. The first is an apparently sprawling investigation by John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, that began as an examination of the origins of the F.B.I. investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 election. The other , led by John Bash, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas, is about the so-called unmasking of Trump associates by Obama administration officials. Mr. Barr personally unleashed both investigations and handpicked the attorneys to run them.

But Justice Department employees, in meeting their ethical and legal obligations , should be well advised not to participate in any such effort.

I think Barr and Durham need to move fast if they are ever going to do anything and if they are going to prove me wrong. We know now that laws were broken and our Constitution was torched by these rogue government officials.

We shouldn't give the swamp the time-of-day to accuse the Trump administration of playing politics or interfering with this election. If the DOJ has evidence and is ready to indict they need to do it now.

If our Justice Department officials haven't done their job to expose the corruption, clean out our institutions and hold people accountable then it will be a tragedy for our nation and the American people. I'm frankly tired of the back and forth. I'm tired of being toyed with and lied to. I believe they should either put up or shut up.

[Aug 04, 2020] Russia never saw Trump as a potential ally or friend by The Saker

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Furthermore, it is pretty obvious to the Russians that while Crimea and MH17 were the pretexts for western sanctions against Russia, they were not the real cause. The real cause of the West's hatred for Russia is as simple as it is old: Russia cannot be conquered, subdued, subverted or destroyed. They've been at it for close to 1,000 years and they still are at it. In fact, each time they fail to crush Russia, their russophobia increases to even higher levels (phobia both in the sense of "fear" and in the sense of "hatred"). ..."
"... I would argue that since at least Russia and the AngloZionist Empire have been at war since at least 2013, when Russia foiled the US plan to attack Syria under the pretext that it was "highly likely" that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons against civilians (in reality, a textbook case of a false flag organized by the Brits), This means that Russia and the Empire have been at [Cold] war since at least 2013, for no less than seven years (something which Russian 6th columnists and Neo-Marxists try very hard to ignore). ..."
"... True, at least until now, this was has been 80% informational, 15% economic and only 5% kinetic, but this is a real existential war of survival for both sides: only one side will walk away from this struggle. The other one will simply disappear (not as a nation or a people, but as a polity; a regime). The Kremlin fully understood that and it embarked on a huge reform and modernization of the Russian armed forces in three distinct ways: ..."
"... While some US politicians understood what was going on (I think of Ron Paul, see here ), most did not. They were so brainwashed by the US propaganda that they were sure that no matter what, "USA! USA! USA!". Alas for them, the reality was quite different. ..."
Aug 04, 2020 | www.unz.com

Truth be told, most Russian politicians (with the notable exception of the official Kremlin court jester, Zhirinovskii) and analysts never saw Trump as a potential ally or friend. The Kremlin was especially cautious, which leads me to believe that the Russian intelligence analysts did a very good job evaluating Trump's psyche and they quickly figured out that he was no better than any other US politician.

Right now, I know of no Russian analyst who would predict that relations between the US and Russia will improve in the foreseeable future. If anything, most are clearly saying that "guys, we better get used to this" (accusations, sanctions, accusations, sanctions, etc. etc. etc.).

Furthermore, it is pretty obvious to the Russians that while Crimea and MH17 were the pretexts for western sanctions against Russia, they were not the real cause. The real cause of the West's hatred for Russia is as simple as it is old: Russia cannot be conquered, subdued, subverted or destroyed. They've been at it for close to 1,000 years and they still are at it. In fact, each time they fail to crush Russia, their russophobia increases to even higher levels (phobia both in the sense of "fear" and in the sense of "hatred").

Simply put -- there is nothing which Russia can expect from the upcoming election. Nothing at all. Still, that does not mean that things are not better than 4 or 8 years ago. Let's look at what changed.

I would argue that since at least Russia and the AngloZionist Empire have been at war since at least 2013, when Russia foiled the US plan to attack Syria under the pretext that it was "highly likely" that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons against civilians (in reality, a textbook case of a false flag organized by the Brits), This means that Russia and the Empire have been at [Cold] war since at least 2013, for no less than seven years (something which Russian 6th columnists and Neo-Marxists try very hard to ignore).

True, at least until now, this was has been 80% informational, 15% economic and only 5% kinetic, but this is a real existential war of survival for both sides: only one side will walk away from this struggle. The other one will simply disappear (not as a nation or a people, but as a polity; a regime). The Kremlin fully understood that and it embarked on a huge reform and modernization of the Russian armed forces in three distinct ways:

A "general" reform of the Russian armed forces which had to be modernized by about 80%. This part of the reform is now practically complete. A specific reform to prepare the western and southern military districts for a major conventional war against the united West (as always in Russian history) which would involve the First Guards Tank Army and the Russian Airborne Forces. The development of bleeding-edge weapons systems with no equivalent in the West and which cannot be countered or defeated; these weapons have had an especially dramatic impact upon First Strike Stability and upon naval operations.

While some US politicians understood what was going on (I think of Ron Paul, see here ), most did not. They were so brainwashed by the US propaganda that they were sure that no matter what, "USA! USA! USA!". Alas for them, the reality was quite different.

Russian officials, by the way, have confirmed that Russia was preparing for war . Heck, the reforms were so profound and far reaching, that it would have been impossible for the Russians to hide what they were doing (see here for details; also please see Andrei Martyanov's excellent primer on the new Russian Navy here ).

While no country is ever truly prepared for war, I would argue that by 2020 the Russians had reached their goals and that now Russia is fully prepared to handle any conflict the West might throw at her, ranging from a small border incident somewhere in Central Asia to a full-scaled war against the US/NATO in Europe .

Folks in the West are now slowly waking up to this new reality (I mentioned some of that here ), but it is too late. In purely military terms, Russia has now created such a qualitative gap with the West that the still existing quantitative gap is not sufficient to guarantee a US/NATO victory. Now some western politicians are starting to seriously freak out (see this lady , for example), but most Europeans are coming to terms with two truly horrible realities:

Russia is much stronger than Europe and, even much worse, Russia will never attack first (which is a major cause of frustration for western russophobes)

As for the obvious solution to this problem, having friendly relations with Russia is simply unthinkable for those who made their entire careers peddling the Soviet (and now Russian) threat to the world.

But Russia is changing, albeit maybe too slowly (at least for my taste). As I mentioned last week, a number of Polish, Ukrainian and Baltic politicians have declared that the Zapad2020 military maneuvers which are supposed to take place in southern Russia and the Caucasus could be used to prepare an attack on the West (see here for a rather typical example of this nonsense). In the past, the Kremlin would only have made a public statement ridiculing this nonsense, but this time around Putin did something different. Right after he saw the reaction of these politicians, Putin ordered a major and UNSCHEDULED military readiness exercise which involved no less than 150,000 troops, 400 aircraft & 100 ships ! The message here was clear:

Yes, we are much more powerful than you are and No, we are not apologizing for our strength anymore

And, just to make sure that the message is clear, the Russians also tested the readiness of the Russian Airborne Forces units near the city of Riazan, see for yourself:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/2s2V8iPofFs?feature=oembed

This response is, I think, the correct one. Frankly, nobody in the West is listening to what the Kremlin has to say, so what is the point of making more statements which in the future will be ignored equally as they have been in the past.

If anything, the slow realization that Russia is more powerful than NATO would be most helpful in gently prodding EU politicians to change their tune and return back to reality. Check out this recent video of Sarah Wagenknecht, a leading politician of the German Left and see for yourself:

https://www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/x7uu5fk

The example of Sahra Wagenknecht is interesting, because she is from Germany, one of the countries of northern Europe; traditionally, northern European powers have been much more anti-Russian than southern Europeans, so it is encouraging to see that the anti-Putin and anti-Russia hysteria is not always being endorsed by everybody.

But if things are very slowly getting better in the EU, in the bad old US of A things are only getting worse. Even the Republicans are now fully on board the Russia-hating float (right behind a "gay pride" one I suppose) and they are now contributing their own insanity to the cause, as this article entitled " Congressional Republicans: Russia should be designated state sponsor of terror " shows (designating Russia as a terrorist state is an old idea of the Dems, by the way).

Russian options for the Fall

In truth, Russia does not have any particularly good options towards the US. Both parties are now fully united in their rabid hatred of Russia (and China too, of course). Furthermore, while there are many well-funded and virulently anti-Russian organizations in the US (Neo-cons, Papists, Poles, Masons, Ukrainians, Balts, Ashkenazi Jews, etc.), Russian organizations in the US like this one , have very little influence or even relevance.

Banderites marching in the US

However, as the chaos continues to worsen inside the US and as US politicians continue to alienate pretty much the entire planet, Russia does have a perfect opportunity to weaken the US grip on Europe. The beauty in the current dynamic is that Russia does not have to do anything at all (nevermind anything covert or illegal) to help the anti-EU and anti-US forces in Europe: All she needs to do is to continuously hammer in the following simple message: "the US is sinking -- do you really want to go down with it?".

There are many opportunities to deliver that message. The current US/Polish efforts to prevent the EU from enjoying cheap Russian gas might well be the best example of what we could call "European suicide politics", but there are many, many more.

Truth be told, neither the US nor the EU are a top priority for Russia, at least not in economic terms. The moral credibility of the West in general can certainly be described as dead and long gone. As for the West military might, it is only a concern to the degree that western politicians might be tempted to believe their own propaganda about their military forces being the best in the history of the galaxy. This is why Russia regularly engages in large surprise exercises: to prove to the West that the Russian military is fully ready for anything the West might try. As for the constant move of more and more US/NATO forces closer to the borders of Russia, they are offensive in political terms, but in military terms, getting closer to Russia only means that Russia will have more options to destroy you. "Forward deployment" is really a thing of the past, at least against Russia.

With time, however, and as the US federal center loses even more of its control of the country, the Kremlin might be well-advised to try to open some venues for "popular diplomacy", especially with less hostile US states. The weakening of the Executive Branch has already resulted in US governors playing an increasingly important international role and while this is not, strictly speaking, legal (only the federal government has the right to engage in foreign policy), the fact is that this has been going on for years already. Another possible partner inside the US for Russian firms would be US corporations (especially now that they are hurting badly). Finally, I think that the Kremlin ought to try to open channels of communication with the various small political forces in the US which are clearly not buying into the official propaganda: libertarians, (true) liberals and progressives, paleo-conservatives.

What we are witnessing before our eyes is the collapse of the US federal center. This is a dangerous and highly unstable moment in our history. But from this crisis opportunities will arise. The best thing Russia can do now is to simply remain very careful and vigilant and wait for new forces to appear on the US political scene.

Twilight Patriot , says: • Website July 29, 2020 at 12:26 am GMT

I really agree with you that the “blame Russia” and “blame China” thing has gotten out of hand in US politics. Whether it will turn into a shooting war seems doubtful to me, as the government is still full of people who are looking out for their own interests and know that a full-sized war with Russia, China, Iran or whoever will not advance their interests.

But who would have guessed, a few years ago, that “Russian asset” would become the all-purpose insult for Democrats to use, not just against Republicans, but against other Democrats?

With Republicans I think that “blame China” is stronger. China makes a good scapegoat for the economic situation in the United States. But convincing the working class that China is the source of their problems (and that Mr. MAGA is going to solve those problems by standing up to China) requires ignorance of the crucial facts about the trade relationship between those two countries.

Namely, that the trade deficit exists only because the Federal Reserve chooses to create huge amounts of new dollars each year for export to other countries, and it’s only possible for US exports to fall behind imports so badly (and thus put so many American laborers out of work) because the Fed is making up the difference by exporting dollars. Granted, it isn’t a policy that the US can change without harming the interests of its own upper classes; at the same time, it isn’t a policy that China could force on the US without the people in charge of the United States wanting it.

This is a topic I’ve dealt with a few times on my own blog.

Why I Don’t Fear Chinese Hegemony: https://www.twilightpatriot.com/2020/05/why-i-dont-fear-chinese-hegemony.html

Nobody Will Win The Trade War: https://www.twilightpatriot.com/2019/09/nobody-will-win-trade-war.html

[Aug 03, 2020] The Guardian is running a more sophisticated version of the false flag story about Russian influence

Aug 03, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

vk , Aug 4 2020 0:59 utc | 21

The Guardian is running a more sophisticated version of the story. It claims the Russians hacked the papers and gave them to Jeremy Corbyn so he could win the General Elections of December 2019:

Russians hacked Liam Fox's personal email to get US-UK trade dossier

The stolen documents – a 451-page dossier of emails – ultimately ended up in the hands of Jeremy Corbyn during last winter's election campaign after Russian actors tried to disseminate the material online.

They had been posted on the social media platform Reddit and brought to the attention of the then Labour leader's team. Corbyn said the documents revealed the NHS "was on the table" in trade talks with the US.

Details of Russia's targeting of Fox's emails were first revealed on Monday by Reuters, which said his account was accessed several times between 12 July and 21 October last year. It was unclear if the documents were obtained when the staunch leave supporter was still trade secretary; he was dropped by Boris Johnson on 24 July.

However, it still is keeping the earliest date as July 12th, thus reproducing the entire Reuters' version.

My guess is that The Guardian adapted the story to its center-left (i.e. Blairite) audience, in a way both Corbyn and the Conservative and Unionist Party could be melded together as a single evil force. If that's the case, then it is circumstantial evidence for a highly and centrally coordinated propaganda machine in the UK, possibly ran directly from the MI5/6, which directly involves all the important British newspapers, TV channels and more.

It's interesting to see how The Guardian sophisticated the clearly fake story. In the excerpt I quoted above, it is clear the source of the leak could've only been secretary Fox (or Fox served as the sacrificial lamb, it doesn't matter for the sake of the argument here).

Then, it connected Fox's leak with Raab's public accusation of Russia (that story where he accused Russia in the name of the British government, but didn't reveal the evidence).

To end with a high note, the Guardian then revived a story of hacked e-mails from 2012 and 2017.

You can then see how the British are capable of recycling old, failed propaganda attacks/fake news to transform then into a new "truth". Very curious and sophisticated methodology of building a long-term, sustained, false narrative. It almost mirrors the Christian method of typology, where a previous event is brought up from oblivion to serve as a prelude for the new event (i.e. the newest fake news).

Richard Steven Hack , Aug 4 2020 1:08 utc | 22

"The attack bore the hallmarks of a state-backed operation."

There is no such thing.

Look at the Twitter hack last week. Everyone said "must be some sophisticated actor, possibly state-sponsored". Turns out it was a 17-year-old in Florida. That has happened repeatedly in the last ten years or more: hacks that looked "sophisticated" turned out to be done by a single individual. People forget that some organized crime hacker groups earn millions of dollars from their hacks and can afford to put quite an effort into the development of sophisticated hacking tools that are the equal of anything a state intelligence agency can produce.

People in infosec know the truth: it's not that hard to compromise any corporation or individual. And "attribution by target" - that is, the notion that because a particular person or organization is government or media, therefore it has to be a state-related hacker - is completely false. *Any* hacker will hit *any* target that provides 1) a challenge, and/or 2) personal identification information, and/or intellectual property that can be sold on the Dark Web.

Only situations where specialized knowledge that is not commonly available to individuals or civilian groups was used in the hack can clearly indicate a state actor. Stuxnet is the classic example, requiring access to and the ability to test the malware with specific pieces of hardware that aren't commonly available to persons outside of industrial or nuclear engineering.

Stealing some papers from a government individual off his phone or home or office desktop is almost trivial in comparison.

Richard Steven Hack , Aug 4 2020 1:12 utc | 24

"his account was accessed several times between 12 July and 21 October"

So for three months they did nothing to fix his security? Good work, guys...you're fired. This is typical - hackers sitting in a corporation's network for months or even years without being detected. It's likely they didn't even notice the unauthorized access until they decided to look back. Not to mention that a government worker isn't supposed to be using "personal email" to host classified information. So the idiot involved should be fired.

Typical infosec clusterfuck. That's assuming it happened at all, of course, which is doubtful.

Richard Steven Hack , Aug 4 2020 1:21 utc | 25

Well, lost two post due to the VPN being on...sigh...

OK, to quote the old British comedy radio show, "I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again"...

"...the attack bore the hallmarks of a state-backed operation."

There is no such thing. *Any* hacker will hack *any* target provided it provides 1) a challenge, and/or 2) personal identification information, and/or 3) intellectual property, the latter two being sold on the Dark Web. Trying to attribute the hacker based on his target is a fool's game - not that there is any lack of fools in the infosec space who use such attribution as marketing, such as CrowdStrike.

Then there's the fact that this guy's account was accessed several times over a three-month period - meaning no one was monitoring his email security, least of all him. Not to mention that he was passing classified papers over a personal email account - which should get him fired. Email is *insecure*, period, unless encrypted between the parties involved. And even then, you just compromise one party's desktop, laptop or phone, and bingo, encryption bypassed. And compromising an individual's or organization's email system is not particularly hard, as any penetration tester knows. One phishing email targeted to the right person usually does it.

[Aug 03, 2020] Joe Biden Advance Team Recommends British Approach To Fighting Russia Start The Disinformation Before The Fact, The Fake Before The Truth -- Doubt Is Russian Mind Control

What is missing from Russian side is a consistent, principled opposition to a very crude campaign of warmongering.
Aug 03, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
jayc , Aug 3 2020 20:35 utc | 10

A poster shared this John Helmer story a few days ago - it is very relevant here:

JOE BIDEN ADVANCE TEAM RECOMMENDS BRITISH APPROACH TO FIGHTING RUSSIA – START THE DISINFORMATION BEFORE THE FACT, THE FAKE BEFORE THE TRUTH -- DOUBT IS RUSSIAN MIND CONTROL
http://johnhelmer.net/joe-biden-advance-team-recommends-british-approach-to-fighting-russia-start-the-disinformation-before-the-fact-the-fake-before-the-truth-doubt-is-russian-mind-control/#more-34229

This is the purpose of the Russia-is-responsible-for-all-malign-events disinformation campaigns as stated by a junior deep-stater:

"An analysis of the UK experience offers some indicators as to what deters Russia .Taken together, this swift, coordinated national response backed by the weight of the international community and imposition of punitive measures exposed Russian malign influence activities and incompetence, embarrassing Russia in the eyes of its citizens. Over time, such reputational damage could cause more serious problems for the Russian government vis-à-vis the Russian people."


Lurk , Aug 3 2020 20:55 utc | 11

@ jayc | Aug 3 2020 20:35 utc | 10

Last time, Putin was seen weaponizing humor. What devious plan is up next in his perverted sadistic mastermind? Weaponizing critical thought?

karlof1 , Aug 3 2020 21:09 utc | 13

As 5-Eyes nations fall further behind Russia & China, the outright lies and disinformation will increase as they'll no longer be capable of honest competition--and that's just the business sphere. In the social sphere, as living standards continue to fall for 5-Eyes residents relative to Russia and China, the shrillness and mendacity of the lying will escalate to cover for the vast political failure that's responsible for the decline. As some have noted, there's been a reversal of positions with the Outlaw US Empire becoming ever more degraded like the USSR previously. Both UK and USA continually behave as spoilt brats, taking their ball home when no longer allowed to win. Self-examination is Taboo. Those watching rightly question how it was that such people rose to dominant positions--completely accidental is the answer.

[Aug 03, 2020] When corporate power is your real government, corporate media is state media by Caitlin Johnstone

Aug 03, 2020 | www.rt.com

By Caitlin Johnstone , an independent journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her website is here and you can follow her on Twitter @caitoz In the American corporatist system, where wealthy elites control the elected government through lobbyists, corporate media is state media, promoting narratives that help maintain the corporate-approved status quo.

The New York Times published an astonishingly horrible article the other day titled "Latin America Is Facing a 'Decline of Democracy' Under the Pandemic" accusing governments like Venezuela and Nicaragua of exploiting Covid-19 to quash opposition and oppress democracy.

The article sources its jarringly propagandistic claims in multiple US government-funded narrative management operations like the Wilson Center and the National Endowment for Democracy -sponsored Freedom House , the extensively plutocrat-funded Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the United States Naval Academy.

The crown jewel of this piece of State Department stenography reads as follows:

"Adding to these challenges, democracy in Latin America has also lost a champion in the United States, which had played an important role in promoting democracy after the end of the Cold War by financing good governance programs and calling out authoritarian abuses."

Whoa, nelly.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=RT_com&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1288972702716395526&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Fop-ed%2F496962-caitlin-johnstone-corporate-media%2F&siteScreenName=RT_com&theme=light&widgetsVersion=223fc1c4%3A1596143124634&width=550px

The fact that America's most widely regarded newspaper feels perfectly comfortable making such a spectacularly in-your-face lie on behalf of the US government tells you everything you need to know about what the mass media in America really are and what they do.

The United States has never at any time been a champion of democracy in Latin America, before or since the Cold War. It has intervened hundreds of times in the continent's affairs throughout history, with everything from murderous corporate colonialism to deadly CIA regime-change operations to overt military invasions . It is currently trying to orchestrate a coup in Venezuela after failing to stage one during the Bush administration, it's pushing regime change in Nicaragua, and The New York Times itself admitted this year that it was wrong to promote the false US government narrative of electoral shenanigans in Bolivia's presidential race last year, a narrative which facilitated a bloody fascist coup .

This is propaganda. There is no other word for it. And yet the only time Western politicians and news reporters use that word is to talk about nations like Russia and China.

READ MORE Caitlin Johnstone: In post-Iraq invasion world, it's absolutely insane to blindly believe the US narrative on China

Why is propaganda used in an ostensibly free democracy with an ostensibly free media? Why are its news media outlets so consistently in alignment with every foreign policy objective of US government agencies, no matter how destructive and inexcusable? If the media and the government are two separate institutions, why do they so consistently function as though they are not separate?

Well, that's easy. It's because they aren't separate. The only thing keeping this from being seen is the fact that America's real government isn't located where people think it is.

In a corporatist system of government, where no hard lines are drawn between corporate/financial power and state power, corporate media is state media. Since bribery is legal in the US political system in the form of corporate lobbying and campaign donations, America's elected government is controlled by wealthy elites who have money to burn and who benefit from maintaining a specific status quo arrangement.

The fact that this same plutocratic class also owns America's media, which is now so consolidated that it's almost entirely run by just six corporations , means that the people who run the government also run the media. This allows America's true rulers to set up a system which promotes narratives that are favorable to their desired status quo.

Which means that the US has state propaganda. They just don't call it that themselves.

Strip away the phony two-handed sock puppet show of US electoral politics and look at how power actually moves in that country, and you just see one more tyrannical regime which propagandizes its citizens, brutally cracks down on protesters , deliberately keeps its populace impoverished so they don't get powerful enough to change things, and attacks any nation which dares to disobey its dictates.

Beneath the thin layer of narrative overlay about freedom and democracy, the US is just one more despotic, bloodthirsty empire. It's no better than any of the other despotic, bloodthirsty empires throughout history. It just has good PR.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=RT_com&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-1&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1289095579335720960&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Fop-ed%2F496962-caitlin-johnstone-corporate-media%2F&siteScreenName=RT_com&theme=light&widgetsVersion=223fc1c4%3A1596143124634&width=550px

Plutocrats not only exert control over America's media and politics, they also form alliances with the secretive government agencies whose operators remain amid the comings and goings of the official elected government. We see examples of this in the way new-money tech plutocrats like Jeff Bezos , Peter Thiel and Pierre Omidyar have direct relationships with the CIA and its proxies.

We also see it in the sexual blackmail operation which was facilitated by the late Jeffrey Epstein in connection with billionaire Leslie Wexner and Israeli intelligence , along with potentially the FBI and/or other US intelligence agencies . Today the internet is abuzz as newly unsealed court documents relating to Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell reveal witness testimony regarding underage sex trafficking, with such high-profile names appearing in the documents as Alan Dershowitz , Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew .

The Overton window of acceptable political discourse has been shrunk into such a narrow spectrum of debate that talking about even well-known and extensively documented facts involving the real nature of America's government and media will get you laughingly dismissed as a conspiracy theorist, which is itself a symptom of tight narrative control by a ruling class which much prefers Americans thinking they live in a free democracy whose government they control with their votes.

//www.youtube.com/embed/Yw0qkvvSE7s

In the old days you used to be able to tell who your rulers were because they'd sit on thrones and wear golden crowns and make you bow before them. Human consciousness eventually evolved beyond the acceptability of such brazen indignities, so it became necessary for rulers to take on more of a background role while the citizenry clap and cheer for the illusory puppet show of electoral politics.

But the kings are still among us, just as cruel and tyrannical as ever. They've just figured out how to mask their tyranny behind the facade of freedom.

But 2020 has been a year of revelations , a trend which seems likely to continue accelerating . Truth cannot stay hidden forever.

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

[Aug 03, 2020] Natalie Wynn also refers to Jo Freeman's 1976 piece on "Trashing," in which she describes her experience of being ostracized by fellow feminists for alleged ideological deviation. The dynamic of cancellation predates the internet.

Highly recommended!
Aug 03, 2020 | crookedtimber.org

oldster 08.03.20 at 1:17 am 141

Natalie Wynn also refers to Jo Freeman's 1976 piece on "Trashing," in which she describes her experience of being ostracized by fellow feminists for alleged ideological deviation. The dynamic of cancellation predates the internet.

(I don't know where a young you-tuber probably not born before the millennium encountered Shulamith Firestone's old partner in crime, but I am delighted that she did! I know it shows my age, but I think that young activists today could benefit a lot from reading what my generation's activists wrote. Also, from getting off my lawn.)

oldster 08.03.20 at 1:21 am ( 142 )

and I forgot the link:
https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/trashing.htm

[Aug 03, 2020] KEEPING YOUR MOUTH SHUT by James L. Gibson & Joseph L. Sutherland

Highly recommended!
This is a shadow of USSR over the USA. Dead are biting from the grave.
Notable quotes:
"... Over the course of the period from the heyday of McCarthyism to the present, the percentage of the American people not feeling free to express their views has tripled. In 2019, fully four in ten Americans engaged in self-censorship. Our analyses of both over-time and cross-sectional variability provide several insights into why people keep their mouths shut. We find that: ..."
"... those possessing more resources (e.g., higher levels of education) report engaging in more self-censorship ..."
"... fully 40% of the American people today reported being less free to speak their minds than they used to. That so many Americans withhold their political views is remarkable -- and portentous. ..."
"... Self-censorship is defined as intentionally and voluntarily withholding information from others in [the] absence of formal obstacles ..."
Aug 03, 2020 | poseidon01.ssrn.com

Over the course of the period from the heyday of McCarthyism to the present, the percentage of the American people not feeling free to express their views has tripled. In 2019, fully four in ten Americans engaged in self-censorship. Our analyses of both over-time and cross-sectional variability provide several insights into why people keep their mouths shut. We find that:

(1) Levels of self-censorship are related to affective polarization among the mass public, but not via an "echo chamber" effect because greater polarization is associated with more self-censorship.

(2) Levels of mass political intolerance bear no relationship to self-censorship, either at the macro- or micro-levels.

(3) Those who perceive a more repressive government are only slightly more likely to engage in self-censorship. And

(4) those possessing more resources (e.g., higher levels of education) report engaging in more self-censorship .

Together, these findings suggest the conclusion that one's larger macro-environment has little to do with self-censorship. Instead, micro-environment sentiments -- such as worrying that expressing unpopular views will isolate and alienate people from their friends, family, and neighbors -- seem to drive self-censorship.

We conclude with a brief discussion of the significance of our findings for larger democracy theory and practice. Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3647099

There can be little doubt that Americans today are deeply divided on their values, many issue preferences, and their ideological and partisan attachments (e.g., Druckman and Levendusky 2019). Indeed, these divisions even extend to the question of whom -- or what kind of person -- their children should marry (Iyengar et al. 2019)!

A concomitant of these divisions is that political discourse has become coarse, abrasive, divisive, and intense. When it comes to politics today, it is increasingly likely that even an innocent but misspoken opinion will cause a kerfuffle to break out.

It therefore should not be surprising to find that a large segment of the American people engages in self-censorship when it comes of expressing their views.1 In a nationally representative survey we conducted in 2019 (see Appendix A), we asked a question about self-censorship that Samuel Stouffer (1955) first asked in 1954, with startling results: fully 40% of the American people today reported being less free to speak their minds than they used to. That so many Americans withhold their political views is remarkable -- and portentous.

... ... ...

===

1 Sharvit et al. put forth a useful definition of self-censorship (2018, 331): " Self-censorship is defined as intentionally and voluntarily withholding information from others in [the] absence of formal obstacles ." Studies of self-censorship have taken many forms, ranging from philosophical inquiries (e.g., Festenstein 2018) to studies of those withholding crucial evidence of human rights abuses (e.g., Bar-Tal 2017) to studies of self-censorship among racial minorities (e.g., Gibson 2012).

[Aug 02, 2020] Austria Confirms OPCW Report On Skripal-Faking By The British, Exposes FT Lies Cover-Up -

Aug 02, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Austria Confirms OPCW Report On Skripal-Faking By The British, Exposes FT Lies & Cover-Up by Tyler Durden Sun, 08/02/2020 - 08:10 Twitter Facebook Reddit Email Print

Authored by John Helmer via Dances With Bears blog,

Austria officially confirmed this week that the British Government's allegation that Novichok, a Russian chemical warfare agent, was used in England by GRU, the Russian military intelligence service, in March 2018, was a British invention.

Investigations in Vienna by four Austrian government ministries, the BVT intelligence agency, and by Austrian prosecutors have revealed that secret OPCW reports on the blood testing of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, copies of which were transferred to the Austrian government, did not reveal a Russian-made nerve agent.

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https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.400.1_en.html#goog_928075609

Two reports, published in Vienna this week by the OE media group and reporter Isabelle Daniel, reveal that the Financial Times publication of the cover-page of one of the OPCW reports exposed a barcode identifying the source of the leaked documents was the Austrian government. The Austrian Foreign Ministry and the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz und Terrorismusbekämpfung (BVT), the domestic intelligence agency equivalent to MI5 or FBI, have corroborated the authenticity of the documents.

The Austrian disclosures also reveal that in London the Financial Times editor, Roula Khalaf, four of the newspaper's reporters, and the management of the Japanese-owned company have fabricated a false and misleading version of the OPCW evidence and have covered up British government lying on the Skripal blood testing and the Novichok evidence.

On Wednesday afternoon this week, OE24, a news portal of the OE media group in Vienna, broke the first story (lead image, right) that the barcode found on the OPCW document photograph published in London had been traced to several Austrian state ministries . The next day, OE political editor Isabelle Daniel reported the Austrian Foreign, Defence and Economics Ministries had received copies of the barcoded OPCW dossier, and that the Justice Ministry and prosecutors were investigating "potential moles".

Daniel also quoted a Foreign Ministry source as saying its copy of the documents had been securely stored in its disarmament department safe, and that there were "no tips" the leak had come from there. Daniel also quoted a BVT spokesman as confirming the authenticity of the OPCW file had been verified. "We have checked it recently. Officially it has not come to us."

Left: Isabelle Daniel of OE, Vienna. Right, Roula Khalaf Razzouk, editor of the Financial Times since her recent appointment by the Nikkei group, the newspaper's owner. Her full name and concealment of her Lebanese political and business interests can be followed here . The names of the four Financial Times reporters who have participated in the misrepresentation and cover-up are Paul Murphy, investigations editor; Dan McCrum, a reporter; Helen Warrell, NATO correspondent; and Max Seddon of the Moscow bureau.

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The leak had been an "explosive secret betrayal" and a criminal investigation was under way, OE24 reported. OE is a privately owned Austrian media group, based in Vienna. It publishes a newspaper, the news portal OE.at, radio and television.

The Financial Times report first exposing the OPCW documents appeared on July 9. Details of how the newspaper fabricated the interpretation the OPCW had corroborated Russian involvement in the Novichok attack can be read here . For the full Skripal story, read the book .

At an OPCW Executive Council meeting on April 14, 2018, five weeks after the Skripal attack, the British Government confirmed that a few days earlier "all States parties" had received copies of the OPCW dossier. This included Austria, as the Viennese sources now acknowledge.

Source: https://www.opcw.org/

"The OPCW responded promptly to our request to send their experts to the United Kingdom," declared Peter Wilson, the British representative to the OPCW on April 14, 2018.

"They conducted a highly professional mission. The OPCW's designated laboratories have also responded professionally and promptly. What the Director-General said was really important on this, and the Technical Secretariat's presentation shows how professional that work was. The report the Technical Secretariat presented to us on 11 April was thorough and methodical. The Technical Secretariat responded quickly to our request to share that report with all States Parties. All have had the chance to see the quality of that work."

Wilson went on to say:

"As you know, on 4 March Yulia and Sergei Skripal were poisoned in Salisbury, the United Kingdom, with a chemical weapon, which United Kingdom experts established to be a Novichok. OPCW has now clearly verified those findings."

The Austrian copy of the OPCW file now confirms this was a misrepresentation of the chemical formula and other evidence the OPCW had gathered.

Wilson went on to conclude:

"the identification of the nerve agent used is an essential piece of technical evidence in our investigation, neither DSTL's [Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down] analysis, nor the OPCW's report, identifies the country or laboratory of origin of the agent used in this attack. So let me also set out the wider picture, which leads the United Kingdom to assess that there is no plausible alternative explanation for what happened in Salisbury than Russian State responsibility. We believe that only the Russian Federation had the technical means, operational experience, and the motive to target the Skripals."

The first qualifying sentence was the British truth; the conclusion was the British lie. The Austrian evidence now verifies there was no evidence of a Russian source in the blood and other test samples; no evidence of Novichok; and no evidence to corroborate the British allegations of a Russian chemical warfare attack.

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In its report, the Financial Times displayed a partial photograph of the cover-page of one of the OPCW documents in its possession (lead image, left). A classification stamp appears to be showing through the title page, but no barcode is visible. The London newspaper appears to have cropped the published picture so as to hide the barcode . That concealment -- proof of the Austrian source – allowed the newspaper reporters to claim the source of the document was unknown, probably Russian, as the headline implied: "Wirecard executive Jan Marsalek touted Russian nerve gas documents."

A British military source was reported as claiming "the documents were 'unlikely' to have come from OPCW member states in western Europe or the US." Khalaf and her reporters added: "The OPCW, which is based in The Hague, said this week that it was investigating the matter, but declined further comment. The Kremlin did not immediately respond to a request for comment." With the barcode in their possession but hidden, they knew they were publishing a combination of disinformation and lies.

The disclosure of the barcode to the Austrians appears to have followed after they had requested it from Khalaf. She checked with her superiors in the newspaper management before handing it over. They believed they were doing so in secret.

It is not known if Motohiro Matsumoto , the Nikkei executive responsible for the London publishing company, was alerted and gave his authorization; he refuses to answer questions. Matsumoto, one of the five directors of Financial Times Ltd., is the general manager of Nikkei's global business division. He takes his running orders from Nikkei's chairman and a long-time media executive, Tsuneo Kita. Matsumoto replaced Hirotomo Nomura at the head of the Financial Times on March 25, 2020. When Nikkei bought the newspaper from Pearson Plc in 2015, Nikkei became its sole proprietor.

The Austrian press has yet to report how the barcode was obtained from the newspaper. Because the BVT and state prosecutors in Vienna are involved in their search for the "moles", it is likely they contacted their counterparts at MI5 and the Home Office, and that the newspaper agreed to hand over its copy of the OPCW file to the latter. The collaboration of the journalists with the secret services to falsify evidence against Moscow in the Novichok story remains a sensitive secret.

Source: https://m.oe24.at/

Khalaf has refused repeated requests for comment. Max Seddon, the newspaper's Moscow reporter, was also asked for additional information about the photograph of the cover-page. He will not answer.

[Aug 02, 2020] The Dems. are absolute champions of hypocrisy and hysterical obfuscations.

Aug 02, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Noirette , Aug 1 2020 18:21 utc | 129

The Dems. are absolute champions of hypocrisy and hysterical obfuscations. They are also rather primitive and short-sighted, which all added up means they perpetually accuse others of their own sins, in narcissistic manipulatory fashion. (Like the abusive husband - prove you wasn't unfaithful - the teen vicious girl bully - you are a slut - etc.)

"Trump won't accept the election results" is a meme that has been going around for ages. Now he hinted he might not accept, everyone is all agog. All it signals is that the Dems. are preparing the ground to contest the results and create serious mayhem. (See the prelude BLM.)

In 2016 they were taken up short, thru lack of attention, stupidity and hubris - typical of a small cadre or consigliere group imagining they control everything. They haven't exited that bubble because they can't - reform is impossible. Their choice of Biden as a possible placeholder (he might be 'retired' and replaced, or a VP slot might be the P pick, etc.) probably seems like a good strategy to them, canny and all. Well over 70, brain damaged, senile and with a reputation of sniffing up little girls, the very idea of 'a leader' is dead at the door.

All it evidences is that the whole 'primary process' and what one might generously dub 'will of the ppl' as the Dems institute it is a total sham (see Sanders), a transparent masquerade. Plus that the Dems have no viable, interesting candidate - the last stab was Obama, whom the Clintons loathed, and many in top spots opposed - but then the 'vote' still counted (even if manipulations were going on - imho only for under 5% of the vote and this was accepted by all parties) so Obama was a sure win. Then he was forced of course to nominate Killary this was seen as a temp. aberration to be dealt with.

Ok, the repubs. So is Trump their candidate or what? :) The democratic 'process' in the US was always an affair of convos in smoke-filled back rooms, and mucho corruption, dirty dealing. What is happening now is that the system is cracking fast and nobody knows if they want dikes to shore it up, to pretend this or that, or to profit from a or b, or to ally with x or y, or to check out, etc. The masks are coming off (oh wait) one thing is for sure is the US population will not move or do anything.

jack at 56 I agree, Skripals being 3-way spies is nonsense. Skripal senior was a washed-out guy who did get some 'kudos' grudgingly from the 'spy' community - ex. he came here (Switz.) and gave some weak talks etc. I reckon he did want to go back to Russia and may have made some feelers or requests to do so, but he would have been ignored or at best shoved to the back of the queue. The Brits never informed him of anything much (imho), etc. Plus, all this going down when his daughter was there makes no sense for a savvy person, etc. No, the unravelling of that story will turn out to be quite humdrum, with a lot of 'accidents' and 'mistakes' etc. (if we ever find out..) with the usual Brit. *Russia Russia Russia* crowd cashing in opportunistically.

[Aug 02, 2020] Russiagate, Nazis, and the CIA by ROB URIE

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The U.S. has spent a century or more trying to install a U.S.-friendly government in Moscow. Following the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the U.S. sent neoliberal economists to loot the country as the Clinton administration, and later the Obama administration, placed NATO troops and armaments on the Russian border after a negotiated agreement not to do so . Subsequent claims of realpolitik are cover for a reckless disregard for geopolitical consequences. ..."
"... The paradox of American liberalism, articulated when feminist icon and CIA asset Gloria Steinem described the CIA as ' liberal, nonviolent and honorable ,' is that educated, well-dressed, bourgeois functionaries have used the (largely manufactured) threat of foreign subversion to install right-wing nationalists subservient to American business interests at every opportunity. ..."
"... To the point made by Christopher Simpson , the CIA could have achieved better results had it not employed former Nazi officers, begging the question of why it chose to do so? ..."
"... Russiagate is the nationalist party line in the American fight against communism, without the communism. Charges of treason have been lodged every time that military budgets have come under attack since 1945. In 1958 the senior leadership of the Air Force was charging the other branches of the military with treason for doubting its utterly fantastical (and later disproven) estimate of Soviet ICBMs. Treason is good for business. ..."
"... Shortly after WWII ended, the CIA employed hundreds of former Nazi military officers, including former Gestapo and SS officers responsible for murdering tens and hundreds of thousands of human beings , to run a spy operation known as the Gehlen Organization from Berlin, Germany. Given its central role in assessing the military intentions and capabilities of the Soviet Union, the Gehlen Organization was more likely than not responsible for the CIA's overstatement of Soviet nuclear capabilities in the 1950s used to support the U.S. nuclear weapons program. Former Nazis were also integrated into CIA efforts to install right wing governments around the world. ..."
"... Under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act passed by Congress in 1998, the CIA was made to partially disclose its affiliation with, and employment of, former Nazis. In contrast to the ' Operation Paperclip ' thesis that it was Nazi scientists who were brought to the U.S. to labor as scientists, the Gehlen Organization and CIC employed known war criminals in political roles. Klaus Barbie, the 'Butcher of Lyon,' was employed by the CIC, and claims to have played a role in the murder of Che Guevara . Wernher von Braun, one of the Operation Paperclip 'scientists,' worked in a Nazi concentration camp as tens of thousands of human beings were murdered. ..."
"... To understand the political space that military production came to occupy, from 1948 onward the U.S. military became a well-funded bureaucracy where charges of treason were regularly traded between the branches. Internecine battles for funding and strategic dominance were (and are) regularly fought. The tactic that this bureaucracy -- the 'military industrial complex,' adopted was to exaggerate foreign threats in a contest for bureaucratic dominance. The nuclear arms race was made a self-fulfilling prophecy. As the U.S. produced world-ending weapons non-stop for decades on end, the Soviets responded in kind. ..."
"... Long story short, the CIA employed hundreds of former Nazi officers who had the ideological predisposition and economic incentive to mis-perceive Soviet intentions and misstate Soviet capabilities to fuel the Cold War. ..."
"... the U.S. had indicated its intention to use nuclear weapons in a first strike -- and had demonstrated the intention by placing Jupiter missiles in Italy, nothing that the U.S. offered during the Missile Crisis could be taken in good faith. ..."
"... Following the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, the Cold War entered a new phase. Cold War logic was repurposed to support the oxymoronic 'humanitarian wars' -- liberating people by bombing them. In 1995 'Russian meddling' meant the Clinton administration rigging the election of Boris Yeltsin in the Russian presidential election. Mr. Clinton then unilaterally reneged on the American agreement to keep NATO from Russia's border when former Baltic states were brought under NATO's control . ..."
"... The Obama administration's 2014 incitement in Ukraine , by way of fostering and supporting the Maidan uprising and the ousting of Ukraine's democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, ties to the U.S. strategy of containing and overthrowing the Soviet (Russian) government that was first codified by the National Security Council (NSC) in 1945. The NSC's directives can be found here and here . The economic and military annexation of Ukraine by the U.S. (NATO didn't exist in 1945) comes under NSC10/2 . The alliance between the CIA and Ukrainian fascists ties to directive NSC20 , the plan to sponsor Ukrainian-affiliated former Nazis in order to install them in the Kremlin to replace the Soviet government. This was part of the CIA's rationale for putting Ukrainian-affiliated former Nazis on its payroll in 1948. ..."
"... That Russiagate is the continuation of a scheme launched in 1945 by the National Security Council, to be engineered by the CIA with help from former Nazi officers in its employ, speaks volumes about the Cold War frame from which it emerges ..."
"... Its near instantaneous adoption by bourgeois liberals demonstrates the class basis of the right-wing nationalism it supports. That liberals appear to perceive themselves as defenders 'democracy' within a trajectory laid out by unelected military leaders more than seven decades earlier is testament to the power of historical ignorance tied to nationalist fervor. Were the former Gestapo and SS officers employed by the CIA 'our Nazis?' ..."
"... Furthermore, are liberals really comfortable bringing fascists with direct historical ties to the Third Reich to power in Ukraine? And while there are no good choices in the upcoming U.S. election, the guy who liberals want to bring to power is lead architect of this move. ..."
Jul 31, 2020 | www.counterpunch.org
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The political success of Russiagate lies in the vanishing of American history in favor of a façade of liberal virtue. Posed as a response to the election of Donald Trump, a straight line can be drawn from efforts to undermine the decommissioning of the American war economy in 1946 to the CIA's alliance with Ukrainian fascists in 2014. In 1945 the NSC (National Security Council) issued a series of directives that gave logic and direction to the CIA's actions during the Cold War. That these persist despite the 'fall of communism' suggests that it was always just a placeholder in the pursuit of other objectives.

The first Cold War was an imperial business enterprise to keep the Generals, bureaucrats, and war materiel suppliers in power and their bank accounts flush after WWII. Likewise, the American side of the nuclear arms race left former Gestapo and SS officers employed by the CIA to put their paranoid fantasies forward as assessments of Russian military capabilities. Why, of all people, would former Nazi officers be put in charge military intelligence if accurate assessments were the goal? The Nazis hated the Soviets more than the Americans did.

The ideological binaries of Russiagate -- for or against Donald Trump, for or against neoliberal, petrostate Russia, define the boundaries of acceptable discourse to the benefit of deeply nefarious interests. The U.S. has spent a century or more trying to install a U.S.-friendly government in Moscow. Following the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the U.S. sent neoliberal economists to loot the country as the Clinton administration, and later the Obama administration, placed NATO troops and armaments on the Russian border after a negotiated agreement not to do so . Subsequent claims of realpolitik are cover for a reckless disregard for geopolitical consequences.

The paradox of American liberalism, articulated when feminist icon and CIA asset Gloria Steinem described the CIA as ' liberal, nonviolent and honorable ,' is that educated, well-dressed, bourgeois functionaries have used the (largely manufactured) threat of foreign subversion to install right-wing nationalists subservient to American business interests at every opportunity. Furthermore, Steinem's aggressive ignorance of the actual history of the CIA illustrates the liberal propensity to conflate bourgeois dress and attitude with an imagined gentility . To the point made by Christopher Simpson , the CIA could have achieved better results had it not employed former Nazi officers, begging the question of why it chose to do so?

On the American left, Russiagate is treated as a case of bad reporting, of official outlets for government propaganda serially reporting facts and events that were subsequently disproved. However, some fair portion of the American bourgeois, the PMC that acts in supporting roles for capital, believes every word of it. Russiagate is the nationalist party line in the American fight against communism, without the communism. Charges of treason have been lodged every time that military budgets have come under attack since 1945. In 1958 the senior leadership of the Air Force was charging the other branches of the military with treason for doubting its utterly fantastical (and later disproven) estimate of Soviet ICBMs. Treason is good for business.

Shortly after WWII ended, the CIA employed hundreds of former Nazi military officers, including former Gestapo and SS officers responsible for murdering tens and hundreds of thousands of human beings , to run a spy operation known as the Gehlen Organization from Berlin, Germany. Given its central role in assessing the military intentions and capabilities of the Soviet Union, the Gehlen Organization was more likely than not responsible for the CIA's overstatement of Soviet nuclear capabilities in the 1950s used to support the U.S. nuclear weapons program. Former Nazis were also integrated into CIA efforts to install right wing governments around the world.

By the time that (Senator) John F. Kennedy claimed a U.S. 'missile gap' with the Soviets in 1958, the CIA was providing estimates of Soviet ICBMs (Inter-continental Ballistic Missiles), that were wildly inflated -- most likely provided to it by the Gehlen Organization. Once satellite and U2 reconnaissance estimates became available, the CIA lowered its own to 120 Soviet ICBMs when the actual number was four . On the one hand, the Soviets really did have a nuclear weapons program. On the other, it was a tiny fraction of what was being claimed. Bad reporting, unerringly on the side of larger military budgets, appears to be the constant.

Under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act passed by Congress in 1998, the CIA was made to partially disclose its affiliation with, and employment of, former Nazis. In contrast to the ' Operation Paperclip ' thesis that it was Nazi scientists who were brought to the U.S. to labor as scientists, the Gehlen Organization and CIC employed known war criminals in political roles. Klaus Barbie, the 'Butcher of Lyon,' was employed by the CIC, and claims to have played a role in the murder of Che Guevara . Wernher von Braun, one of the Operation Paperclip 'scientists,' worked in a Nazi concentration camp as tens of thousands of human beings were murdered.

The historical sequence in the U.S. was WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, to an economy that was heavily dependent on war production. The threatened decommissioning of the war economy in 1946 was first met with an honest assessment of Soviet intentions -- the Soviets were moving infrastructure back into Soviet territory as quickly as was practicable, then to the military budget-friendly claim that they were putting resources in place to invade Europe. The result of the shift was that the American Generals kept their power and the war industry kept producing materiel and weapons. By 1948 these weapons had come to include atomic bombs.

To understand the political space that military production came to occupy, from 1948 onward the U.S. military became a well-funded bureaucracy where charges of treason were regularly traded between the branches. Internecine battles for funding and strategic dominance were (and are) regularly fought. The tactic that this bureaucracy -- the 'military industrial complex,' adopted was to exaggerate foreign threats in a contest for bureaucratic dominance. The nuclear arms race was made a self-fulfilling prophecy. As the U.S. produced world-ending weapons non-stop for decades on end, the Soviets responded in kind.

What ties the Gehlen Organization to CIA estimates of Soviet nuclear weapons from 1948 – 1958 is 1) the Gehlen Organization was central to the CIA's intelligence operations vis-à-vis the Soviets, 2) the CIA had limited alternatives to gather information on the Soviets outside of the Gehlen Organization and 3) the senior leadership of the U.S. military had long demonstrated that it approved of exaggerating foreign threats when doing so enhanced their power and added to their budgets. Long story short, the CIA employed hundreds of former Nazi officers who had the ideological predisposition and economic incentive to mis-perceive Soviet intentions and misstate Soviet capabilities to fuel the Cold War.

Where this gets interesting is that American whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg was working for the Rand Corporation in the late 1950s and early 1960s when estimates of Soviet ICBMs were being put forward. JFK had run (in 1960) on a platform that included closing the Soviet – U.S. ' missile gap .' The USAF (U.S. Air Force), charged with delivering nuclear missiles to their targets, was estimating that the Soviets had 1,000 ICBMs. Mr. Ellsberg, who had limited security clearance through his employment at Rand, was leaked the known number of Soviet ICBMs. The Air Force was saying 1,000 Soviet ICBMs when the number confirmed by reconnaissance satellites was four.

By 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the CIA had shifted nominal control of the Gehlen Organization to the BND, for whom Gehlen continued to work. Based on ongoing satellite reconnaissance data, the CIA was busy lowering its estimates of Soviet nuclear capabilities. Benjamin Schwarz, writing for The Atlantic in 2013, provided an account, apparently informed by the CIA's lowered estimates, where he placed the whole of the Soviet nuclear weapons program (in 1962) at roughly one-ninth the size of the U.S. effort. However, given Ellsberg's known count of four Soviet ICBMs at the time of the missile crisis, even Schwarz's ratio of 1:9 seems to overstate Soviet capabilities.

Further per Schwarz's reporting, the Jupiter nuclear missiles that the U.S. had placed in Italy prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis only made sense as first-strike weapons. This interpretation is corroborated by Daniel Ellsberg , who argues that the American plan was always to initiate the use of nuclear weapons (first strike). This made JFK's posture of equally matched contestants in a geopolitical game of nuclear chicken utterly unhinged. Should this be less than clear, because the U.S. had indicated its intention to use nuclear weapons in a first strike -- and had demonstrated the intention by placing Jupiter missiles in Italy, nothing that the U.S. offered during the Missile Crisis could be taken in good faith.

The dissolution of the USSR in 1991 was met with a promised reduction in U.S. military spending and an end to the Cold War, neither of which ultimately materialized. Following the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, the Cold War entered a new phase. Cold War logic was repurposed to support the oxymoronic 'humanitarian wars' -- liberating people by bombing them. In 1995 'Russian meddling' meant the Clinton administration rigging the election of Boris Yeltsin in the Russian presidential election. Mr. Clinton then unilaterally reneged on the American agreement to keep NATO from Russia's border when former Baltic states were brought under NATO's control .

The Obama administration's 2014 incitement in Ukraine , by way of fostering and supporting the Maidan uprising and the ousting of Ukraine's democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, ties to the U.S. strategy of containing and overthrowing the Soviet (Russian) government that was first codified by the National Security Council (NSC) in 1945. The NSC's directives can be found here and here . The economic and military annexation of Ukraine by the U.S. (NATO didn't exist in 1945) comes under NSC10/2 . The alliance between the CIA and Ukrainian fascists ties to directive NSC20 , the plan to sponsor Ukrainian-affiliated former Nazis in order to install them in the Kremlin to replace the Soviet government. This was part of the CIA's rationale for putting Ukrainian-affiliated former Nazis on its payroll in 1948.

That Russiagate is the continuation of a scheme launched in 1945 by the National Security Council, to be engineered by the CIA with help from former Nazi officers in its employ, speaks volumes about the Cold War frame from which it emerges.

Its near instantaneous adoption by bourgeois liberals demonstrates the class basis of the right-wing nationalism it supports. That liberals appear to perceive themselves as defenders 'democracy' within a trajectory laid out by unelected military leaders more than seven decades earlier is testament to the power of historical ignorance tied to nationalist fervor. Were the former Gestapo and SS officers employed by the CIA 'our Nazis?'

The Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act came about in part because Nazi hunters kept coming across Nazi war criminals living in the U.S. who told them they had been brought here and given employment by the CIA, CIC, or some other division of the Federal government. If the people in these agencies thought that doing so was justified, why the secrecy? And if it wasn't justified, why was it done? Furthermore, are liberals really comfortable bringing fascists with direct historical ties to the Third Reich to power in Ukraine? And while there are no good choices in the upcoming U.S. election, the guy who liberals want to bring to power is lead architect of this move. Cue the Sex Pistols .

[Jul 31, 2020] Crazy Nancy want to be new Senator McCarthy

Abusing prescription drugs at such an advanced age greatly increases probability of hallucinations
Jul 31, 2020 | www.msn.com

Pelosi upbraids counterintel chief in private briefing over Russian meddling

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other top House Democrats admonished the country's top counterintelligence official during a classified election security briefing Friday, accusing him of keeping Americans in the dark about the details of Russia's continued interference in the 2020 campaign. Pelosi hinted at the conflict upon emerging from the briefing Friday morning, saying she thought the administration was "withholding" evidence of foreign election meddling.

[Jul 30, 2020] U.S. Officials Disseminate Disinformation About 'Virus Disinformation'

Notable quotes:
"... Associated Press ..."
"... OneWorld.press ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
Jul 30, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

U.S. Officials Disseminate Disinformation About 'Virus Disinformation' Getald , Jul 29 2020 17:44 utc | 1

In another round of their anti-Russian disinformation campaign 'U.S. government officials' claim that some websites loosely connected to Russia are spreading 'virus disinformation'.

However, no 'virus disinformation' can be found on those sites.

The Associated Press as well as the New York Times were briefed by the 'officials' and provided write ups.

AP : US officials: Russia behind spread of virus disinformation

Two Russians who have held senior roles in Moscow's military intelligence service known as the GRU have been identified as responsible for a disinformation effort meant to reach American and Western audiences, U.S. government officials said. They spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The information had previously been classified, but officials said it had been downgraded so they could more freely discuss it. Officials said they were doing so now to sound the alarm about the particular websites and to expose what they say is a clear link between the sites and Russian intelligence.

Between late May and early July, one of the officials said, the websites singled out Tuesday published about 150 articles about the pandemic response, including coverage aimed either at propping up Russia or denigrating the U.S.

Among the headlines that caught the attention of U.S. officials were "Russia's Counter COVID-19 Aid to America Advances Case for Détente," which suggested that Russia had given urgent and substantial aid to the U.S. to fight the pandemic, and "Beijing Believes COVID-19 is a Biological Weapon," which amplified statements by the Chinese.

The first mentioned piece, Russia's Counter-COVID Aid To America Advances The Case For A New Detente , is by the well known author Andrew Korybko, a U.S. political analyst living in Moscow. It was published at OneWorld.press . The essay discussed the Russian Coronavirus aid flown in early April from Russia to the U.S. The analyst concludes that such aid can be seen as the beginning of a new détente between the U.S. and Russia.

There is zero 'virus disinformation' in the Korybko piece. The aid flight did happen and was widely reported. In a response to the allegations the proprietors of O neWorld point out that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a recent Q&A also alluded to a new détente with Russia. Was that also 'virus disinformation'?

The second piece the 'officials' pointed out, Beijing believes COVID-19 is a biological weapon , was written In March by Lucas Leiroz, a "research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro". It is an exaggerating analysis of the comments and questions a spokesperson of the Chinese Foreign Ministry had made about the possible sources of the Coronavirus.

The original spokesperson quote is in the piece. Referring to additional sources the author's interpretation may go a bit beyond the quote's meaning. But it is certainly not 'virus disinformation' to raise the same speculative question about the potential sources of the virus which at that time many others were also asking.

The piece was published by InfoBRICS.org, a "BRICS information portal" which publishes in the languages of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). It is presumably financed by some or all of those countries.

Another website the 'U.S. officials' have pointed out is InfoRos.ru which publishes in Russian and English. The AP notes of it:

A headline Tuesday on InfoRos.ru about the unrest roiling American cities read "Chaos in the Blue Cities," accompanying a story that lamented how New Yorkers who grew up under the tough-on-crime approach of former Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg "and have zero street smarts" must now "adapt to life in high-crime urban areas."

Another story carried the headline of "Ukrainian Trap for Biden," and claimed that "Ukrainegate" -- a reference to stories surrounding Biden's son Hunter's former ties to a Ukraine gas company -- "keeps unfolding with renewed vigor."

U.S. officials have identified two of the people believed to be behind the sites' operations. The men, Denis Valeryevich Tyurin and Aleksandr Gennadyevich Starunskiy, have previously held leadership roles at InfoRos but have also served in a GRU unit specializing in military psychological intelligence and maintain deep contacts there, the officials said.

InfoRos calls itself a 'news agency' and has some rather boring general interest stuff on its site. But how is its writing in FOX News style about unrest in U.S. cities and about Biden's escapades in the Ukraine 'virus disinformation'? I fail to find any on that site.

In 2018 some "western intelligence agency" told the Washington Post , without providing any evidence, that InfoRos is related to the Russian military intelligence service GU (formerly GRU):

Unit 54777 has several front organizations that are financed through government grants as public diplomacy organizations but are covertly run by the GRU and aimed at Russian expatriates, the intelligence officer said. Two of the most significant are InfoRos and the Institute of the Russian Diaspora.

So InfoRos is getting some public grants and was allegedly previously run by two people who before that worked for the GU. What does that say about the current state and the content it provides? Nothing.

The NYT adds that hardly anyone is reading the websites the 'U.S. officials' pointed out but that their content is at times copied by more prominent aggregator sites:

"What we have seen from G.R.U. operations is oftentimes the social media component is a flop, but the narrative content that they write is shared more broadly through the niche media ecosystem," said Renee DiResta, a research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, who has studied the G.R.U. and InfoRos ties and propaganda work.

There are plenty of sites who copy content from various outlets and reproduce it under their name. But that does not turn whatever they publish into disinformation.

All the pieces mentioned by AP and NYT and attributed to the 'Russian' sites are basically factual and carry no 'virus disinformation'. That makes the 'U.S.officials' claims that they do such the real disinformation campaign.

And the AP and NYT are willingly falling for it.

People being prepared for Russia having the worlds first covid19 vaccine, the US will of course say it was stolen from them. Infantile politicians create infantile press to feed infantile articles to adult children. Critical thinking skills do not exist in the US population.

vk , Jul 29 2020 17:44 utc | 2

There's a corporativist aspect to all of this.

The development of propagation of information/disinformation through the internet eroded the power of the old newspapers/news agencies. It's not that this or that particular website is getting more views, but that the web of communications - the the imperialistic blunders + decline of capitalism post-2008 -, as a whole, weakened what seemed to be an unshakeable trust on the MSM (the very fact that this term exists already is historical evidence of their loss of power).

And this process manifests itself not only in loss of power, but also loss of money: this is particularly evident in the social media, where Facebook (Whatsapp + Facebook proper) and Google are beginning to siphon advertisement money from both TV and the traditional newspapers (printed press). When those traditional printed newspapers went digital, they behaved badly, by using paywalls - this marketing blunder only accelerated their decline in readership and thus further advertisement money, generating a vicious cycle for them.

The loss of influence of public opinion for the MSM also inaugurated another very important societal shift: the middle class' loss of monopoly over opinion and formation of opinion. Historically, it was the role of the middle class to be highly educated, to go to academia (college) and, most importantly, to daily read the newspapers while eating the breakfast. The middle class was the class of the intellectuals by definition, thus served as the clerical class of the capitalist class, the priests of capitalism. With the popularization of the internet, the smartphone and social media, this sanctity was broken or, at least, begun to deteriorate. We can attest this class conflict phenomenon by studying the rise of the term "expert" as a pejorative one. In the West's case, this shift begun through the far-right side of the political spectrum, but the shift is there.

The popularization of what was once a privilege is nothing new in capitalism. The problem here is that capitalism depends on infinite growth to merely exist (i.e. it can't survive on zero growth, it is mathematically impossible), so it has to "monetize" what still isn't monetize in order to find/create more vital space (Lebensraum - a term coined by the hyper-capitalist Nazis) for its expansion and thus survival. Hence the popularization of college education in the USA (then in Europe). Hence the popularization of daily news through the internet/social media. This process, of course, has its positives and negatives (as is the case with every dialectical process) - the fall of the MSM is one of the positives.

So, in fact, when the likes of AP, Reuters, NYT, WaPo, Guardian, Fox, CNN spread disinformation against "alt-media", they are really just protecting their market share - the fact that it implies in suppression of freedom of speech and to mass disinformation and, ultimately, to war and destruction, is merely collateral damage of the business they operate in. They are, after all, capitalist enterprises above all.

bevin , Jul 29 2020 18:16 utc | 3
Excellent analysis, as always, by b. And vk's points are very pertinent too. One tiny quibble: I doubt that the Nazis coined, though they certainly popularised, the term lebensraum.
There is an air of desperation about these campaigns against "Russian" "disinformation" massive changes are occurring, and, because they are so vast, they are moving relatively slowly.
The old media model, now totally outdated, was the first thing to fall. Now capitalism itself is collapsing as a result of the primary contradiction that, left to itself, the marketplace will solve all problems.
As Washington, where magical thinking is sovereign, is demonstrating, left to itself the hidden hand will bring only misery, famine, death and the Apocalypse. This was once very well understood, as a brief look at the history of the founding of the UN will show, now it is the subject of frantic denial by capitalism's priesthood who have grown to enjoy the glitter and sensuality of life in a brothel. It is a sign of their mental decay that they can do no better than to blame Russians.
jayc , Jul 29 2020 18:23 utc | 4
One should presume the anonymous officials responsible for this ground-breaking report (sarc) are close to the various "combatting Russian disinformation" NGOs. They are merely living up to the mission statements of their benefactors. AP and NYTimes are being unprofessional and spreading fake news by failing to reveal their sources. It's mind-numbing - the BS one must wade through.
donkeytale , Jul 29 2020 18:42 utc | 5
VK @ 2

Good point however with one glaring contradiction in your thinking.

You make valid a very criticism of capitalism yet you tend to applaud Chinese capitalist growth (although you tend to deny Chinese capitalist growth is capitalist, a feat of breathtaking magical thinking).

The great Chinese wealth is fully 75% invested in bubblicious real estate valuations of non-commercial real estate built on a mountain of construction debt. Sound familiar?

The irony is Chinese growth since 2008 has been goosed along entirely by the very same financialized hyper capitalist traits as US: great gobs of debt creating supply-side "growth", huge amounts of middle wealth tied to asset inflated bubbles, and of course the resulting income and wealth inequality that rivals US inequality and continues to increase over time.

I snorted coffee out my nose when Gruff tried to totally excuse Chinese income inequality for being only slightly less than US level....how about the truth? Chinese inequality is heinous, only slightly less than the also heinous US level.

The diseased working class in China only has an an arm and two legs hacked off while the diseased US working class is fully quadriplegic. Much, much better to be a fucked over by globalization Chinese citizen! Lmao

psychohistorian , Jul 29 2020 19:19 utc | 6
@ b who ended his posting with
"
And the AP and NYT are willingly falling for it.
"

Sorry b, but AP and NYT are active participants in the disinformation campaign of failing empire and are not falling for anything

The folks that are falling for it are the American public that has lost its ability to discriminate with the fire hose volume of lies told to them on a daily basis.

Empire is in the process of defeating itself which is the only safe way of ending the tyranny of global private finance. I commend China and Russia for having the patience and fortitude to hold the safe space for the dysfunctional social contract having private control of the lifeblood of human commerce to self destruct.

JohnH , Jul 29 2020 19:21 utc | 7
This is SO hilarious! The propagandists are worried about Russian virus dis-information when most dis-information has come from the US government in the person of Trump and from the CDC, which spent months discrediting the effectiveness of face masks!!!

Theses propagandists need to get real jobs dealing with real world problems.

JohnH , Jul 29 2020 19:21 utc | 8
This is SO hilarious! The propagandists are worried about Russian virus dis-information when most dis-information has come from the US government in the person of Trump and from the CDC, which spent months discrediting the effectiveness of face masks!!!

Theses propagandists need to get real jobs dealing with real world problems.

jason , Jul 29 2020 19:25 utc | 9
there has been no national response to coronavirus but there must be a national acceptance that this national non-response is China's fault. and any sources reporting truthfully about the US or disseminating statements easily found elsewhere, as long as they are Russian, Chinese, Venezuelan, Cuban, Iranian, etc., is pure disinformation. How brittle and weak the US is. Where's the Pericles to say to the Spartans, "enter our city and inspect our defenses"? The US is a nation of heavily-armed mice and sheep.

btw, the China love on display around here is pretty funny. in that the Chinese government has mounted a national response to a very serious threat, China is a nation in a way that the US is not. There is no US or we would not have 50 states doing different things in response to the corona outbreak. the US is already dead. But China is a thoroughly authoritarian capitalist state. they are who they are in a dialectic competition with the US and other capitalist powers, not because of some Maoist-Confucian amalgam that inspires such wisdom in their brilliant leaders, who are just as quick to destroy their environment for capitalist gain as anyone on this planet is. The decline of the US will not make China or Russia or any "emerging" power less authoritarian or violent. au quite the contraire. They are Shylocks who will try to better instruction.

However, none of this is of concern to people in the US, whose only concern is the Nazi spawn who've been running "the West" for much longer than the last 75 years. but it's time to kill the bitch, not let it keep screwing us and breeding.

div> Russia's rush to have the first COVID vaccine will be viewed by the propagandists as just another evil attempt by Putin to embarrass the US. Should it prove safe and effective, you can bet that it will be banned in USA, because anything Russian is by definition bad.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/russia-hopes-register-worlds-first-covid-19-vaccine-aug-12

Posted by: JohnH , Jul 29 2020 19:30 utc | 10

Russia's rush to have the first COVID vaccine will be viewed by the propagandists as just another evil attempt by Putin to embarrass the US. Should it prove safe and effective, you can bet that it will be banned in USA, because anything Russian is by definition bad.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/russia-hopes-register-worlds-first-covid-19-vaccine-aug-12

Posted by: JohnH | Jul 29 2020 19:30 utc | 10

Clueless Joe , Jul 29 2020 19:46 utc | 11
As others already said, this is a bit rich, considering that virus disinformation comes from Trump himself, both live and on Twitter, quoting genuine hacks and megalomaniac doctors, depending on the week.
Reality check: Russians will be able to travel across the world way before Americans, for obvious healthcare reasons.
dh , Jul 29 2020 19:50 utc | 12
@2 I would think adblocking has a lot to do with it too. I'm always surprised that it has been allowed to continue.
moon , Jul 29 2020 20:13 utc | 13
Posted by: bevin | Jul 29 2020 18:16 utc | 3

Bevin, I agree, I once had a short exchange on Mondoweiss about the term Lebensraum, it had been used in some type of marketing by my favorite Swizz supermarket. Which then, apparently caused an uproar. The term Lebensraum on its own is rather innocent. Leben (life) Raum (space), a noun compound. Context matters. And I am sure I checked it, and Micros definitively did not use it in any type of world conquering settler context. I haven't stumbled yet across a Micros supermarket anywhere outside Switzerland, ;)

Here is link to the German Wiki entry via Google translate:
https://tinyurl.com/Wikipedia-Lebensraum

vk , Jul 29 2020 20:24 utc | 14
@ Posted by: donkeytale | Jul 29 2020 18:42 utc | 5; Posted by: jason | Jul 29 2020 19:25 utc | 9

Err... this post is not about China.

I think you are the rabid ideologues seeing ghosts, not me.

Perimetr , Jul 29 2020 20:34 utc | 15
AGREE with psychohistorian @ 6

The NTT no longer qualifies as "the paper of record". More like toilet paper if nothing better can be found.

Perimetr , Jul 29 2020 20:35 utc | 16
apologies, meant NYT, i.e. New York Times
barovsky , Jul 29 2020 20:38 utc | 17
I'm under the impression that Info Ros is a Russian government-funded, supported, backed, site, it certainly looks like it and its reportage is decidedly 'neutral'.
donkeytale , Jul 29 2020 20:40 utc | 18
VK @ 14

Actually my comment illustrated the inconsistency of your critique of capitalism post-2008 but nice slide away. Two thumbs up. Way up.

blum , Jul 29 2020 20:41 utc | 19
This is SO hilarious! The propagandists are worried about Russian virus dis-information when most dis-information has come from the US government in the person of Trump and from the CDC, which spent months discrediting ...
Posted by: JohnH | Jul 29 2020 19:21 utc | 8

This is close to my overall take on matters. But I wouldn't put so much emphasis on face masks but on something along the lines of Covid is notthing but a flu. Face masks were initially discussed quite controversially everywhere.

For Georgio Agamben too, strictly a favorite of mine, it was simply another State of Exception too. Suppressive biopolitics:
https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/coronavirus-and-philosophers/

************

Were it gets interesting is here:
A report published last month by a second, nongovernmental organization, Brussels-based EU DisinfoLab, examined links between InfoRos and One World to Russian military intelligence. The researchers identified technical clues tying their websites to Russia and identified some financial connections between InfoRos and the government.

Gotta add that institution to my link list collection on matters.
EU disinfo Lab
https://www.disinfo.eu/publications/how-two-information-portals-hide-their-ties-to-the-russian-news-agency-inforos

They have a competitor which seems Bruxelles based too, Patrick Armstrong alerted me to a while ago:
https://euvsdisinfo.eu/
EUvsDisinfo is the flagship project of the European External Action Service's East StratCom Task Force

************

But yes, on first sight InfoRos seems to be neatly aligned with US alt-Right-Media in basic outlook. More than with the US MSM.

And now I first have to read what has been on Andrew Korybko's mind lately. ;)

blum , Jul 29 2020 20:42 utc | 20

sorry didn't close html tag.
uncle tungsten , Jul 29 2020 21:20 utc | 21
Integrity Initiative strikes again. AP and NYT rush faithfully to print. Journalist gets an extra dime.
Rutherford82 , Jul 29 2020 22:13 utc | 22
Many Americans of all walks of life do not trust their own government, yet most people here seem to have faith that their media outlets are telling the truth. How do you break through to the public that has utter faith in whatever newspaper or television channel they prefer and highlight the lies in a way which gains real traction?

I believe it takes leadership, which, for Americans, mean celebrities have to endorse the idea or it likely won't be taken seriously. This cult of celebrity is mirrored on social media platforms, where millions flock to be a part of some beautiful person's beautiful photograph or some known personalities acceptable opinion du jour.

There is a great bond gripping the minds of American media consumers. They have trained their entire lives to worship at the cult of celebrity and this is the key to breaking the entire media landscape down for them.

This also is the key to unlocking the voices of those who know better with regards to media lies, but keep silent out of fear.

Will a Joe Rogan or Tucker Carlson be able to break the spell? I think it will never happen based on how Hollywood gatekeeps celebrity and based on how hopelessly apathetic most are to Julian Assange.

Ben Barbour , Jul 29 2020 22:36 utc | 23
Lol I write for One World. I'm an American who has never had a piece edited or been told what to write. I was allowed to write a piece about Russia where I was critical of their policy of backing the STC in Yemen (I thought it was bad to divide Yemen). No one makes anybody tow any specific line. I decided not to publish my piece on Russia and the STC in Yemen because I didn't find the topic interesting enough, but I was 100% allowed to be critical of Russia.

If it's a GRU outfit then it's a bad one.

Hoarsewhisperer , Jul 29 2020 23:14 utc | 24
Lol I write for One World. I'm an American who has never had a piece edited or been told what to write.
...
Posted by: Ben Barbour | Jul 29 2020 22:36 utc | 23

Is it possible that you're just the in-house joke at OW?
If they don't care that you'd write "tow" instead of "toe" or that you're too lazy/thoughtless to reproduce the full name of the entity for which STC is an acronym, before using the acronym, then it suggests that One World's Editorial Standards are as lax as your own :-)

Jen , Jul 29 2020 23:29 utc | 25
"... Two Russians who have held senior roles in Moscow's military intelligence service known as the GRU have been identified as responsible for a disinformation effort meant to reach American and Western audiences, U.S. government officials said. They spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly ..."

Of course GRU agents always work in pairs, guided only by the mysterious telepathic powers of the Russian President and no-one or nothing else, as Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov did in Salisbury in March 2018 when they supposedly tried to assassinate or send a warning to Sergei Skripal, and as Dmitri Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoy did in London in November 2006 when they apparently put polonium in a pot of tea served to Alexander Litvinenko in full view of patrons and staff at a hotel restaurant. It's as if each agent carries only half a brain and each half is connected to its complement by the corpus callosum that is Lord Vlademort Putin's thoughts beaming oing-yoing-yoing-like through the atmosphere until they find their targets.

And of course US government officials always speak on condition of anonymity.

As Agence Presse News puts it:

"... The information had previously been classified, but officials said it had been downgraded so they could more freely discuss it. Officials said they were doing so now to sound the alarm about the particular websites and to expose what they say is a clear link between the sites and Russian intelligence ..."

So if US government officials can now freely discuss declassified news, why do they insist on being anonymous? This would be the sort of news announced at a US national press club meeting with Matt Lee in the front row asking awkward and discomfiting questions.

norecovery , Jul 29 2020 23:35 utc | 26
The malicious cultivation (including Gain of Function research) and implantation of this biowarfare agent (and other ones such as Swine Fever) by the U.S. Intelligence services in various places around the world (especially in China and Iran), the intentional faulty responses and deceptive statistics administered by the monopoly-controlled medical establishment, the feigned inability to provide adequate testing, care, and treatment, along with planned economic destruction as a means of restoring investor losses and control of populations through stifling of dissent, are at the heart of the deflection and projection of blame. That broadly-based subject is barely discussed in alternative media and is totally obfuscated in MSM, because the "denier-debunkers" dispute the possibility of such extreme malice existing in our institutions, in spite of previous experience with events such as 9/11 and the '08 financial crisis.
Hoarsewhisperer , Jul 29 2020 23:48 utc | 27
...
So if US government officials can now freely discuss declassified news, why do they insist on being anonymous?
...
Posted by: Jen | Jul 29 2020 23:29 utc | 25

Precisely.
My guess is that they don't know when to quit.
and/or
They embrace the Mythbusters motto...
"If a thing's worth doing, it's worth overdoing."

Benson Barbour , Jul 29 2020 23:54 utc | 28
"Is it possible that you're just the in-house joke at OW?
If they don't care that you'd write "tow" instead of "toe" or that you're too lazy/thoughtless to reproduce the full name of the entity for which STC is an acronym, before using the acronym, then it suggests that One World's Editorial Standards are as lax as your own :-)"

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Jul 29 2020 23:14 utc | 24

Fair point on tow vs toe. That's why editing exists when writing articles. As for the STC part, that is common knowledge if you follow basic geopolitics. When making a post in a comment thread, should I write out "Islamic State of Iraq and Syria" before using the acronym ISIS? If I am posting in a comment thread about Iran, do I need to write out "Mujahedin-e Khalq" instead of just using MEK?

It just displays a massive level of ignorance on your part. Nice try though.

Hoarsewhisperer , Jul 30 2020 0:29 utc | 29
...
It just displays a massive level of ignorance on your part. Nice try though.
Posted by: Benson Barbour | Jul 29 2020 23:54 utc | 28

Thanks. Do you realise that you've just wasted 50+ words explaining why BB didn't bother writing the 3 words that STC stands for?

VietnamVet , Jul 30 2020 0:59 utc | 30
Global media moguls are blaming the 1,000 American deaths per day from the Wuhan coronavirus on Donald Trump to finally get him out of the way. But they are silent on their and the Democrats complicity in the death toll due to the lack of a national public health system or the funding to pay for it.

The USA is going to hell. A scapegoat is needed. For the media and Democrats, Russia is to blame. Anybody else rather than themselves, the true culprits. Donald Trump blames China for the pandemic if he acknowledges it at all but that is where all of Tim Cook's iPhones are made. Blaming China is globalist heresy.

Jackrabbit , Jul 30 2020 1:03 utc | 31
norecovery @Jul29 23:35 #26

I think there's a reasonable case to be made that this is what has occurred.

And, if true, it is covered up by sly suggestions that nCov-19 was man-made with hints or a smug attitude that convey the message that China created the virus. As well as a virtual black-out in Western media of Chinese suggestions that the virus may have started in USA or been planted in Wuhan.

But then, I already stand accused of attributing magical powers of self-interested foresight and boldness to US Deep-State due to my belief that Trump was their choice to lead USA in 2016. And so I expect you're theory will receive the same derision. Yet Empires have not been shy about killing millions when it was in their interest to do so.

In any case, I've written many times that USA/West's unwillingness to fight the virus has been dressed up as innocent mistakes. Even if the West wasn't the source of the virus they have much to answer for. Yet very few have taken note of the way that USA/West have played the pandemic to advance their interests - from lining the pockets of Big Pharma to blaming China for their own "incompetence" (a misnomer: the power-elite are very competent at advancing their interests!).

Inconvenient Truths:


!!
Kay Fabe , Jul 30 2020 1:29 utc | 32
It seems disinformation has been redefined to mean information that counters someone else's (yours) belief. We pretend to be in an Age of Reason but really, we have just replaced religious beliefs with secular beliefs. Science has been taken over by pseudoscientists that have replaced priests. The conflict of interest by the science/priests who profit from their deceptions is beyond criminal.

To know what is the truth you just have to look at whats being censored. Nobody being censored for supporting mask mandates, claiming vaccines are safe, and not questioning the blatant data manipulation of COVID cases that anyone with an open mind and IQ of 100 , and who reads the data, definitions and studies can see through.

It seems people on both sides of the fence have replaced their brains with their chosen ideology. Its like watching a Christian, Jew and Muslim arguing which is the best or true religion. No point in it.

james , Jul 30 2020 1:33 utc | 33
thanks b!

so, lets say GRU agents are feeding russian propaganda sites... how does that compare to all the CIA-FBI agents and has been hacks working for the western msm?? seems a bit rich for the pot to be calling a kettle black, even if they are lying thru their teeth! i am sure if someone did a story on how many CIA - m16 people are presently working with the western msm, they would have a story with some legs... this shite from anonymous usa gov't officials is just that - shite..

@ Ben, or Benson Barbour .. thanks for your comments!

Prof K , Jul 30 2020 1:50 utc | 34
Anyone notice that the Democrats still haven't presented any plan whatsoever to flatten the curve in the US? They are just as bad as Trump.
Seer , Jul 30 2020 1:55 utc | 35
Ben Barbou @ 23
Lol I write for One World. I'm an American who has never had a piece edited or been told what to write. I was allowed to write a piece about Russia where I was critical of their policy of backing the STC in Yemen (I thought it was bad to divide Yemen). No one makes anybody tow any specific line. I decided not to publish my piece on Russia and the STC in Yemen because I didn't find the topic interesting enough, but I was 100% allowed to be critical of Russia.

There's such a thing as self-censorship. Mainstream US news has effectively brought up folks to be this way: stay in line or become unemployed- doesn't need to be stated. Not aimed at you, but it needs to be said (und understood).

Ben Barbour , Jul 30 2020 3:14 utc | 36
@35 That's a very good point. I completely agree. Self-censorship and group think are two of the biggest problems in modern journalism/analysis. One World consistently publishes pro-Pakistan and pro-China articles. When I was first sending them submissions, I did a piece on US vs China in Sudan and South Sudan. I considered omitting China's culpability in escalating the conflicts, and instead focus on laying the blame squarely at the feet of the US. In the end I told the truth about both countries' imperialist escalations (to the best of my ability).

There is a lot of incentive to self-censor at just about any outlet. It's more comfortable to fit in with a site's brand.

In the case of the Russia-STC article, I really just found the subject matter to be thin. Russia's support of the STC is mostly just diplomatic. Not a lot to write about.

AntiSpin , Jul 30 2020 3:55 utc | 37
Think you can't possibly be more outraged than you already are?

Try this --
The Government's Weapon Against Reality Winner: COVID-19
By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News
27 July 20
https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/64239-the-governments-weapon-against-reality-winner-covid-19

One Too Many , Jul 30 2020 4:09 utc | 38
Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Jul 30 2020 0:29 utc | 29

Google or duckduckgo "STC in Yemen". First hit, it's not that hard.

J W , Jul 30 2020 5:39 utc | 39
Posted by: james | Jul 30 2020 1:33 utc | 33

Small wonder that food from Anglozionists is so bad, they love being in the kitchen but they can't stand the heat.

ak74 , Jul 30 2020 5:40 utc | 40
The Americans are increasingly unhinged in their spittle-flecked accusations against not only Russia, but also China, Iran, Venezuela, etc.

It's so pathetic as to be humorous.

Underlying the USA's Two Minutes of Hate campaigns, however, is a deeper disease that defines Americans as a nation and as a people.

Namely, Americans have an inbred fundamentalist belief in their own Moral Superiority as the Beacon of Liberty, Land of the Free, blah, blah, blah--no matter how many nations they have bombed back to the Stone Age, invaded, colonized, regime changed, sanctioned, or economically raped in the name of Freedom and Democracy™.

Donald Trump is half correct.

The United States of America is truly a great nation alright--but great only in terms of its deceit, great in terms of its delusions, and great in terms of the horrors that it has inflicted on much of the world.

Comparing America to the Nazis would be a high insult ... to Nazi Germany, as the Third Reich only lasted about 12 years, while the American Reich has unfortunately lasted well over 200 years and gotten away with its crimes against humanity by possessing what are likely the greatest propaganda machine and political deception in human history: the American Free Press and the world historic lie called "American Freedom."

Harold Pinter in his 2005 Nobel Literature Prize speech briefly but powerfully exposes this heart of American darkness:

"The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner."

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2005/pinter/25621-harold-pinter-nobel-lecture-2005/

Blue Dotterel , Jul 30 2020 6:23 utc | 41
And the disinformation in the USA continues.
https://www.rt.com/usa/496578-fauci-coronavirus-eye-protection/

"Top US immunologist Dr Anthony Fauci is now saying citizens are not "complete" in protecting themselves from the Covid-19 pandemic unless they go beyond wearing a mask and add in eye protection like goggles, too."

More provocation from the oligarchy. Now, that masks are becoming less controversial, time to step up the provocation, division and control.

Fauci is also behind the anti-hydroxychloroquine propaganda, as well, that even b has swallowed. This, despite it being used effectively in other countries. All of this simply because Trump supports it (ergo, it must be bad) and Big Pharma (who control Fauci,
CDC abd WHO) can't profit significantly from its use.

Of course vacines are still an issue:
https://www.globalresearch.ca/kennedy-jr-warns-parents-about-danger-using-largely-untested-covid-vaccines-kids/5719566

"During the course of the debate, Kennedy also talked about the regular vaccines most people take, from Hepatitis B to the flu shot, emphasizing that no proper testing had ever been done, which is mandatory for any other medication. Vaccines "are the only medical product that does not have to be safety-tested against a placebo," he explained."

Kennedy said

"it's not hypothetical that vaccines cause injury, and that injuries are not rare. The vaccine courts have paid out four billion dollars" over the past three decades, "and the threshold for getting back into a vaccine court and getting a judgment – [the Department of Health and Human Services] admits that fewer than one percent of people who are injured ever even get to court."

So, how well has the Russian vaccine been tested? Does anyone know?


Blue Dotterel , Jul 30 2020 6:40 utc | 42
It is interesting how USAians are being played by the oligarchy.

On foreign policy, the dems and reps are in basic agreement and the propaganda is to bring the masses together to hate Russia, Chaina and anyone else who the Western (US) oligarchy has targeted.

Domestically, unity is the enemy of the oligarchy. The masses must be controlled through division and diversion, so the dems and reps play good cop, bad cop (bad and good being relative to the supporter) to ensure the masses are diverted from important oligarch issues to issues of irrelevance to the oligarchs, but easily manipulated emotionnally by the oligarchs for the beast.

It seems so obvious, and yet, works so well.

vato , Jul 30 2020 7:31 utc | 43
Posted by: VietnamVet | Jul 30 2020 0:59 utc | 30

"[...]Donald Trump blames China for the pandemic if he acknowledges it at all but that is where all of Tim Cook's iPhones are made. Blaming China is globalist heresy."


Then why do you phrase it the "Wuhan coronavius" yourself?

Jams O'Donnell , Jul 30 2020 7:59 utc | 44
Posted by: ak74 | Jul 30 2020 5:40 utc | 40

Thanks for that link.

Mark2 , Jul 30 2020 9:32 utc | 45
For those interested in corona virus truth,
I am interested in the question -- - was it spread by negligence or deliberately?
That question must be relivant to this debate on MOA.
I ask this now becouse -- --
Tonight on bbc 'panorama' there investigating the spread of the virus from Hospital to care homes !! I'm told there is some pretty shocking information exposed.
Some may wish to catch that prog. Heads up.

I just add an obversation. -- western psychopathic disinformation and projection has led to a confused public. A public deciding to disengage with politics. To the gain of the psychopaths.

H.Schmatz , Jul 30 2020 10:41 utc | 46
A new candidate to the demonization and disinfo operations has been added...Germany...which has been labeled "delinquent" by the POTUS...in a clear exercise of projection...

https://www.rt.com/news/496584-germany-withdrawl-troops-gas/

Of course, to not be insulted or labeled delinquent, you must act as these other countries enumerated by Southcom commander, to work for the US ( not your country...) and moreover pay for it....Typical mafia extortion, isn´t it?

https://twitter.com/kopamaros/status/1285292016885215237

uncle tungsten , Jul 30 2020 10:49 utc | 47
norecovery #26
That broadly-based subject is barely discussed in alternative media and is totally obfuscated in MSM, because the "denier-debunkers" dispute the possibility of such extreme malice existing in our institutions, in spite of previous experience with events such as 9/11 and the '08 financial crisis.

YES to that and thank you for that post. That the institutions of state and private sectors are the incubators and propagators of extreme malice is axiomatic in the UKUSAI and its five eyed running dogs is beyond doubt. They attack and scorn any critic or unbeliever. They assault and pillory truth speakers and those who might question 'their narrative'.

Then if all that fails the hunt them down and make preposterous claims about them being anti semitic of anti religion or anti their nation.

Mendacity is the currency of the permanent state and its minions and they need to be outed and shamed and challenged at every opportunity.

uncle tungsten , Jul 30 2020 11:00 utc | 48
VietnamVet #30

Wuhan coronavirus you say?

Fort Detrick coronavirus would be on the mark and as you most likely know, you cannot trust the USA lying eyes once you have served them in their killing fields.

Even that right wing ex special forces advocate Steve Pieczenic testifies to the fact of a deadly virus in USA in November/December plus his beloved bloggers say way earlier than that around Maryland etc. Then there is the small problem of the 'vaping' illness that generated lots of pneumonia like fatalities in June/July. And then the instant closure of Fort Detrick due to its leaking all over the place through a totally inadequate waste water treatment plant that couldn't scrub a turd let alone a virus.

Fort Detrick Virus is closer to the reality imo.

William Gruff , Jul 30 2020 11:00 utc | 49
The problem with presstitutes, possibly including Ben Barbour , (disclaimer: I've never read any media products that particular individual generated) goes beyond the point made by Seer @35 . To be sure, there is no chance that a presstitute would bite the hand that feeds it, but there is more depth to the problem of why they all suck so badly, at least the ones in the US. While journalism degrees are the university equivalent of Special Education (nowadays referred to as "Exceptional Student Education" , which is very fitting for students from such an "exceptional" nation), they still prepare the future presstitute to understand that their capitalist employers have interests beyond their immediately apparent ones. That is, more important to a capitalist employer than tomorrow's sales and profits is the preservation of capitalism itself.

But the problem is deeper still. The presstitute that is successfully employed by a capitalist enterprise will invariably be one that knows not to criticize the employer's business, the capitalist system it depends upon, and the empire that improves that employer's profitability. More importantly, that successful hireling will additionally have been brainwashed from infancy that all of these things are good and necessary aspects of the modern world that need to be ideologically defended. The prospective presstitute will be one that not only voluntarily, but eagerly serves its capitalist masters varied interests. After all, when there are plenty of whores to choose from, would you hire one that requires explicit instructions on every last thing you expect from them and just follows those instructions mechanically or the the one that puts effort into figuring out what would please you and delivers that with enthusiasm? Keeping this dynamic in mind will allow one to better understand the capitalist mass media's products.

Steve , Jul 30 2020 11:24 utc | 50
The contempt at which the American ruling class hold their citizens is galling. The US corporate media operates as if their targeted audience are all morons.
moon , Jul 30 2020 11:37 utc | 51
you cannot trust the USA lying eyes once you have served them in their killing fields. ...
Posted by: uncle tungsten | Jul 30 2020 11:00 utc | 48

that's not a good argument, uncle t. But yes I wondered to to what extent VV or good old VietnamVet has been won over to the Trump diction.

blum , Jul 30 2020 11:39 utc | 52
I wondered to to
I wondered too to what extent VV seemingly has been ...
William Gruff , Jul 30 2020 12:00 utc | 53
Mark2 @45: "...was it [ novel coronavirus] spread by negligence or deliberately?"

Most likely both.

There is evidence to suggest that the virus was circulating in the US prior to it being discovered in China. While it is possible this could have been the results of testing the transmissibility of the virus, it seems more probable that it was an accidental release from Fort Detrick. This would explain the facility being shut down last year. Military facilities are never shut down simply for breaking a few rules but because those rule violations led to something unpleasant.

An accidental release, coupled with the fact that the synthetic origin of the virus would become apparent to scientists worldwide, resulted in a need to quickly establish an alternate explanation for the virus. Since the US was losing its trade war with China, and use of a bioweapon to turn the tide was already gamed out and on the table anyway, the virus (or possibly a very similar strain that had been pre-selected for the attack) was deliberately sprayed around a market in Wuhan.

The CDC and CIA probably thought that the virus was contained in the West and that since it was a surprise to the Chinese it would run rampant there and result in their economy shutting down and their borders being closed, decoupling China from the world. With the Chinese treating the virus as a bio attack and defeating its spread, followed by the virus rampaging through the West, the dynamic changed. Now in order for the virus to decouple China it must become endemic in the West. The Chinese must be made to close their borders in fear of becoming infected from the rest of the world. To make this backup plan a reality, and to get the economies moving again as fast as possible, some western leaders have decided to accelerate the spread in the hopes of quickly developing "herd immunity" . Taking out some retirees whom the capitalists view as a burden on the economy is just some nice icing on the cake.

Mark2 , Jul 30 2020 12:04 utc | 54
@ 51 & @ 52
I'd say not ! I'm confided Vietnam Vet is doing 'balenced' Reporting ! The subject of this post. Take another look at both this post and his comment. A lesson in how to be unbiased but truthfull.
Soooo any one got a definition of fake news.
Mine would be Truth before personal agenda.
oldhippie , Jul 30 2020 12:18 utc | 55
Self censorship works well.

Straight cash payoffs work well too.

CIA has had total control of media for 70 years now. It was a priority when they set up shop.

Mark2 , Jul 30 2020 12:19 utc | 56
William Gruff @ 53
I think yours is just about the most clear and concise summary of this whole virus catastrophe that I have seen so far. And that's a hell of a statement !
Unrelated I wonder what would have happened if the Chinese whistle blower had not blown the whistle ? Now that's one to ponder ? As bad as this all is world wide, where would be right now ? Dose not bare thinking about.
vig , Jul 30 2020 12:21 utc | 57
Posted by: Mark2 | Jul 30 2020 12:04 utc | 54

What are you trying to tell me? Anyone that does not acknowledge the virus originated in China and that China didn't respond as fast as it could have? And more polemically: there is some kind of African Marxist heading WHO who obfuscated China's late information to the WHO?

There is a dot of truth in everything. There is also a dot of truth in the fact that Trump or his relevant admin was informed early enough.

Mark2 , Jul 30 2020 12:27 utc | 58
Big @ 57
What ?
jadan , Jul 30 2020 12:35 utc | 59
We've been acquainted with this virus about 7 months or so and it is difficult to separate reliable information from disinformation. We know very little about it, eg, we don't know whether those who recover can be reinfected. Is it like the common cold, against which there is no immunity? We just have to assume that the Trump virus has infected every level of the administration so that there is ignorance and unadulterated stupidity from the lowest level in the ministry of propaganda to the secretary of state and, of course, the president himself currently celebrating the wisdom of an animist/Christian hybrid doctor from Africa spewing the foulest disinformation one can imagine.
vig , Jul 30 2020 12:46 utc | 60
Big @ 57
What ?
Posted by: Mark2 | Jul 30 2020 12:27 utc | 58

babbling: look if this is the good old VV from SST, I wouldn't want to nail him on the usage of Wuhan virus. But on the larger content of his comment, I am wondering.

Full discovery: I entered the US conspiracy universe shortly after 9/11. I'll probably never forget there was this one commenter that completely out of then current preoccupations within the diverse theories, you recall?, suggested that the Chinese were approaching via the Southern borders.

There surely should be a way how the US and Russia

vig , Jul 30 2020 12:48 utc | 61
There surely should be a way how the US and Russia

There surely should be a way how the US and Russia repartition their claims. After all historically the Russian had some type of partly real Yellow threat too ... :)

Mark2 , Jul 30 2020 12:54 utc | 62
Vig @ 60
Thanks for clearing that up. Cheers
Hannibal , Jul 30 2020 12:56 utc | 63
Can probably trace this back to the "integrity initiative" and/ or the Atlantic Council. That's a web worth untangling with transparency.

Spot on James @ 33

One Too Many , Jul 30 2020 13:05 utc | 64
Posted by: Mark2 | Jul 30 2020 12:19 utc | 56

Except the "whistle blower" was not a whistle blower since local, provincial, and nations institutions were already advised or in the process of being advised. Dr Wenliang posted his information in a private chatroom with other medical professionals on December 30th. Timeline of events:

Dec 27 -- Dr. Zhang Jixian, director of the respiratory and critical care medicine department of Hubei Provincial Hospital, files a report to the hospital stating that an unknown pneumonia has developed in three patients and they are not responding to influenza treatment.

Dec 29 -- Hubei Provincial Hospital convened a panel of 10 experts to discuss the now seven cases. Their conclusion that the situation was extraordinary, plus information of two similar cases in other hospitals, prompted the hospital to report directly to the municipal and provincial health authorities.

Dec 30 -- The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission issued an urgent notification to medical institutions under its jurisdiction, ordering efforts to appropriately treat patients with pneumonia of unknown cause.

Dec 31 -- The National Health Commission (NHC) made arrangements in the wee hours, sending a working group and an expert team to Wuhan to guide epidemic response and conduct on-site investigations. The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission released a briefing on its website about the pneumonia outbreak in the city, confirming 27 cases and telling the public not to go to enclosed public places or gather. It suggested wearing face masks when going out. The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission released briefings on the pneumonia outbreak in accordance with the law. WHO's Country Office in the PRC relayed the information to the WHO Western Pacific Regional Office, then to the international level headquarters.

Jan 1 -- The NHC set up a leading group to determine the emergency response to the epidemic. The group convened meetings on a daily basis since then.

Jan 2 -- The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC) and the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences (CAMS) received the first batch of samples of four patients from Hubei Province and began pathogen identification. The NHC came up with a set of guidelines on early discovery, early diagnosis and early quarantine for the prevention and control of the viral pneumonia of unknown cause.

Jan 3 -- Dr. Wenliang signs a statement not to post unsubstantiated rumors.

There's no "whistle blowing" as the information of the cases were already going up the chain of command. These are facts that can be sourced by multiple media outlets. I can't believe this fallacy keeps floating and doesn't flush.

Lurk , Jul 30 2020 13:52 utc | 65
In retrospective analyses, SARS-COV-2 was found in routinely collected samples of European sewage water dating back to at least december 2019. A french doctor reviewed archived medical samples and imagery from patients who had fallen mysteriously ill in the latter half of 2019 and also found that some had been early cases of COVID-19.

The real coronavirus whistle-blower is a doctor in Washington state USA who tested for the virus in Januari 2020 and was silenced by USA medical and federal authorities.

I am afraid that there will never be a sincere investigation into the real cause of the "vaping disease" that caused many deaths from sudden respiratory failure in the USA in the summer of 2019. Tell me again when Ft. Detrick labs was shut down exactly?

Lurk , Jul 30 2020 13:59 utc | 66
@ Hannibal | Jul 30 2020 12:56 utc | 63

Don't forget to mention Mark2's employer, the 77th brigade . We're in an information war , after all.

Piotr Berman , Jul 30 2020 14:00 utc | 67
What are you trying to tell me? Anyone that does not acknowledge the virus originated in China and that China didn't respond as fast as it could have? And more polemically: there is some kind of African Marxist heading WHO who obfuscated China's late information to the WHO?

There is a dot of truth in everything. There is also a dot of truth in the fact that Trump or his relevant admin was informed early enough.

Posted by: vig | Jul 30 2020 12:21 utc | 57

vig repeats widely spread arguments, basically, the "official propaganda" from offices related to an orange-American (excessive time spend on golf courses changes skin color, perhaps in combination with sunscreen, without sunscreen you would get a "redneck look").

1. Origin: somewhat debatable, but any virus has to originate somewhere. Every country was on receiving end of pathogens from other countries.

2. China did not respond as fast as it could have. Now, how fast and effective was USA? One has to note that clusters of fatal lung infections happen regularly, but this is because of mutations that increase impact on health, while separate mutations increase (or decrease) the transmission. Draconian measures are necessary if you get both, but you do not lock cities, provinces, introduce massive quarantine programs until you know that they are necessary. For the same reasons, the response in Western Europe and USA was not as fast as it could have.

3. "African Marxist heading WHO mislead poor naive Americans". What is the budget of American intelligence, and American disease control? Do they collect information, do they have experts? In particular, American authorities knew pretty much what Chinese authorities knew, and they had benefit of several weeks of extra time to devise wise strategy. Giving this benefit to people with limited mental capacities has a limited value. Perhaps China is at fault here too, Pompeo reported about pernicious impact of Chinese Communist Party on PPT meeting in USA, that could have deleterious impact on education and thus on mental capacities.

Pompeo himself may be a victim. He excelled as a West Point student, but if the content of education was crappy, diligence impacted his brain deeper and not for the better. But nobody attempts to blame CCP for that.

vk , Jul 30 2020 14:17 utc | 68
@ Posted by: Mark2 | Jul 30 2020 12:19 utc | 56

It would've changed nothing.

For starters, the "whistleblower" wasn't a whistleblower at all: he thought he had found a resurgence of SARS, not a new pandemic. Secondly, the head of respiratory diseases at the region already was investigating some cases of a "mysterious pneumonia" since end of November or mid-December - so the investigation already was well under way.

Discovering a new disease is not magic: a doctor cannot simply go the market, see a random person, and claim he/she discovered a new virus. Doctors are not gods: they can only diagnose the patients under their care.

The point of discord that the Western MSM capitalized upon was the fact that some random officer from the local police intercepted his private social media and made him sign a letter of reprimand. No Law is ever perfect, and these episodes of false triggers do happen even in Western Democracies.

Little known fact (one which the Western MSM censored) is that the so-called "whistleblower" was a member of the CCP. After knowing the details of the situation (including that the disease was already being investigated), he quickly realized the state-of-the-art and went to the frontlines to fight the pandemic - as any member of the CCP would've done. Revolutionary communist parties have this tradition that comes since the Bolshevik Party, where the leadership always leads by example. The Bolsheviks themselves lost the vast majority of their elite in the Civil War, as they always led in the front (vanguard). Fidel Castro himself led his army in the front when the invasion of the Bay of Pigs begun. So, it is not surprising this doctor, once having the facts on the field, quickly shut up and went to the frontline as a vanguard soldier.

After the whole truth came to the forefront, the Western MSM quickly begun to meltdown over the fake story they fantasized, and the Taiwanese MSM invented a story of some another whistleblower who had discovered the virus "at the end of November". That one never truly gained traction, and silently died out.

But all of this is moot point for the West, because Trump and the other European liberal powers refused to believe either that the virus was real or that it could reach them until February the next year.

But all of this

Den lille abe , Jul 30 2020 14:17 utc | 69
I think it is OK that b nails the US makes yet another display of stupidity.... on the other hand I presume that b also has other things to care about, I mean exposing the US as a "fake" nation is a full time job!
Americans have at least the last 50 years been known for fails, even Churchill commented something like "the Americans will fail numerous times, but eventually they will get it right" well that was back then! Today it is fail upon fail. I know that there must be bright people over there, but it is my sincere impression, that they are a very small minority. Maybe their schooling system has all gone bonkers ?
"3% of all Americans believe the Earth is flat! WTF!!!
America is on a steep slope downward.
Den lille abe , Jul 30 2020 14:31 utc | 70
I am personally not worried much about Covid 19, although I am 63 and live in Sweden, the "black Sheep" in Europe because of our rather lax restrictions, the Swedes themselves are rather good at keeping distance and using common sense.
I am much more worried that the American culture of ignorance, brain farts, stupidity and low IQ media will infest my country further and maybe completely ruin it.
Especially by the junk that comes out of Hollywood, pure Sh*t served nice and hot!
I am happy I know, I have not got to endure further 30 years of this.
Prof K , Jul 30 2020 14:52 utc | 71
A few months ago, b posted a link to a Canadian vlogger who lives in Nanning, China. The vlogger took us on a tour of a so called Wet Market. Here, the vlogger takes us to another Wet Market tour. He does a good job dispelling racist stereotypes and showing real life in China.

https://youtu.be/ppIbzX8JfEw

Mark2 , Jul 30 2020 14:56 utc | 72
One to many @ 64
Thanks ! So there was a group of whistle blowers then. It's down to definitions again. Perhaps mine is a little more loose. But it's of no concern.
For the sake of this excellent thread, perhaps we could all be a little less pedantic. VK ?
cirsium , Jul 30 2020 15:19 utc | 73
@uncle tungsten, 11:00 Jul 30

Also relevant - Crimson Contagion - the pandemic simulation run by the US government from January to August 2019 and was based on an infectious coronavirus coming from a food market in China

PleaseBeleafMe , Jul 30 2020 15:23 utc | 74
@Dla 69,70

Everywhere u go in this world you'll find some version or an "murican" in every country. Even a country like modern first world Switzerland has its "mountain folk".
In my personal experience with Americans I'm most often pleasantly surprised at their levels of sophistication and introspection over their American experiences. An enjoyable and as pleasant a people as anywhere. This may be clouded by mostly meeting these people outside of the US where unless tourists are well educated and travelled and by default more aware of a negative view of their homeland that exists outside of the US. For some reason most of these Americans I've met abroad are decidedly non republican in nature and are mostly
from California and North and North Eastern States. Fellow future Canadians I would call them.
The other side of the coin is when I've travelled to the states. Texas, Florida, Arizona. Whew! What a difference. I've learned that talking politics is impossible and the natives are almost entirely ignorant of anything outside their bubble. Outside of talking points there is no information behind their arguments. Their knowledge of the outside world is incredibly lacking and the view of the US in it is overwhelmingly positive.
It isn't Americans its America and its leadership, its influences, systems and all the other shit that make the US the salad it is. The people r redeemable.

William Gruff , Jul 30 2020 15:34 utc | 75
Calling the professionals doing their jobs in China "whistleblowers" is inaccurate. "Whistleblower" implies revealing information that others are trying to hide. In this case the suggestion is that the Chinese government was trying to hide the outbreak. This is nonsense as the Chinese government was unaware of an outbreak until after the relevant professionals had determined that there was an outbreak. There is no way the Chinese government could have known about an outbreak before the outbreak was identified by the professionals tasked with identifying outbreaks. The only ones who knew about the outbreak before the outbreak occurred were the US "intelligence community" .

[Jul 30, 2020] un gusano sin verg enza

Jul 30, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

dimitrov , Jul 30 2020 22:04 utc | 26

Roberto is what folks in Latin America would deem is "un gusano sin vergüenza'. A willing neo-colonial lapdog for the ghoulish intelligence agencies. You can disregard this sad waste of matter. The governments of Brasil & Ecuador are willingly allowing their countries to succumb to COVID-19. Bio-genocide, in other words. It's a nightmare.

[Jul 27, 2020] Germany Rejects Trump Bid To Let Russia Back Into G7- 'No Chance Due To Ukraine'

So Merkel and Obama staged the coup and Russia is guilty of consequences.
Jul 27, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

For much of the past year Trump has caused angst among allies by maintaining a consistent position that Russia should be invited back into the Group of Seven (G7), making it as it was prior to 2014, the G-8.

Russia had been essentially booted from the summit as relations with the Obama White House broke down over the Ukraine crisis and the Crimea issue. Trump said in August 2019 that Obama had been "outsmarted" by Putin.

But as recently as May when Germany followed by other countries rebuffed Trump's plans to host the G7 at Camp David, Trump blasted the "very outdated group of countries" and expressed that he planned to invite four additional non-member nations, mostly notably Russia .

... per Reuters :

Germany has rejected a proposal by U.S. President Donald Trump to invite Russian President Vladimir Putin back into the Group of Seven (G7) most advanced economies , German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said in a newspaper interview published on Monday.

Interestingly enough the Ukraine and Crimea issues were raised in the interview: "But Maas told Rheinische Post that he did not see any chance for allowing Russia back into the G7 as long as there was no meaningful progress in solving the conflict in Crimea as well as in eastern Ukraine," according to the report.

[Jul 27, 2020] The narratives are breaking down: The entire media class will now spend years leading the public on a wild goose chase for Russian collusion and then act like it's no big deal when the whole thing turned out to be completely baseless by Caitlin Johnstone

Jul 27, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

People's old ways of understanding what's going on in the world just aren't holding together anymore.

... ... ...

New Cold War escalations between the U.S.-centralized empire and the unabsorbed governments of China and Russia are going to cause the media airwaves around the planet to become saturated in ever-intensifying propaganda narratives which favor one side or the other and have no interest in honestly telling people the truth about what's going on.

[Jul 27, 2020] Why it is so difficult to understand what's going on in the world

Jul 27, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

It's difficult to understand what's going on in the world because powerful people actively manipulate public understanding of what's going on in the world.

Powerful people actively manipulate public understanding of what's going on in the world because if the public understood what's going on in the world, they would rise up and use their strength of numbers to overthrow the powerful.

The public would rise up and use their strength of numbers to overthrow the powerful if they understood what's going on in their world because then they would understand that the powerful have been exploiting, oppressing, robbing, cheating and deceiving them while destroying the ecosystem, stockpiling weapons of Armageddon and waging endless wars, for no other reason than so that they can maintain and expand their power.

The public do not rise up and use their strength of numbers to overthrow the powerful because they have been successfully manipulated into not wanting to.

[Jul 26, 2020] Cold Wars Profit -

Jul 26, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Cold Wars & Profit


by Tyler Durden Fri, 07/24/2020 - 02:00 Twitter Facebook Reddit Email Print

Authored by Craig Murray via ConsortiumNews.com,

If an asteroid runs into the earth, any surviving press will blame it on Russia...

The Guardian a few days ago carried a very strange piece [which has since been removed] under the heading "Stamps celebrating Ukrainian resistance in pictures." The first image displayed a stamp bearing the name of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).

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https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.398.1_en.html#goog_29180504 NOW PLAYING

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The UPA was, without any shadow of a doubt, responsible for the slaughter of at least 200,000 Polish civilians; they liquidated whole Polish communities in Volhynia and Galicia, including the women and children. The current Polish government, which is as anti-Russian and pro-NATO as they come, nevertheless has declared this a genocide.

It certainly was an extremely brutal ethnic cleansing. There is no doubt either that at times between 1942 and 1944 the UPA collaborated with the Nazis and collaborated in the destruction of Jews and Gypsies. It is simplistic to describe the UPA as fascist or an extension of the Nazi regime; at times they fought the Nazis, though they collaborated more often.

There is a real sense in which they operated at the level of medieval peasants, simply seizing local opportunities to exterminate rural populations and seize their land and assets, be they Polish, Jew or Gypsy. But on balance any reasonable person would have to conclude that the UPA was an utterly deplorable phenomenon. To publish a celebration of it, disguised as a graphic art piece, without any of this context, is no more defensible than a display of Nazi art with no context.

In fact, The Guardian's very brief text was still worse than no context.

"Ukrainian photographer Oleksandr Kosmach collects 20th-century stamps issued by Ukrainian groups in exile during the Soviet era.

Artists and exiles around the world would use stamps to communicate the horrors of Soviet oppression. "These stamps show us the ideas and values of these people, who they really were and what they were fighting for," Kosmach says."

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That is so misleadingly partial as a description of the art glorifying the UPA movement as to be deeply reprehensible. It does however fit with the anything- goes stoking of Russophobia, which is the mainstay of government and media discourse at the moment. Even at the height of the Cold War, we never saw such a barrage of unprovable accusations leveled at Russia through the media by "security service sources."

Attack on UK Vaccine Research

A whole slew of these were rehearsed by Andrew Marr on his flagship BBC1 morning show. The latest is the accusation that Russia is responsible for a cyber attack on Covid-19 vaccination research. This is another totally evidence-free accusation. But it misses the point anyway.

Andrew Marr, center, in 2014. (Financial Times, Flickr)

The alleged cyber attack, if it happened, was a hack not an attack -- the allegation is that there was an effort to obtain the results of research, not to disrupt research. It is appalling that the U.K. is trying to keep its research results secret rather than share them freely with the world scientific community.

As I have reported before , the U.K. and the USA have been preventing the WHO from implementing a common research and common vaccine solution for Covid-19, insisting instead on a profit driven approach to benefit the big pharmaceutical companies (and disadvantage the global poor).

What makes the accusation that Russia tried to hack the research even more dubious is the fact that Russia had just bought the very research specified. You don't steal things you already own.

Evidence of CIA Hacks

If anybody had indeed hacked the research, we all know it is impossible to trace with certainty the whereabouts of hackers. My VPNs [virtual private networks] are habitually set to India, Australia or South Africa depending on where I am trying to watch the cricket, dodging broadcasting restrictions.

More pertinently, WikiLeaks' Vault 7 release of CIA material showed the specific programs for the CIA in how to leave clues to make a leak look like it came from Russia. This irrefutable evidence that the CIA do computer hacks with apparent Russian "fingerprints" deliberately left, like little bits of Cyrillic script, is an absolutely classic example of a fact that everybody working in the mainstream media knows to be true, but which they all contrive never to mention.

Thus when last week's "Russian hacking" story was briefed by the security services -- that former Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn deployed secret documents on U.K./U.S. trade talks which had been posted on Reddit, after being stolen by an evil Russian who left his name of Grigor in his Reddit handle -- there was no questioning in the media of this narrative. Instead, we had another round of McCarthyite witch-hunt aimed at the rather tired looking Corbyn.

Personally, if the Russians had been responsible for revealing that the Tories are prepared to open up the NHS "market" to big American companies, including ending or raising caps on pharmaceutical prices, I should be very grateful to the Russians for telling us. Just as the world would owe the Russians a favor if it were indeed them who leaked evidence of just how systematically the DNC rigged the 2016 primaries against Bernie Sanders.

But as it happens, it was not the Russians. The latter case was a leak by a disgusted insider, and I very much suspect the NHS U.S. trade deal link was also from a disgusted insider.

When governments do appalling things, very often somebody manages to blow the whistle.

Crowdstrike's Quiet Admission

If you can delay even the most startling truth for several years, it loses much of its political bite. If you can announce it during a health crisis, it loses still more. The world therefore did not shudder to a halt when the CEO of Crowdstrike admitted there had never been any evidence of a Russian hack of the DNC servers.

Crowdstrike's Shawn Henry presenting at the International Security Forum in Vancouver, 2009.
(Hubert K, Flickr)

You will recall the near incredible fact that, even through the Mueller investigation, the FBI never inspected the DNC servers themselves but simply relied on a technical report from Crowdstrike, the Hillary Clinton-related IT security consultant for the DNC.

It is now known for sure that Crowdstrike had been peddling fake news for Hillary. In fact, Crowdstrike had no record of any internet hack at all. There was no evidence of the email material being exported over the internet. What they claimed did exist was evidence that the files had been organized preparatory to export.

Remember the entire "Russian hacking" story was based ONLY on Crowdstrike's say so. There is literally no other evidence of Russian involvement in the DNC emails, which is unsurprising as I have been telling you for four years from my own direct sources that Russia was not involved. Yet finally declassified congressional testimony revealed that Shawn Henry stated on oath that "we did not have concrete evidence" and "There's circumstantial evidence , but no evidence they were actually exfiltrated."

This testimony fits with what I was told by Bill Binney, a former technical director of the National Security Agency (NSA), who told me that it was impossible that any large amount of data should be moved across the internet from the USA, without the NSA both seeing it happen in real time and recording it. If there really had been a Russian hack, the NSA would have been able to give the time of it to a millisecond.

That the NSA did not have that information was proof the transfer had never happened, according to Binney. What had happened, Binney deduced, was that the files had been downloaded locally, probably to a thumb drive.

Bill Binney. (Miquel Taverna / CCCB via Flickr)

So arguably the biggest news story of the past four years -- the claim that Putin effectively interfered to have Donald Trump elected U.S. president -- turns out indeed to be utterly baseless. Has the mainstream media, acting on security service behest, done anything to row back from the false impression it created? No it has doubled down.

Anti-Russia Theme

The "Russian hacking" theme keeps being brought back related to whatever is the big story of the day.

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Then we have those continual security service briefings. Two weeks ago we had unnamed security service sources telling The New York Times that Russia had offered the Taliban a bounty for killing American soldiers. This information had allegedly come from interrogation of captured Taliban in Afghanistan, which would almost certainly mean it was obtained under torture.

It is a wildly improbable tale. The Afghans have never needed that kind of incentivization to kill foreign invaders on their soil. It is also a fascinating throwback of an accusation – the British did indeed offer Afghans money for, quite literally, the heads of Afghan resistance leaders during the first Afghan War in 1841, as I detail in my book "Sikunder Burnes."

Taliban in Herat, Afghanistan, 2001. (Wikipedia)

You do not have to look back that far to realize the gross hypocrisy of the accusation. In the 1980s the West was quite openly paying, arming and training the Taliban -- including Osama bin Laden – to kill Russian and other Soviet conscripts in their thousands. That is just one example of the hypocrisy.

The U.S. and U.K. security services both cultivate and bribe senior political and other figures abroad in order to influence policy all of the time. We work to manipulate the result of elections -- I have done it personally in my former role as a U.K. diplomat. A great deal of the behavior over which Western governments and media are creating this new McCarthyite anti-Russian witch hunt, is standard diplomatic practice.

My own view is that there are malign Russian forces attempting to act on government in the U.K. and the USA, but they are not nearly as powerful as the malign British and American forces acting on their own governments.

The truth is that the world is under the increasing control of a global elite of billionaires, to whom nationality is irrelevant and national governments are tools to be manipulated. Russia is not attempting to buy corrupt political influence on behalf of the Russian people, who are decent folk every bit as exploited by the ultra-wealthy as you or I. Russian billionaires are, just like billionaires everywhere, attempting to game global political, commercial and social structures in their personal interest.

The other extreme point of hypocrisy lies in human rights. So many Western media commentators are suddenly interested in China and the Uighurs or in restrictions on the LBGT community in Russia, yet turn a completely blind eye to the abuse committed by Western "allies" such as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

As somebody who was campaigning about the human rights of both the Uighurs and of gay people in Russia a good decade before it became fashionable, I am disgusted by how the term "human rights" has become weaponized for deployment only against those countries designated as enemy by the Western elite.

Finally, do not forget that there is a massive armaments industry and a massive security industry all dependent on having an "enemy." Powerful people make money from this Russophobia. Expect much more of it. There is money in a Cold War. Sign in to comment Viewing Options arrow_drop_down

jmNZ , 2 hours ago

Most of this can be traced to a group of fanatical Dr Strangeloves in the UK, known as the "The Integrity Initiative" (sic) , now continuing under a new name since its cover was blown by ukcolumnnews.

This group is handsomely funded from the public purse by the Foreign Office and its influence is spread by the BBC and a corps of "disinformation officers" known as the 77th brigade and 13 Signals, all under the control of the British cabinet office.

They are the ones trying to destabilize America via the Democratic (sic) Party.

And their cover is weekly Russia-bashing stories.

bumboo , 6 hours ago

Craig Murray sounds a reasonable voice. He quit or was fired from his Ambassador job in Uzbekistan on Iraq war issue. Compare him with our Gen. Collin Powell, Mr. Clean, who lied about Iraqi WMD in UN, covered up My Lia massacre for a lousy promotion. Now writing books, public speaking for money and appearing on TVs as a wiseman. Wow.

Thutmoses , 7 hours ago

I think it wont be Russia, it will be China.

If an asteroid runs into the earth, any surviving press will blame it on China

Scipio Africanuz , 8 hours ago

Thanks Craig..

Any renewed cold War will freeze the instigators, and should it get hot, then they burn as well..

Unfortunately, in the hot version, mankind gets roasted as well and not just by bombs, but by..

As for the cold version however, the script had flipped thus..

As Sólómọ́nì Wise averred wisely, the borrower is slave to the lender, and it doesn't matter if the duplicitous borrower tries to stiff the lender..

The debts will be paid one way or another..

As for those bamboozled into unsustainable liabilities, there's always the merciful jubilee, but first things first, lessons must be learned, thinking rejuvenated, lifestyle changed, recalibration engaged, and vigilance imbibed..

To ensure serfdom culs de sac are avoided once the deceived by delusions are salvaged..

And thus Craig, the necessity of experience that's bitter, so folks may learn by necessity, what they chose not to learn via humility..

Cheers...

Really_Brit , 8 hours ago

The fundamental problem with this kind of revisionist narrative - that the Russian leadership has been wildly misinterpreted as hostile to the west - is actually the existence, in full sight, of Russia's most obvious propaganda tool - RT. What was called Russia Today until someone in Moscow twigged that almost nothing being broadcast was about Russia that was at all likely to upset Putin and his oligarchy or hint at the countries inferiority complex viz a viz the West. So not what would be seen as free press and free broadcasting.
Nothing remotely like the programs RT / Russia Today has put together (or bought) that describe civil unrest in the developed world. Or civil unrest in the developing world but caused by the machinations of the developed world.

The closure or restrictions on Western NGO's in Russia intentionally stops any attempt to replicate RT / Russia Today. So we will never see the Russian equivalents of recognisable US ex-TV anchors or ex-CIA sounding off, within Russia , about corruption and criminality in their motherland. Even sounding off about Russia outside in the developed world carries a heavy price - just remind ourselves of poisoned ex-spies and Salisbury door knobs!

Tarjan , 2 hours ago

"Salisbury door knobs!"

You're chitting me, right?

~

jmNZ , 51 minutes ago

Ha! Ha!

You're as unreal a Brit as can be imagined.

No one believes the Skripal pantomime. Nor the MH17 'narrative'. Nor the farce where a supposedly democratic country like the UK supports one of the richest and most arbitrary regimes, Sadist Barbaria, in the wanton destruction of one of the poorest, the Yemen. And how many times have the US/UK been caught out cooperating with fanatical jihadis terrorizing Syria, the only parliamentary, secular state in the ME?

We wouldn't know any of this from the BBC.

desertboy , 8 hours ago

" It is appalling that the U.K. is trying to keep its research results secret rather than share them freely with the world scientific community."

Assumes the intent is to make people healthier.

capital101 , 9 hours ago

War is a racket , from Smedley Butler, should be mandatory reading in school.

Don't be a tool, wake the **** up and stop mesuring your wealth using toilet paper

mike_1010 , 9 hours ago

I think there is a positive side to this western animosity against Russia and China too. Because Russia and China now have no good reason to respect western imperialism in the rest of the world.

During the last Cold War, Russia and China helped many countries in Africa and Asia throw off their yoke of western imperialism and have some alternatives for their trade and development. And now we are getting a similar situation.

Russia and China are developing financial tools for international trade independent of the US dollar. Which in the future will limit US power to impose sanctions and interfere with trade between other countries. And of course, both Russia and China have goods and technologies that rival those of western countries. They can provide a complete alternative for countries that the West is trying to isolate and subjugate.

Perhaps western animosity isn't good for world peace or for the people in Russia and China. But there is some benefit in this for many less developed countries who need an alternative to the West for their trade and development.

We have some real competition now, where the competitors aren't colluding with each other. Which is good for developing countries that need some real alternatives for their trade and development.

PT , 9 hours ago

"...First they were our enemies. Then they were our friends. Then they were our enemies again. Then they were our friends again..." - Mad Magazine was pointing this out in the 1970s ... or was it the 1960s?

Judging by the wording and the artwork, probably the '60s.

Fun side note: Compare Mad Magazines from each decade. Which ones had the higher quality writers? Which ones had the higher quality art work? The answer is clearly visible. The older, the better.

[Jul 26, 2020] How to Make a Brick from Straw and Bullshit: The UK and US have accused Russia of launching a weapon-like projectile from a satellite in space.

Jul 26, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MOSCOWEXILE July 23, 2020 at 10:50 am

J'accuse! Again!

One hour ago, BBC:

UK and US say Russia fired a satellite weapon in space

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-53518238

The UK and US have accused Russia of launching a weapon-like projectile from a satellite in space.
In a statement, the head of the UK's space directorate said: "We are concerned by the manner in which Russia tested one of its satellites by launching a projectile with the characteristics of a weapon."
The statement said actions like this "threaten the peaceful use of space".

Those Russians!

Now they're even weaponizing weapons!!!

MARK CHAPMAN July 23, 2020 at 11:48 am

But of course the USA's anti-satellite weapons do not 'threaten the peaceful use of space'. Like its 'Bold Onion' project 60 years ago.

https://www.theweek.in/news/sci-tech/2019/03/27/history-anti-satellite-weapon-us-asat-missile.html

The USA and UK's constant, unremitting "Putin stole my baby's candy" stories that nobody expects them to prove are merely making the pair of them look ridiculous. If you're trying to get Code-Red support for war, step up to the mark and take your shot, instead of constantly sniveling and making it sound like nobody can draw a peaceful breath until the Russians have been eliminated from the planet. But I promise you if you do, you are going to be so sorry. Russia is not Grenada. Time again to trot out my favourite maxim – 'experience keeps a hard school, but fools will learn at no other'.

ET AL July 23, 2020 at 12:57 pm

Or the US's recently stood up Space Force(skin) USSF – spaceforce.mil (.mil = as in military). Maybe that is why the UK is whining about it, i.e. to put space between the US? Oh, and the Brits don't have a capability, having given up launchers in the 1960s.

https://www.npr.org/2019/12/21/790492010/trump-created-the-space-force-heres-what-it-will-do?t=1595537367261

"Space is the world's newest war-fighting domain," President Trump said during the signing ceremony. "Amid grave threats to our national security, American superiority in space is absolutely vital. And we're leading, but we're not leading by enough. But very shortly we'll be leading by a lot."

"This is not a farce. This is nationally critical," Gen. John Raymond, who will lead the Space Force, told reporters on Friday. "We are elevating space commensurate with its importance to our national security and the security of our allies and partners."

About 16,000 Air Force active duty and civilian personnel are being assigned to the Space Force. There's still a lot to figure out, including the force's uniform, logo, and even its official song.

The Space Force will fall within the Department of the Air Force, but after one year it will have its own representation on the Joint Chiefs of Staff,

The new service branch essentially repackages and elevates existing military missions in space from the Air Force, Army and Navy, said Todd Harrison, who directs the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic & International Studies.

"It's about, you know, all the different types of missions our military already does in space -- just making sure that we're doing them more effectively, more efficiently," said Harrison.

"It will create a centralized, unified chain of command that is responsible for space, because ultimately when responsibility is fragmented, no one's responsible," he added.
####

The most interesting bit about the article above is the ommission, i.e. it doesn't mention offensive space capabilities, even though we know about the robotic Boing X57* winged spaceplane that swans about for up to a year.

No. Everyone should wait for the US to deploy its weapon systems and then follow! That would be fair and just because the US is a Democracy and it has earned the right and more importantly, the benefit of the doubt ad infinitum. Or is the X-37 just there to sprinkle calming holy water on America's adversaries? ODFO!

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37

[Jul 25, 2020] Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results

Jul 22, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Zalamander

One by one the so-called Russiagate "evidence" have collapsed. The fake Steele Dossier, "Russian spy" Joseph Mifsud who is actually a self-admitted member of the Clinton Foundation, Roger Stone's non-existant Wikileaks contacts, Russian Afgan bounties, etc. But the neoliberal mainstream media still presents these as "facts" with no retractions.

This is not journalism, its disinformation designed to distract the American public from the failures of capitalism.

[Jul 24, 2020] Greater Russia -- Is Moscow out to subvert the West by Richard Sakwa

There some interesting parts of this analysis. But as soon as a Professor shows that he believes that The Internet Research Agency (IRA) troll factory influence 2016 elections his credibility falls to zero. The same is true about believing that Gussifer 2.0 was not a false play operation by some US actors.
The key problem in the USA foreign policy toward Russia is the concept of "Full Spectrum Dominance" cherished by Washington Neocons and foreign policy establishment (which are of ten the same people). Add to this a crown of greedy and unprincipled chickenhawks (the Blob) who play the anti-Russian for their own advancement, obtaining lucrative positions and enrichment (Fiona Hill, Victoria Nuland and company) and you see the problem. \
Destruction of the UN attempted by the USA after the dissolution of the USSR is a really tragic event, which probably will backfire for the USA sooner of later
Notable quotes:
"... The Putin elite had earlier welcomed Trump's election, but in practice relations deteriorated further. The foreign policy establishment is deeply sceptical that the EU will be able to act with 'strategic autonomy'. Above all, Russo-Western relations have entered into a statecraft 'security dilemma': ..."
"... Currently, we are again faced with a situation in which mutual intentions are assessed by Washington and Moscow as subversive, while each side considers the statecraft employed by the other side as effective enough to achieve its malign goals. At the same time, each side is more sceptical about its own statecraft and appears (or pretends) to be scrambling to catch up (Troitskiy 2019 ). ..."
Jul 15, 2020 | springer.com
Abstract

Russia today is presented as out to subvert the West. The chosen means are meddling in elections and sowing discord in Western societies. Russia in this imaginary looms over an unsuspecting West, undermining democracy and supporting disruptive forces. No longer couched in terms of the Cold War struggle between capitalism and communism, this is a reversion to great power politics of the rawest sort. However, is this analysis correct? Is Vladimir Putin out to undermine the West to achieve his alleged goal of re-establishing some sort of post-Soviet 'greater Russia' imperial union in Russia's neighbourhood, to weaken the Atlantic power system and to undermine the liberal international order? The paper challenges the view that Russia is trying to reconstitute a Soviet-type challenge to the West, and provides an analytical framework to examine the dynamics of Russian foreign policy and on that basis assesses Russia's real rather than imaginary aspirations.

It has become orthodoxy that Russia under an embittered and alienated Vladimir Putin is out to subvert the West. The chosen means are taken to be meddling in elections and sowing discord in Western societies. The various special operations include propelling Donald J. Trump to the White House and fixing the Brexit vote in 2016 (Snyder 2018 ). Putin's Russia in this imaginary looms over an unsuspecting West, undermining democracy and supporting disruptive forces (Shekhovtsov 2017 ; Umland 2017 ). From this perspective, post-communist Russia is up to its old tricks, with the image of the Russian bear threatening the honour of a defenceless Europe dusted off from the Crimean War and the era of the great game in the late nineteenth century. No longer couched in terms of the Cold War struggle between capitalism and communism, this is a reversion to great power politics of the imperial sort. It also represents the application of the weapons of the weak, since Russia by any definition is but a shadow of the former Soviet Union, with less than half the population and an economy at most one-tenth the size of that of the USA. Is this analysis correct? Is Putin out to undermine the West to achieve his alleged goal of re-establishing some sort of post-Soviet union in Russia's neighbourhood and to weaken the Atlantic power system so that the liberal international order is eroded from within? In other words, is Russia today a revisionist power out to create a greater Russia?

Before attempting an answer we need to define our terms. What does it mean to be a revisionist power today, and how can a strategy designed to 'subvert' be analysed and measured? Some fundamental methodological problems render study of the question inherently difficult. How can revisionism and subversion be measured? How can the specific actors involved in such actions be identified and disaggregated? At what point do normal policy differences between states become an existential challenge to an existing order? The answer will take four forms, each of which further defines the question. First, an assessment of the charge of Russian subversion and the various approaches that can be used to examine the simple but endlessly complex question: is there a new quality to Russia actions that build on Soviet era 'active measures' to denigrate and ultimately to destroy an opponent. This requires an examination of the logic of Russian motives and policy-making, including examination of the structure of the international system and the dynamics of Russian international politics, which will be presented in the second section. Third, an assessment of some of the Kremlin's subversive behaviour in recent years, examined in the light of the earlier sections. Fourth, analysis of the character of Russia's challenge assesses whether Russia today really is an insurgent and revisionist power.

Active measures and the subversion of American democracy

Is Russia really out to subvert the West? Much of the American political establishment believe that this is the case. A comprehensive list of Russian sins is presented by Biden and Carpenter ( 2018 ), including tyranny at home, the violation of the sovereignty of neighbours, meddling in the affairs of countries on the road to NATO membership, 'soft subversion' through electoral interference in the USA and France, the manipulation of energy markets and the 'weaponisation' of corruption. In his warning not to overreact to the Chinese challenge, Zakaria ( 2020 , p. 64) notes that its actions, such as stealing military secrets and cyber-warfare, 'are attempts to preserve what China views as its sovereignty'. However, these actions are 'nothing like Moscow's systematic efforts to disrupt and delegitimize Western democracy in Canada, the United States and Europe'. Why do Russia's actions in his view fall into an entirely different category?

One answer is that it is a question of political culture. The study of Moscow Rules by Giles ( 2019a , p. 23) argues that Russia's 'instinctive rejection of cooperative solutions is reinforced by the belief that all great nations achieve security through the creation and assertion of raw power', and this in turn means that Russia believes 'that the insecurity of others makes Russia itself more secure', predicated 'on the dubious principle that there is only a finite amount of security in the world'. Elsewhere (Giles 2019b ) sums up the policy implications in ten key points, which together do not leave much room for diplomatic manoeuvre or even engagement with such a wily adversary who 'takes a very expansive view of what constitutes Russian territory'. Treating it as an equal by normalising relations, as during Barack Obama's reset, 'delivered entirely the wrong messages to Moscow' (Giles 2019a , p. 25). There can be no common ground with such an existential foe, and any substantive engagement smacks of appeasement.

A second perspective focuses on Russophobia, which builds on the political culture notion of some inalienable and ineradicable essence to Russian behaviour. The concept of Russophobia is often used to discount what may well be legitimate criticism of Kremlin policies, but it nevertheless accurately conveys an approach that denigrates not only Russia's leaders but the people as a whole (Mettan 2017 ; Tsygankov 2009 ). In an interview in May 2017 former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper argued that Russians 'are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favour, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique' (Koenig 2017 ). The work of Smith ( 2019 ) complements that of Foglesong ( 2007 ) on long-standing American anxieties about Russia. Smith argues that recurrent bouts of Russophobia are prompted by what he calls the 'Russia anxiety', a long-term pattern of thinking and sentiments about Russia that alternate between fear, contempt and disregard for the country. The cycle began in the sixteenth century when Russia joined the nascent European international society. Anxiety that Russia threatens Western civilisation was accompanied by various versions of 'fake history', as in the publication in nineteenth-century France of Russia's 14-point plan for world domination -- the Testament of Peter the Great. This forgery is just one example of what Smith calls the 'black legend' of Russian history: the idea that aggression, expansionism and authoritarianism are inherent features of Russia's national character. Smith aims to demonstrate that Russia is far from exceptional, and instead its behaviour is predictable and in conformity with traditional patterns of a country defending its national interests, or as Zakaria argues with reference to China, its sovereignty. The major exception was the Soviet period, but this in many ways ran against Russia's national identity and represented an imposition based on chance and contingency. In his view, Russia today is doing no more than any other state, and its external actions are no more egregiously malevolent than any other.

A third approach looks at Soviet legacies and systemic characteristics. From this perspective, Russia has undergone an 'unfinished revolution' (McFaul 2001 ), allowing the Soviet era anti-Western and anti-democratic forces to regroup after the fall of communism. This particularly concerns the so-called siloviki (the security apparatus and its acolytes), as well as the transformed Soviet apparatchiks who became the core of Putin's model of statist oligarchic capitalism. This 'crony capitalism' spreads its subversion by abusing Western legal and financial institutions for their own malign purposes (Belton 2020 ; Dawisha 2014 ). Despite the change of regime and the end of old-style ideological confrontation, the Soviet system in certain fundamental respects has reproduced itself. This is why the repertoire of tactics is sometimes described as a continuation of Soviet era 'active measures' ( aktivnye meropriyatiya ) (Rid 2020 ). These are designed to undermine 'support in the United States and overseas for policies viewed as threatening to Moscow, discrediting US intelligence and law enforcement agencies, weakening US alliances and US relations with partners, and increasing Soviet power and influence across the globe' (Jones 2019 , p. 2). The term is now used indiscriminately to encompass disinformation and cyber activities as elements of a sustained strategy undertaken by the Soviet and now the Russian security services to undermine an enemy by exploiting divisions and the vulnerabilities of competitive and open democratic societies.

The Communist International (Comintern) was established in March 1919 to spread the revolution globally and prompted the Palmer raids in November of that year in the USA as part of the first Red Scare. During the Cold War there were plenty of times when Moscow tried to influence US politics (Haslam 2012 ). In 1948 the Soviet Union backed the Progressive Party's Henry Wallace, who had been Franklin D. Roosevelt's vice president but split with the Democratic Party over President Harry Truman's hawkish Cold War stance. In 1964 Soviet and Czechoslovak agencies smeared the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, as a racist and Ku Klux Klan supporter. In 1968 the Soviet Union offered an unprecedented level of support for the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, including financial aid (which naturally was refused). In 1976 the KGB adopted 'active measures' against Democratic Senator Henry 'Scoop' Jackson, a virulent anti-Soviet hawk. In 1980 and again in 1984 it appears that Senator Edward Kennedy sought Soviet support for his presidential campaign (Kengor 2018 ). In 1983 KGB agents were instructed to help defeat Reagan in his bid for re-election. The Soviet goals outlined above hold to this day in conditions of renewed Cold War, and this is why the term has regained currency (Abrams 2016 ). This is understandable, given the long history of Cold War conflict and renewed confrontation.

What is striking, however, is that most Soviet actions were inept and remarkably ineffective (Robinson 2019 ). We can also add that today such actions are also intensely counterproductive, arousing the hostility of the authorities against which they are directed and discrediting what may be legitimate policy differences with these countries. Political opponents are tarred with the brush of 'collusion' with an external enemy, as was the case during the second Red Scare in the post-war years overseen by Senator Joseph McCarthy. This is also the case, as we shall discuss below, in the 'Russiagate' collusion allegations, asserting that Trump worked with Moscow in 2016 to get himself elected (Sakwa 2021 ). The question then becomes: why does Russia do it? Is it part of a single and coordinated strategy of subversion using covert means, reflecting an overarching doctrine?

This is where the fourth approach, the ideational, comes in. From this perspective, the struggle between communism and capitalism has given way to the conflict between democracies and autocracies, with the latter developing a repertoire of techniques to keep democracy at bay (Hall and Ambrosio 2017 ). Each tries to subvert the other using a range of instruments, while advancing soft power agendas (Sherr 2013 ). Since at least 2004 Russia has been concerned with preventing what it calls 'colour revolutions', in which civil society is mobilised by Western agencies to achieve regime change (Horvath 2011 , 2013 ). This was the issue addressed by Valerii Gerasimov ( 2013 ), the Chief of the Russian General Staff, in his landmark article. The lesson of the Arab spring, he argued, was that the rules of war had changed. Viable states could quickly descend into armed conflict and become victims of foreign intervention and sink into an abyss of state collapse, civil conflict and humanitarian catastrophe. The article was a response to what was perceived to be new forms of Western 'hybrid warfare'. He noted that 'Frontal engagements of large formations of forces at the strategic and operational level are gradually becoming a thing of the past. Long-distance, contactless actions against the enemy are becoming the main means of achieving combat and operational goals'. He identified eight features of modern hybrid warfare that were applied to subvert states and to gain control of territory without resorting to conventional arms. Regime change could be achieved by the use of civil methods such as propaganda, funding and training of protest groups, and information campaigns aimed at discrediting the opponent. He stressed that the 'very rules of war have changed', arguing that non-military means such as the 'use of political, economic and informational, humanitarian, and other non-military measures -- applied in coordination with the protest potential of the population', can exceed 'the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness, and 'that the open use of forces -- often under the guise of peace-keeping and crisis regulation -- is resorted to only at a certain stage, primarily for the achievement of final success in the conflict'.

Gerasimov discounted the element of popular protest against corrupt and authoritarian systems in the Middle East, North Africa and post-Soviet Eurasia and instead framed these events as part of the radicalised West's regime change strategies. Following the Russian actions in Crimea and the Donbas in 2014, the term 'hybrid warfare' was applied to Russia's use of mixed methods (propaganda, disinformation, information warfare and special forces) to achieve what came to be known as a 'nonlinear' military operations (Fridman 2018 ). What Gerasimov had identified as the Western strategy against Russia was now interpreted as the blueprint for the Kremlin's attempts to destabilise its neighbours and Western democracies.

As for motivation, this is where a fifth approach comes in, focusing on questions of identity and Russia's search for status in a competitive international environment. From this perspective, the idealism of Mikhail Gorbachev's 'new political thinking' in international relations in the late 1980s 'offered a global mission that would enhance Soviet international status while preserving a distinctive national identity'. In this way, the Soviet Union could forge a 'shortcut to greatness' by winning great power status not through economic might and military power but through normative innovation and the transformation of international politics (Larson and Shevchenko 2003 ). This instrumental view of ideational innovation is challenged by English ( 2000 ), who stresses the long-term maturation of an intellectual revolution in Soviet thinking, which then carried over into Russian debates. As we shall see, there are many layers to Russia's foreign policy identity, although there is a clear evolution away from an initial enthusiasm for all things European and alignment with the West towards the stronger articulation of a great power version of Russian national interests. These great power aspirations have been interpreted as a type of aspirational constructivism directed towards the identity needs of domestic audiences rather than the expression of an aggressive policy towards the historic West (Clunan 2009 ). Status issues are important (Krickovic and Weber 2018 ), but they have to be understood as part of a larger ensemble of motivations within the structure of international relations.

The final approach focuses on the structural characteristics of international politics, whose specific post-Cold War manifestation will be examined below. Briefly put, defensive neorealism argues that in an anarchic international environment states typically seek to preserve the status quo to maintain their security by preserving the balance of power (Waltz 1979 , p. 121). Offensive realists focus on the maintenance of hegemony in the international system and the struggle to prevent usurpation (Mearsheimer 2001 , p. 21). Revisionism assumes that the balance of power does not adequately guarantee a state's security, hence it seeks to change the balance of power; or that is assumes that the balance of power has changed enough to mount a challenge to the status quo. In Russia's case, classical neorealism of either type would accept regional hegemony, with offshore balancing an adequate mechanism to ensure that it did not mount a global challenge. However, the liberal internationalism that predominated after 1989 makes no provision for regional hegemony of any sort, hence Russia was unable to exert the sort of influence to which it felt entitled, and hence its revisionist challenge was manifested in attacks on Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014. This, at least, is the liberal structural perspective, and even the defensive realist position has guarded against any reassertion of Russia's great power ambitions, hence the concern to ensure that Ukraine was distanced as far as possible from any putative Russian 'sphere of influence' (Brzezinski 1994 , 1997 ).

How are we to adjudicate between these six different presentations of Russian interests and concerns? What is the standard against which we can measure the dynamics of Russian identity formation and foreign policy? Is Putin really trying to create a 'greater Russia' by not only challenging the established powers but also by waging a covert war to shape electoral outcomes while destroying the foundations of democracy itself? Undoubtedly, certain Cold War practices of propaganda and covert influence campaigns have been revived, while some (such as deep espionage operations) never stopped, accompanied now by 'black cash' flows (untraceable and illicit payments) to sympathetic movements, cyber-enhanced intelligence operations and outright cyber-warfare. Some of this predates the Cold War and is part of traditional statecraft, some is part of revived Cold War confrontation, while some is new and takes advantage of developing social media and communication technologies. Together they reflect the logic of conflict stopping short of kinetic military action.

Post-Cold War reconstruction of the West and the international system

What is the character of the conflict? We argue here that this is a structural feature of post-Cold War international politics. Two very different and incommensurate models of post-Cold War order were advanced after 1989 (Sakwa 2017a , pp. 12–19). The logic of expansion made perfect sense from the perspective of what came to be seen as the 'victors' at the end of the Cold War. The long-term adversary had not only renounced the ideology in whose name the struggle against capitalist democracy had been waged, but the country itself disintegrated. This really did look like 'the end of history', with no sustained ideological alternative to capitalist modernity on offer. From the first, the logic of expansion was opposed by Russia, the continuer state to the Soviet Union. From Moscow's perspective, the end of the Cold War was a mutual victory -- the triumph of the new political thinking that had matured in various academic institutes and think tanks (Bisley 2004 ; English 2000 ). This is why the logic of expansion was countered by the logic of transformation , the view that the end of the Cold War offered a unique opportunity to move beyond ideological confrontation between and within states. The idea of revolutionary socialism and class war would give way to a politics of reconciliation and all-class development. This is more than a 'shortcut to greatness' or a strategy for status advancement (although it is both of these), but a proposal for a structural transformation of the conduct of international politics. This demand lies at the base of normative developments in international law over the last century as well as in various peace and environmental movements today. There are plenty of credible realist arguments to dismiss such transformative approaches as hopelessly idealistic, but repeated financial and pathogenic shocks and the enduring threats of environmental catastrophe and nuclear annihilation provide the continuing impulse for transformative thinking (Lieven 2020 ).

This relates to a key point at the heart of Russian post-communist self-identity -- the ambition to join not the West as it exists within the accustomed binaries but a transformed West where Cold War antagonisms are structurally transcended. After 1989 the stated Russian ambition was to join the political West as it existed at the time, defined as the embodiment of the democratic ideal, the rule of law, defensible property rights, and above all the realm of freedom and independent associational life. However, because of the way that the political West evolved during the Cold War, when the larger political civilisation, termed after the Cold War the liberal international order, melded with the Atlantic power system, for a large part (but not all) of the Russia elite this became impossible. The power system at the heart of the liberal normative order endows US power with a unique character. The hegemonic aspect provided a range of international public goods, including the framework for economic globalisation. However, this was accompanied by the practices of primacy, which we can credibly describe as dominion, an ascendancy that has spawned a vast literature describing the USA as an empire (indicatively, Bacevich 2003 ; Johnson 2002 ; Mann 2005 ).

Russian leaders from Gorbachev to Putin insisted that the Cold War West -- what in Russian parlance became known as the 'historic West' -- would have to change with the end of the Cold War to become a 'greater West'. This was effectively the condition for Russia to join the expanded community, but in the end it turned out impossible for both sides to make the necessary adjustments. The greater West would not have to repudiate hegemony -- that was too much even for a demandeur state such as Russia to ask -- but Moscow's leaders did seek a change in the terms of dominion through the creation of what it insisted should be a mutually inclusive security order. Hegemony was to a degree acceptable as long as it was constrained by the system of international law grounded in the post-1945 international system, represented above all by the United Nations. Russian neo-revisionism challenges dominance in its various manifestations (empire, primacy, exceptionalism or greatness), but can live with constrained hegemony.

In sum, the fundamental post-Cold War process in the Russian view was to be mutual transformation , whereas the Western view envisaged a straightforward process of enlargement . In the context in which the main antagonist had itself repudiated the ideology on which it had based its opposition to the historical West since 1917, and which in 1991 disintegrated as a state, the Atlanticist pursuit of expansion and its accompanying logic of dominion was understandable (Wohlforth and Zubok 2017 ). Victory in the Cold War and the disintegration of the historic enemy (the Soviet Union) not only inhibited transformative processes in the historic West but in the absence of a counter-ideology or an opposing power system, encouraged the radicalisation of its key features (Sakwa 2018a ). The original liberal world order after 1945 developed as one of the major pillars (the Soviet Union was the other) within a bipolar system and was initially a relatively modest affair, based on the UN Charter defending the territorial integrity of states (although also committed to anti-colonial national self-determination), multilateral institutions, open markets that was later formulated as the 'four freedoms' of labour, capital, goods and services, accompanied by a prohibition on the use of force except in self-defence. After 1989 the liberal world order, as the only surviving system with genuinely universal aspirations, assumed more ambitious characteristics, including a radical version of globalisation, democracy promotion and regime change.

The framing of the 'historic West' against a putative 'greater West' repeats the recurring Russian cultural trope of contrasting 'good' and 'bad' Europes or Wests, 'with which Russians can seek to make common cause in domestic power struggles' (Hahn 2020 ; see also Neumann 2016 ). As the historic West radicalised, it also enlarged. On the global scale its normative system, the liberal international order, made universalist claims, while its power system (dominion) in Europe brought NATO to Russia's western borders and drove the European Union deep into what had traditionally been Russia's economic and cultural sphere. This would be disruptive in the best of circumstances, but when it became part of the expansion of an Atlantic power system accompanied by the universalising practices of the liberal international order, it provoked a confrontation over Ukraine and the onset of a renewed period of confrontation that some call a New Cold War (Legvold 2016 ; Mastanduno 2019 ; Monaghan 2015 ). In the absence of ideational or institutional modification, let alone innovation, after 1989, there was 'no place for Russia' (Hill 2018 , p. 8 and passim ) in this new order.

Does this mean that Russia has become a revisionist power, out to destroy the historic West? Russia's ambition has in fact been rather different, but in the end no less challenging: to change the practices of the power system at the core of the historic West. Once mutual transformation was no longer an option and the idea of a greater West receded (although it remains a residual feature of Russian thinking), Russia turned to neo-revisionism, a rather more modest ambition to change practices rather than systems (Sakwa 2019 ). This was the culmination of an extended thirty-year period of experimentation. Contrary to the view of the Russian power system as some immutable and unchangeable malign force (Lucas 2008 , 2013 ), the first and second models outlined above, foreign policy and more broadly Russia's engagement with the historic West since the end of the Cold War has evolved through four distinct periods. Periodisation is an important heuristic device and in methodological terms repudiates the view that there is some enduring essence to Russian foreign policy behaviour, with 'active measures' seamlessly transferred from the Soviet Union to post-communist Russia. It is important to note that the periodisation outlined here is layered . In other words, each phase does not simply give way to the next, but builds on and incorporates the earlier one, while changing the emphasis and introducing new elements.

The first period in the early 1990s was characterised by an enthusiastic Westernism and embrace of liberal Atlanticism (Kozyrev 2019 ). In conditions of catastrophic social and economic conditions at home and assertions of US hegemony and dominion abroad (although exercised rather reluctantly in Bosnia and elsewhere at this time), this gave way to a more assertive neo-Soviet era of competitive coexistence, masterminded by the foreign minister from January 1996, Yevgeny Primakov, who between September 1998 and May 1999 was prime minister. His assertion of multipolarity, alignment with India and China (the beginning of the RIC's grouping) and foreign policy activism received a harsh rebuff in the NATO bombing of Serbia from March 1999. Putin came to power in 2000 in the belief that the two earlier strategies were excessive in different directions, and through his policy of 'new realism' tried to find a middle way between acquiescence and assertion. Gorbachev-era ideas of 'normality' were revived, and Putin insisted that Russia would be a 'normal' great power, seeking neither favours from the West nor a privileged position for itself (Sakwa 2008 ). This strategy of positive engagement was thrown off course by the expansive dynamic of the Atlantic power system, including the war in Iraq in 2003, NATO enlargement and the Libyan crisis of 2011. As for Russia, the commodities boom of the 2000s fuelled an unprecedented period of economic growth, accompanied by remarkably successful reforms that transformed the Russian armed forces (Renz 2018 ). These fed ideas of Russian resurgence and appeared to provide the material base for a more assertive politics of resistance.

When Putin returned to the Kremlin in May 2012 the new realism gave way to the fourth phase of post-communist Russian foreign policy, the strategy of neo-revisionism. Already in his infamous Munich speech in February 2007, Putin ( 2007 ) objected to the behaviour of the US-led Atlantic power system, but in substance the fundamentals of the new realist strategy continued. Now, however, neo-revisionism challenged the universal claims of the US-led liberal international order and resisted the advance of the Atlantic power system by intensifying alternative integration projects in Eurasia and accelerating the long-term 'pivot to Asia'. By now Moscow was convinced that the normative hegemonic claims of the liberal international order were only the velvet manifestation of the iron fist of American dominion at its core. Russia, and its increasingly close Chinese partner, stressed the autonomy of international governance institutions, insisting that they were not synonymous with the universal claims of the liberal international order. This, in essence, is the fundamental principle of neo-revisionism: a defence of sovereign internationalism and the autonomy of the international system bequeathed by the Yalta and Potsdam conferences of 1945. This is accompanied by a rejection of the disciplinary practices of the US-led hegemonic constellation, including democracy promotion, regime change, humanitarian intervention and nation building (what Gerasimov identified as Western hybrid warfare) (Cunliffe 2020 ). In effect, this means a rejection of the practices of US-led international order, but not of the system in which it operates.

Putin defends a model of conservative (or sovereign) internationalism that maps on to a ternary understanding of the international system. On the top floor are the multilateral institutions of global governance, above all the UN (in which Russia has a privileged position as permanent member (P5) of the Security Council); on the middle floor states compete and global orders (like the US-led liberal international order) seek to impose their hegemony; while on the ground floor civil society groups and civil associations try to shape the cultural landscape of politics (such as groups trying to push responses to the climate catastrophe and nuclear threats up the global agenda). Putin and his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, condemn the liberal order for not living up to its own standards. As Lavrov ( 2019 ) argued, 'How do you reconcile the imperative of defending human rights with the bombardment of sovereign states, and the deliberate effort to destroy their statehood, which leads to the death of hundreds of thousands of people?'.

This is the neo-revisionist framework, which exposes the gulf between hegemonic principles and practices of dominion. It is revisionist to the degree that it repudiates the application of US dominion to itself, but is willing to work with that hegemony on major international issues as long as Russia's status as an autonomous diplomatic interlocutor is recognised (Lo 2015 ). Neo-revisionism is the natural culmination of a policy stance torn by two contradictory positions. The revisionist impulse seeks to reassert Russia into an international system in which great power diplomacy after the end of the Cold War in 1989 had given way to a hegemonic universalism that by definition repudiated the traditional instruments of great power diplomacy, such as spheres of influence, great power summitry and grand bargains. On the other side, Russia remains a conservative status quo power intent on maintaining the post-1945 international system, which grants it the supreme privilege of P5 membership as well as providing a benign framework to advance its model of sovereign internationalism. This is a model of world order favoured by China, India and many other states, wary not so much of the hegemonic implications of the liberal international order but of the power hierarchy associated with the practices of dominion. This is the framework in which Russia (and China) can engage in globalisation but repudiate the universalist ambitions of the power system with which it is associated.

With the USA under Trump withdrawing from multilateral commitments to focus on bolstering its ascendancy in the world of states (the second level), Russia (and China) inevitably stood up in defence of multilateralism, in which they have such a major stake. This is far from a revisionist position, and instead neo-revisionism defends the present international system but critiques the historical claim of the liberal international order to be identical with the multilateral order itself (Sakwa 2017a ). Of course, the US-led liberal order has indelibly marked international society, but this does not entail a proprietary relationship to that society (Dunne and Reut-Smith ( 2017 ). Russia emerges as the defender of the international system as it is presently constituted, but at the same time advances an alternative (non-hierarchical) idea of how it should operate. On occasion this may entail revisionist acts, such as the annexation of Crimea, which from Moscow's perspective was a defensive reaction to a Western-supported putsch against the legitimate authorities in Kiev (Treisman 2016 ), but they are not part of a consistent revisionist strategy. Both at home and abroad Russia is a status quo power. Putin railed against the West's perceived revisionism in both aspects, but the main point of resistance is the element of dominion at the heart of the Atlantic power system. In both respects there is no evidence that Russia seeks to destroy the international system as presently constituted.

This structural interpretation, in which incompatible models of international politics contest, is overwhelmingly rejected by the partisans of what can be called post-Cold War monism. From this perspective, there is only one viable order, the one generated by the USA and its allies. There can be pluralism within that order, but not between orders. This monist perspective is challenged by some recent international relations literature (Acharya 2017 ; Flockhart 2016 ) and of course by states defending a more pluralist understanding of the international system (for example, English School approaches, Buzan 2014 ). In practical terms the monist imperative, when couched in liberal order terms but rather less so when applied in the language of Trumpian 'greatness', renders Russia the structural equivalent of the Soviet Union, or even the dreaded image of Tsarist Russia.

This leads to a fundamental category error. Russia is not a 'revolutionary power' in the sense defined by Henry Kissinger ( 2013 , p 2), a country that can never be reassured of its security and consequently seeks absolute security at the expense of others. Napoleonic France or Hitlerite Germany were determined to overthrow the international systems of their times to create one more suited to their needs.

Russia today is a conservative power, alarmed by the way that the international system that it had helped create at the end of the Second World War became radicalised after the end of the Cold War. Critics argue that this radicalised version of liberal hegemony was 'bound to fail', since its ambitions were so expansive as to classify as delusional, and which in the end provoked domestic and external resistance (Mearsheimer 2018 , 2019 ). Russia's neo-revisionism after 2012 sought to defend the autonomy of the multilateralism inaugurated by the victorious powers after 1945 and was ready to embrace the 'hegemonic' goals of the liberal order as presented in the Cold War years, but came to fear the revisionism implicit in the 'exceptionalist' ideology of the post-Cold War version of the liberal order, especially when it was accompanied by what was perceived as the aggressive expansion of the dominion of the unipolar Atlantic power system.

The Kremlin and subversion

In the context of the distinction between the hegemony of the liberal international order and the dominion of the Atlantic power system, both Russia and China reaffirm their commitment to the normative principles underlying the international system as it developed after the Second World War. These include the primacy of state sovereignty, territorial integrity, the significance of international law and the centrality of the United Nations (Wilson 2019 ). However, both are challenger powers in two respects: first, in questioning the assertive universalism that was radicalised at the end of the Cold War, including various practices of humanitarian intervention and democracy promotion, accompanied by regime change strategies; and second, dissatisfaction with the existing distribution of power in the international system, hence challenge American primacy and hegemonic practices. This combination of commitment to the international system but challenges to the pre-eminence of a particular order in that system is what renders the two states neo-revisionist rather than outright revisionist powers. To label them as such is a category error, with grave and dangerous policy consequences.

This error has now become enshrined doctrinally. The US National Security Strategy ( 2015 ) already warned that Washington 'will continue to impose significant costs on Russia through sanctions' and would 'deter Russian aggression'. Trump's proclaimed intention of improving relations with Russia provoked a storm of hostility in which Republican neo-conservatives and Democrat liberal internationalists united to stymie moves in that direction. This is why the US National Security Strategy ( 2017 , p. 25), at the end of Trump's first year in power, warned against the 'revisionist powers of China and Russia', ranked alongside the 'rogue powers of Iran and North Korea' and the 'transnational threat organisations, particularly jihadist groups'. The National Defense Strategy ( 2018 , p. 2) also identified Russia and China as revisionist states, seeking 'to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model -- gaining veto authority over other nation's economic, diplomatic and security decisions'. The emergence of challengers undoubtedly came as a shock for a power and normative system that had enjoyed largely unquestioned pre-eminence. Responses to that shock range from intensified neo-conservative militarism, democratic internationalist intensification of ideological struggle to delegitimise Russia's aspirations, as well as an increasingly vocal 'realist' call for a return to the diplomatic practices of pre-Cold War sovereign internationalism.

The first two responses make common cause against Russia's perceived revisionist challenge and have mobilised a network of think tanks and strategies against Russia's instruments of subversion. The far from exhaustive list presented here indicates the scope of Moscow's armoury of subversion, as well as the methodological and practical problems in assessing their scale, motivation and effect. The first is support for insurgent populist movements in the West. Russia rides the wave of populist and nationalist insurgency, but it does not mean either that Russia is the main instigator or beneficiary. The Russian leadership has long complained about the 'hermetic' character of the Atlantic power system and thus welcomes the breach in the impregnable walls of rectitude created from within by the various national populisms of left and right. In other words, Moscow perceives national populist insurgency as a struggle for ideational pluralism within the liberal international order, but above all as allies in the struggle for geostrategic pluralism against the monism of the Atlantic power system. Russia supports some of these movements, but not to the extent of jeopardising the existing structures of the international system. Once again, the tempered challenge of neo-revisionism predominates over the insurrectionary behaviour that would characterise a genuinely revisionist power.

The Alliance for Securing Democracy identified at least 60 instances of Russia funding political campaigns beyond its borders, although many of the cases are circumstantial (Foer 2020 ). In his notorious interview with the Financial Times on the eve of the Osaka G20 summit in June 2019, Putin asserted that 'the liberal idea' has 'outlived its purpose' as publics turned against immigration, open borders and multiculturalism, but he immediately brought in the structural context: '[Liberals] cannot simply dictate anything to anyone just like they have been attempting to do over recent decades' (Barber and Foy 2019 , p. 1). The Kremlin has gone out of its way to identify with right wing (and occasionally left wing) 'populists' who argue for a revision of the EU's relations with Russia, including a dismantling of the sanctions regime. Thus, in the 2017 French presidential election Putin welcomed the head of National Rally (formerly the Front National) Marine Le Pen to Moscow, a move that still attracts widespread condemnation in France. Earlier, a Russian bank had made a €9.4 million loan to her party. Even this needs to be seen in context. Putin's favoured candidate in the 2017 French presidential election was not Le Pen but the more conventional social conservative François Fillon. When the latter's campaign as the nominee of the traditional Gaullist party imploded, Moscow was left bereft of a mainstream candidate calling for a revision of the post-Cold War dominion strategy. As for the funding for Le Pen, the loan was called in prematurely, and the bank was closed down as part of the Central Bank of Russia's attempt to clean up the financial sector.

As for Italy, the leader of the Lega (formerly Lega Nord) party, Matteo Salvini, was one of the strongest advocates of resetting relations with Russia as he entered government following the March 2018 elections as part of the coalition with the Five Star Movement. The relationship was no more than a 'marriage of convenience', with Moscow only engaged to the extent that it could advance the goal of weakening the EU's sanctions regime (Makarychev and Terry 2020 ). In a subsequent scandal, one of Salvini's closest associates and the president of Lombardy Russia, Gianluca Savoini, was taped talking in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow about an illicit scheme to funnel funds through oil sales to support the League's electoral campaigns (Nardelli 2019 ).

On his visit to the Vatican in July 2019 Putin met with the national populists, or otherwise put, the geopolitical revisionists. This was his third meeting with Pope Francis, and Putin sounded more Catholic than the Pope: 'Sometimes I get the feeling that these liberal circles are beginning to use certain elements and problems of the Catholic Church as a tool for destroying the Church itself' (Horowitz 2019 ).

The substantive issue remains. National populists in the West repudiate much of the social liberalism that has now become mainstream, but most also reject the geopolitical orthodoxy that in their view has provoked the Second Cold War with Russia. On that basis there is clearly common cause between the populist insurgency in Europe and the Kremlin. For defenders of the liberal order, this commonality turns the populists into a Moscow-inspired fifth column. The old division between capitalist democracy and communism after the Cold War has given way to a new binary, between liberal democracy and authoritarianism. The fundamental divide shifts on to new ground, which can variously be seen as one between patriotism and cosmopolitanism, which is a variant of the tension between revived nationalist movements opposed to the erosion of state efficacy by neoliberalism within the framework of globalisation. Many share concerns about the influx of refugees and fear even greater flows of migrants in the future, which in their view will erode the civic and cultural bonds of Western societies. National populists challenge cosmopolitan liberalism (Eatwell and Goodwin 2018 ) and thus align with the cultural conservatism that characterises the neo-revisionist period in Russian foreign policy (Robinson 2017 ). In this new political spectrum, Russia emerges as an ally of the patriots and the anti-globalisers and is condemned for funding and variously supporting the anti-liberal insurgency in the West. Whole institutes (such as the Political Capital Institute in Hungary headed by Péter Krekó and the Henry Jackson Society in London) are devoted to exposing these links and the various alleged illicit cash flows and networks. There are certainly plenty of lurid tales and examples of European politicians who have been supported by factions in Russia without being transparent about these links.

However, the common anti-liberal platform with Moscow is only part of the story. The geopolitical factor is no less important, with both left and right populists rejecting elements of US dominion in the Atlantic security system, and question the wisdom of the inexorable drive to the East that inevitably alienates Russia. Here they make common cause with international relations realists as well as pragmatists like George Kennan, who in 1998 warned of the deleterious effects on European security of Moscow's inevitable response to NATO enlargement (Friedman 1998 ). Today these groups are in the vanguard in calling for an end to the sanctions regime, which in their view misses the point -- that Russia's actions in Ukraine and elsewhere after 2014 was a response to the provocative actions of the Atlantic power system in the first place. In other words, anti-liberalism is only one dimension of the putative alliance between national populism in Europe and Moscow. Geopolitical revisionism is perhaps the most important one, and thus national populist movements incur the wrath of the national security establishments. In the UK this led to the creation of the Integrity Initiative and its various European and American affiliates, sponsored by the shadowy so-called Institute of Statecraft, funded by the British state.

There is a third dimension -- in addition to geopolitical revisionism and anti-cosmopolitanism -- in the putative alignment of national populism with Moscow, and that is the question of pluralism. Post-Cold War liberalism entered a paradoxical turn that in the end forswore the fundamental principles on which it is based -- tolerance and pluralism (Horsfield 2017 ). In a situation where the liberal idea faced no serious domestic or geopolitical opposition, it became radicalised and thus eroded its own values. The US-led liberal international order, as suggested above, posed as synonymous with order itself. There could be no legitimate outside to its own expansive ambitions. The counterpart to universalism is monism, which eroded the coherence of liberalism in domestic and foreign policy (Sakwa 2017b , 2018b ). This helps explain why relations with the EU deteriorated so drastically after 2004.

The influx of East European countries accentuated monism by embracing the security guarantees offered by American dominion. Extreme partisans of this view have little time for the hegemonic normative agenda and view the EU as just part of the Atlantic alliance system, and not necessarily the most important one. They radically repudiate Gorbachevian ideas about a common European home or a greater Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok and condemn those who suggest rapprochement with Moscow as 'Trojan horses' (Orenstein and Keleman 2017 ), the name of a series of Atlantic Council reports exposing Russian contacts in the West. For them, security guarantees from Washington are the priority. Thus, pan-continental ideas gave way to an intensified Atlanticism, and dominion prevailed over hegemony. One manifestation of this was the Polish-inspired Eastern Partnership, which in the end became an instrument for the expansion of the EU's geopolitical influence in its neighbourhood, provoking the Ukraine crisis in 2014 (Mearsheimer 2014 ). The European Neighbourhood Policy thereafter became more differentiated and thus accepted the pluralism that it had earlier been in danger of repudiating.

In short, geopolitical revisionist forces are at play in Europe and the USA, and Russian neo-revisionism makes common cause with them to the degree that they offer more pluralist perspectives on international politics and challenge the monist dominion of the Atlantic power system, but the degree to which Moscow supports let alone sponsors this challenge to the post-Cold War order is questionable. This links to a second form of Russian subversion, namely collusion with anti-establishment figures. The most spectacular case of this is the charge that Moscow colluded with Trump to steal the 2016 presidential election.

After nearly two years of work, in March 2019 the Robert Mueller Special Counsel Report into Russiagate boldly asserted that 'The Russian government interfered in the 2016 election in sweeping and systematic fashion' (Mueller 2019 , Vol. 1, p. 1). However, it then rather lamely conceded that 'the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities' (Mueller 2019 , Vol. 1, pp. 5 and 173). Once again reinforcing the geopolitical concerns underlying charges of Russian subversion, the instigators of Russiagate became the heart of the 'resistance' to the president. Alongside credible concerns about his impact on American democratic institutions, they also opposed the rapprochement with Russia that Trump had proclaimed as one of his campaign goals.

In his major foreign policy speech delivered at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington on 27 April 2016, Trump argued that 'I believe an easing of tensions and improved relations with Russia -- from a position of strength -- is possible. Common sense says this cycle of hostility must end. Some say the Russians won't be reasonable. I intend to find out'. Trump promised that America would get 'out of the nation-building business and instead [focus] on creating stability in the world' (Transcript 2016 ). This represented a radical rethinking of foreign policy priorities, and although some of the themes had sounded before, together they challenged the foundations of the post-Cold War international order. They also suited Russia, since the expansive Atlantic system had increasingly become a matter of concern in the Kremlin. This geopolitical coincidence of interests intersected with domestic US political conflicts to create Russiagate, which stymied putative moves towards a new détente.

The third subversive strategy imputed to Russia is cyber-warfare in various forms. There are plenty of cases of Russian hacking, including the attack on the German parliament in 2015, which the German chancellor Angela Merkel condemned as 'outrageous', noting that it impeded her attempts 'to have a better relationship with Russia' (Bennhold 2020 ). She had been equally outraged when she discovered that her office had been bugged by the NSA. In France, 2 days before the second-round presidential vote on 7 May 2017 20,000 campaign emails from the Emmanuel Macron campaign were uploaded to Pastebin, a file-sharing site, and then posted on 4chan, an anonymous message board. The Macron team denounced Russia for a 'high level attack', but even the Atlantic Council reported that the relevant French security agency 'declared that no conclusive evidence pointed to Russian groups', and 'that the simplicity of the attacks pointed toward an actor with lower capabilities' (Galante and Ee 2018 , p. 12). The regulation of hostile cyber activity is crucial, especially when accurate attribution is so difficult and 'false flag' attacks so easy.

This applies to the key Russiagate charge that Russian military intelligence (the GRU) 'hacked' into the server of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Democratic Campaign Congressional Committee (DCCC) and released embarrassing materials to WikiLeaks, the web-based investigative site founded by Julian Assange in 2006. The publication of the emails was allegedly coordinated in some way with the Trump team. The material revealed that the DNC opposed the campaign of the independent left-leaning senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, to ensure Clinton's nomination. The hackers also gained access to the emails of Clinton's campaign director, John Podesta, following a successful spearphishing email sent on 19 March 2016. The 50,000 Podesta emails exposed Clinton's ties with Wall Street bankers, high speaking fees and apparent hypocrisy in condemning privilege while enjoying its benefits. The Russian hackers undoubtedly sought to mine political intelligence, but whether they intended specifically to help Trump is more questionable. The Mueller report detailed the specific GRU cyber-warfare units which hacked the Clinton campaign and the DNC and then released the emails through Russian-sponsored cut-outs, Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks, as well as WikiLeaks. These were 'designed and timed to interfere with the 2016 US presidential election and undermine the Clinton Campaign' (Mueller 2019 , Vol. 1, p. 36).

Strikingly, the FBI or Mueller never conducted forensic examinations of their own and instead relied on CrowdStrike, a private contractor hired by the Democrats to examine their servers. The material was then published, according to the report, through DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0, 'fictitious online personas' created by the GRU, and later through WikiLeaks. Mueller argues that Guccifer 2.0 was the source of the emails and that he was a persona managed by Russian operators (Mueller 2019 , Vol. 1, p. 47). Mueller alleges that Assange worked for or conspired with Russian agencies, but Assange states unequivocally that the Russian government was not the source of the emails, and (surprisingly), he was never questioned by Mueller. The Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) group argues that the DNC emails were physically downloaded and then transferred (by unknown persons) to WikiLeaks rather than being extruded via an electronic download (Binney and McGovern 2017 ). In Congressional testimony in December 2017 CrowdStrike president Shawn Henry ( 2017 ) admitted that he could not confirm that material had actually been exfiltrated from the DNC servers.

The fourth major subversive strategy is disinformation as well as media manipulation. The Internet Research Agency (IRA) based in St Petersburg deployed sock puppet accounts (trolls) and their automated versions (bots) to influence public debate by sharing accounts and voicing divisive opinions. These allegedly shaped voter preferences and depressed turnout among some key constituencies, above all people of colour, in the 2016 US election. The US Intelligence Community Assessment ( 2017 , p. 1) on 6 January 2017 accused Russia of trying to undermine American democracy and charged with 'high confidence' that Putin personally ordered 'an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election, the consistent goals of which were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency'. The ICA was issued in the name of 17 intelligence agencies, although later it became clear that it had been prepared by a 'hand-picked' group selected by Office of the DNI head, James Clapper (Full Transcript 2017 ). The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence ( 2020 , Vol. 4, p. 6) in April 2020 issued its fourth report in its Russia investigation arguing that 'the ICA presents a coherent and well-constructed basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election', a view that is at odds with most commentary on what is usually considered a slipshod and poorly sourced document (for a summary of critiques, see McCarthy 2019 , 2020; Gessen 2017 ).

The coronavirus pandemic in 2020 prompted a new wave of criticism of Russia's disinformation efforts. The Strategic Communications and Analysis division of the European External Action Service, colloquially known as EUvsDisinfo, identified a 'trilateral convergence of disinformation narratives' being promoted by China, Iran and Russia (Jozwiak 2020 ). The work of EUvsDisinfo work was examined by the Reframing Russia group at the University of Manchester (Hutchings and Tolz 2020 ). They examined the specific stories that had been identified as disinformation, and took a broader look at reportage of the pandemic on Russian television, in particular on Channel 1. They found that 'there was little sign here of the coordinated pro-Kremlin "conspiracy theory propaganda" flagged by EUvsDisinfo'. They went further to note that its misrepresentation of Russian Covid-19 coverage was 'troubling' in two respects. First, through 'omission', with sentences taken out of context and 'rephrased in the form of summaries and headlines which make them sound particularly outrageous'. The second way is through 'blatant distortion'. For example, EUvsDisinfo claimed that Sputnik Latvia stated that 'Covid-19 had been designed specifically to kill elderly people', whereas in fact the article had ridiculed such conspiracy theories and highlighted 'their idiocy'. Reframing Russia questioned EUvsDisinfo's methodology, assuming that 'random websites without any traceable links to Russian state structures' were analogous to state-funded media agencies, and that all were part of a coordinated Kremlin-run campaign. It even included 'conspirological, far-right websites which are actually critical of Putin'. They conclude that 'EUvsDisinfo's headlines and summaries border on disinformation'. Examination of the source material 'cited by EUvsDisinfo demonstrates that the Russian state is, in fact, not targeting Western countries with an organised campaign around the current public health crisis'. They ask how a situation was created in which 'an EU-funded body set up to fight disinformation ends up producing it'. Reframing Russia advances two hypotheses to explain how things could be got so wrong. The first is 'a profound misunderstanding of how the media in neo-authoritarian systems such as Russia's work', with not everything managed by the Kremlin. Second, 'The outsourcing of services by state institutions to third parties without a proper assessment of their qualifications to do the required work', In the case of EUvsDisinfo, research is outsourced to some 400 volunteers, who are 'operating in a post-Soviet space saturated by anti-Russian attitudes'.

It is in this context that a burgeoning literature examines possible responses. An article in Foreign Policy in July 2019 argued that 'Moscow now acts regularly against US interests with impunity'. The question, in the view of the author, was how to rebuild deterrence -- 'how to get Putin to start fearing the United States again'. The problem was defined in broad terms: 'how to convince Putin that he can't afford to keep trying to disrupt the global order and undermine the United States, the West, and democracy itself'. The charge list was a long one:

Over the last decade, Putin has provoked Washington again and again: by invading Georgia, annexing Crimea, attacking Ukraine, assassinating opponents at home and abroad, and interfering in elections throughout the West. In each case the underwhelming US response helped convince Putin that he could get away with more such behaviour.

To 'get Putin to start respecting the United States again' such measures as toughening sanctions, strengthening military alliances, and conducting more assertive diplomacy were recommended (Geltser 2019 ). Simpson and Fritsch ( 2019 ), former Wall Street Journal writers who founded Fusion GPS, the agency that in 2016 hired Christopher Steele to prepare the infamous dossier on Trump's links with Russia, insisted that Britain needed its own Mueller report to investigate Russia's role in the Brexit vote. They argued that such an enquiry was 'essential to halt Russia's attack on Britain's democracy' (Simpson and Fritsch 2019 ). The Kremlin Watch Program ( 2019 ) of the Prague-based European Values Center for Security Policy suggested 20 measures to counter 'hostile Russian interference'.

A Pentagon assessment in June 2019 argued that the USA was ill-equipped to counter 'the increasingly brazen political warfare Russia is waging to undermine democracies' (Bender 2019 ). A 150-page study prepared for the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff argued that the USA was still underestimating the scope of Russia's aggression, including the use of propaganda and disinformation to sway public opinion in Europe and across the globe. The study also warned against the growing alignment of Russia and China, which were opposed to America's system of international alliances and shared a proclivity for 'authoritarian stability'. The authors argued that domestic disarray impeded the USA's ability to respond (Department of Defense 2019 ). Natalia Arno, the head of the Free Russia Foundation, agreed with the report's finding and argued that 'Russia is attacking Western institutions in ways more shrewd and strategically discreet than many realize' (Bender 2019 ). The Pentagon report recommended that the State Department should take the lead in devising more aggressive 'influence operations', including sowing division between Russia and China. The study analysed what it called 'gray zone' activities, the attempt by Putin's regime to undermine democratic nations, in particular those on Russia's periphery, through 'hybrid' measures, falling short of direct military action. However, although warning of Moscow's alignment with Beijing, the report recommended cooperation with Russia in key areas such as strategic nuclear weapons. One of the authors, John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School, argued that Ronald Reagan's offer in the 1980s to share research on ballistic missile defence (BMD) should be revisited. The report suggested that while elites and the people broadly supported Putin's foreign policy and the striving for great power status, this was liable to weaken when faced by socio-economic problems.

Inevitably, forces seeking to break the liberal hegemony at home will make common cause with an external power that is also interested in breaking that expansive hegemony. Russia looks for friends wherever it can find them, and seeks a way out of the impasse of the post-Cold War security order. However, it is important to stress the limits to that alignment. If Russia were a genuinely revisionist power, then it would make sense to ally with any force destructive of the old order; but as argued above, Russia is a neo-revisionist power -- concerned with changing the monist practices of post-Cold War liberalism, but not with changing the international system in its entirety. This means that Russia is quite happy to work within existing structures as long as monism can be kept in check. The struggle against 'fake news' and 'Russian disinformation' threatens the pluralism at the heart of traditional liberalism. That is why the investigation into the alleged collusion between the Trump camp and Russia in the 2016 presidential election was more damaging than the putative original offence. When policy differences and divergences in value preferences are delegitimated and couched in binary Cold War terms, then the Atlantic power system is in danger of becoming dangerously hermetic. Immunity to new ideas, even if they come from a traditional adversary, weakens resistance to domestic degradation.

Russia: challenger or insurrectionary?

We are now in a position to assess whether Putin really is out to subvert the West, as suggested by the US intelligence community, much recent commentary and numerous strategic and doctrinal statements. The 'black legend' charge underlies the Russiagate allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 US and other elections. Such accusations are based on the view that a fundamental gulf has opened between the worldviews of the Russian leadership and the Western community. There are some grounds to argue that this is the case, although this needs to be placed into the broader framework of the evolution of Russian foreign policy since the end of the communist era and into the theoretical context of how Russia sees the international system, as described earlier. Above all, as the historic West moved into an era of expansive 'hegemonism', Russia (and China) were inevitably categorised as hostile nations. They had the motive and heft to fight back. Lavrov ( 2019 ) condemned the way that the 'rules-based order' substituted for international law, while the expanded institutions of dominion encircled both countries. Challengers to the radicalised liberal world order become subversive by definition.

Russia is a challenger power but it is not insurrectionary. In other words, it is far from the Soviet position of seeking to advance the ideology of revolutionary socialism, of which 'active measures' were one of the most specific manifestations. Further, Russia is not a revisionist power out to destroy the foundations of the international system as it has taken shape since 1945, but it is neo-revisionist, challenging the practices of the US-led Atlantic order within that system. As a conservative status quo Russia finds itself challenged by the radicalisation of the historic West that it had hoped to transform at the end of the Cold War. Concurrently, Russia's identity as a great power means that it resists the dominion element. It could live with the more modest liberal hegemony of the Cold War years (and in fact, one of the layers of Russia's foreign policy identity still wants to join it), but the combination of radicalised hegemonic universalism and the expansive logic of the power system rendered dominion unacceptable. Russia condemns the Atlantic system for its revolutionary radicalism, manifested in what is perceives to be Western revisionism. Russia thus finds itself divided from the historic West on a range of policy issues, but not ultimately by commitment to the post-1945 international system. This is why Moscow welcomed Trump's post-Atlanticist declarations, since he offered an alternative to the neo-conservative militarism and democratic interventionism of the post-Cold War era. Shackled by Russiagate, Trump was not able to deliver much and in fact the sanctions regime and other forms of neo-containment were intensified. In this context, six observations can help us examine the problem of greater Russia and subversion.

First, it is misleading to see direct continuity between the USSR and Russia. Russia no longer embodies an alternative ideology and is in fact a status quo power in both ideational and territorial terms. Russia is also comparatively far less powerful. If at its peak in the early 1970s Soviet GDP reached 58 per cent that of the USA, today Russia's at most is ten per cent of America's. Russia's defence spending in 2019 was the fourth largest in the world, but at $65 billion this is less than a tenth of the USA at $732 billion (38 per cent of total global military spending) and less than a quarter of China's $261 billion (SIPRI 2020 ). Cold War patterns have been restored, but the dynamics of this confrontation are very different even though some of the procedural rituals of mutual excoriation have returned (Monaghan 2015 ). However, Russia does claim to represent an alternative to the historical West in three ways: as the defender of conservative sovereign internationalism, where states interact on the basis of interests, although norms are far from repudiated; as a socially conservative civilisation state with societal dynamics of its own (Coker 2019 ; Tsygankov 2016 ); and as a European power with a stake in creating some pan-continental framework, while at the same time advocating the establishment of some sort of greater Eurasian unity.

All three open up lines of fracture that Russia seeks to exploit as a challenger but not as an insurrectionary power. In particular, at the civilisational level the identification of the West with the Atlantic system is challenged. This is a process that is advancing in any case within the Atlantic system, with the EU Global Strategy ( 2016 ) talking of 'strategic autonomy'. The election of Trump later that year prompted Merkel ( 2018 ), to argue that Europe could no longer rely on the USA to protect it. The French president Emmanuel Macron ( 2019 ) argued that the corollary of the growing Atlantic divide was rapprochement with Russia. Critics argue that Russia exploits this division and seeks to widen it, and in structural terms they are right. Any breach in the monist wall will be welcomed by any leader in Moscow. It is along this line that charges of Russian subversion lie.

Second, unlike the former Soviet Union where policy was coordinated by the Central Committee and Politburo, today Russia is far from monolithic. The layered phases mean that elements of at least four types of Russian engagement with the West coexist and operate at the same time, although with different intensity. As noted, these range from Atlanticist engagement, competitive coexistence, new realism to neo-revisionism. Commentary on contemporary Russia assumes that it behaves like a unitary actor, with Putin serving as the unique demi-urge with nothing better to do than ceaselessly monitor and manipulate global malign activities. This is indeed a manifestation of Western 'narcissism', and as Paul Robinson ( 2020 ) asks 'where does all this nonsense about Putin wanting to destroy democracy come from? It certainly doesn't come from anything he's ever said'. Russia is a vast and complex country with a vigorous public sphere with plenty of relatively autonomous interests and actors. Institutionalised political pluralism is constrained, but not all roads lead to the Kremlin (Sakwa 2020 ). For example, the national populist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the head of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, has hosted six conferences of far-right politicians since 1992, many attracted by the anti-Western language deployed by much of the Russian elite. They provide an alternative narrative that often coincides with the Kremlin's positions, but this does mean that there is an unbreakable alliance between the two (Moldovanov 2019 ). As the Reframing Russia team argue, not every outlandish comment in Russia's public sphere can be attributed to the Kremlin's propaganda and disinformation department. Equally, we may add, not every oligarch is 'Putin's crony', bent on advancing the Kremlin's malign agenda. This attribution and alignment fallacy is why, among other reasons, sanctions against alleged regime-associated individuals will not achieve the desired effect of changing Russian policy, since they are based on a flawed understanding of how Russia works, as well as the category error noted above about the structural sources of Russian foreign policy.

Third, Russian behaviour is located in the matrix of the changing dynamics of the Atlantic power system, the liberal international order and global power shifts (Karaganov (ed.) 2020 ). Russia is certainly alienated from a particular system that claims to be universal, as well as concerned about the advance of a power system to its borders. The liberal international order may well have been 'doomed to fail' because the key policies on which it is based are deeply flawed (Mearsheimer 2019 ). Spreading liberal democracy around the globe was benign in intent but disastrous in consequence (Walt 2019 ). The illusions generated by exaggerated claims of exceptionalism meant that the US 'squandered' Cold War victory (Bacevich 2020 ). Russia's reaction is just one to an order whose response to the end of the Cold War was to exaggerate the dominion factor and thus undermined its normative hegemony.

Fourth, Russia has returned as a power critical not only of the Atlantic hegemony but also of the values on which it is based. At the St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) in June 2019 Putin talked of the failure of the 'Euro-Atlantic' economic model and argued that 'the existing model of economic relations is still in crisis and this crisis is of a comprehensive nature' (Putin 2019b ). Here and on other occasions he condemned the Atlantic powers' use of sanctions as a form of economic warfare. On the eve of SPIEF on 6 June, Putin and China's leader, Xi Jinping, announced the upgrade of their relationship to a 'Comprehensive Partnership of Coordination for a New Era', accompanied by a joint statement on global strategic stability (Xinhua 2019 ). There is a tension between the expansive liberal hegemony and countries and social movements who question the identification of liberalism with order itself. Liberalism ultimately generates antinomies, which are not mere correctible aberrations but systemic flaws of the liberal paradigm itself. These above all concern the question of taming the power of capital and dealing with inequality and citizen marginalisation. Moscow does not identify itself with these radical critiques, and its criticisms ultimately have a superficial and reversible character. Russia does not stand outside the contradictions of contemporary liberalism, having entered its own liberal era at the end of the Cold War in 1989. That layer in its identity is far from nugatory. Russia's experience of liberalism is distinctive, characterising the 1990s as a time of liberal excess, yet the Putin system is permeated with neoliberal ideas and even liberal aspirations. His critics in Russia from the left and right condemn the antinomies of the system, whereas Putin simply points out the power and cultural contradictions of post-Cold War liberalism.

Fifth, the struggle for geopolitical pluralism after the neo-revisionist turn in 2012 is accompanied by a programme of cultural conservatism, opening the door to alignment with Europe's national populists. In condemning what he took to be the rampant social liberalism, accompanied by Merkel's 'welcome culture' in 2015 vis-ŕ-vis the influx of refugees, Putin ( 2019a ) sought to bolster support among social conservatives in Europe. As political and social liberals united against Putinite Russia, it appeared that the impasse could only be broken by bolstering conservative (if not outright reactionary) movements in Europe. A European change of heart would allow a rapprochement without Russia having to change its domestic or foreign policies: 'It would be 1989 in reverse. This time it would not be Russia but Europe to go through a traumatic conversion to foreign ideas' (Maçăes 2019 ). Russia would be rescued from isolation and policy-makers could once again turn to the creation of a 'greater Europe', reducing Russia's dependence on China and strengthening its position vis-ŕ-vis the USA. This is the foundational argument about Russia being out to subvert the West, and there is some truth in it -- but not in the linear way it is usually interpreted. The alignment is situational and the geopolitics takes precedence over ideological alignment.

Sixth, as the Russiagate affair demonstrates, Russia acts as the scapegoat for problems generated by domestic contradictions. In that case, Russian 'meddling' helped explain how the most improbable of candidates was able to win against an experienced politician, Hillary Clinton, with a long record of public service, to pull off 'the greatest political upset in American history' (Green 2017 , p. 236). This impeded the Democratic Party from coming to terms with its own shortcomings, and the country from addressing its ills. This perhaps is the greatest subversive effect achieved by Russia. As far as we know, this was not achieved deliberately, although there is the view that Russia fed information 'to have the West believe what the Kremlin wants the West to believe' (McCarthy 2019 , p. 166). Even more cunningly, perhaps they were feeding misinformation to Steele to provoke a counter-intelligence investigation that would incapacitate the Trump presidency and set the Democrats off on a wild goose chase that prevented them from reforming and reconnecting with the real concerns of the American people. If the latter is the case, then the operation was a brilliant success. The struggle against presumed Russian 'active measures' does more damage to Western political institutions and the legitimacy of Western normative hegemony than the putative subversive activity itself. The security services and spy agencies of course continue to battle it out behind the scenes, but McCarthyism is as destructive today as it was in the 1950s.

Conclusion

Russia has returned as an international conservative power, but it is not a revisionist one, and even less is it out to subvert the West. Russia certainly looks for allies where it can find them, especially if they advocate the lifting of sanctions. When Macron ( 2019 ) argued that it was time to bring Russia out of the cold, arguing that 'We cannot rebuild Europe without rebuilding a connection with Russia', his comments were welcomed in Moscow, although tempered by a justifiable scepticism.

The Putin elite had earlier welcomed Trump's election, but in practice relations deteriorated further. The foreign policy establishment is deeply sceptical that the EU will be able to act with 'strategic autonomy'. Above all, Russo-Western relations have entered into a statecraft 'security dilemma':

Currently, we are again faced with a situation in which mutual intentions are assessed by Washington and Moscow as subversive, while each side considers the statecraft employed by the other side as effective enough to achieve its malign goals. At the same time, each side is more sceptical about its own statecraft and appears (or pretends) to be scrambling to catch up (Troitskiy 2019 ).

In the nineteenth century, Russia became the 'gendarme' of Europe, and while Putin repudiates the country assuming such a role again, Russia has undoubtedly returned as an international conservative power. Maintenance of a specifically historically determined definition of the status quo is the essence of its neo-revisionism: a defence of traditional ideas of state sovereignty and of an internationalism structured by commitment to the structures of the international system as it took shape after 1945. Russia resents its perceived exclusion from the institutions of Atlantic dominion (above all NATO); but is not out to destroy the international system in which this competition is waged. Thus, Anton Shekhovtsov ( 2017 ) is mistaken to argue that Russia's links to right-wing national populist movements are rooted in philosophical anti-Westernism and an instinct to subvert the liberal democratic consensus in the West. In fact, the alignment is situational and contingent on the impasse in Russo-Western relations and thus is susceptible to modification if the situation changes. Moscow's readiness to embrace Trump in 2016 when he repeatedly argued that it made sense to 'get on' with Russia indicates that Western overtures for improved relations would find the Kremlin ready to reciprocate. In 2017 the Kremlin sent Washington various ideas on how to move out of the impasse in US-Russian relations, but given the 'Russiagate' allegations, the White House was in no position to respond. The same applies when in 2019 Russia was invited to resume full voting rights in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), which the Kremlin embraced even though powerful domestic neo-traditionalist and Eurasianist voices counselled against.

Russia is not out to subvert the West but seeks to change it. For the defenders of monist enlargement, this is just as bad. Resistance at home and abroad to the post-Cold War Western order has exposed unexpected fragilities and insecurities, hence the turn to the language of 'resilience' (for example, EU Global Strategy 2016 ). Given its strategy of resistance, Russia in turn becomes the object against which resilience is tested, becoming one of Federica Mogherini's 'five principles' ( 2016 ), creating yet another barrier to normal diplomatic relations. In fact, the structural model outlined in this paper suggests that Russia does not seek to create a greater Russia through subversion let alone physical enlargement, although all leaders since the end of the Cold have tried to make the country a great power. This raises the fundamental and still unresolved question: is Russia still interested in joining a transformed West? Or has it realised that the only way to retain great power status and sovereign decision-making is to remain outside the West? Joining the transformed West meant the attempt to create a 'greater Europe', what Gorbachev had earlier termed the common European home. For defenders of the existing West, this is perceived as threatening its existing values, norms and freedoms, and perhaps more importantly, also the existing hierarchy of international power; but for Russia, it is a way out of the perceived geopolitical impasse and offers a common developmental strategy.

The West is faced by a choice 'between containment and engagement on mutually agreed terms' (Trenin 2016 , p. 110). Incompatible understanding of the political character of the historical epoch provokes an intense barrage of propaganda from all sides, with mutual allegations of political subversion and interference. The interaction of hegemony and dominion on the one side and multiple layers of identity on the other provides fertile ground for incomprehension and the attribution of sinister motives, provoking the statecraft 'security dilemma' identified above. Russia maintains a neo-revisionist critique, but this does not mean repudiating improved relations with a post-dominion West. The country increasingly pivoted to the East and strengthened its alignment with China, but this does not mean that Russia seeks an irrevocable break with the West (Monaghan 2019 ). This is why it seeks improved relations with the EU and the USA if a satisfactory formula for restored contact can be found. Moscow's support for insurgent populist movements in Europe and disruptive forces in America will always be tempered by larger strategic concerns and are certainly not unequivocal. The greater Russia envisaged by the Kremlin elite is one whose sovereignty is defended and whose great power status is recognised, but it is not one that seeks more territory or to subvert the West and sow discord. The West can be trusted to do that without Russia's help. The West's response to Russia's neo-revisionism has been neo-containment and counter-subversion strategies, but if the analysis proposed in this article has any validity, then new forms of engagement may be a more productive course. References

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Download references Author information Affiliations

  1. School of Politics and International Relations, Rutherford College, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NX, UK

    Richard Sakwa

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Richard Sakwa . Ethics declarations Conflict of interest

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https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41311-020-00258-0

[Jul 24, 2020] US officials force entry into shuttered Chinese consulate in Houston soon after evicted staff left -- RT USA News

Jul 24, 2020 | www.rt.com

NoisyBaboon dontdenythe 7 minutes ago Both China and Russia can even bulldoze the US embassies in their countries. But they will not do this because doing so is actually NONSENSICAL. Let the foools enjoy themselves.

[Jul 24, 2020] Intelligence agencies, in Israel and elsewhere, are organized criminal syndicates

Jul 24, 2020 | twitter.com

. Jul 22 Funny that people hating on me for covering crimes of Israeli intelligence ignore the fact that Mossad heads openly admit it's a criminal organization. Intelligence agencies, in Israel and elsewhere, are organized criminal syndicates. Ex-spy chief said 'fun part' about Mossad is that it's a crime organization. Netanyahu is not amused *** haaretz.com

[Jul 24, 2020] Nobel peace price hawk and other stories

Jul 24, 2020 | www.rt.com

Roger Thornhill 2 hours ago If I recall correctly, Obama gave the Russians all of 48 hours to leave their consulate in San Francisco, which had been occupied since the 19th Century. This was around Christmas time in 2016. So I don't find this particularly surprising. Two days to have the diplomats, staff, and families completely out of the country.

[Jul 23, 2020] Beyond Trump vs. Trump- We Have a Nation to Safeguard

Jul 23, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

The seldom-seen niece's shoddy attempt at psychoanalysis may, despite its flaws, point to worthwhile considerations. (By Gino Santa Maria/Shutterstock)

JULY 23, 2020

|

12:01 AM

JAMES PINKERTON

President Trump is obviously not happy about about the highly unflattering portrait of him painted by his niece, Mary Trump, in her best-selling book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man.
On July 17, reacting to her description of him as "narcissistic," "dysfunctional," and "perverted," the president jabbed back in a tweet , describing her as "a seldom seen niece who knows little about me, says untruthful things about my wonderful parents (who couldn't stand her!) and me."

Of course, the Main Stream Media loves the new book; indeed, pressies are always careful to insert that Mary Trump is a "clinical psychologist," thereby seeking to assign greater weight to her judgment on the famous uncle; she's not just an estranged family member, she's a trained clinician . Thus when Mary declares that Donald's "pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he'll never sit for" -- the MSM treats her words as the voice of an oracular psycho-authority.

https://lockerdome.com/lad/13045197114175078?pubid=ld-dfp-ad-13045197114175078-0&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theamericanconservative.com&rid=www.theamericanconservative.com&width=838

Indeed, speaking of long-distance diagnosis, it might be small comfort to the 45th president to know that plenty of other American presidents have been similarly psychoanalyzed. In fact, no less than the father of psychoanalysis himself, Sigmund Freud, co-authored an unsparing assessment of our 28th president, Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study .

Moreover, we've learned, over the last century or so, that the mind of any individual, when perceived though the Freudian prism, appears to be nothing more than a heaving mass of Greek-named complexes and phobias. And yet through it all, most people manage to get off the couch and do things, including becoming politicians -- a very few even becoming president of the United States. So how do they manage that? And what does that mean for the rest of us?

Some enduring answers to such questions can be found in Harold Lasswell's 1930 book, Psychopathology and Politics. Lasswell is obscure now, but in his day, he was a professor at Yale Law School as well as president of the American Political Science Association. Moreover, he was active when Freud was at the peak of his influence; Psychopathology and Politics is much shaped along the contours of the Viennese Herr Doktor 's thought.

Evidently realizing that the word "psychopathology" in the title would send a strong signal, Lasswell opened his book, a bit defensively, with the declaration, "The purpose of this venture is not to prove that politicians are 'insane.'" In fact, Lasswell, being mostly a political scientist, was careful to stipulate that "the specifically pathological is of secondary importance to the central problem of exhibiting the developmental profile of different types of public characters." In other words, for all his fascination with individual minds, in the end, the author was actually most interested in collective political outcomes.

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https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.398.1_en.html#goog_30920151 00:00 / 00:59 00:00 Next Video × Next Video J.d. Vance Remarks On A New Direction For Pro-worker, Pro-family Conservatism, Tac Gala, 5-2019 Cancel Autoplay is paused

For purposes of analysis, Lasswell categorized three types of political personality: the "agitator," the "administrator," and the "theorist." To illustrate this triptych, Lasswell named a few names; Herbert Hoover, for instance, was labeled an administrator, while Old Testament prophets were labeled as agitators, and Karl Marx labeled as a theorist. Interestingly, Vladimir Lenin was listed as all three types.

Still, for the most part, Lasswell chose to focus, in the Freudian clinical style, on anonymized exemplars of each political personality type, detailing the mental circuities of "Mr. A," as well as "B," "C," and so on.

From there, Lasswell considers how each type meshes with politics. As he puts it, the state is a "manifold," into which political figures enter, and through which political events "are to be understood."

He writes, "political movements derive their vitality from the displacement of private affects upon public objects." Using dark Freudian terminology, Lasswell asserts that "Political crises are complicated by the concurrent reactivation of specific primitive impulses." In that same bleak spirit, he also avers, "Politics is the process by which the irrational bases of society are brought out into the open."

Yet while phrases such as "primitive impulses" and "irrational bases" are the stuff of psychiatry, Lasswell also wrote in political science-y language, as when he laid out his equation for political action: p } d } r = P . Here, p stands for "private motives," } stands for "transformed into," d equals "displacement on to public objects," r stands for " rationalization in terms of public interest," and P "signifies the political man."

In Lasswell's formula, individuals bring their personality with them into the political arena, and then, if they wish to make a mark in politics, they must reconcile, somehow, their own personalities with the political environment. As Lasswell explains, "The distinctive mark of the homo politicus is the rationalization of the displacement in terms of public interests."

We might note that in no sense was Lasswell saying that homo politicus was necessarily good-hearted, or that people were always wise about their own well-being; as he put it, oftentimes, "people are poor judges of their own interests." And so the "solution" in politics, he continued, is "not the 'rationally best' one," but rather, "the emotionally satisfactory one."

Still, Lasswell did not believe in autocracy or dictatorship; he approvingly quoted another political scientist who argued, "Society is not safe . . . when it is forced to follow the dictations of one individual."

Yet because Lasswell shared Freud's gloomy view of human nature, he argued for a sort of guided system, dubbing it "preventive politics." As he put it, "The politics of prevention draws attention squarely to the central problem of reducing the level of strain and maladaptation in society." Thus Lasswell endorsed the application of therapeutic psychology to the population as a whole -- putting the country, as it were, on the therapist's couch.

If that doesn't sound like a plausible solution, we might note that we often do just that to our country's leaders -- and the latest instance is what Mary Trump has done to her uncle.

Yet even those who mistrust a long-distance diagnosis -- and who might see Mary Trump's book as opportunistically timed to the election -- might nonetheless reflect on Lasswell's political equation, p } d } r = P.

After all, individuals do enter into the political system, and they do what they do -- and so it's best if we understand them as well as we can. Indeed, each new entry can be seen as a case study, providing us with an opportunity to learn: What went right? Or, what went wrong? And who makes a good leader?

Such cumulative study gives us all a chance to practice a Lasswellian "politics of prevention." That is, while we don't seem to be able to cure the mentally ill, we can nevertheless take sterner measures to keep the pathological out of political office, especially high political office.

In particular, we might take the view that the electoral political system should serve as a kind of filter, separating out the gold from the dross. If, as Max Weber put it, politics is "the slow boring of hard boards," then maybe we should favor politicians who actually know how to drill a hole, and who know to drill it in the right place -- and not smash the board.

Indeed, if we think of prosaic electoral politics as a filtering process, we might gain more respect for those who prove themselves in a minor office before seeking a major office -- and major responsibility. To put the matter bluntly, if a wannabe pol is maladaptive, let's know early on, when the stakes are low.

This wisdom was well expressed by Sam Rayburn, the Texas politician who served in the U.S. House of Representatives for 48 years, as well as in the Texas state house for six years before that -- and, remarkably, rose to be speaker in both chambers, in Austin as well as in Washington, D.C. As recorded in David Halberstam's classic book about the origins of America's fiasco in the Vietnam War, The Best and the Brightest , in 1961, then-Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson gushed to his old pal Rayburn about how smart and impressive were the men of John F. Kennedy's administration, bandying about brilliant ideas for saving the world. To which Rayburn responded to LBJ, "You may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I'd feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once."

In other words, it would be better if the soaring kites of their intellects were tethered to mundane human experience and political reality -- including the reality of running for office. As we know, absent such tethering, those best and brightest led us into an Asian quagmire, drowning even the political career of LBJ.

So now, in 2020, in these extraordinarily trying times, the voters are about to run their political filter yet again. Indeed, if the presidential polls are to be believed, this filtration system is favoring Joe Biden, who has, after all, undergone the "extreme vetting" of a half-century in elective politics.

So is this an instance in which Lasswell's idea of "preventive politics" is being applied? We can never know from the Yale professor himself, of course, since he long ago went to that great ivory tower in the sky. Yet still, one senses that the author of Psychopathology and Politics would be pleased.

Because, after all, the fate of the nation is more important than the strange case of Trump vs. Trump. ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James P. Pinkerton is a longtime contributing editor at The American Conservative , columnist, and author. He served as longtime regular columnist for Newsday. He has also written for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, National Review, The New Republic, Foreign Affairs, Fortune, and The Jerusalem Post. He is the author of What Comes Next: The End of Big Government--and the New Paradigm Ahead (1995) . He worked in the White House domestic policy offices of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and in the 1980, 1984, 1988 and 1992 presidential campaigns.

[Jul 23, 2020] Demorats defeat amedment ot cut Defence by 10%

Highly recommended!
Jul 23, 2020 | news.antiwar.com

Amendment to make across-the-board reductions overwhelmingly defeated by members of both parties

Eric Garris Posted on July 21, 2020 Categories News

By a vote of 324-93 , the House of Representatives soundly defeated an amendment to reduce Pentagon authorized spending levels by 10%. The amendment does not specify what to cut, only that Congress make across-the-board reductions. The amendment to the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) was offered by Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI). No Republicans voted for the amendment. Libertarian Justin Amash supported the amendment.

Earlier, the House defeated an amendment to stop the Pentagon's submission of an unfunded priorities list. Each year, after the Pentagon's budget request is submitted to Congress, the military services send a separate "wish list," termed "unfunded priorities." This list includes requests for programs that the military would like Congress to fund, in case they decide to add more money to the Pentagon's proposed budget.

This article was written while observing the voting on CSPAN. The House Clerk has not yet posted the roll-call vote. Additional information will be added to the article when available.

[Jul 23, 2020] Garbage in, Garbage out, again

Neocon presstitutes like Appelbaum (actually a well paid MIC lobbyist in disguise) and MI6 connected criminals like like Browder are the feature of the US political landscape, not a bug. I actually did laugh at Browder's piece on the BBC though, were a money launderer and tax evader who left his book keeper to die in a Russian prison telling us we shouldn't trust the Russians.
US economic problems are greatly enhanced by the tremendous amount of defense expenditures (outspending the combined next seven leading countries in arms expenditures) and tax payer's money being wasted on paranoid obsessions likes what's mentioned here: http://markcrispinmiller.com/2020/07/a-visit-from-the-fbi/
Jul 23, 2020 | irrussianality.wordpress.com
A.I.S. JULY 21, 2020 AT 11:33 AM

How can anyone think that Bowder is an authority of anything other then high level Nigerian crown prince scams? Enrique JULY 22, 2020 AT 9:55 PM

Russia's goal? ..to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids, of course. Didn't you read the report? Mikhail JULY 22, 2020 AT 8:18 AM

Talk about "Garbage In-Garbage Out", the idiocy behind that is how she/he/it punked out of live discussion:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/worldhaveyoursay/2007/08/a_new_cold_war.html

Much easier to lob pot shots from a distance where there's little, if any challenge. Enrique JULY 22, 2020 AT 9:31 PM

I think she finally found a husband and stopped ragging on western expats drooling over slavic women like schoolboys. 😉


Enrique JULY 22, 2020 AT 9:11 PM

The article mentions Steele as a discredited participant but what about Applebaum, or are we to forget how her Polish husband was demoted by his own government for concocting a story about Putin offering to split Ukraine with Poland, at an alleged meeting that he was shown to have never attended. Poland no doubt sanctioned him for fabricating such an easily disproved event, certainly not out of any such notion as a search for truth.

That said, not having invited even a token moderate voice to this august 'panel of experts' speaks volumes about either the ignorance, the incompetence, the perfidy or just plain 'We don't really care what you think. We've done our duty' arrogance of the report's authors.

[Jul 21, 2020] Russian influence in the UK is the 'new normal,' widely anticipated report claims

This is not simply projection on the part of UK MI5/MI6 duet, this is a real war on reality. UK false flag operation with Skripla poisoning (which probably was designed to hide possible role of Skripal in creating Steele dossier) now will forever be textbook example of evilness MI5/MI6 honchos.
If we think that GRU is the past was able to fight Abwehr to standstill, they really would now be worried about the blowback from Skripal mess.
Jul 21, 2020 | www.msn.com

A highly-anticipated report by the U.K. Parliament into Russia n interference in the country was released on Tuesday, claiming that Russian influence in the U.K. is the "new normal."

The Russia Report, published after months of delay, is the culmination of two years of fact finding by the U.K. Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee (ICS), providing insights on the Salisbury Novichok poisonings , Russian financial influence and social media disinformation. The report said the U.K. was a "top target" for Russian interference.

The publication of the report comes a week after security services in the U.S., U.K. and Canada said that Russian hackers had been attempting to hack into global coronavirus vaccine research . The Kremlin has denied the accusations.

However, the report will likely disappoint observers who expected the ICS to detail how far Russia interfered in the bitterly contested Brexit Referendum of 2016 . Prime Minister Boris Johnson's was accused of withholding the publication of the report until after the election of December 2019, a claim they denied.

[Jul 21, 2020] This Skripal thing smelled to high heaven from day 1. My opinion is that Sergei Skripal was involved (to what degree is open to speculation) with the Steele dossier.

Highly recommended!
Apr 20, 2019 | theduran.com
Marcus April 20, 2019

There is something rotten in the state .. of England.

This Skripal thing smelled to high heaven from day 1. My opinion is that Sergei Skripal was involved (to what degree is open to speculation) with the Steele dossier. He was getting homesick (perhaps his mother getting older is part of this) for Russia and he thought that to get back to Russia he needed something big to get back in Putin's good graces. He would have needed something really big because Putin really has no use for traitors. Skripal put out some feelers (perhaps through his daughter though that may be dicey). The two couriers were sent to seal or move the deal forward. The Brits (and perhaps the CIA) found out about this and decided to make an example of Sergei. Perhaps because they found out about this late, the deep state/intelligence people had to move very quickly. The deep state story was was extremely shaky (to put it mildly) as a result. Or they were just incompetent and full of hubris.

Then they were stuck with the story and bullshit coverup was layered on bullshit coverup. 7 Reply FlorianGeyer Reply to Marcus April 20, 2019

@ Marcus.

To hope to get away with lies, one must have perfect memory and a superior intellect that can create a lie with some semblance of reality in real life, as opposed to the digital 'reality' in a Video game. And a rather corny video game at that.

MI5/6 failed on all parts of Lie creation 2 Reply Mistaron April 21, 2019

If Trump was so furious about being conned by Haspel, how come he then went on to promote her to becoming the head of the CIA? It's quite perplexing.

[Jul 20, 2020] Gavin "Stupid Boy" Williamson was Minister of Defence when he said that Russia should "go away and shut up"

The game now turned against Johnson and Co and it is British government who now probably should follow his immortal advice "go away and shut up".
Jul 20, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MOSCOWEXILE July 19, 2020 at 10:37 am

Not foreign minister: Gavin "Stupid Boy" Williamson was Minister of Defence when he said that Russia should "go away and shut up".

[Jul 20, 2020] The text of the OPCW document is "enhanced" in FT reports

Jul 20, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

CORTES July 19, 2020 at 1:37 pm

To paraphrase the famous line from "Jaws":

"You're gonna need a bigger rewrite" as another wheel falls off the Skripals Saga Wagon:

http://johnhelmer.net/financial-times-editor-khalaf-fakes-opcw-reports-on-skripal-sturgess-cases-hides-original-documents/

The text of the OPCW document is "enhanced" in FT reports. "Sexed up" was the term used about the UN Weapons Inspectors' report on Iraq's WMD programme way back when.

A Dr. David Kelly was involved. I wonder what became of him?

MOSCOWEXILE July 19, 2020 at 7:47 pm

That term "sexed up" really made me cringe when it suddenly came in vogue amongst UK commenters and "journalists" .

I was already in exile when the the shit hit the fan in the UK as regards criminal Blair's warmongering and was at a loss to understand what "sexed up" meant in the British newspaper articles that I read at the time -- no Internet then, so once a week I used to buy a copy of the "Sunday Times" (Woden forgive me!) in the foyer of of the five-star Hotel National, Moscow. Used to cost me an arm and a leg an' all! Robbing bastards!

[Jul 20, 2020] The above link exhaustively details how the fraud was perpetrated and how the White Helmets were funded. The most disturbing facts were the murder of captive Syrian civilians including children for use as props for Western media.

Jul 20, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

A former British officer and gentleman, no less!

PATIENT OBSERVER July 19, 2020 at 11:29 am

http://syriapropagandamedia.org/james-le-mesurier-a-reconstruction-of-his-business-activities-and-covert-role

The above link exhaustively details how the fraud was perpetrated and how the White Helmets were funded. The most disturbing facts were the murder of captive Syrian civilians including children for use as props for Western media. There is little doubt in my mind that these murders were viewed as standard business practice with the only concern being related to complication from being caught. Of course, being "caught" was a minor inconvenience that the MSM could easily manage into oblivion.

Mr. Le Mesurier may have been killed as the White Helmets no longer had value and dead men rarely talk:

https://www.dailysabah.com/investigations/2019/12/10/british-spy-le-mesurier-was-likely-running-away-from-someone-before-his-death

His wife was not very helpful in the investigation having changed her story several times.

Winberg said she looked for her husband inside the house and saw his lifeless body when she looked out of the window. Police are investigating now how she was able to wake up about half an hour after she took a sleeping pill and why she stacked a large amount of money inside the house into bags immediately after Le Mesurier's body was found.
Among questions that are needed to be addressed in the case is why Le Mesurier, who intended to sleep, did not change his clothes, did not even loosen his belt or remove his watch. It is also not known why he did not choose a definitive suicidal action to kill himself, instead of jumping from a relatively low height and why he chose to walk along the roof, passing around the air conditioning devices on the roof, instead of jumping to the street directly from the section of the roof closer to his window.

Mr. Le Mesurier was previously active in Kosovo.

[Jul 20, 2020] One of the few things that the USA and UK has in common: there is no cost to their lying.

Jul 20, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

ET AL July 20, 2020 at 1:56 am

Not much different from the British public (media). UKgov was in trouble last week for failing to have their own man as head of the toothless rubberstamping parliamentary intelligence and security committee, shortly afterwards UKGov amped up 'Russia wot stole our vaccine' and the whole UK media ran with it, save a couple of articles qustioning the 'timing'.

The thinking the US & UK have in common is that there is no cost to their lying. They're only thinking of the short term obviously, but they depend on the other to turn the cheek ignore it as 'domstic politiking.' Last saturday I saw the al-Beeb s'allah preview of RusAmb interview to be broadcast on Sunday. The anchor had an 'expert' to help her. Cue cherry brief picked quotes from the interview to make the Ambassador look weak and the 'expert' saying 'that's what you would expect them to say.'

Today I see that Scotland is now the target, i.e. that Russia 'interfered' with the independence referendum. It's not even anything goes August yet. This whole year has been August reporting.

[Jul 20, 2020] That wanker Cecil has a lot to answer for!

Jul 20, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MOSCOWEXILE July 19, 2020 at 7:35 pm

I just cannot see why the US public -- better said, some of the US public. -- fall for that torrent of verbal diarrhoea that Maddow regularly gushes forth on TV about all things Russian.

The shite that she so regularly spews out is patently untrue and clearly propagandistic. Time and time again, the content of "The Rachel Maddow Show" (Why "show" FFS? Is it because that is what it is -- a distraction, an entertainment vehicle for the uncritical masses?) has repeatedly been shown to be untrue, but never an apology from Maddow.

Oh, what a surprise! Her paternal grandfather's family name was Medvedev, a Four-by-Two who fled the Evil (Romanov) Empire and set up shop in the "Land of the Free".

Something that has often puzzled me is this: If the Russian Empire was such a "Prison of Nations", all crushed by the autocratic state, how come Western Europe and the USA is swarming with the descendants of the Tsar's former Jewish subjects?

To be fair to Maddow -- though I see no reason why I should be, for she is a lying cnut -- her family background is not really kosher: her mother hails from Newfoundland and is of English/Irish descent, and one of her grandmother's forebears were from the Netherlands. Furthermore, Maddow says that she had a conservative Catholic upbringing. I suppose that's why she's now a liberal lesbian. And guess what: she's a Rhodes Scholar with an Oxford PhD.

That wanker Cecil has a lot to answer for!

[Jul 20, 2020] The Real 'Russian Playbook' Is Written in English -- Strategic Culture

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... There was a deeply held assumption that, when the countries of Central and Eastern Europe joined NATO and the European Union in 2004, these countries would continue their positive democratic and economic transformation. Yet more than a decade later, the region has experienced a steady decline in democratic standards and governance practices at the same time that Russia's economic engagement with the region expanded significantly. ..."
"... Are these developments coincidental, or has the Kremlin sought deliberately to erode the region's democratic institutions through its influence to 'break the internal coherence of the enemy system'? ..."
"... a false flag operation" involving "an alliance of the far right organizations, specifically the Right Sector and Svoboda, and oligarchic parties, such as Fatherland". There is little in Sharp's book to suggest that non-violent resistance would have had much effect on a really brutal and determined government. He also has the naïve habit of using "democrat" and "dictator" as if these words were as precisely defined as coconuts and codfish. But any "dictatorship" – for example Stalin's is a very complex affair with many shades of opinion in it. So, in terms of what he was apparently trying to do, one can see it only succeeding against rather mild "dictators" presiding over extremely unpopular polities. With a great deal of outside effort and resources. ..."
"... His "playbook" is useful to outside powers that want to overthrow governments they don't like. Especially those run by "dictators" not brutal enough to shoot the protesters down. ..."
Jul 17, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

I hadn't given The Russian Playbook much attention until Susan Rice, Obama's quondam security advisor, opined a month ago on CNN that " I'm not reading the intelligence today, or these days -- but based on my experience, this is right out of the Russian playbook ". She was referring to the latest U.S. riots.

Once I'd seen this mention of The Russian Playbook (aka KGB, Kremlin or Putin's Playbook), I saw the expression all over the place. Here's an early – perhaps the earliest – use of the term. In October 2016, the Center for Strategic and International studies (" Ranked #1 ") informed us of the " Kremlin Playbook " with this ominous beginning

There was a deeply held assumption that, when the countries of Central and Eastern Europe joined NATO and the European Union in 2004, these countries would continue their positive democratic and economic transformation. Yet more than a decade later, the region has experienced a steady decline in democratic standards and governance practices at the same time that Russia's economic engagement with the region expanded significantly.

And asks

Are these developments coincidental, or has the Kremlin sought deliberately to erode the region's democratic institutions through its influence to 'break the internal coherence of the enemy system'?

Well, to these people, to ask the question is to answer it: can't possibly be disappointment at the gap between 2004's expectations and 2020's reality, can't be that they don't like the total Western values package that they have to accept, it must be those crafty Russians deceiving them. This was the earliest reference to The Playbook that I found, but it certainly wasn't the last.

Russia has a century-old playbook for 'disinformation' 'I believe in Russia they do have their own manual that essentially prescribes what to do,' said Clint Watts, a research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a former FBI agent. (Nov 2018)

The Russian playbook for spreading fake news and conspiracy theories is the subject of a new three-part video series on The New York Times website titled 'Operation Infektion: Russian Disinformation: From The Cold War To Kanye.' (Nov 2018)

I found headlines such as these: Former CIA Director Outlines Russian Playbook for Influencing Unsuspecting Targets (May 2017) ; Fmr. CIA op.: Don Jr. meeting part of Russian playbook (Jul 2017) ; Americans Use Russian Playbook to Spread Disinformation (Oct 2018) ; Factory of Lies: The Russian Playbook (Nov 2018) ; Shredding the Putin Playbook: Six crucial steps we must take on cyber-security -- before it's too late. (Winter 2018) ; Trump's spin is 'all out of the KGB playbook': Counterintelligence expert Malcolm Nance (May 2019) .

Of course, all these people are convinced Moscow interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Somehow. To some effect. Never really specified but the latest outburst of insanity is this video from the Lincoln Project . As Anatoly Karlin observes: "I think it's really cool how we Russians took over America just by shitposting online. How does it feel to be subhuman?" He has a point: the Lincoln Project, and the others shrieking about Russian interference, take it for granted that American democracy is so flimsy and Americans so gullible that a few Facebook ads can bring the whole facade down. A curious mental state indeed.

So let us consider The Russian Playbook. It stands at the very heart of Russian power. It is old: at least a century old . Why, did not Tolstoy's 1908 Letter to a Hindu inspire Gandhi to bring down the British Indian Empire and win the Great Game for Moscow? The Tolstoy-Putin link is undeniable as we are told in A Post-Soviet 'War and Peace': What Tolstoy's Masterwork Explains About Putin's Foreign Policy : "In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Napoleon (like Putin after him) wanted to construct his own international order ". Russian novelists: adepts of The Playbook every one . So there is much to consider about this remarkable Book which has had such an enormous – hidden to most – role in world history. Its instructions on how to swing Western elections are especially important: the 2016 U.S. election ; Brexit ; " 100 years of Russian electoral interference "; Canada ; France ; the European Union ; Germany and many more. The awed reader must ask whether any Western election since Tolstoy's day can be trusted. Not to forget the Great Hawaiian Pizza Debate the Russians could start at any moment.

What can we know about The Playbook? For a start it must be written in Russian, a language that those crafty Russians insist on speaking among themselves. Secondly such an important document would be protected the way that highly classified material is protected. There would be a very restricted need to know; underlings participating in one of the many plays would not know how their part fitted into The Playbook; few would ever see The Playbook itself. The Playbook would be brought to the desk of the few authorised to see it by a courier, signed for, the courier would watch the reader and take away the copy afterwards. The very few copies in existence would be securely locked away; each numbered and differing subtly from the others so that, should a leak occur, the authorities would know which copy read by whom had been leaked. Printed on paper that could not be photographed or duplicated. As much protection as human cunning could devise; right up there with the nuclear codes .

So, The Russian Playbook would be extraordinarily difficult to get hold of. And yet every talking head on U.S. TV has a copy at his elbow! English copies, one assumes. Rachel Maddow has comprehended the complicated chapter on how to control the U.S. power system . Others have read the impenetrably complex section on how to control U.S. voting machines or change vote counts . Many are familiar with the lists of divisions in American society and directions for exploiting them . Adam Schiff has mastered the section on how to get Trump to give Alaska back . Susan Rice well knows the chapter "How to create riots in peaceful communities".

And so on. It's all quite ridiculous: we're supposed to believe that Moscow easily controls far-away countries but can't keep its neighbours under control.

There is no Russian Playbook, that's just projection. But there is a "playbook" and it's written in English, it's freely available and it's inexpensive enough that every pundit can have a personal copy: it's named " From Dictatorship To Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation " and it's written by Gene Sharp (1928-2018) . Whatever Sharp may have thought he was doing, whatever good cause he thought he was assisting, his book has been used as a guide to create regime changes around the world. Billed as "democracy" and "freedom", their results are not so benign. Witness Ukraine today. Or Libya. Or Kosovo whose long-time leader has just been indicted for numerous crimes . Curiously enough, these efforts always take place in countries that resist Washington's line but never in countries that don't. Here we do see training, financing, propaganda, discord being sown, divisions exploited to effect regime change – all the things in the imaginary "Russian Playbook". So, whatever he may have thought he was helping, Sharp's advice has been used to produce what only the propagandists could call " model interventions "; to the "liberated" themselves, the reality is poverty , destruction , war and refugees .

The Albert Einstein Institution , which Sharp created in 1983, strongly denies collusion with Washington-sponsored overthrows but people from it have organised seminars or workshops in many targets of U.S. overthrows . The most recent annual report of 2014 , while rather opaque, shows 45% of its income from "grants" (as opposed to "individuals") and has logos of Euromaidan, SOSVenezuela, Umbrellamovement , Lwili , Sunflowersquare and others. In short, the logos of regime change operations in Ukraine, Venezuela, Hong Kong, Burkina Faso and Taiwan. (And, ironically for today's USA, Black Lives Matter). So, clearly, there is some connection between the AEI and Washington-sponsored regime change operations.

So there is a "handbook" but it's not Russian.

Reading Sharp's book, however, makes one wonder if he was just fooling himself. Has there ever been a "dictatorship" overthrown by "non-violent" resistance along the lines of what he is suggesting? He mentions Norwegians who resisted Hitler; but Norway was liberated, along with the rest of Occupied Europe, by extremely violent warfare. While some Jews escaped, most didn't and it was the conquest of Berlin that saved the rest: the nazi state was killed . The USSR went away, together with its satellite governments in Europe but that was a top-down event. He likes Gandhi but Gandhi wouldn't have lasted a minute under Stalin. Otpor was greatly aided by NATO's war on Serbia. And, they're only "non-violent" because the Western media doesn't talk much about the violence ; "non-violent" is not the first word that comes to mind in this video of Kiev 2014 . "Colour revolutions" are manufactured from existing grievances, to be sure, but with a great deal of outside assistance, direction and funding; upon inspection, there's much design behind their "spontaneity". And, not infrequently, with mysterious sniping at a expedient moment – see Katchanovski's research on the "Heavenly Hundred" of the Maidan showing pretty convincingly that the shootings were " a false flag operation" involving "an alliance of the far right organizations, specifically the Right Sector and Svoboda, and oligarchic parties, such as Fatherland". There is little in Sharp's book to suggest that non-violent resistance would have had much effect on a really brutal and determined government. He also has the naïve habit of using "democrat" and "dictator" as if these words were as precisely defined as coconuts and codfish. But any "dictatorship" – for example Stalin's is a very complex affair with many shades of opinion in it. So, in terms of what he was apparently trying to do, one can see it only succeeding against rather mild "dictators" presiding over extremely unpopular polities. With a great deal of outside effort and resources.

His "playbook" is useful to outside powers that want to overthrow governments they don't like. Especially those run by "dictators" not brutal enough to shoot the protesters down. It's not Russian diplomats that are caught choosing the leaders of ostensibly independent countries . It's not Russians who boast of spending money in poor countries to change their governments . It's not Russian diplomats who meet with foreign opposition leaders . Russia doesn't fabricate a leader of a foreign country . It's not Russia that invents a humanitarian crisis , bombs the country to bits , laughs at its leader's brutal death and walks away. It's not Russia that sanctions numerous countries . It's not Russia that gives fellowships to foreign oppositionists . Even the Washington Post (one of the principals in sustaining Putindunnit hysteria) covered " The long history of the U.S. interfering with elections elsewhere "; but piously insisted "the days of its worst behavior are long behind it". Whatever the pundits may claim about Russia, the USA actually has an organisation devoted to interfering in other countries' business ; one of whose leading lights proudly boasted: " A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA. "

The famous "Russian Playbook" is nothing but projection onto Moscow of what Washington actually does: projection is so common a feature of American propaganda that one may certain that when Washington accuses somebody else of doing something, it's a guarantee that Washington is doing it.

[Jul 19, 2020] Real cancel culture is a psyop to cancel truth or make it unrecognizable from lie via coloring and half-truths such as Russiagate, White Helmets, Skripals, MH-17, Integrity Initiative, Russian Bounties

Jul 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jackrabbit , Jul 18 2020 21:38 utc | 53

The establishment's massive propaganda campaigns and psyops CANCEL the truth or make it unrecognizable via coloring and half-truths. Russiagate, White Helmets, Skripals, MH-17, Integrity Initiative, Assange, Russian Bounties & remaining in Afghanistan, "China virus", hydroxyChloroquine, etc.

The Trump Administration has CANCELED entire countries via terminating peace treaties, imposing sanctions, covert war, and conducting a propaganda war.

Where is the outrage from writers, artists, and academics about THAT?

[Jul 19, 2020] What the MSM cliche According to former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the matter actually means

Highly recommended!
Yet another evil rumor designed to poison relations with Russia. This time from Yahoo
Jul 19, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

JLee2027 , 1 hour ago

according to former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the matter.

So, it's made up garbage.

[Jul 18, 2020] That self-admitted CIA linked, deep state propaganda puppet outlet lecturing the rest of us about the virtues of fact-checking and journalistic integrity

Notable quotes:
"... Any NYT reporting on Epstein is meant as a distraction -- to cover up the facts. The NYT is the elites' protector, it punches down instead of up. The NYT 'revelations' about guards are a) punching down to protect elites and b) a distraction to protect elites. The NYT is one of the Augean Stables. ..."
Aug 12, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

vk , Aug 12 2019 2:05 utc | 42

@ Posted by: vk | Aug 11 2019 20:42 utc | 11

Oops, it seems I was too optimistic about the NYT. Not even 24h later, we already have these in its home page:

Jeffrey Epstein's Opaque Finances Could Become a Focus for Investigators

[emphasis on the "could"]

Epstein Suicide Conspiracies Show How Our Information System Is Poisoned

Now, people who are doubting the USG are automatically labelled "conspiracy theorists". Except that, in this case, it is perfectly sensible to doubt about his death. He could've put down really powerful people. He wasn't your daily mafia-boy struggling against his mafia boss over US$ 1 billion in cocaine; no: he could put down half the American royalty.


JW , Aug 12 2019 2:48 utc | 48

Ah yes, that self-admitted CIA linked, totally-not deep state propaganda puppet outlet lecturing the rest of us about the virtues of fact-checking and journalistic integrity...
bjd , Aug 11 2019 21:33 utc | 19
Any NYT reporting on Epstein is meant as a distraction -- to cover up the facts. The NYT is the elites' protector, it punches down instead of up. The NYT 'revelations' about guards are a) punching down to protect elites and b) a distraction to protect elites. The NYT is one of the Augean Stables.

[Jul 18, 2020] Divide We Fall -- America Has Been Blacklisted and McCarthyism Refashioned for a New Age

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Not to be outdone, the censors are also taking aim at To Kill a Mockingbird , Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about Atticus Finch, a white lawyer in the Jim Crow South who defends a black man falsely accused of rape. Sixty years after its debut, the book remains a powerful testament to moral courage in the face of racial bigotry and systemic injustice , told from the point of view of a child growing up in the South, but that's not enough for the censors. They want to axe the book -- along with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn -- from school reading curriculums because of the presence of racial slurs that could make students feel "humiliated or marginalized." ..."
"... What started with Joseph McCarthy's headline-grabbing scare tactics in the 1950s about Communist infiltrators of American society snowballed into a devastating witch hunt once corporations and the American people caught the fever. ..."
"... McCarthyism was a contagion, like the plague, spreading like wildfire among people too fearful or weak or gullible or paranoid or greedy or ambitious to denounce it for what it was: an opportunistic scare tactic engineered to make the government more powerful. ..."
"... Battlefield America: The War on the American People ..."
Jul 18, 2020 | www.mintpressnews.com

For those old enough to have lived through the McCarthy era, there is a whiff of something in the air that reeks of the heightened paranoia, finger-pointing, fear-mongering, totalitarian tactics that were hallmarks of the 1950s.

Back then, it was the government -- spearheaded by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee -- working in tandem with private corporations and individuals to blacklist Americans suspected of being communist sympathizers.

By the time the witch hunts carried out by federal and state investigative agencies drew to a close, thousands of individuals ( the vast majority of them innocent any crime whatsoever ) had been accused of communist ties, investigated, subpoenaed and blacklisted. Regarded as bad risks, the accused were blacklisted, and struggled to secure employment. The witch hunt ruined careers, resulting in suicides, and tightened immigration to exclude alleged subversives.

Seventy years later, the vitriol, fear-mongering and knee-jerk intolerance associated with McCarthy's tactics are once again being deployed in a free-for-all attack by those on both the political Left and Right against anyone who, in daring to think for themselves, subscribes to ideas or beliefs that run counter to the government's or mainstream thought

It doesn't even seem to matter what the issue is anymore (racism, Confederate monuments, Donald Trump, COVID-19, etc.): modern-day activists are busily tearing down monuments, demonizing historic figures, boycotting corporations for perceived political transgressions, and using their bully pulpit to terrorize the rest of the country into kowtowing to their demands

All the while, the American police state continues to march inexorably forward.

This is how fascism, which silences all dissenting views, prevails.

The silence is becoming deafening.

After years of fighting in and out of the courts to keep their 87-year-old name, the NFL's Washington Redskins have bowed to public pressure and will change their name and team logo to avoid causing offense . The new name, not yet announced, aims to honor both the military and Native Americans.

Eleanor Holmes Norton, a delegate to the House of Representatives who supports the name change, believes the team's move " reflects the present climate of intolerance to names, statues, figments of our past that are racist in nature or otherwise imply racism [and] are no longer tolerated."

Present climate of intolerance, indeed.

Yet it wasn't a heightened racial conscience that caused the Redskins to change their brand. It was the money. The team caved after its corporate sponsors including FedEx, PepsiCo, Nike and Bank of America threatened to pull their funding

So much for that U.S. Supreme Court victory preventing the government from censoring trademarked names it considers distasteful or scandalous.

Who needs a government censor when the American people are already doing such a great job at censoring themselves and each other, right?

Now there's a push underway to boycott Goya Foods after its CEO, Robert Unanue, praised President Trump during a press conference to announce Goya's donation of a million cans of Goya chickpeas and a million other food products to American food banks as part of the president's Hispanic Prosperity Initiative.

Mind you, Unanue -- whose grandfather emigrated to the U.S. from Spain -- also praised the Obamas when they were in office, but that kind of equanimity doesn't carry much weight in this climate of intolerance.

Not to be outdone, the censors are also taking aim at To Kill a Mockingbird , Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about Atticus Finch, a white lawyer in the Jim Crow South who defends a black man falsely accused of rape. Sixty years after its debut, the book remains a powerful testament to moral courage in the face of racial bigotry and systemic injustice , told from the point of view of a child growing up in the South, but that's not enough for the censors. They want to axe the book -- along with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn -- from school reading curriculums because of the presence of racial slurs that could make students feel "humiliated or marginalized."

Never mind that the N-word makes a regular appearance in hip-hop songs. The prevailing attitude seems to be that it's okay to use the N-word as long as the person saying the word is not white . Rapper Kendrick Lamar "would like white America to let black people exclusively have the word."

Talk about a double standard.

This is also the overlooked part of how oppression becomes systemic: it comes about as a result of a combined effort between the populace, the corporations and the government.

McCarthyism worked the same way.

What started with Joseph McCarthy's headline-grabbing scare tactics in the 1950s about Communist infiltrators of American society snowballed into a devastating witch hunt once corporations and the American people caught the fever.

McCarthyism was a contagion, like the plague, spreading like wildfire among people too fearful or weak or gullible or paranoid or greedy or ambitious to denounce it for what it was: an opportunistic scare tactic engineered to make the government more powerful.

The parallels to the present movement cannot be understated.

The contagion of fear that McCarthy helped spread with the help of government agencies, corporations and the power elite is still poisoning the well, whitewashing our history, turning citizen against citizen, and stripping us of our rights.

What we desperately need is the kind of resolve embodied by Edward R. Murrow, the most-respected newsman of his day.

On March 9, 1954, Murrow dared to speak truth to power about the damage McCarthy was inflicting on the American people. His message remains a timely warning for our age.

We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine; and remember that we are not descended from fearful men. Not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular.

America is approaching another reckoning right now, one that will pit our commitment to freedom principles against a level of fear-mongering that is being used to wreak havoc on everything in its path.

The outcome rests, as always, with "we the people." As Murrow said to his staff before the historic March 9 broadcast: "No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices."

Take heed, America.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People , this may be your last warning.

Feature photo | Nehemiah Nuk Nuk Johnson, left, with JUICE (Justice Unites Individuals and Communities Everywhere), confronts a counter protester who did not give his name in Martinez, Calif., July 12, 2020, during a protest calling for an end to racial injustice and accountability for police. Jeff Chiu | AP

John W. Whitehead is a constitutional attorney, author and founder and president of The Rutherford Institute . His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected] .

[Jul 18, 2020] Real Russiagate bombshell -- FBI knew Steele dossier was fiction, Strzok notes show NYTimes reporting misleading and inaccurate

Notable quotes:
"... "primary sub-source" ..."
"... "misleading and inaccurate" ..."
"... "no evidence" ..."
"... Interestingly, June 2017 is when the FBI and DOJ signed off on the last extension of the FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign via adviser Carter Page. The warrant was signed by acting FBI director and Comey's former deputy Andrew McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein – who wrote both the memo used to fire Comey and the scope memo for the Mueller investigation. ..."
"... Evidence has shown that the initial FISA warrant against Page – in October 2016, shortly before the election – and the three renewals all relied heavily on the Steele Dossier, without making it clear to the court that it was unverified opposition research compiled at the behest of a rival political party. ..."
"... "miscarriage of justice" ..."
"... "collusion" ..."
"... Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! ..."
"... the infamous dossier used as a pretext to spy on President Donald Trump's campaign was unreliable ..."
Jul 17, 2020 | www.rt.com

New documents show the FBI was aware that the infamous dossier used as a pretext to spy on President Donald Trump's campaign was unreliable, and that the New York Times published false information about the 'Russiagate' probe.

The two documents were published on Friday by the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), as part of an ongoing probe of the FBI's investigation of Trump. One is a 59-page, heavily redacted interview of the "primary sub-source" for Christopher Steele, the British spy commissioned through a series of cut-outs by the Hillary Clinton campaign to dig up dirt on Trump during the 2016 election campaign.

While the identity of the source is hidden, the document makes it clear it was not a current or former Russian official, but a non-Russian employee of Steele's British company, Orbis. The source's testimony seriously questioned the claims made in the dossier – which is best known for the salacious accusation that Trump was being blackmailed by Russia with tapes of an alleged sex romp in a Moscow hotel.

The second, and more intriguing, document is a five-page printout of a February 14, 2017 article from the New York Times, along with 13 notes by Peter Strzok, one of the senior FBI agents handling the Russiagate probe. The article was published five days after the FBI interview with the sub-source, and Strzok actually shows awareness of it (in note 11, specifically).

In the very first note, Strzok labeled as "misleading and inaccurate" the claim by the New York Times that the Trump campaign had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials before the 2016 election, noting there was "no evidence" of this.

Likewise, Strzok denied the FBI was investigating Roger Stone (note 10) – a political operative eventually indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller over allegedly lying about (nonexistent) ties to WikiLeaks, whose sentence Trump recently commuted to outrage from 'Russiagate' proponents. Nor was Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort on any calls involving Russian government officials, contrary to claims by the Times (note 3).

Not only did the FBI know the story was false, in part based on the knowledge they had from Steele's source, but the recently ousted FBI director Jim Comey had openly disputed it in June 2017. The paper stood by its reporting.

Interestingly, June 2017 is when the FBI and DOJ signed off on the last extension of the FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign via adviser Carter Page. The warrant was signed by acting FBI director and Comey's former deputy Andrew McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein – who wrote both the memo used to fire Comey and the scope memo for the Mueller investigation.

Evidence has shown that the initial FISA warrant against Page – in October 2016, shortly before the election – and the three renewals all relied heavily on the Steele Dossier, without making it clear to the court that it was unverified opposition research compiled at the behest of a rival political party.

ALSO ON RT.COM So it wasn't 'by the book'? Strzok notes reveal Obama & Biden were involved in FBI going after General Flynn

The last two renewals, in April and June 2017, were requested after the sub-source interview. Commenting on the document release, Sen. Graham called these two renewals a "miscarriage of justice" and argued that the FBI and the Department of Justice should have stopped and re-evaluated their case.

Mueller eventually found no "collusion" between Trump and Russia as alleged by the Democrats, but not before a dozen people – from Stone and Manafort to Trump's first national security adviser Michael Flynn and innocent Russian student Maria Butina – became casualties of the investigation.

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! 236 13


Austin Rock 22 hours ago Staggering is the monumental deceitful effort to hitch Trump to Russia. And yet for MSM and their poodles in the press no barb thrown is too outragious, no smear is too false enough. With Google, Twitter and Facebook on board we Europeans are being played. But we Europeans are not as stupid as your average US punter. These pathetic fairy tales are an embarressement to journalism.

[Jul 17, 2020] The "Russian vaccine hack" is a 3-for-1 deal on propaganda

Looks like Guardian is another intelligence agencies controlled entity.
Notable quotes:
"... Nothing shows just how much the Guardian has become the voice of the Deep State more than its coverage of anything Russia-related. And nothing serves as a better exemplar of how modern propaganda works. ..."
"... As it was anti-Russian I expected it to be accompanied with a Luke Harding byline but this is from the Defence and Security Editor, Dan Sabbagh, Harding, as well as being a plagiarist, has written four anti-Russian books including "Collusion" about how Russia helped Donald Trump get into power (using the discredited Steele dossier as his main source). Here Aaron Mate interviews him leaving him totally uncomfortable by the end. ..."
Jul 16, 2020 | off-guardian.org

The Guardian, and all the other predictable voices, are currently reporting that Russian "state sponsored hackers" have been attempting to steal "medical secrets" from British pharmaceutical researchers.

At this stage they offer no substantiation, but it does serve as good teaching exercise in the techniques of modern propagandists.

  1. First the lack of evidence. Observe the Guardian article, note the complete absence of sources or references. There's not a link in sight. There's no content there beyond the parroted words of UK government officials, whose honesty and/or competence is never interrogated.
  2. Second, the lies by omission. They don't mention, for example, the Vault 7 revelations from Wikileaks that the CIA/Pentagon have developed technology to make one of their own cyber-attacks appear to come from anywhere in the world , Russia obviously included. This is clearly vital information.
  3. Third, the multitasking. When you splash a huge red lie on your front pages, it's always best to make it serve several agendas at once. In fact, an unsupported statement which serves multiple state-backed narratives at the same time is one of the telltale signs of propaganda.

With this one completely unverified claim, the Guardian – or rather the people who tell the Guardian what to say – back up three narratives:

The further demonisation of an "enemy". Russia is portrayed as pursuing "selfish interests with reckless behaviour" , whilst we (and our allies) are "getting on with the hard work of finding a vaccine and protecting global health." Promoting the vaccine. The vaccine is coming. It will likely be mandatory, it will certainly have been insufficiently tested, if tested at all. They need some pro-vaccine advertising, and nothing sells better than "our vaccine is so good, people are trying to steal it". Most importantly – Enhancing the idea that Sars-Cov-2 is a unique global threat which puts us all in danger. The unspoken assumption is that Russia needs to steal our research because the virus is so dangerous we all need to be afraid of it despite it being harmless to the vast majority of people .

Whether it's the (totally unsubstantiated) allegation that Russia put bounties on NATO servicemen in Afghanistan , or the (very predictable) "leak" that "Russian interference" was backing Corbyn in the general election, it's clear that any Globalist deal on the coronavirus is dead and buried, and it's very much open season on Putin's Russia again.

Nothing shows just how much the Guardian has become the voice of the Deep State more than its coverage of anything Russia-related. And nothing serves as a better exemplar of how modern propaganda works.

As it was anti-Russian I expected it to be accompanied with a Luke Harding byline but this is from the Defence and Security Editor, Dan Sabbagh, Harding, as well as being a plagiarist, has written four anti-Russian books including "Collusion" about how Russia helped Donald Trump get into power (using the discredited Steele dossier as his main source). Here Aaron Mate interviews him leaving him totally uncomfortable by the end.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/9Ikf1uZli4g


John Pretty , Jul 17, 2020 12:03 AM Reply to John Goss

This is a favorite piece on Harding, published by Spiked in 2011:

https://www.spiked-online.com/2011/10/04/face-it-the-fsb-is-just-not-that-into-you/

Grafter , Jul 16, 2020 11:10 PM

It's all so dumb and fraudulent . Not worthy of anyone's attention who may possess a few brain cells. Those who serve up this shit in the name of journalism should be sent back to primary school for some basic education . Really, we have had enough of this crap from American morons ever since the Cold War era and here we have the same corrupt media parroting exactly the same dross about those evil Russians . This scum need a history lesson for had it not been for Russia's sacrifice and bravery in WW2 these cretins would not be sitting on their arses writing this dross. This ongoing malevolent campaign against Russia is extremely disturbing and has all the hallmarks of a psychopathic mindset and all coming from a nation whose main "industry" is the production of weaponry and who is responsible for the deaths of between 20 to 30 million people, directly and indirectly since the end of WW2.

Eyes Open , Jul 16, 2020 10:35 PM

It's so obvious the media are pulling a 'dog in a manger' psyop on us. Ie. 'oh no! I never wanted the vaccine in the first place, but the Russians want to steal ours, so all of a sudden I want my vaccine' etc.

Most likely Gate's vaccines will cause harm to some, so take them all I say. (My condolences to the Russians.)

This video – from the horse's mouth. Notice the duping delight:

https://twitter.com/BeachMilk/status/1265265434741272576?s=20

S Cooper , Jul 16, 2020 9:35 PM

"Russian vaccine hack"
So the CORPORATE FASCISTS are saying that the Russian Federation got its vaccine against the CORPORATE FASCIST MASS HYSTERIA FEAR PANIC FRENZY PROPAGANDA CAMPAIGN by hacking? This is not going to end well for the OLIGARCH MOBSTER PSYCHOPATHS.

John Ervin , Jul 16, 2020 11:35 PM Reply to S Cooper

"For The Record" (spitfirelist.com) began reporting 4 or 5 years ago that all the Russiagate baloney, hacks of Hillary et al., was a CIA inside job ~ and related matters like it, long before that ~ referring listeners to much evidence that CIA cyber-technology had long been working on black op devices that could hack while leaving "Russian" or "CCP" digital fingerprints, etc., all the one-trick pony of ceaseless false-flaggery that our Intel has been using for years, for nearly everything. And that stuff isn't really new.

Oliver Stone interviewed Putin for 4 hrs a couple years ago, carried by cable here, and asked him point blank, "Did your agencies hack the DP?" Or words to that effect.

And he answered merely, "That was an internal affair of yours."

Of course, VP is a high spymaster himself, it would seem one of the best, ever, and no stranger to purposeful misdirection certainly, but by the same token of his eminence in that global realm, he is well supported by the evidence.

Especially, "If past is prologue " and all of its preponderance? Endless .

S Cooper , Jul 17, 2020 12:40 AM Reply to John Ervin

The aspect which most concerns me is the no holds barred publicly funded sales and marketing campaign that Psychopath Billy and BIG PHARMA are mounting to find dupes and Guinea Pigs for their toxic patent medicine snake oil brew. It is going to hurt a lot of people.

"The hack" bull shit fairy tale store is just one of the means employed by those criminal psychopaths.

John Ervin , Jul 17, 2020 2:16 AM Reply to S Cooper

Yes indeed, there are many such signs, all of them bad. I don't know why I feel pleased when I get confirmations of all the worst suspicions, if it only confirms my antennae are still functioning, whilst being shamed by the brainwashed and the same old headlines . It should take a lot more or better to please the sensibilities.

I guess it's the sense of vindication, that one can't help but thrill when that terrible thirst for some reality is slaked.

Or that you have cause to be thankful. Faith tells you this won't last forever, and it's a real gift that you weren't fooled.

But it can still feel like "cold comfort" when "almost" everyone you see or know, is.

Too many take the bit too nicely. What good does that do?

It shows up a pale country, too dead, as living only in the flesh, really, too numb in the spirit, not vigilant.

About to be rolled!

voxpox , Jul 16, 2020 9:25 PM

I like this article, it says it all. I have also long harbored a theory that the US intelligence are behind most of the worlds financial cyber-crime, systematically fleecing the world to fund their many many operations around the world. They have the tech with Windows back-doors, the motivation to hide 'off the book' operations and a proven lack of morals as demonstrated during the Iran–Contra affair, many years ago. but what do I know. As Bill Maher says, 'I can't prove it but I know it's true'.

John Ervin , Jul 16, 2020 11:59 PM Reply to voxpox

The USA foreign policy shows a penchant for amoral deceptiveness of ALL other countries, even best allies, chronically.

So that gives heft to Bill Maher's maxim.

Perennial treaty busters and oath breakers, why would anyone trust?

Fool me once etc.

That's at the core of my take on all USA has said about C-19(84). Been there, done that, with 100 other false flags, always the same tune.

The boy who cried wolf: Uncle Scam.

Always proven false after all the marbles are stolen. Or at some point down the road. If not, it shall be, like the JFK fiasco. Like the lone holdout among nations on the Napalm Ban, or sole rogue to drop an A bomb (75th Anniversary of that cowardly Holocaust coming up in a few weeks.)

Lone, lone, lone.

A sad little homeboy in the Land of the Lone Gunman. So many, though. Too many, for the world's good .

~~~~~~~~~£4£&$4$

Don't take it from me, though, I'm a total patriot, really, compared to Mr. Gonzo, Hunter S. Thompson:

"America just a nation of 200 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms at all about using them on anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable."

Hunter always said it like it is, at least at yhr time he saw it, he rode with the Hell's Angels and wrote the 1st book about them, and wasn't much shy about calling a spade a spade.

And. Like my own old man: another highly assisted apparent suicide.

~~~~~~~~

Old Radio broadcast:

"Who was that masked man?!

Why, it's the Lone Ranger!"

[Jul 16, 2020] NYT 'Chief Threat To Democracy'- Eric Weinstein Takes Flamethrower To Paper Of Record After Bari Weiss Quits

Bari Weiss probably deserved what she got as she practiced the same methods herself.
Jul 16, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Eric Weinstein, managing director of Thiel Capital and hsot of The Portal podcast, has gone scorched earth on the New York Times following the Tuesday resignation of journalist Bari Weiss.

Illustration via DanielMiessler.com

Weinstein describes how The Times has morphed into an activist rag - refusing to cover "news" unpaletable to their narrative, while ignoring key questions such as whether Jeffrey Epstein's sex-trafficking ring was "intelligence related."

Jump into Weinstein's Twitter thread by clicking on the below tweet, or scroll down for your convenience.

me title=

https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.395.0_en.html#goog_1939178934

https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.395.0_en.html#goog_1119462986 NOW PLAYING

Trump Administration is Reportedly Out to Smear Dr. Anthony Fauci for Early Comments on Coronavirus

Image Deleted From Trump's Tweet After NYT Complaint

New York Times Ends Apple News Partnership

Trump Says His Niece Is Not Allowed To Publish 'Tell-All' Book

Book with 'Salacious' Stories on Trump Set to Be Published by His Niece

Jon Stewart Spoke Out About Police Issues

Trump Accuses New York Times Of `Virtual Act Of Treason` Over Russia Story

Ben Smith Departs BuzzFeed To Join New York times

* * *

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(continued)


At that moment Bari Weiss became all that was left of the "Paper of Record." Why? Because the existence of Black Racists with the power to hunt professors with Baseball Bats and even redefine the word 'racism' to make their story impossible to cover ran totally counter-narrative.

At some point after 2011, the NYT gradually stopped covering the News and became the News instead. And Bari has been fighting internally from the opinion section to re-establish Journalism inside tbe the NYT. A total reversal of the Chinese Wall that separates news from opinion.

about:blank

about:blank

me title=

This is the paper in 2016 that couldnt be interested in the story that millions of Americans were likely lying to pollsters about Donald Trump.

The paper refusing to ask the CIA/FBI if Epstein was Intelligence related.

The paper that can't report that it seeks race rioting:

I have had the honor of trying to support both @bariweiss at the New York Times and @BretWeinstein in their battles simply to stand alone against the internal mob mentality. It is THE story all over the country. Our courageous individuals are being hunted at work for dissenting.

Before Bari resigned, I did a podcast with her. It was chilling. I'd make an innocuous statement of simple fact and ask her about it. She'd reply " That is obviously true but I'm sorry we can't say that here. It will get me strung up ." That's when I stopped telling her to hang on.

So what just happened? Let me put it bluntly: What was left of the New York Times just resigned from the New York Times. The Times canceled itself. As a separate Hong Kong exists in name only, the New New York Times and affiliated "news" is now the chief threat to our democracy.

This is the moment when the passengers who have been becoming increasingly alarmed, start to entertain a new idea: what if the people now in the cockpit are not airline pilots? Well the Twitter Activists at the @nytimes and elsewhere are not journalists.

What if those calling for empathy have a specific deadness of empathy?

Those calling for justice *are* the unjust?

Those calling "Privilege" are the privileged?

Those calling for equality seek to oppress us?

Those anti-racists are open racists?

The progressives seek regress?

The journalists are covering up the news?

Try the following exercise: put a minus sign in front of nearly every banner claim made by "the progressives".

Q: Doesn't that make more sense?

NEVER MISS THE NEWS THAT MATTERS MOST

ZEROHEDGE DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX

Receive a daily recap featuring a curated list of must-read stories.

Those aren't the pilots you imagine. And we are far closer to revolution than you think.

Bari and I agree on a lot but also disagree fiercely. And so I have learned that she is tougher than tough. But these university and journalistic workplaces are now unworkable. They are the antithesis off what they were built to stand for. It is astounding how long she held out.

Read her letter. I have asked her to do a make-up podcast & she has agreed. Stay tuned If you don't want to be surprised again by what's coming understand this: just as there has been no functioning president, there's now no journalism. We're moving towards a 🌎 of pure activism.

Prepare to lose your ability to call the police & for more autonomous zones where kids die so that Govenors & Mayors can LARP as Kayfabe revolutionaries . Disagree with Ms Weiss all you want as she isn't perfect. But Bari is a true patriot who tried to stand alone. Glad she's out.

We are not finished by a long shot. What the Intellectual Dark Web tried to do MUST now be given an institutional home.

Podcast with Bari on The Portal to come as soon as she is ready.

Stay tuned. And thanks for reading this. It is of the utmost importance.

Thank you all. 🙏

P.S. Please retweet the lead tweet from this thread if you understand where we are. Appreciated.


[Jul 16, 2020] Cancel culture letter is about stifling free speech, not protecting it by JONATHAN COOK

Criticisms of "cancel culture" often is hypocrtical, as was the case with Weiss, and are connected with prioritizing speech that shores up the status quo -- necon dominance in the US MSM.
Jul 13, 2020 | mondoweiss.net

An open letter published by Harper's magazine, and signed by 150 prominent writers and public figures, has focused attention on the apparent dangers of what has been termed a new "cancel culture".

The letter brings together an unlikely alliance of genuine leftists, such as Noam Chomsky and Matt Karp, centrists such as J K Rowling and Ian Buruma, and neoconservatives such as David Frum and Bari Weiss, all speaking out in defence of free speech.

Although the letter doesn't explicitly use the term "cancel culture", it is clearly what is meant in the complaint about a "stifling" cultural climate that is imposing "ideological conformity" and weakening "norms of open debate and toleration of differences".

It is easy to agree with the letter's generalized argument for tolerance and free and fair debate. But the reality is that many of those who signed are utter hypocrites, who have shown precisely zero commitment to free speech, either in their words or in their deeds.

Further, the intent of many them in signing the letter is the very reverse of their professed goal: they want to stifle free speech, not protect it.

To understand what is really going on with this letter, we first need to scrutinize the motives , rather than the substance, of the letter.

A new 'illiberalism'

"Cancel culture" started as the shaming, often on social media, of people who were seen to have said offensive things. But of late, cancel culture has on occasion become more tangible, as the letter notes, with individuals fired or denied the chance to speak at a public venue or to publish their work.

The letter denounces this supposedly new type of "illiberalism":

"We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.

"Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; The result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement."

Tricky identity politics

The array of signatories is actually more troubling than reassuring. If we lived in a more just world, some of those signing – like Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W Bush, and Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former US State Department official – would be facing a reckoning before a Hague war crimes tribunal for their roles in promoting "interventions" in Iraq and Libya respectively, not being held up as champions of free speech.

That is one clue that these various individuals have signed the letter for very different reasons.

Chomsky signed because he has been a lifelong and consistent defender of the right to free speech, even for those with appalling opinions such as Holocaust denial.

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Frum, who coined the term "axis of evil" that rationalised the invasion of Iraq, and Weiss, a New York Times columnist, signed because they have found their lives getting tougher. True, it is easy for them to dominate platforms in the corporate media while advocating for criminal wars abroad, and they have paid no career price when their analyses and predictions have turned out to be so much dangerous hokum. But they are now feeling the backlash on university campuses and social media.

Meanwhile, centrists like Buruma and Rowling have discovered that it is getting ever harder to navigate the tricky terrain of identity politics without tripping up. The reputational damage can have serious consequences.

Buruma famously lost his job as editor of the New York Review of Books two years ago after after he published and defended an article that violated the new spirit of the #MeToo movement. And Rowling made the mistake of thinking her followers would be as fascinated by her traditional views on transgender issues as they are by her Harry Potter books.

'Fake news, Russian trolls'

But the fact that all of these writers and intellectuals agree that there is a price to be paid in the new, more culturally sensitive climate does not mean that they are all equally interested in protecting the right to be controversial or outspoken.

Chomsky, importantly, is defending free speech for all , because he correctly understands that the powerful are only too keen to find justifications to silence those who challenge their power. Elites protect free speech only in so far as it serves their interests in dominating the public space.

If those on the progressive left do not defend the speech rights of everyone, even their political opponents, then any restrictions will soon be turned against them. The establishment will always tolerate the hate speech of a Trump or a Bolsonaro over the justice speech of a Sanders or a Corbyn.

By contrast, most of the rest of those who signed – the rightwingers and the centrists – are interested in free speech for themselves and those like them . They care about protecting free speech only in so far as it allows them to continue dominating the public space with their views – something they were only too used to until a few years ago, before social media started to level the playing field a little.

The center and the right have been fighting back ever since with claims that anyone who seriously challenges the neoliberal status quo at home and the neoconservative one abroad is promoting "fake news" or is a "Russian troll". This updating of the charge of being "un-American" embodies cancel culture at its very worst.

Social media accountability

In other words, apart from in the case of a few progressives, the letter is simply special pleading – for a return to the status quo. And for that reason, as we shall see, Chomsky might have been better advised not to have added his name, however much he agrees with the letter's vague, ostensibly pro-free speech sentiments.

What is striking about a significant proportion of those who signed is their self-identification as ardent supporters of Israel. And as Israel's critics know only too well, advocates for Israel have been at the forefront of the cancel culture – from long before the term was even coined.

For decades, pro-Israel activists have sought to silence anyone seen to be seriously critiquing this small, highly militarized state, sponsored by the colonial powers, that was implanted in a region rich with a natural resource, oil, needed to lubricate the global economy, and at a terrible cost to its native, Palestinian population.

Nothing should encourage us to believe that zealous defenders of Israel among those signing the letter have now seen the error of their ways. Their newfound concern for free speech is simply evidence that they have begun to suffer from the very same cancel culture they have always promoted in relation to Israel.

They have lost control of the "cancel culture" because of two recent developments: a rapid growth in identity politics among liberals and leftists, and a new popular demand for "accountability" spawned by the rise of social media.

Cancelling Israel's critics

In fact, despite their professions of concern, the evidence suggests that some of those signing the letter have been intensifying their own contribution to cancel culture in relation to Israel, rather than contesting it.

That is hardly surprising. The need to counter criticism of Israel has grown more pressing as Israel has more obviously become a pariah state. Israel has refused to countenance peace talks with the Palestinians and it has intensified its efforts to realize long-harbored plans to annex swaths of the West Bank in violation of international law.

Rather than allow "robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters" on Israel, Israel's supporters have preferred the tactics of those identified in the letter as enemies of free speech: "swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought".

Just ask Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the Labour party who was reviled, along with his supporters, as an antisemite – one of the worst smears imaginable – by several people on the Harper's list, including Rowling and Weiss . Such claims were promoted even though his critics could produce no actual evidence of an antisemitism problem in the Labour party.

Similarly, think of the treatment of Palestinian solidarity activists who support a boycott of Israel (BDS), modeled on the one that helped push South Africa's leaders into renouncing apartheid. BDS activists too have been smeared as antisemites – and Weiss again has been a prime offender .

The incidents highlighted in the Harper's letter in which individuals have supposedly been cancelled is trivial compared to the cancelling of a major political party and of a movement that stands in solidarity with a people who have been oppressed for decades.

And yet how many of these free speech warriors have come forward to denounce the fact that leftists – including many Jewish anti-Zionists – have been pilloried as antisemites to prevent them from engaging in debates about Israel's behavior and its abuses of Palestinian rights?

How many of them have decried the imposition of a new definition of antisemitism, by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, that has been rapidly gaining ground in western countries?

That definition is designed to silence a large section of the left by prioritizing the safety of Israel from being criticized before the safety of Jews from being vilified and attacked – something that even the lawyer who authored the definition has come to regret .

Why has none of this "cancel culture" provoked an open letter to Harper's from these champions of free speech?

Double-edge sword

The truth is that many of those who signed the letter are defending not free speech but their right to continue dominating the public square – and their right to do so without being held accountable.

Bari Weiss, before she landed a job at the Wall Street Journal and then the New York Times, spent her student years trying to get Muslim professors fired from her university – cancelling them – because of their criticism of Israel. And she explicitly did so under the banner of "academic freedom", claiming pro-Israel students felt intimidated in the classroom.

The New York Civil Liberties Union concluded that it was Weiss, not the professors, who was the real threat to academic freedom. This was not some youthful indiscretion. In a book last year Weiss cited her efforts to rid Columbia university of these professors as a formative experience on which she still draws.

Weiss and many of the others listed under the letter are angry that the rhetorical tools they used for so long to stifle the free speech of others have now been turned against them. Those who lived for so long by the sword of identity politics – on Israel, for example – are worried that their reputations may die by that very same sword – on issues of race, sex and gender.

Narcissistic concern

To understand how the cancel culture is central to the worldview of many of these writers and intellectuals, and how blind they are to their own complicity in that culture, consider the case of Jonathan Freedland, a columnist with the supposedly liberal-left British newspaper the Guardian. Although Freedland is not among those signing the letter, he is very much aligned with the centrists among them and, of course, supported the letter in an article published in the Guardian.

Freedland, we should note, led the "cancel culture" campaign against the Labour party referenced above. He was one of the key figures in Britain's Jewish community who breathed life into the antisemitism smears against Corbyn and his supporters.

But note the brief clip below. In it, Freedland's voice can be heard cracking as he explains how he has been a victim of the cancel culture himself: he confesses that he has suffered verbal and emotional abuse at the hands of Israel's most extreme apologists – those who are even more unapologetically pro-Israel than he is.

He reports that he has been called a "kapo", the term for Jewish collaborators in the Nazi concentration camps, and a "sonderkommando", the Jews who disposed of the bodies of fellow Jews killed in the gas chambers. He admits such abuse "burrows under your skin" and "hurts tremendously".

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And yet, despite the personal pain he has experienced of being unfairly accused, of being cancelled by a section of his own community, Freedland has been at the forefront of the campaign to tar critics of Israel, including anti-Zionist Jews, as antisemites on the flimsiest of evidence.

He is entirely oblivious to the ugly nature of the cancel culture – unless it applies to himself . His concern is purely narcissistic. And so it is with the majority of those who signed the letter.

Conducting a monologue

The letter's main conceit is the pretence that "illiberalism" is a new phenomenon, that free speech is under threat, and that the cancel culture only arrived at the moment it was given a name.

That is simply nonsense. Anyone over the age of 35 can easily remember a time when newspapers and websites did not have a talkback section, when blogs were few in number and rarely read, and when there was no social media on which to challenge or hold to account "the great and the good".

Writers and columnists like those who signed the letter were then able to conduct a monologue in which they revealed their opinions to the rest of us as if they were Moses bringing down the tablets from the mountaintop.

In those days, no one noticed the cancel culture – or was allowed to remark on it. And that was because only those who held approved opinions were ever given a media platform from which to present those opinions.

Before the digital revolution, if you dissented from the narrow consensus imposed by the billionaire owners of the corporate media, all you could do was print your own primitive newsletter and send it by post to the handful of people who had heard of you.

That was the real cancel culture. And the proof is in the fact that many of those formerly obscure writers quickly found they could amass tens of thousands of followers – with no help from the traditional corporate media – when they had access to blogs and social media.

Silencing the left

Which brings us to the most troubling aspect of the open letter in Harper's. Under cover of calls for tolerance, given credibility by Chomsky's name, a proportion of those signing actually want to restrict the free speech of one section of the population – the part influenced by Chomsky.

They are not against the big cancel culture from which they have benefited for so long. They are against the small cancel culture – the new more chaotic, and more democratic, media environment we currently enjoy – in which they are for the first time being held to account for their views, on a range of issues including Israel.

Just as Weiss tried to get professors fired under the claim of academic freedom, many of these writers and public figures are using the banner of free speech to discredit speech they don't like, speech that exposes the hollowness of their own positions.

Their criticisms of "cancel culture" are really about prioritizing "responsible" speech, defined as speech shared by centrists and the right that shores up the status quo. They want a return to a time when the progressive left – those who seek to disrupt a manufactured consensus, who challenge the presumed verities of neoliberal and neoconservative orthodoxy – had no real voice.

The new attacks on "cancel culture" echo the attacks on Bernie Sanders' supporters, who were framed as "Bernie Bros" – the evidence-free allegation that he attracted a rabble of aggressive, women-hating men who tried to bully others into silence on social media.

Just as this claim was used to discredit Sanders' policies, so the center and the right now want to discredit the left more generally by implying that, without curbs, they too will bully everyone else into silence and submission through their "cancel culture".

If this conclusion sounds unconvincing, consider that President Donald Trump could easily have added his name to the letter alongside Chomsky's. Trump used his recent Independence Day speech at Mount Rushmore to make similar points to the Harper's letter. He at least was explicit in equating "cancel culture" with what he called "far-left fascism":

"One of [the left's] political weapons is 'Cancel Culture' – driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees. This is the very definition of totalitarianism This attack on our liberty, our magnificent liberty, must be stopped, and it will be stopped very quickly."

Trump, in all his vulgarity, makes plain what the Harper's letter, in all its cultural finery, obscures. That attacks on the new "cancel culture" are simply another front – alongside supposed concerns about "fake news" and "Russian trolls" – in the establishment's efforts to limit speech by the left.

Attention redirected

This is not to deny that there is fake news on social media or that there are trolls, some of them even Russian. Rather, it is to point out that our attention is being redirected, and our concerns manipulated by a political agenda.

Despite the way it has been presented in the corporate media, fake news on social media has been mostly a problem of the right. And the worst examples of fake news – and the most influential – are found not on social media at all, but on the front pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

What genuinely fake news on Facebook has ever rivaled the lies justifying the invasion of Iraq in 2003 that were knowingly peddled by a political elite and their stenographers in the corporate media. Those lies led directly to more than a million Iraqi deaths, turned millions more into refugees, destroyed an entire country, and fuelled a new type of nihilistic Islamic extremism whose effects we are still feeling.

Most of the worst lies from the current period – those that have obscured or justified US interference in Syria and Venezuela, or rationalized war crimes against Iran, or approved the continuing imprisonment of Julian Assange for exposing war crimes – can only be understood by turning our backs on the corporate media and looking to experts who can rarely find a platform outside of social media.

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Algorithms changed

I say this as someone who has concerns about the fashionable focus on identity politics rather than class politics. I say it also as someone who rejects all forms of cancel culture – whether it is the old-style, "liberal" cancel culture that imposes on us a narrow "consensus" politics (the Overton window), or the new "leftwing" cancel culture that too often prefers to focus on easy cultural targets like Rowling than the structural corruption of western political systems.

But those who are impressed by the letter simply because Chomsky's name is attached should beware. Just as "fake news" has provided the pretext for Google and social media platforms to change their algorithms to vanish left-wingers from searches and threads, just as "antisemitism" has been redefined to demonize the left, so too the supposed threat of "cancel culture" will be exploited to silence the left.

Protecting Bari Weiss and J K Rowling from a baying left-wing "mob" – a mob that that claims a right to challenge their views on Israel or trans issues – will become the new rallying cry from the establishment for action against "irresponsible" or "intimidating" speech.

Progressive leftists who join these calls out of irritation with the current focus on identity politics, or because they fear being labelled an antisemite, or because they mistakenly assume that the issue really is about free speech, will quickly find that they are the main targets.

In defending free speech, they will end up being the very ones who are silenced.

UPDATE:

You don't criticise Chomsky however tangentially and respectfully – at least not from a left perspective – without expecting a whirlwind of opposition. But one issue that keeps being raised on my social media feeds in his defence is just plain wrong-headed, so I want to quickly address it. Here's one my followers expressing the point succinctly:

"The sentiments in the letter stand or fall on their own merits, not on the characters or histories of some of the signatories, nor their future plans."

The problem, as I'm sure Chomsky would explain in any other context, is that this letter fails not just because of the other people who signed it but on its merit too . And that's because, as I explain above, it ignores the most oppressive and most established forms of cancel culture, as Chomsky should have been the first to notice.

Highlighting the small cancel culture, while ignoring the much larger, establishment-backed cancel culture, distorts our understanding of what is at stake and who wields power.

Chomsky unwittingly just helped a group of mostly establishment stooges skew our perceptions of free speech problems so that we side with them against ourselves. There is no way that can be a good thing.

UPDATE 2:

There are still people holding out against the idea that it harmed the left to have Chomsky sign this letter. And rather than address their points individually, let me try another way of explaining my argument:

Why has Chomsky not signed a letter backing the furore over "fake news", even though there is some fake news on social media? Why has he not endorsed the "Bernie Bros" narrative, even though doubtless there are some bullying Sanders supporters on social media? Why has he not supported the campaign claiming the Labour party has an antisemitism problem, even though there are some antisemites in the Labour party (as there are everywhere)?

He hasn't joined any of those campaigns for a very obvious reason – because he understands how power works, and that on the left you hit up, not down. You certainly don't cheerlead those who are up as they hit down.

Chomsky understands this principle only too well because here he is setting it out in relation to Iran:

"Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don't agree with, like bombing."

For exactly the same reason he has not joined those pillorying Iran – because his support would be used for nefarious ends – he shouldn't have joined this campaign. He made a mistake. He's fallible.

Also, this isn't about the left eating itself. Really, Chomsky shouldn't be the issue. The issue should be that a bunch of centrists and right-wingers used this letter to try to reinforce a narrative designed to harm the left, and lay the groundwork for further curbs on its access to social media. But because Chomsky signed the letter, many more leftists are now buying into that narrative – a narrative intended to harm them. That's why Chomsky's role cannot be ignored, nor his mistake glossed over.

UPDATE 3:

I had not anticipated how many ways people on the left might find to justify this letter.

Here's the latest reasoning. Apparently, the letter sets an important benchmark that can in future be used to protect free speech by the left when we are threatened with being "cancelled" – as, for example, with the antisemitism smears that were used against anti-Zionist Jews and other critics of Israel in the British Labour party.

I should hardly need to point out how naive this argument is. It completely ignores how power works in our societies: who gets to decide what words mean and how principles are applied. This letter won't help the left because "cancel culture" is being framed – by this letter, by Trump, by the media – as a "loony left" problem. It is a new iteration of the "politically correct gone mad" discourse, and it will be used in exactly the same way.

It won't help Steven Salaita, sacked from a university job because he criticised Israel's killing of civilians in Gaza, or Chris Williamson, the Labour MP expelled because he defended the party's record on being anti-racist.

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The "cancel culture" furore isn't interested in the fact that they were "cancelled". Worse still, this moral panic turns the whole idea of cancelling on its head: it is Salaita and Williamson who are accused – and found guilty – of doing the cancelling, of cancelling Israel and Jews.

Israel's supporters will continue to win this battle by claiming that criticism of Israel "cancels" that country ("wipes it off the map"), "cancels" Israel's Jewish population ("drives them into the sea"), and "cancels" Jews more generally ("denies a central component of modern Jewish identity").

Greater awareness of "cancel culture" would not have saved Corbyn from the antisemitism smears because the kind of cancel culture that smeared Corbyn is never going to be defined as "cancelling".

For anyone who wishes to see how this works in practice, watch Guardian columnist Owen Jones cave in – as he has done so often – to the power dynamics of the "cancel culture" discourse in this interview with Sky News. I actually agree with almost everything Jones says in this clip, apart from his joining yet again in the witch-hunt against Labour's anti-Zionists. He doesn't see that witch-hunt as "cancel culture", and neither will anyone else with a large platform like his to protect:

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This essay first appeared on Jonathan Cook's blog: https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/

[Jul 14, 2020] Trump confirms he ordered a cyberattack on a notorious Russian troll farm during the 2018 midterms

"It is unusual for countries to publicly talk about cyberwarfare tactics" Is not the USA position itself to consider such an attack to be a declaration fo war?
Jul 14, 2020 | news.yahoo.com

REUTERS/Yuri Gripas

President Trump confirmed in an interview with the Washington Post that the US launched a cyberattack against infamous Russian troll farm the Internet Research Agency (IRA) during the 2018 midterms.

The Post reported the attack in February 2019, but this is the first time Trump has confirmed it took place. It is unusual for countries to publicly talk about cyberwarfare tactics.

The IRA was indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller in 2018 for conspiracy to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. Russian influence campaigns were also detected during the 2018 midterms .

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories .

President Trump has confirmed that the US launched a cyberattack on the Internet Research Agency (IRA), an infamous Russian troll farm, during the 2018 midterm elections.

The Washington Post first reported on the attack, which blocked the IRA's internet access, in February 2019. The administration did not comment on the report at the time, but Trump confirmed the attack in an interview with Post columnist Marc Thiessen published Friday.

Thiessen asked whether Trump had launched the attack, to which the president replied "correct." This is the first time Trump or the White House has confirmed the attack, and it is unusual for countries to publicly talk about cyberwarfare tactics.

According to The Post's 2019 report, US Cyber Command's attack started on the first day of voting for the November 2018 midterm elections, and continued for a few days while votes were tallied. "They basically took the IRA offline," one source familiar with the matter told The Post.

"Look, we stopped it," Trump told Thiessen. The Internet Research Agency was indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller in 2018 for conspiracy to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. Russian influence campaigns were also detected during the 2018 midterms .

Trump also claimed that Obama had remained silent on the issue of Russian disinformation campaigns ahead of the 2016 election.

"[Obama] knew before the election that Russia was playing around. Or, he was told. Whether or not it was so or not, who knows? And he said nothing. And the reason he said nothing was that he didn't want to touch it because he thought [Hillary Clinton] was winning because he read phony polls. So, he thought she was going to win. And we had the silent majority that said, 'No, we like Trump,'" Trump said.

In October 2016, the Obama administration formally accused Russia of hacking into Democratic computers to steal emails that ended up on Wikileaks. In December 2016, one month after Trump had won the election, Obama ejected 35 suspected Russian intelligence officers in retaliation .

Trump's assertion that he took a tougher stance against Russian disinformation campaigns than Obama comes the week after he commuted the prison sentence of former aide Roger Stone , a move that came just days after Facebook announced it had taken down a network of disinformation accounts after an "investigation linked this network to Roger Stone and his associates."

Trump's attitude to Russia has come under fire from critics recently after reports emerged in late June that he was briefed on Russia offering the Taliban bounties to kill US troops in Afghanistan , and chose not to retaliate.

Read the original article on Business Insider


[Jul 11, 2020] Why Bolton Matters - FPIF

Jul 11, 2020 | fpif.org

Why Bolton Matters

You don't need to lionize Bolton, a far-right hawk, to understand what makes his observations about Trump valuable.

By John Feffer , June 24, 2020 .

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Unreliable narrators are a staple of literature. Consider the delusional, self-serving narrator of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl or the way Humbert Humbert used his cultured references and gorgeous prose to dress up his crimes in Nabokov's Lolita .

Now along comes John Bolton and his account of time served in the Trump administration as national security advisor.

Bolton's latest book has been attacked as fiction by the president, members of his administration, and even members of the administrations of other countries (like South Korea ). Bolton is a thoroughly unpleasant hatchet man who has opposed arms control treaties, diplomacy in most forms, and international institutions of all varieties. He is reliably paleoconservative. But does that make him a reliable narrator of his own story as well?

The picture Bolton paints of the Trump administration is a familiar one. We've been treated to a succession of tell-all accounts of the horror that has been Donald Trump's tenure as president: Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury , Philip Rucker and Carol Leonig's A Very Stable Genius , even A Warning by Anonymous. Each one has added a little more paint to the Hieronymus Bosch picture of the presidency: monsters, unspeakable acts, darkness, and chaos.

Other than a morbid, rubbernecking fascination with atrocity, why is yet another account necessary, and from such a potentially unreliable narrator as John Bolton to boot?

The critics of Bolton's trustworthiness have a point. But Bolton's unreliability resides not so much in his ideology as his opportunism.

As a "kiss-up, kick-down kind of guy," he'll do whatever it takes to attain power. He has a terminal case of Washingtonitis: he thinks he's the smartest man in the room and he reeks of entitlement. He entered the Trump administration not as a true believer in Trump, only a true believer in himself. His book not surprisingly portrays John Bolton as the only person in the Trump administration with any sense at all.

It's easy enough to dismiss Bolton's so-called revelations.

Here's why you shouldn't.

Taking China Off the Table

Foreign policy will not likely be the tipping point for the 2020 presidential election. Trump's base generally doesn't care what happens beyond America's borders (except to keep it beyond America's borders). And the anti-Trump camp just wants to get rid of the president, regardless of what he has done in the international arena.

Still, Trump is running on his foreign policy record. For instance, he has been busy trying to portray his opponent, Joe Biden, as somehow pro-China. "China wants Sleepy Joe sooo badly," Trump tweeted back in April. "They want all of those billions of dollars that they have been paying to the U.S. back, and much more. Joe is an easy mark, their DREAM CANDIDATE!"

Then came the ad campaign that portrayed "Beijing Biden" as "China's puppet" who favors engagement with Beijing without caveats and Biden's son as the beneficiary of sweetheart deals with the Chinese. The Trump ads slam China for its handling of the coronavirus and suggest that Biden would have fumbled the U.S. response out of deference to Beijing (uh, sound familiar?).

The inconvenient truth, however, is that Trump, to quote Nicholas Kristof , "has been China's stooge, a sycophantic flatterer and enabler of President Xi Jinping."

In fact, Beijing would prefer four more years of Trump, not so much because of this sycophancy, but because Trump has been busy upending U.S. alliances that have constrained Chinese geopolitical influence. The trade disputes are an irritant, but China can't expect Joe Biden to be any easier to deal with on that score. Four more years of Trump, on the other hand, would mean four more years of the ebbing of U.S. engagement in world affairs.

As Trump and Biden escalate their China-bashing, along comes Bolton. No friend of Beijing, the national security advisor is appalled at Trump's exchanges with Xi Jinping. In one such conversation, Trump effectively signs up the Chinese leader as an in-kind contributor to his reelection campaign. Bolton had to excise Trump's actual words from his book, but Vanity Fair has filled in the blanks :

According to an unredacted passage shown to Vanity Fair by a source, Trump's ask is even more crudely shocking when you read Trump's specific language. "Make sure I win," Trump allegedly told Xi during a dinner at the G20 conference in Osaka, Japan last summer. "I will probably win anyway, so don't hurt my farms. Buy a lot of soybeans and wheat and make sure we win.

Trump was, of course, impeached for attempting the same strategy with Ukraine.

The other shocking revelation from Bolton's book is Trump's response to China's construction of "re-education" camps for the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang province. It's not simply that Trump ignored China's action, as he contends, to ensure that trade negotiations moved forward. According to Bolton , "Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do."

An American president encouraged another country to engage in a massive human rights violation?

True, American presidents have given the green light to such things in the past: Sukarno's slaughter of suspected Communists in Indonesia in 1965, Pinochet's coup and subsequent crackdown on Allende supporters in Chile in 1973, the Salvadoran government's widespread human rights violations in the 1980s. Horrifying as these atrocities were, American conservatives could rationalize U.S. support for these dictatorships because they were U.S. allies.

But China? That's going to be a difficult sell for an electorate that's already been primed, by the Trump administration itself, to demonize Beijing.

So, in effect, the Bolton book has removed China from the 2020 election campaign. Trump will think twice about accusing Biden of cozy ties with Beijing when the Democrats can literally throw the book (Bolton's, that is) at the president.

Impeachment: Not Dead Yet

Trump loves to play the role of a cornered badger that emerges triumphant in the end. Impeachment would have given an ordinary politician pause. Trump simply held up the Senate's failure to convict as exoneration, despite all the damning evidence produced by the whistleblower and the subsequent Mueller investigation.

The Democrats wanted Bolton to testify during the hearings. He refused to do so voluntarily. Later, he said that he would testify before the Senate if it issued a subpoena. The Republicans, with the exception of Mitt Romney (R-UT) and Susan Collins (R-ME), voted against calling additional witnesses.

Bolton argues in his book that the Democrats made a mess of the impeachment inquiry. Yet, he could have corroborated the charge of collusion with Ukraine and provided evidence of impeachable offenses in other realms of foreign policy. He didn't do so.

Now, of course, some Republicans are saying that it would have been better for Bolton to have testified before Congress rather than save his revelations for now. "One of the things about making allegations in a book for $29.95 -- certainly it's going to be a best-seller I'm sure -- the problem is that when you're selling it in a book, you're not putting yourself in a position to be cross-examined," Tim Scott (R-SC) recently said .

If Scott and one other Republican had simply voted for additional witnesses, they could have made that happen. And they could have saved themselves the cost of buying Bolton's book.

In the end, it probably wouldn't have made much of a difference in the final votes on impeachment. Except for Romney, the Republicans were unwilling to break with the president.

Bolton's book, however, is disinterring all the issues surrounding impeachment and in a light unfavorable to the president. Bolton confirms the infamous quid pro quo -- military assistance in exchange for an investigation into the Ukraine dealings of Biden's son -- that Trump discussed in a phone call with the Ukrainian president and that was flagged by a whistleblower. "Nor, at the time, did I think Trump's comments in the call reflected any major change in direction; the linkage of the military assistance with the Giuliani fantasies was already baked in. The call was not the keystone for me, but simply another brick in the wall," Bolton writes .

Before you shell out $29.95 for the book (actually $32.50 list price), you might wait to see if Congress drags Bolton back to tell his story. This week, Adam Schiff (D-CA) hinted that he might depose the former national security advisor before the House Intelligence Committee.

Who knows? Trump might have to reckon with a second impeachment hearing as he heads into November.

The Benefits of Being Bolton

Bolton predictably criticizes Trump for not being sufficiently hawkish. The president wanted to withdraw troops from the Middle East. He wanted to make nice with North Korea. He had the gall to prioritize trade with China.

From a progressive point of view, that makes Bolton an unreliable narrator. Maybe he was tweaking the facts to make himself look stalwart and wise at the expense of a slow-witted, insufficiently martial president.

But here's the thing: Bolton hasn't written anything in his book that contradicts other accounts of the presidency. There was plenty of evidence of the quid pro quo with Ukraine. Trump did not hide his admiration for Xi Jinping. The president is obsessed with getting re-elected, not because he particularly likes his job but because he must prove that he is a winner.

What makes Bolton's observations most valuable is not their novelty or their acuity but his credentials as a hawk's hawk. His book isn't going to make any Democrats or independents or moderate Republicans change their minds about Trump. But it will introduce some doubts into hardcore conservative supporters. They might not publicly renounce the president. Like Bolton himself , they might not even pull the lever for the Democratic candidate.

But they might decide, because of Bolton, to stay home on November 3, just like so many Republicans decided not to attend Trump's rally in Tulsa this last weekend.

And that, ultimately, is what really puts the fear of Bolton into the Trump reelection campaign.

John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus.

[Jul 11, 2020] Mutiny on the Bounties by Ray McGovern

Jul 03, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

Has there been another mutiny in Trump's White House, as Obama's former ambassador to Russia piles on the nonsense about Trump being in Putin's pocket?


Special to Consortium News

C orporate media are binging on leaked Kool Aid not unlike the WMD concoction they offered 18 years ago to "justify" the U.S.-UK war of aggression on Iraq.

Now Michael McFaul, ambassador to Russia under President Obama, has been enlisted by The Washington Post 's editorial page honcho, Fred Hiatt, to draw on his expertise (read, incurable Russophobia) to help stick President Donald Trump back into "Putin's pocket." (This has become increasingly urgent as the canard of "Russiagate" -- including the linchpin claim that Russia hacked the DNC -- lies gasping for air.)

In an oped on Thursday McFaul presented a long list of Vladimir Putin's alleged crimes, offering a more ostensibly sophisticated version of amateur Russian specialist, Rep. Jason Crow's (D-CO) claim that: "Vladimir Putin wakes up every morning and goes to bed every night trying to figure out how to destroy American democracy."

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry with McFaul meeting Vladimir Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Moscow, Russia, on May 7, 2013. (State Department)

McFaul had -- well, let's call it an undistinguished career in Moscow. He arrived with a huge chip on his shoulder and proceeded to alienate just about all his hosts, save for the rabidly anti-Putin folks he openly and proudly cultivated. In a sense, McFaul became the epitome of what Henry Wooton described as the role of ambassador -- "an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country." What should not be so readily accepted is an ambassador who comes back home and just can't stop misleading.

Not to doubt McFaul's ulterior motives; one must assume him to be an "honest man" -- however misguided, in my opinion. He seems to be a disciple of the James Clapper-Curtis LeMay-Joe McCarthy School of Russian Analysis.

Clapper, a graduate summa cum laude , certainly had the Russians pegged! Clapper was allowed to stay as Barack Obama's director of national intelligence for three and a half years after perjuring himself in formal Senate testimony (on NSA's illegal eavesdropping). On May 28, 2017 Clapper told NBC's Chuck Todd about "the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique."

https://www.youtube.com/embed/tcN_tWk089w?feature=oembed

As a finale, in full knowledge of Clapper's proclivities regarding Russia, Obama appointed him to prepare the evidence-impoverished, misnomered "Intelligence Community Assessment" claiming that Putin did all he could, including hacking the DNC, to help Trump get elected -- the most embarrassing such "intelligence assessment" I have seen in half a century .

Obama and the National Security State

I have asked myself if Obama also had earned some kind of degree from the Clapper/LeMay/McCarthy School, or whether he simply lacked the courage to challenge the pitiably self-serving "analysis" of the National Security State. Then I re-read "Obama Misses the Afghan Exit-Ramp" of June 24, 2010 and was reminded of how deferential Obama was to the generals and the intelligence gurus, and how unconscionable the generals were -- like their predecessors in Vietnam -- in lying about always seeing light at the end of the proverbial tunnel.

Thankfully, now ten years later, this is all documented in Craig Whitlock's, "The Afghanistan Papers: At War With the Truth." Corporate media, who played an essential role in that "war with the truth", have not given Whitlock's damning story the attention it should command (surprise, surprise!). In any case, it strains credulity to think that Obama was unaware he was being lied to on Afghanistan.

Some Questions

Clark Gable (l.) with Charles Laughton (r.) in Mutiny on the Bounty, 1935.

Does no one see the irony today in the Democrats' bashing Trump on Afghanistan, with the full support of the Establishment media? The inevitable defeat there is one of the few demonstrable disasters not attributable directly to Trump, but you would not know that from the media. Are the uncorroborated reports of Russian bounties to kill U.S. troops aimed at making it appear that Trump, unable to stand up to Putin, let the Russians drive the rest of U.S. troops out of Afghanistan?

Does the current flap bespeak some kind of "Mutiny on the Bounties," so to speak, by a leaker aping Eric Chiaramella? Recall that the Democrats lionized the CIA official seconded to Trump's national security council as a "whistleblower" and proceeded to impeach Trump after Chiaramella leaked information on Trump's telephone call with the president of Ukraine. Far from being held to account, Chiaramella is probably expecting an influential job if his patron, Joe Biden, is elected president. Has there been another mutiny in Trump's White House?

And what does one make of the spectacle of Crow teaming up with Rep. Liz Cheney (R, WY) to restrict Trump's planned pull-out of troops from Afghanistan, which The Los Angeles Times reports has now been blocked until after the election?

Hiatt & McFaul: Caveat Editor

And who published McFaul's oped? Fred Hiatt, Washington Post editorial page editor for the past 20 years, who has a long record of listening to the whispers of anonymous intelligence sources and submerging/drowning the subjunctive mood with flat fact. This was the case with the (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the U.S.-UK attack. Readers of the Post were sure there were tons of WMD in Iraq. That Hiatt has invited McFaul on stage should come as no surprise.

To be fair, Hiatt belatedly acknowledged that the Post should have been more circumspect in its confident claims about the WMD. "If you look at the editorials we write running up [to the war], we state as flat fact that he [Saddam Hussein] has weapons of mass destruction," Hiatt said in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review . "If that's not true, it would have been better not to say it." [CJR, March/April 2004]

At this word of wisdom, Consortium News founder, the late Robert Parry, offered this comment: "Yes, that is a common principle of journalism, that if something isn't real, we're not supposed to confidently declare that it is." That Hiatt is still in that job speaks volumes.

'Uncorroborated, Contradicted, or Even Non-Existent'

It is sad to have to remind folks 18 years later that the "intelligence" on WMD in Iraq was not "mistaken;" it was fraudulent from the get-go. The culprits were finally exposed but never held to account.

Announcing on June 5, 2008, the bipartisan conclusions from a five-year study by the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Jay Rockefeller ( D-WV) said the attack on Iraq was launched "under false pretenses." He described the intelligence conjured up to "justify" war on Iraq as "uncorroborated, contradicted, or even non-existent."

Homework

Yogi Berra in 1956. (Wikipedia)

Here's an assignment due on Monday. Read McFaul's oped carefully. It appears under the title: "Trump would do anything for Putin. No wonder he's ignoring the Russian bounties: Russia's pattern of hostility matches Trump's pattern of accommodation."

And to give you a further taste, here is the first paragraph:

"Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to have paid Taliban rebels in Afghanistan to kill U.S. soldiers. Having resulted in at least one American death, and maybe more, these Russian bounties reportedly produced the desired outcome. While deeply disturbing, this effort by Putin is not surprising: It follows a clear pattern of ignoring international norms, rules and laws -- and daring the United States to do anything about it."

Full assignment for Monday: Read carefully through each paragraph of McFaul's text and select which of his claims you would put into one or more of the three categories adduced by Sen. Rockefeller 12 years ago about WMD on Iraq. With particular attention to the evidence behind McFaul's claims, determine which of the claims is (a) "uncorroborated"; which (b) "contradicted"; and which (c) "non-existent;" or (d) all of the above. For extra credit, find one that is supported by plausible evidence.

Yogi Berra might be surprised to hear us keep quoting him with "Deja vu, all over again." Sorry, Yogi, that's what it is; you coined it.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. During his 27-year career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed The President's Daily Brief for Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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Tags: Clark Gabel Curtis LeMay Donald Trump Eric Chiaramella Henry Wooton James Clapper Joe Biden Joe McCarthy Michael McFaul Ray McGovern Vladimir Putin Yogi Berra


Tarus77 , July 6, 2020 at 14:25

Gad, one wonders if it can ever get much lower in the press and the answer is yes, it can and will go lower, i.e. the mcfaul/hiatt tag team. They are still plumbing for the lows.

The question becomes just how stupid these two are or how stupid do they believe the readership is to read and believe this garbage.

Voice from Europe , July 6, 2020 at 11:58

By now the Russia did it ! is in effect a joke in Russia. Economically, politically, geo strategically China and Asia and Africa have become more important and reliable partners of Russia than the USA. And Europe is also dropping fast on the trustworthy partners list…..

John , July 5, 2020 at 12:55

Michael McFaul and Fred Hiatt are both long-time members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), flagship of the globalist “liberal world order”. The CFR and its many interlocking affiliates, along with their media assets and frontmen in government, have dominated US policy since WW2. Most of the Fed chairmen and secretaries of State, Treasury, Defense and CIA have been CFR members, including Jerome Powell and Mark Esper.

The major finance, energy, defense and media corporations are CFR sponsors, and several of their execs are members. David Rubenstein, billionaire founder of the notorious Carlyle Group, is the current CFR chairman. Laurence Fink, billionaire chairman of BlackRock, is a CFR director. See lists at the CFR website.

Anna , July 6, 2020 at 09:38

Michael McFaul and Fred Hiatt are both very active promoters of hate crimes. Neither has any decency hence decency is allergic to war profiteers and opportunistic liars.
The poor USA; to descend to such a deep moral hole that both Michael McFaul and Fred Hiatt are still alive and prospering. Shamelessness and presstituting are paid well in the US.

Juan M Escobedo , July 5, 2020 at 11:35

Dems and Reps are already mad.You cannot destroy what does not exist;like Democracy in these United States.Nor God or Putin could.This has always being a fallacy.This is not a democracy;same thing with”comunist China or the USSR.Those two were never socialist.There has never being a real Socialist or Communist country.

Guy , July 4, 2020 at 12:26

“It is sad to have to remind folks 18 years later that the “intelligence” on WMD in Iraq was not “mistaken;” it was fraudulent from the get-go. The culprits were finally exposed but never held to account.”
That statement goes to the crux of the matter .Why should journalists care about what is true or a lie in their reports ,they know they will never be held to account .They should be held to account through the court system . A lie by any journalist should be actionable by any court of law . The fear of jail time would sort out the scam journalists we presently have to endure . As it is they have perverted the profession of journalism and it is the law of the jungle .No true democracy should put up with this. We are surrounded with lies that are generated by the very establishment that should protect it’s citizens from same .

Skip Scott , July 4, 2020 at 15:36

They are spoon fed those lies by our “intelligence” agencies. As CNN’s Jeff Zucker said, “We’re not investigators, we’re journalists”.
Replace “journalists” with “toadies” or “shills” for our “intelligence” community and you’ve gotten to the truth of the matter.

Anna , July 6, 2020 at 09:50

The ‘journalists’ observe how things have been going on for Cheney the Traitor and Bush the lesser — nothing happened to the mega criminals. The hate-bursting and war-profiteering Cheney’s daughter has even squeezed into US Congress.
In a healthy society where human dignity is cherished, the Cheney family will be ostracized and the family name became a synonym for the word ‘traitor.’ In the unhealthy scoiety of Clintons, Obamas, Epstein, Mueller, Adelsons, Clapper, and Krystols, human dignity is a sin.

Ricard Coleman , July 6, 2020 at 11:42

Our institutions including journalism are not merely corrupt, they are degenerate. That is, the corruption is not occasional or the exception is is by design, desired and entirely normal.

Stan W. , July 4, 2020 at 12:10

I’m still confident that Durham’s investigation will expose and successfully prosecute the maggots that infest our government.

Skip Scott , July 4, 2020 at 15:29

What is the basis for this confidence?

John Puma , July 4, 2020 at 12:03

Re: whether Obumma “had earned some kind of degree from the Clapper/LeMay/McCarthy School” of Russia Analytics.

It would be a worthy addition to his degree collection featuring that earned from the Neville Chamberlain Night School of Critical Political Negotiation.

Jeff Harrison , July 4, 2020 at 11:16

Hmmm. Lessee. The US attacks Afghanistan with about the same legitimacy that we had when we attacked Iraq and the Taliban are in charge. We oust the Taliban from power and put our own puppets in place. What idiot thinks that the Taliban are going to need a bounty to kill Americans?

Wendy LaRiviere , July 4, 2020 at 18:29

Jeff Harrison, I like your logic. Plus, I understand that far fewer Americans are being killed in Afghanistan than were under Obama’s administration.

AnneR , July 4, 2020 at 10:27

Frankly, I am sick to death of the unwarranted, indeed bestial Russophobia that is megaphoned minute by minute on NPR and the BBC World Service (only radio here since my husband died). If it isn’t this latest trumped up (ho ho) charge, there are repeated mentions, in passing, of course, of the Russiagate, hacking, Kremlin control of the Strumpet to back up the latest bunch of lies. Doesn’t matter at *all* that Russiagate was debunked, that even Mueller couldn’t actually demonstrably pull the DNC/ruling elites rabbit out of the hat, that the impeachment of the Strumpet went nowhere. And it clearly – by its total absence on the above radio broadcasts – doesn’t matter one iota that the Pentagonal hasn’t gone along, that gaping holes in the confabulation are (and were) obvious to those who cared to think with half a mind awake and reflecting on past US ruling elite lies, untruths, obfuscations. Nope. Just repeat, repeat, repeat. Orwell would clap his hands (not because he agreed with the atrocious politics but the lesson is learnt).

Added to the whipped up anti-Russia, decidedly anti-Putin crapola – is of course the Russian peoples’ vote, decision making on their own country’s changes to the Basic Law (a form of Constitution). When the radio broadcasts the usual sickening anti-Russian/Putin propaganda regarding this vote immediately prior they would state that the changes would install Putin for many more years: no mention that he would have to be elected, i.e. voted by the populace into the presidency. (This was repeated ad infinitum without any elaboration.) No other proposed changes were mentioned – certainly not that the Duma would gain greater control over the governance of the country and over the president’s cabinet. I.e. that the popularly elected (ain’t that what we call democracy??) representatives in the Duma (parliament) would essentially have more power than the president.

But most significantly, to my mind, no one has (well of course not – this is Russia) raised the issue of the fact that it was the Russian people, the vox populi/hoi polloi, who have had some say in how they are to be governed, how their government will work for them. HOW much say have we had/do we have in how our government functions, works – let alone for us, the hoi polloi? When did we the citizenry last have a voting say on ANY sentence in the Constitution that governs us??? Ummm I do believe it was the creation of the wealthy British descended slave holding, real estate ethnic-cleansing lot who wrote and ratified the original document and the hardly dissimilar Congressional and state types who have over the years written and voted on various amendments. And it is the members of the upper classes in the Supreme Court who adjudicate on its application to various problems.

BUT We the hoi polloi have never, ever had a direct opportunity to individually vote for or against any single part of the Constitution which is supposed to be the “democratic” superstructure which governs us. Unlike the Russians a couple of days ago.

Richard Coleman , July 6, 2020 at 15:48

“HOW much say have we had/do we have in how our government functions, works…” See, that’s your mistake right there. WE don’t have a government. We need one, but we ain’t got one. THEY have a government which they let us go through the motions of electing. ‘Member back when Bernie was talking about a Political Revolution?

Here’s a little fact for you. The five most populous states have a total of 123,000,000 people. That’s 10 Senators. The five least populated states have a total of 3.5 million. That’s also 10 Senators. Democracy anyone?

vinnieoh , July 4, 2020 at 09:37

There have been three coup d’état within the US within the lifetimes of most that read these pages. The first was explained to us by Eisenhower only as he was exiting his time from the national stage; the MIC had co-opted our government. The second happened in 2000, with the putsch in Florida and then the adoption by the neocon cabal of Bush /Chaney of the PNAC blueprint “Strategies for Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (Defenses – hahahaha – shit!). The third happened late last year and early this year when the bottom-up grass-roots movement of progressivism was crushed by the DNC and the cold-warrior hack Biden was inserted as the champion of “the opposition party.”

And, make no mistake that Kamala Harris WILL be his running mate. It was always going to be Harris. It was to be Harris at the TOP of the ticket as the primaries began, but she wasn’t even placing in the top tier in any of the contests. However, the poohbahs and strategists of the DNC are nothing if not determined and consistent. If Biden should win, we should all start practicing now saying “President Harris” because that is what the future holds. For the DNC, she looks the part, she sounds the part, but more importantly she is the very definition of the status quo, corporate ass-kisser, MIC tool.

The professional political class have fully colluded to fatally cripple this democratic republic. “Democracy” is just a word they say like, “Where’s my kickback?” (excuse me – my “motivation”.) This bounty scam and the rehabilitation of GW Bush are nothing but a full blitzkrieg flanking of Trump on the right. And Trump of course is so far out of his depth that he actually believes that Israel is his friend. (A hint Donny: Israel is NO-ONE’S friend.)

What is most infuriating? hope-crushing? plain f$%&*#g scary? is that the majority of Americans from all quarters do not want any of what the professional political class keeps dumping on us. The very attempt at performing this upcoming election will finally and forever lay completely bare the collapse of a functioning government. It’s going to be very ugly, and it may very well be the end. Dog help us all.

Richard Coleman , July 6, 2020 at 15:51

Don’t you think that the assassination of JFK counts as a coup d’etat?

Zhu , July 7, 2020 at 02:10

Apres moi, le Deluge.

John Drake , July 7, 2020 at 11:25

Oh gosh how can you forget the Kennedy Assassination. Most people don’t realize he was had ordered the removal of a thousand advisors from Vietnam starting the process of completely cutting bait there, as he had in Laos and Cambodia. All of which made the generals apoplectic. The great secret about Vietnam-which Ellsberg discovered much latter, and mentioned in his book Secrets, another good read- was that every president had been warned it was likely futile. Kennedy was the only one who took that intelligence seriously-like it was actually intelligent intelligence.

Enter stage right Allen Dulles(fired CIA chief), the anti Castro Cubans, the Mafia and most important the MIC; exit Jack Kennedy.

Douglas, JFK why he died and why it matters is the best work on the subject. And no Oswald did not do it; it was a sniper team from different angles, but read the book it gets complicated.

Roger , July 4, 2020 at 09:11

from Counterpunch.org : “Around 15,000 Soviet troops perished in the Afghan War between 1979 and 1989. The US funneled more than $20 billion to the Mujahideen and other anti-Soviet fighters over that same period. This works out to a “bounty” of $1.33 million for each Soviet soldier killed.”

Skip Scott , July 4, 2020 at 08:35

I am wondering how Cheney and Crow can block Trump from withdrawing the troops from Afghanistan. Is Trump Commander in Chief, or not? How can two senators stop the Commander in Chief from commanding troop movements? I realize they control the budget, but aren’t they crossing into illegality by restricting Trump’s ability to “command”?

Toad Sprocket , July 4, 2020 at 16:49

Yeah, I imagine it’s illegal. Didn’t Lindsay Graham threaten the same thing when Trump was thinking of pulling troops/”advisers” from Syria? And other congress warmongers joined in though I don’t think any legislation was passed. They can’t be bothered to authorize the starts of wars but want to step in when someone tries to end them.

Oh, and Schumer on South Korea troops, I think that one did pass. Almost certainly illegal if it came down to it, but our government is of course lawless. And our courts full of judges who are bought off or moronic or both.

dean 1000 , July 4, 2020 at 06:52

The soft coup attempt continues Ray. More lies and bullshit. It may continue until election day. Will the media fess-up to its lies after the fact again?

Francis Lee , July 4, 2020 at 04:49

“Vladimir Putin wakes up every morning and goes to bed every night trying to figure out how to destroy American democracy.”

Yes, of course it is a well-known ‘fact’ that Putin has nothing better to do than destory American democracy, and I bet he has dreams about it too! But I am minded to think that if anybody has a penchant for destroying American democracy it is the powers that be in the US deep state, intelligence agencies, and zionist cliques controlling the President and Congress.

”Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.”

The American establishment seems to be suffering from a bad case of ‘projection’ as psychiatrists call it. That is to say accusing others of what they are themselves actually doing.

The whole idiotic circus would be hilarious if it were not so serious.

Antonia Young , July 4, 2020 at 12:20

Putin’s (and by extension the Russian Federation’s) primary objective is international stability. “Destroying America, dividing Americans is the last thing he wants.) Putin learned many lessons during the break-up of the U.S.S.R. observing the carpet baggers/oligarchs/vultures who descended on the weak nation, absconding with it’s wealth and resources at mere fractions of their real value. The deep state’s worst fear is the co-operation btwn Putin and President Trump to make the world more peaceful, stable, co-operative and prosperous.

rosemerry , July 4, 2020 at 16:10

The whole conceited and arrogant “belief” that
1. the USA has any resemblance to a democracy and
2 Pres. Putin has nothing else to do but think how he could do a better job of showing the destructive and irresponsible behavior of the USA than its own leaders” and media can do with no help
has no basis in reality.

If anything, Putin is such a stickler for international law, negotiations, avoidance of conflict that he is regarded by many as too Christian for this modern, individualistic, LBGTQ,”nobody matters but me” worldview of the USA!

Steve Naidamast , July 5, 2020 at 19:54

“If the enemy is self destructing, let them continue to do so…”

Napoleon

Zhu , July 7, 2020 at 02:17

“zionist cliques”: Christian Zionist fighting Fundies, eager for the End of the World, the Second Coming of Jesus.

delia ruhe , July 4, 2020 at 01:09

Yup, we got a Bountygate. Since my early morning visit to the Foreign Policy site, the place has exploded with breathless articles on the dastardly Putin and the cowardly Trump, who has so far failed to hold Putin to account. Reminded me of a similar explosion there when Russiagate finally got the attention the Dems thought it deserved.

(Anyone think that the intel community pays a fee to each of the FP columnists whenever one of their a propaganda narratives needs a push to get it off the ground?)

JOHN CHUCKMAN , July 4, 2020 at 08:52

Udo Ulfkotte was a German journalist.

He wrote a sensational book about the practices he experienced of the CIA paying German journalists to publish certain stories.

The book was a big best seller in Germany.

Its English translation was suppressed for years, but I believe is now available.

Susan Siens , July 5, 2020 at 16:30

Reply to John Chuckman: I’d love to read this book but it wasn’t available a few years ago when I looked. I’ll look again!

Voice from Europe , July 6, 2020 at 11:52

Gekaufte journalisten.
Ulfkotte admitted he signed off on numerous articles that were prepared for him during his career. The last year’s of his life he changed his mores and advocated “better die in truth than live with lies”.

Richard A. , July 4, 2020 at 00:59

I remember the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour from decades ago. Real experts on Russia like Dimitri Simes and Stephen Cohen were the ones to appear on that NewsHour. The NewsHour of today rarely has experts on Russia, just experts on Russia bashing–like Michael McFaul. Oh how the mighty have fallen.

Antonia Young , July 3, 2020 at 23:35

Thank you, Ray for your clarion voice in the midst of WMD-seventeen-point-oh. Will the American people have the wisdom to notice how many times we’re being fooled? And finally wake up and stop supporting these questionable news outlets? With appreciation for your excellent analysis, as usual. ~Tonia Young (Formerly with the Topanga Peace Alliance)

Blessthebeasts , July 4, 2020 at 11:55

The majority of Americans have a lot more to worry about than the latest nonsense about Russia. I think most people just tune it out.
The ones being fooled are the fools who have been lapping this crap up from the get go. The supposed educated class who think themselves superior and well informed because they read and listen to the propaganda of PBS, NPR, NYT etc.
They don’t seem to realize the ship is sinking while they’re playing these ridiculous games.

Susan Siens , July 5, 2020 at 16:34

The supposedly educated class, yes! It can be stunning how people believe anything they hear on PBS or NPR, and then they make fun of people who believe anything they hear on Fox News. What’s the difference? Both are propaganda tools.

And, yes, watch us go down in flames while so-called progressives boo-hoo about Trump thinking he’s above the law (like every other president before him). Our local “peace and justice” group sent me an email asking me to sign a petition supporting Robert Mueller. I was gobsmacked, and then I realized our local “peace and justice” group had been taken over by Democratic Party “resisters.” Jeezums, why is every word hijacked?

[Jul 10, 2020] The man behind Iraq WDM hoax rips Fake Russia Bounty Story

Jul 10, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

When Colin Powell of all people has to appear on MSNBC to slam fake reporting you know mainstream media has lost the plot.

In a rare moment, the former Secretary of State under Bush slammed the wall-to-wall coverage of the Russian bounties in Afghanistan story as "almost hysterical" . It's all the more awkard for MSNBC, which had him on the network Thursday to talk about it, given he's one of those 'never Trump' Bush-era officials, who despite a legacy of having fed the world lie after lie to invade Iraq, has since been given "resistance hero" status among liberals.

Describing that military commanders on the ground didn't give credence to The New York Times claim that Russia's GRU was paying Taliban and other militants to kill American soldiers, Powell said the media "got kind of out of control" in the first days after the initial report weeks ago.

"I know that our military commanders on the ground did not think that it was as serious a problem as the newspapers were reporting and television was reporting," Powell told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell. "It got kind of out of control before we really had an understanding of what had happened. I'm not sure we fully understand now."

"It's our commanders who are going to go deal with this kind of a threat, using intelligence given to them by the intelligence community," Powell continued. "But that has to be analyzed. It has to be attested. And then you have to go find out who the enemy is. And I think we were on top of that one, but it just got almost hysterical in the first few days."

He also deflated the ongoing manufactured atmosphere which seeks to maintain a perpetual Washington hawkish position vis-a-vis Moscow, based on perceived "Russian aggression".

"I don't think we're in a position to go to war with the Russians," Powell said. "I know Mr. Putin rather well. He's just figuring out a way to stay in power until 2036. The last thing he's looking for is a war, and the last thing he's looking for is a war with the United States of America."

[Jul 07, 2020] Mutiny on the Bounties by RAY McGOVERN

Highly recommended!
So they dusted of McFaul to provide the support for bounty provocation. I wonder whether McFaul one one of Epstein guests, or what ?
So who was the clone of Ciaramella this time? People want to know the hero
Notable quotes:
"... Not to doubt McFaul's ulterior motives; one must assume him to be an "honest man" -- however misguided, in my opinion. He seems to be a disciple of the James Clapper-Curtis LeMay-Joe McCarthy School of Russian Analysis. ..."
"... Clapper, a graduate summa cum laude , certainly had the Russians pegged! Clapper was allowed to stay as Barack Obama's director of national intelligence for three and a half years after perjuring himself in formal Senate testimony (on NSA's illegal eavesdropping). On May 28, 2017 Clapper told NBC's Chuck Todd about "the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique." ..."
"... As a finale, in full knowledge of Clapper's proclivities regarding Russia, Obama appointed him to prepare the evidence-impoverished, misnomered "Intelligence Community Assessment" claiming that Putin did all he could, including hacking the DNC, to help Trump get elected -- the most embarrassing such "intelligence assessment" I have seen in half a century . ..."
"... Does no one see the irony today in the Democrats' bashing Trump on Afghanistan, with the full support of the Establishment media? The inevitable defeat there is one of the few demonstrable disasters not attributable directly to Trump, but you would not know that from the media. Are the uncorroborated reports of Russian bounties to kill U.S. troops aimed at making it appear that Trump, unable to stand up to Putin, let the Russians drive the rest of U.S. troops out of Afghanistan? ..."
"... Does the current flap bespeak some kind of "Mutiny on the Bounties," so to speak, by a leaker aping Eric Chiaramella? Recall that the Democrats lionized the CIA official seconded to Trump's national security council as a "whistleblower" and proceeded to impeach Trump after Chiaramella leaked information on Trump's telephone call with the president of Ukraine. Far from being held to account, Chiaramella is probably expecting an influential job if his patron, Joe Biden, is elected president. Has there been another mutiny in Trump's White House? ..."
"... It is sad to have to remind folks 18 years later that the "intelligence" on WMD in Iraq was not "mistaken;" it was fraudulent from the get-go. The culprits were finally exposed but never held to account. ..."
"... Here's an assignment due on Monday. Read McFaul's oped carefully. It appears under the title: "Trump would do anything for Putin. No wonder he's ignoring the Russian bounties: Russia's pattern of hostility matches Trump's pattern of accommodation." ..."
"... Full assignment for Monday: Read carefully through each paragraph of McFaul's text and select which of his claims you would put into one or more of the three categories adduced by Sen. Rockefeller 12 years ago about WMD on Iraq. With particular attention to the evidence behind McFaul's claims, determine which of the claims is (a) "uncorroborated"; which (b) "contradicted"; and which (c) "non-existent;" or (d) all of the above. For extra credit, find one that is supported by plausible evidence. ..."
"... Michael McFaul and Fred Hiatt are both long-time members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), flagship of the globalist “liberal world order”. The CFR and its many interlocking affiliates, along with their media assets and frontmen in government, have dominated US policy since WW2. Most of the Fed chairmen and secretaries of State, Treasury, Defense and CIA have been CFR members, including Jerome Powell and Mark Esper. ..."
"... The major finance, energy, defense and media corporations are CFR sponsors, and several of their execs are members. David Rubenstein, billionaire founder of the notorious Carlyle Group, is the current CFR chairman. Laurence Fink, billionaire chairman of BlackRock, is a CFR director. See lists at the CFR website. ..."
"... “It is sad to have to remind folks 18 years later that the “intelligence” on WMD in Iraq was not “mistaken;” it was fraudulent from the get-go. The culprits were finally exposed but never held to account.” ..."
"... They are spoon fed those lies by our “intelligence” agencies. As CNN’s Jeff Zucker said, “We’re not investigators, we’re journalists”. Replace “journalists” with “toadies” or “shills” for our “intelligence” community and you’ve gotten to the truth of the matter. ..."
"... In the unhealthy society of Clintons, Obamas, Epstein, Mueller, Adelsons, Clapper, and Krystols, human dignity is a sin. ..."
"... Our institutions including journalism are not merely corrupt, they are degenerate. That is, the corruption is not occasional or the exception is is by design, desired and entirely normal. ..."
"... from Counterpunch.org : “Around 15,000 Soviet troops perished in the Afghan War between 1979 and 1989. The US funneled more than $20 billion to the Mujahideen and other anti-Soviet fighters over that same period. This works out to a “bounty” of $1.33 million for each Soviet soldier killed.” ..."
"... Yes, of course it is a well-known ‘fact’ that Putin has nothing better to do than destory American democracy, and I bet he has dreams about it too! But I am minded to think that if anybody has a penchant for destroying American democracy it is the powers that be in the US deep state, intelligence agencies, and zionist cliques controlling the President and Congress. ..."
"... Udo Ulfkotte was a German journalist. He wrote a sensational book about the practices he experienced of the CIA paying German journalists to publish certain stories. The book was a big best seller in Germany. Its English translation was suppressed for years, but I believe is now available. ..."
"... Gekaufte journalisten. Ulfkotte admitted he signed off on numerous articles that were prepared for him during his career. The last year’s of his life he changed his mores and advocated “better die in truth than live with lies”. ..."
Jul 03, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

RAY McGOVERN: Mutiny on the Bounties

Has there been another mutiny in Trump's White House, as Obama's former ambassador to Russia piles on the nonsense about Trump being in Putin's pocket?

By Ray McGovern
Special to Consortium News

C orporate media are binging on leaked Kool Aid not unlike the WMD concoction they offered 18 years ago to "justify" the U.S.-UK war of aggression on Iraq.

Now Michael McFaul, ambassador to Russia under President Obama, has been enlisted by The Washington Post 's editorial page honcho, Fred Hiatt, to draw on his expertise (read, incurable Russophobia) to help stick President Donald Trump back into "Putin's pocket." (This has become increasingly urgent as the canard of "Russiagate" -- including the linchpin claim that Russia hacked the DNC -- lies gasping for air.)

In an oped on Thursday McFaul presented a long list of Vladimir Putin's alleged crimes, offering a more ostensibly sophisticated version of amateur Russian specialist, Rep. Jason Crow's (D-CO) claim that: "Vladimir Putin wakes up every morning and goes to bed every night trying to figure out how to destroy American democracy."

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry with McFaul meeting Vladimir Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Moscow, Russia, on May 7, 2013. (State Department)

McFaul had -- well, let's call it an undistinguished career in Moscow. He arrived with a huge chip on his shoulder and proceeded to alienate just about all his hosts, save for the rabidly anti-Putin folks he openly and proudly cultivated. In a sense, McFaul became the epitome of what Henry Wooton described as the role of ambassador -- "an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country." What should not be so readily accepted is an ambassador who comes back home and just can't stop misleading.

Not to doubt McFaul's ulterior motives; one must assume him to be an "honest man" -- however misguided, in my opinion. He seems to be a disciple of the James Clapper-Curtis LeMay-Joe McCarthy School of Russian Analysis.

Clapper, a graduate summa cum laude , certainly had the Russians pegged! Clapper was allowed to stay as Barack Obama's director of national intelligence for three and a half years after perjuring himself in formal Senate testimony (on NSA's illegal eavesdropping). On May 28, 2017 Clapper told NBC's Chuck Todd about "the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique."

https://www.youtube.com/embed/tcN_tWk089w?feature=oembed

As a finale, in full knowledge of Clapper's proclivities regarding Russia, Obama appointed him to prepare the evidence-impoverished, misnomered "Intelligence Community Assessment" claiming that Putin did all he could, including hacking the DNC, to help Trump get elected -- the most embarrassing such "intelligence assessment" I have seen in half a century .

Obama and the National Security State

I have asked myself if Obama also had earned some kind of degree from the Clapper/LeMay/McCarthy School, or whether he simply lacked the courage to challenge the pitiably self-serving "analysis" of the National Security State. Then I re-read "Obama Misses the Afghan Exit-Ramp" of June 24, 2010 and was reminded of how deferential Obama was to the generals and the intelligence gurus, and how unconscionable the generals were -- like their predecessors in Vietnam -- in lying about always seeing light at the end of the proverbial tunnel.

Thankfully, now ten years later, this is all documented in Craig Whitlock's, "The Afghanistan Papers: At War With the Truth." Corporate media, who played an essential role in that "war with the truth", have not given Whitlock's damning story the attention it should command (surprise, surprise!). In any case, it strains credulity to think that Obama was unaware he was being lied to on Afghanistan.

Some Questions

Clark Gable (l.) with Charles Laughton (r.) in Mutiny on the Bounty, 1935.

Does no one see the irony today in the Democrats' bashing Trump on Afghanistan, with the full support of the Establishment media? The inevitable defeat there is one of the few demonstrable disasters not attributable directly to Trump, but you would not know that from the media. Are the uncorroborated reports of Russian bounties to kill U.S. troops aimed at making it appear that Trump, unable to stand up to Putin, let the Russians drive the rest of U.S. troops out of Afghanistan?

Does the current flap bespeak some kind of "Mutiny on the Bounties," so to speak, by a leaker aping Eric Chiaramella? Recall that the Democrats lionized the CIA official seconded to Trump's national security council as a "whistleblower" and proceeded to impeach Trump after Chiaramella leaked information on Trump's telephone call with the president of Ukraine. Far from being held to account, Chiaramella is probably expecting an influential job if his patron, Joe Biden, is elected president. Has there been another mutiny in Trump's White House?

And what does one make of the spectacle of Crow teaming up with Rep. Liz Cheney (R, WY) to restrict Trump's planned pull-out of troops from Afghanistan, which The Los Angeles Times reports has now been blocked until after the election?

Hiatt & McFaul: Caveat Editor

And who published McFaul's oped? Fred Hiatt, Washington Post editorial page editor for the past 20 years, who has a long record of listening to the whispers of anonymous intelligence sources and submerging/drowning the subjunctive mood with flat fact. This was the case with the (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the U.S.-UK attack. Readers of the Post were sure there were tons of WMD in Iraq. That Hiatt has invited McFaul on stage should come as no surprise.

To be fair, Hiatt belatedly acknowledged that the Post should have been more circumspect in its confident claims about the WMD. "If you look at the editorials we write running up [to the war], we state as flat fact that he [Saddam Hussein] has weapons of mass destruction," Hiatt said in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review . "If that's not true, it would have been better not to say it." [CJR, March/April 2004]

At this word of wisdom, Consortium News founder, the late Robert Parry, offered this comment: "Yes, that is a common principle of journalism, that if something isn't real, we're not supposed to confidently declare that it is." That Hiatt is still in that job speaks volumes.

'Uncorroborated, Contradicted, or Even Non-Existent'

It is sad to have to remind folks 18 years later that the "intelligence" on WMD in Iraq was not "mistaken;" it was fraudulent from the get-go. The culprits were finally exposed but never held to account.

Announcing on June 5, 2008, the bipartisan conclusions from a five-year study by the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Jay Rockefeller ( D-WV) said the attack on Iraq was launched "under false pretenses." He described the intelligence conjured up to "justify" war on Iraq as "uncorroborated, contradicted, or even non-existent."

Homework

Yogi Berra in 1956. (Wikipedia)

Here's an assignment due on Monday. Read McFaul's oped carefully. It appears under the title: "Trump would do anything for Putin. No wonder he's ignoring the Russian bounties: Russia's pattern of hostility matches Trump's pattern of accommodation."

And to give you a further taste, here is the first paragraph:

"Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to have paid Taliban rebels in Afghanistan to kill U.S. soldiers. Having resulted in at least one American death, and maybe more, these Russian bounties reportedly produced the desired outcome. While deeply disturbing, this effort by Putin is not surprising: It follows a clear pattern of ignoring international norms, rules and laws -- and daring the United States to do anything about it."

Full assignment for Monday: Read carefully through each paragraph of McFaul's text and select which of his claims you would put into one or more of the three categories adduced by Sen. Rockefeller 12 years ago about WMD on Iraq. With particular attention to the evidence behind McFaul's claims, determine which of the claims is (a) "uncorroborated"; which (b) "contradicted"; and which (c) "non-existent;" or (d) all of the above. For extra credit, find one that is supported by plausible evidence.

Yogi Berra might be surprised to hear us keep quoting him with "Deja vu, all over again." Sorry, Yogi, that's what it is; you coined it.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. During his 27-year career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed The President's Daily Brief for Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.


Tarus77 , July 6, 2020 at 14:25

Gad, one wonders if it can ever get much lower in the press and the answer is yes, it can and will go lower, i.e. the mcfaul/hiatt tag team. They are still plumbing for the lows.

The question becomes just how stupid these two are or how stupid do they believe the readership is to read and believe this garbage.

Voice from Europe , July 6, 2020 at 11:58

By now the Russia did it ! is in effect a joke in Russia. Economically, politically, geo strategically China and Asia and Africa have become more important and reliable partners of Russia than the USA. And Europe is also dropping fast on the trustworthy partners list…..

John , July 5, 2020 at 12:55

Michael McFaul and Fred Hiatt are both long-time members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), flagship of the globalist “liberal world order”. The CFR and its many interlocking affiliates, along with their media assets and frontmen in government, have dominated US policy since WW2. Most of the Fed chairmen and secretaries of State, Treasury, Defense and CIA have been CFR members, including Jerome Powell and Mark Esper.

The major finance, energy, defense and media corporations are CFR sponsors, and several of their execs are members. David Rubenstein, billionaire founder of the notorious Carlyle Group, is the current CFR chairman. Laurence Fink, billionaire chairman of BlackRock, is a CFR director. See lists at the CFR website.

Anna , July 6, 2020 at 09:38

Michael McFaul and Fred Hiatt are both very active promoters of hate crimes. Neither has any decency hence decency is allergic to war profiteers and opportunistic liars.

The poor USA; to descend to such a deep moral hole that both Michael McFaul and Fred Hiatt are still alive and prospering. Shamelessness and presstituting are paid well in the US.

Juan M Escobedo , July 5, 2020 at 11:35

Dems and Reps are already mad. You cannot destroy what does not exist; like Democracy in these United States. Nor God or Putin could. This has always being a fallacy. This is not a democracy; same thing with ”communist" China or the USSR .Those two were never socialist. There has never being a real Socialist or Communist country.

Guy , July 4, 2020 at 12:26

“It is sad to have to remind folks 18 years later that the “intelligence” on WMD in Iraq was not “mistaken;” it was fraudulent from the get-go. The culprits were finally exposed but never held to account.”

That statement goes to the crux of the matter.Why should journalists care about what is true or a lie in their reports ,they know they will never be held to account .They should be held to account through the court system . A lie by any journalist should be actionable by any court of law . The fear of jail time would sort out the scam journalists we presently have to endure .

As it is they have perverted the profession of journalism and it is the law of the jungle .No true democracy should put up with this. We are surrounded with lies that are generated by the very establishment that should protect it’s citizens from same .

Skip Scott , July 4, 2020 at 15:36

They are spoon fed those lies by our “intelligence” agencies. As CNN’s Jeff Zucker said, “We’re not investigators, we’re journalists”. Replace “journalists” with “toadies” or “shills” for our “intelligence” community and you’ve gotten to the truth of the matter.

Anna , July 6, 2020 at 09:50

The ‘journalists’ observe how things have been going on for Cheney the Traitor and Bush the lesser — nothing happened to the mega criminals. The hate-bursting and war-profiteering Cheney’s daughter has even squeezed into US Congress.

In a healthy society where human dignity is cherished, the Cheney family will be ostracized and the family name became a synonym for the word ‘traitor.’ In the unhealthy society of Clintons, Obamas, Epstein, Mueller, Adelsons, Clapper, and Krystols, human dignity is a sin.

Ricard Coleman , July 6, 2020 at 11:42

Our institutions including journalism are not merely corrupt, they are degenerate. That is, the corruption is not occasional or the exception is is by design, desired and entirely normal.

Stan W. , July 4, 2020 at 12:10

I’m still confident that Durham’s investigation will expose and successfully prosecute the maggots that infest our government.

Skip Scott , July 4, 2020 at 15:29

What is the basis for this confidence?

John Puma , July 4, 2020 at 12:03

Re: whether Obumma “had earned some kind of degree from the Clapper/LeMay/McCarthy School” of Russia Analytics.

It would be a worthy addition to his degree collection featuring that earned from the Neville Chamberlain Night School of Critical Political Negotiation.

Jeff Harrison , July 4, 2020 at 11:16

Hmmm. Lessee. The US attacks Afghanistan with about the same legitimacy that we had when we attacked Iraq and the Taliban are in charge. We oust the Taliban from power and put our own puppets in place. What idiot thinks that the Taliban are going to need a bounty to kill Americans?

Wendy LaRiviere , July 4, 2020 at 18:29

Jeff Harrison, I like your logic. Plus, I understand that far fewer Americans are being killed in Afghanistan than were under Obama’s administration.

AnneR , July 4, 2020 at 10:27

Frankly, I am sick to death of the unwarranted, indeed bestial Russophobia that is megaphoned minute by minute on NPR and the BBC World Service (only radio here since my husband died). If it isn’t this latest trumped up (ho ho) charge, there are repeated mentions, in passing, of course, of the Russiagate, hacking, Kremlin control of the Strumpet to back up the latest bunch of lies.

Doesn’t matter at *all* that Russiagate was debunked, that even Mueller couldn’t actually demonstrably pull the DNC/ruling elites rabbit out of the hat, that the impeachment of the Strumpet went nowhere. And it clearly – by its total absence on the above radio broadcasts – doesn’t matter one iota that the Pentagonal hasn’t gone along, that gaping holes in the confabulation are (and were) obvious to those who cared to think with half a mind awake and reflecting on past US ruling elite lies, untruths, obfuscations. Nope. Just repeat, repeat, repeat. Orwell would clap his hands (not because he agreed with the atrocious politics but the lesson is learnt).

Added to the whipped up anti-Russia, decidedly anti-Putin crapola – is of course the Russian peoples’ vote, decision making on their own country’s changes to the Basic Law (a form of Constitution). When the radio broadcasts the usual sickening anti-Russian/Putin propaganda regarding this vote immediately prior they would state that the changes would install Putin for many more years: no mention that he would have to be elected, i.e. voted by the populace into the presidency. (This was repeated ad infinitum without any elaboration.) No other proposed changes were mentioned – certainly not that the Duma would gain greater control over the governance of the country and over the president’s cabinet. I.e. that the popularly elected (ain’t that what we call democracy??) representatives in the Duma (parliament) would essentially have more power than the president.

But most significantly, to my mind, no one has (well of course not – this is Russia) raised the issue of the fact that it was the Russian people, the vox populi/hoi polloi, who have had some say in how they are to be governed, how their government will work for them. HOW much say have we had/do we have in how our government functions, works – let alone for us, the hoi polloi? When did we the citizenry last have a voting say on ANY sentence in the Constitution that governs us??? Ummm I do believe it was the creation of the wealthy British descended slave holding, real estate ethnic-cleansing lot who wrote and ratified the original document and the hardly dissimilar Congressional and state types who have over the years written and voted on various amendments. And it is the members of the upper classes in the Supreme Court who adjudicate on its application to various problems.

BUT We the hoi polloi have never, ever had a direct opportunity to individually vote for or against any single part of the Constitution which is supposed to be the “democratic” superstructure which governs us. Unlike the Russians a couple of days ago.

Richard Coleman , July 6, 2020 at 15:48

“HOW much say have we had/do we have in how our government functions, works…” See, that’s your mistake right there. WE don’t have a government. We need one, but we ain’t got one. THEY have a government which they let us go through the motions of electing. ‘Member back when Bernie was talking about a Political Revolution?

Here’s a little fact for you. The five most populous states have a total of 123,000,000 people. That’s 10 Senators. The five least populated states have a total of 3.5 million. That’s also 10 Senators. Democracy anyone?

vinnieoh , July 4, 2020 at 09:37

There have been three coup d’état within the US within the lifetimes of most that read these pages. The first was explained to us by Eisenhower only as he was exiting his time from the national stage; the MIC had co-opted our government. The second happened in 2000, with the putsch in Florida and then the adoption by the neocon cabal of Bush /Chaney of the PNAC blueprint “Strategies for Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (Defenses – hahahaha – shit!). The third happened late last year and early this year when the bottom-up grass-roots movement of progressivism was crushed by the DNC and the cold-warrior hack Biden was inserted as the champion of “the opposition party.”

And, make no mistake that Kamala Harris WILL be his running mate. It was always going to be Harris. It was to be Harris at the TOP of the ticket as the primaries began, but she wasn’t even placing in the top tier in any of the contests. However, the poohbahs and strategists of the DNC are nothing if not determined and consistent. If Biden should win, we should all start practicing now saying “President Harris” because that is what the future holds. For the DNC, she looks the part, she sounds the part, but more importantly she is the very definition of the status quo, corporate ass-kisser, MIC tool.

The professional political class have fully colluded to fatally cripple this democratic republic. “Democracy” is just a word they say like, “Where’s my kickback?” (excuse me – my “motivation”.) This bounty scam and the rehabilitation of GW Bush are nothing but a full blitzkrieg flanking of Trump on the right. And Trump of course is so far out of his depth that he actually believes that Israel is his friend. (A hint Donny: Israel is NO-ONE’S friend.)

What is most infuriating? hope-crushing? plain f$%&*#g scary? is that the majority of Americans from all quarters do not want any of what the professional political class keeps dumping on us. The very attempt at performing this upcoming election will finally and forever lay completely bare the collapse of a functioning government. It’s going to be very ugly, and it may very well be the end. Dog help us all.

Richard Coleman , July 6, 2020 at 15:51

Don’t you think that the assassination of JFK counts as a coup d’etat?

Zhu , July 7, 2020 at 02:10

Apres moi, le Deluge.

John Drake , July 7, 2020 at 11:25

Oh gosh how can you forget the Kennedy Assassination. Most people don’t realize he was had ordered the removal of a thousand advisors from Vietnam starting the process of completely cutting bait there, as he had in Laos and Cambodia. All of which made the generals apoplectic. The great secret about Vietnam-which Ellsberg discovered much latter, and mentioned in his book Secrets, another good read- was that every president had been warned it was likely futile. Kennedy was the only one who took that intelligence seriously-like it was actually intelligent intelligence.

Enter stage right Allen Dulles (fired CIA chief), the anti Castro Cubans, the Mafia and most important the MIC; exit Jack Kennedy.

Douglas, JFK why he died and why it matters is the best work on the subject. And no Oswald did not do it; it was a sniper team from different angles, but read the book it gets complicated.

Roger , July 4, 2020 at 09:11

from Counterpunch.org : “Around 15,000 Soviet troops perished in the Afghan War between 1979 and 1989. The US funneled more than $20 billion to the Mujahideen and other anti-Soviet fighters over that same period. This works out to a “bounty” of $1.33 million for each Soviet soldier killed.”

Skip Scott , July 4, 2020 at 08:35

I am wondering how Cheney and Crow can block Trump from withdrawing the troops from Afghanistan. Is Trump Commander in Chief, or not? How can two senators stop the Commander in Chief from commanding troop movements? I realize they control the budget, but aren’t they crossing into illegality by restricting Trump’s ability to “command”?

Toad Sprocket , July 4, 2020 at 16:49

Yeah, I imagine it’s illegal. Didn’t Lindsay Graham threaten the same thing when Trump was thinking of pulling troops/”advisers” from Syria? And other congress warmongers joined in though I don’t think any legislation was passed. They can’t be bothered to authorize the starts of wars but want to step in when someone tries to end them.

Oh, and Schumer on South Korea troops, I think that one did pass. Almost certainly illegal if it came down to it, but our government is of course lawless. And our courts full of judges who are bought off or moronic or both.

dean 1000 , July 4, 2020 at 06:52

The soft coup attempt continues Ray. More lies and bullshit. It may continue until election day. Will the media fess-up to its lies after the fact again?

Francis Lee , July 4, 2020 at 04:49

“Vladimir Putin wakes up every morning and goes to bed every night trying to figure out how to destroy American democracy.”

Yes, of course it is a well-known ‘fact’ that Putin has nothing better to do than destory American democracy, and I bet he has dreams about it too! But I am minded to think that if anybody has a penchant for destroying American democracy it is the powers that be in the US deep state, intelligence agencies, and zionist cliques controlling the President and Congress.

”Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.”

The American establishment seems to be suffering from a bad case of ‘projection’ as psychiatrists call it. That is to say accusing others of what they are themselves actually doing.

The whole idiotic circus would be hilarious if it were not so serious.

Antonia Young , July 4, 2020 at 12:20

Putin’s (and by extension the Russian Federation’s) primary objective is international stability. “Destroying America, dividing Americans is the last thing he wants.) Putin learned many lessons during the break-up of the U.S.S.R. observing the carpet baggers/oligarchs/vultures who descended on the weak nation, absconding with it’s wealth and resources at mere fractions of their real value. The deep state’s worst fear is the co-operation btwn Putin and President Trump to make the world more peaceful, stable, co-operative and prosperous.

rosemerry , July 4, 2020 at 16:10

The whole conceited and arrogant “belief” that

  1. The USA has any resemblance to a democracy and
  2. Pres. Putin has nothing else to do but think how he could do a better job of showing the destructive and irresponsible behavior of the USA than its own leaders” and media can do with no help has no basis in reality.

If anything, Putin is such a stickler for international law, negotiations, avoidance of conflict that he is regarded by many as too Christian for this modern, individualistic, LBGTQ, ”nobody matters but me” worldview of the USA!

Steve Naidamast , July 5, 2020 at 19:54

“If the enemy is self destructing, let them continue to do so…”

Napoleon

Zhu , July 7, 2020 at 02:17

“zionist cliques”: Christian Zionist fighting Fundies, eager for the End of the World, the Second Coming of Jesus.

delia ruhe , July 4, 2020 at 01:09

Yup, we got a Bountygate. Since my early morning visit to the Foreign Policy site, the place has exploded with breathless articles on the dastardly Putin and the cowardly Trump, who has so far failed to hold Putin to account. Reminded me of a similar explosion there when Russiagate finally got the attention the Dems thought it deserved.

(Anyone think that the intel community pays a fee to each of the FP columnists whenever one of their a propaganda narratives needs a push to get it off the ground?)

JOHN CHUCKMAN , July 4, 2020 at 08:52

Udo Ulfkotte was a German journalist. He wrote a sensational book about the practices he experienced of the CIA paying German journalists to publish certain stories. The book was a big best seller in Germany. Its English translation was suppressed for years, but I believe is now available.

Susan Siens , July 5, 2020 at 16:30

Reply to John Chuckman: I’d love to read this book but it wasn’t available a few years ago when I looked. I’ll look again!

Voice from Europe , July 6, 2020 at 11:52

Gekaufte journalisten. Ulfkotte admitted he signed off on numerous articles that were prepared for him during his career. The last year’s of his life he changed his mores and advocated “better die in truth than live with lies”.

Richard A. , July 4, 2020 at 00:59

I remember the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour from decades ago. Real experts on Russia like Dimitri Simes and Stephen Cohen were the ones to appear on that NewsHour. The NewsHour of today rarely has experts on Russia, just experts on Russia bashing–like Michael McFaul. Oh how the mighty have fallen.

Antonia Young , July 3, 2020 at 23:35

Thank you, Ray for your clarion voice in the midst of WMD-seventeen-point-oh. Will the American people have the wisdom to notice how many times we’re being fooled? And finally wake up and stop supporting these questionable news outlets? With appreciation for your excellent analysis, as usual. ~Tonia Young (Formerly with the Topanga Peace Alliance)

Blessthebeasts , July 4, 2020 at 11:55

The majority of Americans have a lot more to worry about than the latest nonsense about Russia. I think most people just tune it out.

The ones being fooled are the fools who have been lapping this crap up from the get go. The supposed educated class who think themselves superior and well informed because they read and listen to the propaganda of PBS, NPR, NYT etc.

They don’t seem to realize the ship is sinking while they’re playing these ridiculous games.

Susan Siens , July 5, 2020 at 16:34

The supposedly educated class, yes! It can be stunning how people believe anything they hear on PBS or NPR, and then they make fun of people who believe anything they hear on Fox News. What’s the difference? Both are propaganda tools.

And, yes, watch us go down in flames while so-called progressives boo-hoo about Trump thinking he’s above the law (like every other president before him). Our local “peace and justice” group sent me an email asking me to sign a petition supporting Robert Mueller. I was gobsmacked, and then I realized our local “peace and justice” group had been taken over by Democratic Party “resisters.” Jeezums, why is every word hijacked?

[Jul 07, 2020] Vladimir Putin wakes up every morning and goes to bed every night trying to figure out how to destroy American democracy

Jul 07, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

In an oped on Thursday McFaul presented a long list of Vladimir Putin's alleged crimes, offering a more ostensibly sophisticated version of amateur Russian specialist, Rep. Jason Crow's (D-CO) claim that: "Vladimir Putin wakes up every morning and goes to bed every night trying to figure out how to destroy American democracy."

Francis Lee , July 4, 2020 at 04:49

“Vladimir Putin wakes up every morning and goes to bed every night trying to figure out how to destroy American democracy.”

Yes, of course it is a well-known ‘fact’ that Putin has nothing better to do than destory American democracy, and I bet he has dreams about it too! But I am minded to think that if anybody has a penchant for destroying American democracy it is the powers that be in the US deep state, intelligence agencies, and zionist cliques controlling the President and Congress.

”Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.”

The American establishment seems to be suffering from a bad case of ‘projection’ as psychiatrists call it. That is to say accusing others of what they are themselves actually doing.

The whole idiotic circus would be hilarious if it were not so serious.

[Jul 07, 2020] The value of Trumpo in exposing the Deep State and controlled by intelligence services MSM

Jul 07, 2020 | www.unz.com

David Rodriguez , says: July 6, 2020 at 12:56 pm GMT

@Robert White how self-important, arrogant, and entitled these jerks are, they would understand the volcanic rage directed at Trump. But there is more. Many of these people really are utterly corrupt in the sense that they have made huge amounts of money through illegal deals, influence-peddling, etc. They felt secure in the knowledge that Hillary Clinton was surely not going to go after them, though she might have insisted on a piece of the pie,, like the greasy, small-town lawyer she is. Now things are not nearly so sure and they know it.
Trump is far from perfect, in any way you can imagine. Come November, after he has used Joe Biden as a dishrag, Mr. White and friends will suffer a real case of the sadz.

[Jul 07, 2020] The five Eyes need an enemy to keep budgets up, anyone will do, and Russia is Wall street's favorite bogey, keeping China out of the limelight.

Jul 07, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Antonym , Jul 6 2020 3:07 utc | 82

My impression at this point:

Russia since Putin does not offer much global profit; Xi Jinping on the other hand does, for (manufacturing) stock market darlings like Apple, Amazon or Walmart etc. The five Eyes need an enemy to keep budgets up, anyone will do, and Russia is Wall street's favorite bogey, keeping China out of the limelight.

Western left keeps on supporting Xi, bedazzled by his orchestrated propaganda of being a benign ruler. They barely care about Russia, the main activity is denigrating their own West: "we" are bad = some European colonialists and fascists of two or more generations ago .

[Jul 06, 2020] US claim of 'Russian Bounty' plot in Afghanistan is dubious and dangerous - The Grayzone

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... the essential backdrop for the timing of this story. It really reveals how completely decayed mainstream media is as an institution, that none of these reporters protested the story, didn't see fit to do any independent investigation into it. At best they would print a Russian denial which counts for nothing in the US, or a Taliban denial which counts for nothing in the US. And then and this gets into the domestic political angle because so much of Russiagate, while it's been crafted by former or current intelligence officials, depends on the Democratic Party and it punditocracy, MSNBC and mainstream media as a projection megaphone, as its Mighty Wurlitzer. ..."
"... That took place in this case because, according to this story, Donald Trump had been briefed on Putin paying bounties to the Taliban and he chose to do nothing. Which, of course Trump denies, but that counts for nothing as well. But, again, there's been no independent confirmation of any of this. And now we get into the domestic part, which is that this new Republican anti-Trump operation, The Lincoln Project, had a flashy ad ready to go almost minutes after the story dropped. ..."
"... They're just, like, on meth at Steve Schmidt's political Batcave, just churning this material out. But I feel like they had an inkling, like this story was coming. It just the coordination and timing was impeccable. ..."
"... And The Lincoln Project is something that James Carville, the veteran Democratic consultant, has said is doing more than any Democrat or any Democratic consultant to elect Joe Biden. ..."
"... the Carter Administration, at the urging of national security chief Zbigniew Brzezinski, had enacted what would become Operation Cyclone under Reagan, an arm-and-equip program to arm the Afghan mujahideen. The Saudis put up a matching fund which helped bring the so-called Services Bureau into the field where Osama bin Laden became a recruiter for international jihadists to join the battlefield. And, you know, the goal was, in the words of Brzezinski, as he later admitted to a French publication, was to force the Red Army, the Soviet Red Army, to intervene to protect the pro-Soviet government in Kabul, which they proceeded to do. ..."
"... What he means is by basically paying bounties, which the US was literally doing along with its Gulf allies, to exact the toll on the allies of Assad, Russia. So, let's just say it's true, according to your question, let's just say this is all true. It would be a retaliation for what the United States has done to Russia in areas where it was actually legally invited in by the governments in charge, either in Kabul or Damascus. And that's, I think, the kind of ironic subtext that can hardly be understated when you see someone like Dan Rather wag his finger at Putin for paying the Taliban as proxies. But, I mean, it's such a ridiculous story that it's just hard to even fathom that it's real. ..."
"... just kind of neocon resistance mind-explosion, where first John Bolton was hailed as this hero and truthteller about Trump. ..."
"... And then you have this and it, you know, today as you pointed out, Chuck Todd, "Chuck Toddler", welcomes on Meet the Press John Bolton as this wise voice to comment on Donald Trump's slavish devotion to Vladimir Putin and how we need to escalate. ..."
"... This is what Russiagate has done. It's taken one of the most Strangelovian, psychotic, dangerous, bloodthirsty, sadistic monsters in US foreign policy circles and turned him into a sober-minded, even heroic, truthteller. ..."
Jul 06, 2020 | thegrayzone.com

US claim of 'Russian Bounty' plot in Afghanistan is dubious and dangerous

Max Blumenthal breaks down the "Russian bounty" story's flaws and how it aims to prolong the war in Afghanistan -- and uses Russiagate tactics to continue pushing the Democratic Party to the right

Multiple US media outlets, citing anonymous intelligence officials, are claiming that Russia offered bounties to kill US soldiers in Afghanistan, and that President Trump has taken no action.

Others are contesting that claim. "Officials said there was disagreement among intelligence officials about the strength of the evidence about the suspected Russian plot," the New York Times reports. "Notably, the National Security Agency, which specializes in hacking and electronic surveillance, has been more skeptical."

"The constant flow of Russiagate disinformation into the bloodstream of the Democratic Party and its base is moving that party constantly to the right, while pushing the US deeper into this Cold War," Blumenthal says.

Guest: Max Blumenthal, editor of The Grayzone and author of several books, including his latest "The Management of Savagery."

TRANSCRIPT

AARON MATÉ: Welcome to Pushback, I'm Aaron Maté. There is a new supposed Trump-Russia bombshell. The New York Times and other outlets reporting that Russia has been paying bounties to Afghan militants to kill US soldiers in Afghanistan. Trump and the White House were allegedly briefed on this information but have taken no action.

Now, the story has obvious holes, like many other Russiagate bombshells. It is sourced to anonymous intelligence officials. The New York Times says that the claim comes from Afghan detainees. And it also has some logical holes. The Taliban have been fighting the US and Afghanistan for nearly two decades and never needed Russian payments before to kill the Americans that they were fighting; [this] amongst other questions are raised about this story. But that has not stopped the usual chorus from whipping up a frenzy.

RACHEL MADDOW, MSNBC: Vladimir Putin is offering bounties for the scalps of American soldiers in Afghanistan. Not only offering, offering money [to] the people who kill Americans, but some of the bounties that Putin has offered have been collected, meaning the Russians at least believe that their offering cash to kill Americans has actually worked to get some Americans killed.

FORMER VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Donald Trump has continued his embarrassing campaign of deference and debasing himself before Vladimir Putin. He had has [sic] this information according to The Times, and yet he offered to host Putin in the United States and sought to invite Russia to rejoin the G7. He's in his entire presidency has been a gift to Putin, but this is beyond the pale.

CHUCK TODD, NBC: Let me ask you this. Do you think that part of the that the president is afraid to make Putin mad because maybe Putin did help him win the election and he doesn't want to make him mad for 2020?

SENATE MINORITY LEADER CHUCK SCHUMER: I was not briefed on the Russian military intelligence, but it shows that we need in this coming defense bill, which we're debating this week, tough sanctions against Russia, which thus far Mitch McConnell has resisted.

Joining me now is Max Blumenthal, editor of The Grayzone, author of The Management of Savagery . Max, welcome to Pushback. What is your reaction to this story?

MAX BLUMENTHAL: I mean, it just feels like so many other episodes that we've witnessed over the past three or four years, where American intelligence officials basically plant a story in one outlet, The New York Times , which functions as the media wing of the Central Intelligence Agency. Then no reporting takes place whatsoever, but six reporters, or three to six reporters are assigned to the piece to make it look like it was some last-minute scramble to confirm this bombshell story. And then the story is confirmed again by The Washington Post because their reporters, their three to six reporters in, you know, capitals around the world with different beats spoke to the same intelligence officials, or they were furnished different officials who fed them the same story. And, of course, the story advances a narrative that the United States is under siege by Russia and that we have to escalate against Russia just ahead of another peace summit or some kind of international dialogue.

This has sort of been the general framework for these Russiagate bombshells, and of course they can there's always an anti-Trump angle. And because, you know, liberal pundits and the, you know, Democratic Party operatives see this as a means to undermine Trump as the election heats up. They don't care if it's true or not. They don't care what the consequences are. They're just gonna completely roll with it. And it's really changed, I think, not just US foreign policy, but it's changed the Democratic Party in an almost irreversible way, to have these constant "quote-unquote" bombshells that are really generated by the Central Intelligence Agency and by other US intelligence operations in order to turn up the heat to crank up the Cold War, to use these different media organs which no longer believe in reporting, which see Operation Mockingbird as a kind of blueprint for how to do journalism, to turn them into keys on the CIA's Mighty Wurlitzer. That's what happened here.

AARON MATÉ: What do you make of the logic of this story? This idea that the Taliban would need Russian money to kill Americans when the Taliban's been fighting the US for nearly two decades now. And the sourcing for the story, the same old playbook: anonymous intelligence officials who are citing vague claims about apparently what was said by Afghan detainees.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: This story has, as I said, it relies on zero reporting. The only source is anonymous American intelligence officials. And I tweeted out a clip of a former CIA operations officer who managed the CIA's operation in Angola, when the US was actually fighting on the side of apartheid South Africa against a Marxist government that was backed up by Cuban troops. His name was John Stockwell. And Stockwell talked about how one-third of his covert operations staff were propagandists, and that they would feed imaginary stories about Cuban barbarism that were completely false to reporters who were either CIA assets directly or who were just unwitting dupes who would hang on a line waiting for American intelligence officials to feed them stories. And one out of every five stories was completely false, as Stockwell said. We could play some of that clip now; it's pretty remarkable to watch it in light of this latest fake bombshell.

JOHN STOCKWELL: Another thing is to disseminate propaganda to influence people's minds, and this is a major function of the CIA. And unfortunately, of course, it overlaps into the gathering of information. You, you have contact with a journalist, you will give him true stories, you'll get information from him, you'll also give him false stories.

OFF-CAMERA REPORTER: Can you do this with responsible reporters?

JOHN STOCKWELL: Yes, the Church Committee brought it out in 1975. And then Woodward and Bernstein put an article in Rolling Stone a couple of years later. Four hundred journalists cooperating with the CIA, including some of the biggest names in the business.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: So, basically, I mean, you get the flavor of what someone who was in the CIA at the height of the Cold War I mean, he did the same thing in Vietnam. And the playbook is absolutely the same today. These this story was dumped on Friday in The New York Times by "quote-unquote" American intelligence officials, as a breakthrough had been made in Afghan peace talks and a conference was finally set for Doha, Qatar, that would involve the Taliban, which had been seizing massive amounts of territory.

Now, it's my understanding, and correct me if I'm wrong, that the Taliban had been fighting one of the most epic examples of an occupying army in modern history, just absolutely chewing away at one of the most powerful militaries in human history in their country for the last 19 years, without bounties from Vladimir Putin or private-hotdog-salesman-and-Saint-Petersburg-troll-farm-owner Yevgeny Prigozhin , who always comes up in these stories. It's always the hotdog guy who's doing everything bad from, like, you know, fake Facebook ads to poisoning Sergei Skripal or whatever.

But I just don't see where the Taliban needs encouragement from Putin to do that. It's their country. They want the US out and they have succeeded in seizing large amounts of territory. Donald Trump has come into office with a pledge to remove US troops from Afghanistan and ink this deal. And along comes this story as the peace process begins to advance.

And what is the end-result? We haven't gotten into the domestic politics yet, but the end-result is you have supposedly progressive senators like Chris Murphy of Connecticut attacking Trump for not fighting Russia in Afghanistan. I mean, they want a straight-up proxy war for not escalating. You have Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, someone who's aligned with the Democratic Party, who supported the war in Iraq and, you know, supports just endless war, demanding that the US turn up the heat not just in Afghanistan but in Syria. So, you know, the escalatory rhetoric is at a fever pitch right now, and it's obviously going to impact that peace conference.

Let's remember that three days before Trump's summit with Putin was when Mueller chose to release the indictment of the GRU agents for supposedly hacking the DNC servers. Let's remember that a day before the UN the United Nations Geneva peace talks opened on Syria in 2014 was when US intelligence chose to feed these shady Caesar photos, supposedly showing industrial slaughter of Syrian prisoners, to The New York Times in an investigation that had been funded by Qatar. Like, so many shady intelligence dumps have taken place ahead of peace summits to disrupt them, because the US doesn't feel like it has enough skin in the game or it just simply doesn't want peace in these areas.

So, that's what happened here. That's really, I think, the essential backdrop for the timing of this story. It really reveals how completely decayed mainstream media is as an institution, that none of these reporters protested the story, didn't see fit to do any independent investigation into it. At best they would print a Russian denial which counts for nothing in the US, or a Taliban denial which counts for nothing in the US. And then and this gets into the domestic political angle because so much of Russiagate, while it's been crafted by former or current intelligence officials, depends on the Democratic Party and it punditocracy, MSNBC and mainstream media as a projection megaphone, as its Mighty Wurlitzer.

That took place in this case because, according to this story, Donald Trump had been briefed on Putin paying bounties to the Taliban and he chose to do nothing. Which, of course Trump denies, but that counts for nothing as well. But, again, there's been no independent confirmation of any of this. And now we get into the domestic part, which is that this new Republican anti-Trump operation, The Lincoln Project, had a flashy ad ready to go almost minutes after the story dropped.

THE LINCOLN PROJECT AD: Now we know Vladimir Putin pays a bounty for the murder of American soldiers. Donald Trump knows, too, and does nothing. Putin pays the Taliban cash to slaughter our men and women in uniform and Trump is silent, weak, controlled. Instead of condemnation he insists Russia be treated as our equal.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: I mean, maybe they're just really good editors and brilliant politicians who work overtime. They're just, like, on meth at Steve Schmidt's political Batcave, just churning this material out. But I feel like they had an inkling, like this story was coming. It just the coordination and timing was impeccable.

And The Lincoln Project is something that James Carville, the veteran Democratic consultant, has said is doing more than any Democrat or any Democratic consultant to elect Joe Biden. They're always out there doing the hard work. Who are they? Well, Steve Schmidt is a former campaign manager for John McCain 2008. And you look at the various personnel affiliated with it, they're all McCain former McCain aides or people who worked on the Jeb and George W. Bush campaigns, going back to Texas and Florida. This is sort of the corporate wing of the Republican Party, the white-glove-country-club-patrician Republicans who are very pro-war, who hate Donald Trump.

And by doing this, by them really taking the lead on this attack, as you pointed out, Aaron, number one, they are sucking the oxygen out of the more progressive anti-Trump initiatives that are taking place, including in the streets of American cities. They're taking the wind out of anti-Trump more progressive anti-Trump critiques. For example, I think it's actually more powerful to attack Trump over the fact that he used, basically, chemical weapons on American peaceful protesters to do a fascistic photo-op. I don't know why there wasn't some call for congressional investigations on that. And they are getting skin in the game on the Biden campaign. It really feels to me like this Lincoln campaign operation, this moderate Republican operation which is also sort of a venue for neocons, will have more influence after events like this than the Bernie Sanders campaign, which has an enormous amount of delegates.

So, that's what I think the domestic repercussion is. It's just this constant it's the constant flow of Russiagate disinformation into the bloodstream of the Democratic Party and its base that's moving that party constantly to the right, while pushing the US deeper into this Cold War that only serves, you know, people who are associated with the national security state who need to justify their paycheck and the budget of the institutions that employ them.

AARON MATÉ: Let's assume for a second that the allegation is true, although, you know, you've laid out some of the reasons why it's not. Can you talk about the history here, starting with Afghanistan, something you cover a lot in your book, The Management of Savagery, where the US aim was to kill Russians, going right on through to Syria, where just recently the US envoy for the coalition against ISIS, James Jeffery, who handles Syria, said that his job now is to basically put the Russians in a quagmire in Syria.

JAMES JEFFREY: This isn't Afghanistan. This isn't Vietnam. This isn't a quagmire. My job is to make it a quagmire for the Russians.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, I mean, it feels like a giant act of psychological and political projection to accuse Russia of using an Islamist militia in Afghanistan as a proxy against the US to bleed the US into leaving, because that's been the US playbook in Central Asia and the Middle East since at least 1979. I just tweeted a photo of Dan Rather in Afghanistan, just crossing the Pakistani border and going to meet with some of the Mujahideen in 1980. Dan Rather was panned in The New York in The Washington Post by Tom Toles [Tom Shales], who was the media critic at the time, as "Gunga Dan," because he was so gung-ho for the Afghan mujahideen. In his reports he would complain about how weak their weaponry was, you know, how they needed more how they needed more funding. I mean, you could call it bounties, but it was really just CIA funding.

DAN RATHER: These are the best weapons you have, huh? They only have about twenty rounds for this?

TRANSLATOR: That's all. They have twenty rounds. Yes, and they know that these are all old weapons and they really aren't up to doing anything to the Russian weaponry that's around. But that's all they have, and this is why they want help. And he is saying that America seems to be asleep. It doesn't seem to realize that if Afghanistan goes and the Russians go over to the Gulf, that in a very short time it's going to be the turn of the United States as well.

DAN RATHER: But I'm sure he knows that in Vietnam we got our fingers burned. Indeed, we got our whole hands burned when we tried to help in this kind of situation.

TRANSLATOR [translating to the Afghan man and then his reply]: Your hands were burned in Vietnam, but if you don't agree to help us, if you don't ally yourself with us, then all of you, your whole body will be burnt eventually, because there is no one in the world who can really fight and resist as well as the as much and as well as the Afghans are.

DAN RATHER: But no American mother wants to send her son to Afghanistan.

TRANSLATOR [translating to the Afghan man and then his reply]: We don't need anybody's soldiers here to help us, but we are being constantly accused that the Americans are helping us with weapons. What we need, actually, are the American weapons. We don't need or want American soldiers. We can do the fighting ourselves.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: And a year or several months before, the Carter Administration, at the urging of national security chief Zbigniew Brzezinski, had enacted what would become Operation Cyclone under Reagan, an arm-and-equip program to arm the Afghan mujahideen. The Saudis put up a matching fund which helped bring the so-called Services Bureau into the field where Osama bin Laden became a recruiter for international jihadists to join the battlefield. And, you know, the goal was, in the words of Brzezinski, as he later admitted to a French publication, was to force the Red Army, the Soviet Red Army, to intervene to protect the pro-Soviet government in Kabul, which they proceeded to do.

And then with the introduction of the Stinger missile, the Afghan mujahideen, hailed as freedom fighters in Washington, were able to destroy Russian supply lines, exact a heavy toll, and forced the Red Army to leave in retreat. They helped create what's considered the Soviet Union's Vietnam.

So that was really but the blueprint for what Russian for what Russia is being accused of now, and that same model was transferred over to Syria. It was also actually proposed for Iraq in the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998. Then Senate Foreign Relations chair Jesse Helms actually said that the Afghan mujahideen should be our model for supporting the Iraqi resistance. So, this kind of proxy war was always on the table. Then the US did it in Syria, when one out of every $13 in the CIA budget went to arm the so-called "moderate rebels" in Syria, who we later found out were 31 flavors of jihadi, who were aligned with al-Qaeda's local affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra and helped give rise to ISIS. Michael Morell, I tweeted some video of him on Charlie Rose back in, I think, 2016. He's the former acting director for the CIA, longtime deputy director. He said, you know, the reason that we're in Syria, what we should be doing is causing Iran and Russia, the two allies of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, to pay a heavy price.

MICHAEL MORELL: We need to make the Iranians pay a price in Syria. We need to make the Russians pay a price. The other thing

CHARLIE ROSE: We make them pay the price by killing killing Russians?

MICHAEL MORELL: Yes.

CHARLIE ROSE: And killing Iranians.

MICHAEL MORELL: Yes, covertly. You don't tell the world about it, right? You don't stand up at the Pentagon and say we did this, right? But you make sure they know it in Moscow and Tehran.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: What he means is by basically paying bounties, which the US was literally doing along with its Gulf allies, to exact the toll on the allies of Assad, Russia. So, let's just say it's true, according to your question, let's just say this is all true. It would be a retaliation for what the United States has done to Russia in areas where it was actually legally invited in by the governments in charge, either in Kabul or Damascus. And that's, I think, the kind of ironic subtext that can hardly be understated when you see someone like Dan Rather wag his finger at Putin for paying the Taliban as proxies. But, I mean, it's such a ridiculous story that it's just hard to even fathom that it's real.

AARON MATÉ: Let me read Dan Rather's tweet, because it's so it speaks to just how pervasive Russiagate culture is now. People have learned absolutely nothing from it.

Rather says, "Reporters are trained to look for patterns that are suspicious, and time and again one stands out with Donald Trump. Why is he so slavishly devoted to Putin? There is a spectrum of possible answers ranging from craven to treasonous. One day I hope and suspect we will find out."

It's like he forgot, perhaps, that Robert Mueller and his team spent three years investigating this very issue and came up with absolutely nothing. But the narrative has taken hold, and it's, as you talked about before, it's been the narrative we've been presented as the vehicle for understanding and opposing Donald Trump, so it cannot be questioned. And now it's like it's a matter of, what else is there to find out about Trump and Russia after Robert Mueller and the US intelligence agencies looked for everything they could and found nothing? They're still presented as if it's some kind of mystery that has to be unraveled.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: And it was after, like, a week of just kind of neocon resistance mind-explosion, where first John Bolton was hailed as this hero and truthteller about Trump. Then Dick Cheney was welcomed into the resistance, you know, because he said, "Wear a mask." I mean, you know, his mask was strangely not spattered with the blood of Iraqi children. But, you know, it was just amazing like that. Of course, it was the Lincoln project who hijacked the minds of the resistance, but basically people who used to work on Cheney's campaign said, "Dick Cheney, welcome to the resistance." I mean, that was remarkable. And then you have this and it, you know, today as you pointed out, Chuck Todd, "Chuck Toddler", welcomes on Meet the Press John Bolton as this wise voice to comment on Donald Trump's slavish devotion to Vladimir Putin and how we need to escalate.

CHUCK TODD, NBC: Let me ask you this. Do you think that part of the that the president is afraid to make Putin mad because maybe Putin did help him win the election and he doesn't want to make him mad for 2020?

MAX BLUMENTHAL: I mean, just a few years ago, maybe it was two years ago, before Bolton was brought into the Trump NSC, he was considered just an absolute marginal crank who was a contributor to Fox News. He'd been forgotten. He was widely hated by Democrats. Now here he is as a sage voice to tell us how dangerous this moment is. And, you know, he's not being even brought on just to promote his book; he's being brought on as just a sober-minded foreign policy expert on Meet the Press . That's where we're at right now.

AARON MATÉ: Yeah, and when his critique of Trump is basically that Trump was not hawkish enough. Bolton's most the biggest critique Bolton has of Trump is, as he writes about in his book, is when Trump declined to bomb Iran after Iran shot down a drone over its territory. And Bolton said that to him was the most irrational thing he's ever seen a president do.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, Bolton was mad that Trump confused body bags with missiles, because he said Trump thought that there would be 150 dead Iranians, and I said, "No, Donald, you're confused. It will be 150 missiles that we're firing into Iran." Like that's better! Like, "Oh, okay, that makes everything all right," that we fire a hundred missiles for one drone and maybe that wouldn't that kill possibly more than 150 people?

Well, in Bolton's world this was just another stupid move by Trump. If Bolton were, I mean, just, just watch all the interviews with Bolton. Watch him on The View where the only pushback he received was from Meghan McCain complaining that he ripped off a Hamilton song for his book The Room Where It Happened , and she asked, "Don't you have any apology to offer to Hamilton fans?" That was the pushback that Bolton received. Just watch all of these interviews with Bolton and try to find the pushback. It's not there. This is what Russiagate has done. It's taken one of the most Strangelovian, psychotic, dangerous, bloodthirsty, sadistic monsters in US foreign policy circles and turned him into a sober-minded, even heroic, truthteller.

AARON MATÉ: And inevitably the only long-term consequence that I can see here is ultimately helping Trump, because, if history is a pattern, these Russiagate supposed bombshells always either go nowhere or they get debunked. So, if this one gets forcefully debunked, because I think it's quite possible, because Trump has said that he was never briefed on this and they'll have to prove that he's lying, you know. It should be easy to do. Someone could come out and say that. If they can't prove that he's lying, then this one, I think, will blow up in their face. And all they will have done is, at a time when Trump is vulnerable over the pandemic with over a hundred thousand people dead on his watch, all these people did was ultimately try to bring the focus back to the same thing that failed for basically the entirety of Trump's presidency, which is Russiagate and Trump's supposed―and non-existent in reality―subservience to Vladimir Putin.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: But have you ever really confronted one of your liberal friends who maybe doesn't follow these stories as closely as you do? You know, well-intentioned liberal friend who just has this sense that Russia controls Trump, and asked them to really defend that and provide the receipts and really explain where the Trump administration has just handed the store to Russia? Because what we've seen is unprecedented since the height of the Cold War, an unprecedented deterioration of US-Russia relations with new sanctions on Russia every few months. You ask them to do that. They can't do it. It's just a sense they get, it's a feeling they get. And that's because these bombshells drop, they get reported on the front pages under banners of papers that declare that "democracy dies in darkness," whose brand is something that everybody trusts, The New York Times , The Washington Post , Woodward and Bernstein, and everybody repeats the story again and again and again. And then, if and when it gets debunked, discredited or just sort of disappears, a few days later everybody forgets about it. And those people who are not just, like, 24/7 media consumers but critical-minded media consumers, they're left with that sense that Russia actually controls us and that we must do something to escalate with Russia. So, that's the point of these: by the time the disinformation is discredited, the damage has already been done. And that same tactic was employed against Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, to the point where so many people were left with the sense that he must be an antisemite, although not one allegation was ever proven.

AARON MATÉ: Yeah, and now to the point where, in the Labour Party―we should touch on this for a second―where you had a Labour Party member retweet an article recently that mentioned some criticism of Israel and for that she was expelled from her position in the shadow cabinet.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, well, you know, as a Jew I was really threatened by that retweet [laughter]. I don't know about you.

I mean, this is Rebecca Long Bailey. She's one of the few Corbynites left in a high position in Labour who hasn't been effectively burned at the stake for being a, you know, Jew hater who wants to throw us all in gas chambers because she retweets an interview with some celebrity I'd never heard of before, who didn't even say anything that extreme. But it really shows how the Thought Police have taken control of the Labour Party through Sir Keir Starmer, who is someone who has deep links to the national security state through the Crown Prosecution Service, which he used to head, where he was involved in the prosecution of Julian Assange. And he has worked with The Times of London, which is a, you know, favorite paper of the national security state and the MI5 in the UK, for planting stories against Jeremy Corbyn. He was intimately involved in that campaign, and now he's at the head of the Labour Party for a very good reason. I really would recommend everyone watching this, if you're interested more in who Keir Starmer really is, read "Five Questions for [New Labour Leader] Sir Keir Starmer" by Matt Kennard at The Grayzone. It really lays it out and shows you what's happening.

We're just in this kind of hyper-managed atmosphere, where everything feels so much more controlled than it's ever been. And even though every sane rational person that I know seems to understand what's happening, they feel like they're not allowed to say it, at least not in any official capacity.

AARON MATÉ: From the US to Britain, everything is being co-opted. In the US it's, you know, genuine resistance to Trump, in opposition to Trump, it gets co-opted by the right. Same thing in Britain. People get manipulated into believing that Jeremy Corbyn, this lifelong anti-racist is somehow an antisemite. It's all in the service of the same agenda, and I have to say we're one of the few outlets that are pushing back on it. Everyone else is getting swept up on it and it's a scary time.

We're gonna wrap. Max, your final comment.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, yeah, we're pushing back. And I saw today Mint Press [News], which is another outlet that has pushed back, their Twitter account was just briefly removed for no reason, without explanation. Ollie Vargas, who's an independent journalist who's doing some of the most important work in the English language from Bolivia, reporting on the post-coup landscape and the repressive environment that's been created by the junta installed with US help under Jeanine Áñez, his account has been taken away on Twitter. The social media platforms are basically under the control of the national security state. There's been a merger between the national security state and Silicon Valley, and the space for these kinds of discussions is rapidly shrinking. So, I think, you know, it's more important than ever to support alternative media and also to really have a clear understanding of what's taking place. I'm really worried there just won't be any space for us to have these conversations in the near future.

AARON MATÉ: Max Blumenthal, editor of The Grayzone, author of The Management of Savagery , thanks a lot.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Thanks for having me.

[Jul 03, 2020] My take on Tucker and Maddow: both serve those who write their paychecks, but one of the two bosses is a better businessman.

Jul 03, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Piotr Berman , Jul 3 2020 5:43 utc | 96

My take on Tucker and Maddow: both serve those who write their paychecks, but one of the two bosses is a better businessman.

Tucker does not duplicate Hannity which lets them serve different (if overlapping) segments of the audience. Showing Paralimpil and Gabbard to the viewers did not lead to any major perturbation in American politics, but it lets his viewer feel that they are better informed than the fools who watch Maddow. And it helps that to a degree they are.

uncle tungsten , Jul 3 2020 6:53 utc | 103

JC #72

I get that Tucker invites good a reasonable people on his show and gives voice space where they would not otherwise get it. That is deliberate.

I bet you that the stats show that the demented monotone oozing out of MSNBC and CNN etc has been a serious turn off for a sector of audience that is well informed and exercise critical faculties. That is exactly what Tucker needs to pay for his program as I would be fairly sure these people are Consumers of a desirable degree and advertisers like Tucker's formula and Fox Bosses like Tuckers income generator.

I don't think it is more complex than that and his bosses will entertain most heresies as long as the program generates advertiser demand for that time slot.

So Tucker is OK and he is reasonable and he will interview a broad spectrum. Good for him. But he smooths the pillow and caresses the establishment arse.

[Jul 01, 2020] Russiagate's Last Gasp by Ray McGovern

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... One can read this most recent flurry of Russia, Russia, Russia paid the Taliban to kill GIs as an attempt to pre-empt the findings into Russiagate's origins. ..."
"... But Moscow recognized from the start that Washington was embarked on a fool's errand in Vietnam. There would be no percentage in getting directly involved. And so, the Soviets sat back and watched smugly as the Vietnamese Communists drove U.S. forces out on their "own resources." As was the case with the Viet Cong, the Taliban needs no bounty inducements from abroad. ..."
"... Former CIA Director William Casey said: "We'll know when our disinformation program is complete, when everything the American public believes is false." ..."
"... If Durham finds it fraudulent (not a difficult task), the heads of senior intelligence and law enforcement officials may roll. That would also mean a still deeper dent in the credibility of Establishment media that are only too eager to drink the Kool Aid and to leave plenty to drink for the rest of us. ..."
"... I am not a regular Maddow-watcher, but to me she seemed unhinged -- actually, well over the top. ..."
Jun 29, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

One can read this most recent flurry of Russia, Russia, Russia paid the Taliban to kill GIs as an attempt to pre-empt the findings into Russiagate's origins.

By Ray McGovern
Special to Consortium News

O n Friday The New York Times featured a report based on anonymous intelligence officials that the Russians were paying bounties to have U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan with President Donald Trump refusing to do anything about it. The flurry of Establishment media reporting that ensued provides further proof, if such were needed, that the erstwhile "paper of record" has earned a new moniker -- Gray Lady of easy virtue.

Over the weekend, the Times ' dubious allegations grabbed headlines across all media that are likely to remain indelible in the minds of credulous Americans -- which seems to have been the main objective. To keep the pot boiling this morning, The New York Times' David Leonhardt's daily web piece , "The Morning" calls prominent attention to a banal article by a Heather Cox Richardson, described as a historian at Boston College, adding specific charges to the general indictment of Trump by showing "how the Trump administration has continued to treat Russia favorably." The following is from Richardson's newsletter on Friday:

Historian Richardson added:

"All of these friendly overtures to Russia were alarming enough when all we knew was that Russia attacked the 2016 U.S. election and is doing so again in 2020. But it is far worse that those overtures took place when the administration knew that Russia had actively targeted American soldiers. this bad news apparently prompted worried intelligence officials to give up their hope that the administration would respond to the crisis, and instead to leak the story to two major newspapers."

Hear the siren? Children, get under your desks!

The Tall Tale About Russia Paying for Dead U.S. Troops

Times print edition readers had to wait until this morning to learn of Trump's statement last night that he was not briefed on the cockamamie tale about bounties for killing, since it was, well, cockamamie.

Late last night the president tweeted: "Intel just reported to me that they did not find this info credible, and therefore did not report it to me or the VP. "

For those of us distrustful of the Times -- with good reason -- on such neuralgic issues, the bounty story had already fallen of its own weight. As Scott Ritter pointed out yesterday:

"Perhaps the biggest clue concerning the fragility of the New York Times ' report is contained in the one sentence it provides about sourcing -- "The intelligence assessment is said to be based at least in part on interrogations of captured Afghan militants and criminals." That sentence contains almost everything one needs to know about the intelligence in question, including the fact that the source of the information is most likely the Afghan government as reported through CIA channels. "

And who can forget how "successful" interrogators can be in getting desired answers.

Russia & Taliban React

The Kremlin called the Times reporting "nonsense an unsophisticated plant," and from Russia's perspective the allegations make little sense; Moscow will see them for what they are -- attempts to show that Trump is too "accommodating" to Russia.

A Taliban spokesman called the story "baseless," adding with apparent pride that "we" have done "target killings" for years "on our own resources."

Russia is no friend of the Taliban. At the same time, it has been clear for several years that the U.S. would have to pull its troops out of Afghanistan. Think back five decades and recall how circumspect the Soviets were in Vietnam. Giving rhetorical support to a fraternal Communist nation was de rigueur and some surface-to-air missiles gave some substance to that support.

But Moscow recognized from the start that Washington was embarked on a fool's errand in Vietnam. There would be no percentage in getting directly involved. And so, the Soviets sat back and watched smugly as the Vietnamese Communists drove U.S. forces out on their "own resources." As was the case with the Viet Cong, the Taliban needs no bounty inducements from abroad.

Besides, the Russians knew painfully well -- from their own bitter experience in Afghanistan, what the outcome of the most recent fool's errand would be for the U.S. What point would they see in doing what The New York Times and other Establishment media are breathlessly accusing them of?

CIA Disinformation; Casey at Bat

Former CIA Director William Casey said: "We'll know when our disinformation program is complete, when everything the American public believes is false."

Casey made that remark at the first cabinet meeting in the White House under President Ronald Reagan in early 1981, according to Barbara Honegger, who was assistant to the chief domestic policy adviser. Honegger was there, took notes, and told then Senior White House correspondent Sarah McClendon, who in turn made it public.

If Casey's spirit is somehow observing the success of the disinformation program called Russiagate, one can imagine how proud he must be. But sustained propaganda success can be a serious challenge. The Russiagate canard has lasted three and a half years. This last gasp effort, spearheaded by the Times , to breathe more life into it is likely to last little more than a weekend -- the redoubled efforts of Casey-dictum followers notwithstanding.

Russiagate itself has been unraveling, although one would hardly know it from the Establishment media. No collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Even the sacrosanct tenet that the Russians hacked the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks has been disproven , with the head of the DNC-hired cyber security firm CrowdStrike admitting that there is no evidence that the DNC emails were hacked -- by Russia or anyone else .

U.S. Attorney John Durham. (Wikipedia)

How long will it take the Times to catch up with the CrowdStrike story, available since May 7?

The media is left with one sacred cow: the misnomered "Intelligence Community" Assessment of Jan. 6, 2017, claiming that President Putin himself ordered the hacking of the DNC. That "assessment" done by "hand-picked analysts" from only CIA, FBI and NSA (not all 17 intelligence agencies of the "intelligence community") reportedly is being given close scrutiny by U. S. Attorney John Durham, appointed by the attorney general to investigate Russiagate's origins.

If Durham finds it fraudulent (not a difficult task), the heads of senior intelligence and law enforcement officials may roll. That would also mean a still deeper dent in the credibility of Establishment media that are only too eager to drink the Kool Aid and to leave plenty to drink for the rest of us.

Do not expect the media to cease and desist, simply because Trump had a good squelch for them last night -- namely, the "intelligence" on the "bounties" was not deemed good enough to present to the president.

(As a preparer and briefer of The President's Daily Brief to Presidents Reagan and HW Bush, I can attest to the fact that -- based on what has been revealed so far -- the Russian bounty story falls far short of the PDB threshold.)

Rejecting Intelligence Assessments

Nevertheless, the corporate media is likely to play up the Trump administration's rejection of what the media is calling the "intelligence assessment" about Russia offering -- as Rachel Maddow indecorously put it on Friday -- "bounty for the scalps of American soldiers in Afghanistan."

I am not a regular Maddow-watcher, but to me she seemed unhinged -- actually, well over the top.

The media asks, "Why does Trump continue to disrespect the assessments of the intelligence community?" There he goes again -- not believing our "intelligence community; siding, rather, with Putin."

In other words, we can expect no let up from the media and the national security miscreant leakers who have served as their life's blood. As for the anchors and pundits, their level of sophistication was reflected yesterday in the sage surmise of Face the Nation's Chuck Todd, who Aaron Mate reminds us, is a "grown adult and professional media person." Todd asked guest John Bolton: "Do you think that the president is afraid to make Putin mad because maybe Putin did help him win the election, and he doesn't want to make him mad for 2020?"

"This is as bad as it gets," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi yesterday, adding the aphorism she memorized several months ago: "All roads lead to Putin." The unconscionably deceitful performance of Establishment media is as bad as it gets, though that, of course, was not what Pelosi meant. She apparently lifted a line right out of the Times about how Trump is too "accommodating" toward Russia.

One can read this most recent flurry of Russia, Russia, Russia as a reflection of the need to pre-empt the findings likely to issue from Durham and Attorney General William Barr in the coming months -- on the theory that the best defense is a pre-emptive offense. Meanwhile, we can expect the corporate media to continue to disgrace itself.

Vile

Caitlin Johnstone, typically, pulls no punches regarding the Russian bounty travesty:

"All parties involved in spreading this malignant psyop are absolutely vile, but a special disdain should be reserved for the media class who have been entrusted by the public with the essential task of creating an informed populace and holding power to account. How much of an unprincipled whore do you have to be to call yourself a journalist and uncritically parrot the completely unsubstantiated assertions of spooks while protecting their anonymity? How much work did these empire fluffers put into killing off every last shred of their dignity? It boggles the mind.

It really is funny how the most influential news outlets in the Western world will uncritically parrot whatever they're told to say by the most powerful and depraved intelligence agencies on the planet, and then turn around and tell you without a hint of self-awareness that Russia and China are bad because they have state media.

Sometimes all you can do is laugh."

Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. During his 27-years as a CIA analyst he led the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and prepared The President's Daily Brief for Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. In retirement, he co-created Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.


Aaron , June 30, 2020 at 12:33

If anything, all roads lead to Israel. You have to consider the sources, the writers, journalists, editors, owners, and rich people from which these stories come. This latest ridiculous story will certainly help Trump, so the sources of these Russia stories are actually fans of Trump, they love his tax cuts, he helps their revenue streams, and he's the greatest friend and Zionist to Israel so far and also Wall Street. I think most Americans can understand that Putin doesn't possess all of the supernatural all-encompassing powers and mind-controlling omnipotence that Pelosi and her ilk attribute to him. That's why at his rallies, when Trump points to where the journalists are and sneers at them calling them bloodsuckers and parasites and all that, the people love it, because of stuff like this. It's like saying "look at those assholes, those liberal journalists over at CNN say that you voted for me because of Vladimir Putin?!" It just pisses off people to keep hearing that mantra over and over. So it's a gift to Trump, it helps him so much. And seeing that super expensive helicopter flying around the barren rocky slopes of the middle east, seems like it's out of some Rambo movie. And like Rambo, the tens of thousands of American servicemen that were sacrificed over there, and still commit suicides at a horrific rate, have always been treated by the architects of these wars that only helped the state of Israel, as the expendables. Whether it's a black life, a soldier fighting in Iraq, a foreclosed on homeowner by Mnuchin's work, or a brainwashed New York Times subscriber, we don't seem to matter, we seem to feel the truth that to these people were are indeed expendable. The question to answer I think is, not who is a Russian asset, but who is an Israeli asset?

Andrew Thomas , June 30, 2020 at 12:04

Great reporting as usual, Ray. But special kudos for the NYT moniker 'Gray lady of easy virtue.' I almost laughed out loud. A rare occurrence these days.

Michael P Goldenberg , June 30, 2020 at 10:45

Thanks for another cogent assessment of our mainstream media's utter depravity and reckless irresponsibility. They truly have become nothing more than presstitutes and enemies of the people.

Bob Van Noy , June 30, 2020 at 10:42

"It's all over but the shouting" goes the idiom and I think that is true of Russiagate, especially, thank all goodness, here at Robert Parry's Journalistic site!

I have a theory that propaganda has a lifetime but when it reaches a truly absurd level, it's all over. Clearly, we've reached that level Thanks to all at CN

evelync , June 30, 2020 at 10:33

You call Rachel Madcow "unhinged", Ray ..well, yes, I'm shocked at myself that there was a time that I tuned in to her show .
Sorry Ms Madcow you've turned yourself into a character from Dr Strangelove

The key threats – climate change, pandemics, nuclear war – and why we continue to fail to address these real things while filling the airwaves instead with the tiresome russia,russia,russia mantra – per Accam's razer suggests that it serves very short term interests of money and power whoever whatever the MICIMATT answers to.
"Former CIA Director William Casey said: "We'll know when our disinformation program is complete, when everything the American public believes is false." "

Who exactly was the "we" Casey was answering to each day?
I know it wasn't me or the planet or humanity or anyone I know.

Bill Rice , June 30, 2020 at 10:20

If only articles like this were read by the masses. Maybe people would get a clue. Blind patriotism is not patriotic at all. Skepticism is healthy.

torture this , June 30, 2020 at 09:54

It's a shame that VIPS reporting is top secret. It's the only information coming from people familiar with the ins and outs of spy agencies that can be trusted.

GeorgeG , June 30, 2020 at 09:45

Ray,
You missed the juicy stuff. See: tass.com/russia/1172369 Russia Foreign Ministry: NYT article on Russia in Afghanistan fake from US intelligence. Here is the kicker:

The Russian Foreign Ministry pointed to US intelligence agencies' involvement in Afghan drug trafficking.
"Should we speak about facts – moreover, well-known [facts], it has not long been a secret in Afghanistan that members of the US intelligence community are involved in drug trafficking, cash payments to militants for letting transport convoys pass through, kickbacks from contracts implementing various projects paid by American taxpayers. The list of their actions can be continued if you want," the ministry said.

The Russian Foreign Ministry suggested that those actions might stem from the fact that the US intelligence agencies "do not like that our and their diplomats have teamed up to facilitate the start of peace talks between Kabul and the Taliban (outlawed in Russia – TASS)."

"We can understand their feelings as they do not want to be deprived of the above mentioned sources of the off-the-books income," the ministry stressed.

Thomas Fortin , June 30, 2020 at 12:08

Affirmative Ray, two of my old comrades who were SF both did security on CIA drug flights back in the day, and later on both while under VA care decided to die off God I miss them, great guys and honest souls.

DH Fabian , June 30, 2020 at 09:41

One point remains a mystery. Why would anyone think that when the US invades a country, someone would need to pay the people of that country a bounty to fight back?

Mark Clarke , June 30, 2020 at 09:27

If Biden wins the presidency and the Democrats take back the Senate, Russiagate will strengthen and live on for many years.

Al , June 30, 2020 at 12:11

All to deflect from Clinton's private server while SOS, 30,000 deleted emails, and the sale of US interests via the Clinton Foundation.

Zedster , June 30, 2020 at 12:56

That, or we learn Chinese.

Skip Scott , June 30, 2020 at 09:08

Another interesting aside is that Tulsi Gabbard's "Stop funding Terrorists" bill went nowhere in Congress. So it's Ok for us and our Arab allies to fund them, but not the Russians? Maybe we should go back to calling them the Mujahideen?

Thomas Scherrer , June 30, 2020 at 12:10

Preach, my child.

And aloha to the last decent woman in those halls.

HARRY M HAYS , June 30, 2020 at 09:01

Do you not think that the timing of all this (months after the report was allegedly presented to Trump) is an attempt to stop Trump from signing an agreement with the Taliban that will allow him to withdraw American troops from that country?

Skip Scott , June 30, 2020 at 08:58

Great article Ray, but I have to question whether Durham will fulfill his role and get to the bottom of the origins of RussiaGate. If he actually does name names and prosecute, how will the MSM cover it? What will Ms. Madcow have to say? Ever since the fizzling failure of the Epstein investigation, I have had my doubts about Barr and his minion Durham. I hope I'm wrong. Time will tell.

Thomas Fortin , June 30, 2020 at 12:24

I think on here I can talk about this issue you brought up Scott, on other places when I tried to have a rational discussion on the matter, I got shouted down, well they tried anyway.
I highly suggest to any readers of this here on Consortium to get Gore Vidal's old book, Imperial America, and also watch his old documentary, THE UNITED STATES OF AMNESIA.
Here is the point of it,
"Officially we have two parties which are in fact wings of a common party of property with two right wings. Corporate wealth finances each. Since the property party controls every aspect of media they have had decades to create a false reality for a citizenry largely uneducated by public schools that teach conformity with an occasional advanced degree in consumerism."
-GORE VIDAL, The United States of Amnesia
Also,
"There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt -- until recently and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties."
? Gore Vidal
Others have pointed out the same like this,
"Nobody should have any illusions. The United States has essentially a one-party system and the ruling party is the business party."
? Noam Chomsky
"In the United States [ ] the two main business-dominated parties, with the support of the corporate community, have refused to reform laws that make it virtually impossible to create new political parties (that might appeal to non-business interests) and let them be effective. Although there is marked and frequently observed dissatisfaction with the Republicans and Democrats, electoral politics is one area where notions of competitions and free choice have little meaning. In some respects the caliber of debate and choice in neoliberal elections tends to be closer to that of the one-party communist state than that of a genuine democracy."
? Robert W. McChesney, Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order
"The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies is a foolish idea. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can throw the rascals out at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies."
? Carroll Quigley [1910 – 1977 was an American historian and theorist of the evolution of civilizations. He is remembered for his teaching work as a professor at Georgetown University, for his academic publications.]
Teddy Roosevelt, whose statue is under attack in NYC, had this to say,
"The bosses of the Democratic party and the bosses of the Republican party alike have a closer grip than ever before on the party machines in the States and in the Nation. This crooked control of both the old parties by the beneficiaries of political and business privilege renders it hopeless to expect any far-reaching and fundamental service from either."
-THEODORE ROOSEVELT, The Outlook, July 27, 1912
I suggest also that you look up on line this article, Heads They Win, Tails We Lose: Our Fake Two-Party System
by Prof. Stephen H. Unger at Columbia, here is his concluding thought,
"The drift toward loss of liberty, unending wars, environmental degradation, growing economic inequality can't be stopped easily, but it will never be halted as long as we allow corporate interests to rule our country by means of a pseudo-democracy based on the two-party swindle."
With this all in mind, and if your my age, you might recall about how over the past more then 50 years, no matter which party gets in power, nothing of any significance changes, the wars continue, the transfer of wealth to the few, and the erosion of basic civil liberties continues pretty well unabated.
Trump is surrounded by neo-cons and I expect nothing will happen to change anything. I would get into how most called liberals are hardly that, but in reality neo-cons, but I've said enough for now, when you consider the statements I shared, then the Matrix begins to come unraveled.

Grady , June 30, 2020 at 08:01

Not to mention the potential peace initiative with Afghanistan and Taliban that is looming. Peace is not profitable, so who has the dual interests in maintaining protracted war in a strategic location while ensuring the poppy crop stays the most productive in the world? It seems said poppy production under the pre war Taliban government was minimal as they eliminated most of it. Attacking the Taliban and thwarting its rule allowed for greater production, to the extent it is the global leader in helping to fulfill the opiate demand. Gary Webb established long ago that the intelligence community, specifically the CIA, has somewhat of a tradition in such covert operations and logic would dictate they're vested interest lies in maintaining a high yield crop while feeding the profit center that is the MIC war machine. While certainly a bit digressive, the dots are there to connect.

Paul , June 30, 2020 at 07:54

My friend, I love your columns. Thank you, you have been one of the few sane voices on Russiagate from the beginning.

Sadly most Americans and most people in the world will not receive these simple truths you are telling. (not their fault)

We will continue our fight against the system.

Peace, Paul from South Africa

Voice from Europe , June 30, 2020 at 07:38

Don't think this will be the last Russiagate gasp whoever becomes the next president.
The 'liberal democrats' believe their own delusions and as long as they control the MSM, they won't stop. Lol.

Thomas Fortin , June 30, 2020 at 12:29

You should read my reply to Scott, most of these Democrats are not liberals, but neo-cons who just liberal virtue signal while in reality supporting the neo-con agenda. I hate it how the so called alternative or independent media abuse terms and words, which obscures realities. Anyway, take a look at my reply and the quotes I shared.
"Definition of liberal, one who is open-minded or not strict in the observance of orthodox, traditional, or established forms or ways, progressive, broad-minded, . willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one's own; open to new ideas, denoting a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise."
? Derived from Webster's and the Oxford Dictionaries

"Liberal' comes from the Latin liberalis, which means pertaining to a free man. In politics, to be liberal is to want to extend democracy through change and reform. One can see why that word had to be erased from our political lexicon."
? Gore Vidal, "The Great Unmentionable: Monotheism and its Discontents," The Lowell Lecture, Harvard University, April 20, 1992.

Tom Welsh , June 30, 2020 at 06:23

Er, hypocrisy much?

"'Kill Russians and Iranians, threaten Assad,' says ex-CIA chief backing Clinton"
hXXps://www.rt.com/usa/355291-morrell-kill-russians-clinton/

Tom Welsh , June 30, 2020 at 06:13

Once again I would like to compliment Mr McGovern on his magnificently Biblical appearance. That full set would do credit to any Old Testament prophet.

I see him as the USA's own Jeremiah.

Tom Welsh , June 30, 2020 at 06:12

Seeing that picture of Johnson's sad, wicked bloodhound features really, really makes me wish I had had a chance to be outside his tent pissing in. I'd have been careful to drink as many gallons of beer as possible beforehand.

Although it would have been better, from a humanitarian pont of view, just to set fire to the tent.

Tom Welsh , June 30, 2020 at 06:10

"Historian Richardson "

Clearly a serious exaggeration.

Tom Welsh , June 30, 2020 at 06:09

Ah, the Chinook! The 60-year-old helicopter that epitomises everything Afghan patriots love about the USA. It's big, fat, slow, clumsy, unmanoeuvrable, and may carry enough US troops to make shooting it down a damaging political blow against Washington.

Vivek , June 30, 2020 at 05:43

Ray,
What do you make of Barbara Honeggar's second career as a alternative story peddler?
see hXXps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB21BVFOIjw

CNfan , June 30, 2020 at 03:43

A brilliant piece, with a deft touch depicting the timeless human follies running our foreign policy circus. Real-world experience, perspective, and courage like Ray's were the dream of the drafters of our 1st Amendment. And ending with Caitlin's hammer was effective. As to who benefits? I suspect the neocons – our resident war-addicts and Israeli assets. Paraphrasing Nancy, "All roads lead to Netanyahu."

Ehzal , June 30, 2020 at 03:12

So,Russia what will do in next Upcoming Years during these covid-19.

Realist , June 30, 2020 at 02:54

Ray, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has embraced these allegations against Russia as the gospel truth and has threatened to seek revenge against Putin once he occupies the White House.

He said Americans who serve in the military put their life on the line. "But they should never, never, never ever face a threat like this with their commander in chief turning a blind eye to a foreign power putting a bounty on their heads."

"I'm quite frankly outraged by the report," Biden said. He promised that if he is elected, "Putin will be confronted and we'll impose serious costs on Russia."

This is the kind of warmongering talk that derailed the expected landslide victory for the Queen of Warmongers in 2016. This time round though, Trump has seemingly already swung and badly missed three times in his responses to the Covid outbreak, the public antics attributed to BLM, and the Fed's creation of six trillion dollars in funny money as a gift to the most privileged tycoons on the planet. In baseball, which will not have a season in spite of the farcical theatrics between ownership and players, that's called a "whiff" and gets you sent back to the bench.

According to all the pollsters, Donnie's base of white working class "deplorables" are already abandoning his campaign–bigly, prompting the none-too-keen Biden to assume that over-the-top Russia bashing is back in season, especially since trash-talking Nobel Laureate Obama is now delivering most of the mute sock puppet Biden's lines. It was almost comical to watch Joe do nothing but grin in the framed picture to the left of his old boss during their most recent joint interview with the press. This dangerous re-set of the Cold War is NOT what the people want, nor is it good for them or any living things.

DH Fabian , June 30, 2020 at 10:18

Biden already lost 2020 -- in spite of the widely-disliked Trump. This is why Democrats began working to breath life back into Russia-gate by late last year, setting the stage to blame Russia for their 2020 defeat. We spent the past 25 years detailing the demise of the Democratic Party (replaced by the "New Democrat Party"), and it turned out that the party loyalists didn't hear a word of it.

John A , June 30, 2020 at 02:15

As a viewer from afar, in Europe, I find it mindboggling how the American public seem to believe all this nonsense about Russia. Have the people there really been that dumbed down by chewing gum for the eyes television and disgusting chemical and growth h0rmone laced food? Sad, sad, sad.

Tom Welsh , June 30, 2020 at 06:17

John, I think there is something to what you say about dumbing down. I recall Albert Jay Nock lamenting, in about 1910, how dreadfully US education had already been dumbed down – and things have been going steadily downhill ever since.

But I don't think we can quite release the citizenry from responsibility on account of their ignorance. (Isn't it a legal maxim that ignorance is not an excuse?)

There is surely deep down in most people a sly lust for dominance, a desire to control and forbid and compel; and also a quiet satisfaction at hearing of inferior foreigners being harmed or killed by one's own "world class" armed forces.

TS , June 30, 2020 at 11:14

> As a viewer from afar, in Europe, I find it mindboggling how the American public seem to believe all this nonsense about Russia.

May I remind you that most of the mass media in Europe parrot all this nonsense, and a large segment of the public swallows it?

Charles Familant , June 30, 2020 at 00:50

Mr. McGovern has not made his case. To his question as to why Taliban militants need any additional incentive to target U.S. troops in Afghanistan, it is not far-fetched to believe these militants would welcome additional funds to continue their belligerency. Waging war is not cheap and is especially onerous for relatively small organizations as compared to major powers. What reason would Putin have to pay such bounty? The increase in U.S. troop casualties would provide Trump an additional rationale to bring the troops home, as he had promised during his campaign speeches in 2015 and 2016. This action would be a boon to his re-election prospects. Putin is well aware that if Biden wins in November, there is little likelihood of the hostility in Afghanistan or anywhere else being brought to an end. But, more to the point, the likelihood of U.S. sanctions against Russia being curtailed under a Biden presidency is remote. To what he deemed rhetorical, Mr. McGovern asks how successful were U.S. interrogators of such captured Taliban in the past, I remind him that there were opposing views regarding which techniques were most effective. Might not these interrogators have, in the present case, employed more effective means? Finally, it should not even be a question as to why any news agency does not reveal its sources. But in this case, the New York Times specifically mentions that the National Security Council discussed the intelligence finding in late March. Further, if it is true that Trump, Pence et al ignored the said briefs of which the administration was well aware, this should be no surprise to any of us. Case in point: how long did it take Trump to respond to the present pandemic? One telling observation: Mr. McGovern says that Heather Cox Richardson is "described as a historian at Boston College.' She is not just "described as a historian" Mr. McGovern, she IS a historian at Boston College; in fact, she is a professor at that college and has authored six scholarly works that have been published as books, the most recent of which in March of this year by the Oxford University Press. Mr. McGovern states that the points Richardson made her most most recent newsletter as "banal." I see nothing banal in that newsletter, but rather a list of relevant factual occurrences. Finally (this time it really is final), Mr. McGovern employs the use of sarcasm to discount what Richardson and others have contended regarding this most recent expose. And seems to give more credibility to the comments made by Trump and his cohorts, as though this administration is remarkable for its integrity.

Sam F , June 30, 2020 at 11:05

Plausible interest does not make unsupported accusations a reality. What bounties did the US offer?
Have you forgotten that the US set up Al Qaeda in Afghanistan with weapons to attack the USSR there?

Zhu , June 30, 2020 at 00:34

Come December this year, which losing party will blame which scapegoat? Russia? China? The Man in the Moon? It must be a hard decision!

Zhu , June 30, 2020 at 00:31

Unfortunately, bad ideas and conspiracy fictions rarely disappear completely. But that Afghans need to be paid to kill invaders is the dumbest conspiracy fiction yet.

Thomas Fortin , June 29, 2020 at 21:31

Excellent report Ray, as usual.
Interesting note here, I watched The Hill's Rising program, and listened to young conservative Saagar say, although he does not believe that Russia-gate is credible, he made the statement that Russia is supplying the Taliban weapons and wants us to get out of Afghanistan, and that is considered a fact by all journalists!
Saagar is a bit conflicted, he does not, but does believe the gods of intelligence, like so many did with the Gulf of Tonkin so long ago, I remember that all too well.
As I look out upon the ignorant masses and useful idiots who strain at those Confederate and other monuments, while continuing to elect the same old people back into office who continue the status quo, its a bit discouraging. We were told so long ago about our current situation, that,
"It is only when the people become ignorant and corrupt, when they degenerate into a populace, that they are incapable of exercising the sovereignty. Usurpation is then an easy attainment, and an usurper soon found. The people themselves become the willing instruments of their own debasement and ruin." [James Monroe, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1817]
As a historian of some sort and educational film maker, I do my best to educate people, though its a bit overwhelming at times how ignorant and fascist brain-washed most are. Monroe, like the other founders knew the secret of maintaining a free and prosperous republic, from the same piece, "Let us, then, look to the great cause, and endeavor to preserve it in full force. Let us by all wise and constitutional measures promote intelligence among the people as the best means of preserving our liberties."
George Carlin got it right about why education "sucks", it was by design, so our work is cut out for us.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
~Thomas Jefferson

GMCasey , June 29, 2020 at 21:25

Why would Putin even bother? America and its endless wars is doing itself in. Afghanistan is said to be," the graveyard of empires." It was for Alexander the Great -- –it was for Russia and I suppose that it will be for America too -- -

DW Bartoo , June 29, 2020 at 20:50

Ray, I certainly hope that Durham and Barr will not wait too long a time to make public the truth about Russiagate.

Indeed, certain heads should, figuratively, roll, and as well, the whole story about who was behind the setting up of Flynn needs to, somehow, make it through the media flack.

Judge Sullivan's antics having been rather thoroughly shot down, though the media is desperately trying to either spin or ignore the reality that it was not merely Flynn that Sullivan was hoping to harm, but also the power of the executive branch relative to the judicial branch.

The role of Obama and of Biden who, apparently, suggested the use of the Logan Act as the means to go after Flynn, who we now know was intentionally entrapped by the intrepid FBI, need to be made clear as well.

Just as with the initial claims that torture was the work of "a few bad apples", when anyone with any insight into such "policy" actions had to have known that it WAS official policy (crafted by Addington, Bybee, and Yoo, as it turned out, directed to do so by the Bush White House), so too, must it be realized that it was not some rogue agents and loose cannons, but actual instructions "from above", explicit or implicit, that "encouraged" the behavior of those who spoke of "Insurance" policies designed to hamper, hinder, and harm the incoming administration.

Clearly, I am no fan of Trump, and while I honestly regard the Rule of Law as essentially a fairytale for the gullible (as the behavior of the "justice" system from the " qualified immunity" of the police, to the "absolute immunity" of prosecutors, judges, and the political class must make clear,to even the most giddy of childish believers in U$ purity, innocence, and exceptionalism, that the "law" serves to protect wealth and power and NOT the public), I should really like to consider that even in a pretend democracy, some things are simply not to be tolerated.

Things, like torture, like fully politicized law enforcement or "intelligence" agencies, like secret court proceedings, where judges may be lied to with total impunity and actual evidence is not required. As well as things like a media thoroughly willing to requrgitate blatant propaganda as "fact" (while having, again, no apparent need of genuine evidenc), or other things like total surveillance, and the destruction of habeas corpus.

One should like to imagine that such things might concern the majority.

Yet, a society that buys into forever wars, lesser-evil voting, and created Hitler like boogeymen, that countenances being lied into wars and consistently lied to about virtually everything, is hardly likely to discern the truth of things until the "Dream" collapses into personal pain, despair, and Depression.

Unless there is an awakening quite beyond that already tearing down statues, but yet still , apparently, unwilling to grasp the totality of the corruption throughout the entire edifice of "authority", of the total failure of a system that has no real legitimacy, except that given it by voters choosing between two sides of the same tyranny, it may be readily imagined, should Biden be "victorious", that Russiagate, Chinagate, Irangate, Venezuelagate, and countless other "Gates" will become Official History.

In which case, this is not a last gasp, of Russiagate, but a new and full head of steam for more of the same.

How easy it has been for the lies to prevail, to become "truth" and to simply disappear the voices of those who ask for evidence, who dare question, who doubt.

How easy to co-opt and destroy efforts to educate or bring about critically necessary change.

There are but a few months for real evidence to be revealed.

If Durham and Barr decide not to "criminalize policy differences", as Obama, the "constitutional scholar", did regarding torture, then what might we imagine will be the future of those who have an understanding of even those lies long being used, and with recent additions, for example, to torture Julian Assange?

All of the deceit has common purpose, it is to maintain absolute control.

If Russiagate is not completely exposed, for all that it is and was intended to be, then quaint little discussions about elite misbehavior will be banished from general awareness, and those who persist in questioning will be rather severely dealt with.

Antonia , June 30, 2020 at 11:43

ABSOLUTELY. Well said. NOW where to make the changes absolutely necessary?

Zalamander , June 29, 2020 at 18:47

Thanks Ray. There are multiple reasons for the continued existance of Russiagate as the Democratic party has no real answers for the economic depression affecting millions of Americans. Neoliberal Joe Biden is also an exceptionally weak presidential candidate, who does not even support universal healthcare for all Americans like every other advanced industrialized country has. That said, the Dems are indeed desperate to deflect attention away from the Durham investigation, as it is bound to expose the total fraud of Crossfire Hurricane.

Sam F , June 29, 2020 at 18:16

Thanks, Ray, a very good summary, with reminders often needed by many in dealing with complex issues.

[Jul 01, 2020] Outrage Erupts After NYT Uses Slain Marine's Photo For -Unsubstantiated- Propaganda -

Jul 01, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

As we noted earlier Tuesday, several pundits took the DNI and CIA statements as a clear denial that there was anything significant or worthy of briefing the president on regarding alleged "Russian bounties" -- meaning it was likely deemed "chatter" or unsubstantiated rumor picked up either by US or British intelligence -- and subsequently leaked to the press to revive the pretty much dead Russiagate narrative of some level of "Trump-Putin collusion".

In short, when your 'unsubstantiated chatter' hit-piece loses steam, prop it up with a slain Marine .

[Jul 01, 2020] Looks like the same people who used to push records up the pop charts are now manipulating the Amazon best sellers charts, though I wouldn't put this past Amazon themselves.

Jul 01, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

AlfieDolittle , 1 minute ago

Amazon's No 1 Bestseller?

Looks like the same people who used to push records up the pop charts are now manipulating the Amazon best sellers charts, though I wouldn't put this past Amazon themselves.

No one buys this garbage other than uni libraries.

scott157 , 2 minutes ago

Matt Taibbi hits ANOTHER grand slam!!!!! regarding robin diangelo, she should cease scissoring and try a penis........it would spread sunshine all over her place.......................

Michael Norton , 4 minutes ago

Someone should write a book called White Strength.

novictim , 4 minutes ago

And let us never forget the crackpot theory that only Blacks cannot be racist 'cuz P + P + R -> (Prejudice + Power) = Racism.

This social theory defines blacks as being definitionally incapable of possessing power over whites. Ya, that's not racist at all!

johnnyg , 5 minutes ago

Teaming up with Ruth Frankenberg to help attack "fellow whites"? Oy vey!

I wonder if it's "fragility" to need every university, multinational corp, media monopoly, and celebrity constantly patting you on the *** and silencing any criticism of your constant terrible behavior?

Shirley Yugest , 5 minutes ago

She should end her whiteness immediately.

[Jun 29, 2020] The bounties could be a false flag: the Taliban doesn t need a Russian bounty to kill American soldiers

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The Taliban doesn't need a Russian bounty to kill American soldiers. It would be a waste of money to pay for something the Taliban do anyway. Does the NYT believe the Taliban are motivated only by money? ..."
"... Any deal they make will necessitate that the the Taliban not spread their message north of the Afghan border into the former Soviet-stans that Moscow considers as within its sphere of influence. ..."
"... the bounties could be a false flag as someone else here mentioned. Pakistani ISI? Al-Qaeda? The Pakistani branch of the Taliban? ..."
"... Given the timing of the story, its more plausible that someone in the Intel community took a weak source, perhaps a single POW making an unverifiable claim and leaked it to make it harder for Trump to do any of the following ... ..."
"... Who was the "source" of the leak? It seems that as Ric Grenell noted. There was some raw intel that on investigation didn't meet the smell test. Someone who had access to that and is a buddy to a favorite Times reporter gave them something to spin to further the narrative that Trump is beholden to Putin. ..."
"... The problem with thinking of people like TTG is that for Russia, the USA presence in Afghanistan is actually useful. As in "never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake". Afghanistan occupation is a part of "Full Spectrum Dominance" play and, as such is a blunder. The USA simply does not has the resources for world control, despite the dominance of neocons who are ready to fight for it to the last dollar. ..."
"... I read this story as nothing more than a garden variety election year dirty trick using democratic party contacts in the print media and intel services. ..."
"... It can retroactively appear to wipe egg off their faces for their embarrassingly inept if not outright illegal Russiagate hoax which hobbled the entire country and world for three whole years, because it will be unassailable other than through denial and bolster the farago of Russia collusion suspicions simply by repetition. ..."
"... All sorts of nonsensical "corroborating" tall tales can and almost certainly will be spun. Without such an evil Russia story at hand they, the dems, would leave themselves open to being lambasted by Trump for subjecting him to three years of humiliation based on an inane, middle school level "dossier" (don't you love that? how sneaky cute to enoble it with such a word for the poor rubes) written by a reputed to be former member of "British Intelligence" (think Kim Philby if you need a clue) turned character assassin for hire. ..."
"... I tend to agree. If it is dead GIs the Russians want then all they need to do is to run guns to the Taliban. It's not as if the Taliban will then take those guns, say "gee, thanks", and then go out duck-hunting. They'd be after bigger game. But this? A bounty, which would require a payment on proof of a kill? As Larry Johnson so sarcastically said: "Yeah, that makes total sense. Russians are stupid, don't cha know." I don't believe it. ..."
"... It makes about as much sense as Russia's equally-sarcastic insinuation that an uptick in dead GIs may be the result of a CIA protecting its illegal drug business like a Mafia Don. At least the Russians have some reason to take offense. The USA, eh, perhaps less so. ..."
astutenews.com

Larry Johnson , 28 June 2020 at 09:55 PM

TTG, Your claims about US drug trafficking via the Contras is a leftwing myth. Fascinated that you'd fall for the crap.

I actually have a lot of first hand knowledge about that, having worked the Central American Task Force at CIA, having been the senior Regional Analyst for Central America, and my business relationship with the former head of DEA's International Ops and the Agent in charge of the undercover money laundering ops in NYC.

Eden Pastora's involvement in drug trafficking was taking place outside the control of the CIA. Gary Webb's delusional claims were without foundation. You, for some reason, seem to accept them at face value. Why?

optimax , 28 June 2020 at 10:00 PM
The Taliban doesn't need a Russian bounty to kill American soldiers. It would be a waste of money to pay for something the Taliban do anyway. Does the NYT believe the Taliban are motivated only by money?
JP Billen , 28 June 2020 at 10:13 PM
Revenge is not the only possible motive. Disruption of the US/Taliban/AfghanGov peace negotiations allows the Russian peace negotiations for Afghanistan to go forward. Those negotiations have been going on and off for three years.

As Leith mentioned above Russian support to the Taliban started about three years ago. Coincidence? By the way Rex Tillerson when he was SecState also claimed the Russians were arming the Taliban. Anyway if the US peace negotiations fail and the Russians succeed it is a win-win for Moscow's world rep. Of course they want to mess up any US deal with the Taliban to give their own deal a chance of success.

Any deal they make will necessitate that the the Taliban not spread their message north of the Afghan border into the former Soviet-stans that Moscow considers as within its sphere of influence.

That may work for the current crop of Taliban but it may turn out shortsighted as there are some small Uzbeki-Afghan and Tajik-Afghan Taliban factions that may never want to stop spreading Sharia.

Or the bounties could be a false flag as someone else here mentioned. Pakistani ISI? Al-Qaeda? The Pakistani branch of the Taliban?

China allegedly has unofficial relations with the Taliban but with their problem in Xinjiang you would think they would never actively support Islamic fundamentalists. Qatar? They were accused of supporting Taliban terrorism in Afghanistan, but their accuser was Saudi Arabia so is probably BS IMHO.

Christian J. Chuba , 29 June 2020 at 01:18 AM
"The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, CNN and Sky News back up the NYT reporting through their sources."
Does this mean that each one contacted different source in the govt to verify the story or that they verified that the NYT contact was actually a govt employee and not the Easter Bunny?

Given the timing of the story, its more plausible that someone in the Intel community took a weak source, perhaps a single POW making an unverifiable claim and leaked it to make it harder for Trump to do any of the following ...

  1. Withdraw troops from Germany,
  2. Make the G7 into the G8 by letting Russia back in,
  3. Reinforce the Russians are despicable narrative (always a win).

Everyone in the MSM accepts this as an indisputable fact. It must be intoxicating to be able to leak a story and have everyone accept it without challenge.

And I'll add ... the NATO countries in Europe would be more willing to pay a premium for U.S. and Qatar LNG vs Russian NG if they find out that Russia is using their money to kill their soldiers.

The ONLY rational reason I heard why Russia would do this came from what I consider a marginal website, Veterans today. Gordon Duff said that the Russians did this to deter madman Trump from killing more Russians in Syria. I don't buy the theory but at least it proposes a rational motive while the MSM didn't even need a rational motive.

Jack , 29 June 2020 at 02:27 AM
Intel just reported to me that they did not find this info credible, and therefore did not report it to me or @VP. Possibly another fabricated Russia Hoax, maybe by the Fake News @nytimesbooks, wanting to make Republicans look bad!!!

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1277431695248183298?s=21

Who was the "source" of the leak? It seems that as Ric Grenell noted. There was some raw intel that on investigation didn't meet the smell test. Someone who had access to that and is a buddy to a favorite Times reporter gave them something to spin to further the narrative that Trump is beholden to Putin.

likbez , 29 June 2020 at 02:52 AM

@ancientarcher | 28 June 2020 at 08:16 AM

Now you want to portray NYT as the paragon of truth-telling!! .

...But then isn't your ancestry from Lithuania. Your hatred is strong. I get that - I see that all time with people from the ex-Soviet republics formerly ruled by Russia. Hope others see that too.

You hit the nail. TTG sometimes sounds really like a Ukrainian nationalist on those issues. That means that TTG simply can't think strategically in this case due to his bias.

If Russia wanted to hurt the USA in Afghanistan then Strela launchers would be in hands of Taliban long ago with plausible deniability that they obtained them from Libya.

The problem with thinking of people like TTG is that for Russia, the USA presence in Afghanistan is actually useful. As in "never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake". Afghanistan occupation is a part of "Full Spectrum Dominance" play and, as such is a blunder. The USA simply does not has the resources for world control, despite the dominance of neocons who are ready to fight for it to the last dollar.

The especially prominent attitude in the State Department and NSC (Bolton is a nice example of those MIC bottom-feeders)

It drains the USA resources, and it turns the people of Asian xUSSR republics (so called Stans) against the USA and as such, makes neocolonialist policies in xUSSR republics more difficult.

Fourth and Long , 29 June 2020 at 03:13 AM

I read this story as nothing more than a garden variety election year dirty trick using democratic party contacts in the print media and intel services.

They were rehearsing their checklist litany of egregious faults of Donald Trump as president - corona, resulting recession/depression, etcetera - insert your picks, and decided they needed another one -- did nothing about Rooskies bribing Taliban to kill American soldiers.

It can retroactively appear to wipe egg off their faces for their embarrassingly inept if not outright illegal Russiagate hoax which hobbled the entire country and world for three whole years, because it will be unassailable other than through denial and bolster the farago of Russia collusion suspicions simply by repetition.

All sorts of nonsensical "corroborating" tall tales can and almost certainly will be spun. Without such an evil Russia story at hand they, the dems, would leave themselves open to being lambasted by Trump for subjecting him to three years of humiliation based on an inane, middle school level "dossier" (don't you love that? how sneaky cute to enoble it with such a word for the poor rubes) written by a reputed to be former member of "British Intelligence" (think Kim Philby if you need a clue) turned character assassin for hire.

J , 29 June 2020 at 03:30 AM

President Trump tweeted on Sunday night that U.S. intelligence "just reported to me that they did not find this info credible, and therefore did not report it to me or [Vice President Mike Pence]". The Taliban have also ridiculed the report.

Yeah, Right , 29 June 2020 at 04:21 AM

Personanongrata,

I tend to agree. If it is dead GIs the Russians want then all they need to do is to run guns to the Taliban. It's not as if the Taliban will then take those guns, say "gee, thanks", and then go out duck-hunting. They'd be after bigger game. But this? A bounty, which would require a payment on proof of a kill? As Larry Johnson so sarcastically said: "Yeah, that makes total sense. Russians are stupid, don't cha know." I don't believe it.

It makes about as much sense as Russia's equally-sarcastic insinuation that an uptick in dead GIs may be the result of a CIA protecting its illegal drug business like a Mafia Don. At least the Russians have some reason to take offense. The USA, eh, perhaps less so.

Fred , 29 June 2020 at 08:06 AM

TTG,

"undermining US political and social unity"

I can't wait to see a story on what the Chinese have been up to in doing precisely that with billions in investment funds to children of prominent politicians, bribes to academics, NGO cultural centers, operatives sent to the using 'student' as cover, or work via H1B visa holders.

[Jun 29, 2020] Afghanistan occupation is a part of Full Spectrum Dominance play and, as such is a blunder and Russians probably are wise enough to adhere to maxim never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake by TTG

Notable quotes:
"... Assuming this is based on true events for the moment, is there a significant chance this could've been a false flag cover for an op by someone else? Thinking along the lines of the Israeli's "We're CIA" assassination ops of nuclear engineers in Iran here. Would the Paki intell services or even Iran attempt this in Afghanistan, perhaps? ..."
"... I had thought the Russians fear radical Islam as much or more than we do, so I can imagine them paying bounties to Talibs for ISIL scalps much easier than US ones, were they interested enough to play in that sandbox at all. ..."
"... And it's disgusting how you continue to politicize intelligence. You clearly don't understand how raw intel gets verified. Leaks of partial information to reporters from anonymous sources is dangerous because people like you manipulate it for political gain. ..."
"... Let The NY Times show what it got! We'll be waiting with bated breath. Propaganda all the time. 24x7. There can be no rational discourse in the USA. ..."
"... This story seems like more of a non-story, instigated by those who are still trying to maintain the Russian Hoax: the MSM/Resistance, neocon warmongers/NeverTrumpers, et al. As the election grows nigh, Leftists and their allies on the Right are getting more and more shrill and unhinged, demanding conformity of thought and grasping for ways to maintain the perpetual outrage of their ranks over Any. Little. Thing. Sorest of losers, all. I have a feeling they'll still be filled with anger even if Biden wins -- I noticed a growing number of perpetually aggrieved even while Obama was still POTUS. Is it something in the water? ..."
"... This story is obvious crap and it is purveyed by obvious Democrat shills - the NYT, quoting obvious anti Trump sources that have a well earned reputation for lying - the Five eyes intelligence community. ..."
"... This whole "story" stinks to high heaven. Judy Miller redux - regime-change info ops, coordinated across multiple media organizations. I happen to dislike Trump, Pompeo et al as much as the next person but here we have, yet again, another "scoop" with zero actual evidence, only the say-so of some nameless "intel officials," whose jobs might be described more accurately as state propaganda managers. ..."
Jun 29, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Likbez,

@ancientarcher , 28 June 2020 at 08:16 AM

Now you want to portray NYT as the paragon of truth-telling!! .
...But then isn't your ancestry from Lithuania. Your hatred is strong. I get that - I see that all time with people from the ex-Soviet republics formerly ruled by Russia. Hope others see that too.

You hit the nail. TTG sometimes sounds really like a Ukrainian nationalist on those issues.

TTG simply can't think strategically in this case due to his bias.

If Russia wanted to hurt the USA in Afghanistan then Strela launchers would be in hands of Taliban long ago with plausible deniability that they obtained them from Libya.

The problem with thinking of people like TTG is that for Russia, the USA presence in Afghanistan is actually useful.

As in "never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake".

Afghanistan occupation is a part of "Full Spectrum Dominance" play and, as such is a blunder. The USA simply does not has the resources for world control, despite the dominance of neocons who are ready to fight for it to the last dollar. The especially prominent attitude in the State Department and NSC (Bolton is a nice example of those MIC bottom-feeders)

It drains the USA resources, and it turns the people of Asian xUSSR republics (so called Stans) against the USA and as such, makes neocolonial policies in xUSSR republics more difficult.

The Twisted Genius , 28 June 2020 at 11:51 AM

Fred,

The DOJ only dropped charges against two of Prigozhin's companies. The case against the IRA and 13 trolls still stands. Prigozhin was able to use Concord's business status and his lawyers' "client, not client" status to dig out evidence on the case without exposing himself to the court. His strategy was both brilliant and cynical.

The K-pop and Tik-Tok trolling of Parscale and the Trump rally was brilliant and cost not a dime. It didn't limit the attendance of the rally since sign up was not limited. It did screw up Parscale's data collection and tricked him into believing there was more enthusiasm for Trump that there actually was. It embarrassed him and Trump. And yes, this methodology is closely related to what the Russians did in 2016 except the Tik-Tok trolling was masterminded by a 51 year old Iowan grandmother rather than a former Russian KGB officer.

The Twisted Genius , 28 June 2020 at 11:55 AM

Babak,

I'm not trying to deny USI involvement in any of this drug dealing. Or defend it in any way. It's despicable and shameful. All of it.

Larry Johnson , 28 June 2020 at 12:15 PM

Boy, I never thought I'd see TTG be so gullible. The NY Times story is being rolled out in conjunction with British reporting, which oddly claims the same thing. The provenance of this so-called intelligence is so thin and questionable that it is natural to ask who has the agenda and what is their goal? Creating and maintaining the Russian boogey man as the ultimate threat does not serve US National Security interests. The Russians have been pretty consistent over the last 20 years about eliminating radical Islamists. They, unlike many in the United States, understand the threat.
So, here is their "brilliant" super secret plan--ally themselves with the guys they spent ten years fighting in Afghanistan, pay them to kill Americans and Brits and other US allies with the understanding that their super secret plan will be discovered and will be used as justification for attacking Russia. Yeah, that makes total sense. Russians are stupid, don't cha know.

CK , 28 June 2020 at 12:23 PM

@srw
The USA needs its boogieman under the bed.
When it is under a child's bed the answer is warm milk cookies and a mommies hug.
When it is under a IC person's bed the answer is heroin, hookers and cold cash.
When we leave Afghanistan and its poppy fields to the Taliban they may just do what they had done 20 years ago close down the trade.
That would mean that the only readily available supply of nod juice would be Chinese Fentanyl or Mexican Brown.

etrog , 28 June 2020 at 12:28 PM

ancientarcher,

Long live anti semitism, where right and left are in concert. By the way, we Jews also control the US military industrial complex and most intelligence agencies. The moderator approved your comment, I doubt he will let mine get through.

turcopolier , 28 June 2020 at 01:36 PM

TTG et al

This Skynews report makes it sound like this is a British story based on British leaks of one of their own parliamentary documents. If that is so, then the story may have been rejected by the US IC and never briefed to the WH. https://news.sky.com/.../russia-paid-taliban-fighters-to...

turcopolier , 28 June 2020 at 01:41 PM

etrog

So thin skinned! And so intended to intimidate to achieve silence. Obvious troll.

Leith , 28 June 2020 at 02:01 PM

Three years ago General John Nicholson, Commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, testified before the Senate about Russian support to the Talibs.

Two years ago in an interview with BBC he repeated the charge that the Russians were supporting and arming the Taliban. He quoted stories written in Taliban media sources about support from the Russians. He also cited captured Russian-made night vision goggles, medium and heavy machine guns as well as small arms. He says that although the Russians and Talibs are not natural allies, they use the narrative of ISIS fighters in Afghanistan as justification for legitimizing support.

Mark Logan , 28 June 2020 at 02:14 PM

Assuming this is based on true events for the moment, is there a significant chance this could've been a false flag cover for an op by someone else? Thinking along the lines of the Israeli's "We're CIA" assassination ops of nuclear engineers in Iran here. Would the Paki intell services or even Iran attempt this in Afghanistan, perhaps?

A Russian motive is difficult to imagine in this for me. Mindless revenge for what happened forty years ago strikes me as just barely plausible. I had thought the Russians fear radical Islam as much or more than we do, so I can imagine them paying bounties to Talibs for ISIL scalps much easier than US ones, were they interested enough to play in that sandbox at all.

Jack , 28 June 2020 at 02:31 PM
I never heard this. And it's disgusting how you continue to politicize intelligence. You clearly don't understand how raw intel gets verified. Leaks of partial information to reporters from anonymous sources is dangerous because people like you manipulate it for political gain.

https://twitter.com/richardgrenell/status/1277024942232530945?s=21

Ric Grenell responding to a accusatory tweet by Ted Lieu.

And there's the obligatory POTUS tweet.

The Fake News @ nytimes must reveal its "anonymous" source. Bet they can't do it, this "person" probably does not even exist!

Let The NY Times show what it got! We'll be waiting with bated breath. Propaganda all the time. 24x7. There can be no rational discourse in the USA.

JMH , 28 June 2020 at 02:45 PM

"The K-pop and Tik-Tok trolling of Parscale and the Trump rally was brilliant and cost not a dime. It didn't limit the attendance of the rally since sign up was not limited."

Are you sure? AOC for one applauded this is as well but remember, Congress shall not abridge the right of the people to peacefully assemble.

"Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) credited "teens on TikTok" for the lower than expected turnout at President Trump's rally on Saturday night in Tulsa, Okla., his first since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic." The Hill

Leith , 28 June 2020 at 02:56 PM

@Mark Logan: "revenge for what happened forty years ago"

Well there are still a lot of sore hineys in Moscow for that and for the glorification of it in Hollywood stunts like RamboIII.

Or more likely it could be revenge for the deaths of the Wagner Group Mercs in Syria just two years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Khasham#Unofficial_Russian_sources_version

Etrog , 28 June 2020 at 03:35 PM

Babak makkinejad,

Thanks for the laugh.

akaPatience , 28 June 2020 at 04:27 PM

Trump's been trying to get us out of Afghanistan for a long time. Yet there are those who are making a BFD over the report, as though we're supposed to impeach the POTUS or start WWIII because of the allegation. Who are all of the dead soldiers killed by Russian-paid bounty hunters anyway, and what proof is there that they were killed at Putin's directive?

This story seems like more of a non-story, instigated by those who are still trying to maintain the Russian Hoax: the MSM/Resistance, neocon warmongers/NeverTrumpers, et al. As the election grows nigh, Leftists and their allies on the Right are getting more and more shrill and unhinged, demanding conformity of thought and grasping for ways to maintain the perpetual outrage of their ranks over Any. Little. Thing. Sorest of losers, all. I have a feeling they'll still be filled with anger even if Biden wins -- I noticed a growing number of perpetually aggrieved even while Obama was still POTUS. Is it something in the water?

Fred , 28 June 2020 at 05:07 PM

TTG,

So you researched where all the people gathering tickets to that event came from, or just concluded the published press reports are accurate?

The Twisted Genius , 28 June 2020 at 05:13 PM

pl,

The Sky News story says a British security official is confirming the reports are true. It doesn't sound like this defense official originated the story. Some are now speculating whether Boris Johnson was briefed or if he was kept in the dark. The Brits will demand an in-person answer from their government on Monday. A CNN report refers to a British security official. Might be the same source. NYT and WaPo refer to US officials for their sources.

The Twisted Genius , 28 June 2020 at 05:17 PM

Fred,

I probably saw the same press reports you did. Who knows where they all live? It was done online.

turcopolier , 28 June 2020 at 05:25 PM

TTG

You are usually good at reading between the lines. Usually. It does not sound that way to me. The implication in the article is that this "story" exists in the report cited and that this is what has been planted in the US media. We will see.

walrus , 28 June 2020 at 06:04 PM

This story is obvious crap and it is purveyed by obvious Democrat shills - the NYT, quoting obvious anti Trump sources that have a well earned reputation for lying - the Five eyes intelligence community.

Why would anyone give this story a grain of credibility?

Even without that, I can think of a heap of perfectly acceptable Russian engagements with the Taliban - exactly like our own.

turcopolier , 28 June 2020 at 06:06 PM

TTG

You are repeating the same error in logic that Habakkuk criticized you for. You say there are many "stories" and then you treat these stories as proven facts. Are you the sole author of this line?

D , 28 June 2020 at 06:29 PM

This whole "story" stinks to high heaven. Judy Miller redux - regime-change info ops, coordinated across multiple media organizations. I happen to dislike Trump, Pompeo et al as much as the next person but here we have, yet again, another "scoop" with zero actual evidence, only the say-so of some nameless "intel officials," whose jobs might be described more accurately as state propaganda managers.

How many more times are people gonna fall for this same routine? Even the Wapo, WSJ "confirmations" are a bait-and-switch. The only thing they confirm is that intel officials are indeed pushing this story, not its veracity. It's a circular claim -- like Cheney citing NYT "confirmation" of the unproven allegations his own office had passed on to Judy Miller.

You can only speculate as to why this, why now. Just six months ago it was Iranians -- per Pompeo and his own cadre of "intel officials" -- who were offering bounties and sponsoring their own spoiler wing of the Taliban. So maybe it's a pre-fab "story" already in the propaganda repertory. The motive? Obviously it's to revive the Russiagate zombie one more time and make it go the distance -- the full four years of the Trump admin. And it creates media bubble pressure to extend the Afghan occupation. The kind of pressure that seems to have worked like a charm in case of Syria -- where Trump's order somehow got modified from withdrawal to open-ended occupation and oil-thievery.

The relationship between flagship media and their contacts in the "intelligence community" isn't journalism. It's the relationship an advertising agency has to a client. They market the client's product and get paid in "scoops" and, with it, increased traffic.

Personanongrata , 28 June 2020 at 07:21 PM

Italicized/bold text was excerpted from Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says found at the Grey Lady Down:

The disclosure comes at a time when Mr. Trump has said he would invite Mr. Putin to an expanded meeting of the Group of 7 nations, but tensions between American and Russian militaries are running high.

What a startling coincidence.

What would the Russians hope to gain? Revenge?

If it was revenge the Russians sought they could have simply sat back and let the Taliban continue on with business as usual without having to break a sweat or get their hands dirty - while sitting back and snickering at the futility of US efforts in Afghanistan.

Has there been any evidence presented to support the anonymous European intelligence officials extraordinary claims?

The Gray Lady Down report only offers other Russia bad stories which are light on evidence and heavy on innuendo.

Serge , 28 June 2020 at 07:47 PM

My only question is, and I can't find any answer to this(please someone direct me if they know, which militants?

Fred , 28 June 2020 at 07:55 PM

Col.,

One more planted story like the Steele Dossier to give the left something to investigate.

FakeBot , 28 June 2020 at 08:05 PM

It sounds like more of the same old sabotage Trump has been dealing with since assuming office. Why else would this leak and why else would Trump be left out of the loop? This reminds me of what Harry Reid once said on CNN during the 2016 election: intelligence officials should lie to Trump in briefings.

Trump and these officials need to set aside the pettiness and do what's right. That means pulling out of Afghanistan in a timely and appropriate manner without putting lives at risk.

[Jun 29, 2020] After Iraq WMD and Russia Collusion, we should ask for real evidence instead of the top intelligence sources

Petty scoundrels from NYT are not that inventive. They just want to whitewash Russiagate fiasco. This whole "story" stinks to high heaven. Judy Miller redux - regime-change info ops, coordinated across multiple media organizations.
Notable quotes:
"... After Iraq WMD and Russia Collusion, we should ask for real evidence instead of the "top intelligence sources". And we should not buy we can't provide any evidence because of sources & methods. ..."
"... On a practical note, how was a Taliban soldier militant meant to verify his claim to a bounty? I assume that scalping was not a feasible option, but if you are going to offer a bounty then you are going to want proof that the person claiming that bounty did, indeed, do the job. ..."
Jun 29, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com
"Russia offered bounties to Afghan militants to kill US troops" - TTG - Sic Semper Tyrannis

blue peacock | 27 June 2020 at 10:19 PM

After Iraq WMD and Russia Collusion, we should ask for real evidence instead of the "top intelligence sources". And we should not buy we can't provide any evidence because of sources & methods.

Be skeptical of anything published by Pravda on the Hudson and Pravda on the Potomac when it comes to intelligence matters. Especially months before a general election.

Fred | 27 June 2020 at 10:32 PM

On to Moscow! Where's Bomb'n Bolton when we need him? "a European intelligence official told CNN."..... "The official did not specify as to the date of the casualties, their number or nationality, or whether these were fatalities or injuries."

So, unknown official, unknown date, unknown if there were any actual casualties.

"The US concluded that the GRU was behind the interference in the 2016 US election and cyberattacks against the Democratic National Committee and top Democratic officials."

Quick, someone tell the House Impeachment Inquiry Committee! Oh, wait, that was Ukraine. What did Mueller collude, I mean conclude, about that Russian interference?

Let me quote the former acting DNI: "You clearly don't understand how raw intel gets verified. Leaks of partial information to reporters from anonymous sources is dangerous because people like you manipulate it for political gain."

https://twitter.com/RichardGrenell/status/1277024942232530945

I believe he was tweeting that to the press, but then they are doing this for political reasons. Lockdowns and socialist revolutionary riots must not be working in the left's favor. I wonder why?

Yeah, Right | 28 June 2020 at 12:50 AM

On a practical note, how was a Taliban soldier militant meant to verify his claim to a bounty? I assume that scalping was not a feasible option, but if you are going to offer a bounty then you are going to want proof that the person claiming that bounty did, indeed, do the job.

So if a coalition soldier died on *this* day how was a Talibani supposed to confirm to the GRU that "Yep, I did that. Where's my money?"

TTG, I think you are being led away from the truth by your significant bias against Russia. Those with a blinkered vision see only what they want to see. No mystery there.

Now you want to portray NYT as the paragon of truth telling!! Haven't we seen enough examples of the lying by Jewish owned neocon media, especially the Times? Now that the Russia-gate fire is nearly put out, these guys are pumping this story.
You really need to understand the depth of hatred the Jews have for Russia and Russians that makes them like this. That's the only country /civilisation that got away from their grasp just when they thought have got it. Not once, but twice in the last century.

But then isn't your ancestry from Lithuania. Your hatred is strong. I get that - I see that all time with people from the ex-Soviet republics formerly ruled by Russia. Hope others see that too.

Barbara Ann , 28 June 2020 at 09:42 AM

Regardless of its veracity, this story will definitely hit Trump where it hurts - chapeau to the individual(s) who conceived this work of fiction, if indeed it is so.

Again, whether or not performance bonuses* were actually offered by the GRU, has anyone considered that this may still be a Russian Intelligence op?

Perhaps we should first ask whether the Kremlin wants to deal with a US under another 4 years of Trump. From their FP POV, the huge uncertainty and instability they see in the US now will surely be ramped up to a whole new level, in the event that he is re-elected. And of course all hope that Trump may be able to improve the relationship with Russia was dashed long ago, by Russiagate and the ongoing Russophobia among the Borg. Jeffrey's mission in Syria is a case in point. At least the US Deep State is the devil they know.

If the answer to the above question is "no" it must surely be a trivial matter for the GRU to feed such a damaging story to Trump's enemies in the USIC.

* "bounties" is an emotive word, useful to Trump's enemies, evoking individual pay for an individual death - real personal stuff. As others have pointed out the practicality of such a scheme seems improbable. Surely it is more likely that any such incentive pay would be for the group, upon coalition casualties confirmed in the aftermath of an attack. The distinction may not seem important, but the Resistance media can be relied upon to use language designed to inflict the most harm.

Flavius , 28 June 2020 at 09:48 AM

'Intel' without evidence is "bunk". Have we learned nothing from Chrissy Steele and the Russiagate fiasco - I know a guy who knows a guy who said... the Russians are bad and Donald Trump is an a......e. Bob Mueller and 18 pissed off democrats have concluded that the Russians are systemically bad and Donald Trump is an a......e. 4 months before a Presidential election intel sources have revealed to the NYT that the Russians are very very bad and Donald Trump is an a......e. Ah yes, the New York Ridiculously Self Degraded Times has broken another important story. I wonder why? Enough already...and yes, we have made a systemic laughing stock of ourselves.

Oh, and remind me again of why we've been staying around Kabul - something about improving the lot of women, or gays, or someone?

Diana Croissant , 28 June 2020 at 09:51 AM

I'm personally not ready to "duck and cover" after reading this.

I have accepted the fact that Russia is no longer the Soviet Union. I am watching television news at night but no longer see the clock ticking as I turn it off and go to sleep. So far, no one I know has taken to building a fallout shelter in his back yard.

I want an answer to this question: Whatever happened to the pillow and blanket I had to bring to school and store in the school's basement in case we all had to retreat there and be locked down in it during the bombing? Who do I go to to get reparations for the cost of those items? (I was never given the opportunity to retrieve them when I graduated.) Did Khrushchev have to take his shoe to a cobbler after using it to pound on the table while threatening to bury us?

Babak makkinejad , 28 June 2020 at 10:19 AM

TTG

The rebuttal from Russia.

Which raises the ante by making very very serious accusations of drug trade by US Intelligence.

https://tass.com/russia/1172369/amp?__twitter_impression=true

Charlie Wilson , 28 June 2020 at 11:06 AM

I think the killing of soldiers should be strictly forbidden. Only civilians should be targeted. It is easier and no one gives a shit.

The Twisted Genius , 28 June 2020 at 11:17 AM

Babak,

There's a rich history of stories about USI involvement in the drug trade. CIA was involved in the heroin trade during the Viet Nam War. The Iran-Contra mess involved selling Columbian cocaine to help finance Nicaraguan anti-Communist rebels. US involvement in the Afghanistan drug trade has been talked about for years. As I said, there are no glitter fartin' unicorns here.

Babak makkinejad , 28 June 2020 at 11:42 AM

TTG

The Iranian statistics do not lie. Transhipment of drugs across Iran from Afghanistan has been increasing since the American invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

The US Office of Foreign Asset Control, the US DIA, the CIA etc. are powerless to do anything about that but are, evidently, all powerfull against USD transactions of the Iranian government.

[Jun 28, 2020] Unsophisticated disinformation Moscow rebuffs NYT story alleging Russia offered Taliban money to kill US troops in Afghanist

Notable quotes:
"... "covertly offered rewards" ..."
"... On Saturday, the Russian Foreign Ministry dismissed the NYT story as "fake information." ..."
"... This unsophisticated plant clearly illustrates the low intellectual abilities of the propagandists from US intelligence, who, instead of inventing something more plausible, resort to conjuring up such nonsense. ..."
"... "Then again, what else can one expect from intelligence services that have bungled the 20-year war in Afghanistan," the ministry said. ..."
"... Moscow has suggested that this misinformation was "planted" because the US may be against Russia "assisting" in peace talks between the Taliban and the internationally-recognised government in Kabul. ..."
Jun 27, 2020 | www.rt.com

The Russian Foreign Ministry has rejected a US media report claiming Moscow offered to pay jihadi militants to attack US soldiers in Afghanistan. It said such 'fake news' merely betrays the low skill levels of US spy agencies. Citing US intelligence officials – unnamed, of course – the New York Times reported that, last year, Moscow had "covertly offered rewards" to Taliban-linked militants to attack American troops and their NATO allies in Afghanistan.

On Saturday, the Russian Foreign Ministry dismissed the NYT story as "fake information."

This unsophisticated plant clearly illustrates the low intellectual abilities of the propagandists from US intelligence, who, instead of inventing something more plausible, resort to conjuring up such nonsense.

"Then again, what else can one expect from intelligence services that have bungled the 20-year war in Afghanistan," the ministry said.

Moscow has suggested that this misinformation was "planted" because the US may be against Russia "assisting" in peace talks between the Taliban and the internationally-recognised government in Kabul.

US-led NATO troops have been fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan since 2001. The campaign, launched in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, has cost Washington billions of dollars and resulted in the loss of thousands of American soldiers' lives. Despite maintaining a military presence for almost two decades, the US has failed to defeat the Taliban, which is still in control of vast swaths of the country.

Moreover, the office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction has compiled several reports detailing how tens of millions of US taxpayers' funds have been spent on dubious regeneration projects.

[Jun 28, 2020] It is the US intelligence s job to lie to you. NYT s Afghan bounty story is CIA press release by Caitlin Johnstone

This whole "story" stinks to high heaven. Judy Miller redux - regime-change info ops, coordinated across multiple media organizations.
Notable quotes:
"... To be clear, this is journalistic malpractice. Mainstream media outlets which publish anonymous intelligence claims with no proof are just publishing CIA press releases disguised as news. They're just telling you to believe what sociopathic intelligence agencies want you to believe under the false guise of impartial and responsible reporting. This practice has become ubiquitous throughout mainstream news publications, but that doesn't make it any less immoral. ..."
"... "Same old story: alleged intelligence ops IMPOSSIBLE to verify, leaked to the press which reports them quoting ANONYMOUS officials," tweeted journalist Stefania Maurizi. ..."
"... "So we are to simply believe the same intelligence orgs that paid bounties to bring innocent prisoners to Guantanamo, lied about torture in Afghanistan, and lied about premises for war from WMD in Iraq to the Gulf of Tonkin 'attack'? All this and no proof?" ..."
"... "It's totally outrageous for Russia to support the Taliban against Americans in Afghanistan. Of course, it's totally fine for the US to support jihadi rebels against Russians in Syria, jihadi rebels who openly said the Taliban is their hero," ..."
"... On the flip side, all the McResistance pundits have been speaking of this baseless allegation as a horrific event that is known to have happened, with Rachel Maddow going so far as to describe it as Putin offering bounties for the "scalps" of American soldiers in Afghanistan. This is an interesting choice of words, considering that offering bounties for scalps is, in fact, one of the many horrific things the US government did in furthering its colonialist ambitions , which, unlike the New York Times allegation, is known to have actually happened. ..."
Jun 28, 2020 | www.rt.com
By Caitlin Johnstone , an independent journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her website is here and you can follow her on Twitter @caitoz

Whenever one sees a news headline ending in "US Intelligence Says", one should always mentally replace everything that comes before it with "Blah blah blah we're probably lying."

"Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill Troops, US Intelligence Says", blares the latest viral headline from the New York Times . NYT's unnamed sources allege that the GRU "secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan -- including targeting American troops", and that the Trump administration has known this for months.

To be clear, this is journalistic malpractice. Mainstream media outlets which publish anonymous intelligence claims with no proof are just publishing CIA press releases disguised as news. They're just telling you to believe what sociopathic intelligence agencies want you to believe under the false guise of impartial and responsible reporting. This practice has become ubiquitous throughout mainstream news publications, but that doesn't make it any less immoral.

Also on rt.com There they go again: NYT serves up spy fantasy about Russian 'bounties' on US troops in Afghanistan

In a post-Iraq-invasion world, the only correct response to unproven anonymous claims about a rival government by intelligence agencies from the US or its allies is to assume that they are lying until you are provided with a mountain of independently verifiable evidence to the contrary. The US has far too extensive a record of lying about these things for any other response to ever be justified as rational, and its intelligence agencies consistently play a foundational role in those lies.

Voices outside the mainstream-narrative control matrix have been calling these accusations what they are: baseless, lacking in credibility, and not reflective of anything other than fair play, even if true.

"Same old story: alleged intelligence ops IMPOSSIBLE to verify, leaked to the press which reports them quoting ANONYMOUS officials," tweeted journalist Stefania Maurizi.

America to end 'era of endless wars' & stop being policeman, Trump gives same old election promises he broke

"So we are to simply believe the same intelligence orgs that paid bounties to bring innocent prisoners to Guantanamo, lied about torture in Afghanistan, and lied about premises for war from WMD in Iraq to the Gulf of Tonkin 'attack'? All this and no proof?" tweeted author and analyst Jeffrey Kaye.

"It's totally outrageous for Russia to support the Taliban against Americans in Afghanistan. Of course, it's totally fine for the US to support jihadi rebels against Russians in Syria, jihadi rebels who openly said the Taliban is their hero," tweeted author and analyst Max Abrams.

On the flip side, all the McResistance pundits have been speaking of this baseless allegation as a horrific event that is known to have happened, with Rachel Maddow going so far as to describe it as Putin offering bounties for the "scalps" of American soldiers in Afghanistan. This is an interesting choice of words, considering that offering bounties for scalps is, in fact, one of the many horrific things the US government did in furthering its colonialist ambitions , which, unlike the New York Times allegation, is known to have actually happened.

It is true, as many have been pointing out, that it would be fair play for Russia to fund violent opposition the the US in Afghanistan, seeing as that's exactly what the US and its allies have been doing to Russia and its allies in Syria, and did to the Soviets in Afghanistan via Operation Cyclone . It is also true that the US military has no business in Afghanistan anyway, and any violence inflicted on US troops abroad is the fault of the military expansionists who put them there. The US military has no place outside its own easily defended borders, and the assumption that it is normal for a government to circle the planet with military bases is a faulty premise.

'Unsophisticated' disinformation: Moscow rebuffs NYT story alleging Russia offered Taliban money to kill US troops in Afghanistan

But before even getting into such arguments, the other side of the debate must meet its burden of proof that this has even happened. That burden is far from met. It is literally the US intelligence community's job to lie to you. The New York Times has an extensive history of pushing for new wars at every opportunity, including the unforgivable Iraq invasion , which killed a million people, based on lies. A mountain of proof is required before such claims should be seriously considered, and we are very, very far from that.

I will repeat myself: it is the US intelligence community's job to lie to you. I will repeat myself again: it is the US intelligence community's job to lie to you. Don't treat these CIA press releases with anything but contempt.

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

[Jun 28, 2020] Trump himself demolished NYT provocation -- the Russia/Taliban story

Jun 28, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Brendan , Jun 28 2020 14:18 utc | 4

Trump himself has rubbished the NYT's Russia/Taliban story on Twitter today:

"Nobody briefed or told me, @VP Pence, or Chief of Staff @MarkMeadows about the so-called attacks on our troops in Afghanistan by Russians, as reported through an "anonymous source" by the Fake News @nytimes. Everybody is denying it & there have not been many attacks on us..... "
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1277202159109537793

"The Fake News @ nytimes must reveal its "anonymous" source. Bet they can't do it, this "person" probably does not even exist! twitter.com/richardgrenell "
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1277215720418484224

Christian J. Chuba , Jun 28 2020 15:17 utc | 11

NYT exclusive: breaking, bombshell report, bombshell report, Russia pays Taliban to kill U.S. Troops

The puppets dance for their puppet masters yet again. I was struck that in all of the MSM responses on CNN and FOX every single host accepted it as an absolute fact that this was true. If an unnamed source said something to a reporter at the NYT then it must have happened in that way and the facts are irrefutable. Wow our 'journalists' are pathetic.

1. The guy who leaked this could be twisting a half or even quarter truth to embarrass Trump, derail our withdrawal from Germany or Afghanistan ... nahh impossible. Our CIA guys never have an agenda.

2. This could be disinformation against Russia ... nahh we are the good guys, that's not how we roll.

The guy on CNN could not believe the WH statement that they were not briefed, 'it strains credibility'. Maybe one POW made an outlandish claim to get better treatment and lower level staff did not think the claim itself had enough credibility. Nope, it was leaked by an Intelligence guy, therefore it must be true.

journalism is dead. buried, dug up, cremated and then scattered over a trash dump in the U.S.

[Jun 28, 2020] Evidence Free Press Release Claims 'Russia Did Bad, Trump Did Not Respond' - NYT, WaPo Publish It

Highly recommended!
Projection, yet another time. An old and very effective dirty propaganda trick. Fake news outlet are intelligence services controlled outlets.
Notable quotes:
"... Reporters from the New York Times and the Washington Post were called up by unnamed 'officials' and told to write that Russia pays some Afghans to kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. There is zero evidence that the claim is true. The Taliban spokesman denies it. The numbers of U.S. soldiers killed in Afghanistan is minimal. The alleged sources of the claims are criminals the U.S. has taken as prisoners in Afghanistan. ..."
"... The journalistic standards at the New York Times and Washington Post must be below zero to publish such nonsense without requesting real evidence. The press release like stories below from anti-Trump/anti-Russian sources have nothing to do with ' great reporting ' but are pure stenography. ..."
"... If the Russians were truly inclined in a direction leading them to "pay bounties" for American scalps in Afghanistan, they would instead be doing what we once did: providing state-of-the-art Manpads to Afghan jihadis. Any sort of bar room or shit house rumor these days is attributed to "intelligence officials" or "intelligence sources", always unnamed of course. ..."
"... The paragraph about "reasons to believe" is vacuous in the extreme: ..."
"... "The intelligence assessment is said to be based at least in part on interrogations of captured Afghan militants and criminals. The officials did not describe the mechanics of the Russian operation, such as how targets were picked or how money changed hands. It is also not clear whether Russian operatives had deployed inside Afghanistan or met with their Taliban counterparts elsewhere." ..."
"... We know from the past that US forces were torturing TOTALLY RANDOM INDIVIDUALS, occasionally to death. Needless to say, "officials did not describe the mechanics" of the interrogation, neither did not describe any corroborative details. The most benign scenario is that "captured Afghan militants and criminals" are pure fiction rather than actual people subjected to "anal inspections", "peroneal strikes", left overnight hanging from the ceiling etc. to spit out random incoherent tidbits about the Russians, like "it is also not clear".... A long list of "not clear"'s. ..."
"... Together, it is very crude "manufacturing of consent", and unfortunately, this is a workable technique of manipulation. Crudity is the tool, not a defect in this case. I will explain later what I mean, this post is probably too long already. ..."
Jun 28, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Evidence Free Press Release Claims 'Russia Did Bad, Trump Did Not Respond' - NYT , WaPo Publish It A. Pols , Jun 27 2020 14:34 utc | 1

There were allegations about emails that someone exfiltrated from the DNC and provided to Wikileaks . Russia must have done it. The FBI and other intelligence services were all over it. In the end no evidence was provided to support the claims.

There were allegations that Trump did not really win the elections. Russia must have done it. The various U.S. intelligence service, together with their British friends, provided all kinds of sinister leaks about the alleged case. In the end no evidence was provided to support the claims.

A British double agent, Sergej Skirpal, was allegedly injured in a Russian attack on him. The intelligence services told all kind of contradicting nonsense about the case. In the end no evidence was provided to support the claims.

All three cases had two points in common. The were based on sources near to the U.S. and British intelligence community. They were designed to increase hostility against Russia. The last point was then used to sabotage Donald Trump's original plans for better relations with Russia.

Now the intelligence services make another claim that fits right into the above scheme.

Reporters from the New York Times and the Washington Post were called up by unnamed 'officials' and told to write that Russia pays some Afghans to kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. There is zero evidence that the claim is true. The Taliban spokesman denies it. The numbers of U.S. soldiers killed in Afghanistan is minimal. The alleged sources of the claims are criminals the U.S. has taken as prisoners in Afghanistan.

All that nonsense is again used to press against Trump's wish for better relations with Russia. Imagine - Trump was told about these nonsensical claims and he did nothing about it!

The same intelligence services and 'officials' previously paid bounties to bring innocent prisoners to Guantanamo Bay, tortured them until they made false confessions and lied about it. The same intelligence services and 'officials' lied about WMD in Iraq. The same 'intelligence officials' paid and pay Jihadis disguised as 'Syrian rebels' to kill Russian and Syrian troops which defend their countries.

The journalistic standards at the New York Times and Washington Post must be below zero to publish such nonsense without requesting real evidence. The press release like stories below from anti-Trump/anti-Russian sources have nothing to do with ' great reporting ' but are pure stenography.

The New York Times :

Cont. reading: Evidence Free Press Release Claims 'Russia Did Bad, Trump Did Not Respond' - NYT, WaPo Publish It

Posted by b at 13:43 UTC | Comments (3) If the Russians were truly inclined in a direction leading them to "pay bounties" for American scalps in Afghanistan, they would instead be doing what we once did: providing state-of-the-art Manpads to Afghan jihadis. Any sort of bar room or shit house rumor these days is attributed to "intelligence officials" or "intelligence sources", always unnamed of course.

JohnH , Jun 27 2020 14:45 utc | 2

Biden is the intelligence services' ideal candidate -- an easily manipulated empty suit. There's a reason why charges of Biden wrongdoing are as easily dismissed as nonsensical charges against Trump and Russia get fabricated. And that reason is that the media is as happy to be manipulated as Biden.
Piotr Berman , Jun 27 2020 15:03 utc | 3
Two puzzling and disturbing aspects.

The paragraph about "reasons to believe" is vacuous in the extreme:

"The intelligence assessment is said to be based at least in part on interrogations of captured Afghan militants and criminals. The officials did not describe the mechanics of the Russian operation, such as how targets were picked or how money changed hands. It is also not clear whether Russian operatives had deployed inside Afghanistan or met with their Taliban counterparts elsewhere."

We know from the past that US forces were torturing TOTALLY RANDOM INDIVIDUALS, occasionally to death. Needless to say, "officials did not describe the mechanics" of the interrogation, neither did not describe any corroborative details. The most benign scenario is that "captured Afghan militants and criminals" are pure fiction rather than actual people subjected to "anal inspections", "peroneal strikes", left overnight hanging from the ceiling etc. to spit out random incoherent tidbits about the Russians, like "it is also not clear".... A long list of "not clear"'s.

This is disturbing, although this is precisely the quality of "intelligence" that gets released to the public. The second disturbing aspect is that the article was opened to comments, and as usually in such cases, the comments are full of fury at Russians and Trump, and with the numbers of "recommend"'s reaching thousands. On non-Russian topics, if comments are allowed, one can see a much wider spectrum of opinion, sometimes with huge numbers of "recommend"'s to people who criticize and doubt the official positions. Here I lost patience looking for any skeptical comment.

Together, it is very crude "manufacturing of consent", and unfortunately, this is a workable technique of manipulation. Crudity is the tool, not a defect in this case. I will explain later what I mean, this post is probably too long already.

[Jun 26, 2020] The Media War On Truthful Reporting And Legitimate Opinions - A Documentary

Notable quotes:
"... You can fool someone for a long time, you can fool a lot of people for a short time - but you can't fool a lot of people for a long time. That is, unless those people are willing to live the lie. ..."
"... I think the reason the MSM's propaganda is so effective nowadays (and I'm thinking specifically about the world since the Iraq invasion in 2003) is that, deep down, maybe in the collective inconsciousness level, the working classes from the First World countries know their superior living standards depend on imperial brutality over the rest of the world. ..."
"... The current increased smear campaigns against the so called Russian Bots, Assad Apologists etc., is surely just the first part of of a an attempt to implement very serious censorship and control over the internet to attempt to completely block out any alternative voices. ..."
"... Obivously western intelligence servies, NATO leak stuff to western msm to intimidate and censor political oppostion in every western country. ..."
"... Orwell's great fear was totalitarianism. Either from the left or the right. What we have now is much more subtle. The MSM retains the illusion of freedom and most people go along with it. We may even realize we are being manipulated but the only alternative is posting on sites like MOA. ..."
"... The Skirpal charade was a front for several things but mainly, I think, to turn the focus away from Brexit and to opening the Cold War front again. ..."
"... George Orwell has been a presence throughout this thread. It was unfortunate he was hurried by MI6 to finish the last pages of 'Animal Farm' so it could be translated into Arabic and be used to discredit Communist parties in Western Asia. This always raised the ire of Communist organisations through following decades .This being said he wrote some great text especially for me the revealing 1939 novel - Coming up for A ..."
"... I don't know if wars are really an extension of diplomacy by other means, but they certainly seem to be... an extension of ideology and propaganda. Ideas are very important in preparing and fighting wars; especially today, though, in reality the way we think about our western imperial war-fighting, goes back well over a century, back to the Whiteman's Burden and other imperialist myths. ..."
"... For the last thirty years we've essentially been fighting 'liberal crusades for freedom and democracy.' That, at least, was the 'cover story' the pretext presented to the people. There's an irony here. Just like Islamic State, we've been engaging in 'holy warfare' too! ..."
Apr 21, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various 'party lines'.
George Orwell, Looking back on the Spanish War , Chapter 4

Last week saw an extreme intensifying of the warmongers' campaign against individuals who publicly hold and defend a different view than the powers-that-be want to promote. The campaign has a longer history but recently turned personal. It now endangers the life and livelihood of real people.

In fall 2016 a smear campaign was launched against 200 websites which did not confirm to NATO propaganda. Prominent sites like Naked Capitalism were among them as well as this site:

This website, MoonofAlabama.org , is now listed as "Russian propaganda outlet" by some neoconned, NATO aligned, anonymous " Friendly Neighborhood Propaganda Identification Service " prominently promoted by today's Washington Post . The minions running that censorship list also watch over our "Russian propaganda" Twitter account @MoonofA .

While the ProPornOT campaign was against websites the next and larger attack was a general defaming of specific content.

The neoconservative Alliance For Securing Democracy declared that any doubt of the veracity of U.S. propaganda stories discussed on Twitter was part of a "Russian influence campaign". Their ' dashboard ' shows the most prominent hashtags and themes tweeted and retweeted by some 600 hand-selected but undisclosed accounts. (I have reason to believe that @MoonofA is among them.) The dashboard gave rise to an endless line of main-stream stories faking concern over alleged "Russian influence". The New York Times published several such stories including this recent one :


bigger
Russia did not respond militarily to the Friday strike, but American officials noted a sharp spike in Russian online activity around the time it was launched.

A snapshot on Friday night recorded a 2,000 percent increase in Russian troll activity overall, according to Tyler Q. Houlton, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security. One known Russian bot, #SyriaStrikes, had a 4,443 percent increase in activity while another, #Damsucs, saw a 2,800 percent jump, Mr. Houlton said.

A person on Twitter, or a bot, is tagged by a chosen name led with an @-sign. Anything led with a #-sign is a 'hashtag', a categorizing attribute of a place, text or tweet. Hashtags have nothing to do with any "troll activity". The use of the attribute or hashtag #syriastrike increased dramatically when a U.S. strike on Syria happened. Duh. A lot of people remarked on the strikes and used the hashtag #syriastrike to categorize their remarks. It made it easier for others to find information about the incident.

The hashtag #Damsucs does not exit. How could it have a 2,800% increase? It is obviously a mistyping of #Damascus or someone may have used as a joke. In June 2013 an Associated Press story famously carried the dateline "Damsucs". The city was then under artillery attack from various Takfiri groups. The author likely felt that the situation sucked.


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The spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security Tyler Q. Holton, to which the Times attributes the "bot" nonsense, has a Twitter account under his name and also tweets as @SpoxDHS. Peter Baker, the NYT author, has some 150,000 followers on Twitter and tweets several times per day. Holton and Tyler surely know what @accounts and #hashtags are.

One suspects that Holton used the bizzare statistic of the infamous ' Dashboard ' created by the neoconservative, anti-Russian lobby . The dashboard creators asserted that the use of certain hashtags is a sign of 'Russian bots'. On December 25 the dashboard showed that Russian trolls and bots made extensive use of the hashtag #MerryChristmas to undermine America's moral.


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One of the creators of the dashboard, Clint Watts, has since confessed that it is mere bullshit :

"I'm not convinced on this bot thing," said Watts, the cofounder of a project that is widely cited as the main, if not only, source of information on Russian bots. He also called the narrative "overdone."

As government spokesperson Holton is supposed to spout propaganda that supports the government's policies. But propaganda is ineffective when it does not adhere to basic realities. Holton is bad at his job. Baker, the NYT author, did even worse. He repeated the government's propaganda bullshit without pointing out and explaining that it obviously did not make any sense. He used it to further his own opinionated, false narrative. It took a day for the Times to issue a paritial correction of the fact free tale.

With the situation in Syria developing in favor of the Syrian people, with dubious government claims around the Skripal affair in Salisbury and the recent faked 'chemical attack' in Douma the campaign against dissenting reports and opinions became more and more personal.

Last December the Guardian commissioned a hatchet job against Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett . Beeley and Bartlett extensively reported (vid) from the ground in Syria on the British propaganda racket "White Helmets". The Guardian piece defended the 'heros' of the White Helmets and insinuated that both journalists were Russian paid stooges.

In March the self proclaimed whistle-blower and blowhard Sibel Edmonds of Newsbud launched a lunatic broadside smear attack (vid) against Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett. The Corbett Report debunked (vid) the nonsense. (The debunking received 59,000 views. Edmonds public wanking was seen by less than 23,000 people.)

Some time ago the CIA propaganda outlets Voice of America and Radio Free Europe started a 'fact-checking' website and named it Polygraph.info . (Some satirist or a clueless intern must have come up with that name. No country but the U.S. believes that the unscientific results of polygraph tests have any relation to truthfulness. To any educated non-U.S. citizen the first association with the term 'polygraph' is the term 'fake'.)

On April 4 the Polygraph wrote a smear piece about the Twitter account Ian56 (@Ian56789). Its headline: Disinfo News: Doing the Kremlin's Work: A Fake Twitter Troll Pushes Many Opinions :

Ben Nimmo, the Senior Fellow for Information Defense at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, studies the exploits of "Ian56" and similar accounts on Twitter. His recent article in the online publication Medium profiles such fake pro-Kremlin accounts and demonstrates how they operate.
...

Nimmo, and several other dimwits quoted in the piece, came to the conclusion that Ian56 is a Kremlin paid troll, not a real person. Next to Ian56 Nimmo 'identified' other 'Russian troll' accounts:

Ben Nimmo @benimmo - 10:50 UTC - 24 Mar 2018

One particularly influential retweeter (judging by the number of accounts which then retweeted it) was @ValLisitsa, which posts in English and Russian. Last year, this account joined the troll-factory #StopMorganLie campaign.

Nimmo's employer, the Atlantic Council, is a lobby of companies who profit from war .

Had Nimmo, a former NATO spokesperson, had some decent education he would have know that @ValLisitsa, aka Valentina Lisitsa , is a famous American-Ukrainian pianist. Yes, she sometimes tweets in Russian language to her many fans in Russia and the Ukraine. Is that now a crime? The videos of her world wide performances on Youtube have more than 170 million views. It is absurd to claim that she is a 'Russian troll' and to insinuate that she is taking Kremlin money to push 'Russian troll' opinions.

Earlier this month Newsweek also targeted the journalists Beeley and Bartlett and smeared a group of people who had traveled to Syria as 'Assad's pawns'.

On April 14 Murdoch's London Times took personal aim at the members of a group of British academics who assembled to scientificly investigate dubious claims against Syria. Their first investigation report though, was about the Skripal incident in Salisbury. The London Times also targeted Bartlett and Beeley. The piece was leading on page one with the headline: "Apologists for Assad working in universities". A page two splash and an editorial complemented the full fledged attack on the livelihood of the scientists.


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Tim Hayward, who initiated the academic group, published a (too) mild response.

On April 18 the NPR station Wabenews smeared the black activists Anoa Changa and Eugene Puryear for appearing on a Russian TV station. It was the begin of an ongoing, well concerted campaign launched with at least seven prominent smear pieces issued on a single day against the opposition to a wider war on Syria.

On April 19 the BBC took aim at Sarah Abdallah , a Twitter account with over 130,000 followers that takes a generally pro Syrian government stand. The piece also attacked Vanessa Beeley and defended the 'White Helmets':

In addition to pictures of herself, Sarah Abdallah tweets constant pro-Russia and pro-Assad messages, with a dollop of retweeting mostly aimed at attacking Barack Obama, other US Democrats and Saudi Arabia.
...
The Sarah Abdallah account is, according to a recent study by the online research firm Graphika, one of the most influential social media accounts in the online conversation about Syria, and specifically in pushing misinformation about a 2017 chemical weapons attack and the Syria Civil Defence, whose rescue workers are widely known as the "White Helmets".
...
Graphika was commissioned to prepare a report on online chatter by The Syria Campaign , a UK-based advocacy group organisation which campaigns for a democratic future for Syria and supports the White Helmets.

The Syria Campaign Ltd. is a for profit 'regime change' lobby which, like the White Helmets it promotes, is sponsored with millions of British and U.S. taxpayer money.

Brian Whitaker, a former Middle East editor for the Guardian , alleged that Sarah Abdullah has a 'Hizbullah connection'. He assumes that from two terms she used which point to a southern Lebanese heritage. But south Lebanon is by far not solely Hizbullah and Sarah Abdallah certainly does not dress herself like a pious Shia. She is more likely a Maronite or secular whatever. Exposing here as 'Hizbullah' can easily endanger her life. Replying to Whitaker the British politician George Galloway asked:

George Galloway @georgegalloway - 14:50 UTC - Replying to @Brian_Whit

Will you be content when she's dead Brian?
...
Will you be content Brian when ISIS cut off her head and eat her heart? You are beneath contempt. Even for a former Guardian man

Whitaker's smear piece was not even researched by himself. He plagiarized it, without naming his source, from Joumana Gebara, a CentCom approved Social Media Advisor to parts of the Syrian 'opposition'. Whitaker is prone to fall for scams like the 'White Helmets'. Back in mid 2011 he promoted the "Gay Girl in Damascus", a scam by a 40 year old U.S. man with dubious financial sources who pretended to be a progressive Syrian woman.

Also on April 19 the Guardian stenographed a British government smear against two other prominent Twitter accounts:

Russia used trolls and bots to unleash disinformation on to social media in the wake of the Salisbury poisoning, according to fresh Whitehall analysis. Government sources said experts had uncovered an increase of up to 4,000% in the spread of propaganda from Russia-based accounts since the attack, – many of which were identifiable as automated bots.

Notice that this idiotic % increase claim, without giving a base number, is similar to the one made in the New York Times piece quoted above. It is likely also based on the lunatic 'dashboard'.

[C]ivil servants identified a sharp increase in the flow of fake news after the Salisbury poisoning, which continued in the runup to the airstrikes on Syria.

One bot, @Ian56789, was sending 100 posts a day during a 12-day period from 7 April, and reached 23 million users, before the account was suspended. It focused on claims that the chemical weapons attack on Douma had been falsified, using the hashtag #falseflag. Another, @Partisangirl, reached 61 million users with 2,300 posts over the same 12-day period.

The prime minister discussed the matter at a security briefing with fellow Commonwealth leaders Malcolm Turnbull, Jacinda Ardern and Justin Trudeau earlier this week. They were briefed by experts from GCHQ and the National Cyber Security Centre about the security situation in the aftermath of the Syrian airstrikes.

The political editor of the Guardian , Heather Steward, admitted that her 'reporting' was a mere copy of government claims:

Heather Stewart @GuardianHeather - 10:38 UTC - 20 Apr 2018

It's not my analysis - as the piece makes quite clear - it's the government's.

The government claim was also picked up by other British outlets like Sky News (vid).


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A day earlier Ian56/@Ian56789 account with 35,000 followers had suddenly been blocked by Twitter. Ben Nimmo was extremely happy about this success. But after many users protested to the Twitter censors the account was revived.

Neither Ian, nor Partisangirl, are 'bots' or have anything to do with Russia. Partisangirl, aka Syria Girl, is the twitter moniker of Maram Susli, a Syrian-Australian scientist specialized in quantum chemistry. She was already interviewed on Australian TV (vid) four years ago and has been back since. She has published videos of herself talking about Syria on Youtube and on Twitter and held presentations on Syria at several international conferences. Her account is marked as 'verified' by Twitter. Any cursory search would have shown that she is a real person.

The claim of bots and the numbers of their tweets the government gave to the Guardian and Sky News are evidently false . With just a few clicks the Guardian and Sky News 'journalists' could have debunked the British government claims. But these stenograhers do not even try and just run with whatever nonsense the government claims. Sky News even manipulated the picture of Partisangirl's Twitter homepage in the video and screenshot above. The original shows Maram Susli speaking about Syrian refugees at a conference in Germany. The picture provides that she is evidently a living person and not a 'bot'. But Sky News did not dare to show that. It would have debunked the government's claim.


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After some negative feed back on social media Sky News contacted the 'Russian bot' Ian and invited him to a live interview (vid). Ian Shilling, a wakeful British pensioner, managed to deliver a few zingers against the government and Sky News . He also published a written response:

I have been campaigning against the Neocons and the Neocon Wars since January 2002, when I first realised Dick Cheney and the PNAC crowd were going to use 9/11 as the pretext to launch a disastrous invasion of Iraq. This has nothing to do with Russia. It has EVERYTHING to do with the massive lies constantly told by the UK & US governments about their illegal Wars of Aggression.
...

Brian Whitaker could not hold back. Within the 156,000 tweets Ian wrote over seven years Whitaker found one(!) with a murky theory (not a denial) about the Holocaust. He alleged that Ian believes in 'conspiracy theories'. Whitaker then linked to and discussed one Conspirador Norteño who peddles 'Russian bots' conspiracy theories. Presumably Whitaker did not get the consp-irony of doing such.

On the same day as the other reports the British version of the Huffington Post joined the Times in its earlier smear against British academics, accusing Professor Hayward and Professor Piers Robinson of "whitewashing war crimes". They have done no such thing. Vanessa Beeley was additionally attacked.

Also on the 19th the London Times aimed at another target. Citizen Halo , a well known Finnish grandma, was declared to be a 'Russian troll' based on Ben Nimmo's pseudo-scientific trash, for not believing in the Skripal tale and the faked 'chemical attack' in Syria. The Times doubted her nationality and existence by using quotes around her as a "Finnish activist".

Meanwhile the defense editor of the Times , Deborah Haynes, is stalking Valentina Lisitsa on Twitter. A fresh smear-piece against the pianist is surely in the works.

The obviously organized campaign against critical thinking in Britain extended beyond the Atlantic. While the BBC , Guardian, HuffPo, Times and Sky News published smear pieces depicting dissenting people as 'Russian bots', the Intercept pushed a piece by Mehdi Hasan bashing an amorphous 'left' for rejecting a U.S. war on Syria: Dear Bashar al-Assad Apologists: Your Hero Is a War Criminal Even If He Didn't Gas Syrians .

Mehdi Hasan is of course eminently qualified to write such a piece. Until recently he worked for Al Jazeerah , the media outlet of the Wahhabi dictatorship of Qatar which supports the Qatari sponsored al-Qaeda in its war against Syria. The Mehdi Hasan's piece repeats every false and debunked claim that has been raised against the Syrian government as evidence for the Syrian president's viciousness. Naturally many of the links he provides point back to Al Jazeerah's propaganda. A few years ago Mehdi Hasan tried to get a job with the conservative British tabloid Daily Mail . The Mail did not want him. During a later TV discussion Hasan slammed the Daily Mail for its reporting and conservative editorial position. The paper responded by publishing his old job application. In it Mehdi Hasan emphasized his own conservative believes:

I am also attracted by the Mail's social conservatism on issues like marriage, the family, abortion and teenage pregnancies.

A conservative war-on-Syria promoter is bashing an anonymous 'left' which he falsely accuses of supporting Assad when it takes a stand against imperial wars. Is that a 'progressive' Muslim Brotherhood position? (Added: Stephen Gowans and Kurt Nimmo respond to Hasan's screed.)

On the same day Sonali Kolhatkar at Truthdig , as pseudo-progressive as the Intercept , published a quite similar piece: Why Are Some on the Left Falling for Fake News on Syria? . She bashes the 'left' - without citing any example - for not falling for the recent scam of the 'chemical attack' in Douma and for distrusting the U.S./UK government paid White Helmets. The comments against the piece are lively.

Those working in the media are up in arms over alleged fake news and they lament the loss of paying readership. But they have only themselves to blame. They are the biggest creators of fake news and provider of government falsehood. Their attacks on critical readers and commentators are despicable.

Until two years ago Hala Jabar was foreign correspondent in the Middle East for the Sunday Times . After fourteen years with the paper and winning six awards for her work she was 'made redundant' for her objective reporting on Syria. She remarks on the recent media push against truth about Syria and the very personal attacks against non-conformist opinions:

Hala Jaber @HalaJaber - 18:36 UTC - 19 Apr 2018

In my entire career, spanning more than three decades of professional journalism, I have never seen MSM resolve to such ugly smear campaigns & hit pieces against those questioning mainstream narratives, with a different view point, as I have seen on Syria, recently.

.2/ This is a dangerous manoeuvre , a witch hunt in fact, aimed not only at character assassination, but at attempting to silence those who think differently or even sway from mainstream & state narrative.

.3/ It would have been more productive, to actually question the reason why more & more people are indeed turning to alternative voices for information & news, than to dish out ad hominem smears aimed at intimidating by labelling alternative voices as conspirators or apologists.

.4/ The journalists, activists, professors & citizens under attack are presenting an alternative view point. Surely, people are entitled to hear those and are intelligent enough to make their own judgments.

.5/ Or is there an assumption, (patronizing, if so), that the tens of thousands of people collectively following these alternative voices are too dumb & unintelligent to reach their own conclusions by sifting through the mass information being dished at them daily from all sides?

.6/ Like it or hate it, agree or disagree with them, the bottom line is that the people under attack do present an alternative view point. Least we forget, no one has a monopoly on truth. Are all those currently launching this witch hunt suggesting they do?

The governments and media would like to handle the war on Syria like they handled the war in Spain. They want reports without "any relation to the facts". The media want to "retail the lies" and eager propagandists want to "build emotional superstructures over events that never happened."

The new communication networks allow everyone to follow the war on Syria as diligently as George Orwell followed the war in Spain in which he took part. We no longer have to travel to see the differences of what really happens and what gets reported in the main stream press. We can debunk false government claims with freely available knowledge.

The governments, media and their stenographers would love to go back to the old times when they were not plagued by reports and tweets from Eva, Vanessa, Ian, Maram and Sarah or by blogposts like this one. The vicious campaign against any dissenting report or opinion is a sorry attempt to go back in time and to again gain the monopoly on 'truth'.

It is on us to not let them succeed.

Posted by b on April 21, 2018 at 23:02 UTC | Permalink


bevin , Apr 21 2018 23:23 utc | 1

next page " Excellent.
The good news about both The Intercept and Truthdig pieces is that the comments quickly showed that readers knew what the publishers were up to. The Intercept seemed to have removed Hasan's obscene act of prostitution within a day.

The reality is that we simply have to expect the imperialists, now reduced to propaganda and domestic repression, to act in this way: there is no point in attempting to shame them and they never did believe in journalistic principles or standards or ethics. They are the scum who serve a cannibalistic system for good wages and a comfortable life style- that is what the 'middle class' always did do and always will.

Kaiama , Apr 21 2018 23:56 utc | 2
No longer is it possible to control TV, Radio and printed newspapers and use them to set the message. There are now an almost infinite set of channels including youtube, twitter, blogs, podcasts,streamed radio... It's like there is a public bitcoin/bitnewsledger where new information only gets written into the ledger if it is authenicated by sufficient endorsements.

In the past, a lie could travel around the world before the truth got its shoes on (Mark Twain I believe) but the truth is catching up. We are in the midst of the great changeover where older people still rely on traditional information channels yet younger internet enabled peoplecan leverage the new channels more effectively to educate themselves.

Cycloben , Apr 22 2018 0:01 utc | 3
Western propagandists are freaking out because nobody believes their lies anymore. The more they freak out, the more we know they have lost the narrative.

I just fear for the safety of these independent journalists. It is not beneath the deep state to assassinate their enemies. These people need to be very careful.

Michael Murry , Apr 22 2018 0:47 utc | 11
Orwell would have understood and loved this:
The 2018 Pulitzer Prize winner in National Reporting – Staffs of The New York Times and The Washington Post

For deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation's understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect's transition team and his eventual administration. (The New York Times entry, submitted in this category, was moved into contention by the Board and then jointly awarded the Prize.)

The hysterical, side-splitting laughter over this chicken-choking, circle-jerking drivel will echo in eternity. Galactic stupidity simply doesn't get any more cosmic, except perhaps awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama.

C I eh? , Apr 22 2018 1:04 utc | 12
This is a fight between Deep States of the Rothschild-UK 'Octopus,' US-centric Rockefeller-Kochs, Russian (itself split between competing and intertwined Anglo-American clans/Eurasianists vs Altanticists) and China (also divided between sovereignty oriented Shanghai and Rothschild affiliated Hong Kong which was founded upon the opium trade in cooperation with the UK-Octopus).

The main point of contention is whether we have a hard or soft landing as the New World Order is born, with the UK-Octopus needing to instigate an epic crisis so as to bury countless trillions of worthless derivatives it sits upon, specifically seeking to collapse the USD as a global fiat and use the ensiung chaos to assist the Chinese as they establish an unasailable Yuan fiat. A war with Russia will bring the US-centric Deep State to it's knees and so this forms the basis of the not-so secret alliance between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, while China attempts to remain neutral since Xi prefers a smooth transition since the US-centric group may well launch a nuclear false flag attack on the Korean peninsula, thus irradiating the region and dooming the potential for a Chinese dominated century, should the interests of yhis group be ignored.

All gloves are off and the dispostions of various players are suddenly crystal clear after the firing of Octopus agent Tillerson by Trump via twitter led immediately to the launching of operation 'Novichok,' and was followed up with an attempted series of false flags in East Ghouta which were planned so as to bring the US and Russia to war.

Other important players include the US military (itself divided between Octopus NATO and US-centric Pentagon), the CIA, which is always on all sides of any conflict but was until recently headed by Koch protege Mike Pompeo, as well as smaller Arab, Persian and Turkish Deep States all jockeying for advantage and position. Even the Vatican is included and said to be divided between Polish Cardinals on one side, with German, Italian and many Spanish speaking Cardinals as opponents. There are other Deep States as well and in every instance they are divided between one of the two main parties and themselves to one or another degree.

Media and social control is mainly the preserve of the UK Octopus, so as all of us have understood for some time, anything included within it, from the NYTimes to most of Hollywood, is completely worthless. Alternative media was created as an alternative to Octopus media, while Trump takes to twitter so as to bypass their control.

I feel like a US voter forced to choose between Republicans and Democrats, but with the promised 'Blue Wave' coming in November when Congressional elections are due, certain to be impeached Donald Trump and his US-centric backers have a very short time frame in which to change the score.

S , Apr 22 2018 1:08 utc | 13
CNN also published a long smear piece against YouTubers, basically advocating for depriving them of ad income: http://money.cnn.com/2018/04/19/technology/youtube-ads-extreme-content-investigation/index.html . Among other things, it had this to say about a U.S. comedian and political commentator Jimmy Dore:
Ads also appeared on The Jimmy Dore Show channel, a far-left YouTube channel that peddles conspiracy theories, such as the idea that Syrian chemical weapons attacks are hoaxes.

Syria is really the unifying theme in all these attacks.

Diana , Apr 22 2018 1:21 utc | 15
I congratulate Bernhard on yet another excellent piece of investigative journalism. My comment is not intended to criticise or take away from it, but only to point out that Orwell's quote was taken out of context, in the sense that although he remarks on partisan propaganda, he says that it is unimportant, since "the broad picture of the war which the Spanish Government presented to the world was not untruthful. The main issues were what it said they were." On the other hand, the lies of the pro-NATO press are important because unlike the partisan lies told by leftist parties during the Spanish Civil War, today's NATO lies are the equivalent of the official fascist propaganda of that time: they distort and hide the main issues. Here is the full quote from the link that B has diligently provided:

I remember saying once to Arthur Koestler, 'History stopped in 1936', at which he nodded in immediate understanding. We were both thinking of totalitarianism in general, but more particularly of the Spanish civil war. Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various 'party lines'. Yet in a way, horrible as all this was, it was unimportant. It concerned secondary issues -- namely, the struggle for power between the Comintern and the Spanish left-wing parties, and the efforts of the Russian Government to prevent revolution in Spain. But the broad picture of the war which the Spanish Government presented to the world was not untruthful. The main issues were what it said they were. But as for the Fascists and their backers, how could they come even as near to the truth as that? How could they possibly mention their real aims? Their version of the war was pure fantasy, and in the circumstances it could not have been otherwise.

Tyronius , Apr 22 2018 1:48 utc | 16
As a given group loses its grip on power, it tends to employ ever more extreme tactics. This explains the recent behavior of players like the US government, the UK government, the American mainstream media and various think tanks. What other extreme behavior should we expect from such a cabal? After all, they've already shown contempt for conditionally protected freedoms- all of them- and a willingness to manufacture any narrative they want in order to further their aims of conquest and profiteering. This whole mess could spiral out of control in countless ways with terrifying consequences.
dh , Apr 22 2018 1:49 utc | 17
@15 Yes but I'm not sure how relevant Orwell's quote is to today. Do we even have a 'left-wing' anymore? Or a Comintern for that matter? Even fascism wears a smiley face. Seems to me that what we have is a tightly controlled MSM. That control may be slipping but we have yet to see a replacement.
psychohistorian , Apr 22 2018 2:01 utc | 18
Those of us at MoA who are regulars may feel a certain level of complacency based on the level of discourse here but I assure you that most Americans are still very much zombie followers of whatever the TV and other media tell them. I believe that there is a strong possibility that MoA and like sites will become the focus of paid narrative pushers and if that is not successful there are other ways to make b and our lives difficult.

If b is ever knocked offline for some reason and needs help I encourage him to email his readers with potential strategies to show/provide support. Thanks again and again for your web site b.

Jackrabbit , Apr 22 2018 2:05 utc | 19
The first casualty of war is the truth. Many Westerners would recognize this phrase but many of them don't understand that there -IS- a war (the new Cold War). The longstanding law that prevented government propaganda in the US was revoked several years ago. U.S Repeals Propaganda Ban, Spreads Government-Made News to Americans
Ken , Apr 22 2018 2:07 utc | 20
This type of tyranny has been going on forever in the US. Take A. Lincoln. More than 14,000 civilians were arrested under martial law during the war throughout the Union. Abraham Lincoln did so because they expressed views critical of Lincoln or his war. It's the same-o. Different faces same crap.
frances , Apr 22 2018 2:14 utc | 22
b- I am sorry to see their attacks on you, if things do go sideways please contact me if I can be of help in any way.
Do you know what has happened to Tucker Carlson, he has been such a strong voice for truth that I am concerned for him.
Stay strong and thank you for all you do in support of the truth.
Clueless Joe , Apr 22 2018 2:23 utc | 23
Sure, there are more people that see the lies and bullshit for what they are. Still, seeing it is not enough. What really matters now is to fully wipe out the mainstream media, to make it completely extinct, and therefore seeing they're full of shit is only the prerequisite to pondering how to actually bankrupt and destroy them. That's what everyone who's not fully on board with the Western regimes' and bankers' propaganda should be thinking about. How to convince people not only to stop buying their lies, but to stop buying them at all, how to cut down the vast majority of their readership/viewers to the point they don't matter anymore.
Tom , Apr 22 2018 2:26 utc | 24
Thank you b. This a very important subject. It wouldn't surprise me if a false flag happened that would be aimed at censuring all alternative news. This might be centered around a decoupling of east from west, perhaps when the current financial crisis explodes. Oh, has anyone heard from Tucker Carlson lately?
VK , Apr 22 2018 3:06 utc | 25
You can fool someone for a long time, you can fool a lot of people for a short time - but you can't fool a lot of people for a long time. That is, unless those people are willing to live the lie.

I think the reason the MSM's propaganda is so effective nowadays (and I'm thinking specifically about the world since the Iraq invasion in 2003) is that, deep down, maybe in the collective inconsciousness level, the working classes from the First World countries know their superior living standards depend on imperial brutality over the rest of the world. That's why, for example, the USG and Downing Street haven't lost significant credibility domestically after Iraq and after Libya. This is a dark social pact: people live the lies only to sleep well at night and claim plausible deniability after; they only wish it to be over quickly and at the least human cost from their side (every coffin that comes back to their community from the Middle East is a crack in the illusion). They believe in Russiagate because, deep down, they don't want to believe they were capable of electing someone like Trump and, mainly, because they know their economies are failing, and the only solution is to invade other countries/prop up the war industry.

Brian , Apr 22 2018 3:16 utc | 26
Smearing people for appearing on RT! Americans who prattle on about freedom and democracy are pressuring other not to do this or that which is to inhibit their freedom. Don't they know it makes them look like dictators without portfolio?
Fernando Arauxo , Apr 22 2018 3:34 utc | 27
The greatest martyr IMHO is Lisa Howard. If she were alive today she would have thrived on the Alt-media circuit. She is our patron saint.
Rob , Apr 22 2018 4:35 utc | 28
Great article, b. I am a relative newcomer to MoA, having found it through Caitlin Johnstone (Rogue Journalist), but in a short time, I have come to rely heavily on it for "hidden" news and incisive analysis. Yes, independent news outlets are vital sources of truth, but their reach is still tiny compared to that of the Empire and its toads in the media. The well organized smear campaign against those who refuse to bow down is a frightening development indeed.
karlof1 , Apr 22 2018 4:45 utc | 29
Thanks b for your outstanding dissecting! The Information War is complex yet still remains simple--all that's required is a critically thinking approach for any personally unconfirmed sources and the data presented followed by the willingness to ask questions, no matter how uncomfortable. Such a disciplined mind was once the paramount goal for those seeking wisdom, but such pursuits are deemed passé, unrequired in the Digital Age. But Big Lie Media's been working its evil for decades despite many calling out the lies. Funny how the two big former communist nations are now more credible than the West and expressly seek honest and open--Win-Win--relationships based on trust and equality. The Moral Table at play during Cold War 1 is flipped with the Outlaw US Empire being the Evil Empire. And the Evil Empire can't stand its own nakedness and its oozing social sores.

The liar is often agitated and nervous whereas one with the facts rests easy and remains calm. In the run up to their summit, note how Trump is already agitated and nervous, already prefacing his lies to come, whereas Kim is easy and calm, setting the table. Shrillness and hysteria are the similar signs provided by media liars and is almost always fact-free, supposed "sources" anonymous.

Grieved , Apr 22 2018 5:02 utc | 30
A magisterial piece of journalism, b. Congratulations, and thank you.

~~

Spain. Orwell. Fascism.

I was born decades after the Spanish Civil War, and to be very honest I never knew much about it, nor have ever learned since. But Guernica I knew about, even as a young teenager in school. The culture was shocked into remembering forever that there was a lie involved with Guernica. That's all I ever really knew, was that Spain was a lie, underneath which a massacre lay.

They say it was the humanitarian and artistic type of people who kept the truth of Spain alive against the propaganda of the fascists. I don't know. I believe as I said the other day that propaganda only works to crowd out the truth, so that people are not exposed to the truth. But propaganda doesn't work in a battle against the truth, when people are exposed to both sides of the story.

If you were running a scam based on fake news, and one day you had to make allegations using this very term, and play your "fake news" card on the table in a round of betting that was merely one round in a long game - if you did this, you'd be a bad card player, or one driven to the corner and getting extremely close to leaving the table.

If your playing partner suddenly had to show the "false flag" card on the surface of the table for the whole game to see - yet another secret hole card exposed and now worthless forever - you could well think your game was finished. And it is - barring a few nasty tricks...which will be recorded and placed into the game as IOU's.

Don't anybody be part of that collateral damage - be well. And instead, let's collect on those IOU's. The game is almost over. Many people will appear to say that the players cannot be beat. But they are with the losers. We are the players.

Merlin2 , Apr 22 2018 5:32 utc | 32
psychohistorian @17

I wholeheartedly second your suggestion. I think the battle against the truth by the deep States everywhere has only begun. They will not stop at smearing individual posters or sites.

I do think we all need to start becoming more aware of alternatives, to YouTube (how's DTube?), Twitter (gab?), Facebook, Google (several alternatives) etc. But that will not be enough because I fear that in time the IP providers will come under pressure too - in all the western countries, especially. And the domain providers 9we all know them), followed by blog platforms such as WorldPress. I am not saying it's easy to curtail all of those, but they will try, as sure as the sun sets in the West.

Of course, the biggest attacks will be mounted against anonymous commenters and posters. That's already in the works at several outlets. The idea is of course that by stripping off anonimity people will self-censor for fear of repercussions to their real life selves.

There are people working on alternative platforms of all sorts. I am somewhat hopeful about user owned sites though these efforts are nascent. I hope commenters here will share what they know of alternatives, even knowing this won't be an easy battle. After all, Twitter owes its popularity to well, its popularity. Same with Facebook or Instagram or youTube. Therein lies the rub - it won't be easy to wean users from these platforms as many start-ups found out. That however should not mean that we shouldn't try. More and more Twitter users for example are cross-posting on gab, and several youTubers started uploading also to Dtube. neither site is ideal, I know. But neither was Twitter when it started.

Antares , Apr 22 2018 5:50 utc | 33
The real aim of propaganda is to persuade the politicians and not the public. One man in their middle wants to start a war and the media make sure that his or her fellow politicians will hear no other story and make support the only possibility. That's why people like us have to be vilified, so that all these politicians can invent an excuse for themselves and turn their head away. What we think really doesn't matter because we are not the ones in control. They only have to convince the Colin Powells and Frank Timmermans's.
Al-Pol , Apr 22 2018 5:52 utc | 34
The current increased smear campaigns against the so called Russian Bots, Assad Apologists etc., is surely just the first part of of a an attempt to implement very serious censorship and control over the internet to attempt to completely block out any alternative voices.

Amber Rudd the UK Home Secretary has been banging on about Russian cyber attcks for the past couple of months. Whilst based on the history of UK Government IT projects I couldn't expect the UK alone to be capable of implementing any meaningful censorship scheme (they have a track record of producing so many multi-billion pound national IT project disasters) but with the coordinated help of the US and others they might just be able to put up enough censorship barriers to be able to get back to their original plans (removing Assad and whatever else they have in mind). False-flag chemical attacks haven't quite worked out to plan, but add in a false-flag cyber attack that apparently disables some of the UK (and/or US/EU) vital services and that should be enough for them to convince the plebs and sufficient MP's that it has become absolutely necessary to block Russain and other media and internet sites and force the owners of many social media channels to disable long lists of people with alternative views.

Dave , Apr 22 2018 6:32 utc | 36
Prop or Not is NOT a 'friendly neighbourhood' anything. It was exposed a while ago as being a joint state propaganda project between the CIA and West Ukraine, with the goal of spreading anti-Russia disinformation, and employing the collusion of some no-integrity US propaganda rags like The Daily Beast.

http://yournewswire.com/propornot-cia-ukrainian-operation/
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/01/28/unpacking-the-shadowy-outfit-behind-2017s-biggest-fake-news-story/

bobzibub , Apr 22 2018 7:14 utc | 37
Many thanks b for the hard work. This is what we wish our traditional media would invest the time and publish.

Instead, what we get is something like: Terry Glavin: Here's why some people choose not to believe in Assad's atrocities which seems to be a great example of the Dunning Kruger effect. Note the vitriol!

My question is their motivation and timing. Why does the rhetoric seem to increase after the latest attack? Why care if 10% of the population doesn't follow their narrative now? Are they preparing for a new round of kinetic action? Or do they simply believe their management of the narrative needs more investment?

ralphieboy , Apr 22 2018 9:38 utc | 41
If people are going to rely on social media feeds for anything other than information on what their friends and family are up to, then they are opening themselves up to being manipulated easily and with a minimum of actual effort.

You no longer need to own a newspaper or a broadcast network to do so.

JohnnyRVF , Apr 22 2018 11:23 utc | 49
Ultimately people with a concience and some integrity will realize that something is awry. I'm no spring chicken and have been on the net for nearly 20 years. There are more ' old ' people surfing the net than initially may be apparent. As life passes by people become much more attuned to bullsh*t. T. May's husband is on the board of a large British Armaments company. No doubt her ministers are all in on many scams. She is a very mediocre character, a fool as her time as home secretary demonstrated and was only voted in place so as to do the bidding of others. And in my opinion, when I say others I mean she is the western harlot who jumps when anyone pulls her string. They say that if you tell a lie often enough people believe it to be the truth. Not necessarily. There are so many holes in the Skripal and Syrian stories that only someone who doesn't want to have their view challenged will believe them. The stories are falling apart and as they do, so does the credibility and trust of the western MSM and Politik. The reason the Germans and others refused to join in, is I suspect, they realize that in part, because once that is lost, it takes a great deal more to recover it. The Skripal case and the latest Syrian faked gas attack is the start of the end for T. May and her govt.
fairleft , Apr 22 2018 11:25 utc | 50
Good comments, especially psychohistorian about being prepared to jump to alternative platforms ... Perhaps Russian ones?

What I was referencing in comment 5 is this relatively new desire by the 'powers that be' for purity, for absolutely no one from 'our side' dissenting against the mainstream (and completely bonkers in its anti-Russian extremism) narrative. This is not like the pre-digital age, when small-circulation real leftist publications were not subject to mainstream and official government extermination campaigns. And I don't think this is simply because of digital age reach, because the readership for the real alternative media's left/anti-imperial perspective doesn't engage enough people to be meaningful in terms of power and elections. At least in the US; less certain about elsewhere.

There's something angry, extreme, and extremely insecure about the psychology of the Western ruling class right now. My bet is that because of that insecurity they won't be so dangerous to Russia/China in the years to come, but instead the anger will be directed at internal left/anti-militarist dissenters. For some reason our reality bugs the sh!t out of them despite our small numbers.

deschutes , Apr 22 2018 11:33 utc | 51
Until recently I used to read articles at both The Intercept and at Truthdig, but have since realized both of these 'news' outlets actively censor posts that are too accurate, too insightful of what the US government and MSM are doing in Syria and how they are manipulating public opinion with the White Helmets, staged false gas attacks, etc. I don't trust Pierre Omidyar, the philanthropist behind The Intercept, he has questionable political alliances. I have had many of my posts at both Truthdig and The Intercept censored even though they were entirely within comment rules. The Intercept has a lot of really BAD journalists posting crap there, like this ass clown Mehdi Hasan. Even Glenn Greenwald, a multi millionaire, is suspect. Both of these websites are psuedo-left and should not be trusted!
From the resistance trench with love , Apr 22 2018 11:40 utc | 52
....attacks on critical readers and commentators are despicable..

Indeed, but "the one free of sin to throw the first stone" ....

From my experience at several supposed "alternative media", most of them somehow pro-Russian in the sense that they do not promote the sick warmongerism coming from the US and UK stablishments against Russia and its allies in Syria and against Syria herself, every site has its biases and slandering attacks by the owners of the blogs or by the "community" os sycophants residing there are everyday bread for any newcomer who could express a bit of dissent against the general editorial view.
I mayself have been obliged to change my nickname several times already to avoid attacks or banning/censorship, when my position about Syrai and Russia does not differ almost in the least with that of the people mentioned above who are being object of smearing campaign by the MSM....and this has happened to me in the supposed pro-Russian "alt-media"....

Thus, I would recommend to apply a bit of self-criticism and reflect about how anyone of us are probably contributing to the same effort of the bullies mentioned above against mainly common citizens who only try to commit themselves to spread some of the truth they are finding online through research and intensive reading, and try to offer an alternative point of view or simply debunk the usual nonsense especially against certain ideologies, mostly spreaded by US commenters.....

timbers , Apr 22 2018 11:50 utc | 53
I noticed the part about Ian Shillilng being accused of denying the Holocaust or implying it was a govt conspiracy.

I find that interesting, because a co-worker asked me out to the blue "Do you even believe the Holocaust happened?" It's a strange question with no relation to Russiagate, yet pops up a lot so it clearly has an agenda. The question made no sense but I did recognized it as a familiar attack by the warmongers. My response was to to respond to such a ridiculous, dishonest question and I ignored it.

He went to ask if I was "stupid" for not seeing that Mueller's indictments over lying to the FBI and tax evasion/money laundering in Ukraine are NOT are not same thing as proving Russia meddled to deny Hillary her Presidency.

Don Wiscacho , Apr 22 2018 12:07 utc | 54
Thanks for the article b.
As painful as it is to watch the increasing attempts at censoring non-msm voices, we can take solace in the fact that, like a cornered rat, the establishment has no other option left but an all-out, full-retard attack on anyone not toeing the line. While the damage they are doing is real, this should be balanced with the fact that this attack comes out of weakness and not strength: they are the ones "losing", and knowledge of that reality makes them increasingly unhinged.
partisan , Apr 22 2018 12:13 utc | 55
https://twitter.com/RealAlexRubi/status/966178001858826241

LOL

At first I thought this is some kind of joke. Than I watched few times, I still believe CNN guy is in some kind of mission here, let's say to distract its viewers from existential matters that grips ordinary people in the US. His insistence on the "Russians" is illogical at first...this woman appear to be serious but when it comes to CNN everything is set-up, not just everyone can come to CNN, period. No facts involved the conversation is about NOTHING, that is the US national narrative being imposed by the ruling class trough various media. Just like "attack" on Syria and Syria's gas attack. There were none, there were no cruise missile fired, there were no downed ones! CNN's role is also to entertain its audience as well, everything but not talk about social and economic issues. In other words to indoctrinate - shift attention, not to ask unpleasant questions.

fast freddy , Apr 22 2018 13:50 utc | 61
The NYT and NPR are warmonger institutions. It is sad that ppl who consider themselves to be liberals, democrats, blue team (anti-war?- that's a stretch!) embrace these institutions as purveyors of truth or even real news.

Has the NYT ever seen a war it didn't support?

Anonymous2 , Apr 22 2018 14:00 utc | 62
Great job b,

Obivously western intelligence servies, NATO leak stuff to western msm to intimidate and censor political oppostion in every western country.

Ben Nimmo is one of the most maniac propaganda dogs Nato/Neocons out there, he is a propaganda agent for NATO.

Levcek , Apr 22 2018 14:06 utc | 63
@ Diana 15

I don't feel that the quote is out of context. Yes, you show that Orwell clearly didn't consider it a big deal at that time, but what is happening now is that what he describes is omnipresent, the main stream of information we get, there is nothing else if you don't search for alternatives. It is beyond doubt that Orwell, in the present context, would never have added what he added in that book.
So in that light I feel the quote is extremely relevant and a good start of the article.

I want to express my thanks for this site and am really glad I was pointed towards MoA by other sources of real information.

Anonymous2 , Apr 22 2018 14:14 utc | 64
Meanwhile, the same western media give free pass to liberal warcriminals like Macron's France that just today call for permanent illegal occupation of Syria - after illegally bombing it.

France's Macron Urges US, Allies to Stay in Syria Even After Daesh Defeat
https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201804221063800226-macron-daesh-us-france-syria/

But no, it is people like us who call out this BS that gets silenced and harassed by the same ignorant western media/"journalists" along with the western deep state spy networks!

Eric , Apr 22 2018 14:28 utc | 66
What an excellent source of information the MoA site offers those of us who are seeking the truth and living in an Empire full of lies.Over the past few months, I have perused this site regularly and always find it very helpful in gaining a better and more concise understanding of
what is really going on in our world.

I am also astounded at how helpful it is for me to read the comments of so many who are regulars here.
The courtesy and level of intellectual dialog that goes on here in the comments section is a rare thing indeed! We all must fight for truth for the sake of our families and loved ones.

Levcek , Apr 22 2018 14:45 utc | 68
@ somebody | Apr 22, 2018 7:01:49 AM | 46

"Fake" and "Genuine" are used to describe the video with the water being poured over people. Fisk calls them genuine because the video was taped in the place where it pretends to be, not in a film set or a location where nothing was going on. It was filmed in the real hospital with real doctors, nurses and victims.
The video therefore is real (not staged), but the claim that people are suffering from gas wounds is false.

You can thus also say that the video is fake: it is said to show victims of a gas attack, while the doctor says they were suffering from suffocation, and only when someone shouted "gas", did people start hosing each other down (which as someone posted in another article, would have only made things worse if they had chlorine on them). As evidence of a gas attack, the video is fake.

As long as a person is not claiming that the video shows victims of a real gas attack aftermath, we're all on the same side I guess.

Anonymous2 , Apr 22 2018 14:51 utc | 70
The response is of course to more eagerly call out the neocons propangada, western media propaganda and so forth, get a twitter account, get a blog, lets multiply this movement, because these people will of course not stop at destroying peoples lives in the newspapers, they will call for censorship, registrations and sooner or later jail for these views.
dh , Apr 22 2018 14:54 utc | 71
Orwell's great fear was totalitarianism. Either from the left or the right. What we have now is much more subtle. The MSM retains the illusion of freedom and most people go along with it. We may even realize we are being manipulated but the only alternative is posting on sites like MOA.
Bevin Kacon , Apr 22 2018 15:49 utc | 76
@ 75

The UK has no credibility left now. May's farcical handling of the Brexit negs has exposed her as little more than a Tory mouthpiece, parroting party bon mots whilst having no clue where she is heading. And I suspect her civil servants haven't, either!

The Skirpal charade was a front for several things but mainly, I think, to turn the focus away from Brexit and to opening the Cold War front again. But what is alarming was her open support for attacks on Syria. It's been known for some time that the UK has special forces operating in Syria covertly; May's tub-thumping pretty much clarified that the Uk is as determined as Washington and that Rothschild puppet Macron to force a regime change in Syria.

You said she must go. I said the same thing last September after the fall-out from the June election and other foot-in-mouth incidents: she'd be gone before year end. How wrong I was. She has figures in the background protecting her.

majobrs , Apr 22 2018 19:10 utc | 78
Crushing dissent goes completely against 'liberal values' which is about the only high ground left for the humanitarian regime changers a.k.a the Franquistas. So that is not going to happen. On the other hand, social media is the easiest place to use covert operatives, even MSM has other sponsors and actors, social media can be directly controlled by governments , and the 'intelligence community'. So they are just using the net for what they set it up for.
Propaganda for domestic consumption in the USA, isn't really meant to convince as much as to scare people into submission. People don't obey Big Brother because they like him or believe him, but because they cannot talk back to him and are scared of him. Media Scare tactics work less if people can talk back, hear their own voice, not just Big Brother from every loudspeaker.

Martin Luther (not King) said that "A lie is like a snowball: the further you roll it the bigger it becomes." The snowball is melting because there is shift in the narrative given what is happening on the ground in Syria. I find it fascinating that as it melts down layer by layer, the first trojan horse outfits to implode are left humanitarian ones like the Intercept, Newsbud, Democracy Now. The right wing ones like Fox, Young Turks, just concentrate on dumbing down the conversation to reduce reality to bombastic and misleading 'political' points. This is a another way to control the conversation, to scare people into thinking that facts or not facts but partisan political 'opinions'. Look at how Jimmy Dore's in the interview mentioned by B with Carla Ortiz, is trying to dumb down the conversation and keeps feigning ignorance. Thankfully she blows him out of the water. Good job Carla!
The snowball is big and melting slowly. Who's next?

Grieved , Apr 23 2018 1:47 utc | 84
@b

Vesti has a great 10-minute clip dated yesterday from a Russian talk show with Margarita Simonyan of RT doing much of the talking. What she says is really encouraging about how she's trying to talk, not to power (which already knows the real truth that it's obscuring) but to common people, because there are those among the common people who do speak up and who really do shape public opinion - not governments.

She cited Roger Waters as an example, who was speaking at a concert and telling the truth about the White Helmets. She said, someone has to read in order to speak. And someone has to write so someone can read. And that's what RT is doing, and that's how it works. And it is working.

The panel agreed that the truth from Tony Blair finally came out 15 years later. So we have only to persist and stay safe for 15 years and we win:
The Tony Blair Rule: The Truth Takes 15 Years to Come Out, Skripal Countdown Starts Now - Simonyan

David Park , Apr 23 2018 2:16 utc | 87
Thanks for introducing us to Valentina Lisitsa! Her playing is magnificent with exquisite dynamics and timing.
ashley albanese , Apr 23 2018 3:52 utc | 89
George Orwell has been a presence throughout this thread. It was unfortunate he was hurried by MI6 to finish the last pages of 'Animal Farm' so it could be translated into Arabic and be used to discredit Communist parties in Western Asia. This always raised the ire of Communist organisations through following decades .This being said he wrote some great text especially for me the revealing 1939 novel - Coming up for A
Steve , Apr 23 2018 8:54 utc | 91
What many people don't realize is that fascism is a greedy habit, it expands to finally swallow up those who think they are protected by silence or looking the other way. The individuals and organizations villified today are the real heroes, and even if they suffer today, they will be vindicated in the end. But unfortunately the gullible masses would by then be in the open prison of fascism.
MichaelK , Apr 23 2018 15:00 utc | 94
I don't know if wars are really an extension of diplomacy by other means, but they certainly seem to be... an extension of ideology and propaganda. Ideas are very important in preparing and fighting wars; especially today, though, in reality the way we think about our western imperial war-fighting, goes back well over a century, back to the Whiteman's Burden and other imperialist myths.

For the last thirty years we've essentially been fighting 'liberal crusades for freedom and democracy.' That, at least, was the 'cover story' the pretext presented to the people. There's an irony here. Just like Islamic State, we've been engaging in 'holy warfare' too!

The reason our media is so full of lies and distortions and propaganda is because the harsh realities of our New Imperialism wars are so out of synch with the reality of what's happening and crucially the attitudes of the general public who don't want to fight more overseas wars, and especially if they are 'crusades' for democracy and freedom. But what's happened recently is that dissent is being targeted as tantamount to treason. This is rather new and disturbing.

It's because the ruling elite are... losing it and way too many people are questioning their ideas about the wars we are fighting and their legitimacy and 'right to rule.'

In many ways the Internet is bringing about a kind of revolution in relation to the people's access to 'texts' and images that reminds one of the great intellectual upheavals that the translation of the Bible had on European thought four hundred years ago. Suddenly Bibles were being printed all over the place and people could read the sacred texts without having to ask the educated priests to 'filter' and translate and explain what it all meant. In a way Wikileaks was doing the same thing... allowing people access to secret material, masses of it, bypassing the traditional newsmedia and the journalistic 'preists.'

[Jun 24, 2020] Advice to Russigaters of the Democratic Party

Jun 24, 2020 | www.unz.com

JoaoAlfaiate , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 2:48 pm GMT

Before confronting the Russians, it might be a good idea to regain control of Minneapolis and Seattle ..

[Jun 24, 2020] Trump has caved numerous times, he is an idiot when it comes to hiring his enemies hoping to appease them, but there is no question that he opposes mass immigration and invasions.

Jun 24, 2020 | www.unz.com

Hegar , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 5:44 pm GMT

Giraldi's first paragraph is spot on. But after corona dealing the economy a heavy blow, I don't think Trump will start a war before the election. I don't think he would have done that otherwise either, though there was some risk. Trump has caved numerous times, he is an idioht when it comes to hiring his enemies hoping to appease them, but there is no question that he opposes mass immigration and invasions.

I suppose most people here know this, but let's look at how many of the pro-war names mentioned belong to the 2.5 % "Chosen":

George Bush
Donald Rumsfeld
Hillary Clinton
Michael Ledeen (White, but studied history under *George Mosse, immigrated from Germany)
Reuel Gerecht
Dan Senor

*Richard Perle
*Paul Wolfowitz (The architect of the Afghan-Iraq invasions, who gathered support for them in Congress and organized the pro-war communication)
*Douglas Feith (would have been the Sec. of Defense if people hadn't objected too much, as he was infamous after the Iran-Contra affair)
*Eliot Abrams
*Lewish "Scooter" Libby of the dead eyes
*Robert Kagan
*Frederick Kagan
*Victoria Nuland
*Madeleine Albright (Half a million dead Iraqi children from starvation sanctions and bombing the infrastructure for twelve years was "worth it")

That's six Whites and nine Tribe.

If those nine hadn't existed millions would have been alive today, there would have been no flood of Somalis, Afghans, Iraqis and Syrians to Europe, and the U.S. and the Middle East would have been far better off.

[Jun 23, 2020] Identity politics is, first and foremost, a dirty and shrewd political strategy developed by the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party ( soft neoliberals ) to counter the defection of trade union members from the party

Highly recommended!
divide and conquer 1. To gain or maintain power by generating tension among others, especially those less powerful, so that they cannot unite in opposition.
Notable quotes:
"... In its most general form, identity politics involves (i) a claim that a particular group is not being treated fairly and (ii) a claim that members of that group should place political priority on the demand for fairer treatment. But "fairer" can mean lots of different things. I'm trying to think about this using contrasts between the set of terms in the post title. A lot of this is unoriginal, but I'm hoping I can say something new. ..."
"... The second problem is that neoliberals on right and left sometimes use identity as a shield to protect neoliberal policies. As one commentator has argued, "Without the bedrock of class politics, identity politics has become an agenda of inclusionary neoliberalism in which individuals can be accommodated but addressing structural inequalities cannot." What this means is that some neoliberals hold high the banner of inclusiveness on gender and race and thus claim to be progressive reformers, but they then turn a blind eye to systemic changes in politics and the economy. ..."
"... Critics argue that this is "neoliberal identity politics," and it gives its proponents the space to perpetuate the policies of deregulation, privatization, liberalization, and austerity. ..."
"... If we assume that identity politics is, first and foremost, a dirty and shrewd political strategy developed by the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party ("soft neoliberals") many things became much more clear. Along with Neo-McCarthyism it represents a mechanism to compensate for the loss of their primary voting block: trade union members, who in 2016 "en mass" defected to Trump. ..."
Dec 28, 2019 | crookedtimber.org

likbez 12.27.19 at 10:21 pm

John,

I've been thinking about the various versions of and critiques of identity politics that are around at the moment. In its most general form, identity politics involves (i) a claim that a particular group is not being treated fairly and (ii) a claim that members of that group should place political priority on the demand for fairer treatment. But "fairer" can mean lots of different things. I'm trying to think about this using contrasts between the set of terms in the post title. A lot of this is unoriginal, but I'm hoping I can say something new.

You missed one important line of critique -- identity politics as a dirty political strategy of soft neoliberals.

See discussion of this issue by Professor Ganesh Sitaraman in his recent article (based on his excellent book The Great Democracy ) https://newrepublic.com/article/155970/collapse-neoliberalism

To be sure, race, gender, culture, and other aspects of social life have always been important to politics. But neoliberalism's radical individualism has increasingly raised two interlocking problems. First, when taken to an extreme, social fracturing into identity groups can be used to divide people and prevent the creation of a shared civic identity. Self-government requires uniting through our commonalities and aspiring to achieve a shared future.

When individuals fall back onto clans, tribes, and us-versus-them identities, the political community gets fragmented. It becomes harder for people to see each other as part of that same shared future.

Demagogues [more correctly neoliberals -- likbez] rely on this fracturing to inflame racial, nationalist, and religious antagonism, which only further fuels the divisions within society. Neoliberalism's war on "society," by pushing toward the privatization and marketization of everything, thus indirectly facilitates a retreat into tribalism that further undermines the preconditions for a free and democratic society.

The second problem is that neoliberals on right and left sometimes use identity as a shield to protect neoliberal policies. As one commentator has argued, "Without the bedrock of class politics, identity politics has become an agenda of inclusionary neoliberalism in which individuals can be accommodated but addressing structural inequalities cannot." What this means is that some neoliberals hold high the banner of inclusiveness on gender and race and thus claim to be progressive reformers, but they then turn a blind eye to systemic changes in politics and the economy.

Critics argue that this is "neoliberal identity politics," and it gives its proponents the space to perpetuate the policies of deregulation, privatization, liberalization, and austerity.

Of course, the result is to leave in place political and economic structures that harm the very groups that inclusionary neoliberals claim to support. The foreign policy adventures of the neoconservatives and liberal internationalists haven't fared much better than economic policy or cultural politics. The U.S. and its coalition partners have been bogged down in the war in Afghanistan for 18 years and counting. Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq is a liberal democracy, nor did the attempt to establish democracy in Iraq lead to a domino effect that swept the Middle East and reformed its governments for the better. Instead, power in Iraq has shifted from American occupiers to sectarian militias, to the Iraqi government, to Islamic State terrorists, and back to the Iraqi government -- and more than 100,000 Iraqis are dead.

Or take the liberal internationalist 2011 intervention in Libya. The result was not a peaceful transition to stable democracy but instead civil war and instability, with thousands dead as the country splintered and portions were overrun by terrorist groups. On the grounds of democracy promotion, it is hard to say these interventions were a success. And for those motivated to expand human rights around the world, it is hard to justify these wars as humanitarian victories -- on the civilian death count alone.

Indeed, the central anchoring assumptions of the American foreign policy establishment have been proven wrong. Foreign policymakers largely assumed that all good things would go together -- democracy, markets, and human rights -- and so they thought opening China to trade would inexorably lead to it becoming a liberal democracy. They were wrong. They thought Russia would become liberal through swift democratization and privatization. They were wrong.

They thought globalization was inevitable and that ever-expanding trade liberalization was desirable even if the political system never corrected for trade's winners and losers. They were wrong. These aren't minor mistakes. And to be clear, Donald Trump had nothing to do with them. All of these failures were evident prior to the 2016 election.

If we assume that identity politics is, first and foremost, a dirty and shrewd political strategy developed by the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party ("soft neoliberals") many things became much more clear. Along with Neo-McCarthyism it represents a mechanism to compensate for the loss of their primary voting block: trade union members, who in 2016 "en mass" defected to Trump.

Initially Clinton calculation was that trade union voters has nowhere to go anyways, and it was correct for first decade or so of his betrayal. But gradually trade union members and lower middle class started to leave Dems in droves (Demexit, compare with Brexit) and that where identity politics was invented to compensate for this loss.

So in addition to issues that you mention we also need to view the role of identity politics as the political strategy of the "soft neoliberals " directed at discrediting and the suppression of nationalism.

The resurgence of nationalism is the inevitable byproduct of the dominance of neoliberalism, resurgence which I think is capable to bury neoliberalism as it lost popular support (which now is limited to financial oligarchy and high income professional groups, such as we can find in corporate and military brass, (shrinking) IT sector, upper strata of academy, upper strata of medical professionals, etc)

That means that the structure of the current system isn't just flawed which imply that most problems are relatively minor and can be fixed by making some tweaks. It is unfixable, because the "Identity wars" reflect a deep moral contradictions within neoliberal ideology. And they can't be solved within this framework.

[Jun 20, 2020] The symphony orchestra of Austin, Texas has fired their lead trombonist for politically incorrect Twit

People who post of Twitter are stupid by definition, but people who fire employees for posting on Twitter are trying to replicate excesses of Stalinism (and, in way, McCarthysm) on a farce level. As in Marx "history repeats: first as tragedy, the second as farce"
By classifying the (somewhat incorrect; Obama was elected not only because he was half black, but also because he was half--CIA ;-) Twit below as the cry "fire" in crowded theater, we really try to replay the atmosphere of Stalinist Russia on a new level.
Notable quotes:
"... Austin Symphony Trombonist Fired Over Racist Comments , The Violin Channel, June 1, 2020 ..."
Jun 20, 2020 | www.unz.com

Here's some darkness: the symphony orchestra of Austin, Texas has fired their lead trombonist. This is a white lady named Brenda Sansig Salas, 51 years old and a U.S. Army veteran. Austin Symphony Trombonist Fired Over Racist Comments , The Violin Channel, June 1, 2020 She'd been posting comments on social media. The comment that precipitated her firing was apparently this one:

The BLACKS are looting and destroying their environment. They deserve what they get.

Brenda Sansig Salas

Have you checked out the 1/2 black president swine flu H1N1, and EBOLA?

What has your 1/2 black president done for you??

The ONLY REASON he was elected was because he is 1/2 black.

People voted on racist principles, not on the real issues . The BLACKS are looting and destroying their environment. They deserve what
they get. Playing the RACE CARD IS RACIST.

Symphony orchestra spokes-critter Anthony Corroa [ Email him ]announced the firing of Ms. Salas in the dreary schoolmarmish jargon of corporate wokeness: This language is not reflective of who we are as an organization." And "there is no place for hate within our organization."

[Jun 20, 2020] The American Press Is Destroying Itself by Matt Taibbi

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness. ..."
"... The leaders of this new movement are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew debate, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation. They are counting on the guilt-ridden, self-flagellating nature of traditional American progressives, who will not stand up for themselves, and will walk to the Razor voluntarily. ..."
"... Now, this madness is coming for journalism. Beginning on Friday, June 5th, a series of controversies rocked the media. By my count, at least eight news organizations dealt with internal uprisings (it was likely more). Most involved groups of reporters and staffers demanding the firing or reprimand of colleagues who'd made politically "problematic" editorial or social media decisions. ..."
"... The New York Times, the Intercept , Vox, the Philadelphia Inquirier, Variety , and others saw challenges to management. ..."
"... I always question, why does a Black life matter only when a white man takes it?... Like, if a white man takes my life tonight, it's going to be national news, but if a Black man takes my life, it might not even be spoken of It's stuff just like that that I just want in the mix. ..."
"... Bon Apetit ..."
"... Philadelphia Inquirer's ..."
"... Morning Consult ..."
"... Philadelphia Inquirer ..."
"... fuck you, shut up, send money, do better, check yourself, I'm tired ..."
"... Game of Thrones ..."
"... washing the feet ..."
"... The traditional view of the press was never based on some contrived, mathematical notion of "balance," i.e. five paragraphs of Republicans for every five paragraphs of Democrats. The ideal instead was that we showed you everything we could see, good and bad, ugly and not, trusting that a better-informed public would make better decisions. This vision of media stressed accuracy, truth, and trust in the reader's judgment as the routes to positive social change. ..."
Jun 20, 2020 | taibbi.substack.com

Reporting by Matt Taibbi Subscribe

Sometimes it seems life can't get any worse in this country. Already in terror of a pandemic, Americans have lately been bombarded with images of grotesque state-sponsored violence, from the murder of George Floyd to countless scenes of police clubbing and brutalizing protesters.

Our president, Donald Trump, is a clown who makes a great reality-show villain but is uniquely toolless as the leader of a superpower nation. Watching him try to think through two society-imperiling crises is like waiting for a gerbil to solve Fermat's theorem. Calls to "dominate" marchers and ad-libbed speculations about Floyd's "great day" looking down from heaven at Trump's crisis management and new unemployment numbers (" only" 21 million out of work!) were pure gasoline at a tinderbox moment. The man seems determined to talk us into civil war.

But police violence, and Trump's daily assaults on the presidential competence standard, are only part of the disaster. On the other side of the political aisle, among self-described liberals, we're watching an intellectual revolution. It feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind. It's become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.

The leaders of this new movement are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew debate, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation. They are counting on the guilt-ridden, self-flagellating nature of traditional American progressives, who will not stand up for themselves, and will walk to the Razor voluntarily.

They've conned organization after organization into empowering panels to search out thoughtcrime, and it's established now that anything can be an offense, from a UCLA professor placed under investigation for reading Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" out loud to a data scientist fired* from a research firm for -- get this -- retweeting an academic study suggesting nonviolent protests may be more politically effective than violent ones!

Now, this madness is coming for journalism. Beginning on Friday, June 5th, a series of controversies rocked the media. By my count, at least eight news organizations dealt with internal uprisings (it was likely more). Most involved groups of reporters and staffers demanding the firing or reprimand of colleagues who'd made politically "problematic" editorial or social media decisions.

The New York Times, the Intercept , Vox, the Philadelphia Inquirier, Variety , and others saw challenges to management.

Probably the most disturbing story involved Intercept writer Lee Fang, one of a fast-shrinking number of young reporters actually skilled in investigative journalism. Fang's work in the area of campaign finance especially has led to concrete impact, including a record fine to a conservative Super PAC : few young reporters have done more to combat corruption.

Yet Fang found himself denounced online as a racist, then hauled before H.R. His crime? During protests, he tweeted this interview with an African-American man named Maximum Fr, who described having two cousins murdered in the East Oakland neighborhood where he grew up. Saying his aunt is still not over those killings, Max asked:

I always question, why does a Black life matter only when a white man takes it?... Like, if a white man takes my life tonight, it's going to be national news, but if a Black man takes my life, it might not even be spoken of It's stuff just like that that I just want in the mix.

Shortly after, a co-worker of Fang's, Akela Lacy, wrote, "Tired of being made to deal continually with my co-worker @lhfang continuing to push black on black crime narratives after being repeatedly asked not to. This isn't about me and him, it's about institutional racism and using free speech to couch anti-blackness. I am so fucking tired." She followed with, "Stop being racist Lee."

The tweet received tens of thousands of likes and responses along the lines of, " Lee Fang has been like this for years, but the current moment only makes his anti-Blackness more glaring ," and " Lee Fang spouting racist bullshit it must be a day ending in day ." A significant number of Fang's co-workers, nearly all white, as well as reporters from other major news organizations like the New York Times and MSNBC and political activists (one former Elizabeth Warren staffer tweeted, " Get him !"), issued likes and messages of support for the notion that Fang was a racist. Though he had support within the organization, no one among his co-workers was willing to say anything in his defense publicly.

Like many reporters, Fang has always viewed it as part of his job to ask questions in all directions. He's written critically of political figures on the center-left, the left, and "obviously on the right," and his reporting has inspired serious threats in the past. None of those past experiences were as terrifying as this blitz by would-be colleagues, which he described as "jarring," "deeply isolating," and "unique in my professional experience."

To save his career, Fang had to craft a public apology for "insensitivity to the lived experience of others." According to one friend of his, it's been communicated to Fang that his continued employment at The Intercept is contingent upon avoiding comments that may upset colleagues. Lacy to her credit publicly thanked Fang for his statement and expressed willingness to have a conversation; unfortunately, the throng of Intercept co-workers who piled on her initial accusation did not join her in this.

I first met Lee Fang in 2014 and have never known him to be anything but kind, gracious, and easygoing. He also appears earnestly committed to making the world a better place through his work. It's stunning that so many colleagues are comfortable using a word as extreme and villainous as racist to describe him.

Though he describes his upbringing as "solidly middle-class," Fang grew up in up in a diverse community in Prince George's County, Maryland, and attended public schools where he was frequently among the few non-African Americans in his class. As a teenager, he was witness to the murder of a young man outside his home by police who were never prosecuted, and also volunteered at a shelter for trafficked women, two of whom were murdered. If there's an edge to Fang at all, it seems geared toward people in our business who grew up in affluent circumstances and might intellectualize topics that have personal meaning for him.

In the tweets that got him in trouble with Lacy and other co-workers, he questioned the logic of protesters attacking immigrant-owned businesses " with no connection to police brutality at all ." He also offered his opinion on Martin Luther King's attitude toward violent protest (Fang's take was that King did not support it; Lacy responded, "you know they killed him too right"). These are issues around which there is still considerable disagreement among self-described liberals, even among self-described leftists. Fang also commented, presciently as it turns out, that many reporters were "terrified of openly challenging the lefty conventional wisdom around riots."

Lacy says she never intended for Fang to be "fired, 'canceled,' or deplatformed," but appeared irritated by questions on the subject, which she says suggest, "there is more concern about naming racism than letting it persist."

Max himself was stunned to find out that his comments on all this had created a Twitter firestorm. "I couldn't believe they were coming for the man's job over something I said," he recounts. "It was not Lee's opinion. It was my opinion."

By phone, Max spoke of a responsibility he feels Black people have to speak out against all forms of violence, "precisely because we experience it the most." He described being affected by the Floyd story, but also by the story of retired African-American police captain David Dorn, shot to death in recent protests in St. Louis. He also mentioned Tony Timpa, a white man whose 2016 asphyxiation by police was only uncovered last year. In body-camera footage, police are heard joking after Timpa passed out and stopped moving, " I don't want to go to school! Five more minutes, Mom !"

"If it happens to anyone, it has to be called out," Max says.

Max described discussions in which it was argued to him that bringing up these other incidents now is not helpful to the causes being articulated at the protests. He understands that point of view. He just disagrees.

"They say, there has to be the right time and a place to talk about that," he says. "But my point is, when? I want to speak out now." He pauses. "We've taken the narrative, and instead of being inclusive with it, we've become exclusive with it. Why?"

There were other incidents. The editors of Bon Apetit and Refinery29 both resigned amid accusations of toxic workplace culture. The editor of Variety, Claudia Eller, was placed on leave after calling a South Asian freelance writer "bitter" in a Twitter exchange about minority hiring at her company. The self-abasing apology ("I have tried to diversify our newsroom over the past seven years, but I HAVE NOT DONE ENOUGH") was insufficient. Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Inquirer's editor, Stan Wischowski, was forced out after approving a headline, "Buildings matter, too."

In the most discussed incident, Times editorial page editor James Bennet was ousted for green-lighting an anti-protest editorial by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton entitled, " Send in the troops ."

I'm no fan of Cotton, but as was the case with Michael Moore's documentary and many other controversial speech episodes, it's not clear that many of the people angriest about the piece in question even read it. In classic Times fashion, the paper has already scrubbed a mistake they made misreporting what their own editorial said, in an article about Bennet's ouster. Here's how the piece by Marc Tracy read originally (emphasis mine):

James Bennet, the editorial page editor of The New York Times, has resigned after a controversy over an Op-Ed by a senator calling for military force against protesters in American cities.

Here's how the piece reads now :

James Bennet resigned on Sunday from his job as the editorial page editor of The New York Times, days after the newspaper's opinion section, which he oversaw, published a much-criticized Op-Ed by a United States senator calling for a military response to civic unrest in American cities.

Cotton did not call for "military force against protesters in American cities." He spoke of a "show of force," to rectify a situation a significant portion of the country saw as spiraling out of control. It's an important distinction. Cotton was presenting one side of the most important question on the most important issue of a critically important day in American history.

As Cotton points out in the piece, he was advancing a view arguably held by a majority of the country. A Morning Consult poll showed 58% of Americans either strongly or somewhat supported the idea of "calling in the U.S. military to supplement city police forces." That survey included 40% of self-described "liberals" and 37% of African-Americans. To declare a point of view held by that many people not only not worthy of discussion, but so toxic that publication of it without even necessarily agreeing requires dismissal, is a dramatic reversal for a newspaper that long cast itself as the national paper of record.

Incidentally, that same poll cited by Cotton showed that 73% of Americans described protecting property as "very important," while an additional 16% considered it "somewhat important." This means the Philadelphia Inquirer editor was fired for running a headline – "Buildings matter, too" – that the poll said expressed a view held by 89% of the population, including 64% of African-Americans.

(Would I have run the Inquirer headline? No. In the context of the moment, the use of the word "matter" especially sounds like the paper is equating "Black lives" and "buildings," an odious and indefensible comparison. But why not just make this case in a rebuttal editorial? Make it a teaching moment? How can any editor operate knowing that airing opinions shared by a majority of readers might cost his or her job?)

The main thing accomplished by removing those types of editorials from newspapers -- apart from scaring the hell out of editors -- is to shield readers from knowledge of what a major segment of American society is thinking.

It also guarantees that opinion writers and editors alike will shape views to avoid upsetting colleagues, which means that instead of hearing what our differences are and how we might address those issues, newspaper readers will instead be presented with page after page of people professing to agree with one another. That's not agitation, that's misinformation.

The instinct to shield audiences from views or facts deemed politically uncomfortable has been in evidence since Trump became a national phenomenon. We saw it when reporters told audiences Hillary Clinton's small crowds were a " wholly intentional " campaign decision. I listened to colleagues that summer of 2016 talk about ignoring poll results, or anecdotes about Hillary's troubled campaign, on the grounds that doing otherwise might "help Trump" (or, worse, be perceived that way).

Even if you embrace a wholly politically utilitarian vision of the news media – I don't, but let's say – non-reporting of that "enthusiasm" story, or ignoring adverse poll results, didn't help Hillary's campaign. I'd argue it more likely accomplished the opposite, contributing to voter apathy by conveying the false impression that her victory was secure.

After the 2016 election, we began to see staff uprisings. In one case, publishers at the Nation faced a revolt – from the Editor on down – after articles by Aaron Mate and Patrick Lawrence questioning the evidentiary basis for Russiagate claims was run. Subsequent events, including the recent declassification of congressional testimony , revealed that Mate especially was right to point out that officials had no evidence for a Trump-Russia collusion case. It's precisely because such unpopular views often turn out to be valid that we stress publishing and debating them in the press.

In a related incident, the New Yorker ran an article about Glenn Greenwald's Russiagate skepticism that quoted that same Nation editor, Joan Walsh, who had edited Greenwald at Salon. She suggested to the New Yorker that Greenwald's reservations were rooted in "disdain" for the Democratic Party, in part because of its closeness to Wall Street, but also because of the " ascendance of women and people of color ." The message was clear: even if you win a Pulitzer Prize, you can be accused of racism for deviating from approved narratives, even on questions that have nothing to do with race (the New Yorker piece also implied Greenwald's intransigence on Russia was pathological and grounded in trauma from childhood).

In the case of Cotton, Times staffers protested on the grounds that " Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger ." Bennet's editorial decision was not merely ill-considered, but literally life-threatening (note pundits in the space of a few weeks have told us that protesting during lockdowns and not protesting during lockdowns are both literally lethal). The Times first attempted to rectify the situation by apologizing, adding a long Editor's note to Cotton's piece that read, as so many recent "apologies" have, like a note written by a hostage.

Editors begged forgiveness for not being more involved, for not thinking to urge Cotton to sound less like Cotton ("Editors should have offered suggestions"), and for allowing rhetoric that was "needlessly harsh and falls short of the thoughtful approach that advances useful debate." That last line is sadly funny, in the context of an episode in which reporters were seeking to pre-empt a debate rather than have one at all; of course, no one got the joke, since a primary characteristic of the current political climate is a total absence of a sense of humor in any direction.

As many guessed, the "apology" was not enough, and Bennet was whacked a day later in a terse announcement.

His replacement, Kathleen Kingsbury, issued a staff directive essentially telling employees they now had a veto over anything that made them uncomfortable : "Anyone who sees any piece of Opinion journalism, headlines, social posts, photos -- you name it -- that gives you the slightest pause, please call or text me immediately."

All these episodes sent a signal to everyone in a business already shedding jobs at an extraordinary rate that failure to toe certain editorial lines can and will result in the loss of your job. Perhaps additionally, you could face a public shaming campaign in which you will be denounced as a racist and rendered unemployable.

These tensions led to amazing contradictions in coverage. For all the extraordinary/inexplicable scenes of police viciousness in recent weeks -- and there was a ton of it, ranging from police slashing tires in Minneapolis, to Buffalo officers knocking over an elderly man, to Philadelphia police attacking protesters -- there were also 12 deaths in the first nine days of protests, only one at the hands of a police officer (involving a man who may or may not have been aiming a gun at police).

Looting in some communities has been so bad that people have been left without banks to cash checks, or pharmacies to fill prescriptions; business owners have been wiped out (" My life is gone ," commented one Philly store owner); a car dealership in San Leandro, California saw 74 cars stolen in a single night. It isn't the whole story, but it's demonstrably true that violence, arson, and rioting are occurring.

However, because it is politically untenable to discuss this in ways that do not suggest support, reporters have been twisting themselves into knots. We are seeing headlines previously imaginable only in The Onion, e.g., " 27 police officers injured during largely peaceful anti-racism protests in London ."

Even people who try to keep up with protest goals find themselves denounced the moment they fail to submit to some new tenet of ever-evolving doctrine, via a surprisingly consistent stream of retorts: fuck you, shut up, send money, do better, check yourself, I'm tired and racist .

Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, who argued for police reform and attempted to show solidarity with protesters in his city, was shouted down after he refused to commit to defunding the police. Protesters shouted "Get the fuck out!" at him, then chanted " Shame !" and threw refuse, Game of Thrones -style , as he skulked out of the gathering. Frey's "shame" was refusing to endorse a position polls show 65% of Americans oppose , including 62% of Democrats, with just 15% of all people, and only 33% of African-Americans, in support.

Each passing day sees more scenes that recall something closer to cult religion than politics. White protesters in Floyd's Houston hometown kneeling and praying to black residents for "forgiveness for years and years of racism" are one thing, but what are we to make of white police in Cary, North Carolina, kneeling and washing the feet of Black pastors? What about Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer kneeling while dressed in " African kente cloth scarves "?

There is symbolism here that goes beyond frustration with police or even with racism: these are orgiastic, quasi-religious, and most of all, deeply weird scenes, and the press is too paralyzed to wonder at it. In a business where the first job requirement was once the willingness to ask tough questions, we've become afraid to ask obvious ones.

On CNN, Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender was asked a hypothetical question about a future without police: "What if in the middle of the night, my home is broken into? Who do I call?" When Bender, who is white, answered , "I know that comes from a place of privilege," questions popped to mind. Does privilege mean one should let someone break into one's home, or that one shouldn't ask that hypothetical question? (I was genuinely confused). In any other situation, a media person pounces on a provocative response to dig out its meaning, but an increasingly long list of words and topics are deemed too dangerous to discuss.

The media in the last four years has devolved into a succession of moral manias. We are told the Most Important Thing Ever is happening for days or weeks at a time, until subjects are abruptly dropped and forgotten, but the tone of warlike emergency remains: from James Comey's firing, to the deification of Robert Mueller, to the Brett Kavanaugh nomination, to the democracy-imperiling threat to intelligence "whistleblowers," all those interminable months of Ukrainegate hearings (while Covid-19 advanced), to fury at the death wish of lockdown violators, to the sudden reversal on that same issue, etc.

It's been learned in these episodes we may freely misreport reality, so long as the political goal is righteous. It was okay to publish the now-discredited Steele dossier, because Trump is scum. MSNBC could put Michael Avenatti on live TV to air a gang rape allegation without vetting, because who cared about Brett Kavanaugh – except press airing of that wild story ended up being a crucial factor in convincing key swing voter Maine Senator Susan Collins the anti-Kavanaugh campaign was a political hit job (the allegation illustrated, "why the presumption of innocence is so important," she said ). Reporters who were anxious to prevent Kavanaugh's appointment, in other words, ended up helping it happen through overzealousness.

There were no press calls for self-audits after those episodes, just as there won't be a few weeks from now if Covid-19 cases spike, or a few months from now if Donald Trump wins re-election successfully painting the Democrats as supporters of violent protest who want to abolish police. No: press activism is limited to denouncing and shaming colleagues for insufficient fealty to the cheap knockoff of bullying campus Marxism that passes for leftist thought these days.

The traditional view of the press was never based on some contrived, mathematical notion of "balance," i.e. five paragraphs of Republicans for every five paragraphs of Democrats. The ideal instead was that we showed you everything we could see, good and bad, ugly and not, trusting that a better-informed public would make better decisions. This vision of media stressed accuracy, truth, and trust in the reader's judgment as the routes to positive social change.

For all our infamous failings, journalists once had some toughness to them. We were supposed to be willing to go to jail for sources we might not even like, and fly off to war zones or disaster areas without question when editors asked. It was also once considered a virtue to flout the disapproval of colleagues to fight for stories we believed in (Watergate, for instance).

Today no one with a salary will stand up for colleagues like Lee Fang. Our brave truth-tellers make great shows of shaking fists at our parody president , but not one of them will talk honestly about the fear running through their own newsrooms. People depend on us to tell them what we see, not what we think. What good are we if we're afraid to do it?

Sean Carson Jun 13

This is such an IMPORTANT story. But it's not just happening in newsrooms, it's happening everywhere: college campuses, corporations and the workplace, social media platforms, politics, you name it. These ideologues are the Red Guard of a new Cultural Revolution. Their goal is power and their method is leveraging progressive guilt. I think they are far, far more dangerous than Donald Trump or anything going on with the right. Thank you Matt for writing about this! 163

Dazed and Confused Jun 13

Bravo for writing this Matt. You could, of course, have written it without first establishing your bona fides as a trump detractor. The problem you address has nothing to do with trump and would exist regardless of who was in the white house. This doesn't mean there are no problems with trump, or that he hasn't made a bad situation worse. But that is where we are today. Before anyone can criticize the obviously insane ideological absurdities within the liberal/left wing press they must first take a swing at trump in case anyone thinks criticism of the press is the same thing as supporting trump. How sad.

[Jun 20, 2020] "If none of us ever read a book that was "dangerous," had a friend who was "different," or joined an organization that advocated "change," we would all be the kind of people Joe McCarthy wants."

Jun 20, 2020 | taibbi.substack.com

Check Jun 13

"If none of us ever read a book that was "dangerous," had a friend who was "different," or joined an organization that advocated "change," we would all be the kind of people Joe McCarthy wants."

Edward R. Murrow

[Jun 16, 2020] Saagar Enjeti- Obamagate is real and the media can't just ignore it

They gaslighted the whole nation. Amazing achievement. In other words, they are a real criminal gang, a mafia. No questions about it. This is Nixon impeachment level staff. This are people that brought us Lybia, Syria: this senile Creepy Joe.
Jun 16, 2020 | www.youtube.com

Saagar Enjeti blasts former President Obama after it was revealed in transcripts he was the person who told then-deputy attorney general Sally Yates about Mike Flynn's intercepted phone call with the Russian ambassador, Joe Biden responds to Flynn claims on Good Morning America.

Maniachael Productions , 1 month ago

Lmao a war criminal complaining about the rule of law not being upheld

C.I.A. , 3 weeks ago

It's disgusting to me how news sources say that Obama gate isn't real.

[Jun 16, 2020] Saagar Enjeti- BOMBSHELL reveals Biden at center of Obamagate, media ignores

They gaslighted the whole nation. Amazing achievement. In other words, they are a real criminal gang, a mafia. No questions about it.
Jun 16, 2020 | www.youtube.com

Columbus1152 , 1 month ago

Dementia comes in handy at a time like this.

RayC1 , 1 month ago

Biden just described his entire political career, "I was there, but i had nothing to do with it"

Arthur Sprong , 1 month ago

He's not senile, he's getting ready to be "unfit for trial".

Charles Jannuzi , 1 month ago

Bad Brain Joe was Obomber's point man in the Ukraine coup and all the grifting and grafting that followed.

john smith , 1 month ago

"I know nothing about those moves to investigate Flynn." "These documents clearly outline that you were in a meeting at a specific time specifically about that." "OH! I'm sorry! I thought you asked if I was INVOLVED IN IT!"

Jeff Zekas , 1 month ago (edited)

The word is "entrapment" - Years ago, one of the officers in the investigations squad said to me, "How can you claim to be better than them, if you break the law to catch 'em?" - Now I understand what he was saying.

[Jun 15, 2020] In the 20th Century approximately 30 world leaders were assassinated. I bet in most cases those prosecuted for the crime were little more than Oswald-like patsies. And this list doesn't even include government leaders killed in mysterious plane crashes.

Jun 15, 2020 | off-guardian.org

Charlotte Russe Jun 13, 2020 1:21 PM CONTROLLED OPPOSITION

In the 20th Century approximately 30 world leaders were assassinated. I bet in most cases those prosecuted for the crime were little more than Oswald-like patsies. And this list doesn't even include government leaders killed in mysterious plane crashes.

One such political figure was Senator Paul Wellstone who died in a highly suspicious 2002 plane crash. "Wellstone's death comes almost two years to the day after a similar plane crash killed another Democratic Senator locked in a tight election contest, and that was Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan, on October 16, 2000.

Wellstone was in a hotly contested reelection campaign, but polls showed he was beginning to pull ahead of Republican nominee Norm Coleman, the former mayor of St. Paul, in the wake of the vote in the Senate to authorize President Bush to wage war against Iraq.

The liberal Democrat was a well-publicized opponent of the war resolution, the only Senator in a tight race to vote against it. there are enormous financial stakes involved in control of the Senate. Republican control of the Senate would make it possible to push through new tax cuts for the wealthy and other perks for corporate America worth billions of dollars -- more than enough of an incentive to commit murder." The death of US Senator Paul Wellstone: accident or murder?

It would appear, politicians risk being murdered if they "genuinely" go against the grain remaining true to their beliefs and principles by deliberately using their power to jeopardize insidious ruling class lucrative schemes and scams. By the way, this is how you know ALL the nonstop "resistance" against the orange buffoon is just utter bullshit. If Trump was a actually a threat to the military/security/surveillance/corporate state he would have already been JFK'd or Olof Palme'd.

The worldwide gangster ruling class is just like any other criminal organization which regularly eliminates anyone who has the power to alter the status quo. The security state like common mobsters use extortion or murder to get their way. We all know about J Edgar Hooverr and his extortion files. Hoover maintained a special official and confidential file in his office. The "secret files," as they became widely known, guaranteed Hoover's longevity as Director of the FBI. In fact, today those intelligence agency "dirty files" are even more extensive given the sophisticated and heightened nature of surveillance. Funny, that gives the term "controlled opposition" a whole new meaning. Gezzah Potts Jun 13, 2020 1:57 PM Reply to Charlotte Russe You hit the nail on the head Charlotte. If Trump really was a genuine threat, they would've already got rid of him. It's all one giant charade.
A Punch and Judy Show for the masses.
Find it quite startling the divisiveness in the United States, and those that I often come across who fervently believe that Trump or Qanon will save the United States and also lock up Obama, the Clinton's, Soros, etc, etc. What can you say?
While reading your comment, four names popped into my head: Thomas Sankara, Patrice Lumumba, Maurice Bishop and Salvador Allende.
And we know what happened in Chile after Allende's death. It became the test tube guinea pig for Neoliberalism. 6 0 Reply Charlotte Ruse Jun 13, 2020 3:47 PM Reply to Gezzah Potts Yes it's all showbiz ..

[Jun 12, 2020] Russia, Russia, Russia - Obama Apparatchiks Blame Moscow For America's Riots

Jun 12, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Russia, Russia, Russia - Obama Apparatchiks Blame Moscow For America's Riots by Tyler Durden Thu, 06/11/2020 - 22:45 Authored by Phillip Giraldi via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

If one ventures into the vast wasteland of American television it is possible to miss the truly ridiculous content that is promoted as news by the major networks. One particular feature of media-speak in the United States is the tendency of the professional reporting punditry to go seeking for someone to blame every time some development rattles the National Security plus Wall Street bubble that we all unfortunately live in. The talking heads have to such an extent sold the conclusion that China deliberately released a lethal virus to destroy western democracies that no one objects when Beijing is elevated from being a commercial competitor and political adversary to an enemy of the United States. One sometimes even sees that it is all a communist plot. Likewise, the riots taking place all across the U.S. are being milked for what it's worth by the predominantly liberal media, both to influence this year's election and to demonstrate how much the news oligarchs really love black people.

As is often the case, there are a number of inconsistencies in the narrative. If one looks at the numerous photos of the protests in many parts of the country, it is clear that most of the demonstrators are white, not black, which might suggest that even if there are significant pockets of racism in the United States there is also a strong condemnation of that fact by many white people. And this in a country that elected a black man president not once, but twice, and that black president had a cabinet that included a large number of African-Americans.

Also, to further obfuscate any understanding of what might be taking place, the media and chattering class is obsessed with finding white supremacists as instigators of at least some of the actual violence. It would be a convenient explanation for the Social Justice Warriors that proliferate in the media, though it is supported currently by little actual evidence that anyone is exploiting right-wing groups.

Simultaneously, some on the right, to include the president, are blaming legitimately dubbed domestic terrorist group Antifa , which is perhaps more plausible, though again evidence of organized instigation appears to be on the thin side. Still another source of the mayhem apparently consists of some folks getting all excited by the turmoil and breaking windows and tossing Molotov cocktails, as did two upper middle class attorneys in Brooklyn last week.

Nevertheless, the search goes on for a guilty party. Explaining the demonstrations and riots as the result of the horrible killing of a black man by police which has revulsed both black and white Americans would be too simple to satisfy the convoluted yearnings of the likes of Wolf Blitzer and Rachel Maddow.

Which brings us to Russia. How convenient is it to fall back on Russia which, together with the Chinese, is reputedly already reported to be working hard to subvert the November U.S. election. And what better way to do just that than to call on one of the empty-heads of the Barack Obama administration, whose foreign policy achievements included the destruction of a prosperous Libya and the killing of four American diplomats in Benghazi, the initiation of kinetic hostilities with Syria, the failure to achieve a reset with Russia and the assassinations of American citizens overseas without any due process. But Obama sure did talk nice and seem pleasant unlike the current occupant of the White House.

The predictable Wolf Blitzer had a recent interview with perhaps the emptiest head of all the empowered women who virtually ran the Obama White House. Susan Rice was U.N. Ambassador and later National Security Advisor under Barack Obama. Before that she was a Clinton appointee who served as Undersecretary of State for African Affairs. She is reportedly currently being considered as a possible running mate for Joe Biden as she has all the necessary qualifications being a woman and black.

While Ambassador and National Security Advisor, Rice had the reputation of being extremely abrasive . She ran into trouble when she failed to be convincing in support of the Obama administration exculpatory narrative regarding what went wrong in Benghazi when the four Americans, to include the U.S. Ambassador, were killed.

In her interview with Blitzer, Rice said:

"We have peaceful protesters focused on the very real pain and disparities that we're all wrestling with that have to be addressed, and then we have extremists who've come to try to hijack those protests and turn them into something very different. And they're probably also, I would bet based on my experience, I'm not reading the intelligence these days, but based on my experience this is right out of the Russian playbook as well. I would not be surprised to learn that they have fomented some of these extremists on both sides using social media. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they are funding it in some way, shape, or form."

It should be noted that Rice, a devout Democrat apparatchik, produced no evidence whatsoever that the Russians were or have been involved in "fomenting" the reactions to the George Floyd demonstrations and riots beyond the fact that Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden all believe that Moscow is responsible for everything. Clinton in particular hopes that some day someone will actually believe her when she claims that she lost to Trump in 2016 due to Russia. Even Robert Mueller, he of the Russiagate Inquiry, could not come up with any real evidence suggesting that the relatively low intensity meddling in the election by the Kremlin had any real impact. Nor was there any suggestion that Moscow was actually colluding with the Trump campaign, nor with its appointees, to include National Security Advisor designate Michael Flynn.

Fortunately, no one took much notice of Rice based on her "experience," or her judgement insofar as she possesses that quality. Glenn Greenwald responded :

"This is fuxxing lunacy -- conspiratorial madness of the worst kind -- but it's delivered by a Serious Obama Official and a Respected Mainstream Newscaster so it's all fine This is Infowars-level junk. Should Twitter put a 'False' label on this? Or maybe a hammer and sickle emoji?"

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Maria Zakharova accurately described the Rice performance as a "perfect example of barefaced propaganda." She wrote on her Facebook page "Are you trying to play the Russia card again? You've been playing too long – come back to reality" instead of using "dirty methods of information manipulation" despite "having absolutely no facts to prove [the] allegations go out and face your people, look them in the eye and try telling them that they are being controlled by the Russians through YouTube and Facebook. And I will sit back and watch 'American exceptionalism' in action."

It should be assumed that the Republicans will be coming up with their own candidate for "fomenting" the riots and demonstrations. It already includes Antifa, of course, but is likely to somehow also involve the Chinese, who will undoubtedly be seen as destroying American democracy through the double whammy of a plague and race riots. Speaking at the White House, National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien warned about foreign incitement , including not only the Chinese, but also Iran and even Zimbabwe. And, oh yes, Russia.

One thing is for sure, no matter who is ultimately held accountable, no one in the Congress or White House will be taking the blame for anything.

[Jun 10, 2020] They Really Are Lying To You The American Conservative

Notable quotes:
"... Washington Post's ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Wall Street Journal ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
Jun 10, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

The media's Russiagate failures were just a trial-run for the last four months.

June 10, 2020

|

12:01 am

Arthur Bloom The most effective kind of propaganda is by omission. Walter Duranty didn't cook up accounts from smiling Ukrainian farmers, he simply said there was no evidence for a famine, much like the media tells us today that there is no evidence antifa has a role in the current protests. It is much harder to do this today than it was back then -- there are photographs and video that show they have been -- which is the proximate cause for greater media concern about conspiracy theories and disinformation.

For all the hyperventilating over the admittedly creepy 2008 article about "cognitive infiltration," by Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, it was a serious attempt to deal with the problem of an informational center being lost in American public life, at a time when the problem was not nearly as bad as it is today. It proposed a number of strategies to reduce the credibility of conspiracy theorists, including seeding them with false information. Whether such strategies have been employed, perhaps with QAnon, which has a remarkable ability to absorb all other conspiracy theories that came before it, I leave to the reader's speculation.

Books will one day be written about the many failures of the media during the Trump presidency, but much of the Russiagate narrative-shaping was related to the broader problem of decentralization and declining authority of establishment media. One of the more egregious examples is the Washington Post's report that relied upon a blacklist created by an anonymous group, PropOrNot, that found more than 200 sites carried water for the Russians in some way, and not all on the right either. In fact, if the Bush administration had commissioned a list of news sources that were carrying water for Saddam Hussein in 2006, it would have looked almost the same as the PropOrNot list, except here it was, recast as an effort to defend democratic integrity. On the list was Naked Capitalism, Antiwar.com, and Truthdig.

This should have been a bigger scandal, very good evidence that the war on disinformation was not that but a campaign against officially unapproved information. But virtually nobody except Glenn Greenwald objected. There is some evidence that this style of blacklisting went even further, into the architecture of search engines. My reporting on Google search last year found that one of the "fringe domain" blacklists included Robert Parry's Consortium News. In other words, if Google had been around in the 1980s, Parry's exposes on Iran-Contra would have been excluded from Google News results.

The criteria for inclusion on any of these lists are much more amorphous than a more traditional one: taking money from a foreign power. As of this week, we now have a figure for how much the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal have taken from China Daily, a state-run newspaper, since 2016. It's $4.6 million, and $6 million, respectively. This is more than an order of magnitude greater than Russia is thought to have spent on Facebook advertising prior to the 2016 election.

There are other specific Russiagate disgraces one would be remiss to overlook, like star reporter Natasha Bertrand, who was hired at MSNBC after several appearances in which she repeatedly defended the accuracy of the Steele Dossier, which itself was likely tainted by Russian disinformation. The newspaper that published the Pentagon Papers defended the outing of a source to the FBI. How David Ignatius, considered America's top reporter on the intelligence community, can show his face in public after he was allegedly told by James Clapper to "take the kill shot on Flynn," and then two days later doing just that, is disturbing (Clapper's spokesman disputes this account, but Ignatius has not). The scoop, that Flynn, the incoming national security advisor had spoken to the Russian ambassador, is in no way suspicious, but for weeks was treated as if Flynn was making contact with his handler.

What Russiagate amounts to, as Matt Taibbi among others have written, is the use of federal investigative resources to criminalize or persecute dissenters from the foreign policy line of what we here at TAC call the Blob, in the same way that the PropOrNot list amounts to an attempt to suppress unapproved sources of news.

Many of the same figures involved in prolonging the Russiagate hysteria were also big cheerleaders for the Bush and Obama wars. Before Russiagate, there was the Pentagon military analysts scandal, in which it was revealed that dozens of media commentators on military affairs were doing so without disclosing their connections to the Pentagon or defense contractors. It implicated Barry McCaffrey, Bill Clinton's drug war czar, who is now an MSNBC contributor who helped to provide color for the narrative of General Flynn's decline, suggesting he was mentally ill after he had initially been supportive of him getting the job.

In a certain sense, Trump provides journalists who have disturbingly cozy relationships with powerful people a way of looking like they are holding the powerful accountable, without alienating any of their previous friends. Trump is in fact one of the weakest executives in presidential history, partly because of the massive resistance to him in the federal workforce, but also because his White House seems powerless to actually do anything about that. That people actually think the dark cloud of fascism has descended upon the land when Trump can't even figure out how to work those levers of power just shows how obsessed with symbolic matters -- "representation," they call it -- our politics has become.

The subsequent failures of the American information landscape have only served to reinforce this dynamic. Both the self-inflicted economic catastrophe of the coronavirus shutdowns, and the recent civil unrest, will serve to concentrate wealth away from the hated red-state bourgeoise and into the hands of the oligarchs in blue states, including Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post . This bears repeating: COVID and the protests will lead to a large transfer of wealth from a reliably Republican demographic -- small business owners -- to one that is at best split, which is why you saw Jamie Dimon kneeling in front of a bank vault this week.

Untangling the question of intent is difficult in the best of circumstances, and the same is true here. The contrast between news networks ominously reporting on Florida beachgoers a month ago now cheering on mass gatherings in large cities may not in fact be due to the fact that the large consortiums that own the networks stand to benefit financially from the continued shutdown of the country. They may sincerely believe, along with public health officials , that balancing the risks of institutional racism and getting COVID-19 is worth discussing in relation to protests, but balancing the same risks when it comes to going to church or burying a family member is not. Or it may just be studied naivety, like the kind exhibited a few weeks ago when the whole New York media scene rushed to the defense of the New Yorker 's Jia Tolentino, who played the victim after people on social media revealed that her family was involved in what certainly appears to be an exploitative immigration scam.

The rise of the first-person essay and subjectivity in journalism may turn out to be a perfectly congenial development for the powerful people in America; Tolentino is great at writing about herself. For one thing, this is a lot cheaper than reporting; it probably isn't a coincidence that this development has coincided with a huge decline in newsroom budgets. But at the same time blaming this on economics feels like it misses the point, because there are many people who are convinced this trend is good.

But the way it intersects with official corruption has me rather nervous. To give one example, it seems clear that #MeToo degenerated after the Kavanaugh hearings and Biden's nomination. And given the apparent loyalties of someone like David Ignatius, he isn't going to be the one to unravel the intelligence connections involved in the great sexual violence story of our generation, the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. So we are left with the Netflix version, slotted right into the typical narrative, in which the Epstein story looks fundamentally the same as most other stories of sexual coercion, involving a powerful man and less powerful woman, only with an exceptionally powerful man. And yet there are so many indications it was not typical.

So it is today with George Floyd as well. It seems like there are perfectly reasonable questions to be asked about the acquaintance between him and Derek Chauvin, and the fact that the rather shady bar they both worked at conveniently burned down. But by now most of the media is now highly invested in not seeing anything other than a statistic, another incident in a long history of police brutality, and the search for facts has been replaced by narratives. This is a shame, because it is perfectly possible to think that police have a history of poor treatment toward black people and there might be corruption involved in the George Floyd case, which is something Ben Crump, the lawyer for Floyd's family, seems to suggest in his interview on Face the Nation this weekend.

Two incidents in the last week, the freakout among young New York Times staffers over their publication of an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton that has now led to the resignation of the editorial page editor, and the report by Cockburn that Andrew Sullivan has been barred from writing about the protests by New York magazine, are a good indication that all of this is going to get worse. As for the class of people who actually own these media properties, they will probably find that building a padded room for woke staffers, in the form of whatever HR and "safety"-related demands they're making, will suit their interests just fine. about the author Arthur Bloom is managing editor of The American Conservative. He was previously deputy editor of the Daily Caller and a columnist for the Catholic Herald. He holds masters degrees in urban planning and American studies from the University of Kansas. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Washington Times, The Spectator (UK), The Guardian, Quillette, The American Spectator , Modern Age, and Tiny Mix Tapes.

[Jun 06, 2020] One crisis too many -- Will the riots be Trump's undoing by Arnon Mishkin

Jun 06, 2020 | www.foxnews.com

But even among those who justified the unrest, there was a sense that it, particularly the video of looting and violence, could result in a sense of "white backlash" and play into President Trump's reelection effort. This is a president who used his inaugural address to promise to fight "American Carnage" and has successfully appealed to "white backlash" throughout his career.

The history of urban unrest – starting with the 1967-68 riots, but extending through 1992 and 2014 – was consistent with the belief that Trump could benefit politically. Indeed, the 1968 riots helped both George Wallace and Richard Nixon run on "law and order" platforms, the 1992 riots arguably helped lead to the 1994 "Super Predators" crime bill, and the 2014 protests clearly, in the end, benefited Trump politically.

Indeed, many assumed that the response would help Trump successfully benefit from the 2020 unrest. Among those was Trump himself, who came out strongly arguing for "law and order" –criticizing governors who were not dealing sufficiently harshly with protesters, sending the U.S. military into Washington, D.C., and suggesting he was going to send them into other cities as well.

But so far, it hasn't worked out politically as some expected. Trump's poll numbers continue to decline – Biden currently leads him by eight points in the RealClearPolitics average

[Jun 06, 2020] Why Does The New York Times Brazenly Deny The Obvious Zero Hedge

Jun 06, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

by Tyler Durden Fri, 06/05/2020 - 22:00 Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The American Institute for Economic research,

Don't laugh derisively, as people do these days, but I've always admired the New York Times . First draft of history. Talent everywhere. Best production values. Even with its ideological spin, it can be scrupulous about facts. You can usually extract the truth with a decoder ring. Its outsized influence over the rest of the press makes it essential. I've relied on it for years. Even given everything, and I mean everything.

Until now. It's just too much. Too much unreality, manipulation, propaganda, and flat out untruths that are immediately recognizable to anyone. I can't believe they think they can get away with this with credibility intact. I'm not speaking of the many great reporters, technicians, editors, production specialists, and the tens of thousands who make it all possible. I'm speaking of a very small coterie of people who stand guard over the paper's editorial mission of the moment and enforce it on the whole company, with no dissent allowed.

Let's get right to the offending passage. It's not from the news or opinion section but the official editorial section and hence the official voice of the paper. The paragraph from June 2, 2020, reads as follows.

Healing the wounds ripped open in recent days and months will not be easy. The pandemic has made Americans fearful of their neighbors, cut them off from their communities of faith, shut their outlets for exercise and recreation and culture and learning. Worst of all, it has separated Americans from their own livelihoods.

Can you imagine? The pandemic is the cause!

I would otherwise feel silly to have to point this out but for the utter absurdity of the claim. The pandemic didn't do this. It caused a temporary and mostly media-fueled panic that distracted officials from doing what they should have done, which is protect the vulnerable and otherwise let society function and medical workers deal with disease.

Instead, the CDC and governors around the country, at the urging of bad computer-science models uninformed by any experience in viruses, shut down schools, churches, events, restaurants, gyms, theaters, sports, and further instructed people to stay in their homes, enforced sometimes even by SWAT teams. Jewish funerals were broken up by the police.

It was brutal and egregious and it threw 40 million people out of work and bankrupted countless businesses. Nothing this terrible was attempted even during the Black Death. Maximum economic damage; minimum health advantages . It's not even possible to find evidence that the lockdowns saved lives at all .

But to hear the New York Times tell the story, it was not the lockdown but the pandemic that did this. That's a level of ideological subterfuge that is almost impossible for a sane person to conjure up, simply because it is so obviously unbelievable.

It's lockdown denialism.

Why? From February 2020 and following, the New York Times had a story and they are continuing to stick to it. The story is that we are all going to die from this pandemic unless government shuts down society. It was a drum this paper beat every day.

Consider what the top virus reporter Donald J. McNeil (B.A. Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley) wrote on February 28, 2020, weeks before there was any talk of shutdowns in the U.S.:

There are two ways to fight epidemics: the medieval and the modern.

The modern way is to surrender to the power of the pathogens: Acknowledge that they are unstoppable and to try to soften the blow with 20th-century inventions, including new vaccines, antibiotics, hospital ventilators and thermal cameras searching for people with fevers.

The medieval way, inherited from the era of the Black Death, is brutal: Close the borders, quarantine the ships, pen terrified citizens up inside their poisoned cities.

For the first time in more than a century, the world has chosen to confront a new and terrifying virus with the iron fist instead of the latex glove.

And yes, he recommends the medieval way. The article continues on to praise China's response and Cuba's to AIDS and says that this approach is natural to Trump and should be done in the United States. ( AIER called him out on this alarming column on March 4, 20202.)

McNeil then went on to greater fame with a series of shocking podcasts for the NYT that put a voice and even more panic to the failed modeling of Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College London.

This first appeared the day before his op-ed calling for global lockdown. The transcript includes this:

I spend a lot of time thinking about whether I'm being too alarmist or whether I'm being not alarmist enough. And this is alarmist, but I think right now, it's justified. This one reminds me of what I have read about the 1918 Spanish influenza.

Reminder: 675,000 Americans died in that pandemic. There were only 103 million people living in the U.S. at the time.

He continues:

I'm trying to bring a sense that if things don't change, a lot of us might die. If you have 300 relatively close friends and acquaintances, six of them would die in a 2.5 percent mortality situation.

That's an astonishing claim that seems to forecast 8.25 million Americans will die. So far as I know, that is the most extreme claim made by anyone, four times as high as the Imperial College model.

What should we do to prevent this?

You can't leave. You can't see your families. All the flights are canceled. All the trains are canceled. All the highways are closed. You're going to stay in there. And you're locked in with a deadly disease. We can do it.

So because this coronavirus "reminds" him of one he read about, he can say on the air that four million people could soon die, and therefore life itself should be cancelled. Because a reporter is "reminded" of something.

This is the same newspaper that in 1957 urged people to stay calm during the Asian flu and trust medical providers – running all of one editorial on the topic. What a change! This was an amazing podcast -- amazingly irresponsible.

McNeil was not finished yet. He was at it again on March 12, 2020, demanding that we not just close big events and schools but shut down everything and everyone "for months." He went back on the podcast twice more, then started riding the media circuit, including NPR . It was also the same. China did it right. We need to lock down or people you know, if you are one of the lucky survivors, will die.

To say that the New York Times was invested in the scenario of "lock down or we die" is an understatement. It was as invested in this narrative as it was in the Russia-collaboration story or the Ukrainian-phone call impeachment, tales to which they dedicated hundreds of stories and many dozens of reporters. The virus was the third pitch to achieve their objective.

Once in, there was no turning back, even after it became obvious that for the vast numbers of people this was hardly a disease at all, and that most of the deaths came from one city and mostly from nursing homes that were forced by law to take in COVID-19 patients.

That the newspaper, a once venerable institution, has something to answer for is apparent. But instead of accepting moral culpability for having created a panic to fuel the overthrow of the American way of life, they turn on a dime to celebrate people who are not socially distancing in the streets to protest police brutality.

To me, the protests on the streets were a welcome relief from the vicious lockdowns. To the New York Times , it seems like the lockdowns never happened. Down the Orwellian memory hole.

In this paper's consistent editorializing, nothing is the fault of the lockdowns.

Everything instead is the fault of Trump, who "tends to see only political opportunity in public fear and anger, as in his customary manner of contributing heat rather than light to the confrontations between protesters and authority."

True about Trump but let us remember that the McNeil's first pro-lockdown article praised Trump as perfectly suited to bring about the lockdown, and the paper urged him to do just that, while only three months later washing their hands of the whole thing, as if had nothing to do with current sufferings much less the rage on the streets.

And the rapid turnaround of this paper on street protests was stunning to behold. A month ago, people protesting lockdowns were written about as vicious disease spreaders who were denying good science. In the blink of an eye, the protesters against police brutality (the same police who enforced the lockdown) were transmogrified into bold embracers of First Amendment rights who posed no threat to public health.

Not even the scary warnings about the coming "second wave" were enough to stop the paper from throwing out all its concern over "targeted layered containment" and "social distancing" in order to celebrate protests in the streets that they like.

And they ask themselves why people are incredulous toward mainstream media today.

The lockdowns wrecked the fundamentals of life in America. The New York Times today wants to pretend they either didn't happen, happened only in a limited way, or were just minor public health measures that worked beautifully to mitigate disease. And instead of having an editorial meltdown over these absurdities, preposterous forecasts, and extreme panic mongering that contributed to vast carnage, we seen an internal revolt over the publishing of a Tom Cotton editorial, a dispute over politics not facts.

The record is there: this paper went all in back in February to demand the most authoritarian possible response to a virus about which we already knew enough back then to observe that this was nothing like the Spanish flu of 1918. They pretended otherwise, probably for ideological reasons, most likely.

It was not the pandemic that blew up our lives, commercial networks, and health systems. It was the response to the virus that did that. The Times needs to learn that it cannot construct a fake version of reality just to avoid responsibility for what they've done. Are we really supposed to believe what they write now and in the future? This time, I hope, people will be smart and learn to consider the source.

[Jun 06, 2020] Lisa Page Hired By NBC And MSNBC As Legal Analyst (No, Not The Onion!) by Jonathan Turley

This is just the Deep State retirement package.
So another rabid neocon is hired by neocon MSM and instantly was interviewed by neocon Madcow, blaming Russia for the coup d'état against Trump that Obama administration with her help launched. Nothing new, nothing interesting.
Notable quotes:
"... Page testified that even by May 2017, they did not find such evidence that "it still existed in the scope of possibility that there would be literally nothing" to connect Trump and Russia. ..."
"... There was little reason to believe in this "insurance policy" given the absence of evidence. Yet, Page still viewed the effort led by Strzok as an indemnity in case of election. ..."
"... The Inspector General found that, soon after the first surveillance was ordered, FBI agents began to cast doubts on the veracity of the Steele document ..."
"... it was quickly established that no credible evidence existed to support the continuance of the investigation -- which Page called their "insurance policy." ..."
"... Page also left out her other emails including calling Trump foul names while praising Hillary Clinton and other opponents. Even if she were not involved in the ongoing controversy, her emails show her to be fervently opposed to both Trump and the Republicans. ..."
Jun 06, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Lisa Page, the former FBI lawyer who resigned in the midst of the Russian investigation scandal, has been hired a NBC and MSNBC as a legal analyst. The move continues a trend started by CNN in hiring Trump critics, including officials terminated for misconduct, to offer legal analysis on the Trump Administration. We have previously discussed the use by CNN of figures like Andrew McCabe to give legal analysis despite his being referred for possible criminal charges by the Inspector General for repeatedly lying to federal investigators. The media appears intent on fulfilling the narrative of President Trump that it is overly biased and hostile in its analysis. Indeed, it now appears a marketing plan that has subsumed the journalistic mission.

Page appeared with Rachel Maddow and began her work as the new legal analyst by discussing her own controversial work at the FBI. Page is still part of investigation by various committees and the investigation being conducted by U.S Attorney John Durham.

I have denounced President Trump for his repeated and often vicious references to Page's affair with fired FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok . There is no excuse for such personal abuse. I also do not view her emails as proof of her involvement in a deep-state conspiracy as opposed to clearly inappropriate and partisan communications for someone involved in the investigation. Indeed, Page did not appear a particularly significant figure in the investigation or even the FBI as a whole. She was primarily dragged into the controversy due to her relationship with Strzok.

However, Trump has legitimate reason to object (as he has) to this hiring as do those who expect analysis from experts without a personal stake in the ongoing investigations. It has long been an ethical rule in American journalism not to pay for interviews. Either NBC is paying for exclusive rights to Page in interviews like the one on Maddow's show or it is hiring an expert with a personal stake in these controversies to give legal analysis. Neither is a good option for a network that represented the gold standard in journalism with figures like John Chancellor, Edwin Newman, and Roger Mudd.

It is not that Page disagrees with the Administration on legal matters or these cases. It is the fact that she is personally involved in the ongoing stories and has shown intense and at times unhinged bias against Trump in communications with Strzok and others. She is the news story, or at least a significant part of it.

Andrew A. Weissmann has also been retained as a legal analyst by NBC and MSNBC. While Weissmann has been raised by Republicans as a lightening rod for his perceived partisan bias as a member of the Mueller team, he does not have the type of personal conflict or interest in these investigations. Weissmann is likely to be raised in the hearing over the next weeks into the Flynn case in terms of prosecutorial decisions. (It is worth noting that Fox hired Trey Gowdy at an analyst even though he would be commenting on matters that came before his committee in these investigations.) In terms of balance, however, the appearance of both Page and Weissmann giving analysis on the Administration's response to the protests is a bit jarring for some .

Page was an unknown attorney in the FBI before she was forced into the public eye due to her emails with Strzok. Her emails fueled the controversy over bias in the FBI. They were undeniably biased and strident including the now famous reference to the FBI investigation as "insurance" in case Trump was elected. In the email in August 2016, here's what Strzok wrote:

I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy's office [Andrew McCabe is the FBI deputy director and married to a Democratic Virginia State Senate candidate] for that there's no way he gets elected -- but I'm afraid we can't take that risk. It's like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you're 40

What particularly concerns me is that Page has come up recently in new disclosures in the Flynn case . In newly released document is an email from former FBI lawyer Lisa Page to former FBI special agent Peter Strzok, who played the leadership role in targeting Flynn. In the email, Page suggests that Flynn could be set up by making a passing reference to a federal law that criminalizes lies to federal investigators. She suggested to Strzok that "it would be an easy way to just casually slip that in." So this effort was not about protecting national security or learning critical intelligence. As I have noted, the email reinforces other evidence that it was about bagging Flynn for the case in the legal version of a canned trophy hunt.

It appears that, on January 4, 2017, the FBI's Washington Field Office issued a "Closing Communication" indicating that the bureau was terminating "CROSSFIRE RAZOR" -- the newly disclosed codename for the investigation of Flynn. That is when Strzok intervened. The FBI had investigated Flynn and various databases and determined that "no derogatory information was identified in FBI holdings." Due to this conclusion, the Washington Field Office concluded that Flynn "was no longer a viable candidate as part of the larger CROSSFIRE HURRICANE umbrella case." On that same day, however, fired FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok instructed the FBI case manager handling CROSSFIRE RAZOR to keep the investigation open, telling him "Hey don't close RAZOR." The FBI official replied, "Okay." Strzok then confirmed again, "Still open right? And you're the case agent? Going to send you [REDACTED] for the file." The FBI official confirmed: "I have not closed it Still open." Strzok responded "Rgr. I couldn't raise [REDACTED] earlier. Pls keep it open for now."

Strzok also texted Page:

"Razor still open. :@ but serendipitously good, I guess. You want those chips and Oreos?" Page replied "Phew. But yeah that's amazing that he is still open. Good, I guess."

Strzok replied "Yeah, our utter incompetence actually helps us. 20% of the time, I'm guessing :)"

Page will be the focus of much of the upcoming inquiries both in Congress and the Justice Department as will CNN's legal analyst Andrew McCabe.

In her Maddow segment, Page attempts to defuse the "insurance policy" email as all part of her commitment to protecting the nation, not her repeatedly stated hatred for Trump. In what is now a signature for MSNBC, Maddow did not ask a single probative question but actually helped her frame the response. Even in echo journalistic circles, the echo between the two was deafening.

Page explained"

"It's an analogy. First of all, it's not my text, so I'm sort of interpreting what I believed he meant back three years ago, but we're using an analogy. We're talking about whether or not we should take certain investigative steps or not based on the likelihood that he's going to be president or not."

You have to keep in mind if President Trump doesn't become president, the national-security risk, if there is somebody in his campaign associated with Russia, plummets. You're not so worried about what Russia's doing vis-à-vis a member of his campaign if he's not president because you're not going to have access to classified information, you're not going to have access to sources and methods in our national-security apparatus. So, the 'insurance policy' was an analogy. It's like an insurance policy when you're 40. You don't expect to die when you're 40, yet you still have an insurance policy."

Maddow then decided to better frame the spin:

"So, don't just hope that he's not going to be elected and therefore not press forward with the investigation hoping, but rather press forward with the investigation just in case he does get in there."

Page simply responds " Exactly ."

Well, not exactly.

Page is leaving out that, as new documents show, there never was credible evidence of any Russian collusion. Recently, the Congress unsealed testimony from a long line of Obama officials who denied ever seeing such evidence, including some who publicly suggested that they had .

Indeed, Page testified that even by May 2017, they did not find such evidence that "it still existed in the scope of possibility that there would be literally nothing" to connect Trump and Russia.

There was little reason to believe in this "insurance policy" given the absence of evidence. Yet, Page still viewed the effort led by Strzok as an indemnity in case of election.

The Inspector General found that, soon after the first surveillance was ordered, FBI agents began to cast doubts on the veracity of the Steele document and suggested it might be disinformation from Russian intelligence. The IG said that, due to the relatively low standard required for a FISA application, he could not say that the original application was invalid but that it was quickly established that no credible evidence existed to support the continuance of the investigation -- which Page called their "insurance policy."

Page also left out her other emails including calling Trump foul names while praising Hillary Clinton and other opponents. Even if she were not involved in the ongoing controversy, her emails show her to be fervently opposed to both Trump and the Republicans.

Bias however has become the coin of the realm for some networks. Why have echo journalism when you can have an analyst simply repeat her position directly? For viewers who become irate at the appearance of opposing views ( as vividly demonstrated in the recent apology of the New York Times for publishing a conservative opinion column ), having a vehemently biased and personally invested analyst is reassuring. It is not like Page will suddenly blurt out a defense of Flynn or Trump or others in the Administration.

With Page, NBC has crossed the Rubicon and left its objectivity scattered on the far bank.

we_the_people, 11 minutes ago (Edited)

Nothing says professional journalism like hiring a dirty whore who was an active participant in a coup to overthrow a duly elected President!

The level of insanity is truly amazing!

Heroism, 14 minutes ago

The MSM gets more Orwellian by the day, and today is like tomorrow.

More proof that corruption and deceit pay, big time. Surely, at some point viewers and voters

will say, "Enough!" and hit these purveyors of lies where it hurts--in the ratings and pocketbooks. Meanwhile,

the people will just willingly suffer..............

[Jun 04, 2020] The Minneapolis Putsch by CJ Hopkins

Looks like the third stage of the Purple revolution against Trump, with Russiagate and Ukrainegate and two initial stages.
Notable quotes:
"... Things couldn't be going better for the Resistance if they had scripted it themselves. Actually, they did kind of script it themselves. Not the murder of poor George Floyd, of course. Racist police have been murdering Black people for as long as there have been racist police. No, the Resistance didn't manufacture racism. They just spent the majority of the last four years creating and promoting an official narrative which casts most Americans as "white supremacists" who literally elected Hitler president, and who want to turn the country into a racist dictatorship. ..."
"... According to this official narrative, which has been relentlessly disseminated by the corporate media, the neoliberal intelligentsia, the culture industry, and countless hysterical, Trump-hating loonies, the Russians put Donald Trump in office with those DNC emails they never hacked and some division-sowing Facebook ads that supposedly hypnotized Black Americans into refusing to come out and vote for Clinton. Putin purportedly ordered this personally, as part of his plot to "destroy democracy." ..."
"... The protesting and rioting that typically follows the murder of an unarmed Black person by the cops has mushroomed into " an international uprising " cheered on by the corporate media, corporations, and the liberal establishment, who don't normally tend to support such uprisings, but they've all had a sudden change of heart, or spiritual or political awakening, and are down for some serious property damage, and looting, and preventative self-defense, if that's what it takes to bring about justice, and to restore America to the peaceful, prosperous, non-white-supremacist paradise it was until the Russians put Donald Trump in office. ..."
"... America is still a racist country, but America is no more racist today than it was when Barack Obama was president. A lot of American police are brutal, but no more brutal than when Obama was president. America didn't radically change the day Donald Trump was sworn into office. All that has changed is the official narrative. And it will change back as soon as Trump is gone and the ruling classes have no further use for it. ..."
Jun 04, 2020 | consentfactory.org
underground bunker ." Opportunist social media pundits on both sides of the political spectrum are whipping people up into white-eyed frenzies. Americans are at each other's throats, divided by identity politics, consumed by rage, hatred, and fear.

Things couldn't be going better for the Resistance if they had scripted it themselves. Actually, they did kind of script it themselves. Not the murder of poor George Floyd, of course. Racist police have been murdering Black people for as long as there have been racist police. No, the Resistance didn't manufacture racism. They just spent the majority of the last four years creating and promoting an official narrative which casts most Americans as "white supremacists" who literally elected Hitler president, and who want to turn the country into a racist dictatorship.

According to this official narrative, which has been relentlessly disseminated by the corporate media, the neoliberal intelligentsia, the culture industry, and countless hysterical, Trump-hating loonies, the Russians put Donald Trump in office with those DNC emails they never hacked and some division-sowing Facebook ads that supposedly hypnotized Black Americans into refusing to come out and vote for Clinton. Putin purportedly ordered this personally, as part of his plot to "destroy democracy." The plan was always for President Hitler to embolden his white-supremacist followers into launching the "RaHoWa," or the "Boogaloo," after which Trump would declare martial law, dissolve the legislature, and pronounce himself Führer. Then they would start rounding up and murdering the Jews, and the Blacks, and Mexicans, and other minorities, according to this twisted liberal fantasy.

I've been covering the roll-out and dissemination of this official narrative since 2016, and have documented much of it in my essays , so I won't reiterate all that here. Let's just say, I'm not exaggerating, much. After four years of more or less constant conditioning, millions of Americans believe this fairy tale, despite the fact that there is absolutely zero evidence whatsoever to support it. Which is not exactly a mystery or anything. It would be rather surprising if they didn't believe it. We're talking about the most formidable official propaganda machine in the history of official propaganda machines.

And now the propaganda is paying off. The protesting and rioting that typically follows the murder of an unarmed Black person by the cops has mushroomed into " an international uprising " cheered on by the corporate media, corporations, and the liberal establishment, who don't normally tend to support such uprisings, but they've all had a sudden change of heart, or spiritual or political awakening, and are down for some serious property damage, and looting, and preventative self-defense, if that's what it takes to bring about justice, and to restore America to the peaceful, prosperous, non-white-supremacist paradise it was until the Russians put Donald Trump in office.

In any event, the Resistance media have now dropped their breathless coverage of the non-existent Corona-Holocaust to breathlessly cover the "revolution." The American police, who just last week were national heroes for risking their lives to beat up, arrest, and generally intimidate mask-less "lockdown violators" are now the fascist foot soldiers of the Trumpian Reich. The Nike corporation produced a commercial urging people to smash the windows of their Nike stores and steal their sneakers. Liberal journalists took to Twitter, calling on rioters to " burn that shit down! " until the rioters reached their gated community and started burning down their local Starbucks. Hollywood celebrities are masking up and going full-black bloc, and doing legal support . Chelsea Clinton is teaching children about David and the Racist Goliath . John Cusack's bicycle was attacked by the pigs . I haven't checked on Rob Reiner yet, but I assume he is assembling Molotov cocktails in the basement of a Resistance safe house somewhere in Hollywood Hills.

Look, I'm not saying the neoliberal Resistance orchestrated or staged these riots, or "denying the agency" of the folks in the streets. Whatever else is happening out there, a lot of very angry Black people are taking their frustration out on the cops, and on anyone and anything else that represents racism and injustice to them.

This happens in America from time to time. America is still a racist society. Most African-Americans are descended from slaves. Legal racial discrimination was not abolished until the 1960s, which isn't that long ago in historical terms. I was born in the segregated American South, with the segregated schools, and all the rest of it. I don't remember it -- I was born in 1961 -- but I do remember the years right after it. The South didn't magically change overnight in July of 1964. Nor did the North's variety of racism, which, yes, is subtler, but no less racist.

So I have no illusions about racism in America. But I'm not really talking about racism in America. I'm talking about how racism in America has been cynically instrumentalized, not by the Russians, but by the so-called Resistance, in order to delegitimize Trump and, more importantly, everyone who voted for him, as a bunch of white supremacists and racists.

Fomenting racial division has been the Resistance's strategy from the beginning. A quote attributed to Joseph Goebbels, "accuse the other side of that which you are guilty," is particularly apropos in this case. From the moment Trump won the Republican nomination, the corporate media and the rest of the Resistance have been telling us the man is literally Hitler, and that his plan is to foment racial hatred among his "white supremacist base," and eventually stage some "Reichstag" event, declare martial law and pronounce himself dictator. They've been telling us this story over and over, on television, in the liberal press, on social media, in books, movies, and everywhere else they could possibly tell it.

So, before you go out and join the "uprising," take a look at the headlines today, turn on CNN or MSNBC, and think about that for just a minute. I don't mean to spoil the party, but they've preparing you for this for the last four years.

Not you Black folks. I'm not talking to you. I wouldn't presume to tell you what to do. I'm talking to white folks like myself, who are cheering on the rioting and looting, and are coming out to "help" you with it, but who will be back home in their gated communities when the ashes have cooled, and the corporate media are gone, and the cops return to "police" your neighborhoods.

OK, and this is where I have to restate (for the benefit of my partisan readers) that I'm not a fan of Donald Trump, and that I think he's a narcissistic ass clown, and a glorified con man, and blah blah blah, because so many people have been so polarized by insane propaganda and mass hysteria that they can't even read or think anymore, and so just scan whatever articles they encounter to see whose "side" the author is on and then mindlessly celebrate or excoriate it.

If you're doing that, let me help you out whichever side you're on, I'm not on it.

I realize that's extremely difficult for a lot of folks to comprehend these days, which is part of the point I've been trying to make. I'll try again, as plainly as I can.

America is still a racist country, but America is no more racist today than it was when Barack Obama was president. A lot of American police are brutal, but no more brutal than when Obama was president. America didn't radically change the day Donald Trump was sworn into office. All that has changed is the official narrative. And it will change back as soon as Trump is gone and the ruling classes have no further use for it.

And that will be the end of the War on Populism , and we will switch back to the War on Terror, or maybe the Brave New Pathologized Normal or whatever Orwellian official narrative the folks at GloboCap have in store for us.

#

CJ Hopkins
June 1, 2020
Photo: Nike (George Floyd commercial)

[Jun 03, 2020] Dems ratpack of reparations freaks, weird sexual curiosities, and race hustlers is actually a fifth column for Trump re-election by Fred Reed

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The Democrats are fielding as candidates a roster of middle-school clowns and unflavored tapioca. Are they secretly in Trump's pay? Like Clinton with her "Deplorables" suicide line? ..."
"... Probably the Russians are behind it. ..."
Jul 25, 2019 | www.unz.com

They're going to do it, I tell you: The whole touchy-feely do-gooding ratpack of Microaggression worriers, reparations freaks, weird sexual curiosities, race hustlers, bat.-Antifa psychos, and egalitarian enstupidators of universities. They are going to elect Trump. Again.

Washington, where I shortly will be for a bit, is crazy. It has not the slightest, wan, etiolated idea of what is going on in America. The Democrats are fielding as candidates a roster of middle-school clowns and unflavored tapioca. Are they secretly in Trump's pay? Like Clinton with her "Deplorables" suicide line?

Probably the Russians are behind it.

[Jun 03, 2020] Not The Onion: NY Times Urges Trump To Establish Closer Ties With Moscow

Highly recommended!
Jul 23, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

2016 a Russia-Trump campaign collusion conspiracy was afoot and unfolding right before our eyes, we were told, as during his roll-out foreign policy speech at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., then candidate Trump said [ gasp! ]:

" Common sense says this cycle, this horrible cycle of hostility must end and ideally will end soon. Good for both countries. Some say the Russians won't be reasonable. I intend to find out."

NPR and others had breathlessly reported at the time, "Sergey Kislyak, then the Russian ambassador to the U.S., was sitting in the front row" [ more gasps! ].

This 'suspicious' "coincidence or something more?" event and of course the infamous Steele 'Dodgy Dossier' were followed by over two more years of the following connect-the-dots mere tiny sampling of unrestrained theorizing and avalanche of accusations...

Here's a very brief trip down memory lane:

2017, Politico: The Hidden History of Trump's First Trip to Moscow

2017, NYT: Trump's Russia Motives (where we were told: "President Trump certainly seems to have a strange case of Russophilia.")

2017, Business Insider: James Clapper: Putin is handling Trump like a Russian 'asset'

2017, USA Today: Donald Trump's ties to Russia go back 30 years

2018, NYT: Trump, Treasonous Traitor

2018, AP: Russia had 'Trump over a barrel'

2018, BBC: Russia: The 'cloud' over the Trump White House

2018, NYT: From the Start, Trump Has Muddied a Clear Message: Putin Interfered

2018, USA Today: " From Putin with love"

2019, WaPo: Here are 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian asset

2019, Vanity Fair: "The President Has Been Acting On Russia's Behalf": U.S. Officials Are Shocked By Trump's Asset-Like Behavior

2019, Wired: Trump Must Be A Russian Agent... (where we were told...ahem: " It would be rather embarrassing ... if Robert Mueller were to declare that the president isn't an agent of Russian intelligence." )

Embarrassing indeed.

"The walls are closing in!" - we were assured just about every 24 hours .

It's especially worth noting that a July 2018 New York Times op-ed argued that President Trump -- dubbed a "treasonous traitor" for meeting with Putin in Helsinki -- should "be directing all resources at his disposal to punish Russia."

Fast-forward to a July 2019 NY Times Editorial Board piece entitled "What's America's Winning Hand if Russia Plays the China Card?" How dizzying fast all of the above has been wiped from America's collective memory! Or at least the Times is engaged in hastily pushing it all down the memory hole Orwell-style in order to cover its own dastardly tracks which contributed in no small measure to non-stop national Russiagate hype and hysteria, with this astounding line:

President Trump is correct to try to establish a sounder relationship with Russia... -- Editorial Board, New York Times, 7-22-19

That's right, The Times' pundits have already pivoted to the new bogeyman while stating they agree with Trump on Russian relations :

"Given its economic, military and technological trajectory, together with its authoritarian model, China, not Russia , represents by far the greater challenge to American objectives over the long term . That means President Trump is correct to try to establish a sounder relationship with Russia and peel it away from China ."

[... Mueller who? ]

Remember how recently we were told PUTIN IS WEAPONIZING EVERYTHING! from space to deep-sea exploration to extreme climate temperatures to humor to racial tensions to even 'weaponized whales' ?

It's 2019, and we've now come full circle . This is The New York Times editorial board continuing their call for Trump to establish "sounder" ties and "cooperation" with Russia :

"Even during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union often made progress in one facet of their relationship while they remained in conflict over other aspects. The United States and Russia could expand their cooperation in space . They could also continue to work closely in the Arctic And they could revive cooperation on arms control."

Could we imagine if a mere six months ago Trump himself had uttered these same words? Now the mainstream media apparently agrees that peace is better than war with Russia.

With 'Russiagate' now effectively dead, the NY Times' new criticism appears to be that Trump-Kremlin relations are not close enough , as Trump's "approach has been ham-handed " - the 'paper of record' now tells us.

Or imagine if Trump had called for peaceful existence with Russia almost four years ago? Oh wait...

" Common sense says this cycle, this horrible cycle of hostility must end and ideally will end soon. Good for both countries." -- Then candidate Trump on April 27, 2016

Cue ultra scary red Trump-Kremlin montage.

[Jun 03, 2020] Requiem to Russiagate: this was the largest and the most successful attempt to gaslight the whole US population ever attempted by CIA and Clinton wing of Dems by CJ Hopkins

Highly recommended!
Neoliberal MSM just “got it wrong,” again … exactly like was the case with those Iraqi WMDs ;-).
So many neocons and neolibs seem so disappointed to find out that the President is not a Russian asset that it looks they’d secretly wish be ruled by Putin :-).
But in reality there well might be a credible "Trump copllition with the foreign power". Only with a different foreign power. Looks like Trump traded American foreign policy for Zionist money, not Russian money. That means that "the best-Congress-that-AIPAC-money-can-buy" will never impeach him for that.
And BTW as long as Schiff remains the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee the witch hunt is not over. So the leash remains strong.
Notable quotes:
"... it appears that hundreds of millions of Americans have, once again, been woefully bamboozled . Weird, how this just keeps on happening. At this point, Americans have to be the most frequently woefully bamboozled people in the entire history of woeful bamboozlement. ..."
"... That's right, as I'm sure you're aware by now, it turns out President Donald Trump, a pompous former reality TV star who can barely string three sentences together without totally losing his train of thought and barking like an elephant seal, is not, in fact, a secret agent conspiring with the Russian intelligence services to destroy the fabric of Western democracy. ..."
"... Paranoid collusion-obsessives will continue to obsess about redactions and cover-ups , but the long and short of the matter is, there will be no perp walks for any of the Trumps. No treason tribunals. No televised hangings. No detachment of Secret Service agents marching Hillary into the White House. ..."
Apr 02, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by CJ Hopkins via The Unz Review,

So the Mueller report is finally in, and it appears that hundreds of millions of Americans have, once again, been woefully bamboozled . Weird, how this just keeps on happening. At this point, Americans have to be the most frequently woefully bamboozled people in the entire history of woeful bamboozlement.

If you didn't know better, you'd think we were all a bunch of hopelessly credulous imbeciles that you could con into believing almost anything, or that our brains had been bombarded with so much propaganda from the time we were born that we couldn't really even think anymore.

That's right, as I'm sure you're aware by now, it turns out President Donald Trump, a pompous former reality TV star who can barely string three sentences together without totally losing his train of thought and barking like an elephant seal, is not, in fact, a secret agent conspiring with the Russian intelligence services to destroy the fabric of Western democracy.

After two long years of bug-eyed hysteria, Inspector Mueller came up with squat. Zip. Zero. Nichts. Nada. Or, all right, he indicted a bunch of Russians that will never see the inside of a courtroom, and a few of Trump's professional sleazebags for lying and assorted other sleazebag activities (so I guess that was worth the $25 million of taxpayers' money that was spent on this circus).

Notwithstanding those historic accomplishments, the entire Mueller investigation now appears to have been another wild goose chase (like the "search" for those non-existent WMDs that we invaded and destabilized the Middle East and murdered hundreds of thousands of people pretending to conduct in 2003). Paranoid collusion-obsessives will continue to obsess about redactions and cover-ups , but the long and short of the matter is, there will be no perp walks for any of the Trumps. No treason tribunals. No televised hangings. No detachment of Secret Service agents marching Hillary into the White House.

The jig, as they say, is up.

But let's try to look on the bright side, shall we?

... ... ...

[Jun 02, 2020] Trump vs spring riots

Notable quotes:
"... All this race hatred, discrimination and societal engineering should have been over in the 60s and 70s , but the USG always needs to have an enemy . In fact it pays to have several , ask the Pentagon and the Law Enforcement Agencies, in regards to wages, benefits, kickbacks, cash theft, and pensions , these days. ..."
"... You want the Trump you voted for? You got him. A liar with all the integrity of a corona virus. You indirectly voted for Bibi too. Don't try to claim you didn't know for heavens sake. Kushners and Trumps are openly in Bibi's pocket. It was in plain sight and you voted accordingly. ..."
"... Trump was always a weak coward who believes in nothing, save the ego of Trump. Events have simply caught up to him. If the Republicans stick with this useless coward, not only are they committing suicide as a Party, they are dooming the nation as well. ..."
Jun 02, 2020 | www.unz.com

vot tak , says: Show Comment June 1, 2020 at 9:29 am GMT

Trump hid from protesters in UNDERGROUND BUNKER, claims NYT, triggering #BunkerBoy trend

https://www.rt.com/usa/490358-trump-underground-bunker-hashtag/

"Trump wants to portray himself as a strongman, authoritarian did he really go hide in a bunker from some 20 year old kids? real tough guy"

Actually likud quisling trump is an ideal poster boi for vdare "values".

Truth3 , says: Show Comment June 1, 2020 at 9:33 am GMT
Trump is a narcissistic windbag clown, that lied his way into Bill Clinton's Oral Office.

I know, personally, how evil he is.

Total JooStooge and he deserves nothing less than complete rejection by those he fooled honest law-abiding working Christian Americans.

Good riddance.

Of course Hillary is worse. Of course Biden is worse.

But until real Americans finally realize that we can't wait for a saviour, but have to save ourselves, Trump and his kind will continue to drag us deeper into the bog of Joogoo.

GMC , says: Show Comment June 1, 2020 at 9:37 am GMT
All this race hatred, discrimination and societal engineering should have been over in the 60s and 70s , but the USG always needs to have an enemy . In fact it pays to have several , ask the Pentagon and the Law Enforcement Agencies, in regards to wages, benefits, kickbacks, cash theft, and pensions , these days.

But the Owners knew, that keeping the populace fighting, is like money in the Banks { literally } so those folks breaking through for Peace in the 60s, had to be silenced, bought off, run off or assassinated. It's been one evil social game after another – and its more visible today , than it was 50 yrs ago- I won't get started on what or who put the nail in the coffin, with the 1965 Open, Unlimited, Unvetted Immigration changes.

Emily , says: Show Comment June 1, 2020 at 10:14 am GMT
You want the Trump you voted for? You got him. A liar with all the integrity of a corona virus. You indirectly voted for Bibi too. Don't try to claim you didn't know for heavens sake. Kushners and Trumps are openly in Bibi's pocket. It was in plain sight and you voted accordingly.

Where were all these voters weeping into their coffee when the primaries were held?. The best choice was Rand Paul – got nowhere – as all these now weeping cupcakes voted for Trump – a man with such an appalling record of honesty and integrity and an insult to any decent person.

You voted for Trump. And have voted for Hillary for years too. Probably the worlds biggest financial criminal and a war criminal without parallel even by US standards.. You also voted for Bush one and two. Obama twice. And one of the most corrupt and hideous candidates – Bill Clinton also Twice. And you imposed this roll of lies and dishonour onto the entire planet.

No wonder America and its people are being seen as depraved and stupid, lacking in simple understanding of international law and any decency and honour.
And now all set to vote for Biden are you? A rapist and vilely corrupt, outstandingly so in a bed of of corruption misnamed Washington.

Emily , says: Show Comment June 1, 2020 at 10:25 am GMT
@ebear

So you will vote for a man who has so far refused to arrest and put on trial the group of men and women who would appear to be guilty of sedition and treason against your country?

Wow!. Traitors going to walk – so it seems.. Vote for a man so devoid of respect for America, its people, its rule of law and its constitution. A band of absolute traitors to the state – laughing..

The day you see indictments of Comey, Brennan, McCabe and the rest of the nest of vipers – then consider your vote – but to vote for a man who refuses – so far and its now years – to take action against those guilty of trying to overthrow the governance of the United States – is not a man fit for the office of President. You need an outstanding third party candidate and the brains to vote for them

Dream on. Biden ot Trump – are you mad or just brainwashed psychos. Its makes Xi look good.

theMann , says: Show Comment June 1, 2020 at 10:29 am GMT

Trump was always a weak coward who believes in nothing, save the ego of Trump. Events have simply caught up to him. If the Republicans stick with this useless coward, not only are they committing suicide as a Party, they are dooming the nation as well.

Anonymous [661] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment June 1, 2020 at 10:53 am GMT
The current situation is nothing new. In '92 Mayor Bradley publicly announced no police would intervene in the LA riots because it was too dangerous–thereby guaranteeing widespread arson and looting. Same thing in Baltimore a few years ago, it's okay 'we just need to let the rioters blow off some steam'.

And why wasn't Antifa declared a terrorist organization three years ago? Why did they get a free pass all this time?

I guess nothing will happen until Netanyahu picks up the phone and tells Trump what to do.

Emslander , says: Show Comment June 1, 2020 at 11:38 am GMT
@Herald Don't believe for a second that Joe Biden is being helped by any of this. Trump is a weak blowhard, but naming Antifa a terrorist organization will be very important over the next three months.

Trump will win, but it'll be a vapid and lukewarm next four years of him trying to develop a "legacy" of sweetness and liberality. Someone will come along, then, who will make him look like a pussy.

Realist , says: Show Comment June 1, 2020 at 11:49 am GMT
@Really No Shit

Trump has one weakness that he can't overcome even if his life depended on it. the love of money which is the driving force behind his decisions and not the jingoistic hogwash about the love for America!

That weakness is one that is shared by those that rule this country. It is called avarice avarice for wealth and power. Trump is a minion of the Deep State. Today in spite of all the shit the stock is up in pre market trading. If the market were valued realistically it would have been down at least 30% from here before the recent bullshit.

Manfred Arcane , says: Show Comment June 1, 2020 at 12:06 pm GMT
@Anonymous Kirkpatrick was declaring Trump in freefall, a fool who abandoned his early promises, etc., as early as the 2016 Wisconsin primary. He has been writing variations on this theme for four years, and I don't know why anyone takes him seriously. Do I want Trump to declare martial law, round up every last BLM and Antifa member, and start telling everyone that Floyd got what was coming to him? Of course. Do I expect him to do it? Of course not. A lot of people don't seem able to understand that Trump is not playing to us, or to the blacks, when he tries to take the middle road when dealing with situations like this; he's playing to the enormous amount of middle-class suburban Boomers and Evangelicals out there, who unfortunately he can't get elected without, and who will never be willing to accept the truth about vibrancy and its effects. To them, black folks are still sacred objects, and they will freak out in large numbers if the President starts mouthing "white nationalist" rhetoric and having "protesters" gunned down in the streets. I love Trump and appreciate what he's been able to do, but he can't save people who aren't willing to be saved–and since that includes a majority of the "conservative" citizens, America is ultimately unsalvageable, regardless of what Trump does or doesn't do.
Norman , says: Show Comment June 1, 2020 at 4:08 pm GMT
@NDarwish No, you have it backwards. WE never gave up on Trump. Trump gave up on US. Filling the white house with the Tel Aviv mafia.

[Jun 02, 2020] Where Have You Gone, Donald Trump A Nation Turns Its Yearning Eyes To You by James Kirkpatrick

This riots in no way represent a danger to Trump other then in PR. They have zero organization and most rioters soon iether be arrested or gone home. In a way "Occupy Wall Street" was a more dangerous for the elite movement. This is just a nuisance.
As for elections on one side Trump again demonstrated upper incompetence and inability to act with some nuance, on t he other it discredited Democrats identity politics.
Notable quotes:
"... Live Updates, George Floyd Protests Continue ..."
"... Twitter changed its profile to honor Black Lives Matter amid George Floyd protests ..."
"... Business Insider, ..."
"... Looter shot dead by pawn shop owner,' during George Floyd riots ..."
"... Family identifies federal officer shot, killed in connection with George Floyd protest in Oakland ..."
"... Woman Found Dead Inside Car In North Minneapolis Amid 2 nd Of Looting ..."
"... , Fires, CBS Minnesota, ..."
"... Separate shootings leave 3 dead in Indianapolis overnight ..."
"... Attorney General William P. Barr's Statement on Riots and Domestic Terrorism ..."
"... , Department of Justice, ..."
"... Tim Walz Blames Riots On 'Outsiders,' Cartels And White Supremacists -- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Joy Reid Join in ..."
"... St. Paul police rebut social media theory that officer instigated Minneapolis unrest ..."
"... Right-Wing Conspiracists Pull From Old Playbook: Blame George Soros For Riots ..."
"... LA appeals for National Guard as looting spreads, ..."
"... George Floyd's brother says Trump 'kept pushing me off' during call ..."
"... Advantage Biden, with risks; Trump disapproval grows: POLL ..."
"... Bush Wins Points for Speech on L.A. Riots ..."
"... The Christian Science Monitor, ..."
"... When trump spoke at AIPAC before the 2016 election, I already wrote him off. I was 1000% on the money. ..."
"... Trump was always the Pied Piper, following Hillary's orders while leading foolish populists off the cliff. If you're still expecting anything else from him, you're deluded. ..."
"... A true opponent of Deepstate would have spent the first month firing and jailing thousands of bureaucrats. Trump didn't fire anyone at all. ..."
"... Trump is finished. Unfortunately, his opponents are just as corrupt and criminal. ..."
"... I see a lot of whites among the protesters. How much of that is anger over Floyd and how much is pent up rage over the senseless lockdowns I cant say. ..."
"... As in 2016, people will again vote Trump as a giant FU to the Left, which they'll perceive as having caused, if not instigated this crisis. Disaffected Trump supporters who might not have bothered this time, are rethinking that as we speak. At this point, a Trump landslide is a very real possibility. ..."
"... the unholy and fragile Democrat alliance that includes white-hating blacks, left-indoctrinated students, hysterical femmes, radical queers, antifa terrorists, disaffected POC, and white 'moderates' constitutes an arranged political marriage that will not endure ..."
"... On the other hand, Trump now gets to advocate for political stability, cultural continuity, and even physical safety. The unhinged, far-too-left looters now seen on TV are actually a Godsend for Trump. Watch him amass most of what's left of America's silent (white, middle class) majority on election-day. Regular folks will reemerge as a unified block in the wake of these despicable acts of lawlessness and greed. ..."
"... It would take more then a department store and a police precinct to make a point: "We want leadership, not profiteering", "Bust the bulb" add focus. Corporate headquarters, gated communities, the White House, Capitol Hill, Millionaire communities, airports, bridges, paralysing the hardware farms of Google, Facebook and Twitter, spreading to cities as London, Amsterdam, Paris, great opportunities there. "No borders, no castles". Disruption is a start and a means to an end. Explaining comes later. Only going that direction would cause any effects that last. ..."
May 31, 2020 | www.unz.com

President Donald Trump ran on a Law And Order platform in 2016 but he's currently presiding over the most widespread civil disorder of this generation. The obvious reality: these riots are simply an excuse for blacks to loot without fear of punishment. Without an immediate policy of ruthless coercion directed and executed by the federal government, most Americans will correctly assume that Trump is unwilling or incapable of defending their lives and property. If so, his re-election campaign is probably finished -- and America along with it.

Link Bookmark It's hard to overstate the extent of the violence, with riots, arson and looting in Scottsdale, Dallas, New York , Ferguson, St. Louis, Richmond and countless other cities [ Live Updates, George Floyd Protests Continue , by Tony Lee, Breitbart, May 30, 2020]. In Minneapolis, where the riots began, Mayor Jacob Frey blamed riots on " white supremacists ," an insane conspiracy theory which went completely unchecked by Twitter's "fact checkers." Twitter itself, showing utter contempt for President Trump's executive order alleging political bias, changed its profile to show solidarity with Black Lives Matter [ Twitter changed its profile to honor Black Lives Matter amid George Floyd protests , by Ellen Cranley, Business Insider, May 31, 2020].

President Trump had previously tweeted that " when the looting starts, the shooting starts " (a tweet censored by Twitter). However, while Minneapolis police were unable to prevent their own precinct headquarters from being burned down , they did have the time to arrest a man for allegedly shooting looters near his business [ ' Looter shot dead by pawn shop owner,' during George Floyd riots , by James Hockaday, Metro, May 28, 2020]. Unless President Trump demands pardons for all those who will be in a similar situation, such anarcho-tyranny will continue.

There have already been deaths, few of which attracted much attendance from the Narrative-promoting Main Stream Media . These include:

Federal Protective Service officer Dave Underwood, a black man whose life doesn't Matter to Black Lives Matter [ Family identifies federal officer shot, killed in connection with George Floyd protest in Oakland , by Dan Noyes and Lauren Martinez, ABC News, May 31, 2020]. A woman found dead in Milwaukee "trauma visible" on her body; some reports on social media suggest she was kidnapped before being murdered [ Woman Found Dead Inside Car In North Minneapolis Amid 2 nd Of Looting , Fires, CBS Minnesota, May 29, 2020] Three dead in Indianapolis, another city which has been ravaged by recent anti-police protests; none of the shootings involved police officers [ Separate shootings leave 3 dead in Indianapolis overnight , WISHTV8, May 31, 2020].

There were also countless beatings, including of a man holding an American flag in Portland and another who tried to help him , a man who allegedly tried to defend his business with a sword , and people at a shop in broad daylight .

It is useless to try to find all the examples, they are incalculable, as is the number of businesses destroyed or the amount of property damage.

President Trump said Sunday morning the government would declare Antifa a terrorist organization. Attorney General William Barr said violence "instigated and carried out by Antifa and other similar groups in connection with the rioting is domestic terrorism and will be treated accordingly" [ Attorney General William P. Barr's Statement on Riots and Domestic Terrorism , Department of Justice, May 31, 2020].

We'll know that this is serious if these Leftist networks, which raise money and operate openly, are arrested using the RICO statutes and other prosecutorial tools.

I have my doubts but also my hopes.

It is truly amazing is that Leftists have decided to believe that the rioting is being carried out by whites, or at least is directed by whites. Leftists, not just in Minnesota, think " white supremacists " are to blame [ Tim Walz Blames Riots On 'Outsiders,' Cartels And White Supremacists -- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Joy Reid Join in , by Virginia Kruta, Daily Caller, May 30, 2020]. Others think the police are instigating the violence with undercover officers [ St. Paul police rebut social media theory that officer instigated Minneapolis unrest , by John Shipley, Pioneer Press, May 29, 2020].

It's important to note that Leftists actually believe this. They believed in the Russia Hoax, didn't they?

Meanwhile, President Trump and conservatives' focus on white "Antifa" or George Soros makes a similar mistake [ Right-Wing Conspiracists Pull From Old Playbook: Blame George Soros For Riots , by Sergei Klebnikov, Forbes, May 30, 2020]. Much of this violence is simply blacks robbing and looting because they can , not because there is any political end beyond a vague fury at police and whites generally.

President Trump has avoided addressing the nation, reportedly because First Son-In-Law Jared Kushner thinks it will make things worse [ LA appeals for National Guard as looting spreads, by Ella Torres, William Mansell, and Christina Carrega, ABC News, May 31, 2020]. But, as with his handling of the coronavirus, Trump is suffering politically not because he is being too forceful, but because he is being too weak.

Trump called George Floyd's family, but the family is condemning him for it, not praising his compassion [ George Floyd's brother says Trump 'kept pushing me off' during call , by Martin Pengelly, The Guardian, May 31, 2020]. He now heavily trails Joe Biden in the polls and is once again falling into his signature trap: saying tough things that infuriate Leftists without backing up his words with action that rallies the Right [ Advantage Biden, with risks; Trump disapproval grows: POLL , by Gary Langer, ABC News, May 31, 2020].

During the Los Angeles Riots, even President George H.W. Bush eventually sent in the Marines and then addressed the nation, simultaneously displaying leadership and paternal concern for the American people [ Bush Wins Points for Speech on L.A. Riots , by Linda Feldmann, The Christian Science Monitor, May 4, 1992].

https://www.youtube.com/embed/KD_3NOIEk-0?feature=oembed

President Trump thus far is limited to vague tweets about "STRENGTH!' without much tangible proof of it.

Even worse, in the case of this "STRENGTH" tweet, Twitter once again instantly suspended the account of the person President Trump quote-tweeted.

The company knows the White House won't do anything. This situation is becoming increasingly humiliating not just for the president, but for his supporters.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump seemed to have remarkable luck, with extraordinary events breaking in his favor. In the run-up to this election, he hasn't had great luck, but he has had a series of crises that any competent nationalist politician could have easily exploited:

He had a foreign pandemic and huge public support for enacting at least a temporary immigration moratorium or more creative economic populist policies . Instead, he disastrously tried to downplay the pandemic to try to appease the stock market in the short term. He has Twitter revealing its bias to the entire world, giving him a sure-fire rationale for protecting the free speech of his supporters. This would dramatically ease his task of fighting the Main Stream Media/ Democrat cartel during the re-election campaign. However, the president has done nothing substantive, once again coming off as weak and feckless and leaving his supporters isolated. Now, he has nationwide riots and videos of businesses being burned to the ground, all being essentially cheered on by his MSM/Dem opponents. America is begging for a crackdown. Instead, President Trump is blaming Democratic state and local elected officials rather than taking action himself.

President Trump simply can't afford any more mistakes. America is burning. The nationalist that voters thought they were electing in 2016 needs to act.

If he doesn't, he can't be surprised if Leftists simply become more emboldened, and if demoralized patriots stay away from the polls.

This is President Trump's one last chance not to let his voters down. If he blows it, I think the 2020 campaign will be irredeemable -- and unlike Republicans, Democrats will have no problem in using government power to crush their political enemies once they are in the White House again.

James Kirkpatrick [ Email him |Tweet him @VDAREJamesK ] is a Beltway veteran and a refugee from Conservatism Inc. His latest book is Conservatism Inc.: The Battle for the American Right . Read VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow 's Preface here .


Anon [333] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment June 1, 2020 at 4:40 am GMT

Why doesn't Trump realize Jared is a viper at the heart of his family and administration? He absolutely needs to address the nation. Jared might be setting up another style of coup attempt.
Astuteobservor II , says: Show Comment June 1, 2020 at 4:43 am GMT
When trump spoke at AIPAC before the 2016 election, I already wrote him off. I was 1000% on the money.
polistra , says: Website Show Comment June 1, 2020 at 4:44 am GMT
You're four years late. Trump was always the Pied Piper, following Hillary's orders while leading foolish populists off the cliff. If you're still expecting anything else from him, you're deluded.

There's one small point of forgiveness for fools. Obama showed his Deepstate loyalty BEFORE the 2008 election, so there was no reason for any honest observer to vote for him. Trump didn't show his hand until just AFTER the 2016 election. After the first week it was amply clear that he had no intentions of "draining the swamp". A true opponent of Deepstate would have spent the first month firing and jailing thousands of bureaucrats. Trump didn't fire anyone at all.

Uncle J , says: Show Comment June 1, 2020 at 4:44 am GMT
Another white supremacist trash piece. You guys never learn. Trump is finished. Unfortunately, his opponents are just as corrupt and criminal. This country is doomed and it will not be able to redeem itself, and deserves what's coming to it. Especially, not with the moronic and insensitive example of articles, authors and a blind culture that is portrayed above.
Pft , says: Show Comment June 1, 2020 at 5:17 am GMT
I see a lot of whites among the protesters. How much of that is anger over Floyd and how much is pent up rage over the senseless lockdowns I cant say.

If you look back to last year Barr developed his precrime program, Trump pushed HARPA/SAFE HOME, bills for Domestic Terrorism were proposed, FBI issues memo that conspiracy theories (question official narratives) promote terrorism , etc. This all happening while Crimson Contagion exercises, Urban Outbreak Exercises and Event 201 simulation are happening. Coincidence?

The Rockefeller Lockstep Report in 2010 predicted pushback

After Lockdowns over the virus , conditions were ripe for an explosion that would allow the pre-crime/domestic terrorism agendas to get political support. Just needed a trigger and I think the Floyd killing was an operation intended to be that trigger. Push back begins. The protests gone violent with a convenient supply of bricks may be due to agent provocateurs. Contract tracing apps issued before the protests will certainly be put to good use. Contract tracers will be given another job.

Trump now declares antifa a Terrorist Group. Basically anyone opposed to fascism and authoritarianism can be suspected of being antifa and a terrorist. How convenient for fascists and authoritarians.

Trapped on Clown World , says: Show Comment June 1, 2020 at 5:20 am GMT
At this point people have to be considering the fact that Trump is more of a hindrance than a help. He appears to be nothing more than a lullaby used to put his supporters to sleep, secure in their delusions that they have a viable political future as long as they vote hard enough.

If it takes a president Stacy Abrams to wake them up, then why not now? In the extremely unlikely event that Trump pulls off another victory, what will be the purpose? He's clearly demonstrated that he is incapable of any action beyond nominating a SC justice and tweeting. 4 more years of having to listen to delusional MAGA people is too much to stomach for no payoff.

I'd rather have an obese gap toothed woman of color ordering the construction of all POC settlements in white neighboorhoods. Maybe then the MAGA folks would wake up. Of course it's more likely that they would start cheering Marco Rubio by claiming that he only wants to build 10 apartments per un-diverse town instead of 30.

I have America fatigue.

ebear , says: Show Comment June 1, 2020 at 6:16 am GMT
I'll preface this with I'm no fan of Donald Trump.

That said, I believe the soon-to-be-wrath of the people will fall mainly on state governors and city mayors rather than on Trump. Polls mean nothing these days. 2016 proved that one. What's right in front of many people today is that they've not only lost wages to CV-19, but now, just as they're gearing up to return, their workplace is gone -- either burned down, or indefinitely closed due to the riots and related damage to public infrastructure.

Meanwhile in flyover country, people look on in horror at what, rightly or wrongly, is associated in their minds with BLM and ANTIFA. That is to say The Left. Cartoonish, yes, but that's what they see.

As in 2016, people will again vote Trump as a giant FU to the Left, which they'll perceive as having caused, if not instigated this crisis. Disaffected Trump supporters who might not have bothered this time, are rethinking that as we speak. At this point, a Trump landslide is a very real possibility.

This is not the outcome I want -- that doesn't actually exist at this time -- but FWIW, it's the way I see it playing out. I know history doesn't always repeat, but this looks a lot like 1968 to me.

Franz , says: Show Comment June 1, 2020 at 7:29 am GMT
@Meena

Trump is hiding in a bunker . Hope he stays there for good.

Yes. It's why some of us stayed home in 2016. A choice between Hillary, a lifelong flake, and yet another third-rate actor. Did everyone forget that the other third-rate actor, Reagan, gave the country away?

It's fitting for Trump to tweet and hide. He has successfully updated hit and run.

green , says: Show Comment June 1, 2020 at 7:43 am GMT
Welcome back, James Kirkpatrick! Trump has disappointed, and he may be down in the polls, but he's not out.

This Mau Mau power grab (and the media's role in promoting it) is actually winning votes for Trump. The President represents the rule of law. Civilization. This is a winning ticket. And people are fed up with all the slick media favoritism. It's toxic.

Meanwhile, the unholy and fragile Democrat alliance that includes white-hating blacks, left-indoctrinated students, hysterical femmes, radical queers, antifa terrorists, disaffected POC, and white 'moderates' constitutes an arranged political marriage that will not endure . Most of these assorted malcontents have only one thing that unites them: hatred of Trump and his base. This is not a winning platform. Plus, sleepy Joe will have to repudiate all this liberal violence and looting if he's to maintain his (allegedly) leading position in the polls. BLM may not like this, nor will the uber-progressive wing of the Democrat party. Expect fireworks.

On the other hand, Trump now gets to advocate for political stability, cultural continuity, and even physical safety. The unhinged, far-too-left looters now seen on TV are actually a Godsend for Trump. Watch him amass most of what's left of America's silent (white, middle class) majority on election-day. Regular folks will reemerge as a unified block in the wake of these despicable acts of lawlessness and greed.

After Trump chews up sleepy Joe in the debates, watch this race flip into a Trump landslide. It happened for Nixon. Maybe then, Trump the two-term President will revisit the agenda that got him elected as a candidate in 2016. This final scenario might not be likely, but stranger things have happened.

Carlos22 , says: Show Comment June 1, 2020 at 7:45 am GMT
So what's the difference between this and the Rodney King riots?

They'll blow off some steam and will return back to their shitty little lives by the end of the week.

Commentator Mike , says: Show Comment June 1, 2020 at 7:57 am GMT
@Pft Even all this arson may be of benefit the business community. Weren't we reading endless comments how the lockdown has badly affected small businesses, many of which would go bankrupt due to lack of customers? Perhaps the best thing for them is to get burnt down so they can claim the insurance as many of them would probably have had to close shop anyway.
nietzsche1510 , says: Show Comment June 1, 2020 at 8:00 am GMT
@Anon show me one single pick of his admin. who ended up beneficial for him or his reelection: Jared is the personification of Netanyahu in the White House: clusterfuck nation will be his signature at the court of History.
anon [113] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment June 1, 2020 at 8:03 am GMT
@Pinche Perro This is the same guy who sat back and did nothing as Covid-19 approached American shores. You think he cares about you now?

Trump allegedly asked Fauci if officials could let coronavirus 'wash over' US

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/492390-wapo-trump-allegedly-asked-fauci-if-officials-could-let-coronavirus

nietzsche1510 , says: Show Comment June 1, 2020 at 8:12 am GMT
Minnesota is diverting the looming class war to racial rioting.
PetrOldSack , says: Show Comment June 1, 2020 at 8:54 am GMT

Where Have You Gone, Donald Trump? A Nation Turns Its Yearning Eyes to You
James Kirkpatrick • May 31, 2020

Out of context, the whole of the elites bulb is irrecoverable. The "bend" to turn it into politics, is going to be little of a patch, won´t last the next round.

The "ramble" in the streets is way exaggerated, nothing will come of it if all semi-organized groups that have ambitions do not add to the noise, and get some pertinent rusults: bargaining power. It is a dream opportunity to "vote" with one´s feet. Real disorder cannot be worse, when the asserted elites are morally corrupt and have no ethics.

It would take more then a department store and a police precinct to make a point: "We want leadership, not profiteering", "Bust the bulb" add focus. Corporate headquarters, gated communities, the White House, Capitol Hill, Millionaire communities, airports, bridges, paralysing the hardware farms of Google, Facebook and Twitter, spreading to cities as London, Amsterdam, Paris, great opportunities there. "No borders, no castles". Disruption is a start and a means to an end. Explaining comes later. Only going that direction would cause any effects that last.

These are few things that come to mind. When historically, "real" leaders can have a chance to re-assert and reorganize, effectively stump out the "rot at the top", there must be some serious rioting first.

There is not much of an alternative, and outside the US forces, Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, people up to dumps as Bangladesh, Libya, will gladly stomp the US obese backside.

These above are thoughts that come to mind, regarding a minor overblown bush-fire for now. The thing is a fizzle.

[Jun 02, 2020] Susan Rice Suggests Russians Fomented Floyd Protests, Violence Across U.S. Obama s former national security adviser offered no evidence for her bizarre claim by Barbara Boland

So one of key players of Russiagate gaslighting and Flynn entrapment trying the same dirty trick again. Nice...
Notable quotes:
"... "We have peaceful protesters focused on the very real pain and disparities that we're all wrestling with that have to be addressed, and then we have extremists who've come to try to hijack those protests and turn them into something very different. And they're probably also, I would bet based on my experience, I'm not reading the intelligence these days, but based on my experience this is right out of the Russian playbook as well." ..."
"... "I would not be surprised to learn that they have fomented some of these extremists on both sides using social media. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they are funding it in some way, shape, or form." ..."
Jun 01, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

President Barack Obama's former national security adviser Susan Rice suggested without evidence that the Russians could be behind the violent demonstrations that have taken place across the U.S. following the death of George Floyd.

Speaking to CNN's Wolf Blitzer Sunday, Rice said:

"We have peaceful protesters focused on the very real pain and disparities that we're all wrestling with that have to be addressed, and then we have extremists who've come to try to hijack those protests and turn them into something very different. And they're probably also, I would bet based on my experience, I'm not reading the intelligence these days, but based on my experience this is right out of the Russian playbook as well."

"I would not be surprised to learn that they have fomented some of these extremists on both sides using social media. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they are funding it in some way, shape, or form."

Rice admits she's not reading the intelligence anymore, so what makes her think the Russians are behind this?

She doesn't offer much more in the way of evidence for her assertion, other than that the Russians are the Democrats' always-present bogeyman, ever ready from behind their poorly translated social media posts to unleash mayhem upon the U.S.

Ever since the election of President Donald Trump, Democrats have blamed Russians for the outcome of the 2016 election.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller found evidence that Russian-linked accounts spent a small amount of money placing social media ads for the purpose of influencing the 2016 election, but there's nothing to suggest their efforts were successful. The Department of Justice abruptly dropped its prosecution of a Russian-based troll farm, days before trial. Mueller also did not find evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia during the 2016 election.

Although the claims of Russian "collusion" in the 2016 election were eventually found to be nearly totally baseless, Rice's new narrative, that Russians support 2020's post-Floyd rioting, appears to be even more fact-threadbare.

Rice's claim drew criticism from across the political spectrum.

Eoin Higgens, a senior editor at Common Dreams, tweeted "you cannot make this sh– up. F -- - deranged" while former U.S. attorney Andrew McCarthy tweeted "there she goes again."

There's a reason Rice's claim was not taken seriously -- besides the lack of evidence for the Russian meddling narrative that has dominated the nation's political life since 2016, there's also the sheer ineptitude of the actual Russian trolling and ads themselves.

Just look at this ad the Russians funded from the 2016 election cycle for a taste of how convincing those Russians and their social media campaigns can be:


Feral Finster 19 hours ago

Predictable as a stopped clock.
Bureaucrat 19 hours ago • edited
I haven't seen condemnation across the political spectrum. There are a few hard-left progressives like Aaron Mate, Matt Taibbi, and Glenn Greenwald of course, but they have always hated the RussiaGate conspiracy. I won't be holding my breath for any of the #Resistance puppets castigate Rice. They can't, because #RussiaGate is foundational to their existence.
Connecticut Farmer Bureaucrat 2 hours ago
"...#RussiaGate is foundational to their existence."

It's the only hat rack that they have, otherwise they would be left with having to blame themselves for running the wrong horse in 2016.

Scroop Moth 18 hours ago
Y'all are really confusing me! During the civil rights marches, conservatives warned people that the "agitators" were Russian tools. Now, you say that's crazy talk!.

Rice asserts that civic agitation is ". . .right out of the Russian playbook. . ." Let's presume she's had a peek into the Russia playbook. Her statement can be falsified by the good fact checkers at this website!

Speaking for myself, I wouldn't be more surprised than Rice to learn that Russia is still in the outside agitator business. Just a suggestion, of course. Someone as patriotic as Rice really should check it out.

Connecticut Farmer Scroop Moth 2 hours ago
"Russia is still in the outside agitator business."

So is the United States (check out the Russian election of 1996). We're not as good as the Russians though.

Gerald Arcuri 17 hours ago
Why would anyone listen to what Susan Rice has to say about matters of national security?
Alex (the one that likes Ike) 17 hours ago
The saddest thing is that she's been too lazy to come up even with the most jury-rigged conspiracy theory as to why Russians would need it, despite the fact that emotional reaction-oriented rhetorical turds to... sculpture such a theory (albeit a very debunkable one) are floating on the surface. A most deplorable intellectual sloth. What to expect from neolibs/neocons, though? They're always like that. Say some folderol - and then go hiding in the kind Grandpa Bolton's venerable moustɑche.
Timothy Herring 16 hours ago
Wild speculation needs no evidence.
MPC Timothy Herring 15 hours ago
People like her are about to get their due, by being baselessly accused of being Chinese agents.
AdmBenson 13 hours ago
I don't know which idea is more laughable - Black Americans are so lacking in agency that they aren't even responsible for their own protests, or, the Russians are so diabolical that they can turn anyone and everyone into the Manchurian Candidate.

More likely, Susan Rice can't admit that her woke ideology has limitations. She needs a scapegoat so badly that she'll babble any nonsense to accuse one. Hard to believe she was once the National Security Adviser.

ZizaNiam 12 hours ago
I read on a libertarian oriented forum that the current protests are actually being done by the Chinese. Apparently, the Soviets (Russians) instigated the riots in the late 60s.
Slappyhappy 9 hours ago
Where are all the stars you ask" afterwards they will come out with concerts on TV, speeches big speeches that they real do care you hear me, PC BS they will look tragic this time, all the makeup in the world won;t hide their deception, arrogance, utter idiocy in White Towers.
JPH 4 hours ago
Transcripts of under oath statements before the House Intelligence committee revealed neither Susan Rice nor other Obama administration officials had any evidence of Russian meddling in 2016. Of course all proceeded with spreading baseless inuendo for years before and afterwards.

So if not under oath anything Susan Rice alleges is simply not worth listening to.

Miamijac 2 hours ago
civic agitation is ". . .right out of the Russian playbook. . ." Were they responsible for the Boston Tea Party too?
Wallstreet Panic 2 hours ago
Seems like so many presidents have been led into terrible foreign policy decisions by their Blob advisors...Obama by Susan Rice, Samantha Power, and Hillary; Dubya by Cheney and Rumsfield; Carter by Zbiggy, Ford and Nixon (both who should have known better) by Kissinger.
L RNY 2 hours ago
Susan Rice is more ignorant and has far lower intelligence than I ever suspected or she is playing politics and lying. The Russians have no motive. The Russians have no hand to play. The Chinese who have bribed a long list of democratic politicians have a very significant motive and a major hand to play in fomenting riots and race animosity...as a means to influence the November election away from Trump to Biden.

[Jun 01, 2020] Obama adviser Susan Rice knows who's responsible for the George Floyd riots. You guessed right, it's RUSSIA!

In was not enough for Obama honchos to gaslight the while nation with Russiagate. They want more action ;-)
Jun 01, 2020 | www.rt.com

How original.

[Jun 01, 2020] More Evidence of the Fraud Against General Michael Flynn by Larry C Johnson

Highly recommended!
Looks like regular consultation between Russians and incoming administration to me. Also it was lame duck President who unilaterally decided to up his ante against Russians (criminally gaslighting the US public), expelled Russian diplomats to make the gaslighting more plausible, and seized Russian diplomatic property in violation of international norms. It was Obama who unleashed FBI dogs like Strzok and McCabe on Trump.
Russia later retaliated in a very modest way without seizing any US property, they just cut the level of the USA diplomatic personnel in Russia to the level of Russian personnel in the USA.
Notable quotes:
"... To summarize--a total of eight different calls between Kislyak and Flynn were recorded between December 22, 2016 and January 19, 2017. Five of the eight calls were initiated by Ambassador Kislyak -- Mike Flynn only called Kislyak three times and two of those were in response to calls from Kislyak, who requested a call back or left a message. ..."
Jun 01, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

More Evidence of the Fraud Against General Michael Flynn by Larry C Johnson

I never ceased to be amazed at the dishonesty and laziness of the media when it comes to reporting anything about Michael Flynn and the astonishing miscarriage of justice in bringing charges against him. The documents declassified and released by the DNI last Friday exonerate General Flynn and expose the FBI and the Mueller team as gargantuan liars. Even though Friday's release of the declassified summaries and transcripts was overshadowed quickly by rioting in Minnesota (you know, if it bleeds and burns it is the lede), the documents reveal General Flynn as the consummate professional keen on serving his country and the Russian Ambassador as disgusted by the petulance and arrogance of the Obama administration.

The declassified material released by newly installed Director for National Intelligence actually consists of two different sets of documents--First, there are five summaries of conversations for 22, 23, 29 (two on the 29th) December 2016 and 5 January. Second, there are the full transcripts of the conversations for December 23, December 29, December 31 in 2016 and January 12 and January 19, 2017.

To summarize--a total of eight different calls between Kislyak and Flynn were recorded between December 22, 2016 and January 19, 2017. Five of the eight calls were initiated by Ambassador Kislyak -- Mike Flynn only called Kislyak three times and two of those were in response to calls from Kislyak, who requested a call back or left a message.

Here are the specifics of those calls.


Alan , 30 May 2020 at 09:44 PM

This is also very interesting:

"Before General Flynn's voce message turns on, there is an open line, barely audible chat.
Someone asks Chernyshev, "Which agency are we talking about?" Chernyshev asks as to
confirm if he understands the question and responds in the same time: "Which Agency hackers
did the hacking? Believe me, Americans did hacked this all."

Petrel , 30 May 2020 at 10:56 PM
The full exchange between General Flynn and Ambassador Kislyak throws much light on the subsequent Sunday morning mis-speaking by the Vice-President Pence.

From the first telephone call, Flynn tells Kislyak that President-elect Trump will only be inaugurated 3-weeks hence. Therefore Trump in late-December cannot formally make foreign policy decisions immediately.

In a later exchange about Russia's proposed Astana Peace Conference to de-escalate ISIS activity In Syria, Flynn responds that Russia has Trump's backing to begin preparations with the Syrians, Turks et al. On his part, Flynn will begin pencilling-in who would be on a future US delegation.

It goes without saying that Vice President-elect Pence, during this period had a full-time job marshaling the Transition and may not have been in the loop on these tentative Russian peace initiatives. When asked on a Sunday morning talk show, Pence could correctly say President Trump had no "official communications" with the Kremlin. But to later trash & demand Flynn's dismissal for "lying to him" about the informal phone calls was inappropriate.

Pence could easily have told Americans that President-elect Trump was establishing informal relations, through multiple phone calls, with world leaders and he, Pence, was not party to all of them. No one in the fledgling Trump Administration was lying to him.

anon , 31 May 2020 at 12:25 AM
Hi Larry.why not tackle this knot from the Russian end.Russia has been fighting in Syria since jisr al shugour massacre in the groves.There naval base on the med was threatened and Gazprom stood to lose control of energy resources flowing out of the me too Europe.That has now been achieved.Not only that but Wagner group are in Libyan with Russian air support.From that point of view what was Flynn's role in this
Mathias Alexander , 31 May 2020 at 02:50 AM
" amazed at the dishonesty and laziness of the media". Dishonesty and laziness are the norm in the media.
English Outsider , 31 May 2020 at 06:06 AM

That was one superb summary.

I wonder sometimes whether the new administration, from Trump downwards, realised just what they were up against after that unexpected election victory.

h , 31 May 2020 at 12:02 PM
Time will tell but something tells me the release of the Kislyak-Flynn transcripts/FBI cuts is also related to Boente's forced resignation. Here's sundance's take - it's a long read btw - https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/05/30/boom-dana-boente-removed-fbi-chief-legal-counsel-forced-to-resign/

And yes, the hacking comment is fascinating on so many levels. It's just kinda left hanging out there all by itself, eh?

And a quick off-topic thank you to the Col for posting the Lara Logan clip. All efforts hunting for it yesterday failed. She nailed it.

JerseyJeffersonian , 31 May 2020 at 01:15 PM
English Outsider,

Yes, I think that evidence thus far revealed suggests that the sedition was far along, and this even before Trump's victory - an insurance policy, if you will, and way beyond any opposition research, as much of the "information", if not at root fabricated, was otherwise illegally gathered.

And immediate that election victory, things went into overdrive as the seditionists' panicked, doubling and tripling down on their illegal actions to frame a projected impeachment narrative as their next tactic. I hesitate to call it their next strategy, as it was too knee jerk to be characterized in that fashion.

So, no, I think that the new Trump administration had little idea of just how this transition of administration was, counter to most prior precedents, planned to be undermined with the full intent to invalidate the election of President Trump, and if possible, to overturn it .

This was sedition on multiple levels, crimes deliberately embarked upon to destroy the Constitution and the Republic by any means that these traitors deemed efficacious.

May they all rot in Hell.

blue peacock , 31 May 2020 at 04:48 PM
Petrel,

I believe Trump knew he was being spied on as Adm. Rogers informed him and thereafter he moved his transition organization away from Trump Tower.

In any case why did Trump throw Flynn under the bus? In hindsight that was a huge mistake. Another huge mistake in hindsight was not cleaning house at the DOJ, FBI and the intel agencies early. That allowed Rosenstein and Wray to get Mueller going and created the pretext of the investigation to bury all the incriminating evidence. Trump never declassified anything himself which he could have and broke open the plot. He then gave Barr all classification authority who sat on it for a year. Look how fast Ric Grenell declassified stuff. There was no "sources & methods" the usual false justification.

It is unconscionable how severely Flynn was screwed over. Why is Wray still there? How many of the plotter cohort still remain?

[Jun 01, 2020] Injustice inequality are the real cause of US riots – but establishment who ignored the problem now cowardly blame Russia by Scott Ritter

Notable quotes:
"... The United States today functions in a never-never land of fiction and fantasy when it comes to allegations of Russian meddling in its internal affairs. Logically speaking, most Americans should be insulted by the notion that their democratic institutions are so weak that a half-baked social media campaign could sway a national election (never minding the reality that former presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg spent more than $500 million on advertising , run by the most sophisticated media support team in the history of American politics, and couldn't get the electoral needle to move an inch). ..."
Jun 01, 2020 | www.rt.com

As American political leaders are confronted with the scope and scale of the unrest engendered by decades of failed policy, they're turning to a time-tested scapegoat to deflect responsibility away from their shoulders – Russia. While American cities burn, its politicians are desperately looking to assign responsibility for the chaos and anarchy that is unfolding. Among those casting an accusatory finger is Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican from the State of Florida and the acting Chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee.

"Seeing VERY heavy social media activity of #protest & counter reactions from social media accounts linked to at least three foreign adversaries," Rubio tweeted . "They didn't create these divisions," Rubio noted, "but they are actively stoking & promoting violence & confrontation from multiple angles."

Also on rt.com Russia's to blame? MSM allegations that Moscow had a hand in US anti-police-brutality riots 'entirely to be expected'

Evelyn Farkas, a former Obama-era defense official and current candidate for Congress, tweeted "I hope the @FBI is investigating potential direct or indirect foreign interference in looting. Definitely not out of the question." While neither Rubio nor Farkas named Russia in their tweets, they are both well-known for their Russia-baiting postings on social media, and there could be little doubt as to whom they were pointing an accusatory finger at.

President Obama's former National Security Advisor, Susan Rice, however, left no doubt about where the source of this "foreign influence" came from. In an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, Rice, discussing the violent protests sweeping America today, declared "I would bet, based on my experience, I'm not reading the intelligence these days, but based on my experience this is right out of the Russian playbook as well."

Rice, Rubio and Farkas are not alone. Typical of the anti-Russian hyperventilation taking place in US media regarding Russia's alleged hidden hand in the ongoing riots is an article published by CNN , written by Donie O'Sullivan , a reporter who works closely with CNN's investigative unit "tracking and identifying online disinformation campaigns targeting the American electorate." While concluding that "the protests are real, and so are the protesters' concerns," and cautioning the reader to step back and take a breath "before getting too caught up" in any discussion about Russian involvement, O'Sullivan asserts that starting with the 2016 Presidential election "Russia backed (and is likely still backing) an elaborate, years-long covert misinformation campaign" involving "a network of Facebook and Twitter pages designed to look like they were run by real American activists and that were used to stoke tensions in American society."

But the pičce de résistance comes in the middle of the article. "Arguably Russia's biggest achievement," O'Sullivan states, "was the paranoia it instilled in American society. We now regularly see Americans accuse people and groups on social media that they do not agree with of being Russian trolls or bots. These accusations are often made with no evidence and can distract from and undermine real Americans who are engaging in political speech."

Thanks to Russia, O'Sullivan asserts, Americans now have Russia on their mind even if Russia is not involved–which is, of course, Russia's fault. But don't fret -- "It is possible that we will learn in the coming days, weeks, and months that some covert activity has been going on–that some Facebook pages and Twitter accounts encouraging violent protests are indeed linked to Russia."

The United States today functions in a never-never land of fiction and fantasy when it comes to allegations of Russian meddling in its internal affairs. Logically speaking, most Americans should be insulted by the notion that their democratic institutions are so weak that a half-baked social media campaign could sway a national election (never minding the reality that former presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg spent more than $500 million on advertising , run by the most sophisticated media support team in the history of American politics, and couldn't get the electoral needle to move an inch).

There is a truism that you cannot solve a problem without first properly defining it. In their effort to shift blame away from their own failings by alleging "outside" (i.e., Russia) sources of interference in the ongoing social unrest ravaging American cities, the politicians and leaders Americans look to for solutions are setting themselves up for failure, if for no other reason that any solution which is predicated on unproven allegations of Russian meddling isn't solving the real problems facing American society today.

Russia did not direct the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police. Nor did Russia direct and implement decades of policing culture in the United States underpinned by racism, backed by a system of justice that sustained and magnified the same. The social and legal inequities of American law enforcement have been a problem hiding in plain sight for decades, only to be ignored by generations of American leaders who exploited the fear-based culture that fed on this system for their own political gain; Russia had nothing whatsoever to do with this cancer that has metastasized throughout the width and breadth of the American body public.

It is the height of intellectual hypocrisy and moral cowardice for those whom America needs the most in this time of trouble to stand up and take a hard, honest look at the diseased nature of the American law enforcement establishment today, and make the kind of difficult but necessary decisions needed to reform it, to instead cast blame on the Russian bogeyman. The Russian blame game may play well on media outlets that long ago surrendered to a political establishment desperate to retain power and influence regardless of the cost. But, for the legion of Americans whose frustration with the inherent racism of American policing policies today, this kind of simplistic deflection will not succeed. America's cities are on fire; manufacturing false narratives that place the blame for this conflagration of Russia will not put them out.

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT. Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer. He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf's staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer. He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf's staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter

[Jun 01, 2020] More Evidence of the Fraud Against General Michael Flynn by Larry C Johnson

Highly recommended!
Looks like regular consultation between Russians and incoming administration to me. Also it was lame duck President who unilaterally decided to up his ante against Russians (criminally gaslighting the US public), expelled Russian diplomats to make the gaslighting more plausible, and seized Russian diplomatic property in violation of international norms. It was Obama who unleashed FBI dogs like Strzok and McCabe on Trump.
Russia later retaliated in a very modest way without seizing any US property, they just cut the level of the USA diplomatic personnel in Russia to the level of Russian personnel in the USA.
Jun 01, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

More Evidence of the Fraud Against General Michael Flynn by Larry C Johnson

I never ceased to be amazed at the dishonesty and laziness of the media when it comes to reporting anything about Michael Flynn and the astonishing miscarriage of justice in bringing charges against him. The documents declassified and released by the DNI last Friday exonerate General Flynn and expose the FBI and the Mueller team as gargantuan liars. Even though Friday's release of the declassified summaries and transcripts was overshadowed quickly by rioting in Minnesota (you know, if it bleeds and burns it is the lede), the documents reveal General Flynn as the consummate professional keen on serving his country and the Russian Ambassador as disgusted by the petulance and arrogance of the Obama administration.

The declassified material released by newly installed Director for National Intelligence actually consists of two different sets of documents--First, there are five summaries of conversations for 22, 23, 29 (two on the 29th) December 2016 and 5 January. Second, there are the full transcripts of the conversations for December 23, December 29, December 31 in 2016 and January 12 and January 19, 2017.

To summarize--a total of eight different calls between Kislyak and Flynn were recorded between December 22, 2016 and January 19, 2017. Five of the eight calls were initiated by Ambassador Kislyak -- Mike Flynn only called Kislyak three times and two of those were in response to calls from Kislyak, who requested a call back or left a message.

Here are the specifics of those calls.


Alan , 30 May 2020 at 09:44 PM

This is also very interesting:

"Before General Flynn's voce message turns on, there is an open line, barely audible chat.
Someone asks Chernyshev, "Which agency are we talking about?" Chernyshev asks as to
confirm if he understands the question and responds in the same time: "Which Agency hackers
did the hacking? Believe me, Americans did hacked this all."

Petrel , 30 May 2020 at 10:56 PM
The full exchange between General Flynn and Ambassador Kislyak throws much light on the subsequent Sunday morning mis-speaking by the Vice-President Pence.

From the first telephone call, Flynn tells Kislyak that President-elect Trump will only be inaugurated 3-weeks hence. Therefore Trump in late-December cannot formally make foreign policy decisions immediately.

In a later exchange about Russia's proposed Astana Peace Conference to de-escalate ISIS activity In Syria, Flynn responds that Russia has Trump's backing to begin preparations with the Syrians, Turks et al. On his part, Flynn will begin pencilling-in who would be on a future US delegation.

It goes without saying that Vice President-elect Pence, during this period had a full-time job marshaling the Transition and may not have been in the loop on these tentative Russian peace initiatives. When asked on a Sunday morning talk show, Pence could correctly say President Trump had no "official communications" with the Kremlin. But to later trash & demand Flynn's dismissal for "lying to him" about the informal phone calls was inappropriate.

Pence could easily have told Americans that President-elect Trump was establishing informal relations, through multiple phone calls, with world leaders and he, Pence, was not party to all of them. No one in the fledgling Trump Administration was lying to him.

anon , 31 May 2020 at 12:25 AM
Hi Larry.why not tackle this knot from the Russian end.Russia has been fighting in Syria since jisr al shugour massacre in the groves.There naval base on the med was threatened and Gazprom stood to lose control of energy resources flowing out of the me too Europe.That has now been achieved.Not only that but Wagner group are in Libyan with Russian air support.From that point of view what was Flynn's role in this
Mathias Alexander , 31 May 2020 at 02:50 AM
" amazed at the dishonesty and laziness of the media". Dishonesty and laziness are the norm in the media.
English Outsider , 31 May 2020 at 06:06 AM

That was one superb summary.

I wonder sometimes whether the new administration, from Trump downwards, realised just what they were up against after that unexpected election victory.

h , 31 May 2020 at 12:02 PM
Time will tell but something tells me the release of the Kislyak-Flynn transcripts/FBI cuts is also related to Boente's forced resignation. Here's sundance's take - it's a long read btw - https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/05/30/boom-dana-boente-removed-fbi-chief-legal-counsel-forced-to-resign/

And yes, the hacking comment is fascinating on so many levels. It's just kinda left hanging out there all by itself, eh?

And a quick off-topic thank you to the Col for posting the Lara Logan clip. All efforts hunting for it yesterday failed. She nailed it.

JerseyJeffersonian , 31 May 2020 at 01:15 PM
English Outsider,

Yes, I think that evidence thus far revealed suggests that the sedition was far along, and this even before Trump's victory - an insurance policy, if you will, and way beyond any opposition research, as much of the "information", if not at root fabricated, was otherwise illegally gathered.

And immediate that election victory, things went into overdrive as the seditionists' panicked, doubling and tripling down on their illegal actions to frame a projected impeachment narrative as their next tactic. I hesitate to call it their next strategy, as it was too knee jerk to be characterized in that fashion.

So, no, I think that the new Trump administration had little idea of just how this transition of administration was, counter to most prior precedents, planned to be undermined with the full intent to invalidate the election of President Trump, and if possible, to overturn it .

This was sedition on multiple levels, crimes deliberately embarked upon to destroy the Constitution and the Republic by any means that these traitors deemed efficacious.

May they all rot in Hell.

blue peacock , 31 May 2020 at 04:48 PM
Petrel,

I believe Trump knew he was being spied on as Adm. Rogers informed him and thereafter he moved his transition organization away from Trump Tower.

In any case why did Trump throw Flynn under the bus? In hindsight that was a huge mistake. Another huge mistake in hindsight was not cleaning house at the DOJ, FBI and the intel agencies early. That allowed Rosenstein and Wray to get Mueller going and created the pretext of the investigation to bury all the incriminating evidence. Trump never declassified anything himself which he could have and broke open the plot. He then gave Barr all classification authority who sat on it for a year. Look how fast Ric Grenell declassified stuff. There was no "sources & methods" the usual false justification.

It is unconscionable how severely Flynn was screwed over. Why is Wray still there? How many of the plotter cohort still remain?

[May 31, 2020] Russians are geniuses: first they put Donald Trump in power and now they're trying to tear the country apart under him by supporting both black lives matter, and white supremacists at the same time.

May 31, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Maximus , May 31 2020 20:32 utc | 76

Boy these Russians are geniuses of the highest order ... First they put Donald Trump in power and now they're trying to tear the country apart under him by supporting both black lives matter, and white supremacists at the same time.

I don't know how these stupid Journos can even imagine this stuff up out of their arses. The sad irony is that these journalists will be the ones when future generations look back who most contributed to the downfall of America ....

[May 31, 2020] On the meaning of the term Russiagate

May 31, 2020 | angrybearblog.com
  1. likbez , May 31, 2020 2:03 am

    Anybody who uses the term "Russiagate" seriously and not to recognize the actual and serious Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election in support of Trump is not to be taken remotely seriously.

    Russiagate is a valid and IMHO very useful political discourse term which has two intersecting meanings:

    1. Obamagate : Attempt of a certain political forces around Clintons and Obama with the support of intelligence agencies to stage a "color revolution" against Trump, using there full control of MSM as air superiority factor. With the main goal is the return to "classic neoliberalism" (neoliberal globalization uber alles) mode

    Which Trump rejected during his election campaign painting him as a threat to certain powerful neoliberal forces which include but not limited to Silicon Valley moguls (note bad relations of Trump and Bezos), some part of Wall street financial oligarchy, and most MSMs honchos.

    2. Neo-McCarthyism campaign unleashed by Obama administration with the goal to whitewash Hillary fiasco and to preserve the current leadership of the Democratic Party.

    That led to complete deterioration of relations between the USA and Russia and increase of chances of military conflict between two. Add to this consistent attempts of Trump to make China an enemy and politicize the process of economic disengagement between the two countries and you understand the level of danger. .

    When a senior Russian official implicitly calls the USA a rogue state and Trump administration -- gangsters on international arena, that a very bad sign. See

    https://nationalinterest.org/feature/russian-deputy-foreign-minister-sergei-ryabkov-%E2%80%9Cwe-have-no-trust-no-confidence-whatsoever%E2%80%9D

    But then again, it may well be so that the current Republican administration will in effect become a line in history in which a considerable number of useful international instruments were abrogated and that America exited them in the anticipation that this approach would serve U.S. interests better. Having said that, I will never say or never suggest that it was for us -- at least in the mid-2010s -- better with the previous administration.

    It was under the previous Obama administration that endless rounds of sanctions were imposed upon Russia. That was continued under Trump. The pretext for that policy is totally rejected by Russia as an invalid and illegal one. The previous administration, weeks before it departed, stole Russian property that was protected by diplomatic immunity, and we are still deprived of this property by the Trump administration. We have sent 350 diplomatic notes to both the Obama and the Trump administrations demanding the return of this property, only to see an endless series of rejections. It is one of the most vivid and obvious examples of where we are in our relationship.

    There is no such thing as "which administration is better for Russia in the U.S.?" Both are bad, and this is our conclusion after more than a decade of talking to Washington on different topics.

    Heilbrunn: Given the dire situation you portray, do you believe that America has become a rogue state?

    Ryabkov: I wouldn't say so, that's not our conclusion. But the U.S. is clearly an entity that stands for itself, one that creates uncertainty for the world. America is a source of trouble for many international actors. They are trying to find ways to protect and defend themselves from this malign and malicious policy of America that many of the people around the world believe should come to an end, hopefully in the near future.

    What I can't understand is this stupid jingoism, kind of "cult of death" among the US neocons, who personally are utter chickenhawks, but still from their comfortable offices write dangerous warmongering nonsense. Without understanding possible longer term consequences.

    Of course, MIC money does not smell, but some enthusiasts in blogs do it even without proper remuneration

[May 29, 2020] Andrew Weisdman, the attack dog of Mueller investigation, fundraiser links Creepy Joe to Russiagate and Mueller

May 29, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

The Biden campaign has quietly canceled a fundraiser headlined by Andrew Weissman - former special counsel Robert Mueller's 'attack dog' lawyer who hand-picked the so-called '13 angry Democrats.'

Weissman, who attended Hillary Clinton's election night party in 2016, donated to Obama and the DNC, yet somehow conducted an unbiased investigation that turned up snake-eyes, was set to do a June 2 "fireside chat" with Biden , according to the WSJ , which notes that the fundraiser was pulled right after it was posted late last week - shortly after the Trump campaign began to latch onto it.

Yes, there's more value in keeping the lie going that the mueller special counsel hasn't already been established beyond any doubt as a fraudulent and deeply unethical partisan takedown scheme against Trump https://t.co/5wuFYpgggr https://t.co/mxaHomTaQO

-- Buck Sexton (@BuckSexton) May 29, 2020

Weissman - known as the "architect" of the case against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort - notably reached out to a Ukrainian oligarch for dirt on Trump and his team days after FBI agent Peter Strzok texted "There's no big there there" regarding the Trump investigation in exchange for 'resolving the Firtash case' in Chicago, in which he was charged in 2014 with corruption and bribery linked to a US aerospace deal.

According to investigative journalist John Solomon, Firtash turned down Weissman's offer because he didn't have credible information or evidence against Trump , Manafort, or anyone else.

[May 28, 2020] U.S. Declares a Vaccine War on the World

Notable quotes:
"... The failure of the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) against COVID-19, with nearly four times the annual budget of the WHO, is visible to the world. The CDC failed to provide a successful test for SARS-CoV-2 in the critical months of February and March , while ignoring the WHO's successful test kits that were distributed to 120 countries. ..."
"... Trump has yet to hold his administration and the CDC responsible for this criminal bungling. This, more than any other failure , is the reason that the U.S. numbers for COVID-19 are now more than 1.5 million and about a third of all global infections. Contrast this with China, the first to face an unknown epidemic, stopping it at 82,000 infections, and the amazing results that countries such as Vietnam and South Korea have produced. ..."
"... Taiwan was the first to inform the WHO of human-to-human transmissions in December, but was completely ignored. ..."
"... "Just how evil does this situation become? Is the general leadership of the American political economy trying to be evil just for the fun of it?" ..."
"... And at what point does the general indifference to this state of affairs that still, incredibly, obtains, turn over into mass outrage and condemnation? Skrelli, Bayer, and all the rest are frelling evil. Extortion writ large, with easily preventable death and suffering. ..."
"... As you note it's about profits. One of the disturbing condemnations of the now fading American Century, which most USians remain contentedly oblivious to is that during their watch as global hegemon, the US, in what can be seen, in the best light, as bad faith, worked to undermine the democratic functionality of international cooperative organizations like the WHO, the UN, etc. ..."
"... The intention of granting copyrights and patents was noble, to provide a limited monopoly on an invention or literary work for a limited period. IP has been distorted and twisted, extended to insane time limits to protect works that for any common sense thinkers have already become public domain (see, e.g. the Happy Birthday song, Mickey Mouse or re-formulation of a drug that's gone out of patent). Software should have had its own IP regime but that ship has sailed (thanks Bill G.). ..."
May 28, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Donald Trump launched a new vaccine war in May, but not against the virus. It was against the world. The United States and the UK were the only two holdouts in the World Health Assembly from the declaration that vaccines and medicines for COVID-19 should be available as public goods , and not under exclusive patent rights. The United States explicitly disassociated itself from the patent pool call, talking instead of "the critical role that intellectual property plays" -- in other words, patents for vaccines and medicines. Having badly botched his COVID-19 response, Trump is trying to redeem his electoral fortunes in the November elections this year by promising an early vaccine. The 2020 version of Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan is shaping up to be, essentially, " vaccines for us" -- but the rest of the world will have to queue up and pay what big pharma asks, as they will hold the patents.

In contrast, all other countries agreed with the Costa Rican proposal in the World Health Assembly that there should be a patent pool for all COVID-19 vaccines and medicines. President Xi said that Chinese vaccines would be available as a public good , a view also shared by European Union leaders . Among the 10 candidate vaccines in Phase 1 and 2 of clinical trials, the Chinese have five, the United States has three, and the UK and Germany have one each.

Trump has given an ultimatum to the World Health Organization (WHO) with a permanent withdrawal of funds if it does not mend its ways in 30 days. In sharp contrast, in the World Health Assembly (the highest decision-making body of the WHO), almost all countries, including close allies of the United States, rallied behind the WHO. The failure of the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) against COVID-19, with nearly four times the annual budget of the WHO, is visible to the world. The CDC failed to provide a successful test for SARS-CoV-2 in the critical months of February and March , while ignoring the WHO's successful test kits that were distributed to 120 countries.

Trump has yet to hold his administration and the CDC responsible for this criminal bungling. This, more than any other failure , is the reason that the U.S. numbers for COVID-19 are now more than 1.5 million and about a third of all global infections. Contrast this with China, the first to face an unknown epidemic, stopping it at 82,000 infections, and the amazing results that countries such as Vietnam and South Korea have produced.

One issue is now looming large over the COVID-19 pandemic. If we do not address the intellectual property rights issue in this pandemic, we are likely to see a repeat of the AIDS tragedy . People died for 10 years (1994-2004) as patented AIDS medicine was priced at $10,000 to $15,000 for a year's supply, far beyond their reach. Finally, patent laws in India allowed people to get AIDS medicine at less than a dollar a day , or $350 for a year's supply. Today, 80 percent of the world's AIDS medicine comes from India. For big pharma, profits trumped lives, and they will continue to do so, COVID or no COVID, unless we change the world.

Most countries have compulsory licensing provisions that will allow them to break patents in case of epidemics or health emergencies. Even the WTO, after a bitter fight, accepted in its Doha Declaration (2001) that countries, in a health emergency, have the right to allow any company to manufacture a patented drug without the patent holder's permission, and even import it from other countries.

Why is it, then, that countries are unable to break patents, even if there are provisions in their laws and in the TRIPS Agreement? The answer is their fear of U.S. sanctions against them. Every year, the U.S. Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) issues a Special 301 Report that it has used to threaten trade sanctions against any country that tries to compulsorily license any patented product. India figures prominently in this report year after year, for daring to issue a compulsory license in 2012 to Natco for nexavar, a cancer drug Bayer was selling for more than $65,000 a year . Marijn Dekkers, the CEO of Bayer, was quoted widely that this was "theft," and "We did not develop this medicine for Indians We developed it for Western patients who can afford it."

This leaves unanswered how many people even in the affluent West can afford a $65,000 bill for an illness. But there is no question that a bill of this magnitude is a death sentence for anybody but the super-rich in countries like India. Though a number of other drugs were under also consideration for compulsory licensing at that time, India has not exercised this provision again after receiving U.S. threats.

It is the fear that countries can break patents using their compulsory licensing powers that led to proposals for patent pooling. The argument was that since many of these diseases do not affect rich countries, big pharma should either let go of their patents to such patent pools, or philanthropic capital should fund the development of new drugs for this pool. Facing the pandemic of COVID-19, it is this idea of patent pooling that emerged in the recent World Health Assembly , WHA-73. All countries supported this proposal, barring the United States and its loyal camp follower, the UK . The United States also entered its disagreement on the final WHA resolution, being the lone objector to patent pooling of COVID-19 medicines and vaccines, noting "the critical role that intellectual property plays in incentivizing the development of new and improved health products."

While patent pooling is welcome if no other measure is available, it also makes it appear as if countries have no other recourse apart from the charity of big capital. What this hides, as charity always does, is that people and countries have legitimate rights even under TRIPS to break patents under conditions of an epidemic or a health emergency.

The United States, which screams murder if a compulsory license is issued by any country, has no such compunction when its own interests are threatened. During the anthrax scare in 2001, the U.S. Secretary of Health issued a threat to Bayer under "eminent domain for patents" for licensing the anthrax-treatment drug ciprofloxacin to other manufacturers. Bayer folded, and agreed to supply the quantity at a price that the U.S. government had set. And without a whimper. Yes, this is the same Bayer that considers India as a "thief" for issuing a compulsory license!

The vaccination for COVID-19 might need to be repeated each year, as we still do not know the duration of its protection. It is unlikely that a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 will provide a lifetime immunity like the smallpox vaccine. Unlike AIDS, where the patient numbers were smaller and were unfortunately stigmatized in different ways, COVID-19 is a visible threat for everyone. Any attempt to hold people and governments to ransom on COVID-19 vaccines or medicines could see the collapse of the entire patent edifice of TRIPS that big pharma backed by the United States and major EU countries have built. That is why the more clever in the capitalist world have moved toward a voluntary patent pool for potential COVID-19 medicines and vaccines. A voluntary patent pool means that companies or institutions holding patents on medicines -- such as remdesivir -- or vaccines would voluntarily hand them over to such a pool. The terms and conditions of such a handover, meaning at concessional rates, or for only for certain regions, are still not clear -- leading to criticism that a voluntary patent pool is not a substitute for declaring that all such medicines and vaccines should be declared global public goods during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Unlike clever capital, Trump's response to the COVID-19 vaccine is to thuggishly bully his way through. He believes that with the unlimited money that the United States is now willing to put into the vaccine efforts, it will either beat everybody else to the winning post, or buy the company that is successful . If this strategy succeeds, he can then use "his" COVID-19 vaccine as a new instrument of global power. It is the United States that will then decide which countries get the vaccine (and for how much), and which ones don't.

Trump does not believe in a rule-based global order , even if the rules are biased in favor of the rich. He is walking out of various arms control agreements and has crippled the WTO . He believes that the United States, as the biggest economy and the most powerful military power , should have the untrammeled right to dictate to all countries. Threats of bombing and invasions can be combined with illegal unilateral sanctions ; and the latest weapon in his imaginary arsenal is withholding vaccines.

Trump's little problem is that the days of the United States being a sole global hegemon passed decades ago. The United States has shown itself as a fumbling giant and its epidemic response shambolic . It has been unable to provide virus tests to its people in time, and failed to stop the epidemic through containment/mitigation measures, which a number of other countries have done.

China and the EU have already agreed that any vaccine developed by them will be regarded as a public good. Even without that, once a medicine or a vaccine is known to be successful, any country with a reasonable scientific infrastructure can replicate the medicine or the vaccine, and manufacture it locally. India in particular has one of the largest generic drug and vaccine manufacturing capacities in the world. What prevents India, or any country for that matter, from manufacturing COVID-19 vaccines or drugs once they are developed -- only the empty threat of a failed hegemon on breaking patents?


Noel Nospamington , May 28, 2020 at 4:19 am

Clearly the Trump and Johnson administrations are completely wrong in not supporting that all COVID vaccines and medications be declared as public goods. This is an unprecedented global threat requiring unprecedented global response.

But as a Canadian I have to reluctantly admit, there are legimate reasons to oppose the WHO. Trump like a broken clock can be correct twice a day, even if he is wrong the other 1438 times a day.

The worst offence is that the WHO (World Health Organisation) is suppose to represent the world, and yet it deliberately excludes Taiwan, which it a known part of the world with 24 million people.

Taiwan was the first to inform the WHO of human-to-human transmissions in December, but was completely ignored. And Taiwan has best handled its response to the pandemic.

Personally I think that all countries should stop supporting the WHO until it restores Taiwan's observer status it previous had until 2016. The only other reasonable option would be to create an alternative health organisation to the WHO which does not exclude any part of the world.

The WHO also has other failings, including corruption, exorbitant travel expenses, and an unqualified president beholden to the CCP. But these failings pale in comparison to Taiwan's exclusion, and hopefully the other failings can be fixed within the organisation.

Amfortas the hippie , May 28, 2020 at 7:49 am

"Just how evil does this situation become? Is the general leadership of the American political economy trying to be evil just for the fun of it?"

And at what point does the general indifference to this state of affairs that still, incredibly, obtains, turn over into mass outrage and condemnation?
Skrelli, Bayer, and all the rest are frelling evil. Extortion writ large, with easily preventable death and suffering.

it did NOT begin with trump.It's been there for most of my life. What will it take for ordinary people to get mad enough about it all to do something about it?

Even in this article, the unspoken assumption is that our hands are somehow tied that these corps have agency far beyond anyone else's but those corps can be seized, and exist only at the pleasure of governments in the places they pretend to exist in.

They are a human creation an Egregore, set tottering about as if it were willful and alive but even Lefties treat them as untouchable godlike entities "oh, well lets appeal to "Benevolent Capital, instead "

"Behold, I show you the last man. 'What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?' thus asks the last man, and blinks. The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea; the last man lives longest. 'We have invented happiness,'say the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs against him, for one needs warmth

One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor or rich: both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion.

No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse. 'Formerly, all the world was mad,' say the most refined, and they blink

One has one's little pleasure for the day and one's little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health. 'We have invented happiness,' say the last men, and they blink.""

-Zarathustra

mpalomar , May 28, 2020 at 8:50 am

As you note it's about profits. One of the disturbing condemnations of the now fading American Century, which most USians remain contentedly oblivious to is that during their watch as global hegemon, the US, in what can be seen, in the best light, as bad faith, worked to undermine the democratic functionality of international cooperative organizations like the WHO, the UN, etc.

Thus when emergencies arise such as international diplomatic crisis or pandemics, it is found these organisations have been rendered untrustworthy, corrupted and unreliable; unsuited to purpose. American exceptionalism?

VietnamVet , May 28, 2020 at 5:55 am

It is clear now that the USA will not fund a national public health system to fight the coronavirus epidemic. The only conclusion is the reason is to allow Pharmaceutical Corporations to make huge profits by marketing patented drugs and vaccines to treat the illness; if and when, they become available sometime in the future.

Due to incompetence, lack of money and bad messengering; the economic reopening of the USA could kill close to a million Americans. To Republicans and Libertarians, this is of no concern. Democrats may acknowledge the deaths but say they are unavoidable.

For the Elite keeping their wealth is more important than spending a portion to prevent the huge costs in lives and treasure that will come once the Wuhan Coronavirus is established across North America like the related common cold.

Alternate Delegate , May 28, 2020 at 6:32 am

This is a teachable moment on the immorality of all "intellectual property". I am pleased to see that so many countries – other than the US and the UK – can get together on the common decency of allowing everyone to live, and set that above the "justice" of paying off intellectual property assignees. But these countries still have some ways to go in understanding that this applies to all information. That the creation of information can never be a living – in contrast to a living based on the creation of essential goods and services, about which we are learning so much right now! – and that information can never be owned.

They do not yet fully comprehend that all claims to own and extract rent from information are in fact crimes against humanity.

But they will. A teachable, as I said, moment.

Bugs Bunny , May 28, 2020 at 7:05 am

The intention of granting copyrights and patents was noble, to provide a limited monopoly on an invention or literary work for a limited period. IP has been distorted and twisted, extended to insane time limits to protect works that for any common sense thinkers have already become public domain (see, e.g. the Happy Birthday song, Mickey Mouse or re-formulation of a drug that's gone out of patent). Software should have had its own IP regime but that ship has sailed (thanks Bill G.).

Either a giant reform is due or people will ignore the law and infringe the IP. Chinese companies do it with impunity. Maybe they're right to do so.

John Wright , May 28, 2020 at 9:59 am

It appears that the USA has some real competition in the intellectual property game.

Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Intellectual_Property_Indicators

Patent applications for the top 20 offices, 2018
Rank Country Patent applications
1 China 1,542,002
2 U.S. 597,141
3 Japan 313,567
4 South Korea 209,992

If one sums up USA patent applications vs Asia (China, Japan, SK), it is USA 597K vs Asia 2066K.

So Asia is putting in patent applications, vs the USA, at a 3.46 multiple vs the USA.

It will be interesting to see if the USA attitude about the sanctity of intellectual property changes when important key patents are held by the rest of the world.

timbers , May 28, 2020 at 8:33 am

Teachable moments. This could get really interesting if China or a non US & associated puppets develops an effect Covid treatment first.

I will dream of something like this: China develops vaccine, offers it free to US on condition it reduce it's Dept of War & Aggression by 80% and honor all existing and recently existing arms control agreement, and withdraws it's Naval forces though out the world and confines them to the North Atlantic and California coast.

ProNewerDeal , May 28, 2020 at 8:55 am

I wonder if a geopolitically powerful nation/bloc of nations such as China/India/etc might announce that they disregard pharma IP, & announce that they will adhere to the economist Dr Dean Baker-type policy of open source pharma R&D/recipe publication, any private manufacturer may manufacture & sell the resultant pharma SKU. I am referring to any type of pharma or medical device (such as ventilators), not just a COVID-19 vaccine. I would guesstimate that the "soft power" & goodwill generated by such a policy would be extremely beneficial to those nation(s). Furthermore, the US if it tried to retaliate via sanctions or other threats would get a corresponding additional decrease in soft power.

Raj , May 28, 2020 at 9:37 am

To be honest, in some instances Indian govt practices on pharma are quite bad. It is extremely hard in some instances to recoup investments at prices they ask for.

[May 26, 2020] Too much drinking at working place or what -- omething really strange happening at the NY Times: instead of usual warmongering we see critique of military as white supremacist organization

May 26, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , May 25 2020 18:08 utc | 96

Something's happening at the NY Times .

As I pointed out in my 29 above about the front page noting the names and occupations of 1,000 of the 100,000 that have needlessly died due to Trump's Treasonous Do Nothing COVID-19 Policy, today RT reports about a Memorial Day op/ed that disses the Military: "Why Does the U.S. Military Celebrate White Supremacy?"

That made the Pentagon's Spin Master angry, puff out his chest to fume and moan.

There's not much to the RT report, but I can't recall any similar display done before by the NY Times . IMO, something's happened within the Top Office and it seems to be aimed at Trump.

Of course, I'd never have known about any such happening if it hadn't been for the reporting by RT & Global Times .

[May 24, 2020] Wouldn't it be more useful to allocate $ 250,000 to save someone's lives instead of "Exposing Russian Health Disinformation"

$250K can buy a lot of masks, probably over million ;-)
May 24, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

moscowexile May 24, 2020 at 4:10 am

Have they nothing better to do than peddle their Russophobia?

Wouldn't it be more useful to allocate $ 250,000 to save someone's lives, @StateDept ? Instead of "Exposing Russian Health Disinformation"
➡️ https://t.co/Hv3CydUgBX

📸 Medical aid 🇷🇺✈️🇺🇸 in NYC and Moscow pic.twitter.com/BVFxDVJJAH

-- Russia in USA 🇷🇺 (@RusEmbUSA) May 23, 2020

[May 24, 2020] Shadow of coronavirus over the US Presedential elections

Did Trump really lost "Over 65" voting block? If so he is cooked.
May 24, 2020 | www.globaltimes.cn

"The American people are miserable amid the epidemic, and their president is an eccentric who does not care about the safety of ordinary people and is good at passing the buck," Li said.

Many analysts have noted the epidemic in the US might not end before the US election , and Trump's repeated emphasis on work resumption would not take off as long as the coronavirus enjoys freedom to spread.

... ... ...

Ni Feng, director of the institute of American studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, told the Global Times the death notice of COVID-19 victims on the New York Times' front page could "deal a fatal blow to Trump's re-election" as most of the names on the front page were elderly people, his potential voters.

The elderly are always conservative, and thus most are potentially Trump's voters, Ni opined.

The voter turnout of the elderly is also higher than young people, said Ni, noting Trump's behavior will make the firmest supporters change their mind, "facing the crisis of life."

[May 24, 2020] Why Russiagate Still Matters by Rob Urie

The concept of managerial class liberals (PMC - abbrevation which probably means "project management class" ??? ) as the core of Clinton wing of the Democrtic Party is an interesting one.
Notable quotes:
"... At the height of the Russiagate hysteria, as charges were flying that the 'attack' was worse than Pearl Harbor and 9/11 rolled into one, the class that had filled military recruiting stations following these earlier events was notably quiet. The faction that believed the charges, managerial class liberals (PMC), still substantially believes them despite none of the evidence put forward to support them holding up under examination. ..."
"... The Iraq War and the Great Recession created political divisions that are unlikely to be resolved without a redistribution of political and economic power downward. ..."
"... By the time the Great Recession struck in 2007, the U.S. war against Iraq was widely understood to be a strategic and military blunder, murderous almost beyond comprehension, and based on lies from American officials. ..."
"... Prior to this -- in the early 1990s, the New Democrats had made a strategic decision to tie their lot to the 'new economy' of Wall Street. Recruiting suburban Republicans into the Democratic Party was old news by Bill Clinton's second term. The PMC was made the ideological core of the Party. This helps explain the substantial overlap between the 'liberal hawks' who would some years later support George W. Bush's war against Iraq and the Russiagate truthers who were tied through class interests to its orthodoxies. ..."
"... While Democrat versus Republican or left versus right are most often used to distinguish Russiagate proponents and believers from skeptics, it was the urban and suburban PMC that gets its news from the establishment press -- the New York Times, Washington Post and NPR, that believed and supported the story. As it happens, the PMC and rich are the demographic that these news sources serve . Class connotes substantively different lived experience. The Russiagate true believers have benefitted from official connections and the skeptics and large majority of those disinterested in Russiagate haven't. ..."
"... As one who spent years using scientific methods to conduct empirical research, 1) it is as easy to lie with evidence as without it and 2) every source for the Russiagate charges that I followed tied back to the DNC, the CIA or its NGO affiliates like the Atlantic Council. These are political actors, not disinterested parties. The method of reporting is to state charges in the headline, and then to correctly state that official sources claim that the headline charges are true in the body of the article. This leaves the impression that evidence supports the headline charges with no actual evidence having been presented. Deference to authority isn't evidence. ..."
"... As I laid out in 2018 here , the role of the CIA in oil and gas geopolitics ties the motives for demonizing Russia to U.S. machinations in Ukraine and to weapons production and distribution as the business of U.S. based corporations. Further back, while the George W. Bush administration's war against Iraq was a strategic, military, moral and humanitarian disaster, oligarchs and corporate executives made personal fortunes from it. This 'model' of the modern state acting on behalf of business interests ties all the way back to the alleged pre-capitalism of mercantilism. ..."
"... The PMC is the service class of this state-capitalism, with corporate lawyers, tech workers, Wall Street traders and middle managers whose livelihoods and identities are tied to their class position through these jobs. ..."
"... This difference in lived experience explains why the PMC saw the Wall Street bailouts as both necessary and effective, while much of the rest of the country didn't. Wall Street is the functional core of the PMC economy through the process of financialization. ..."
"... The tendency to vote rises with family income. The well to do elected Donald Trump, as they do every president. As the machinations to make Joe Biden the Democrat's candidate in 2020 suggest, the poor can vote for their choice to represent the interests of the rich, but not their own ..."
"... Russiagate was and is defense of a class realm, of the power of the rich and the PMC to do as they please without the political chatter of the 'little people' or the populist pretensions of Donald Trump. ..."
"... While it seems evident now that Trump was never more than a minor inconvenience in the CIA's plans for murder, mayhem, and world domination, this wasn't evident at the outset of his tenure in the White House. John Brennan and James Clapper have demonstrated over long careers that the well-behaved fascism of corporate political control, for profit militarism, targeted and occasionally brutal repression of the 'little people' and democracy in name only, are fine with them. ..."
"... That none of the Russiagate charges turned out to have merit has had no determinable political impact to date. Its central protagonists knew they were telling lies (links above) all along. Not considered by the Russiagate acolytes is that those telling lies weren't lying to the marginally literate 'fascists' who should in elite theory have been the easiest to fool. Those people don't spend their days reading the New York Times and listening to NPR. They were lying to the educated elite. And lest this elite imagine that it was in on the lies -- they quite conspicuously believed every word of them. ..."
May 22, 2020 | www.counterpunch.org

A thought experiment with a purpose is to ask: if a group of former Directors of the CIA, NSA and FBI put forward a story about a malevolent foreign power acting against the U.S. without providing evidence that their story is true, who would believe them? While this wasn't precisely the setup for Russiagate, all of the former Directors came forward as former Directors of intelligence agencies, not as private citizens. And the information they presented was compiled as opposition research for a political campaign. It might have (did) provided a basis for further inquiry, but it wasn't evidence as it was presented.

Oddly, ironically even, the part of the population that in earlier history would have taken former government officials at their word and been ready to fight, kill, or die to right this alleged wrong, was circumspect in the case of Russiagate. At the height of the Russiagate hysteria, as charges were flying that the 'attack' was worse than Pearl Harbor and 9/11 rolled into one, the class that had filled military recruiting stations following these earlier events was notably quiet. The faction that believed the charges, managerial class liberals (PMC), still substantially believes them despite none of the evidence put forward to support them holding up under examination.

This seeming role reversal of managerial class liberals being whipped into a nationalistic fervor while the rest of the country looked away was a long time coming. Trump loathing explains why liberals want Donald Trump gone from office, but not the nationalistic fervor or the studied disinterest of the rest of the country in the 'attack' by a foreign power. The receptivity, or lack thereof, of these political factions (classes) to official proclamations is the result of lived history. The Iraq War and the Great Recession created political divisions that are unlikely to be resolved without a redistribution of political and economic power downward.

Graph: As was much reported at the time, the Great Recession was orders of magnitude more economically destructive than prior post-WWII recessions. Both the severity and persistence of unemployment were far outside of the post-War experience. At the time of the 2016 election, long-term unemployment had still not returned to pre-recession levels. Its levels and impact were differentiated by class, with employment amongst the PMC, composed largely of liberal Democrats, quickly returning to pre-recession levels. while working class employment permanently disappeared or was turned into gig jobs. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve.

Up through the U.S. war against Iraq, working class men joined the military and fought American wars while the rich and professional classes got educational deferments or a doctor's note claiming one or another exemption-worthy malady to do the hard work of 'changing the system from within.' Even with the class-blind farce of a 'volunteer' military, there came a time around 2006 when the intersection of official lies and body bags accumulated to the point where a righteous rebellion against official power took hold amongst the 'lesser' classes. Barack Obama won election in 2008 based in part on his carefully worded rejection of wars of choice.

By the time the Great Recession struck in 2007, the U.S. war against Iraq was widely understood to be a strategic and military blunder, murderous almost beyond comprehension, and based on lies from American officials. And it was far from being resolved. For structural reasons including three-plus decades of planned deindustrialization, the systematic weakening of labor's power and the social safety net, and the partitioning of the economy into financialized and not financialized sectors, the bailouts of Wall Street produced different outcomes by class, with the PMC seeing its fortunes quickly restored while the working class was left to languish.

Prior to this -- in the early 1990s, the New Democrats had made a strategic decision to tie their lot to the 'new economy' of Wall Street. Recruiting suburban Republicans into the Democratic Party was old news by Bill Clinton's second term. The PMC was made the ideological core of the Party. This helps explain the substantial overlap between the 'liberal hawks' who would some years later support George W. Bush's war against Iraq and the Russiagate truthers who were tied through class interests to its orthodoxies.

To tie this together, the Americans who died, were permanently disabled or who lost family members and friends in the U.S. war against Iraq, also found themselves on the wrong side of the class war that began in the 1980s with deindustrialization. By the time of the Great Recession, working class labor was forced to contend with long-term unemployment (graph above) or with the perpetual insecurity of the gig economy. Contrariwise, those whose class position meant that they had 'better things to do' than to volunteer to serve in Iraq had their fortunes quickly restored in the Great Recession through government bailouts.

While Democrat versus Republican or left versus right are most often used to distinguish Russiagate proponents and believers from skeptics, it was the urban and suburban PMC that gets its news from the establishment press -- the New York Times, Washington Post and NPR, that believed and supported the story. As it happens, the PMC and rich are the demographic that these news sources serve . Class connotes substantively different lived experience. The Russiagate true believers have benefitted from official connections and the skeptics and large majority of those disinterested in Russiagate haven't.

Referred to, but not yet addressed, is the complete failure of the Russiagate evidence to match the DNC / establishment press / national security state storylines. From collusion between the Russian government and Donald Trump to emails leaked to, and then published by, Wikileaks to the Russian troll farm and its ties to the GRU (Russian intelligence), none of these theories have been supported by the evidence offered. And most of the political actors who spent years promoting them knew they weren't true before Donald Trump even took office.

As one who spent years using scientific methods to conduct empirical research, 1) it is as easy to lie with evidence as without it and 2) every source for the Russiagate charges that I followed tied back to the DNC, the CIA or its NGO affiliates like the Atlantic Council. These are political actors, not disinterested parties. The method of reporting is to state charges in the headline, and then to correctly state that official sources claim that the headline charges are true in the body of the article. This leaves the impression that evidence supports the headline charges with no actual evidence having been presented. Deference to authority isn't evidence.

This kind of journalism isn't just poor reporting. It is either naively trusting of official sources or it is intended to deceive. Given how little follow-up has been done on the serial failures of the evidence, the most probable answer is that it is straight-up propaganda. But the conception of propaganda that the facts support requires something like a unified state interest, as well as an explanation of how and why the establishment press serves as a permanent conduit for official disinformation. Given that an elected President was the target of the Russiagate campaign, the unified state interest theory doesn't work.

More broadly, the neoliberal project seems to have been modeled on the Marxist / Leninist conception of the state as existing to promote the interests of prominent capitalists. Beginning around the time of Bill Clinton's election to the presidency, the privatization of government services led to the creation of a public-private amalgam composed of PMC workers who perform state functions like domestic spying for the CIA and the NSA. Russiagate certainly appears from its motives, sources, 'facts' and constituency, to have been carried out by functionaries in this public-private amalgam who saw it as their right to reverse the outcome of the 2016 election.

As I laid out in 2018 here , the role of the CIA in oil and gas geopolitics ties the motives for demonizing Russia to U.S. machinations in Ukraine and to weapons production and distribution as the business of U.S. based corporations. Further back, while the George W. Bush administration's war against Iraq was a strategic, military, moral and humanitarian disaster, oligarchs and corporate executives made personal fortunes from it. This 'model' of the modern state acting on behalf of business interests ties all the way back to the alleged pre-capitalism of mercantilism.

The PMC is the service class of this state-capitalism, with corporate lawyers, tech workers, Wall Street traders and middle managers whose livelihoods and identities are tied to their class position through these jobs. Through the social partitions of class, they are free to have self-flattering politics that have no bearing on how their lives are lived. Identity politics like 'ending racism' have no bearing on who their co-workers are, who their neighbors are or who their children attend school with. Class determines these. This largely explains why beliefs, rather than acts, are the currency of this politics. Class is invisible for those who never encounter, or more precisely see, the economic and social consequences of capitalism on different classes.

This difference in lived experience explains why the PMC saw the Wall Street bailouts as both necessary and effective, while much of the rest of the country didn't. Wall Street is the functional core of the PMC economy through the process of financialization. That the vast majority of the country works and lives far from this functional core makes it the center of the PMC economy, not of the broader economy. And the bailouts 'worked' in the sense that they quickly restored PMC jobs and bonuses. That they topped off four decades of declining fortunes for working class workers (graph above) was hidden behind economic aggregates.

The endless reading of the political tea leaves over Donald Trump's electoral victory, over whether it was a dispossessed working class or Republican plutocrats that brought him to victory, is the analytical equivalent of the debate over the economic impact of the bailouts. Rich people vote, poor people don't (graph below). Electoral politics is a struggle that takes place amongst the rich and the PMC. The visceral disdain the PMC has shown for the 'little people' throughout Russiagate is the product of four decades of class warfare launched from above, not the start of it.

Graph: The tendency to vote rises with family income. The well to do elected Donald Trump, as they do every president. As the machinations to make Joe Biden the Democrat's candidate in 2020 suggest, the poor can vote for their choice to represent the interests of the rich, but not their own. This gives credence to Thomas Ferguson's 'investment theory' of politics. The rich vote to protect their investment in political outcomes. Source: econofact.org.

Russiagate was and is defense of a class realm, of the power of the rich and the PMC to do as they please without the political chatter of the 'little people' or the populist pretensions of Donald Trump.

While it seems evident now that Trump was never more than a minor inconvenience in the CIA's plans for murder, mayhem, and world domination, this wasn't evident at the outset of his tenure in the White House. John Brennan and James Clapper have demonstrated over long careers that the well-behaved fascism of corporate political control, for profit militarism, targeted and occasionally brutal repression of the 'little people' and democracy in name only, are fine with them.

What they and the PMC do object to is any notion of democracy that doesn't leave them in control of everything that it allegedly exists to determine. If elected leaders believe they have a legitimate reason for taking military action, why do they resort to using political and psychological coercion (like Russiagate) rather than taking their case to the people? If other, much poorer, countries can run free and fair elections, why can't the U.S.? And why are corporate representatives allowed to craft public policies when their interests diverge from the public's?

That none of the Russiagate charges turned out to have merit has had no determinable political impact to date. Its central protagonists knew they were telling lies (links above) all along. Not considered by the Russiagate acolytes is that those telling lies weren't lying to the marginally literate 'fascists' who should in elite theory have been the easiest to fool. Those people don't spend their days reading the New York Times and listening to NPR. They were lying to the educated elite. And lest this elite imagine that it was in on the lies -- they quite conspicuously believed every word of them.

That Brennan, Clapper and company are everything that liberals claim to hate about Donald Trump -- tacky talk show hosts who spout whatever bullshit comes to mind if they think it will close the deal, suggests that Trump himself would be a #Resistance hero if he had run as a Democrat. Otherwise, bright lights on the left can't seem to get past the notion that the establishment press always reports bullshit when doing so is politically convenient. Reporting what power says rather than what it does is to be a mouthpiece for power. That is what the establishment press does, and that is why it is considered the 'legitimate' source.

As befits this moment in history, there are no generally applicable lessons to be drawn from Russiagate. Its central protagonists have already moved on to the 'restoring integrity to the White House' grift. By making the election a choice between getting ass cancer or shingles, Biden or Trump -- you decide which is which, the nation has reached a zenith of sorts.

This type of moment produced punk rock in an earlier age. Again, as befits the age, we now have the moment without the punk rock. As the existential philosophers had it, despair is our friend. At least that's what Putin tells me.

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics is published by CounterPunch Books.More articles by: Rob Urie Join the debate on Facebook

[May 24, 2020] Did coronavirus cooked Trump, including the erosion of his support by evangelicals?

May 24, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Po litico says that some recent polls showing the president's support among his white Christian base is eroding has prompted Trump to call for churches to re-open. Excerpts:

The anxiety over Trump's standing with the Christian right surfaced after a pair of surveys by reputable outfits earlier this month found waning confidence in the administration's coronavirus response among key religious groups, with a staggering decline in the president's favorability among white evangelicals and white Catholics. Both are crucial constituencies that supported Trump by wide margins in 2016 and could sink his reelection prospects if their turnout shrinks this fall.

The polls paint a bleak picture for Trump, who has counted on broadening his religious support by at least a few percentage points to compensate for weakened appeal with women and suburban populations. One GOP official said the dip in the president's evangelical support also appeared in internal party polling, but disputed the notion that it had caused panic. Another person close to the campaign described an April survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, which showed a double-digit decline in Trump's favorability among white evangelicals (-11), white Catholics (-12) and white mainline protestants (-18) from the previous month, as "pretty concerning."

More:

Following the PRRI survey, which was conducted while Trump was a dominant presence at televised daily briefings by his administration's coronavirus task force, Pew Research Center released new data last week that showed a 7-point increase from April to May in white Catholics who disapprove of Trump's response to the Covid-19 crisis and a 6-point decline among white evangelicals who previously gave him positive marks.

The open-the-churches call from Trump today is just rhetorical. The president doesn't have the power to re-open them; state governments do. The president is trying to send a signal that he is on the side of churchgoers. Not sure that's going to do the trick. From Politico:

It's unlikely that critics of church closings alone are responsible for the decline in Trump's favorability among critical religious demographics. According to the Pew survey, 43 percent of white evangelicals and 52 percent of white Catholics think the current restrictions on public activity in their areas are appropriate versus 42 percent and 31 percent, respectively, who think fewer restrictions would be better. Greater shares of white evangelicals and white Catholics also said they are more afraid about their state governments lifting restrictions on public activity too soon than they are about leaving the restrictions in place for too long.

Read it all.

Maybe the truth is that conservative Christians may prefer Trump to Biden on issues that matter to them, but his handling of the global pandemic overrides everything else this year. No doubt that many Christian voters would vote Trump no matter how he performed on pandemic response. Andrew Sullivan writes today:

A year ago precisely, Trump's approval rating was, in FiveThirtyEight's poll of polls, 53.8 percent disapprove, 41.1 percent approve. This week, the spread was 53.1 percent disapprove and 43 percent approve. Almost identical. None of the events of the last year -- impeachment, plague, economic collapse -- have had anything but a trivial impact on public opinion.

Sullivan unspools a merciless reel of Trump's failures in the crisis -- really crushing stuff. TAC's Bob Merry wrote earlier this week that Trump will probably lose this fall because he has not been a very good president. Excerpt:

It is true also that Trump's knot of popular support–about 43 percent of the electorate, based on approval surveys–is remarkably solid, willing to accept just about anything he does or says so long as he continues to attack those dastardly elites.

But presidential elections also don't turn on any incumbent's base of support. Reelection requires that a president build upon that base and create a governing coalition by bringing in new converts through Oval Office achievement. Richard Nixon, a 43 percent president following the 1968 election, pulled to his party much of the George Wallace constituency, nearly 14 percent of the popular vote in 1968. The result was a reelection landslide. Similarly, following the 1980 election Ronald Reagan pulled to his banner the so-called Reagan Democrats, which contributed to his margin of victory in numerous congressional battles and in his own landslide reelection in 1984.

Or consider the case of Bill Clinton, like Nixon a 43 percent president after his 1992 victory against incumbent George H. W. Bush and upstart candidate Ross Perot, who garnered 19 percent of the popular vote. Clinton had his head handed to him in the 1994 midterm elections following a sub-par performance during his first two years in office. But after that he brilliantly calibrated his leadership to capture a significant portion of the Perot vote. Thus did he build on his base through performance in office and become a two-term president.

Trump has proved himself incapable of this kind of political calibration. He can't even talk to those Americans who might be receptive to his policies but haven't yet joined up. He talks only to his base.

This is true. If Trump gets bad news, he blames the messenger. He attacked Fox News today over a poll showing him behind Biden nationally -- as if reporting what their poll actually found was an act of disloyalty. As Sullivan writes,

Directly challenging him, even when his numbers are wrong, appears to erode Mr. Trump's trust, according to former officials, and ultimately he stops listening. In other words, the officials who tell him things he doesn't want to believe are soon sidelined or fired.

Again, everybody knows that there is a solid rock of immovable Trump voters -- I'm guessing that the 44 percent of Republicans who believe that Bill Gates wants to inject microchips into people with a coronavirus vaccine are part of that crowd -- but they are not enough to win Trump a second term. What about everybody else? Why are those Christian voters who had a favorable opinion of Trump now abandoning him? I'd say a lot of it has to do with exhaustion. The country is facing a crisis like none it has seen in a century. It is crashing the economy. We can re-open, but if people start getting sick again, everybody's going to stay home. These people who are normally inclined to Trump, but now going off of him -- they're going to make the difference between victory and defeat for the president. And they're worn out with all this instability, and the stupid, pointless drama.

I mean, look at this. Whatever you think of Jeff Sessions, he stood by Trump early, when few others in Washington did. But he made the mistake of putting duty to the law above personal loyalty to Trump. This is the kind of thing that once upon a time, conservatives thought worth supporting. Trump has never forgiven him for it. Sessions is running for his old Senate seat back -- and Trump is trying to keep him from getting it. Look:

. @realdonaldtrump Look, I know your anger, but recusal was required by law. I did my duty & you're damn fortunate I did. It protected the rule of law & resulted in your exoneration. Your personal feelings don't dictate who Alabama picks as their senator, the people of Alabama do. https://t.co/QQKHNAgmiE

-- Jeff Sessions (@jeffsessions) May 23, 2020

See what I mean? What is the point of doing this to Jeff Sessions, except spite? I mean, come on, Jeff Sessions? Really? There are a certain number of conservatives who are just fed up with crap like this, and can't stand the thought of four more years of it.

That's my guess -- but then, I'm talking about somebody like myself: never a fan of Trump, and genuinely frightened about what a Democrat in the White House would do, especially if the Dems take the Senate (which they will likely do if Trump loses in a landslide). But nobody knows what the future holds for the country in this pandemic, either in terms of public health or the economy. Can we risk four more years of this chaos and craziness and overall incompetence, especially not knowing what's ahead on the virus and the economy? Is that prospect scarier than a Democratic president and Democratic Senate naming and confirming judges?

Maybe. I did not imagine anything like this in January, but then, I didn't imagine that we would get to Memorial Day weekend with almost 100,000 Americans dead, and 40 million unemployed.

UPDATE: Reader Daniel (Not Larison)'s comment resonates with me:

This Pandemic, and the response to it, and the response of the public to the response, has left me utterly exhausted.

My Facebook feed is getting crammed with my conservative friend's fear-mongering about how (a) the virus is just a "cold", (b) the official death counts are greatly exaggerated (through wide-spread incompetence and fraud), (c) the left is using this crisis to destroy our freedoms, (d) masks are tyranny, (e) Trump's response has been perfect, (f) blue state governors want to gain power and destroy their economies just to make Trump look bad, and (g) the people who died would have died from something else any way. Sprinkled among these responses are things like the Gates microchip thing, 5g causes the virus, it's really Obama's fault, etc.

Sometimes they post some actual true information, like the errors of 4 states in double-counting positive test results or that congressional democrats did try to pack the COVID-19 relief bill with a wishlist of progressive causes. But mostly I see wild assertions and baseless accusations. Anyone who agrees with Trump is smart and can be trusted, anyone who disagrees with him is stupid and/or evil.

It truly is remarkable how even this kind of a crisis has been politicized. There is nearly a perfect correlation between COVID-19 skepticism and Trump support. Tens of thousands of health professionals and medical examiners committing fraud or incompetent by including COVID-19 as a cause of death? Certainly, if it makes Trump look bad. Dozens of other nations adopting similar policies to blue governors? Yeah, they're crashing their economies because they hate Trump, too.

It is utter madness. Rather than respecting genuine differences in opinion, rather than arguing with facts and data, we are responding with hatred, contempt, and raw emotion.

The left certainly is not above this–as we have seen in issues like transgenderism and Project 1619, the left certainly has engaged in this and continues to do so. I've lost count of how many liberal friends I've had to stop following on Facebook because of their utter contempt not just of Trump, but of anyone who would dare express support for him or his policies. And their cursing like sailors they wear like a badge of honor, as of it's a mark of liberation.

Weimar America, truly. We're facing a dual crisis of health and economic collapse that we hadn't seen in a century, and rather than rising to the occasion, many of us are just attacking each other. It reminds me of what Josephus wrote in "The Jewish War" about the Jews, under siege by Roman forces in an incredibly over packed Jerusalem, were busy killing each other rather than facing the enemies outside.

Perhaps I am just a pessimist. Certainly not all Americans are rigidly divided into Team Red and Team Blue–maybe not even the majority. But enough are for me to lose much of my hope for the future of this country.

Yet I know God is in control, and this could very well be a manifestation of his judgment on our wicked, wicked culture. Or even from a secular perspective, our culture has built such a toxic response to crisis that we cannot survive. Either way, without change, I cannot see us surviving as a unified nation and people (if we truly are any more) too far into the future.


William Anderson a day ago

Rod, there is one thing you left out of the article: Democrats have made it absolutely clear that they hate white evangelicals and their campaign rhetoric will be quite incendiary on any issues of Christianity and society. At best, they will tell evangelicals that they should be more like the so-called Religious Left (Sojourners, Natalie Bolz-Weber, etc.) and at worst, they will sound like Beto O'Rourke when he called for taxing churches that did not change their theology to welcome homosexuality and transgenderism.

Biden already has declared that transgender rights are "today's civil rights issue," and I expect him to double down on his commitment there. Furthermore, given his tendency to say outrageous things, you can bet he will be going right up to the line to where he declares the Bible to be hate speech, and he is going to outright threaten evangelicals. He will go radical on abortion rights and let it be known that churches that do not support open-ended abortions to the time of birth (paid for by taxpayers) are going to face the wrath of his administration.

Does anyone believe Biden will be silent on these issues or be anything but in-your-face incendiary? Now, Donald Trump will not respond very well, since Trump doesn't respond very well on anything and he almost surely will say and do things that will partially neutralize this advantage that Biden will drop into his lap. Nonetheless, Joe Biden will be absolutely clear that he hates evangelicals and means to do them harm if he is elected. Given that much of secular America feels the same way, it probably will get him votes on the left.

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Beowulf 21 hours ago
In political years, five months is like a few generations these days. Trump is not anyone's idea of an effective president but I think it is way too early to see how corona affects him. I suspect most of his supporters think this is a hoax anyway and the people really freaked out by corona weren't voting for Trump in the first place.

As to Trump's performance on corona, how is that going to be assessed? I'd assume by lives lost and economic damage. But corona has hit a lot of countries. If Trump's bumblings actually had an effect, how would we know except by comparison? In the good 'ol moneyball stats there is a
metric called "value over replacement player" (VORP) where you compare the performance your player in question to the performance you would get from the average replacement. Just because you are disappointed in the performance of your player doesn't mean you can expect to get much
better from replacing him. It could turn out he's close to the average.

So if we are looking at stats to assess Trump, we are gonna have to moneyball it. Which leader are we going to compare Trump to? Which country "did things right"? What's our baseline? Our average replacement player? I don't think any of us can say right now which countries did things right. It is too early, we don't know enough about corona and we don't know the ways in which the decisions of leaders have affected the outcome or failed to affect it. In terms of deaths per million, U.S. seems pretty average. Plenty of countries in Europe with leaders who "listen to experts" have far higher deaths per million at the moment. Belgium, Sweden, Netherlands, UK, Italy, France, Spain all look worse than us.

None of this is to attribute any real skill to Trump, but in a situation where there is no prospective
criteria by which to identify who has the wisdom to navigate the situation (only retrospective analysis of the data of countries that all tried different things) you might rather be lucky than good.

Heroic Fool 21 hours ago
I'm genuinely puzzled as to where you and Politico are coming to this conclusion based on the evidence presented. Looking at the data used in the article, it appears that Trump's approval rating among certain groups felt a bump around the time when the main COVID panic started, and then, a month later decreased to....where it was at the beginning of the year. His overall approval/disapproval rating is still more or less the same as it had been throughout his presidency, and more interestingly, Trump's approval among his "core base" has increased significantly compared to 2017, not to mention 2015.

The other key fact embedded in the data is that Trump's approval among certain groups was still considerably low during November 2016 , much lower than it is today for example. This speaks to the simple truth that the majority of people who vote for Trump aren't necessarily that fond of the man, but they still pulled the lever for him. Until there is hard evidence that the number of people who absolutely will not vote for Trump increases, we can't make any conclusions as to how more or less likely Trump's chances are in November.

One last item to note is that the worst cases by far occurred in heavily Democratic districts, and, as the reports explained, were the main areas where this loss of support among Christians was reported. On the one hand, it's very likely that these people, to be blunt, wouldn't have had much chance at pushing their districts to the Republican side anyway and thus their support is not nearly as important as those in swing states. On the other hand, to be a bit cheeky, given how poorly Democrat-run areas have fared in this crisis, why on earth would you want another Democrat in the highest executive office?

Megan S 20 hours ago
I thought we'd seen into Trump's soul over the past five years, but the way he's revealing himself now is astounding. The man is just unraveling, all his spitefulness and sociopathies bubbling to the surface. There's nothing left to him now but his impotent rage. Maybe the people who didn't want to see the truth of the man can't help but see now.
Siarlys Jenkins Megan S 3 hours ago
He's a failure, on a world stage, and his self-image is that he's a genius whose wise leadership will bring us all peace, contentment and prosperity. Naturally, he's throwing a temper tantrum and lashing out in all directions.
MacCheerful 20 hours ago
I think you underestimate the power of fear and self-delusion. Nearly all Republicans have been convinced that all Democrats are nearly satanic. For the next week conservative media will dwell relentlessly and obsessively on Biden's recent stupid statement while ignoring whatever additional nonsense comes out of the White House. (Did you know there's a recent study showing that widespread use of hydroxychloroquine (sp?) is probably bad? You wouldn't if you read conservative media) It's strange to live in a country where a substantial number of people can no longer see the good in other citizens, but here we are
Rod Dreher Moderator MacCheerful 6 hours ago
Do you not see that most Democrats regard Republicans in the same way? This has been documented.
MacCheerful Rod Dreher 6 hours ago
Oh absolutely. Speaking for myself only, I regard Republican leadership, people like Mitch McConnell, Pompeo, and of course our president as various mixtures of stupid and evil, and their more devoted followers as pretty close to the same. The people who vote Republican because they always vote Republican and don't pay much attention to politics, like members of my family, I regard simply as incurious, but as family I still love them.

But I still think Democrats are a lot more justified in their disdain, as implied by Kevin Drum in a recent post:

https://www.motherjones.com...

Did you know the candidate for the U.S. Senate in Oregon is a Q follower? And that when the National Review advised Republicans to abandon her the majority of the comments on the page retorted that Democrats are worse and more deluded and more crazy than Q?

Daniel (not Larrison) 15 hours ago
This Pandemic, and the response to it, and the response of the public to the response, has left me utterly exhausted.

My Facebook feed is getting crammed with my conservative friend's fear-mongering about how (a) the virus is just a "cold", (b) the official death counts are greatly exaggerated (through wide-spread incompetence and fraud), (c) the left is using this crisis to destroy our freedoms, (d) masks are tyranny, (e) Trump's response has been perfect, (f) blue state governors want to gain power and destroy their economies just to make Trump look bad, and (g) the people who died would have died from something else any way. Sprinkled among these responses are things like the Gates microchip thing, 5g causes the virus, it's really Obama's fault, etc.

Sometimes they post some actual true information, like the errors of 4 states in double-counting positive test results or that congressional democrats did try to pack the COVID-19 relief bill with a wishlist of progressive causes. But mostly I see wild assertions and baseless accusations. Anyone who agrees with Trump is smart and can be trusted, anyone who disagrees with him is stupid and/or evil.

It truly is remarkable how even this kind of a crisis has been politicized. There is nearly a perfect correlation between COVID-19 skepticism and Trump support. Tens of thousands of health professionals and medical examiners committing fraud or incompetent by including COVID-19 as a cause of death? Certainly, if it makes Trump look bad. Dozens of other nations adopting similar policies to blue governors? Yeah, they're crashing their economies because they hate Trump, too.

It is utter madness. Rather than respecting genuine differences in opinion, rather than arguing with facts and data, we are responding with hatred, contempt, and raw emotion.

The left certainly is not above this--as we have seen in issues like transgenderism and Project 1619, the left certainly has engaged in this and continues to do so. I've lost count of how many liberal friends I've had to stop following on Facebook because of their utter contempt not just of Trump, but of anyone who would dare express support for him or his policies. And their cursing like sailors they wear like a badge of honor, as of it's a mark of liberation.

Weimar America, truly. We're facing a dual crisis of health and economic collapse that we hadn't seen in a century, and rather than rising to the occasion, many of us are just attacking each other. It reminds me of what Josephus wrote in "The Jewish War" about the Jews, under siege by Roman forces in an incredibly over packed Jerusalem, were busy killing each other rather than facing the enemies outside.

Perhaps I am just a pessimist. Certainly not all Americans are rigidly divided into Team Red and Team Blue--maybe not even the majority. But enough are for me to lose much of my hope for the future of this country.

Yet I know God is in control, and this could very well be a manifestation of his judgment on our wicked, wicked culture. Or even from a secular perspective, our culture has built such a toxic response to crisis that we cannot survive. Either way, without change, I cannot see us surviving as a unified nation and people (if we truly are any more) too far into the future.

Kessler 14 hours ago
I think Trump entered oval office as a political tabula rasa. Republicans could have moulded him into anything policy-wise, since he lacked knowledge of washington insider on how to run things. So they did. Republicans turned him into a traditional, respectable republican corporatist stock market whisperer President(tm). I think Republicans deserve to lose because of their terrible policies and incompetence, though I don't see how democrats deserve to win, because of their terrible policies and incompetence. But then again, it's not like policies matter. As Cuomo demonstrates, all you need is good media coverage. It's frustrating, that Trump is likely going to lose, because his PR is worse, not because his policies have been terrible.
5Miriam9 Kessler 4 hours ago
Republicans didn't have to work too hard given how willfully ignorant Trump is. All he's ever been interested in doing is brandishing his brand and lining his pockets. There's nothing there but endless appetite and resentment. He has no policies save for self-aggrandizement.
David Naas 13 hours ago
Even out of office, he has been exposed to the addictive thrill of cheering crowds, and so he will not fade from the scene. Certain Progressivists are salivating at the prospect of hauling him and his associates through the courts, but that will not stop his rallies, and will only keep his name in lights for a long time.

The Democratic Party leadership - - or "Donorship" - - wants to return to their version of normal, getting rich(er) off globalism. The neocons want to get back to endless wars. And Trump's Troopers will be there, carrying their AR-15 clones to protests and occupying national park rest areas. It will be chaotic. One can easily foresee more "Ruby Ridge" scenarios in our collective future.

Shy of a nation-wide revival of religion or of the civil religion, it won't get better for a long time.

Those who liken this time to how WW1 changed the world forever are partly right. But they miss that the world is always changing forever. And yet it is always the same. Face it, the last half of the 20th Century was an unusually easy time for Americans. We are now moving into what the rest of the world, throughout history, considers normal.

[May 23, 2020] 'Rhetorical hyperbole' and NOT FACT: Court rejects OAN suit over MSNBC host Rachel Maddow's claim about 'Russian propaganda'

Court defined Madcow as professional liar, not a news source
Notable quotes:
"... "the most obsequiously pro-Trump right wing news outlet in America" ..."
"... "really literally paid Russian propaganda." ..."
"... "the Kremlin's official propaganda outlet" ..."
"... "utterly and completely false. ..."
"... "has never been paid or received a penny from Russia or the Russian government," ..."
"... "news and opinions," ..."
"... "makes it more likely that a reasonable viewer would not conclude that the contested statement implies an assertion of objective fact." ..."
May 23, 2020 | www.rt.com
A US judge dismissed a defamation lawsuit by One America News Network against MSNBC over Rachel Maddow's claims that OAN was "literally" Russian propaganda, ruling that her segment was merely "an opinion" and "exaggeration." OAN sued the liberal talk show host and MSNBC for defamation, demanding over $10 million in damages, back in September 2019. The lawsuit was based on the July 22 episode of The Rachel Maddow Show, where Maddow launched a scathing broadside against the conservative television network, labeling it "the most obsequiously pro-Trump right wing news outlet in America" and "really literally paid Russian propaganda."

In the segment, Maddow cited a story by The Daily Beast's Kevin Poulsen about OAN's Kristian Rouz, who has previously contributed to Sputnik as a freelance author. Toeing the general US mainstream line on the Russian media, be it Sputnik or RT, Poulsen branded the Russian news agency "the Kremlin's official propaganda outlet" and said Rouz was once on its "payroll." Shortly after MSNBC's star talent peddled the claim, OAN rejected the allegations as "utterly and completely false. " The outlet, which is owned by the Herring Networks, a small California-based family company, said that it "has never been paid or received a penny from Russia or the Russian government," with its only funding coming from the Herring family.

In their bid to win the case, Maddow herself, MSNBC, Comcast Corporation and NBCUniversal Media did not address the accusation itself - namely, that her claim about OAN was false - but opted to invoke the First Amendment, insisting that the rant should be protected as free speech.

Siding with Maddow, the California district court defined Maddow's show as a mix of "news and opinions," concluding that the manner in which the progressive host blurted out the accusations "makes it more likely that a reasonable viewer would not conclude that the contested statement implies an assertion of objective fact." h

The court said that while Maddow "truthfully" related the story by the Daily Beast, the statement about OAN being funded by the Kremlin was her "opinion" and "exaggeration" of the said article.

While the legal trick helped Maddow to get off the hook without ever trying to defend her initial statement, conservative commentators on social media wasted no time in pointing out that dodging a payout to OAN literally meant admitting that Maddow was not, in fact, news.

[May 22, 2020] Why Trump Will Likely Lose in November

Predictions are difficult, especially about the future. Who wll vote for Creepy Joe? that is the question. But it is true that many people who voted for trump in 2016 hoping for changes will not vote for him. Most will not vote at all. With his foreign policies and smug warmonger Pompeo at the State Department he lost all anti-war independents block. With COVID-19 fiasco he lost a large part of working class -- which was most severely hit by the lockdown as well as small business support.
Notable quotes:
"... Look at how Trump is getting killed among people that don't like either candidate. And how he's losing independents solidly. That's your danger zone, not the left. He won in 2016 in large part because he had those two in the bag. ..."
May 22, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Mitt Romney was treated by the mainstream media with derision and ridicule, portrayed as an out-of-touch plutocrat who babbled about binders full of women. They depicted him as "a wealthy 1950s sitcom dad who liked firing poor people. Trump will attacked in the same way

Donald Trump captured the presidency in 2016 in part because he perceived, alone among presidential contenders that year, that a chasm had opened up between the country's arrogant meritocratic elite and vast numbers of citizens who felt the elites had turned on them and were leading the country astray. But another factor was the perception of many voters that Barack Obama's second term had been a mild failure (following a mild first-term success; hence his 2012 reelection). Incumbent performance in office remains a potent factor in presidential elections.

And that's why Donald Trump likely will lose the presidency come November. His performance, thoroughly at variance from his blustery rhetoric, will have rendered him, in the eyes of a majority of Americans, ineligible for rehire. His is not the kind of record that normally leads to a two-term presidency or to party retention of the White House when the incumbent is not on the ballot. Viewed from this perspective, Trump looks like a goner.

Trump supporters will of course recoil at this prediction. In disbelief, they will point to the intensity of his followers and the fecklessness of his opposition. And it is true that former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic candidate, appears hapless as he hunkers down in his Delaware basement and projects himself with a certain halting awkwardness. But history tells us that voters focus far more on incumbent performance, which can be sharply defined, than on predictions of challenger performance, which are wispy at best.

It is true also that Trump's knot of popular support–about 43 percent of the electorate, based on approval surveys–is remarkably solid, willing to accept just about anything he does or says so long as he continues to attack those dastardly elites.

But presidential elections also don't turn on any incumbent's base of support. Reelection requires that a president build upon that base and create a governing coalition by bringing in new converts through Oval Office achievement.


engineerscotty David Naas 3 days ago

With Trump, I expect a "surprise" (and other various dirty tricks) here on out.

As I've noted before, the Burisma nonsense may end up backfiring. Not only did it get him impeached (even though he wasn't removed from office), but it may innoculate Biden from further such surprises--there will be a presumption, if anything scandalous comes from out of left field, that it might well be another attempt at rat-f***ing.

(And Biden has been equally fortunate in his accusers from the left; as the Tara Reade allegations seem to be falling apart. He's not entirely in the clear--the vagueness of the allegations prevent Biden from mounting an affirmative defense, such as an alibi, but right now he seems to be winning the credibility battle on that front).

Mother124 engineerscotty 2 days ago
The Tara Reade allegations aren't "falling apart." They're being smothered. They're either ignored, or dismissed with a "Biden says it never happened? Oh, OK....never mind" attitude.
Room_237 David Naas 2 days ago
A QAnnon crazy just won the Oregon GOP senate primary. Not only is Trump losing he is taking the entire GOP down with him. Either the GOP clears up the nuts or the nuts take over.
Mother124 PeteZilla 2 days ago
I agree. Trump has taken politics to a new low. When he's not on teleprompter, his "speeches" are more of a stand-up act where he exaggerates his accomplishments ("the best ever"..."record" everything) and lobs personal insults at his perceived enemies "loser,""incompetent," "the worst").

He has NO intention of expanding his base. He's happy to play to their adoration. And his cultists don't want him to "pivot and change." They cheer him on.

That this is what so many people in this country want from a president is appalling.

TISO_AX2 KeepAmericaGreat! 2 days ago
He proved that in '16. Rather, we did. We the people made it happen. DJT just happens to be the means by which we re-made the American political landscape. Leftist Democrats still haven't caught up.

They learned nothing from 2016 and after...nothing. They still cling to Washington establishment politics like a communist to The Party. Power in a handful of politicians is all that matters to them. They'll sooner or later see that the people are the source of our government.

MPC TISO_AX2 a day ago
TISO you seem like a pretty reasonable guy generally.

Look at how Trump is getting killed among people that don't like either candidate. And how he's losing independents solidly. That's your danger zone, not the left. He won in 2016 in large part because he had those two in the bag.

I'm in those groups and voted for him then - I won't repeat this year. He was a good statement to make in 2016 but for me that's now made. Personally he looks like a real idiot handling a crisis but I don't like his personality cult, I don't like his floppiness with the ruling elite, and I especially don't like his turning immigrants into the white male of the right. I hate idpol and he's just refined a right wing version of it.

My two cents. No doubt I'll be back to voting Republicans in 22 or 24.

Robert Bruce MPC 16 hours ago
Nice post!!!!!!! Trump is indeed losing the indie vote as well as a sliver of the true conservative vote. The guy is only a shade or two better than having a president Camacho from Idiocracy. Trump won both the GOP nomination and the general election because he was the only GOP candidate that said what the majority of GOP voters wanted to hear and was the only candidate that didn't come off as an Establishment clone. On top of that, Hilary was not a well liked candidate(either was Trump) as two thirds of GOP and Dem voters didn't like their candidate, but disliked the other just a bit more. It is sad that we are in the same situation in 2020, in which there really isn't a really good candidate to choose from
Robert Bruce TISO_AX2 16 hours ago
Guy was a moron for his famous line to a GOP crowd insinuating that half the people in the country were freeloaders. Not too far fetched of a statement, but absolutely a campaign killer. They indeed did depict him as a rather wealthy 1950's Mr Cleaver type that was a job killer, but that wasn't far off the mark either. The banking cartel had their boy in office already so there was no need for a change, thus the rather stale, boring, and easily targeted Romney was hung out to dry.
EboTebo PeteZilla 2 days ago
He's NOT stupid, but he's dumb, thick and most of all lazy, too lazy to stand up and do the right thing!
The_Anthropologist_Forensic Bryce David Sylvia 2 days ago • edited
He "defeated" the ISIS Caliphate? And here i was under the impression that Iran was a Shia country and Syria was mostly secular, while ISIS was a product of Salafist and Wahabist American allies like the Saudis?

This commenter epitomizes everything wrong with the Fox News cheerleading devotee. So consumed by the cult of Personality that is Trump and "owning the Libs" that they can't see they have gotten nothing from Trump. No immigration reform, no wall, no end to Middle East adventurism..... Just "tough tweets"

LETS LOOK AT THE FEW THINGS HE HAS DONE...He along with Kim Kardashian put forth the "First Step Act" freeing tens of thousands of mostly inner city felons; the situation in the Middle East exponentially worse "thanks" to his rhetoric, loose usage of missiles on countries WE ARE NOT at war with along with ASSASSINATING NATIONAL HEROES/MILITARY COMMANDERS of other sovereign nations we are not at war with; he passed a corporate tax cut, Trump has focussed on spreading LGBT values to Africa and abroad, and after attacking NAFTA for two decades passed "NAFTA 2.0", and has consistently made this country look even worse than it normally has over the past 40 years.

If Israel isn't your priority in regards to the embassy moves or if your not a corporate head benefiting from Trumps "we need more immigration than ever before" glut of cheap third world labor, then you should see him as an unmitigated disaster. Look beyond the Grifters like Charlie Kirk and Sean Hannity.

FND The_Anthropologist_Forensic 2 days ago
The ISIS caliphate was defeated. ISIS still exists. One cannot destroy an ideology on the battlefield. The caliphate was their "country" that they carved out of Syria. Virtually ALL of the rebels in Syria, even the non-ISIS ones are Sunni, not Shia. The Shia are on the side of the Syrian government. That includes Iran.
JonF311 FND 2 days ago
To be clear, the US did not defeat the "caliphate". That honor goes to Syria and its patron Russia. America was just the cheering section.
Blood Alcohol JonF311 2 days ago • edited
Iran was not mentioned for some reason!
Iranians were the first to recognize ISIL was an arm of Israel/UAE/US axis to destabilize not only Syria but any country that stood up to the axis. Then the Russian read the message on the wall and got involved.
Robert Bruce DukeofAnarchy . 16 hours ago
Of course they did. Any decent economic/business magazine/ web site/blog was saying as far back as last September that the FED was running out of "ammo" to forestall a collapse that was going to happen late this summer or early fall, then the virus hits to take the blame for the poor economy instead of where it belongs and that is with the Federal Reserve and co. Now we are hearing we are going to get QE to infinity and beyond, which basically means the globalists are tanking the dollar for probably a global digital currency sometime in the not too distant future.

[May 22, 2020] System Update with Glenn Greenwald - The Murderous History and Deceitful Function of the CIA

May 22, 2020 | www.youtube.com

The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity The CIA’s Murderous Practices, Disinformation Campaigns, and Interference in

In the weeks before the 2016 presidential election, the most powerful former leaders of the Central Intelligence Agency did everything they could to elect Hillary Clinton and defeat Donald Trump. President Obama’s former acting CIA chief Michael Morrell published a full-throated endorsement of Clinton in the New York Times and claimed “Putin ha[s] recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation,” while George W. Bush’s post-9/11 CIA and NSA Chief, Gen. Michael Hayden, writing in the Washington Post, refrained from endorsing Clinton outright but echoed Morrell by accusing Trump of being a “useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow” and sounding “a little bit the conspiratorial Marxist.” Meanwhile, the intelligence community under James Clapper and John Brennan fed morsels to both the Obama DOJ and the US media to suggest a Trump/Russia conspiracy and fuel what became the Russiagate investigation.

In his extraordinary election-advocating Op-Ed, Gen. Hayden, Bush/Cheney’s CIA Chief, candidly explained the reasons for the CIA’s antipathy for Trump: namely, the GOP candidate’s stated opposition to allowing CIA regime change efforts in Syria to expand as well as his opposition to arming Ukrainians with lethal weapons to fight Russia (supposedly “pro-Putin” positions which, we are now all supposed to forget, Obama largely shared).

As has been true since President Harry Truman’s creation of the CIA after World War II, interfering in other countries and dictating or changing their governments — through campaigns of mass murder, military coups, arming guerrilla groups, the abolition of democracy, systemic disinformation, and the imposition of savage despots — is regarded as a divine right, inherent to American exceptionalism. Anyone who questions that or, worse, opposes it and seeks to impede it (as the CIA perceived Trump was) is of suspect loyalties at best.

The CIA’s antipathy toward Trump continued after his election victory. The agency became the primary vector for anonymous, illegal leaks designed to depict Trump as a Kremlin agent and/or blackmail victim. It worked to ensure the leak of the Steele dossier that clouded at least the first two years of Trump’s presidency. It drove the scam Russiagate conspiracy theories. And before Trump was even inaugurated, open warfare erupted between the president-elect and the agency to the point where Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer explicitly warned Trump on the Rachel Maddow Show that he was risking full-on subversion of his presidency by the agency:

Democrats, early in Trump’s presidency, saw clearly that the CIA had become one of Trump’s most devoted enemies, and thus began viewing them as a valuable ally. Leading out-of-power Democratic foreign policy elites from the Obama administration and Clinton campaign joined forces not only with Bush/Cheney neocons but also former CIA officials to create new foreign policy advocacy groups designed to malign and undermine Trump and promote hawkish confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia. Meanwhile, other ex-CIA and Homeland Security officials, such as John Brennan and James Clapper, became beloved liberal celebrities by being hired by MSNBC and CNN to deliver liberal-pleasing anti-Trump messaging that, on a virtually daily basis, masqueraded as news.

Fair Use Excerpt. Read the rest here.


Arthur Davis , 1 day ago

All covered extensively in Killing Hope , U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, by William Blum

Timothy Lee , 22 hours ago

Oliver Stone's "The Untold History of the US" opened up my eyes to how shameful our history really is. The American Empire is no better then Great Britain, the very power this country was supposed to rise above.

Mehdi Hosseini , 1 day ago

When a system is fully controlled by the big corporation/money every action and move must serve it's master. Some are directly related to their immediate interest and some to prevent any future challenge to it.

Dennis Miller , 1 day ago

let's not forget the Dulles Brothers (CIA & State)

Joe Filter , 1 day ago

Such sad facts. 'Killing Hope' really does describe it.

Cygnus X-321 , 1 day ago

"...At CBS, we had been contacted by the CIA, as a matter of fact, by the time I became the head of the news and public affairs division in 1954 shifts had been established ... I was told about them and asked if I'd carry on with them...." -- Sid Mickelson, CBS News President 1954-61, describing Operation Mockingbird

Jorge Eduardo da Silva Tavares , 1 day ago

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, by John Perkins, was a NYTimes best-seller about the methods CIA use to dominate countries in Latin America and in Asia. John Perkins never was interviewed by Us Media.

[May 21, 2020] Falsification of history as the major goal of propaganda

May 21, 2020 | off-guardian.org

Howard ,

"History," they say, "is written by the winners." But if you want to get at the fundamental flaw, remove the last three words and you have it: "History is written."

Events cannot be written, they can only be lived.

Just as a sun in a picture cannot give heat or light. The problem is that those who live history seldom speak of it, it's much too traumatic for them.

And those who speak voluminously of it most likely did not live it.

kenny gordon ,

Nice comment, Howard.

When my Father [Royal Artillery] was told to stop fighting against my Father-in-Law [Waffen SS], he was sent off to fight against MOSSAD in Palestine he witnessed the brutal treatment handed out to the "indigenous people" and was very reluctant to talk about his experience.. "By way of deception thou shalt do war"..!

[May 21, 2020] Russophobia in the Age of Donald Trump: The Narrative of Trump's "Collusion" with Russia by Andrei P. Tsygankov

May 21, 2020 | www.oxfordscholarship.com

During the US presidential election campaign, American media developed yet another perception of Russia as reflected in the narrative of Trump's collusion with the Kremlin. 1 Having originated in liberal media and building on the previous perceptions of neo-Soviet autocracy and foreign threat, the new perception of Russia was that of the enemy that won the war against the United States. By electing the Kremlin's favored candidate, America was defeated by Russia. As a CNN columnist wrote, "The Russians really are here, infiltrating every corner of the country, with the single goal of disrupting the American way of life." 2 The two assumptions behind the new media narrative were that Putin was an enemy and that Trump was compromised by Putin. The inevitable conclusion was that Trump could not be a patriot and potentially was a traitor prepared to act against US interests.

The new narrative was assisted by the fact that Trump presented a radically different perspective on Russia than Clinton and the US establishment. The American political class had been in agreement that Russia displayed an aggressive foreign policy seeking to destroy the US-centered international order. Influential politicians, both Republicans and Democrats, commonly referred to Russian president Putin as an extremely dangerous KGB spy with no soul. Instead, Trump saw Russia's international interests as not fundamentally different from America's. He advocated that the United States to find a way to align its policies and priorities in defeating terrorism in the Middle East -- a goal that Russia shared -- with the Kremlin's. Trump promised to form new alliances to "unite the civilized world against Radical Islamic Terrorism" and to eradicate it "completely from the face of the Earth." 3 He hinted that he was prepared to revisit the thorny issues of Western sanctions against (p.83) the Russian economy and the recognition of Crimea as a part of Russia. Trump never commented on Russia's political system but expressed his admiration for Putin's leadership and high level of domestic support. 4

Capitalizing on the difference between Trump's views and those of the Democratic Party nominee, Hillary Clinton, the liberal media referred to Trump as the Kremlin-compromised candidate. Commentators and columnists with the New York Times , such as Paul Krugman, referred to Trump as the "Siberian" candidate. 5 Commentators and pundits, including those with academic and political credentials, developed the theory that the United States was under attack. The former ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, wrote in the Washington Post that Russia had attacked "our sovereignty" and continued to "watch us do nothing" because of the partisan divide. He compared the Kremlin's actions with Pearl Harbor or 9/11 and warned that Russia was likely to perform repeat assaults in 2018 and 2020. 6 The historian Timothy Snyder went further, comparing the election of Trump to a loss of war, which Snyder said was the basic aim of the enemy. Writing in the New York Daily News , he asserted, "We no longer need to wonder what it would be like to lose a war on our own territory. We just lost one to Russia, and the consequence was the election of Donald Trump." 7

The election of Trump prompted the liberal media to discuss Russia-related fears. The leading theory was that Trump would now compromise America's interests and rule the country on behalf of Putin. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times called for actions against Russia and praised "patriotic" Republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham for being tough on Trump. 8 MSNBC host Rachel Maddow asked whether Trump was actually under Putin's control. Citing Trump's views and his associates' travel to Moscow, she told viewers, "We are also starting to see (p.84) what may be signs of continuing [Russian] influence in our country, not just during the campaign but during the administration -- basically, signs of what could be a continuing operation." 9 Another New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof, published a column titled "There's a Smell of Treason in the Air," arguing that the FBI's investigation of the Trump presidential campaign's collusion "with a foreign power so as to win an election" was an investigation of whether such collusion "would amount to treason." 10 Responding to Trump's statement that his phone was tapped during the election campaign, the Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum tweeted that "Trump's insane 'GCHQ tapped my phone' theory came from . . . Moscow." McFaul and many others then endorsed and retweeted the message. 11

To many within the US media, Trump's lack of interest in promoting global institutions and his publicly expressed doubts that the Kremlin was behind cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee (DNC) served to exacerbate the problem. Several intelligence leaks to the press and investigations by Congress and the FBI contributed to the image of a president who was not motivated by US interests. The US intelligence report on Russia's alleged hacking of the US electoral system released on January 8, 2017, served to consolidate the image of Russia as an enemy. Leaks to the press have continued throughout Trump's presidency. Someone in the administration informed the press that Trump called Putin to congratulate him on his victory in elections on March 18, 2018, despite Trump's advisers' warning against making such a call. 12

In the meantime, investigations of Trump's alleged "collusion" with Russia were failing to produce substantive evidence. Facts that some associates of Trump sought to meet or met with members of Russia's government did not lead to evidence of sustained contacts or collaboration. It was not proven that the Kremlin's "black dossier" on Trump compiled by British intelligence officer (p.85) Christopher Steele and leaked to CNN was truthful. Russian activity on American social networks such as Facebook and Twitter was not found to be conclusive in determining outcomes of the elections. 13 In February 2018, a year after launching investigation, Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted thirteen Russian nationals for allegedly interfering in the US 2016 presidential elections, yet their connection to Putin or Trump was not established. On March 12, 2018, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Burr stated that he had not yet seen any evidence of collusion. 14 Representative Mike Conaway, the Republican leading the Russia investigation, announced the end of the committee's probe of Russian meddling in the election. 15

Trump was also not acting toward Russia in the way the US media expected. His views largely reflected those of the military and national security establishment and disappointed some of his supporters. 16 The US National Security Strategy and new Defense Strategy presented Russia as a leading security threat, alongside China, Iran, and North Korea. The president made it clear that he wanted to engage in tough bargaining with Russia by insisting on American terms. 17 Instead of improving ties with Russia, let alone acting on behalf of the Kremlin, Trump contributed to new crises in bilateral relations that had to do with the two sides' principally different perceptions. While the Kremlin expected Washington to normalize relations, the United States assumed Russia's weakness and expected it to comply with Washington's priorities regarding the Middle East, Ukraine, and Afghanistan and nuclear and cyber issues. 18 Trump also authorized the largest expulsion of Russian diplomats in US history and ordered several missile strikes against Assad's Russia-supported positions in Syria, each time provoking a crisis in relations with Moscow. Even Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, whom Rachel Maddow suspected of being appointed on Putin's advice to "weaken" the State Department and "bleed out" (p.86) the FBI, 19 was replaced by John Bolton. The latter's foreign policy reputation was that of a hawk, including on Russia. 20

Responding to these developments, the media focused on fears of being attacked by the Kremlin and on Trump not doing enough to protect the country. These fears went beyond the alleged cyber interference in the US presidential elections and included infiltration of American media and social networks and attacks on congressional elections and the country's most sensitive infrastructure, such as electric grids, water-processing plants, banking networks, and transportation facilities. In order to prevent such developments, media commentators and editorial writers recommended additional pressures on the Kremlin and counteroffensive operations. 21 One commentator recommended, as the best defense from Russia's plans to interfere with another election in the United States, launching a cyberattack on Russia's own presidential elections in March 2018, to "disrupt the stability of Vladimir Putin's regime." 22 A New York Times editorial summarized the mood by challenging President Trump to confront Russia further: "If Mr. Trump isn't Mr. Putin's lackey, it's past time for him to prove it." 23 The burden of proof was now on Trump's shoulders. Opposition to the "Collusion" Narrative

In contrast to highly critical views of Russia in the dominant media, conservative, libertarian, and progressive sources offered different assessments. Initially, opposition to the collusion narrative came from the alternative media, yet gradually -- in response to scant evidence of Trump's collusion -- it incorporated voices within the mainstream.

The conservative media did not support the view that Russia "stole" elections and presented Trump as a patriot who wanted to make America great rather than develop "cozy" relationships with (p.87) the Kremlin. Writing in the American Interest , Walter Russell Mead argued that Trump aimed to demonstrate the United States' superiority by capitalizing on its military and technological advantages. He did not sound like a Russian mole. Challenging the liberal media, the author called for "an intellectually solvent and emotionally stable press" and wrote that "if President Trump really is a Putin pawn, his foreign policy will start looking much more like Barack Obama's." 24 Instead of viewing Trump as compromised by the Kremlin, sources such Breitbart and Fox News attributed the blame to the deep state, "the complex of bureaucrats, technocrats, and plutocrats," including the intelligence agencies, that seeks to "derail, or at least to de-legitimize, the Trump presidency" by engaging in accusations and smear campaigns. 25

Echoing Trump's own views, some conservatives expressed their admiration for Putin as a dynamic leader superior to Obama. In particular, they praised Putin for his ability to defend Russia's "traditional values" and great-power status. 26 Neoconservative and paleoconservative publications like the National Review , the Weekly Standard, Human Events Online , and others critiqued Obama's "feckless foreign policy," characterized by "fruitless accommodationism," contrasting it with Putin's skilled and calculative geopolitical "game of chess." 27 A Washington Post / ABC News poll revealed that among Republicans, 75% approved of Trump's approach on Russia relative; 40% of all respondents approved. 28 This did not mean that conservatives and Republicans were "infiltrated" by the Kremlin. Mutual Russian and American conservative influences were limited and nonstructured. 29 The approval of Putin as a leader by American conservatives meant that they shared a certain commonality of ideas and were equally critical of liberal media and globalization. 30

Progressive and libertarian media also did not support the narrative of collusion. Gary Leupp at CounterPunch found the (p.88) narrative to be serving the purpose of reviving and even intensifying "Cold War-era Russophobia," with Russia being an "adversary" "only in that it opposes the expansion of NATO, especially to include Ukraine and Georgia." 31 Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com questioned the narrative by pointing to Russia's bellicose rhetoric in response to Trump's actions. 32 Glenn Greenwald and Zaid Jilani at Intercept reminded readers that, overall, Trump proved to be far more confrontational toward Russia than Obama, thereby endangering America. 33 In particular Trump severed diplomatic ties with Russia, armed Ukraine, appointed anti-Russia hawks, such as ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, National Security Advisor John Bolton, and Secretary of State Michal Pompeo to key foreign policy positions, antagonized Russia's Iranian allies, and imposed tough sanctions against Russian business with ties to the Kremlin. 34

The dominant liberal media ignored opposing perspectives or presented them as compromised by Russia. For instance, in amplifying the view that Putin "stole" the elections, the Washington Post sought to discredit alternative sources of news and commentaries as infiltrated by the Kremlin's propaganda. On November 24, 2016, the newspaper published an interview with the executive director of a new website, PropOrNot, who preferred to remain anonymous, and claimed that the Russian government circulated pro-Trump articles before the election. Without providing evidence on explaining its methodology, the group identified more than two hundred websites that published or echoed Russian propaganda, including WikiLeaks and the Drudge Report , left-wing websites such as CounterPunch, Truthout, Black Agenda Report, Truthdig , and Naked Capitalism , as well as libertarian venues such as Antiwar.com and the Ron Paul Institute. 35 Another mainstream liberal outlet, CNN, warned the American people to be vigilant against the Kremlin's alleged efforts to spread propaganda: "Enormous numbers of (p.89) Americans are not only failing to fight back, they are also unwitting collaborators -- reading, retweeting, sharing and reacting to Russian propaganda and provocations every day." 36

However, voices of dissent were now heard even in the mainstream media. Masha Gessen of the New Yorker said that Trump's tweet about Robert Mueller's indictments and Moscow's "laughing its ass off" was "unusually (perhaps accidentally) accurate." 37 She pointed out that Russians of all ideological convictions "are remarkably united in finding the American obsession with Russian meddling to be ridiculous." 38 The editor of the influential Politico , Blake Hounshell, confessed that he was a Russiagate skeptic because even though "Trump was all too happy to collude with Putin," Mueller's team never found a "smoking gun." 39 In reviewing the book on Russia's role in the 2016 election Russian Roulette , veteran New York Times reporter Steven Lee Myers noted that the Kremlin's meddling "simply exploited the vulgarity already plaguing American political campaigns" and that the veracity of many accusations remained unclear. 40 Explaining Russophobia

The high-intensity Russophobia within the American media, overblown even by the standards of previous threat narratives, could no longer be explained by differences in national values or by bilateral tensions. The new fear of Russia also reflected domestic political polarization and growing national unease over America's identity and future direction.

The narrative of collusion in the media was symptomatic of America's declining confidence in its own values. Until the intervention in Iraq in 2004, optimism and a sense of confidence prevailed in American social attitudes, having survived even the terrorist attack on the United States on September 11, 2001. The (p.90) country's economy was growing and its position in the world was not challenged. However, the disastrous war in Iraq, the global financial crisis of 2008, and Russia's intervention in Georgia in August 2008 changed that. US leadership could no longer inspire the same respect, and a growing number of countries viewed it as a threat to world peace. 41 Internally, the United States was increasingly divided. Following presidential elections in November 2016, 77% of Americans perceived their country as "greatly divided on the most important values." 42 The value divide had been expressed in partisanship and political polarization long before the 2016 presidential elections. 43 The Russia issue deepened this divide. According to a poll taken in October 2017, 63% of Democrats, but just 38% of Republicans, viewed "Russia's power and influence" as a major threat to the well-being of the United States. 44

During the US 2016 presidential elections, Russia emerged as a convenient way to accentuate differences between Democratic and Republican candidates, which in previous elections were never as pronounced or defining. The new elections deepened the partisan divide because of extreme differences between the two main candidates, particularly on Russia. Donald Trump positioned himself as a radical populist promising to transform US foreign policy and "drain the swamp" in Washington. His position on Russia seemed unusual because, by election time, the Kremlin had challenged the United States' position in the world by annexing Crimea, supporting Ukrainian separatism, and possibly hacking the DNC site.

The Russian issue assisted Clinton in stressing her differences from Trump. Soon after it became known that DNC servers were hacked, she embraced the view that Russia was behind the cyberattacks. She accused Russia of "trying to wreak havoc" in the United States and threatened retaliation. 45 In his turn, Trump used Russia to challenge Clinton's commitment to national security (p.91) and ability to serve as commander in chief. In particular, he drew public attention to the FBI investigation into Clinton's use of a private server for professional correspondence, and even noted sarcastically that the Russians should find thirty thousand missing emails belonging to her. The latter was interpreted by many in liberal media and political circles as a sign of Trump's being unpatriotic. 46 Clinton capitalized on this interpretation. She referred to the issue of hacking as the most important one throughout the campaign and challenged Trump to agree with assessments of intelligence agencies that cyberattacks were ordered by the Kremlin. She questioned Trump's commitments to US national security and accused him of being a "puppet" for President Putin. 47 Following Trump's victory, Clinton told donors that her loss should be partly attributed to Putin and the election hacks directed by him. 48

Clinton's arguments fitted with the overall narrative embraced by the mainstream media since roughly 2005 characterizing Russia as abusive and aggressive. Clinton viewed Russia as an oppressive autocratic power that was aggressive abroad to compensate for domestic weaknesses. Previously, in her book Hard Choices , then-secretary of state Clinton described Putin as "thin-skinned and autocratic, resenting criticism and eventually cracking down on dissent and debate." 49 This view was shared by President Obama, who publicly referred to Russia as a "regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors not out of strength but out of weakness." 50 During the election's campaign, Clinton argued that the United States should challenge Russia by imposing a no-fly zone in Syria with the objective of removing Assad from power, strengthening sanctions against the Russian economy, and providing lethal weapons to Ukraine in order to contain the potential threat of Russia's military invasion.

Following the elections, the partisan divide deepened, with liberal establishment attacking the "unpatriotic" Trump. Having (p.92) lost the election, Clinton partly attributed Trump's victory to the role of Russia and advocated an investigation into Trump's ties to Russia. In February 2017 the Clinton-influenced Center for American Progress brought on a former State Department official to run a new Moscow Project. 51 As acknowledged by the New Yorker , members of the Clinton inner circle believed that the Obama administration deliberately downplayed DNC hacking by the Kremlin. "We understand the bind they were in," one of Clinton's senior advisers said. "But what if Barack Obama had gone to the Oval Office, or the East Room of the White House, and said, 'I'm speaking to you tonight to inform you that the United States is under attack . . .' A large majority of Americans would have sat up and taken notice . . . it is bewildering -- it is baffling -- it is hard to make sense of why this was not a five-alarm fire in the White House." 52

In addition to Clinton, many other members of the Washington establishment, including some Republicans, spread the narrative of Russia "attacking" America. Republican politicians who viewed Clinton's defeat and the hacking attacks in military terms included those of chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee John McCain, who stated, "When you attack a country, it's an act of war," 53 and former vice president Dick Cheney, who called Russia's alleged interference in the US election "a very serious effort made by Mr. Putin" that "in some quarters that would be considered an act of war." 54 A number of Democrats also engaged in the rhetoric of war, likening the Russian "attack," as Senator Ben Cardin did, to a "political Pearl Harbor." 55

Rumors and leaks, possibly by members of US intelligence agencies, 56 and activities of liberal groups that sought to discredit Trump contributed to the Russophobia. In addition to the DNC hacking accusations, many fears of Russia in the media were based on the assumption that contacts, let alone cooperation with the (p.93) Kremlin, was unpatriotic and implied potentially "compromising" behavior: praise of Putin as a leader, possible business dealings with Russian "oligarchs," and meetings with Russian officials such Ambassador Sergei Kislyak. 57

There were therefore two sides to the Russia story in the US liberal media -- rational and emotional. The rational side had to do with calculations by Clinton-affiliated circles and anti-Russian groups pooling their resources to undermine Trump and his plans to improve relations with Russia. Among others, these resources included dominance within the liberal media and leaks by the intelligence community. The emotional side was revealed by the liberal elites' values and ability to promote fears of Russia within the US political class and the general public. Popular emotions of fear and frustration with Russia already existed in the public space due to the old Cold War memories, as well as disturbing post–Cold War developments that included wars in Chechnya, Georgia, and Ukraine. In part because of these memories, factions such as those associated with Clinton were successful in evoking in the public liberal mind what historian Richard Hofstadter called the "paranoid style" or "the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy." 58 Mobilized by liberal media to pressure Trump, these emotions became an independent factor in the political struggle inside Washington. The public display of fear and frustration with Russia and Trump could only be sustained by a constant supply of new "suspicious" developments and intense discussion by the media.

[May 20, 2020] MadCow in action

May 20, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

xxx 10 hours ago

Russia, Russia, Russia !!!!!!!!!!

Russia, Russia, Russia !!!!!!!!!!

Russia, Russia, Russia !!!!!!!!!!

Take Breath........

Russia, Russia, Russia !!!!!!!!!!!

xxx 10 hours ago

something is rotten in the Dutch kingdom.

usually fish rots from the head.

[May 20, 2020] Russiagate skunk Evelyn Farkas is emotionally exhausted by correct claims that she blatantly lied to Mika Brzezinski

Was it Crowdstrike that had shown her the forensics data? This McCarthyist dog just keeps lying and keeps digging. The Obama administration was as shameless as they were crooked.
"They all sound like kids that got caught raiding the cookie jar making up wild tales of innocence with cookie crumbs all over their faces."
Notable quotes:
"... Opening your eyes wider while speaking doesn't make you look more intense, credible, and believable... ..."
"... (((They))) are taught from birth to "lie to, cheat, rob, enslave, and kill, with impunity" all Americans they call "Goyim, a mindless herd of cattle, sub-human animals." ..."
"... Ah Evelyn, Evelyn! You're just an exposed resistance tool HRC campaign hack doubling downer unemployed TDS afflicted congress woman wannabe who has no shame no principals and no alibi. Lots of love and kisses to Bezos/WaPo for letting them share your pain with us. Here at the disinfo clearinghouse you couldn't get elected dog catcher. ..."
May 18, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

...Meanwhile, Poor Evelyn's campaign staff has become " emotionally exhausted " after her Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts have been "overwhelmed with a stream of vile, vulgar and sometimes violent messages" in response to the plethora of conservative outlets which have called her out for Russia malarkey.

There is evidence that Russian actors are contributing to these attacks. The same day that right-wing pundits began pumping accusations, newly created Russian Twitter accounts picked them up. Within a day, Russian " disinformation clearinghouses " posted versions of the story . Many of the Twitter accounts boosting attacks have posted in unison, a sign of inauthentic social media behavior.

We assume Zero Hedge is included in said ' disinformation clearinghouses ' Farkas fails to expound on.

She closes by defiantly claiming "I wasn't silenced in 2017, and I won't be silenced now."

No Evelyn, nobody is silencing you. You're being called out for your role in the perhaps the largest, most divisive hoax in US history - which was based on faulty intelligence that includes CrowdStrike admitting they had no proof of that Russia exfiltrated DNC emails, and Christopher Steele's absurd dossier based on his 'Russian sources.'


MrAToZ, 1 minute ago

What's with the bug eyes on these crooks?

Kurpak, 27 seconds ago

Opening your eyes wider while speaking doesn't make you look more intense, credible, and believable...

It makes you look ******* insane.

iAmerican10, 8 minutes ago (Edited)

(((They))) are taught from birth to "lie to, cheat, rob, enslave, and kill, with impunity" all Americans they call "Goyim, a mindless herd of cattle, sub-human animals."

... ... ...

otschelnik, 35 minutes ago

Ah Evelyn, Evelyn! You're just an exposed resistance tool HRC campaign hack doubling downer unemployed TDS afflicted congress woman wannabe who has no shame no principals and no alibi. Lots of love and kisses to Bezos/WaPo for letting them share your pain with us. Here at the disinfo clearinghouse you couldn't get elected dog catcher.

[May 20, 2020] But if the Russians were coming, really, wouldn't most Americans rush to Putin's assistance? And wouldn't that make America a vastly better place?

May 20, 2020 | www.unz.com

Parfois1 , says: Show Comment May 9, 2020 at 2:12 am GMT

@Ann Nonny Mouse

But if the Russians were coming, really, wouldn't most Americans rush to Putin's assistance? And wouldn't that make America a vastly better place?

Not unique either! The Russians did that in the X Century when, as tradition and legend has it, they invited the Varangians (Vikings) to come to rule over them because the squabbling parties (presumably the local variety of Reps and Dems) made the place (Kiev-Rus) ungovernable. About time they (the Russians) return the favour!

[May 20, 2020] McGovern Turn Out The Lights, Russiagate Is Over by Ray McGovern

Highly recommended!
It is not. Forces behind Russiagate are intact and still have the same agenda. CrowdStrike was just a tool. As long as Full Spectrum Dominance dourine is alive, Russiagate will flourish in one form or another
Notable quotes:
"... The need for a scapegoat to blame for Hillary Clinton's snatching defeat out of the jaws victory also played a role; as did the need for the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex (MICIMATT) to keep front and center in the minds of Americans the alleged multifaceted threat coming from an "aggressive" Russia. (Recall that John McCain called the, now disproven , "Russian hacking" of the DNC emails an "act of war.") ..."
"... Though the corporate media is trying to bury it, the Russiagate narrative has in the past few weeks finally collapsed with the revelation that CrowdStrike had no evidence Russia took anything from the DNC servers and that the FBI set a perjury trap for Gen. Michael Flynn. There was already the previous government finding that there was no collusion between Trump and Russia and the indictment of a Russian troll farm that supposedly was destroying American democracy with $100,000 in Facebook ads was dropped after the St. Petersburg defendants sought discovery. ..."
"... Given the diffident attitude the Security State plotters adopted regarding hiding their tracks, Durham's challenge, with subpoena power, is not as formidable as were he, for example, investigating a Mafia family. ..."
"... Meanwhile, the corporate media have all been singing from the same sheet since Trump had the audacity a week ago to coin yet another "-gate" -- this time "Obamagate." Leading the apoplectic reaction in corporate media, Saturday's Washington Post offered a pot-calling-the-kettle-black pronouncement by its editorial board entitled "The absurd cynicism of 'Obamagate"? ..."
"... So if we dug in and found large payments from George Soros or Mrs Clinton to these 'journalists', what crime could they be accused of? No crimes, I don't think. ..."
"... There never was anything to Russiagate. It was always just politics. I knew that from the beginning. There was, however, a lot of something to the torture scandal. Obama said "We are not going to look back." And now Gina Haspel, one of the chief torturers, partly responsible for destroying the torture tapes, despite a court order to preserve them, is now head of the CIA. ..."
"... Drain the Swamp my ***. He's started by firing all the IG's? Trump "looking back," not forward. He could start by investigating Gina Haspel. ..."
"... For example, Foglesong argued that "a vital factor in the revival of the crusade in the 1970s was the need to expunge doubts about American virtue instilled by the Vietnam War, revelations about CIA covert actions, and the Watergate scandal." ..."
"... By tracing American representations of Russia over the last 130 years, Foglesong illuminated three of the strongest notions that have informed American attitudes toward Russia: (1) a messianic faith that America could inspire sweeping overnight transformation from autocracy to democracy; (2) a notion that despite historic differences, Russia and America are very much akin, so that Russia, more than any other country, is America's "dark double;" (3) an extreme antipathy to "evil" leaders who Americans blame for thwarting what they believe to be the natural triumph of the American mission. These expectations and emotions continue to effect how American journalists and politicians write and talk about Russia. "My hope," Foglesong concluded, "is that by seeing how these attitudes have distorted American views of Russia for more than a century, we may begin to be able to escape their grip." ..."
May 19, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored by Ray McGovern via ConsortiumNews.com,

Seldom mentioned among the motives behind the persistent drumming on alleged Russian interference was an over-arching need to help the Security State hide their tracks.

The need for a scapegoat to blame for Hillary Clinton's snatching defeat out of the jaws victory also played a role; as did the need for the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex (MICIMATT) to keep front and center in the minds of Americans the alleged multifaceted threat coming from an "aggressive" Russia. (Recall that John McCain called the, now disproven , "Russian hacking" of the DNC emails an "act of war.")

But that was then. This is now.

Though the corporate media is trying to bury it, the Russiagate narrative has in the past few weeks finally collapsed with the revelation that CrowdStrike had no evidence Russia took anything from the DNC servers and that the FBI set a perjury trap for Gen. Michael Flynn. There was already the previous government finding that there was no collusion between Trump and Russia and the indictment of a Russian troll farm that supposedly was destroying American democracy with $100,000 in Facebook ads was dropped after the St. Petersburg defendants sought discovery.

All that's left is to discover how this all happened.

Attorney General William Barr, and U.S. Attorney John Durham, whom Barr commissioned to investigate this whole sordid mess seem intent on getting to the bottom of it. The possibility that Trump will not chicken out this time, and rather will challenge the Security State looms large since he felt personally under attack.

Writing on the Wall

Given the diffident attitude the Security State plotters adopted regarding hiding their tracks, Durham's challenge, with subpoena power, is not as formidable as were he, for example, investigating a Mafia family.

Plus, former NSA Director Adm. Michael S. Rogers reportedly is cooperating. The handwriting is on the wall. It remains to be seen what kind of role in the scandal Barack Obama may have played.

But former directors James Comey, James Clapper, and John Brennan, captains of Obama's Security State, can take little solace from Barr's remarks Monday to a reporter who asked about Trump's recent claims that top officials of the Obama administration, including the former president had committed crimes. Barr replied:

"As to President Obama and Vice President Biden, whatever their level of involvement, based on the information I have today, I don't expect Mr. Durham's work will lead to a criminal investigation of either man. Our concerns over potential criminality is focused on others."

In a more ominous vein, Barr gratuitously added that law enforcement and intelligence officials were involved in "a false and utterly baseless Russian collusion narrative against the president. It was a grave injustice, and it was unprecedented in American history."

Meanwhile, the corporate media have all been singing from the same sheet since Trump had the audacity a week ago to coin yet another "-gate" -- this time "Obamagate." Leading the apoplectic reaction in corporate media, Saturday's Washington Post offered a pot-calling-the-kettle-black pronouncement by its editorial board entitled "The absurd cynicism of 'Obamagate"?

The outrage voiced by the Post called to mind disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok's indignant response to criticism of the FBI by candidate Trump, in a Oct. 20, 2016 text exchange with FBI attorney Lisa Page:

Strzok: I am riled up. Trump is a f***ing idiot, is unable to provide a coherent answer.

Strzok -- I CAN'T PULL AWAY, WHAT THE F**K HAPPENED TO OUR COUNTRY

Page -- I don't know. But we'll get it back. We're America. We rock.

Strzok -- Donald just said "bad hombres"

Strzok -- Trump just said what the FBI did is disgraceful.

Less vitriolic, but incisive commentary came from widely respected author and lawyer Glenn Greenwald on May 14, four days after Trump coined "Obamagate": ( See "System Update with Glenn Greenwald -- The Sham Prosecution of Michael Flynn").

For a shorter, equally instructive video of Greenwald on the broader issue of Russia-gate, see this clip from a March 2019 Democracy Now! -sponsored debate he had with David Cay Johnston titled, "As Mueller Finds No Collusion, Did Press Overhype Russiagate? Glenn Greenwald vs. David Cay Johnston":

https://www.youtube.com/embed/qdYw6jk3TTA

(The entire debate is worth listening to). I found one of the comments below the Democracy Now! video as big as a bummer as the commentator did:

"I think this is one of the most depressing parts about the whole situation. In their dogmatic pushing for this false narrative, the Russiagaters might have guaranteed Trump a second term. They have done more damage to our democracy than Russia ever has done and will do ." (From "Clamity2007")

In any case, Johnston, undaunted by his embarrassment at the hands of Greenwald, is still at it, and so is the avuncular Frank Rich -- both of them some 20 years older than Greenwald and set in their evidence-impoverished, media-indoctrinated ways.

... ... ...


Uncle Frank, 40 seconds ago

So if we dug in and found large payments from George Soros or Mrs Clinton to these 'journalists', what crime could they be accused of? No crimes, I don't think.

But when journalists are revealed to be issuing paid-for propaganda/lies mixed with their own internal opinions, and their publisher allows it to be presented as if it were reporting rather than opinion, said writers, editors, and publishers are relegated to obscurity and derision.

Their work will never be taken seriously again by anyone who wasn't already brain-washed.

They don't get that, I guess.

QABubba, 47 minutes ago (Edited)

There never was anything to Russiagate. It was always just politics. I knew that from the beginning. There was, however, a lot of something to the torture scandal. Obama said "We are not going to look back." And now Gina Haspel, one of the chief torturers, partly responsible for destroying the torture tapes, despite a court order to preserve them, is now head of the CIA.

General Flynn was so involved with Turkey he should have been registered as a foreign agent.

And as I have said before, the real crime was laundering Russian Mafia/Heroin money through Deutsche Bank into New York real estate. It is curious that Turkey is also a huge transport spot for heroin into the EU. And France and other EU nations have a migrant population that lives off the drug trade.

Drain the Swamp my ***. He's started by firing all the IG's? Trump "looking back," not forward. He could start by investigating Gina Haspel.

1911A1, 55 minutes ago

Operation Mockingbird

The MSM disinformation campaign with consistent common talking points is not difficult to see with a little discernment. The bigger question is has this happened organically or is there a larger agency manipulating the public discourse?

Question_Mark, 43 minutes ago

4AM secure drop from Senior Executive Services ( SES ) is a threat to our democracy.

Our greatest responsibility is to serve our [insert name of community here] community.

1surrounded2, 1 hour ago

" It remains to be seen what kind of role in the scandal Barack Obama may have played. "

Come on, Ray, I know you are not that stupid, but you ARE that libtarded.

Obama's very obvious role in all of this: KINGPIN .

Moribundus, 3 hours ago

Amazon.com The American Mission and the 'Evil Empire' The Crusade for a Free Russia Since 1881 (8580000721935) Foglesong,

"By 1905," Foglesong stated, "this fundamental reorientation of American views of Russia had set up a historical pattern in which missionary zeal and messianic euphoria would be followed by disenchantment and embittered denunciation of Russia's evil and oppressive rulers." The first cycle, according to Foglesong, culminated in 1905, when the October Manifesto, perceived initially by Americans as a transformation to democracy, gave way to a violent socialist revolt. Foglesong observed similar cycles of euphoria to despair during the collapse of the tsarist government in 1917, during the partial religious revival of World War II, and during the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s

Crucial to Foglesong's analysis was how these cycles coincided with a contemporaneous need to deflect attention away from America's own blemishes and enhance America's claim to its global mission.

For example, Foglesong argued that "a vital factor in the revival of the crusade in the 1970s was the need to expunge doubts about American virtue instilled by the Vietnam War, revelations about CIA covert actions, and the Watergate scandal."

By tracing American representations of Russia over the last 130 years, Foglesong illuminated three of the strongest notions that have informed American attitudes toward Russia: (1) a messianic faith that America could inspire sweeping overnight transformation from autocracy to democracy; (2) a notion that despite historic differences, Russia and America are very much akin, so that Russia, more than any other country, is America's "dark double;" (3) an extreme antipathy to "evil" leaders who Americans blame for thwarting what they believe to be the natural triumph of the American mission. These expectations and emotions continue to effect how American journalists and politicians write and talk about Russia. "My hope," Foglesong concluded, "is that by seeing how these attitudes have distorted American views of Russia for more than a century, we may begin to be able to escape their grip."

Moribundus, 3 hours ago

America's imperialism rules: Never to admit a fault or wrong; never to accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time; blame that enemy for everything that goes wrong; take advantage of every opportunity to raise a political whirlwind.

Kidbuck, 5 hours ago

Trump hasn't engaged in a fight in his life. He's a sissy at heart wants to negotiate. He can't even do that right. He's caved on nearly every campaign promise he made. The only thing his administration fights for is their salary and their retirement. Hillary still waddles free and farts in his general direction.

ChaoKrungThep, 4 hours ago

Trump the Mafia punk, like his dad, and draft dodger like his German grand dad. Barr, old CIA asset from the Clinton-Mena coke smuggling op. This crappy crew is running their masters' game in front of the redneck rabble who are dumber than their mutts.

Save_America1st, 9 hours ago

Geez...how far behind can most of these assholes be after all these years????

For one...there was no "Russia-gate". It was all a hoax from the beginning, and anyone with a few functioning brain cells knew that from the start.

And as of about 3 years ago we have all known this as "Obamagate" for the most part...we all knew the corruption of the hoax totally led up to O-Scumbag.

And now as of the recent disclosures it is a total fact.

Haven't most of you been watching Dan Bongino for over 2 years now and haven't you read his books? Haven't you been reading Sarah Carter and John Soloman among others for nearly 3 years now???

Surely, you haven't been just sitting around sucking leftist media **** for over 3 years, right???????? I'm sure you haven't.

So why is this article even necessary on ZeroHedge?????

We already knew and have known the truth since before even the 2016 election. Drop it.

Posa, 9 hours ago

So funny. The 85 Year old "American century' is palpably disintegrating before our very eyes. In particular the Deep State permanent bureaucracy is completely untethered and facing what seems to be a Great Reckoning in the form of Barr- Durham. Cognitve Derangement prevails in the press and spills overto the body politic. The country teeters a slo-mo Civil War. Meanwhile, The dollar is disintegrating and we seem to face an economic abyss, the Terminal Depression. Real "last Days of Rome" stuff.

BaNNeD oN THe RuN, 5 hours ago (Edited)

The Israeli dual citizens like Adelson and Mercer bought the Presidency.

Mossad was the organization handling the mole Seth Rich.

Blaming Russia also worked for those 2 groups because it deflected attention away from (((them))).

Ray McGovern, being ex-intel, must know this to be true.

LetThemEatRand, 11 hours ago

Russiagate. The supposed target of said coup d'etat just Presided over the largest bailout of banks ever by a factor of five or more. Trump supporters are asleep for the bailout, Trump haters are asleep for the bailout. Let's fight about transgender bathrooms and Russiagate, shall we?

yojimbo, 8 hours ago

I glance at the MSM, so here is a Guardian article along strongly TDS lines https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/19/will-donald-trump-end-up-in-prison-arwa-mahdawi

It's projection again, implying Obama gate is fake, like Russiagate actually was.. Tough to even want to get through!

[May 19, 2020] America: "We demand an coronavirus origin investigation, but the investigators must agree on the outcome that we specify before they begin investigating!"

Highly recommended!
May 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

William Gruff , May 18 2020 15:40 utc | 13

America: "We demand an investigation, but the investigators must agree on the outcome that we specify before they begin investigating!"

Why not? It works for gas attacks, chemical weapons poisoning, and airliner shoot downs, so why not biological weapons attacks too?

[May 19, 2020] New Documents From the Sham Prosecution of Gen. Michael Flynn Also Reveal Broad Corruption in the Russiagate Investigations by Glenn Greenwald

This is about intelligence agencies becaming a powerful by shadow political force, much like STASI. This not about corruption per se, but about perusing of political goals by dirty means. So it is closer to sedition then to corruption.
Notable quotes:
"... there was no valid reason for the FBI to have interrogated Flynn about his conversations with Kislyak in the first place. There is nothing remotely untoward or unusual -- let alone criminal -- about an incoming senior national security official, three weeks away from taking over, reaching out to a counterpart in a foreign government to try to tamp down tensions. As the Washington Post put it , "it would not be uncommon for incoming administrations to interface with foreign governments with whom they will soon have to work." ..."
"... there was also massive corruption on the part of the investigators themselves, exploiting and abusing their vast and invasive investigative and prosecutorial powers for ideological goals, political subterfuge, election manipulation, and personal vendettas ..."
"... To begin with, cable and other news outlets that employed former Obama-era intelligence operatives, generals, and prosecutors to disseminate every Russiagate conspiracy theory they could find -- virtually always without any dissent or even questioning -- have barely acknowledged these explosive new documents. ..."
"... But the most critical reason to delve deeply into this case is that it reveals one the most dangerous abuses of power a democracy can suffer: The powers of the CIA, FBI, and NSA were blatantly and repeatedly abused to manipulate election outcomes and achieve political advantage. ..."
"... Flynn is a right-wing, hawkish general whose views on the so-called war on terror are ones utterly anathema to my own beliefs. That does not make his prosecution justified. One's views of Flynn personally or his politics (or those of the Trump administration generally) should have absolutely no bearing on one's assessment of the justifiability of what the U.S. government did to him here -- any more than one has to like the political views of the detainees at Guantanamo to find their treatment abusive and illegal , or any more than one has to agree with the views of people who are being censured in order to defend their right of free expression . ..."
"... As the journalist Aaron Maté demonstrated when he brilliantly challenged The Guardian's Luke Harding about his bestselling book claiming to prove collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia -- one of the few times a Russiagate conspiracy advocate was forced to confront a knowledgeable critic -- those claims often cannot survive even minimal critical scrutiny. That's why media outlets have insulated these conspiracy theory advocates, as well as their audiences, from any dissent or even critical questioning. ..."
May 14, 2020 | theintercept.com
Gen. Michael Flynn, President Obama's former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and President Donald Trump's former national security adviser, pleaded guilty on December 1, 2017, to a single count of lying to the FBI about two conversations he had with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak while Flynn served as a Trump transition team official (Flynn was never charged for any matters relating to his relationship with the Turkish government). As part of the plea deal, special counsel Robert Mueller recommended no jail time for Flynn , and the plea agreement also seemingly put an end to threats from the Mueller team to prosecute Flynn's son.

Last Thursday, the Justice Department filed a motion seeking to dismiss the prosecution of Flynn based, in part, on newly discovered documents revealing that the conduct of the FBI, under the leadership of Director James Comey and his now-disgraced Deputy Andrew McCabe (who himself was forced to leave the Bureau after being caught lying to agents ), was improper and motivated by corrupt objectives. That motion prompted histrionic howls of outrage from the same political officials and their media allies who have spent the last three years pushing maximalist Russiagate conspiracy theories.

But the prosecution of Flynn -- for allegedly lying to the FBI when he denied in a January 24 interrogation that he had discussed with Kislyak on December 29 the new sanctions and expulsions imposed on Russia by the Obama administration -- was always odd for a number of reasons. To begin with, the FBI agents who questioned Flynn said afterward that they did not believe he was lying (as CNN reported in February 2017: "the FBI interviewers believed Flynn was cooperative and provided truthful answers. Although Flynn didn't remember all of what he talked about, they don't believe he was intentionally misleading them, the officials say"). For that reason, CNN said, "the FBI is not expected to pursue any charges against" him.

More importantly, there was no valid reason for the FBI to have interrogated Flynn about his conversations with Kislyak in the first place. There is nothing remotely untoward or unusual -- let alone criminal -- about an incoming senior national security official, three weeks away from taking over, reaching out to a counterpart in a foreign government to try to tamp down tensions. As the Washington Post put it , "it would not be uncommon for incoming administrations to interface with foreign governments with whom they will soon have to work." What newly released documents over the last month reveal is what has been generally evident for the last three years: The powers of the security state agencies -- particularly the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and the DOJ -- were systematically abused as part of the 2016 election and then afterward for political rather than legal ends.

While there was obviously deceit and corruption on the part of some Trump officials in lying to Russiagate investigators and otherwise engaging in depressingly common D.C. lobbyist corruption , there was also massive corruption on the part of the investigators themselves, exploiting and abusing their vast and invasive investigative and prosecutorial powers for ideological goals, political subterfuge, election manipulation, and personal vendettas . The former category (corruption by Trump officials) has received a tidal wave of endless media attention, while the latter (corruption and abuse of power by those investigating them) has received almost none.

For numerous reasons, it is vital to fully examine with as much clarity as possible the abuse of power that drove the prosecution of Flynn. To begin with, cable and other news outlets that employed former Obama-era intelligence operatives, generals, and prosecutors to disseminate every Russiagate conspiracy theory they could find -- virtually always without any dissent or even questioning -- have barely acknowledged these explosive new documents.

More disturbingly, liberals and Democrats -- as part of their movement toward venerating these security state agencies -- have completely jettisoned long-standing, core principles about the criminal justice system, including questioning whether lying to the FBI should be a crime at all and recognizing that innocent people are often forced to plead guilty -- in order to justify both the Flynn prosecution and the broader Mueller probe.

But the most critical reason to delve deeply into this case is that it reveals one the most dangerous abuses of power a democracy can suffer: The powers of the CIA, FBI, and NSA were blatantly and repeatedly abused to manipulate election outcomes and achieve political advantage. In other words, we know now that these agencies did exactly what Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer warned they would do to Trump when he appeared on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC program shortly before Trump's inauguration:

This turned out to be one of the most prescient and important (and creepy) statements of the Trump presidency: from Chuck Schumer to Rachel Maddow - in early January, 2017, before Trump was even inaugurated: pic.twitter.com/TUaYkksILG

-- Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 8, 2019
Because U.S. politics is now discussed far more as tests of tribal loyalty ("Whose side are you on?") than actual ideological or even political beliefs ("Which policies do you favor or oppose?"), it is very difficult to persuade people to separate their personal or political views of Flynn ("Do you like him or not?") from the question of whether the U.S. government abused its power in gravely dangerous ways to prosecute him.

Flynn is a right-wing, hawkish general whose views on the so-called war on terror are ones utterly anathema to my own beliefs. That does not make his prosecution justified. One's views of Flynn personally or his politics (or those of the Trump administration generally) should have absolutely no bearing on one's assessment of the justifiability of what the U.S. government did to him here -- any more than one has to like the political views of the detainees at Guantanamo to find their treatment abusive and illegal , or any more than one has to agree with the views of people who are being censured in order to defend their right of free expression .

The ability to distinguish between ideological questions from evidentiary questions is vital for rational discourse to be possible, yet has been all but eliminated at the altar of tribal fealty. That is why evidentiary questions completely devoid of ideological belief -- such as whether one found the Russiagate conspiracy theories supported by convincing evidence -- have been treated not as evidentiary matters but as tribal ones: to be affiliated with the left (an ideological characterization), one must affirm belief in those conspiracy theories even if one does not find the evidence in support of them actually compelling. The conflation of ideological and evidentiary questions, and the substitution of substantive political debates with tests of tribal loyalty, are indescribably corrosive to our public discourse.

As a result, whether one is now deemed on the right or left has almost nothing to do with actual political beliefs about policy questions and everything to do with one's willingness to serve the interests of one team or another. With the warped formula in place, U.S. politics has been depoliticized , stripped of any meaningful ideological debates in lieu of mindless team loyalty oaths on non-ideological questions.

Our newest SYSTEM UPDATE episode, debuting today, is devoted to enabling as clear and objective an examination as possible of the abuses that drove the Flynn prosecution -- including these critical, newly declassified documents -- as well the broader Russiagate investigations of which it was a part. These abuses have received far too little attention from the vast majority of the U.S. media that simply excludes any questioning or dissent of their prevailing narratives about all of these matters.

Notably, we invited several of the cable stars and security state agents who have been pushing these conspiracy theories for years to appear on the program for a civil discussion, but none were willing to do so -- because they are so accustomed to being able to spout these theories on MSNBC, CNN, and in newspapers without ever being meaningfully challenged. Regardless of one's views on these scandals, it is unhealthy in the extreme for any media to insulate themselves from a diversity of views.

As the journalist Aaron Maté demonstrated when he brilliantly challenged The Guardian's Luke Harding about his bestselling book claiming to prove collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia -- one of the few times a Russiagate conspiracy advocate was forced to confront a knowledgeable critic -- those claims often cannot survive even minimal critical scrutiny. That's why media outlets have insulated these conspiracy theory advocates, as well as their audiences, from any dissent or even critical questioning.

Today's SYSTEM UPDATE episode, which we believe provides the most comprehensive examination to date of these new documents relating to the Flynn prosecution and how this case relates to the broader Russiagate investigative abuses, can be viewed above or on The Intercept's YouTube channel .

[May 19, 2020] NYT Critique of Ronan Farrow Describes Pathology of "Resistance Journalism"

This is about control of MSM by intelligence agencies, not so much about corruption of individual journalists. Journalist became like in the USSR "Soldiers of the Party" -- well paid propagandist of particular, supplied to them talking points.
Notable quotes:
"... encouraged and incentivized ..."
"... for each segment ..."
May 19, 2020 | theintercept.com

What is particularly valuable about Smith's article is its perfect description of a media sickness borne of the Trump era that is rapidly corroding journalistic integrity and justifiably destroying trust in news outlets. Smith aptly dubs this pathology "resistance journalism," by which he means that journalists are now not only free, but encouraged and incentivized , to say or publish anything they want, no matter how reckless and fact-free, provided their target is someone sufficiently disliked in mainstream liberal media venues and/or on social media:

[Farrow's] work, though, reveals the weakness of a kind of resistance journalism that has thrived in the age of Donald Trump: That if reporters swim ably along with the tides of social media and produce damaging reporting about public figures most disliked by the loudest voices, the old rules of fairness and open-mindedness can seem more like impediments than essential journalistic imperatives.

That can be a dangerous approach, particularly in a moment when the idea of truth and a shared set of facts is under assault.

In assailing Farrow for peddling unproven conspiracy theories, Smith argues that such journalistic practices are particularly dangerous in an era where conspiracy theories are increasingly commonplace. Yet unlike most journalists with a mainstream platform, Smith emphasizes that conspiracy theories are commonly used not only by Trump and his movement (conspiracy theories which are quickly debunked by most of the mainstream media), but are also commonly deployed by Trump's enemies, whose reliance on conspiracy theories is virtually never denounced by journalists because mainstream news outlets themselves play a key role in peddling them:

We are living in an era of conspiracies and dangerous untruths -- many pushed by President Trump, but others hyped by his enemies -- that have lured ordinary Americans into passionately believing wild and unfounded theories and fiercely rejecting evidence to the contrary. The best reporting tries to capture the most attainable version of the truth, with clarity and humility about what we don't know. Instead, Mr. Farrow told us what we wanted to believe about the way power works, and now, it seems, he and his publicity team are not even pretending to know if it's true.

Ever since Donald Trump was elected , and one could argue even in the months leading up to his election, journalistic standards have been consciously jettisoned when it comes to reporting on public figures who, in Smith's words, are "most disliked by the loudest voices," particularly when such reporting "swim[s] ably along with the tides of social media." Put another way: As long the targets of one's conspiracy theories and attacks are regarded as villains by the guardians of mainstream liberal social media circles, journalists reap endless career rewards for publishing unvetted and unproven -- even false -- attacks on such people, while never suffering any negative consequences when their stories are exposed as shabby frauds.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/OOhRRr6c1wA?autoplay=0&rel=0&enablejsapi=1&origin=https%3A%2F%2Ftheintercept.com&widgetid=1 infiltrated and taken over the U.S. government through sexual and financial blackmail leverage over Trump and used it to dictate U.S. policy; Trump officials conspired with the Kremlin to interfere in the 2016 election; Russia was attacking the U.S. by hacking its electricity grid , recruiting journalists to serve as clandestine Kremlin messengers , and plotting to cut off heat to Americans in winter. Mainstream media debacles -- all in service of promoting the same set of conspiracy theories against Trump -- are literally too numerous to count, requiring one to select the worst offenses as illustrative .

Glenn Beck 2009 + Maddow 2019 is the greatest crossover event in history pic.twitter.com/D1NElGBq3U

-- Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) January 31, 2019
In March of last year, Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi -- writing under the headline "It's official: Russiagate is this generation's WMD" -- compared the prevailing media climate since 2016 to that which prevailed in 2002 and 2003 regarding the invasion of Iraq and the so-called war on terror: little to no dissent permitted, skeptics of media-endorsed orthodoxies shunned and excluded, and worst of all, the very journalists who were most wrong in peddling false conspiracy theories were exactly those who ended up most rewarded on the ground that even though they spread falsehoods, they did so for the right cause.

Under that warped rubric -- in which spreading falsehoods is commendable as long as it was done to harm the evildoers -- the New Yorker's Jeffrey Goldberg, one of the most damaging endorsers of false conspiracy theories about Iraq , rose to become editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, while two of the most deceitful Bush-era neocons, Bush/Cheney speechwriter David Frum and supreme propagandist Bill Kristol, have reprised their role as leading propagandists and conspiracy theorists -- only this time aimed against the GOP president instead of on his behalf -- and thus have become beloved liberal media icons. The communications director for both the Bush/Cheney campaign and its White House, Nicole Wallace, is one of the most popular liberal cable hosts from her MSNBC perch.

Join Our Newsletter Original reporting. Fearless journalism. Delivered to you. I'm in Exactly the same journalism-destroying dynamic is driving the post-Russiagate media landscape. There is literally no accountability for the journalists and news outlets that spread falsehoods in their pages, on their airwaves, and through their viral social media postings. The Washington Post's media columnist Erik Wemple has been one of the very few journalists devoted to holding these myth-peddlers accountable -- recounting how one of the most reckless Russigate conspiracy maximialists, Natasha Bertrand, became an overnight social media and journalism star by peddling discredited conspiratorial trash (she was notably hired by Jeffrey Goldberg to cover Russigate for The Atlantic); MSNBC's Rachel Maddow spent three years hyping conspiratorial junk with no need even to retract any of it; and Mother Jones' David Corn played a crucial, decisively un-journalistic role in mainstreaming the lies of the Steele dossier all with zero effect on his journalistic status, other than to enrich him through a predictably bestselling book that peddled those unhinged conspiracies further.

Wemple's post-Russiagate series has established him as a commendable, often-lone voice trying -- with futility -- to bring some accountability to U.S. journalism for the systemic media failures of the past three years. The reason that's futile is exactly what Smith described in his column on Farrow: In "resistance journalism," facts and truth are completely dispensable -- indeed, dispensing with them is rewarded -- provided "reporters swim ably along with the tides of social media and produce damaging reporting about public figures most disliked by the loudest voices."

That describes perfectly the journalists who were defined, and enriched, by years of Russiagate deceit masquerading as reporting. By far the easiest path to career success over the last three years -- booming ratings, lucrative book sales, exploding social media followings, career rehabilitation even for the most discredited D.C. operatives -- was to feed establishment liberals an endless diet of fearmongering and inflammatory conspiracies about Drumpf and his White House. Whether it was true or supported by basic journalistic standards was completely irrelevant. Responsible reporting was simply was not a metric used to assess its worth.

It was one thing for activists, charlatans, and con artists to exploit fears of Trump for material gain: that, by definition, is what such people do. But it was another thing entirely for journalists to succumb to all the low-hanging career rewards available to them by throwing all journalistic standards into the trash bin in exchange for a star turn as a #Resistance icon. That , as Smith aptly describes, is what "Resistance Journalism" is, and it's hard to identify anything more toxic to our public discourse.

Perhaps the single most shameful and journalism-destroying episode in all of this -- an obviously difficult title to bestow -- was when a national security blogger, Marcy Wheeler, violated long-standing norms and ethical standards of journalism by announcing in 2018 that she had voluntarily turned in her own source to the FBI, claiming she did so because her still-unnamed source "had played a significant role in the Russian election attack on the US" and because her life was endangered by her brave decision to stop being a blogger and become an armchair cop by pleading with the FBI and the Mueller team to let her work with them. In her blog post announcing what she did, she claimed she was going public with her treachery because her life was in danger, and this way everyone would know the real reason if "someone releases stolen information about me or knocks me off tomorrow."

To say that Wheeler's actions are a grotesque violation of journalistic ethics is to radically understate the case. Journalists are expected to protect their sources' identities from the FBI even if they receive a subpoena and a court order compelling its disclosure; we're expected to go to prison before we comply with FBI attempts to uncover our source's identity. But here, the FBI did not try to compel Wheeler to tell them anything; they displayed no interest in her as she desperately tried to chase them down.

By all appearances, Wheeler had to beg the FBI to pay attention to her because they treated her like the sort of unstable, unhinged, unwell, delusional obsessive who, believing they have uncovered some intricate conspiracy, relentlessly harass and bombard journalists with their bizarre theories until they finally prattle to themselves for all of eternity in the spam filter of our email inboxes. The claim that she was in possession of some sort of explosive and damning information that would blow the Mueller investigation wide open was laughable. In her post, she claimed she "always planned to disclose this when this person's role was publicly revealed," but to date -- almost two years later -- she has never revealed "this person's" identity because, from all appearances, the Mueller report never relied on Wheeler's intrepid reporting or her supposedly red-hot secrets.

Like so many other Russiagate obsessives who turned into social media and MSNBC/CNN #Resistance stars, Wheeler was living a wild, self-serving fantasy, a Cold War Tom Clancy suspense film that she invented in her head and then cast herself as the heroine: a crusading investigative dot-connecter uncovering dangerous, hidden conspiracies perpetrated by dangerous, hidden Cold War-style villains (Putin) to the point where her own life was endangered by her bravery. It was a sad joke, a depressing spectacle of psycho-drama, but one that could have had grave consequences for the person she voluntarily ratted out to the FBI. Whatever else is true, this episode inflicted grave damage on American journalism by having mainstream, Russia-obsessed journalists not denounce her for her egregious violation of journalistic ethics but celebrate her for turning journalism on its head.

Why? Because, as Smith said in his Farrow article, she was "swim[ing] ably along with the tides of social media and produc[ing] damaging reporting about public figures most disliked by the loudest voices" and thus "the old rules of fairness and open-mindedness [were] more like impediments than essential journalistic imperatives." Margaret Sullivan, the former New York Times public editor and now the Washington Post's otherwise reliably commendable media reporter, celebrated Wheeler's bizarre behavior under the headline: "A journalist's conscience leads her to reveal her source to the FBI."

Despite acknowledging that "in their reporting, journalists talk to criminals all the time and don't turn them in" and that "it's pretty much an inviolable rule of journalism: Protect your sources," Sullivan heralded Wheeler's ethically repugnant and journalism-eroding violation of those principles. "It's not hard to see that her decision was a careful and principled one," Sullivan proclaimed.

She even endorsed Wheeler's cringe-inducing, self-glorifying claims about her life being endangered by invoking long-standard Cold War clichés about the treachery of the Russkies ("Overly dramatic? Not really. The Russians do have a penchant for disposing of people they find threatening."). The English language is insufficient to convey the madness required to believe that the Kremlin wanted to kill Marcy Wheeler because her blogging was getting Too Close to The Truth, but in the fevered swamps of resistance journalism, literally no claim was too unhinged to be embraced provided that it fed the social media #Resistance masses.

Sullivan's article quoted no critics of Wheeler's incredibly controversial behavior -- no need to: She was on the right side of social media reaction. And Sullivan never bothered to return to wonder why her prediction -- "Wheeler hasn't named the source publicly, though his name may soon be known to all who are following the Mueller investigation" -- never materialized. Both CNN and, incredibly, the Columbia Journalism Review published similarly sympathetic accounts of Wheeler's desperate attempts to turn over her source to the FBI and then cosplay as though she were some sort of insider in the Mueller investigation. The most menacing attribute of what Smith calls "Resistance Journalism" is that it permits and tolerates no dissent and questioning: perhaps the single most destructive path journalism can take. It has been well-documented that MSNBC and CNN spent three years peddling all sorts of ultimately discredited Russiagate conspiracy theories by excluding from their airwaves anyone who dissented from or even questioned those conspiracies. Instead, they relied upon an increasingly homogenized army of former security state agents from the CIA, FBI, and NSA to propound, in unison, all sorts of claims about Trump and Russia that turned out to be false, and peppered their panels of "analysts" with journalists whose career skyrocketed exclusively by pushing maximalist Russiagate claims, often by relying on the same intelligence officials these cable outlets sat them next to.

That NBC & MSNBC hired as a "news analyst" John Brennan - who ran the CIA when the Trump/Russia investigation began & was a key player in the news he was shaping as a paid colleague of their reporters - is a huge ethical breach. And it produced this: pic.twitter.com/nPlaq5YVxf

-- Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 2, 2019
This trend -- whereby diversity of opinion and dissent from orthodoxies are excluded from media discourse -- is worsening rapidly due to two major factors. The first is that cable news programs are constructed to feed their audiences only self-affirming narratives that vindicate partisan loyalties. One liberal cable host told me that they receive ratings not for each show but for each segment , and they can see the ratings drop off -- the remotes clicking away -- if they put on the air anyone who criticizes the party to which that outlet is devoted (Democrats in the case of MSNBC and CNN, the GOP in the case of Fox).

But there's another more recent and probably more dissent-quashing development: the disappearance of media jobs. Mass layoffs were already common in online journalism and local newspapers prior to the coronavirus pandemic , and have now turned into an industrywide massacre . With young journalists watching jobs disappearing en masse, the last thing they are going to want to do is question or challenge prevailing orthodoxies within their news outlet or, using Smith's "Resistance Journalism" formulation, to "swim against the tides of social media" or question the evidence amassed against those "most disliked by the loudest voices."

Affirming those orthodoxies can be career-promoting, while questioning them can be job-destroying. Consider the powerful incentives journalists face in an industry where jobs are disappearing so rapidly one can barely keep count. During Russiagate, I often heard from young journalists at large media outlets who expressed varying degrees of support for and agreement with the skepticism which I and a handful of other journalists were expressing, but they felt constrained to do so themselves, for good reason. They watched the reprisals and shunning doled out even to journalists with a long record of journalistic accomplishments and job security for the crime of Russiagate skepticism, such as Taibbi (similar to the way MSNBC fired Phil Donahue in 2002 for opposing the invasion of Iraq), and they know journalists with less stature and security than Taibbi could not risk incurring that collective wrath.

All professions and institutions suffer when a herd, groupthink mentality and the banning of dissent prevail. But few activities are corroded from such a pathology more than journalism is, which has as its core function skepticism and questioning of pieties. Journalism quickly transforms into a sickly, limp version of itself when it itself wages war on the virtues of dissent and airing a wide range of perspectives.

I do not know how valid are Smith's critiques of Farrow's journalism. But what I know for certain is that Smith's broader diagnosis of "Resistance Journalism" is dead-on, and the harms it is causing are deep and enduring. When journalists know they will thrive by affirming pleasing falsehoods, and suffer when they insist on unpopular truths, journalism not only loses its societal value but becomes just another instrument for societal manipulation, deceit, and coercion.

[May 19, 2020] Beyond BuzzFeed: The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump-Russia Story by Glenn Greenwald

Images removed
Those are far from failures, those were successful disinformation/propaganda operations conducted with a certain goal -- remove Trump -- which demonstrate the level of intelligence agencies control of the MSM. In other words those are parts of a bigger intelligence operation -- the color revolution against Trump led most probably by Obama and Brennan.
Now we know that Obama played an important role in Russiagate media hysteria and, most porbably, in planning and executing the operation to entrap Flynn.
Notable quotes:
"... They are listed in reverse order, as measured by the magnitude of the embarrassment, the hysteria they generated on social media and cable news, the level of journalistic recklessness that produced them, and the amount of damage and danger they caused ..."
"... Note that all of these "errors" go only in one direction: namely, exaggerating the grave threat posed by Moscow and the Trump circle's connection to it. It's inevitable that media outlets will make mistakes on complex stories. If that's being done in good faith, one would expect the errors would be roughly 50/50 in terms of the agenda served by the false stories. That is most definitely not the case here. Just as was true in 2002 and 2003, when the media clearly wanted to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and thus all of its "errors" went in that direction, virtually all of its major "errors" in this story are devoted to the same agenda and script: ..."
"... Crowdstrike, the firm hired by the DNC, claimed they had evidence that Russia hacked Ukrainian artillery apps; they then retracted it . ..."
"... The U.S. media and Democrats spent six months claiming that all "17 intelligence agencies" agreed Russia was behind the hacks; the NYT finally retracted that in June, 2017: "The assessment was made by four intelligence agencies -- the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community." ..."
"... Widespread government and media claims that accused Russian agent Maria Butina offered "sex for favors" were totally false (and scurrilous). ..."
Jan 20, 2019 | theintercept.com
BuzzFeed was once notorious for traffic-generating "listicles," but has since become an impressive outlet for deep investigative journalism under editor-in-chief Ben Smith. That outlet was prominently in the news this week thanks to its "bombshell" story about President Trump and Michael Cohen: a story that, like so many others of its kind, blew up in its face , this time when the typically mute Robert Mueller's office took the extremely rare step to label its key claims "inaccurate."

But in homage to BuzzFeed's past viral glory, following are the top ten worst media failures in two-plus-years of Trump/Russia reporting. They are listed in reverse order, as measured by the magnitude of the embarrassment, the hysteria they generated on social media and cable news, the level of journalistic recklessness that produced them, and the amount of damage and danger they caused. This list was extremely difficult to compile in part because news outlets (particularly CNN and MSNBC) often delete from the internet the video segments of their most embarrassing moments. Even more challenging was the fact that the number of worthy nominees is so large that highly meritorious entrees had to be excluded, but are acknowledged at the end with (dis)honorable mention status.

Note that all of these "errors" go only in one direction: namely, exaggerating the grave threat posed by Moscow and the Trump circle's connection to it. It's inevitable that media outlets will make mistakes on complex stories. If that's being done in good faith, one would expect the errors would be roughly 50/50 in terms of the agenda served by the false stories. That is most definitely not the case here. Just as was true in 2002 and 2003, when the media clearly wanted to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and thus all of its "errors" went in that direction, virtually all of its major "errors" in this story are devoted to the same agenda and script:

10. RT Hacked Into and Took Over C-SPAN (Fortune)

On June 12, 2017, Fortune claimed that RT had hacked into and taken over C-SPAN and that C-SPAN "confirmed" it had been hacked. The whole story was false:

C-SPAN Confirms It Was Briefly Hacked by Russian News Site https://t.co/NUFD662FMz pic.twitter.com/POstGFzvNE

-- Fortune Tech (@FortuneTech) January 12, 2017

Kremlin-funded Russian news network RT interrupted C-SPAN's online feed for about ten minutes Thursday afternoon https://t.co/Z25LqoCW2H

-- New York Magazine (@NYMag) January 12, 2017

Holy shit. Russia state propaganda (RT) "hacked" into C-SPAN feed and took over for a good 40 seconds today? In middle of live broadcast. https://t.co/pwWYFoDGDU

-- Isaac Saul (@Ike_Saul) January 12, 2017

RT America ominously takes over C-SPAN feed for ten minutes @tommyxtopher reviews today's events for #shareblue https://t.co/uiiU5awSMs

-- Leah McElrath (@leahmcelrath) January 12, 2017

After investigation, C-SPAN has concluded that the RT interruption was not the result of a hack, but rather routing error.

-- ErikWemple (@ErikWemple) January 18, 2017
9. Russian Hackers Invaded the U.S. Electricity Grid to Deny Vermonters Heat During the Winter (WashPost)

On December 30, 2016, the Washington Post reported that "Russian hackers penetrated the U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont," causing predictable outrage and panic, along with threats from U.S. political leaders. But then they kept diluting the story with editor's notes – to admit that the malware was found on a laptop not connected to the U.S. electric grid at all – until finally acknowledging, days later, that the whole story was false, since the malware had nothing to do with Russia or with the U.S. electric grid:

Breaking: Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont https://t.co/LED11lL7ej

-- The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) December 31, 2016

NEW: "One of the world's leading thugs, [Putin] has been attempting to hack our electric grid," says VT Gov. Shumlin https://t.co/YgdtT4JrlX pic.twitter.com/AU0ZQjT3aO

-- ABC News (@ABC) December 31, 2016

https://www.youtube.com/embed/9ktNVW_TblI?autoplay=0&rel=0&enablejsapi=1&origin=https%3A%2F%2Ftheintercept.com&widgetid=1

Washington Post retracts story about Russian hack at Vermont utility https://t.co/JX9l0926Uj via @nypost

-- Kerry Picket (@KerryPicket) January 1, 2017
8. A New, Deranged, Anonymous Group Declares Mainstream Political Sites on the Left and Right to be Russian Propaganda Outlets and WashPost Touts its Report to Claim Massive Kremlin Infiltration of the Internet (WashPost)

On November 24, 2016, the Washington Post published one of the most inflammatory, sensationalistic stories to date about Russian infiltration into U.S. politics using social media, accusing "more than 200 websites" of being "routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans." It added: "stories planted or promoted by the disinformation campaign [on Facebook] were viewed more than 213 million times."

Unfortunately for the paper, those statistics were provided by a new, anonymous group that reached these conclusions by classifying long-time, well-known sites – from the Drudge Report to Clinton-critical left-wing websites such as Truthout, Black Agenda Report, Truthdig, and Naked Capitalism, as well as libertarian venues such as Antiwar.com and the Ron Paul Institute. – as "Russian propaganda outlets," producing one of the longest Editor's Note in memory appended to the top of the article (but not until two weeks later , long after the story was mindlessly spread all throughout the media ecosystem):

Russian propaganda effort helped spread fake news during election, say independent researchers https://t.co/3ETVXWw16Q

-- Marty Baron (@PostBaron) November 25, 2016

Just want to note I hadn't heard of Propornot before the WP piece and never gave permission to them to call Bellingcat "allies" https://t.co/jQKnWzjrBR

-- Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) November 25, 2016

Marty, I would like to more about PropOrNot, "experts" cited in the article. Their website provides little in the way of ID. https://t.co/ZiK8pKzUwx

-- Jack Shafer (@jackshafer) November 25, 2016
7. Trump Aide Anthony Scaramucci is Involved in a Russian Hedge Fund Under Senate Investigation (CNN)

On June 22, 2017, CNN reported that Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci was involved with the Russian Direct Investment Fund, under Senate investigation. He was not. CNN retracted the story and forced the three reporters who published it to leave the network. 6. Russia Attacked U.S. "Diplomats" (i.e. Spies) at the Cuban Embassy Using a Super-Sophisticated Sonic Microwave Weapon (NBC/MSNBC/CIA)

On September 11, 2017, NBC News and MSNBC spread all over its airwaves a claim from its notorious CIA puppet Ken Dilanian that Russia was behind a series of dastardly attacks on U.S. personnel at the Embassy in Cuba using a sonic or microwave weapon so sophisticated and cunning that Pentagon and CIA scientists had no idea what to make of it.

But then teams of neurologists began calling into doubt that these personnel had suffered any brain injuries at all – that instead they appear to have experienced collective psychosomatic symptoms – and then biologists published findings that the "strange sounds" the U.S. "diplomats" reported hearing were identical to those emitted by a common Caribbean male cricket during mating season.

An @NBCNews exclusive: After more than a year of mystery, Russia is the main suspect in the sonic attacks that sickened 26 U.S. diplomats and intelligence officials in Cuba. @MitchellReports has the latest. pic.twitter.com/NEI9PJ9CpD

-- TODAY (@TODAYshow) September 11, 2018

Wow >> U.S. has signals intelligence linking the sonic attacks on Americans in Cuba and China to *Russia* https://t.co/FbNla0vu9W

-- Andrew Desiderio (@desiderioDC) September 11, 2018

Following NBC report about sonic attacks, @SenCoryGardner renews calls for declaring Russia a state sponsor of terror https://t.co/wrnubfecom

-- Niels Lesniewski (@nielslesniewski) September 11, 2018

5. Trump Created a Secret Internet Server to Covertly Communicate with a Russian Bank (Slate)

Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank. pic.twitter.com/8f8n9xMzUU

-- Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) November 1, 2016

It's time for Trump to answer serious questions about his ties to Russia. https://t.co/D8oSmyVAR4 pic.twitter.com/07dRyEmPjX

-- Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 31, 2016
4. Paul Manafort Visited Julian Assange Three Times in the Ecuadorian Embassy and Nobody Noticed (Guardian/Luke Harding)

On November 27, 2018, the Guardian published a major "bombshell" that Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had somehow managed to sneak inside one of the world's most surveilled buildings, the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and visit Julian Assange on three different occasions. Cable and online commentators exploded.

Seven weeks later, no other media outlet has confirmed this ; no video or photographic evidence has emerged; the Guardian refuses to answer any questions; its leading editors have virtually gone into hiding; other media outlets have expressed serious doubts about its veracity; and an Ecuadorian official who worked at the embassy has called the story a complete fake:

Paul Manafort held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and visited around the time he joined Trump's campaign, the Guardian has been told. https://t.co/Fc2BVmXipk

-- Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) November 27, 2018

The sourcing on this is a bit thin, or at least obscured. But it's the ultimate Whoa If True. It's...ballgame if true.

-- Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) November 27, 2018

https://www.youtube.com/embed/4A2cuuRK2NU?autoplay=0&rel=0&enablejsapi=1&origin=https%3A%2F%2Ftheintercept.com&widgetid=7

The Guardian reports that Paul Manafort visited Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, the same month that Manafort joined Donald Trump's presidential campaign in 2016, a meeting that could carry vast implications for the Russia investigation https://t.co/pYawnv4MHH

-- Los Angeles Times (@latimes) November 27, 2018
3. CNN Explicitly Lied About Lanny Davis Being Its Source – For a Story Whose Substance Was Also False: Cohen Would Testify that Trump Knew in Advance About the Trump Tower Meeting (CNN)

On July 27, 2018, CNN published a blockbuster story : that Michael Cohen was prepared to tell Robert Mueller that President Trump knew in advanced about the Trump Tower meeting. There were, however, two problems with this story: first, CNN got caught blatantly lying when its reporters claimed that "contacted by CNN, one of Cohen's attorneys, Lanny Davis, declined to comment" (in fact, Davis was one of CNN's key sources, if not its only source, for this story), and second, numerous other outlets retracted the story after the source, Davis, admitted it was a lie. CNN, however, to this date has refused to do either: 2. Robert Mueller Possesses Internal Emails and Witness Interviews Proving Trump Directed Cohen to Lie to Congress (BuzzFeed)

BREAKING: President Trump personally directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow in order to obscure his involvement. https://t.co/BEoMKiDypn

-- BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) January 18, 2019

BOOM! https://t.co/QDkUMaEa7M pic.twitter.com/9kcZZ8m1gt

-- Benjamin Wittes (@benjaminwittes) January 18, 2019

The allegation that the President of the United States may have suborned perjury before our committee in an effort to curtail the investigation and cover up his business dealings with Russia is among the most serious to date. We will do what's necessary to find out if it's true. https://t.co/GljBAFqOjh

-- Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) January 18, 2019

If the @BuzzFeed story is true, President Trump must resign or be impeached.

-- Joaquin Castro (@JoaquinCastrotx) January 18, 2019

Listen, if Mueller does have multiple sources confirming Trump directed Cohen to lie to Congress, then we need to know this ASAP. Mueller shouldn't end his inquiry, but it's about time for him to show Congress his cards before it's too late for us to act. https://t.co/ekG5VSBS8G

-- Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) January 18, 2019

UPDATE: A spokesperson for the special counsel is disputing BuzzFeed News' report. https://t.co/BEoMKiDypn pic.twitter.com/GWWfGtyhaE

-- BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) January 19, 2019

To those trying to parse the Mueller statement: it's a straight-up denial. Maybe Buzzfeed can prove they are right, maybe Mueller can prove them wrong. But it's an emphatic denial https://t.co/EI1J7XLCJe

-- Devlin Barrett (@DevlinBarrett) January 19, 2019

. @Isikoff : "There were red flags about the BuzzFeed story from the get-go." Notes it was inconsistent with Cohen's guilty plea when he said he made false statements about Trump Tower to Congress to be "consistent" with Trump, not at his direction. pic.twitter.com/tgDg6SNPpG

-- David Rutz (@DavidRutz) January 19, 2019

We at The Post also had riffs on the story our reporters hadn't confirmed. One noted Fox downplayed it; another said it "if true, looks to be the most damning to date for Trump." The industry needs to think deeply on how to cover others' reporting we can't confirm independently. https://t.co/afzG5B8LAP

-- Matt Zapotosky (@mattzap) January 19, 2019

Washington Post says Mueller's denial of BuzzFeed News article is aimed at the full story: "Mueller's denial, according to people familiar with the matter, aims to make clear that none of those statements in the story are accurate."
https://t.co/ene0yqe1mK

-- andrew kaczynski (@KFILE) January 19, 2019

If you're one of the people tempted to believe the self-evidently laughable claim that there's something "vague" or unclear about Mueller's statement, or that it just seeks to quibble with a few semantic trivialities, read this @WashPost story about this https://t.co/0io99LyATS pic.twitter.com/ca1TwPR3Og

-- Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 19, 2019

You can spend hours parsing the Carr statement, but given how unusual it is for any DOJ office to issue this sort of on the record denial, let alone this office, suspect it means the story's core contention that they have evidence Trump told Cohen to lie is fundamentally wrong.

-- Matthew Miller (@matthewamiller) January 19, 2019

New York Times throws a bit of cold water on BuzzFeed's explosive -- and now seriously challenged -- report that Trump instructed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress: https://t.co/9N7MiHs7et pic.twitter.com/7FJFT9D8fW

-- ErikWemple (@ErikWemple) January 19, 2019

I can't speak to Buzzfeed's sourcing, but, for what it's worth, I declined to run with parts of the narrative they conveyed based on a source central to the story repeatedly disputing the idea that Trump directly issued orders of that kind.

-- Ronan Farrow (@RonanFarrow) January 19, 2019

FWIW in all our reporting I haven't found any in the Trump Org that have met with or been interviewed by Mueller. https://t.co/U4eV1MZc8p

-- John Santucci (@Santucci) January 18, 2019
1. Donald Trump Jr. Was Offered Advanced Access to the WikiLeaks Email Archive (CNN/MSNBC)

The morning of December 9, 2017, launched one of the most humiliating spectacles in the history of the U.S. media. With a tone so grave and bombastic that it is impossible to overstate, CNN went on the air and announced a major exclusive: Donald Trump, Jr. was offered by email advanced access to the trove of DNC and Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks – meaning before those emails were made public. Within an hour, MSNBC's Ken Dilanian, using a tone somehow even more unhinged, purported to have "independently confirmed" this mammoth, blockbuster scoop, which, they said, would have been the smoking gun showing collusion between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks over the hacked emails (while the YouTube clips have been removed, you can still watch one of the amazing MSNBC videos here ).

There was, alas, just one small problem with this massive, blockbuster story: it was totally and completely false. The email which Trump, Jr. received that directed him to the WikiLeaks archive was sent after WikiLeaks published it online for the whole world to see, not before. Rather than some super secretive operative giving Trump, Jr. advanced access, as both CNN and MSNBC told the public for hours they had confirmed, it was instead just some totally pedestrian message from a random member of the public suggesting Trump, Jr. review documents the whole world was already talking about. All of the anonymous sources CNN and MSNBC cited somehow all got the date of the email wrong.

To date, when asked how they both could have gotten such a massive story so completely wrong in the same way, both CNN and MSNBC have adopted the posture of the CIA by maintaining complete silence and refusing to explain how it could possibly be that all of their "multiple, independent sources" got the date wrong on the email in the same way, to be as incriminating – and false – as possible. Nor, needless to say, will they identify their sources who, in concert, fed them such inflammatory and utterly false information.

Sadly, CNN and MSNBC have deleted most traces of the most humiliating videos from the internet, including demanding that YouTube remove copies. But enough survives to document just what a monumental, horrifying, and utterly inexcusable debacle this was. Particularly amazing is the clip of the CNN reporter (see below) having to admit the error for the first time, as he awkwardly struggles to pretend that it's not the massive, horrific debacle that it so obviously is:

Knowingly soliciting or receiving anything of value from a foreign national for campaign purposes violates the Federal Election Campaign Act. If it's worth over $2,000 then penalties include fines & IMPRISONMENT. @DonaldJTrumpJr may be in bigly trouble. #FridayFeeling https://t.co/dRz6Ph17Er

-- Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) December 8, 2017

boom https://t.co/9RPPltRq8k pic.twitter.com/eyYHkOMEPi

-- Benjamin Wittes (@benjaminwittes) December 8, 2017

CNN is leading the way in bashing BuzzFeed but it's worth remembering CNN had a humiliation at least as big & bad: when they yelled that Trump Jr. had advanced access to the WL archive (!): all based on a wrong date. They removed all the segments from YouTube, but this remains: pic.twitter.com/0jiA50aIku

-- Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 19, 2019

Dishonorable Mention:

[May 19, 2020] Russophobia in the Age of Donald Trump

Highly recommended!
Russiaphobia as a pathological reaction on the deep crisis of neoliberalism
Notable quotes:
"... The described lack of confidence was reflected in the exaggerated fear that Russia was capable of destroying the West's values. However, Russia and Putin were neither omnipresent nor threatening to destroy the United States' political system. ..."
"... Russia's basic motives remain defensive even when the Kremlin relies on assertive tactics. Russia's assertiveness, even in cyberspace, is of a reactive nature and is a response to US policies. ..."
"... Rather than fighting a full-scale information war with the West, Russia seeks to increase its status and strengthen its bargaining position in relations with the United States. 68 The Kremlin has been proposing to negotiate rules of cooperation in the cyber area since early in the twenty-first century. Motivated by an insistence on "cyber-sovereignty," Russia regularly proposes resolutions at the United Nations to prohibit "information aggression," In a 2011 letter to the United Nations General Assembly, Russia proposed an "International Code of Conduct for Information Security," stipulating that states subscribing to the code would pledge to "not use information and communications technologies and other information and communications networks to interfere with the internal affairs of other states or with the aim of undermining their political, economic and social stability." 69 ..."
"... Overall, what the Kremlin challenges is the United States' post–Cold War behavior that undermines Russia's status as a great power. Although Russia is not in a position to directly challenge the United States and the US-centered international order, the Kremlin hopes to gain external recognition as a great power by relying on low-cost methods and revealing the vulnerability of Western nations. Russia's capabilities and presence in global cyber and media space are limited, and the Kremlin is motivated by asymmetric deployment of its media, information, and cyber power. ..."
May 19, 2020 | www.oxfordscholarship.com
Chapter:
(p.81) 5 Russophobia in the Age of Donald Trump
Source:
The Dark Double
Author(s):
Andrei P. Tsygankov
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190919337.003.0005

Abstract and Keywords

The chapter extends the argument about media and value conflict between Russia and the United States to the age of Donald Trump. The new value conflict is assessed as especially acute and exacerbated by the US partisan divide. The Russia issue became central because it reflected both political partisanship and the growing value division between Trump voters and the liberal establishment. In addition to explaining the new wave of American Russophobia, the chapter analyzes Russia's own role and motives. The media are likely to continue the ideological and largely negative coverage of Russia, especially if Washington and Moscow fail to develop a pragmatic form of cooperation.

Keywords: Russia, Trump, US elections, narrative of collusion, partisan divide

This chapter addresses the new development in the US media perception of the Russian threat following the election of Donald Trump as the United States' president. The election revealed that US national values could no longer be viewed as predominantly liberal and favoring the global promotion of democracy, as supported by Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. During and after the election, the liberal media sought to present Moscow as not only favoring Trump but being responsible for his election and even ruling on behalf of the Kremlin. Those committed to a liberal worldview led the way in criticizing Russia and Putin for assaulting liberal democratic values globally and inside the United States. This chapter argues that the Russia issue became so central in the new internal divide because it reflects both political partisanship and the growing division between the values of Trump voters and those of the liberal establishment. The domestic political struggle has exacerbated the divide. Russia's otherness, again, has highlighted values of "freedom," seeking to preserve the confidence of the liberal self. (p.82)

The Narrative of Trump's "Collusion" with Russia

During the US presidential election campaign, American media developed yet another perception of Russia as reflected in the narrative of Trump's collusion with the Kremlin. 1 Having originated in liberal media and building on the previous perceptions of neo-Soviet autocracy and foreign threat, the new perception of Russia was that of the enemy that won the war against the United States. By electing the Kremlin's favored candidate, America was defeated by Russia. As a CNN columnist wrote, "The Russians really are here, infiltrating every corner of the country, with the single goal of disrupting the American way of life." 2 The two assumptions behind the new media narrative were that Putin was an enemy and that Trump was compromised by Putin. The inevitable conclusion was that Trump could not be a patriot and potentially was a traitor prepared to act against US interests.

The new narrative was assisted by the fact that Trump presented a radically different perspective on Russia than Clinton and the US establishment. The American political class had been in agreement that Russia displayed an aggressive foreign policy seeking to destroy the US-centered international order. Influential politicians, both Republicans and Democrats, commonly referred to Russian president Putin as an extremely dangerous KGB spy with no soul. Instead, Trump saw Russia's international interests as not fundamentally different from America's. He advocated that the United States to find a way to align its policies and priorities in defeating terrorism in the Middle East -- a goal that Russia shared -- with the Kremlin's. Trump promised to form new alliances to "unite the civilized world against Radical Islamic Terrorism" and to eradicate it "completely from the face of the Earth." 3 He hinted that he was prepared to revisit the thorny issues of Western sanctions against (p.83) the Russian economy and the recognition of Crimea as a part of Russia. Trump never commented on Russia's political system but expressed his admiration for Putin's leadership and high level of domestic support. 4

Capitalizing on the difference between Trump's views and those of the Democratic Party nominee, Hillary Clinton, the liberal media referred to Trump as the Kremlin-compromised candidate. Commentators and columnists with the New York Times , such as Paul Krugman, referred to Trump as the "Siberian" candidate. 5 Commentators and pundits, including those with academic and political credentials, developed the theory that the United States was under attack. The former ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, wrote in the Washington Post that Russia had attacked "our sovereignty" and continued to "watch us do nothing" because of the partisan divide. He compared the Kremlin's actions with Pearl Harbor or 9/11 and warned that Russia was likely to perform repeat assaults in 2018 and 2020. 6 The historian Timothy Snyder went further, comparing the election of Trump to a loss of war, which Snyder said was the basic aim of the enemy. Writing in the New York Daily News , he asserted, "We no longer need to wonder what it would be like to lose a war on our own territory. We just lost one to Russia, and the consequence was the election of Donald Trump." 7

The election of Trump prompted the liberal media to discuss Russia-related fears. The leading theory was that Trump would now compromise America's interests and rule the country on behalf of Putin. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times called for actions against Russia and praised "patriotic" Republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham for being tough on Trump. 8 MSNBC host Rachel Maddow asked whether Trump was actually under Putin's control. Citing Trump's views and his associates' travel to Moscow, she told viewers, "We are also starting to see (p.84) what may be signs of continuing [Russian] influence in our country, not just during the campaign but during the administration -- basically, signs of what could be a continuing operation." 9 Another New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof, published a column titled "There's a Smell of Treason in the Air," arguing that the FBI's investigation of the Trump presidential campaign's collusion "with a foreign power so as to win an election" was an investigation of whether such collusion "would amount to treason." 10 Responding to Trump's statement that his phone was tapped during the election campaign, the Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum tweeted that "Trump's insane 'GCHQ tapped my phone' theory came from . . . Moscow." McFaul and many others then endorsed and retweeted the message. 11

To many within the US media, Trump's lack of interest in promoting global institutions and his publicly expressed doubts that the Kremlin was behind cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee (DNC) served to exacerbate the problem. Several intelligence leaks to the press and investigations by Congress and the FBI contributed to the image of a president who was not motivated by US interests. The US intelligence report on Russia's alleged hacking of the US electoral system released on January 8, 2017, served to consolidate the image of Russia as an enemy. Leaks to the press have continued throughout Trump's presidency. Someone in the administration informed the press that Trump called Putin to congratulate him on his victory in elections on March 18, 2018, despite Trump's advisers' warning against making such a call. 12

In the meantime, investigations of Trump's alleged "collusion" with Russia were failing to produce substantive evidence. Facts that some associates of Trump sought to meet or met with members of Russia's government did not lead to evidence of sustained contacts or collaboration. It was not proven that the Kremlin's "black dossier" on Trump compiled by British intelligence officer (p.85) Christopher Steele and leaked to CNN was truthful. Russian activity on American social networks such as Facebook and Twitter was not found to be conclusive in determining outcomes of the elections. 13 In February 2018, a year after launching investigation, Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted thirteen Russian nationals for allegedly interfering in the US 2016 presidential elections, yet their connection to Putin or Trump was not established. On March 12, 2018, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Burr stated that he had not yet seen any evidence of collusion. 14 Representative Mike Conaway, the Republican leading the Russia investigation, announced the end of the committee's probe of Russian meddling in the election. 15

Trump was also not acting toward Russia in the way the US media expected. His views largely reflected those of the military and national security establishment and disappointed some of his supporters. 16 The US National Security Strategy and new Defense Strategy presented Russia as a leading security threat, alongside China, Iran, and North Korea. The president made it clear that he wanted to engage in tough bargaining with Russia by insisting on American terms. 17 Instead of improving ties with Russia, let alone acting on behalf of the Kremlin, Trump contributed to new crises in bilateral relations that had to do with the two sides' principally different perceptions. While the Kremlin expected Washington to normalize relations, the United States assumed Russia's weakness and expected it to comply with Washington's priorities regarding the Middle East, Ukraine, and Afghanistan and nuclear and cyber issues. 18 Trump also authorized the largest expulsion of Russian diplomats in US history and ordered several missile strikes against Assad's Russia-supported positions in Syria, each time provoking a crisis in relations with Moscow. Even Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, whom Rachel Maddow suspected of being appointed on Putin's advice to "weaken" the State Department and "bleed out" (p.86) the FBI, 19 was replaced by John Bolton. The latter's foreign policy reputation was that of a hawk, including on Russia. 20

Responding to these developments, the media focused on fears of being attacked by the Kremlin and on Trump not doing enough to protect the country. These fears went beyond the alleged cyber interference in the US presidential elections and included infiltration of American media and social networks and attacks on congressional elections and the country's most sensitive infrastructure, such as electric grids, water-processing plants, banking networks, and transportation facilities. In order to prevent such developments, media commentators and editorial writers recommended additional pressures on the Kremlin and counteroffensive operations. 21 One commentator recommended, as the best defense from Russia's plans to interfere with another election in the United States, launching a cyberattack on Russia's own presidential elections in March 2018, to "disrupt the stability of Vladimir Putin's regime." 22 A New York Times editorial summarized the mood by challenging President Trump to confront Russia further: "If Mr. Trump isn't Mr. Putin's lackey, it's past time for him to prove it." 23 The burden of proof was now on Trump's shoulders.

Opposition to the "Collusion" Narrative

In contrast to highly critical views of Russia in the dominant media, conservative, libertarian, and progressive sources offered different assessments. Initially, opposition to the collusion narrative came from the alternative media, yet gradually -- in response to scant evidence of Trump's collusion -- it incorporated voices within the mainstream.

The conservative media did not support the view that Russia "stole" elections and presented Trump as a patriot who wanted to make America great rather than develop "cozy" relationships with (p.87) the Kremlin. Writing in the American Interest , Walter Russell Mead argued that Trump aimed to demonstrate the United States' superiority by capitalizing on its military and technological advantages. He did not sound like a Russian mole. Challenging the liberal media, the author called for "an intellectually solvent and emotionally stable press" and wrote that "if President Trump really is a Putin pawn, his foreign policy will start looking much more like Barack Obama's." 24 Instead of viewing Trump as compromised by the Kremlin, sources such Breitbart and Fox News attributed the blame to the deep state, "the complex of bureaucrats, technocrats, and plutocrats," including the intelligence agencies, that seeks to "derail, or at least to de-legitimize, the Trump presidency" by engaging in accusations and smear campaigns. 25

Echoing Trump's own views, some conservatives expressed their admiration for Putin as a dynamic leader superior to Obama. In particular, they praised Putin for his ability to defend Russia's "traditional values" and great-power status. 26 Neoconservative and paleoconservative publications like the National Review , the Weekly Standard, Human Events Online , and others critiqued Obama's "feckless foreign policy," characterized by "fruitless accommodationism," contrasting it with Putin's skilled and calculative geopolitical "game of chess." 27 A Washington Post / ABC News poll revealed that among Republicans, 75% approved of Trump's approach on Russia relative; 40% of all respondents approved. 28 This did not mean that conservatives and Republicans were "infiltrated" by the Kremlin. Mutual Russian and American conservative influences were limited and nonstructured. 29 The approval of Putin as a leader by American conservatives meant that they shared a certain commonality of ideas and were equally critical of liberal media and globalization. 30

Progressive and libertarian media also did not support the narrative of collusion. Gary Leupp at CounterPunch found the (p.88) narrative to be serving the purpose of reviving and even intensifying "Cold War-era Russophobia," with Russia being an "adversary" "only in that it opposes the expansion of NATO, especially to include Ukraine and Georgia." 31 Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com questioned the narrative by pointing to Russia's bellicose rhetoric in response to Trump's actions. 32 Glenn Greenwald and Zaid Jilani at Intercept reminded readers that, overall, Trump proved to be far more confrontational toward Russia than Obama, thereby endangering America. 33 In particular Trump severed diplomatic ties with Russia, armed Ukraine, appointed anti-Russia hawks, such as ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, National Security Advisor John Bolton, and Secretary of State Michal Pompeo to key foreign policy positions, antagonized Russia's Iranian allies, and imposed tough sanctions against Russian business with ties to the Kremlin. 34

The dominant liberal media ignored opposing perspectives or presented them as compromised by Russia. For instance, in amplifying the view that Putin "stole" the elections, the Washington Post sought to discredit alternative sources of news and commentaries as infiltrated by the Kremlin's propaganda. On November 24, 2016, the newspaper published an interview with the executive director of a new website, PropOrNot, who preferred to remain anonymous, and claimed that the Russian government circulated pro-Trump articles before the election. Without providing evidence on explaining its methodology, the group identified more than two hundred websites that published or echoed Russian propaganda, including WikiLeaks and the Drudge Report , left-wing websites such as CounterPunch, Truthout, Black Agenda Report, Truthdig , and Naked Capitalism , as well as libertarian venues such as Antiwar.com and the Ron Paul Institute. 35 Another mainstream liberal outlet, CNN, warned the American people to be vigilant against the Kremlin's alleged efforts to spread propaganda: "Enormous numbers of (p.89) Americans are not only failing to fight back, they are also unwitting collaborators -- reading, retweeting, sharing and reacting to Russian propaganda and provocations every day." 36

However, voices of dissent were now heard even in the mainstream media. Masha Gessen of the New Yorker said that Trump's tweet about Robert Mueller's indictments and Moscow's "laughing its ass off" was "unusually (perhaps accidentally) accurate." 37 She pointed out that Russians of all ideological convictions "are remarkably united in finding the American obsession with Russian meddling to be ridiculous." 38 The editor of the influential Politico , Blake Hounshell, confessed that he was a Russiagate skeptic because even though "Trump was all too happy to collude with Putin," Mueller's team never found a "smoking gun." 39 In reviewing the book on Russia's role in the 2016 election Russian Roulette , veteran New York Times reporter Steven Lee Myers noted that the Kremlin's meddling "simply exploited the vulgarity already plaguing American political campaigns" and that the veracity of many accusations remained unclear. 40

Explaining Russophobia

The high-intensity Russophobia within the American media, overblown even by the standards of previous threat narratives, could no longer be explained by differences in national values or by bilateral tensions. The new fear of Russia also reflected domestic political polarization and growing national unease over America's identity and future direction.

The narrative of collusion in the media was symptomatic of America's declining confidence in its own values. Until the intervention in Iraq in 2004, optimism and a sense of confidence prevailed in American social attitudes, having survived even the terrorist attack on the United States on September 11, 2001. The (p.90) country's economy was growing and its position in the world was not challenged. However, the disastrous war in Iraq, the global financial crisis of 2008, and Russia's intervention in Georgia in August 2008 changed that. US leadership could no longer inspire the same respect, and a growing number of countries viewed it as a threat to world peace. 41 Internally, the United States was increasingly divided. Following presidential elections in November 2016, 77% of Americans perceived their country as "greatly divided on the most important values." 42 The value divide had been expressed in partisanship and political polarization long before the 2016 presidential elections. 43 The Russia issue deepened this divide. According to a poll taken in October 2017, 63% of Democrats, but just 38% of Republicans, viewed "Russia's power and influence" as a major threat to the well-being of the United States. 44

During the US 2016 presidential elections, Russia emerged as a convenient way to accentuate differences between Democratic and Republican candidates, which in previous elections were never as pronounced or defining. The new elections deepened the partisan divide because of extreme differences between the two main candidates, particularly on Russia. Donald Trump positioned himself as a radical populist promising to transform US foreign policy and "drain the swamp" in Washington. His position on Russia seemed unusual because, by election time, the Kremlin had challenged the United States' position in the world by annexing Crimea, supporting Ukrainian separatism, and possibly hacking the DNC site.

The Russian issue assisted Clinton in stressing her differences from Trump. Soon after it became known that DNC servers were hacked, she embraced the view that Russia was behind the cyberattacks. She accused Russia of "trying to wreak havoc" in the United States and threatened retaliation. 45 In his turn, Trump used Russia to challenge Clinton's commitment to national security (p.91) and ability to serve as commander in chief. In particular, he drew public attention to the FBI investigation into Clinton's use of a private server for professional correspondence, and even noted sarcastically that the Russians should find thirty thousand missing emails belonging to her. The latter was interpreted by many in liberal media and political circles as a sign of Trump's being unpatriotic. 46 Clinton capitalized on this interpretation. She referred to the issue of hacking as the most important one throughout the campaign and challenged Trump to agree with assessments of intelligence agencies that cyberattacks were ordered by the Kremlin. She questioned Trump's commitments to US national security and accused him of being a "puppet" for President Putin. 47 Following Trump's victory, Clinton told donors that her loss should be partly attributed to Putin and the election hacks directed by him. 48

Clinton's arguments fitted with the overall narrative embraced by the mainstream media since roughly 2005 characterizing Russia as abusive and aggressive. Clinton viewed Russia as an oppressive autocratic power that was aggressive abroad to compensate for domestic weaknesses. Previously, in her book Hard Choices , then-secretary of state Clinton described Putin as "thin-skinned and autocratic, resenting criticism and eventually cracking down on dissent and debate." 49 This view was shared by President Obama, who publicly referred to Russia as a "regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors not out of strength but out of weakness." 50 During the election's campaign, Clinton argued that the United States should challenge Russia by imposing a no-fly zone in Syria with the objective of removing Assad from power, strengthening sanctions against the Russian economy, and providing lethal weapons to Ukraine in order to contain the potential threat of Russia's military invasion.

Following the elections, the partisan divide deepened, with liberal establishment attacking the "unpatriotic" Trump. Having (p.92) lost the election, Clinton partly attributed Trump's victory to the role of Russia and advocated an investigation into Trump's ties to Russia. In February 2017 the Clinton-influenced Center for American Progress brought on a former State Department official to run a new Moscow Project. 51 As acknowledged by the New Yorker , members of the Clinton inner circle believed that the Obama administration deliberately downplayed DNC hacking by the Kremlin. "We understand the bind they were in," one of Clinton's senior advisers said. "But what if Barack Obama had gone to the Oval Office, or the East Room of the White House, and said, 'I'm speaking to you tonight to inform you that the United States is under attack . . .' A large majority of Americans would have sat up and taken notice . . . it is bewildering -- it is baffling -- it is hard to make sense of why this was not a five-alarm fire in the White House." 52

In addition to Clinton, many other members of the Washington establishment, including some Republicans, spread the narrative of Russia "attacking" America. Republican politicians who viewed Clinton's defeat and the hacking attacks in military terms included those of chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee John McCain, who stated, "When you attack a country, it's an act of war," 53 and former vice president Dick Cheney, who called Russia's alleged interference in the US election "a very serious effort made by Mr. Putin" that "in some quarters that would be considered an act of war." 54 A number of Democrats also engaged in the rhetoric of war, likening the Russian "attack," as Senator Ben Cardin did, to a "political Pearl Harbor." 55

Rumors and leaks, possibly by members of US intelligence agencies, 56 and activities of liberal groups that sought to discredit Trump contributed to the Russophobia. In addition to the DNC hacking accusations, many fears of Russia in the media were based on the assumption that contacts, let alone cooperation with the (p.93) Kremlin, was unpatriotic and implied potentially "compromising" behavior: praise of Putin as a leader, possible business dealings with Russian "oligarchs," and meetings with Russian officials such Ambassador Sergei Kislyak. 57

There were therefore two sides to the Russia story in the US liberal media -- rational and emotional. The rational side had to do with calculations by Clinton-affiliated circles and anti-Russian groups pooling their resources to undermine Trump and his plans to improve relations with Russia. Among others, these resources included dominance within the liberal media and leaks by the intelligence community. The emotional side was revealed by the liberal elites' values and ability to promote fears of Russia within the US political class and the general public. Popular emotions of fear and frustration with Russia already existed in the public space due to the old Cold War memories, as well as disturbing post–Cold War developments that included wars in Chechnya, Georgia, and Ukraine. In part because of these memories, factions such as those associated with Clinton were successful in evoking in the public liberal mind what historian Richard Hofstadter called the "paranoid style" or "the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy." 58 Mobilized by liberal media to pressure Trump, these emotions became an independent factor in the political struggle inside Washington. The public display of fear and frustration with Russia and Trump could only be sustained by a constant supply of new "suspicious" developments and intense discussion by the media.

Russia's Role and Motives

Russia's "attacking" America and Trump's "colluding" with the Kremlin remained poorly substantiated. Taken together, the DNC hacking, Trump's and Putin's mutual praise, and Trump associates' (p.94) contacts with Russian officials implied Kremlin infiltration of the United States' internal politics. Yet viewed separately, each was questionable and unproven. Some of these points could have also been made about Hillary Clinton, who had ties to Russian -- not to mention Saudi Arabian -- business circles and Ukrainian politicians. 59 Political views cannot be counted as evidence. Contacts with Russian officials could have been legitimate exchanges of views about two countries' interests and potential cooperation. Even the CIA- and the FBI-endorsed conclusion that Russia attacked the DNC servers was questioned by some observers on the grounds that forensic evidence was lacking and that it relied too much on findings by one cybersecurity company. 60 In general, discussion of Russia in the US media lacked nuances and a sense of proportion. As Jesse Walker, an editor at Reason magazine and author of The United States of Paranoia , pointed out,

There's a difference between thinking that Moscow may have hacked the Democratic National Committee and thinking that Moscow actually hacked the election, between thinking the president may have Russian conflicts of interest and thinking he's a Russian puppet . . . when someone like the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman declares that Putin "installed" Donald Trump as president, he's moving out of the realm of plausible plots and into the world of fantasy. Similarly, Clinton's warning that Trump could be Putin's "puppet" leaped from an imaginable idea, that Putin wanted to help her rival, to the much more dubious notion that Putin thought he could control the impulsive Trump. (Trump barely seems capable of controlling himself.) 61

The loose and politically tendentious nature of discussions, circulation of questionable leaks and dossiers complied by unidentified (p.95) individuals, and lack of serious evidence led a number of observers to conclude that the Russia story was more about stopping Trump than about Russia. The Russian scandal was symptomatic of the poisonous state of bilateral relations that Democrats exploited for the purpose of derailing Trump. US-Russia relations became a hostage of partisan domestic politics. As one liberal and tough critic of Putin wrote, Democratic lawmakers' rhetoric of war in connection with the 2016 elections "places Republicans -- who often characterize themselves as more hawkish on Russia and defense -- in a bind as they try to defend to the new administration's strategy towards Moscow." 62 Another observer noted that Russiagate performed "a critical function for Trump's political foes," allowing "them to oppose Trump while obscuring key areas where they either share his priorities or have no viable alternative." 63

The described lack of confidence was reflected in the exaggerated fear that Russia was capable of destroying the West's values. However, Russia and Putin were neither omnipresent nor threatening to destroy the United States' political system. A number of analysts, such as Mark Schrad, identified fears of Russia as "increasingly hysterical fantasies" and argued that Russia was not a global menace. 64 If the Kremlin was indeed behind the cyberattacks, it was not for the reasons commonly broached. Rather than trying to subvert the US system, it sought to defend its own system against what it perceived as a US policy of changing regimes and meddling in Russia's internal affairs. The United States has a long history of covert activities in foreign countries. 65 Washington's establishment has never followed the advice given by prominent American statesmen such as George Kennan to let Russians "be Russians" and "work out their internal problems in their own manner." 66 Instead, the United States assumes that America defines the rules and boundaries of proper behavior in international politics, while others must simply follow the rules.

(p.96) Russia's basic motives remain defensive even when the Kremlin relies on assertive tactics. Russia's assertiveness, even in cyberspace, is of a reactive nature and is a response to US policies. Experts observe that Russia's conception of cyber and other informational power serves the overall purpose of protecting national sovereignty from encroachments by the United States. 67 Rather than fighting a full-scale information war with the West, Russia seeks to increase its status and strengthen its bargaining position in relations with the United States. 68 The Kremlin has been proposing to negotiate rules of cooperation in the cyber area since early in the twenty-first century. Motivated by an insistence on "cyber-sovereignty," Russia regularly proposes resolutions at the United Nations to prohibit "information aggression," In a 2011 letter to the United Nations General Assembly, Russia proposed an "International Code of Conduct for Information Security," stipulating that states subscribing to the code would pledge to "not use information and communications technologies and other information and communications networks to interfere with the internal affairs of other states or with the aim of undermining their political, economic and social stability." 69

Overall, what the Kremlin challenges is the United States' post–Cold War behavior that undermines Russia's status as a great power. Although Russia is not in a position to directly challenge the United States and the US-centered international order, the Kremlin hopes to gain external recognition as a great power by relying on low-cost methods and revealing the vulnerability of Western nations. Russia's capabilities and presence in global cyber and media space are limited, and the Kremlin is motivated by asymmetric deployment of its media, information, and cyber power.

[May 16, 2020] Bought MSM experts typically are just MIC prostitutes: most are neocons and "Russiagaters"

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... War is too important to be left to the generals ..."
May 16, 2020 | www.rt.com

Originally from: Covid-19, Russiagate, Iraq – politicians are too happy to defer to convenient 'experts' -- RT Op-ed

So-called "experts" are too narrow in their focus and too often wrong in their judgments to be able to decide the sorts of life-and-death issues a nation's political leaders are asked to decide. If " War is too important to be left to the generals ," as Georges Clemenceau, (France's prime minister during World War I) claimed, then foreign policy is too important to be left to the intelligence agencies, and public policy is too important to be left to the scientists.

From the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, politicians and media fell over themselves in their rush to defer to the " experts. " Apparently, it was up to scientists to decide whether a country should shut down its economy and keep its citizens locked up in their homes in perpetuity. It was up to scientists to determine whether a country can, if ever, resume normal life. As for the consequences -- economic depression, exploding national debt, lost businesses and means of livelihood, growing alcoholism and drug abuse, rise in suicides, spiraling untreated medical problems -- those are things the public would just have to live with, because there could be no second-guessing of the scientists.

[May 15, 2020] Lies, damned lies and statistics

May 15, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

et Al May 11, 2020 at 9:11 am

al-Beeb s'Allah live news feed on their website Summary: Russia now has the third-highest number of confirmed cases in the world, overtaking UK and Italy .

Three pages further on the live feed you can read:* Russia has confirmed 2,009 deaths in total. You have to go to page four for the actual story @13:07 that links to the summary to actual story details (there are no links in the summary at all!) to read taking the total death toll to 2,009, which is far lower than the numbers reported in many other countries. (my emphasis) *** So well below the UK's own tally of 32,000 heroic deaths. That's good to know.

As others have pointed out, Russia has carried out the highest number of tests in u-Rope, now greater than 4.5 million, which is only behind the US globally

Thank God there is the BBC to put things in to proper perspective in such a professional way / sarc.

* https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-52612438/page/3
** https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-52612438/page/4

[May 15, 2020] "Travel brings wisdom only to the wise. It renders the ignorant more ignorant than ever."

Joe Abercrombie, from "Last Argument of Kings"
May 15, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

et Al May 9, 2020 at 10:53 am

al-Beeb s'Allah: Coronavirus: Belarus WW2 parade defies pandemic and upstages Putin

the Fraudian: Victory Day: Belarus swaggers on parade as Russians leave Red Square deserted
####

[May 15, 2020] Russia can be anything you like, provided your objective is to shit on it

May 15, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

"Do you remember that part, in the Wizard of Oz, when the witch is dead and the Munchkins start singing? Think that kind of happiness."

Julie Mulhern, from "The Deep End"

The New York Times is unable to contain its glee at Russia's having had to cancel its Victory Day celebrations. There was no end of negative press directed at Putin for having not yet announced postponement or cancellation, because it looked for a bit as if Russia was going to go for herd immunity rather than bringing everything to a grinding halt, and sequestering its terrified citizens in their homes as the west has done. But finally the number of Russian infections began to rocket encouragingly upward, and something had to be done. So it was lockdown, Victory Day postponed indefinitely, and the Times couldn't be happier.

The Times has been going downhill at quite a clip ever since the mendacious aluminum-tubes nonsense in the runup to the American invasion of Iraq, and in fact the Times was an enthusiastic promoter of that war in general, swaddling itself in righteousness when serial liar Judith Miller went to jail rather than reveal her sources. It was a 'proud but awful moment for The Times' , but heroine Miller 'surrendered her liberty in defense of a greater liberty'. Give me a moment, will you? I want to put on some violins.

Ah, that's better. Inspiring, thank you, Judith. But in the end the Times' blubbering about greater liberty looked a lot more like a heartstrings strumfest in defense of telling outrageous lies that got thousands upon thousands of innocent people killed, brought out the very worst in Americans in the grimy corridors of Abu Ghraib , and left a country so battered, demoralized and divided that it has never recovered to this day.

The foregoing is simply a measure of how far the Times has fallen, from standard-bearer for journalistic excellence to liberal demagogue, not fit to wrap fish and chips in. And the unseemly sneering and giggling of the authors of the subject piece should be regarded with the same contempt which would surely be directed at Russians who cheered at Independence Day celebrations having to be canceled in the United States – stick your tailgate parties up your tailgate, Amerikanski!

But since we're here, let's take a look at what a journalist's salary at The New York Times buys you these days, shall we?

First of all, what does Victory Day celebrate? Because the Nazi surrender was actually tendered twice; it was signed May 7th, 1945 at Reims, by Alfred Jodl for Germany, Walter Bedell Smith for the Allied Expeditionary Force, and Ivan Susloparov for the Soviet High Command. But the latter was only a junior officer who did not have the authority to sign on behalf of the state, and the Soviet High Command had not approved the text of the surrender agreement. Stalin insisted on a second ceremony, said that the first ceremony constituted a preliminary agreement only, and insisted on the surrender being signed in Berlin, 'center of Nazi aggression'.

"Today, in Reims, Germans signed the preliminary act on an unconditional surrender. The main contribution, however, was done by Soviet people and not by the Allies, therefore the capitulation must be signed in front of the Supreme Command of all countries of the anti-Hitler coalition, and not only in front of the Supreme Command of Allied Forces. Moreover, I disagree that the surrender was not signed in Berlin, which was the center of Nazi aggression. We agreed with the Allies to consider the Reims protocol as preliminary."

Eisenhower immediately agreed, and the final Instrument of Surrender was signed May 9th, 1945, by Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel for Germany, Marshal Georgy Zhukov for the Soviet High Command, and Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder for the Allied Expeditionary Force. This is the date which has been celebrated every year since, by the Soviet Union and its inheritor, the Russian Federation.

What does it commemorate? The loss, according to credible research , of 23.8 million Soviet citizens due to war and occupation, 7.2 million of them soldiers who died on the front lines, 3.1 million more Soviet prisoners of war in German custody, .9 million dead – many of them starved to death – in the siege of Leningrad, and 2.5 million in the Jewish holocaust.

The USA lost a total of 418,500 .

Victory Day is not about we-had-more-people-killed-than-you. But just to put the magnitude of Soviet losses in perspective – total deaths in World War II, what the Soviets called the Great Patriotic War, were around 60 million people. The Soviet Union accounted for nearly half the dead of the global total.

And another thing; the war was fought mostly in Europe, and if you look down the rows of national casualties, you will notice a pattern – once you add civilian casualties on to the military deaths, the total takes a huge jump. Austria; 261,000 military dead – total deaths, 384,700. Belgium, 12,100 military dead. Total deaths, 86,000. France; military deaths, 217,600. Total deaths, 567,600. You see what I mean, I'm sure.

United States of America; military deaths, 416,800. Total deaths, 418,500. 1,700 civilian deaths of American citizens. For each American soldier killed in battle, the Soviet Union lost 17.

And even the most pessimistic would have to admit that the USA came out of World War II in a pretty good position; my, yes. Incredibly, American managers of General Motors and Ford went along with the conversion of their German plants to military production at a time when U.S. government documents show they were still resisting calls by the Roosevelt administration to step up military production in their plants at home.

"When American GIs invaded Europe in June 1944, they did so in jeeps, trucks and tanks manufactured by the Big Three motor companies in one of the largest crash militarization programs ever undertaken. It came as an unpleasant surprise to discover that the enemy was also driving trucks manufactured by Ford and Opel -- a 100 percent GM-owned subsidiary -- and flying Opel-built warplanes."

America profited handsomely, both by doing business with the Nazis right up until it was forced to stop, while at the same time America was churning out war materiel to support the allies as fast as factory lines could be made to run. Nice work if you can get it. The Bretton Woods agreement , concluded in 1944, abandoned the gold standard as the global currency in favour of the US greenback, putting America in the driver's seat as the dominant world power. The Soviets were left with a country in smoking ruins, as apple-cheeked America went back to work with a whistle on its lips. Right away, muttering started about the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which has recently exploded into accusation by the US Ambassador to Poland that Russia started the war. The Moscow Times, a militantly pro-western newspaper, ponders why Russia will not 'confront its role in the war', and decides it must be Putin's fault .

"Teaching history has never been easy in Russia, where archives are closed and transparent discussions about the country's Soviet past are met with hostility. Even then, teaching World War II is more difficult: with every year that Putin is in power, Russia fails to confront its role in the war head on."

And now some fucking American chowderhead – in Moscow – openly snickers over the cancellation of the Victory Day parade and celebration, in between boasting about how he carries a shopping bag with him every time he decides to go out for a stroll, so police won't challenge him on why he's not at home.

"I prefer going out during the day, walking with my wife, shielded by a big shopping bag in the hope that the police will let us be."

And of course, the canard we have all become accustomed to, Russia is aflame with coronavirus, with over 10.000 new cases per day for the last three days straight. As of the middle of April, Russia reported that nearly half its new cases were asymptomatic , and that proportion continues to increase – it seems reasonable to assume the high numbers result from increased testing. Deaths from coronavirus in Russia remain extremely low. 1,723 COVID victims have died, of a total 187,859 cases since the beginning of the outbreak, a mortality rate so far of .91%, about the same as the seasonal flu.

"Travel brings wisdom only to the wise. It renders the ignorant more ignorant than ever."

Joe Abercrombie, from "Last Argument of Kings"


Mark Chapman May 9, 2020 at 8:03 am

Oh, that is explained as well – "In a country with a long history of legal nihilism, the mayor's stay-at-home pleas were not expected to gain much traction. Russia is, after all, a land where, according to popular wisdom, "the severity of the law is compensated by the laxity of its enforcement" and "when something is not allowed but is greatly desired it can be done."

Again, the beauty of artistic license; on the one hand, the law in Russia is just words – nobody really pays attention to it. The only people who don't do just as they please are lazy fucking Russian puddings who can't be bothered to think big. On the other, whenever Navalny and his hamsters want to march straight into Red Square or down major streets where they can cause a traffic jam, the oppressive hand of the law is everywhere at once and screaming children are dragged off to prison, or straight to the nearest recruiting office where they are clapped into the army before they know what they're about. Depending on what kind of story you are writing for the New York Times, the law in Russia can be either wall-to-wall incompetence, Keystone Kops writ large, unenforceable and just going through the motions. Or it can be oppression, everywhere at once, brave liberals sweating over their keyboards at night in garrets, always waiting for that knock on the door, but so committed to getting the truth out that they risk their very lives.

Russia can be anything you like, provided your objective is to shit on it.

The vignette the author details above suggests that he and his wife are just out for a gratuitous stroll, to take the air – that little bit smarter than the native mugs who stay crammed into their tiny apartments, you see. It never occurs to them that all they need do is carry a shopping bag, and the cops will be either too lazy or too dumb to investigate.

moscowexile May 9, 2020 at 9:20 am
Misunderstood the above!

He's so smart!!!

He's not really shopping and the dumb Orcs don't suspect that he is fooling them!

But I see Orcs walking around outside my Moscow house all the time, and they are not carrying shopping bags and the cops do not stop them.

In fact, since this isolation regime has come into force, I have yet to see a cop in our neighborhood.

At the very beginning of the "quarantine", 2 cops came to the basketball court outside our house and told sone boys to bugger off. I am sure some old ratbag of an interfering babushka had summoned them.

Moscow Exile May 9, 2020 at 3:30 am

https://www.youtube.com/embed/bT8fv4Qokdw?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

And the Liberasts loathe the celebration of the victory against Nazism: they think it would have been better if the filth had won.

They also detest all those who participate in the "Immortal Regiment" parade, saying they all receive payment to do so.

Note the multi ethnicity of the USSR forces and citizens in the above clip.

Remember, now, "Russians" are inveterate racists!

[May 15, 2020] Actually, Maddow considers herself a Serious Journalist

May 15, 2020 | www.unz.com

Bill Jones , says: Show Comment May 14, 2020 at 9:24 am GMT

@Sgt. Joe Friday "Actually, Maddow considers herself a Serious Journalist. She "speaks truth to power," and she'd probably be the first to tell you that. Repeatedly.

Limbaugh on the other hand, if asked to pick a word to describe his profession would likely say "entertainer.""

While in actuality, the roles are very nearly reversed. (Nearly only because I don't find Maddow amusing)

[May 14, 2020] The NYT takes whatever it wants from whomever has got it, without giving anything back or acknowledging any help or assistance, if it thinks it can get away with it because it believes that, like the Empire it serves, it is Exceptional.

May 14, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com
Jen, May 10, 2020 at 3:54 am

Ben Norton, "Russian Journalists accuse NY Times of stealing stories that earned it the Pulitzer Prize – for second time"

"The New York Times has been accused for a second time of stealing major scoops from Russian journalists. One of those stories won the Times a Pulitzer Prize this May.

The journalists who have accused the Times of taking their work without credit also happen to be the same liberal media crusaders against Vladimir Putin [my emphasis] that Western correspondents at the Times and other mainstream outlets have cast as persecuted heroes

As Yasha Levine further down the page says, the NYT takes whatever it wants from whomever has got it, without giving anything back or acknowledging any help or assistance, if it thinks it can get away with it because it believes that, like the Empire it serves, it is Exceptional.

[May 14, 2020] Tucker on Obamagate

May 14, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Patient Observer May 11, 2020 at 8:50 am

Don't fuck with the Tuck:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/fHh19Baj_pM?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

The guy is on fire. Per Carlson, Obama orchestrated the Russian collusion propaganda. I suspect that the lovely Ms. Hilary was a conspirator as well.

Carlson has the number 1 television news show with 4.56 million viewers on average.

https://www.nytimes.com/svc/oembed/html/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2020%2F04%2F28%2Fbusiness%2Fmedia%2Fvirus-tucker-carlson-sean-hannity-fox-ratings.html

Like Like

Mark Chapman May 11, 2020 at 9:54 am
Absolutely remarkable; in fact, 'stunning', as he uses it, is not too much of a stretch. The 'liberal elites' just go right on lying even though the sworn testimony of FBI interviewers is available for anyone to read, as well as the chilling manipulations of Strozk and Page, both of whom should be in prison and perhaps will be. And that fucker Schiff should swing. I can't believe the transformation of Carlson from Bush shill to the reincarnation of Edward R. Murrow. He makes this case so compellingly that nobody could watch that clip and not believe that Flynn was railroaded from the outset. And what were they allegedly going to jail Flynn's son for? Does anyone know? Were they just going to make something up? That is terrifying, and almost argues for the disbanding of the FBI, although it demonstrably still contains honest agents – as Carlson asks rhetorically, how many times have they done this already, and gotten away with it?

It's hard to imagine anyone would vote Democrat now.

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Cortes May 11, 2020 at 10:10 am
The son was being lined up for prosecution for alleged FARA violations regarding work on Turkey, I think. The son was working with the General.

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Mark Chapman May 11, 2020 at 11:45 am
Couldn't have been too much of a crime, if they offered to let him go in exchange for Flynn pleading guilty to lying. Actually, you'd kind of think their business was prosecuting crimes whoever committed them, and that offering to excuse a crime in exchange for a guilty plea is .kind of a crime.

Man, they have to clean house at the FBI. And there probably are several other organizations that need it, too. Not the political culling based on ideology that was a feature of the Bush White House, but the crowd that's in now just cannot be allowed to get off with nothing.

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uncle tungsten May 12, 2020 at 2:55 am
Greetings Mark and all, I am a new arrival as Jen suggested the company is fine here for barflies to ponder the world. Can I surmise that if Flynn and son were the FBI targets for nefarious business dealings then surely Biden and son fall in to that same category. After all Biden and son filched millions after arranging a USA loan of $1Billion to Ukraine and then did it again after the IMF loaned a few million more. Carpetbagging and its modern day practice is a crime in the USA last I looked.

If that conspicuous bias isn't enough cause to dismember the FBI then consider the Uranium One deal that Hillary Clinton and family set up or perhaps the Debbie Wasserman Shultz fostering the Awan family spy and blackmail ring.

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Mark Chapman May 12, 2020 at 9:37 am
Good day, Uncle, and welcome! For some reason I can't fathom, the Democrats seem to own or control all the 'respectable' media in the USA. FOX News is an exception, and has been a mouthpiece for the Republicans since its inception. But the Democrats control the New York Times and the Washington Post, which together represent the bulk of American public feeling to foreigners, and probably to the domestic audience as well. They are extremely active on conflicts between the two parties, ensuring the Democratic perspective gets put forward in calm, reasonable why-wouldn't-a-sensible-person-think-this-way manner. At the same time they cast horrific aspersions at the Republicans. Not that either are much good; but the news coverage is very one-sided – the position of the Democrats on the sexual-assault furor over the Kavanaugh appointment compared with their wait-and-see attitude to very similar accusations against Biden is a classic example.

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rkka May 13, 2020 at 9:33 am
Mark,

I don't think its the Democrats that control the NYT &WP, so much as plutocrats. They're also the ones who fund both the Democrats & the Republicans. The only significant difference between the parties is largely in the arena of the social "culture war" issues. But on the issues plutocrats care about, like economic policy & foreign policy, the differences are shades of grey, rather than actual distinctions.

Just remember the coverage of both papers in the run up to George W Shrub's catastrophic Iraq war. They're stenographers, not journalists.

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Mark Chapman May 13, 2020 at 11:12 am
That may well be true, but the NYT and WP historically champion the Democrats, endorse the Democratic candidate for president, and pander to Democratic issues and projects. The Wall Street Journal is the traditional Republican print outlet, and there might be others but I don't know them. CNN is overwhelmingly and weepily Democratic in its content – Wolf Blitzer's eyes nearly roll back in his head with ecstasy whenever he mentions Saint Hillary – while FOX News is Repubican to the bone and openly contemptuous of liberals. It could certainly be, on reflection probably is, that the same cabal of corporatists control them all, and a fine joke they must think it. And I certainly and emphatically agree there is almost no difference between the parties in execution of external policy.

[May 14, 2020] Dirty Dozen: The 12 revelations that sunk Mueller's case against Flynn

Notable quotes:
"... Ideally, they should each be prosecuted with an attempt to discern their connections to the political establishment, and specifically to the Clintons. What does that woman have to do to get jailed – blow somebody away on the 6 o'clock news? ..."
May 14, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

et Al May 11, 2020 at 8:22 am

JusttheNews.com: Dirty Dozen: The 12 revelations that sunk Mueller's case against Flynn
https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/dirty-dozen-12-revelations-sunk-muellers-case-against

After a prescient 2017 tip from inside the FBI, a slow drip of revelations exposed the deep problems with the Flynn prosecution.
####

All at the link.

I should add that the author, seasoned investigative reporter John Soloman, wrote much of this over at TheHill.com and was targeted for review over his clearly labelled 'opinion' pieces reporting on the Bidens in the Ukraine. The Hill's conclusion is piss weak and accuses him of what just about every other journalist in the US does and reads in particular of holding him up to a much higher standard than others. As you will see from his twatter bio, he's worked for AP, Washington Post, The Washington Times and The Hill. Some things you are just not supposed to investigate, let alone report.

https://thehill.com/author/john-solomon

https://thehill.com/homenews/news/483600-the-hills-review-of-john-solomons-columns-on-ukraine

Mark Chapman May 11, 2020 at 9:37 am
At an absolute minimum, the FBI officials involved – except those who did their jobs properly and stated their judgments at the outset that there was no evidence Flynn was not telling the truth, or believed he was – should be fired and their pensions, if applicable, rescinded.

Ideally, they should each be prosecuted with an attempt to discern their connections to the political establishment, and specifically to the Clintons. What does that woman have to do to get jailed – blow somebody away on the 6 o'clock news?

[May 14, 2020] Neo-McCarthyism as a classic war propaganda

May 14, 2020 | www.unz.com

utu , says: Show Comment May 14, 2020 at 5:36 am GMT

Here we come to the Fourth Pillar of Sufficient Totalitarianism: Repetition, repetition, repetition. In Mein Kampf (now removed from Amazon) Adolf said that propaganda should not be entrusted to.intellectuals They are, he said, easily bored, like sophisticated ideas, and constantly want to change the message.

Hitler indeed said it while criticizing German WWI propaganda and praising the British one. Hitler was talking of what he learned form British propaganda and that it should be emulated:

Particularly in the field of propaganda, placid aesthetes and blase intellectuals should never be allowed to take the lead. The former would readily transform the impressive character of real propaganda into something suitable only for literary tea parties. As to the second class of people, one must always beware of this pest; for, in consequence of their insensibility to normal impressions, they are constantly seeking new excitements.

Such people grow sick and tired of everything. They always long for change and will always be incapable of putting themselves in the position of picturing the wants of their less callous fellow-creatures in their immediate neighbourhood, let alone trying to understand them. The blase intellectuals are always the first to criticize propaganda, or rather its message, because this appears to them to be outmoded and trivial.

And he praised British propaganda for appealing to instincts not reason, staying on message and never being objective:

In this respect also the propaganda organized by our enemies set us an excellent example. It confined itself to a few themes, which were meant exclusively for mass consumption, and it repeated these themes with untiring perseverance. Once these fundamental themes and the manner of placing them before the world were recognized as effective, they adhered to them without the slightest alteration for the whole duration of the War. At first all of it appeared to be idiotic in its impudent assertiveness. Later on it was looked upon as disturbing, but finally it was believed.

But in England they came to understand something further: namely, that the possibility of success in the use of this spiritual weapon consists in the mass employment of it, and that when employed in this way it brings full returns for the large expenses incurred.

In England propaganda was regarded as a weapon of the first order, whereas with us it represented the last hope of a livelihood for our unemployed politicians and a snug job for shirkers of the modest hero type.

Vilification of the enemy by British and American propaganda worked:

On the other hand, British and American war propaganda was psychologically efficient. By picturing the Germans to their own people as Barbarians and Huns, they were preparing their soldiers for the horrors of war and safeguarding them against illusions. The most terrific weapons which those soldiers encountered in the field merely confirmed the information that they had already received and their belief in the truth of the assertions made by their respective governments was accordingly reinforced. Thus their rage and hatred against the infamous foe was increased. The terrible havoc caused by the German weapons of war was only another illustration of the Hunnish brutality of those barbarians; whereas on the side of the Entente no time was left the soldiers to meditate on the similar havoc which their own weapons were capable of. Thus the British soldier was never allowed to feel that the information which he received at home was untrue.

While Germans did not have that strong animus to vilify. They rather ridiculed the enemy and it was a mistake:

It was, for example, a fundamental mistake to ridicule the worth of the enemy as the Austrian and German comic papers made a chief point of doing in their propaganda. The very principle here is a mistaken one; for, when they came face to face with the enemy, our soldiers had quite a different impression. Therefore, the mistake had disastrous results. Once the German soldier realised what a tough enemy he had to fight he felt that he had been deceived by the manufacturers of the information which had been given him. Therefore, instead of strengthening and stimulating his fighting spirit, this information had quite the contrary effect. Finally he lost heart.

And the greatest mistake of German propaganda was that sometimes it was trying to be objective or even handed:

The aim of propaganda is not to try to pass judgment on conflicting rights, giving each its due, but exclusively to emphasize the right which we are asserting. Propaganda must not investigate the truth objectively and, in so far as it is favourable to the other side, present it according to the theoretical rules of justice; yet it must present only that aspect of the truth which is favourable to its own side.

It was a fundamental mistake to discuss the question of who was responsible for the outbreak of the war and declare that the sole responsibility could not be attributed to Germany. The sole responsibility should have been laid on the shoulders of the enemy, without any discussion whatsoever.

And what was the consequence of these half-measures? The broad masses of the people are not made up of diplomats or professors of public jurisprudence nor simply of persons who are able to form reasoned judgment in given cases, but a vacillating crowd of human children who are constantly wavering between one idea and another. As soon as our own propaganda made the slightest suggestion that the enemy had a certain amount of justice on his side, then we laid down the basis on which the justice of our own cause could be questioned. The masses are not in a position to discern where the enemy's fault ends and where our own begins

[May 13, 2020] John Brennan Concealed 'High-Quality' Intelligence That Russia Wanted Hillary Clinton To Win

May 13, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Likklemore , May 13 2020 16:41 utc | 14

The scoundrels who plotted Russiagate need to lawyer up:

John Brennan Concealed 'High-Quality' Intelligence That Russia Wanted Hillary Clinton To Win:

Former CIA director John Brennan suppressed intelligence which indicated that Russia wanted Hillary Clinton to win because "she was a known quantity," vs. the unpredictable Donald Trump, according to Fox News' Ed Henry.[.]

==========

Never mind the prosecutorial misdeeds - FBI Can't prove guilt. Judge Sullivan is delaying DOJ's move to drop the case against General Flynn.
LINK and LINK

[May 13, 2020] IRRUSSIANALITY

Notable quotes:
"... It's not been a great week for proponents of Russiagate conspiracies. A release of transcripts of meetings of the American House of Representatives Intelligence Committee revealed that person after person interviewed by the Committee denied having any knowledge of collusion between Donald Trump and his campaign on the one hand and the Russian state on the other. This was despite the fact that many of those so interviewed had claimed in public that such collusion had taken place. The discrepancy between their public and private utterances has rightfully been interpreted as further evidence that the whole collusion story was a fabrication from start to finish. ..."
"... Collusion was only half of Russiagate. The other half was the allegation of Russian 'interference' in the US election, founded especially on claims that the Russian military intelligence service, the GRU, had hacked and leaked documents from the Democratic National Committee (DNC). This allegation was based on research undertaken by a private company Crowdstrike, but now the Intelligence Committee minutes reveal that Crowdstrike couldn't even confirm that how the DNC data had been leaked let alone that the Russians were responsible. All they had, according to the testimony, was 'circumstantial evidence' and 'indicators' – not exactly solid proof. ..."
"... The Atlantic ..."
May 13, 2020 | irrussianality.wordpress.com

#DemocracyRIP and the narcissism of Russiagate May 12, 2020 PaulR 12 Comments

Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. [Gone with the Wind]

It's not been a great week for proponents of Russiagate conspiracies. A release of transcripts of meetings of the American House of Representatives Intelligence Committee revealed that person after person interviewed by the Committee denied having any knowledge of collusion between Donald Trump and his campaign on the one hand and the Russian state on the other. This was despite the fact that many of those so interviewed had claimed in public that such collusion had taken place. The discrepancy between their public and private utterances has rightfully been interpreted as further evidence that the whole collusion story was a fabrication from start to finish.

Collusion was only half of Russiagate. The other half was the allegation of Russian 'interference' in the US election, founded especially on claims that the Russian military intelligence service, the GRU, had hacked and leaked documents from the Democratic National Committee (DNC). This allegation was based on research undertaken by a private company Crowdstrike, but now the Intelligence Committee minutes reveal that Crowdstrike couldn't even confirm that how the DNC data had been leaked let alone that the Russians were responsible. All they had, according to the testimony, was 'circumstantial evidence' and 'indicators' – not exactly solid proof.

Given this, you'd imagine that this would be a good time for Russiagaters to slink off into a dark corner somewhere and hope that people forget all the nonsense they've been spouting for the past four years. But not a bit of it, for what do we find in the latest edition of The Atlantic magazine than an article by Franklin Foer with the scary title 'Putin is well on the way to stealing the next election'.

Foer is in some respects the original Russiagater. He was well ahead of the game, and in a July 2016 article in Slate laid out the basic narrative many months before others latched onto it. The article has it all: a scary title ('Putin's Puppet' – meaning Trump); Vladimir Putin's evil plan to destroy Europe and the United States; a cast of characters with allegedly dubious connections to the Kremlin (Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Carter Page, etc. – you met them first in Foer's article); Trump's supposed desperation to break into the Moscow real estate market; allegations of Trump's lack of creditworthiness leading him to seek shady Russian sources of finance; and so on – in short, the whole shebang long before it was on anyone else's radar.

Not wanting to let a good story go to waste, Foer has been on it ever since, and gained a certain amount of notoriety when he broke the 'story' that US President Donald Trump was secretly exchanging messages with the Russian government via the computer servers of Alfa Bank. Unfortunately for Foer, it didn't take more than a minute or three for researchers to expose his revelation as utter nonsense. This, however, didn't seem to shake him. In the world of journalism there appears to be no such thing as accountability for those who publish fake news about Russians producing fake news, and so it is that Foer is back on the Russiagate wagon with his new piece in the Atlantic , warning us that it's bad enough that Putin elected Trump once, but now he's going to do it all over again.

The basic theme of Foer's latest is pretty much the same as in his original article of July 2016. Back then Foer informed readers that, 'Vladimir Putin has a plan for destroying the West – and that plan looks a lot like Donald Trump'. 'The destruction of Europe is a grandiose objective; so is the weakening of the United States', Foer went on, keen to let us know that Putin's aims were nothing if not extreme ('The destruction of Europe' no less!!). Now, nearly four years later, he tell us breathlessly that 'Vladimir Putin dreams of discrediting the American democratic system' (How does he know this? Does he have some special dream detection equipment he's snuck into the Kremlin? Alas, Foer doesn't tell.) According to Foer:

It's possible, however, to mistake a plot point – the manipulation of the 2016 election – for the full sweep of the narrative. Events in the United States have unfolded more favorably than any operative in Moscow could have dreamed: Not only did Russia's preferred candidate win, but he has spent his first term fulfilling the potential it saw in him, discrediting American institutions, rending the seams of American culture, and isolating a nation that had styled itself as indispensable to the free world. But instead of complacently enjoying its triumph, Russia almost immediately set about replicating it. Boosting the Trump campaign was a tactic; #DemocracyRIP remains the larger objective.

#DemocracyRIP?? Seriously? Where does Foer get this? I'm willing to offer him a challenge. I'll pay him $100 (Canadian not US) if he can find anywhere, anywhere, any statement by Vladimir Putin or another top official in the Russian Federation in which they state any sort of preference for what sort of political system the United States has, and in particular state a preference that the USA ceases to be a democracy. If he can't, he'll have to pay me $100. I'm confident I'll win. The truth, as far as I can see, is that like Rhett Butler, they don't give a damn. America can be a democracy, or an autocracy, or any other thing as far as they're concerned, as long as it just leaves them alone. Insofar as thinking Russians do discuss the matter, I get a strong impression they generally regard the problem not as being that America is a democracy so much as being that it isn't, not really, as actual power is seen as lying in the hands of special interests and some sort of version of the 'deep state'. More democracy, not less, would be the preferred solution.

So where does all the nonsense about Putin wanting to destroy democracy come from? It certainly doesn't come from anything he's ever said. And it certainly doesn't come from a serious examination of Russia's true potential. Russia can no more destroy American democracy than it send a man to Alpha Centauri. And its leaders know that perfectly well. So why do Americans think that Putin is lying in his bed, 'dreaming' about the 'destruction of Europe', the 'weakening of America' and '#DemocracyRIP'? I'll hazard a guess – it's a serious case of narcissism. America believes it is the centre of the universe, and it also imagines itself a democracy, and so it thinks that American democracy must be what's at the centre of everybody else's universe too. Well, sorry, Franky boy, it just ain't so. #DemocracyRIP?? In your dreams, perhaps, but certainly not in Putin's.

[May 13, 2020] John Brennan Concealed 'High-Quality' Intelligence That Russia Wanted Hillary Clinton To Win Report

Notable quotes:
"... House Intelligence Committee staff told me that after an exhaustive investigation reviewing intelligence and interviewing intelligence officers, they found that Brennan suppressed high-quality intelligence suggesting that Putin actually wanted the more predictable and malleable Clinton to win the 2016 election . ..."
"... Instead, the Brennan team included low-quality intelligence that failed to meet intelligence community standards to support the political claim that Russian officials wanted Trump to win, House Intelligence Committee staff revealed. They said that CIA analysts also objected to including that flawed, substandard information in the assessment. ..."
"... Fox 's Henry said that he has obtained independent confirmation of the pro-Clinton Russia claim made by Fleitz . ..."
"... Brennan's concealment of this key information was yet another link in the chain of the Obama administration's plot to smear Donald Trump as a Russian asset - a hoax supported by the Clinton-funded Steele dossier, which the FBI knew was Russian disinformation (or, more likely, Steele's Russophobic fantasies) before they used it as a predicate to spy on Trump aide Carter Page during the 2016 election. ..."
May 13, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com
Former CIA director John Brennan suppressed intelligence which indicated that Russia wanted Hillary Clinton to win because "she was a known quantity," vs. the unpredictable Donald Trump, according to Fox News ' Ed Henry.

During a Tuesday night discussion with Tucker Carlson, Henry said that Brennan "also had intel saying, actually, Russia wanted Hillary Clinton to win because she was a known quantity, she had been secretary of state, and Vladimir Putin's team thought she was more malleable, while candidate Donald Trump was unpredictable."

https://www.youtube.com/embed/xWSWdS8rILs

Perhaps Russian President Vladimir Putin has fond memories of the time Bill Clinton hung out at his 'private homestead' during the same trip where he collected a $500,000 payday for a speech at a Moscow bank, right before the Uranium One deal was approved.

And as Breitbart 's Joel Pollak notes, Henry's claim backs up a similar allegation by former National Security Council chief of staff Fred Fleitz , who said on April 22:

House Intelligence Committee staff told me that after an exhaustive investigation reviewing intelligence and interviewing intelligence officers, they found that Brennan suppressed high-quality intelligence suggesting that Putin actually wanted the more predictable and malleable Clinton to win the 2016 election .

Instead, the Brennan team included low-quality intelligence that failed to meet intelligence community standards to support the political claim that Russian officials wanted Trump to win, House Intelligence Committee staff revealed. They said that CIA analysts also objected to including that flawed, substandard information in the assessment.

Fox 's Henry said that he has obtained independent confirmation of the pro-Clinton Russia claim made by Fleitz .

Brennan's concealment of this key information was yet another link in the chain of the Obama administration's plot to smear Donald Trump as a Russian asset - a hoax supported by the Clinton-funded Steele dossier, which the FBI knew was Russian disinformation (or, more likely, Steele's Russophobic fantasies) before they used it as a predicate to spy on Trump aide Carter Page during the 2016 election.

And now, Brennan is a contributor on MSNBC. How fitting.

[May 12, 2020] Six big lies you have been told about Russiagate

May 12, 2020 | www.rt.com

By Nebojsa Malic

Russian 'meddling' in the 2016 US presidential election has become an article of faith, not just among Democrats but many Republicans as well, thanks to the endless repetition of vague talking points, none of which hold water. It all began with the Democratic National Committee (DNC) claiming in June 2016 that Russia hacked their computers, after documents were published revealing the party's rigging of the primaries. This was followed by Hillary Clinton accusing her rival for the presidency Donald Trump that he was "colluding" with Russia by asking Moscow for her emails – the ones she deleted from a private server she used to conduct State Department business, that is.

With a little help of the mainstream media, which overwhelmingly endorsed Clinton and predicted her victory, her efforts to cover up her email scandal turned into Russia "hacking our democracy," eventually spawning the 'Russiagate' investigation led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and a series of failed attempts to derail Trump's election and oust him from the White House.

Lie #1: Russia hacked the DNC

The infamous US intelligence community assessment (ICA) of January 2017, and the Senate Intelligence Committee report based on it – as well as 'analysis' by actual election meddlers , among others – all claimed that the Russian government and President Vladimir Putin personally were behind the "hack" and publication of DNC documents. These have always been assertions, and no evidence was ever provided.

Also on rt.com We want to believe: 'Russian hacking' memo REVEALS how US intel pinned leaks to Kremlin

Last week's declassification of 50+ interviews in the probe conducted by the House Intelligence Committee revealed that the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, brought in by the DNC lawyers to fix the "hack," did not have evidence either.

CrowdStrike's president, ex-FBI official Shawn Henry, testified that they "saw activity that we believed was consistent with activity we'd seen previously and had associated with the Russian Government." [emphasis added]

In the same testimony, Henry also testified that CrowdStrike never had any evidence the data was actually "exfiltrated," i.e. stolen from the DNC servers.

I want to stress what a pretty big revelation this is. Crowdstrike, the firm behind the accusation that Russia hacked & stole DNC emails, admitted to Congress that it has no direct evidence Russia actually stole/exfiltrated the emails. More from Crowdstrike president Shaun Henry: pic.twitter.com/UCGSyO2rLt

-- Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) May 8, 2020

CrowdStrike's feelings about the hack remain the only "evidence" so far, since the FBI never asked them or the DNC for the actual server, as Henry also confirmed. Meanwhile, former NSA official and whistleblower William Binney argued back in November 2017 that actual evidence showed a leak from the inside, not a hack.

Also on rt.com 'Zero evidence' that Russia hacked DNC, says NSA whistleblower (VIDEO) Lie #2: Russia hacked Podesta's emails and published them in collusion with WikiLeaks

There is likewise zero proof that the Russian government had anything to do with the private email account of John Podesta, Clinton's campaign chair, which a staffer admitted had been compromised when someone fell for a phishing scam.

Instead, the key argument that WikiLeaks was somehow 'colluding' with Russia over the publication of the emails rests on a conspiracy theory promoted by the Clinton campaign staff, after RT reported on a fresh batch of emails before WikiLeaks got around to tweeting about them – but after they were published on the website and available to anyone willing to do actual journalism.

Also on rt.com RT beats internet to break #Podestaemails6 & everybody loses their minds (conspiracy theory warning)

In fact, the existence of RT has been a major "argument" of Russiagaters; a third of the ICA intended to show 'Russian meddling' consisted of a four-year-old appendix about RT that was in no way relevant to the 2016 situation but lamented its coverage of fracking and 'Occupy Wall Street' protests, for example.

Lie #3: The Steele 'pee tape' dossier was irrelevant

As it later emerged, Clinton's claims about 'Russian collusion' were based on a dodgy dossier her campaign commissioned through the DNC and a firm called Fusion GPS from a British spy named Christopher Steele. It said that the Kremlin was blackmailing Trump with a tape of depraved sex acts in a Moscow hotel, with prostitutes supposedly paid to urinate on a bed President Barack Obama had slept on.

It was clearly ridiculous and entirely evidence-free. Democrats claimed it played no role in Russia investigations. Yet the FBI paid Steele for information from the dossier, and used it to justify a FISA warrant for the surveillance of Trump campaign aide Carter Page – and with him the campaign itself – starting right before the election, and renewed three times.

Also on rt.com 'Spygate' update: At least two FISA warrants to spy on Carter Page were 'not valid,' DOJ says

By January 2020, the DOJ had formally disavowed the dossier and all four FISA warrants, along with any information obtained from them, saying "there was insufficient predication to establish probable cause."

Lie #4: General Michael Flynn treasonously colluded with Russia and lied about it to the FBI

Trump's first national security adviser was hounded out of the White House after less than two weeks on the job, after media leaks insinuated he had improperly discussed sanctions with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, violating the Logan Act, and then lied to the FBI about it.

After FBI Director James Comey was fired by Trump in May 2017, he told the media the president had urged him to drop the investigation of Flynn, which was quickly construed as "obstruction" and used as one of the pretexts to appoint Robert Mueller as special counsel into 'Russiagate.'

Also on rt.com 'Get him to lie so we can prosecute him': New docs reveal FBI plan to set up General Flynn in perjury trap

When actual evidence was finally coaxed out of prosecutors, however, it showed that the FBI sought to frame Flynn in a perjury trap, and that the people involved were Comey himself, his deputy Andrew McCabe, disgraced lovers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, and others. All charges against Flynn were dropped.

Flynn didn't even lie to Strzok and the other agent interviewing him – and the memo of that conversation had been first heavily edited, then destroyed. Basically, everything about the Flynn case has been as false as ABC's December 2017 bombshell report about his "collusion" with Russia that got Brian Ross fired.

Also on rt.com ABC's fake news about Flynn & Russia causes stocks to crash Lie #5: Mueller found collusion, or at least Russian meddling

When Mueller's final report came out, in the spring of 2019, it found zero evidence of "collusion" but insisted there had been Russian "meddling" in the election. The only trouble was that he had no proof of meddling , basing it entirely on the above-mentioned intelligence "assessments" and his own indictments.

A Russian company named in one of the indictments actually contested it in US court and won. First, a federal judge slapped down Mueller's prosecutors for violating rules by presenting allegations as "established" and "confirmed" facts and ruling that no link was actually established behind a catering company accused of "sowing discord" on social media – a far cry from hacking the DNC! – and the Russian government.

Also on rt.com Another nail in Russiagate coffin? Federal judge destroys key Mueller report claim

The DOJ quietly dropped that particular case in March, just as coronavirus shutdowns were starting across the US, using "recent events" and a change in classification of some of its evidence as a face-saving excuse.

Lie #6: Paul Manafort was Trump's conduit to Russia

Paul Manafort, who ran Trump's campaign between March and August 2016, was convicted of multiple counts of conspiracy against the US and sentenced to a lengthy prison term. However, despite repeated attempts by the media to present him as some kind of liaison between Trump and Russia, the entirety of things that got him in trouble with the law had to do with tax evasion on money he made lobbying for and in Ukraine.

Also on rt.com Collusion with Ukraine? NY Times corrects its bombshell 'Russiagate' report

During the two trials against Manafort, it emerged that he and his business partner Rick Gates had worked with Podesta's brother Tony to fleece Ukrainian oligarchs for years, and stash the profits in tax havens.

The Ukrainian officials who leaked the so-called "black ledger" implicating Manafort to the US media were even convicted of election meddling by a court in Kiev, and the whole thing may have been solicited by a Ukrainian-American DNC contractor The US media have been curiously uninterested in that particular "collusion," needless to say.

Also on rt.com DNC contractor asked Ukrainian Embassy for dirt on Trump campaign, envoy confirms

Peel back all these layers of misinformation, like an onion, and what's left is an empty talking point, endlessly repeated by Democrats like Adam Schiff (D-California), that "Russia hacked our democracy."

The charge is vague enough that it can mean anything, and deliberately so. No evidence is ever offered, because there isn't any – as the years of investigations and boxes full of documents have clearly shown.

[May 11, 2020] Guardian adopted McCarthyism as editorial policy

The text below speaks for itself
May 11, 2020 | www.theguardian.com

Under the subtitle The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare, Thomas Rid helps remind us how we reached this morass, one with antecedents reaching back to Czarist Russia and the Bolshevik revolution. To be sure, the US can use all the help it can get as it navigates the current election cycle and the lies, rumours and uncertainty that shroud the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.

Rid was born in West Germany amid the cold war. The Berlin Wall fell when he was a teenager. He is now a professor at Johns Hopkins.

So what are “active measures”? Previously, Rid testified they were “semi-covert or covert intelligence operations to shape an adversary’s political decisions”.

“Almost always,” he explained, “active measures conceal or falsify the source.”

The special counsel’s report framed them more narrowly as “operations conducted by Russian security services aimed at influencing the course of international affairs”. Add in technology and hacking, and an image of modern asymmetric warfare emerges.

Rid travels back to the early years of communist Russia, recounting the efforts of the government to discredit the remnants of the ancien régime and squash attempts to restore the monarchy. The Cheka, the secret police, hatched a plot that involved forged correspondence, a fictitious organization, a fake counter-revolutionary council and a government-approved travelogue.

Words and narratives morphed into readily transportable munitions. The émigré community was declawed and the multi-pronged combination deemed “wildly successful”. The project also “served as an inspiration for future active measures”. A template had been set.

Fast forward to the cold war and the aftermath of the US supreme court’s landmark school desegregation case. The tension between reality and the text and aspirations of the Declaration of Independence was in the open again. Lunch-counter sit-ins and demands for the vote filled newspapers and TV screens. The fault lines were plainly visible – and the Soviet Union pounced.

In 1960, the KGB embarked on a “series of race-baiting disinformation operations” that included mailing Ku Klux Klan leaflets to African and Asian delegations to the United Nations on the eve of a debate on colonialism. At the same time, Russian “operators posed as an African American organization agitating against the KKK”.

More than a half-century later, Russia ran an updated version of the play. Twitter came to host the fake accounts of both “John Davis”, ostensibly a gun-toting Texas Christian and family man, and @BlacktoLive”, along with hundreds of others.

The Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Russian troll factory, organized pro-Confederate flag rallies. As detailed by Robert Mueller, the IRA also claimed that the civil war was not “about slavery” and instead was “all about money”, a false trope that continues to gain resonance among Trump supporters and proponents of the “liberate the states” movement. According to Brian Westrate, treasurer of the Wisconsin Republican party, “the Confederacy was more about states’ rights than slavery.”

Depicting West Germany as Hitler’s heir was another aim. At the time, “some aging former Nazis still held positions of influence”, Rid writes. In the late 1960s, “encouraging ‘anti-German tendencies in the West’ was very much a priority”.

In 1964, with Russian assistance, Czech intelligence mounted Operation Neptun, sinking Nazi wartime documents to the bottom of the ominous sounding Black Lake, near the German border. The cache was then “discovered” – media pandemonium ensued. Four years later the mastermind of the scheme, Ladislav Bittman, defected to the US.

Prior to 2016, Russia’s most notable active measure using the US as a foil was the lie that Aids was “made in the USA”. In retaliation for US reports of Soviet use of chemical weapons in Afghanistan, the KGB unfurled Operation Denver, a multi-platformed campaign that falsely claimed “Aids was an American biological weapon developed at Fort Detrick, Maryland”. Central to the effort was the earlier publication of an anonymous letter with a New York byline by an Indian newspaper. The forged missive claimed “Aids may invade India: mystery disease caused by US lab experiments.”

[May 11, 2020] Tucker: Adam Schiff should resign

This is nationwide gaslighting by Clinton gang of neoliberals who attempted coup d'état, and Adam Schiff was just one of the key figures in this coupe d'état, king of modern Joe McCarthy able and willing to destroy a person using false evidence
What is interesting is that Tucker attacked Republicans for aiding and abetting the coup d'état against Trump
May 11, 2020 | www.youtube.com

RionE23 , 2 days ago

I'm sick of politicians getting a free pass by "resigning" no, they break the law they go to jail.. just like the rest of us.

shannon11590 , 1 day ago

Adam Schiff simply needs to be criminally prosecuted and imprisoned for the countless number of criminal acts that he committed while in Congress.

[May 11, 2020] Twin Pillars of Russiagate Crumble by Ray McGovern

Highly recommended!
So the RussiaGate was giant gaslighting of the US electorate by Clinton gang and intelligence agencies rogues.
Notable quotes:
"... For two and a half years the House Intelligence Committee knew CrowdStrike didn't have the goods on Russia. Now the public knows too. ..."
"... House Intelligence Committee documents released Thursday reveal that the committee was told two and half years ago that the FBI had no concrete evidence that Russia hacked Democratic National Committee computers to filch the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks ..."
"... Henry testifies that "it appears it [the theft of DNC emails] was set up to be exfiltrated, but we just don't have the evidence that says it actually left." ..."
"... This, in VIPS view, suggests that someone with access to DNC computers "set up" selected emails for transfer to an external storage device – a thumb drive, for example. The Internet is not needed for such a transfer. Use of the Internet would have been detected, enabling Henry to pinpoint any "exfiltration" over that network. ..."
"... Bill Binney, a former NSA technical director and a VIPs member, filed a sworn affidavit in the Roger Stone case. Binney said: "WikiLeaks did not receive stolen data from the Russian government. Intrinsic metadata in the publicly available files on WikiLeaks demonstrates that the files acquired by WikiLeaks were delivered in a medium such as a thumb drive." ..."
"... Both pillars of Russiagate–collusion and a Russian hack–have now fairly crumbled. ..."
"... Thursday's disclosure of testimony before the House Intelligence Committee shows Chairman Adam Schiff lied not only about Trump-Putin "collusion," [which the Mueller report failed to prove and whose allegations were based on DNC and Clinton-financed opposition research] but also about the even more basic issue of "Russian hacking" of the DNC. [See: "The Democratic Money Behind Russia-gate."] ..."
"... Fortunately, the cameras were still on when I approached Schiff during the Q&A: "You have every confidence but no evidence, is that right?" I asked him. His answer was a harbinger of things to come. This video clip may be worth the four minutes needed to watch it. ..."
"... Schiff and his partners in crime will be in for much tougher treatment if Trump allows Attorney General Barr and US Attorney John Durham to bring their investigation into the origins of Russia-gate to a timely conclusion. Barr's dismissal on Thursday of charges against Flynn, after released FBI documents revealed that a perjury trap was set for him to keep Russiagate going, may be a sign of things to come. ..."
May 11, 2020 | original.antiwar.com

For two and a half years the House Intelligence Committee knew CrowdStrike didn't have the goods on Russia. Now the public knows too.

House Intelligence Committee documents released Thursday reveal that the committee was told two and half years ago that the FBI had no concrete evidence that Russia hacked Democratic National Committee computers to filch the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks in July 2016.

The until-now-buried, closed-door testimony came on Dec. 5, 2017 from Shawn Henry, a protégé of former FBI Director Robert Mueller (from 2001 to 2012), for whom Henry served as head of the Bureau's cyber crime investigations unit.

Henry retired in 2012 and took a senior position at CrowdStrike, the cyber security firm hired by the DNC and the Clinton campaign to investigate the cyber intrusions that occurred before the 2016 presidential election.

The following excerpts from Henry's testimony speak for themselves. The dialogue is not a paragon of clarity; but if read carefully, even cyber neophytes can understand:

Ranking Member Mr. [Adam] Schiff: Do you know the date on which the Russians exfiltrated the data from the DNC? when would that have been?

Mr. Henry: Counsel just reminded me that, as it relates to the DNC, we have indicators that data was exfiltrated from the DNC, but we have no indicators that it was exfiltrated (sic). There are times when we can see data exfiltrated, and we can say conclusively. But in this case, it appears it was set up to be exfiltrated, but we just don't have the evidence that says it actually left.

Mr. [Chris] Stewart of Utah: Okay. What about the emails that everyone is so, you know, knowledgeable of? Were there also indicators that they were prepared but not evidence that they actually were exfiltrated?

Mr. Henry: There's not evidence that they were actually exfiltrated. There's circumstantial evidence but no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated.

Mr. Stewart: But you have a much lower degree of confidence that this data actually left than you do, for example, that the Russians were the ones who breached the security?

Mr. Henry: There is circumstantial evidence that that data was exfiltrated off the network.

Mr. Stewart: And circumstantial is less sure than the other evidence you've indicated.

Mr. Henry: "We didn't have a sensor in place that saw data leave. We said that the data left based on the circumstantial evidence. That was the conclusion that we made.

In answer to a follow-up query on this line of questioning, Henry delivered this classic: "Sir, I was just trying to be factually accurate, that we didn't see the data leave, but we believe it left, based on what we saw."

Inadvertently highlighting the tenuous underpinning for CrowdStrike's "belief" that Russia hacked the DNC emails, Henry added: "There are other nation-states that collect this type of intelligence for sure, but the – what we would call the tactics and techniques were consistent with what we'd seen associated with the Russian state."

Interesting admission in Crowdstrike CEO Shaun Henry's testimony. Henry is asked when "the Russians" exfiltrated the data from DNC.

Henry: "We did not have concrete evidence that the data was exfiltrated from the DNC, but we have indicators that it was exfiltrated." ?? pic.twitter.com/TyePqd6b5P

-- Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) May 8, 2020

Not Transparent

Try as one may, some of the testimony remains opaque. Part of the problem is ambiguity in the word "exfiltration."

The word can denote (1) transferring data from a computer via the Internet (hacking) or (2) copying data physically to an external storage device with intent to leak it.

As the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity has been reporting for more than three years, metadata and other hard forensic evidence indicate that the DNC emails were not hacked – by Russia or anyone else.

Rather, they were copied onto an external storage device (probably a thumb drive) by someone with access to DNC computers. Besides, any hack over the Internet would almost certainly have been discovered by the dragnet coverage of the National Security Agency and its cooperating foreign intelligence services.

Henry testifies that "it appears it [the theft of DNC emails] was set up to be exfiltrated, but we just don't have the evidence that says it actually left."

This, in VIPS view, suggests that someone with access to DNC computers "set up" selected emails for transfer to an external storage device – a thumb drive, for example. The Internet is not needed for such a transfer. Use of the Internet would have been detected, enabling Henry to pinpoint any "exfiltration" over that network.

Bill Binney, a former NSA technical director and a VIPs member, filed a sworn affidavit in the Roger Stone case. Binney said: "WikiLeaks did not receive stolen data from the Russian government. Intrinsic metadata in the publicly available files on WikiLeaks demonstrates that the files acquired by WikiLeaks were delivered in a medium such as a thumb drive."

The So-Called Intelligence Community Assessment

There is not much good to be said about the embarrassingly evidence-impoverished Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) of Jan. 6, 2017 accusing Russia of hacking the DNC.

But the ICA did include two passages that are highly relevant and demonstrably true:

(1) In introductory remarks on "cyber incident attribution", the authors of the ICA made a highly germane point: "The nature of cyberspace makes attribution of cyber operations difficult but not impossible. Every kind of cyber operation – malicious or not – leaves a trail."

(2) "When analysts use words such as 'we assess' or 'we judge,' [these] are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary High confidence in a judgment does not imply that the assessment is a fact or a certainty; such judgments might be wrong." [And one might add that they commonly ARE wrong when analysts succumb to political pressure, as was the case with the ICA.]

The intelligence-friendly corporate media, nonetheless, immediately awarded the status of Holy Writ to the misnomered "Intelligence Community Assessment" (it was a rump effort prepared by "handpicked analysts" from only CIA, FBI, and NSA), and chose to overlook the banal, full-disclosure-type caveats embedded in the assessment itself.

Then National Intelligence Director James Clapper and the directors of the CIA, FBI, and NSA briefed President Obama on the ICA on Jan. 5, 2017, the day before they gave it personally to President-elect Donald Trump.

On Jan. 18, 2017, at his final press conference, Obama saw fit to use lawyerly language on the key issue of how the DNC emails got to WikiLeaks , in an apparent effort to cover his own derriere.

Obama: "The conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to the Russian hacking were not conclusive as to whether WikiLeaks was witting or not in being the conduit through which we heard about the DNC e-mails that were leaked."

So we ended up with "inconclusive conclusions" on that admittedly crucial point. What Obama was saying is that U.S. intelligence did not know -- or professed not to know -- exactly how the alleged Russian transfer to WikiLeaks was supposedly made, whether through a third party, or cutout, and he muddied the waters by first saying it was a hack, and then a leak.

From the very outset, in the absence of any hard evidence, from NSA or from its foreign partners, of an Internet hack of the DNC emails, the claim that "the Russians gave the DNC emails to WikiLeaks " rested on thin gruel.

In November 2018 at a public forum, I asked Clapper to explain why President Obama still had serious doubts in late Jan. 2017, less than two weeks after Clapper and the other intelligence chiefs had thoroughly briefed the outgoing president about their "high-confidence" findings.

Clapper replied : "I cannot explain what he [Obama] said or why. But I can tell you we're, we're pretty sure we know, or knew at the time, how WikiLeaks got those emails." Pretty sure?

Preferring CrowdStrike; 'Splaining to Congress

CrowdStrike already had a tarnished reputation for credibility when the DNC and Clinton campaign chose it to do work the FBI should have been doing to investigate how the DNC emails got to WikiLeaks . It had asserted that Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery app, resulting in heavy losses of howitzers in Ukraine's struggle with separatists supported by Russia. A Voice of America report explained why CrowdStrike was forced to retract that claim.

Why did FBI Director James Comey not simply insist on access to the DNC computers? Surely he could have gotten the appropriate authorization. In early January 2017, reacting to media reports that the FBI never asked for access, Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee there were "multiple requests at different levels" for access to the DNC servers.

"Ultimately what was agreed to is the private company would share with us what they saw," he said. Comey described CrowdStrike as a "highly respected" cybersecurity company.

Asked by committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) whether direct access to the servers and devices would have helped the FBI in their investigation, Comey said it would have. "Our forensics folks would always prefer to get access to the original device or server that's involved, so it's the best evidence," he said.

Five months later, after Comey had been fired, Burr gave him a Mulligan in the form of a few kid-gloves, clearly well-rehearsed, questions:

BURR: And the FBI, in this case, unlike other cases that you might investigate – did you ever have access to the actual hardware that was hacked? Or did you have to rely on a third party to provide you the data that they had collected?

COMEY: In the case of the DNC, we did not have access to the devices themselves. We got relevant forensic information from a private party, a high-class entity, that had done the work. But we didn't get direct access.

BURR: But no content?

COMEY: Correct.

BURR: Isn't content an important part of the forensics from a counterintelligence standpoint?

COMEY: It is, although what was briefed to me by my folks – the people who were my folks at the time is that they had gotten the information from the private party that they needed to understand the intrusion by the spring of 2016.

In June last year it was revealed that CrowdStrike never produced an un-redacted or final forensic report for the government because the FBI never required it to, according to the Justice Department.

By any normal standard, former FBI Director Comey would now be in serious legal trouble, as should Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan, et al. Additional evidence of FBI misconduct under Comey seems to surface every week – whether the abuses of FISA, misconduct in the case against Gen. Michael Flynn, or misleading everyone about Russian hacking of the DNC. If I were attorney general, I would declare Comey a flight risk and take his passport. And I would do the same with Clapper and Brennan.

Schiff: Every Confidence, But No Evidence

Both pillars of Russiagate–collusion and a Russian hack–have now fairly crumbled.

Thursday's disclosure of testimony before the House Intelligence Committee shows Chairman Adam Schiff lied not only about Trump-Putin "collusion," [which the Mueller report failed to prove and whose allegations were based on DNC and Clinton-financed opposition research] but also about the even more basic issue of "Russian hacking" of the DNC. [See: "The Democratic Money Behind Russia-gate."]

Five days after Trump took office, I had an opportunity to confront Schiff personally about evidence that Russia "hacked" the DNC emails. He had repeatedly given that canard the patina of flat fact during an address at the old Hillary Clinton/John Podesta "think tank," The Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Fortunately, the cameras were still on when I approached Schiff during the Q&A: "You have every confidence but no evidence, is that right?" I asked him. His answer was a harbinger of things to come. This video clip may be worth the four minutes needed to watch it.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/SdOy-l13FEg

Schiff and his partners in crime will be in for much tougher treatment if Trump allows Attorney General Barr and US Attorney John Durham to bring their investigation into the origins of Russia-gate to a timely conclusion. Barr's dismissal on Thursday of charges against Flynn, after released FBI documents revealed that a perjury trap was set for him to keep Russiagate going, may be a sign of things to come.

Given the timid way Trump has typically bowed to intelligence and law enforcement officials, including those who supposedly report to him, however, one might rather expect that, after a lot of bluster, he will let the too-big-to-imprison ones off the hook. The issues are now drawn; the evidence is copious; will the Deep State, nevertheless, be able to prevail this time?

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President's Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). This originally appeared at Consortium News .

[May 11, 2020] Trump and the culture of ling in his administration

May 11, 2020 | www.unz.com

As noted above, the Establishment view on foreign and national security policy was based on the principle that there must always be a united front when dealing with situations that are being closely watched by foreigners. If a cabinet secretary or the president says something relating to foreign or military affairs it should be the unified view of both the administration and the loyal opposition. Unfortunately, with President Donald Trump that unanimity has broken down, largely because the chief executive either refuses to or is incapable of staying on script. The most recent false step involved the origin of the corona virus, with the intelligence community stating that there was no evidence that the virus was "man made or genetically modified" in a lab followed by the president several hours later contradicting that view asserting that he had a "high degree of confidence" that the coronavirus originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China based on secret information that he could not reveal .

There has also been reports that the Trump White House has in fact been pushing the intelligence community (IC) to "hunt for evidence" linking the virus to the Wuhan laboratory, suggesting that the entire China gambit is mostly political, to have a scapegoat available in case the troubled handling of the virus in the United States becomes a fiasco and therefore a political liability. This pressure apparently prompted an additional statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence saying: "The IC will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan."

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has claimed without providing any details that there is "overwhelming evidence" that coronavirus came out of the Wuhan laboratory, is reportedly leading the push to demonize China. He and other administration officials have expressed their frustration over the C.I.A.'s apparent inability to come up with a definitive explanation for the outbreak's origin. C.I.A. analysts have reportedly responded that there is no evidence to support any one theory with "high confidence" and they are afraid that any equivocating response will immediately be politicized. Some analysts noted that their close monitoring of communications regarding the Wuhan lab suggest that the Chinese government itself does not regard the lab as a source of the contagion.

To be sure, any intelligence community document directly blaming the Chinese government for the outbreak would have a devastating impact on bilateral relations for years to come, a consequence that Donald Trump apparently does not appreciate. And previous interactions initiated by Trump administration officials suggest that Washington might use its preferred weapon sanctions in an attempt to pressure other nations to also hold China accountable, which would multiply the damage.

Given what is at stake in light of the White House pressure to prove what might very well be unprovable, many in the intelligence community who actually value what they do and how they do it are noticeably annoyed and some have even looked for allies in Congress, where they have found support from the Pentagon over Administration decision making that is both Quixotic and heavily politicized.

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith of Washington has responded to the concerns expressed to him by both the military and intelligence communities, admitting that he is " worried about a culture developing" where many senior officials are now making decision not on the merits of the case but rather out of fear that they will upset the president if they do not choose correctly.

While the intelligence agencies are concerned over the fabrication of a false consensus over the coronavirus, similar to what occurred regarding Iraq's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction in 2002-3, the Defense Department is more concerned that fundamental mechanisms that have been in place since the Second World War are now under attack, including how the military maintains discipline and punishes officers and enlisted men who have deviated from established policies.

[May 11, 2020] Anti-Russian hysteria as the key feature of American neofascism. In a way RussiaGate is a neofascist putsch

May 11, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

FDR warned his son before his death of his understanding of the British takeover of American foreign policy, but still could not reverse this agenda. His son recounted his father's ominous insight:

"You know, any number of times the men in the State Department have tried to conceal messages to me, delay them, hold them up somehow, just because some of those career diplomats over there aren't in accord with what they know I think. They should be working for Winston. As a matter of fact, a lot of the time, they are [working for Churchill]. Stop to think of 'em: any number of 'em are convinced that the way for America to conduct its foreign policy is to find out what the British are doing and then copy that!" I was told six years ago, to clean out that State Department. It's like the British Foreign Office ."

Before being fired from Truman's cabinet for his advocacy of US-Russia friendship during the Cold War, Wallace stated:

"American fascism" which has come to be known in recent years as the Deep State. "Fascism in the postwar inevitably will push steadily for Anglo-Saxon imperialism and eventually for war with Russia. Already American fascists are talking and writing about this conflict and using it as an excuse for their internal hatreds and intolerances toward certain races, creeds and classes."

In his 1946 Soviet Asia Mission , Wallace said " Before the blood of our boys is scarcely dry on the field of battle, these enemies of peace try to lay the foundation for World War III. These people must not succeed in their foul enterprise. We must offset their poison by following the policies of Roosevelt in cultivating the friendship of Russia in peace as well as in war."

[May 10, 2020] Fear to tell truth, smoke mirrors, writing not for readers but for other journalists - How UK press got to be the LEAST trust by Neil Clark

MSM now run under control of intelligence agencies and use State Department of Foreign Office talking points, much like in the USSR, where this role was played by communist Party
Notable quotes:
"... Part of the problem is that newspapers have morphed into viewspapers. The distinction between reporting and comment has been blurred. Back in the 70s, leading publications only had one comment piece and an editorial. Their pages were packed with news items, with stories reported factually and without a 'bent'. ..."
"... Today, comment has taken over, but while there's no shortage of 'opinion', most of it is saying very much the same thing. I think we first saw this phenomenon in the lead up to the Iraq War. I was one of the very few mainstream commentators who ridiculed the claim that Iraq had WMDs. It was obvious to me that if the leaders of the UK and US genuinely believed Saddam possessed these terrible weapons, they wouldn't be planning to do the one thing which would provoke the Iraqi leader into using them, i.e. invade his country. Yet the Great WMDs Hoax, which a child of five could see through, was promoted by nearly all 'serious' journalists. The most vociferous media cheerleaders for the invasion faced no professional blowback, on the contrary, their careers have flourished. ..."
May 06, 2020 | www.rt.com

Trust in the written press in Britain is the lowest in 33 European countries. That's hardly surprising seeing how so many journalists have become mere stenographers for, or lackeys of, the Establishment power elites. Just when you think the reputation of the UK media couldn't sink any lower, it just did. An annual survey undertaken by EurobarometerEU, across 33 countries, puts the UK at the bottom, with a net trust of -60. Yes that's right, minus 60 . It's a fall of 24 points since last year. Just 15 percent of Brits trust their print media. But it's not the only survey showing a similar trend.

The attached graphic about trust in the written press, published last week, has not been widely reported in Britain. This is a huge annual survey by @EurobarometerEU across 33 countries. It's the ninth year out of the past ten that the UK has been last. We have a problem. pic.twitter.com/8eYoQR7XZw

-- Brian Cathcart (@BrianCathcart) May 5, 2020

Newspapers came in rock bottom (with a rating of -50) in a YouGov poll on Sky where the question was asked, "How much do you trust the following on Coronavirus?" And in case you think it's only the Sun we're talking about here, another poll showed that distrust of so-called 'upmarket' papers was running at 52 percent.

How did we get here? I've got a collection of old newspapers and magazines dating back several decades. Part of the problem is that newspapers have morphed into viewspapers. The distinction between reporting and comment has been blurred. Back in the 70s, leading publications only had one comment piece and an editorial. Their pages were packed with news items, with stories reported factually and without a 'bent'.

Read more The BBC used to be gold standard, now it's losing public trust with political meddling

Today, comment has taken over, but while there's no shortage of 'opinion', most of it is saying very much the same thing. I think we first saw this phenomenon in the lead up to the Iraq War. I was one of the very few mainstream commentators who ridiculed the claim that Iraq had WMDs. It was obvious to me that if the leaders of the UK and US genuinely believed Saddam possessed these terrible weapons, they wouldn't be planning to do the one thing which would provoke the Iraqi leader into using them, i.e. invade his country. Yet the Great WMDs Hoax, which a child of five could see through, was promoted by nearly all 'serious' journalists. The most vociferous media cheerleaders for the invasion faced no professional blowback, on the contrary, their careers have flourished.

As bad as the Iraq War propaganda was, things have got even worse since then. Obnoxious gatekeepers have ensured that the parameters of what can and can't be said in print have narrowed still further.

In the mid-Noughties, I was writing regularly in the UK mainstream print media. So too was John Pilger. Our articles were popular with readers, but not with the gatekeepers. When I wrote a balanced, alternative view on Belarus for the New Statesman in 2011, I came under fierce gatekeeper attack.

I forgot that on Belarus and many other issues, only one point of view was allowed. Silly me.

Only one thing can save UK print press

Today, the lack of diversity of opinion is one of the reasons why newspaper sales have crashed – (sales have slumped by two-thirds in the past 20 years), and conversely why 'alternative' sites, and media outlets where a wide range of opinions ARE heard have done so well. Who wants to pay money for a paper when the political views published in it range from pro-war centrist-left, to pro-war centrist-right?

If there was a single newspaper or magazine column which examined forensically whether Labour really did have an anti-Semitism 'crisis' under Jeremy Corbyn, I must have missed it.

And apart from Mary Dejevsky in the i paper, where was the journalism examining the many inconsistencies in the official narrative of the Skripal case? Why has 'Private Eye', which bills itself as 'anti-Establishment', not covered the ongoing Philip Cross Wikipedia editing scandal ?

Also on rt.com 'One way to pay for headlines': Backlash after UK govt gifts newspapers Ł35m Covid-19 advertising bump

I'm sure the old 'Eye' of Richard Ingrams and Bron Waugh would have if Wikipedia had been around then.

And what about the Covid-19 coverage? Has any journalist asked the very simple question: if the virus is as bad as the government says it is, and a domestic lockdown is necessary to stop its spread, why have flights continued to come into the country (including from virus hotspots) unchecked?

Don't get me wrong, there are still some good columnists out there, but sadly you can count them on one hand.

The only thing that can save UK print media from total collapse is if there is a large-scale clear-out of the faux-left/neocon-dominated commentariat and their replacement by writers who actually address the issues that readers are interested in. Newspapers used to be published for their readers, now it seems most are published for people who write for other newspapers – and to enable 'Inside the Tenters' to congratulate each other for their 'brilliant' articles on Twitter.

The smug, mutual back-slapping nonsense, seen at its worst at journalist 'award' ceremonies, has gone on for too long. We need more old-style chain-smoking journos, not frightened of telling truth to power – and less smoke and mirrors.

Trust in British print media can be restored, but only if we go back to the future.

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. His award winning blog can be found at www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. He tweets on politics and world affairs @NeilClark66 is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. His award winning blog can be found at www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. He tweets on politics and world affairs @NeilClark66 6 May, 2020 17:39 Get short URL

[May 10, 2020] What did Obama know, and when did he know it

FBI under Obama acted as Gestapo -- the political police. Obama looks now especially bad and probably should be prosecuted for the attempt to stage coup d'état against legitimately elected president. His CIA connections need to investigated and prosecuted too, and first of all Brennan.
Notable quotes:
"... Yates, who was briefly the acting attorney general during the early days of the Trump administration before getting fired, also laid out how in the ensuing days, Comey kept the FBI's actions cloaked in secrecy and repeatedly rebuffed her suggestions that the incoming Trump team be made aware of the Flynn recordings. ..."
"... "One thing people will see when they look at the documents is how Director Comey purposely went around the Justice Department and ignored Deputy Attorney General Yate s," Attorney General William Barr said during a Thursday interview with CBS News. "Deputy Attorney General Yates, I've disagreed with her about a couple of things, but, you know, here she upheld the fine tradition of the Department of Justice. She said that the new administration has to be treated just like the Obama administration, and they should go and tell the White House about their findings And, you know, Director Comey ran around that." ..."
"... Obama asked Yates and Comey to stay behind when the meeting concluded. ..."
"... Obama "started by saying that he had 'learned of the information about Flynn' and his conversation with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak," Yates said, according to the notes. "Obama specified he did not want any additional information on the matter but was seeking information on whether the White House should be treating Flynn any differently." washington examiner ..."
"... Obama did not want any additional information on the matter? Careful CYA. From the account of this meeting it is clear that Obama and Biden knew that Comey was intent on pursuing Flynn. If that is so, then subsequent events indicate that Obama did not act to stop Comey, and since Comey was hiding his effort against Flynn from main Justice, it must be that someone on high was encouraging him. Now, who would that be? pl ..."
"... All this was known in DC for the past few years. Everyone on the HSPCI knew what the closed door testimony was. Clapper was categorical that there was "no empirical evidence of collusion". The Crowdstrike CEO was categorical that he had no definitive evidence that the Russians exfiltrated data from the DNC servers. Yet Schiff, Clapper, Brennan and all the media hacks were on TV every night screaming Russia! Russia! and Collusion! Collusion! ..."
"... I'm revealing my age by using this expression from the Watergate era, but "what did Obama, Biden and Comey know, and when did they know it?" ..."
"... So Obama used Yates to go after Flynn. They have really worked a number on Flynn to discredit him, and it almost worked. Now it would appear their scheme is starting to unravel a bit. ..."
"... Is Obama being thrown under the bus here? Are Comey and Yates (or others) trying to cover their asses now that Flynn is free? Did Trump and his allies always know this and waited for the right moment to reveal it for better effect? The game is at hand. ..."
"... Brennan was encouraging Comey. I just learned something recently. Brennan spent time in Indonesia around the same time that Obama's mother lived there. It has been reported that Obama and Brennan had a fairly close relationship. I wonder how long they have known each other. ..."
"... I did see a clip of Matt Gaetz calling out Ryan and Trey Gowdy from preventing them from issuing subpoenas. Why do you think the Republican leadership in the House and Senate did not want to investigate? ..."
May 09, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

" Former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates told special counsel Robert Mueller's team that she first learned the FBI possessed and was investigating recordings of Flynn's late 2016 conversations with a Russian envoy following a Jan. 5, 2017, national security meeting at the White House. It wasn't Comey who told her, but former President Barack Obama.

Yates, who was briefly the acting attorney general during the early days of the Trump administration before getting fired, also laid out how in the ensuing days, Comey kept the FBI's actions cloaked in secrecy and repeatedly rebuffed her suggestions that the incoming Trump team be made aware of the Flynn recordings.

These revelations appear in declassified FBI interview notes of the Mueller team's conversation with Yates in August 2017, highlighted by the Justice Department on Thursday as U.S. Attorney for D.C. Timothy Shea moved to drop its criminal charges against Flynn.

"One thing people will see when they look at the documents is how Director Comey purposely went around the Justice Department and ignored Deputy Attorney General Yate s," Attorney General William Barr said during a Thursday interview with CBS News. "Deputy Attorney General Yates, I've disagreed with her about a couple of things, but, you know, here she upheld the fine tradition of the Department of Justice. She said that the new administration has to be treated just like the Obama administration, and they should go and tell the White House about their findings And, you know, Director Comey ran around that."

Yates told Mueller's team she first learned of the Flynn recordings following a White House meeting about the Intelligence Community Assessment attended by Yates, Comey, Vice President Joe Biden , then-CIA Director John Brennan, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, then-national security adviser Susan Rice, and others. Obama asked Yates and Comey to stay behind when the meeting concluded.

Obama "started by saying that he had 'learned of the information about Flynn' and his conversation with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak," Yates said, according to the notes. "Obama specified he did not want any additional information on the matter but was seeking information on whether the White House should be treating Flynn any differently." washington examiner

-------------

Obama did not want any additional information on the matter? Careful CYA. From the account of this meeting it is clear that Obama and Biden knew that Comey was intent on pursuing Flynn. If that is so, then subsequent events indicate that Obama did not act to stop Comey, and since Comey was hiding his effort against Flynn from main Justice, it must be that someone on high was encouraging him. Now, who would that be? pl

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/sally-yates-learned-of-flynn-targeting-from-obama-as-comey-kept-her-in-the-dark-declassified-documents-show


Jack , 09 May 2020 at 12:40 PM

Sir

All this was known in DC for the past few years. Everyone on the HSPCI knew what the closed door testimony was. Clapper was categorical that there was "no empirical evidence of collusion". The Crowdstrike CEO was categorical that he had no definitive evidence that the Russians exfiltrated data from the DNC servers. Yet Schiff, Clapper, Brennan and all the media hacks were on TV every night screaming Russia! Russia! and Collusion! Collusion!

Devin Nunes was spot on and correct that there was an attempted coup. All the media and even many Republicans called him a conspiracy theorist.

SST maintaining its glorious tradition was spot on in its analysis with the limited data available that there was a coup and the traitors were not those in the Trump campaign but the leadership in law enforcement and intelligence. A big shoutout to you, Larry and David Habakkuk.

Trump himself was like deer caught in the headlights. Furiously tweeting but not doing much of anything else while his own nominees at the DOJ and FBI were plotting and acting to destroy his presidency. Devin Nunes imploring him to declassify and expose all the evidence from the FISA applications, the 302s, the internal communications among the plotters including the prolific FBI lovers. He still hasn't.

What happens next? Will the whole coup be exposed in its entirety? Will anyone be held to account?

If Trump doesn't care enough even when his ass was being fried to disclose all the evidence with the stroke of his pen and if all he cares is to tweet "witch-hunt" and "Drain the Swamp", how realistic is it that any of the coup plotters will be tried for treason?

Deap , 09 May 2020 at 01:01 PM
Barry was doing his usual thing, the signature move of his entire political career: .... voting "present". His CYA equivalent of no comment.

Plausible deniability was a high art form for Barry. Where was Barry Soetoro between 16:00 and 22:00 on Sept 11, 2012? We still do not know.

Jim Henely , 09 May 2020 at 01:07 PM
I'm revealing my age by using this expression from the Watergate era, but "what did Obama, Biden and Comey know, and when did they know it?"
RussianBot , 09 May 2020 at 01:40 PM
So Obama used Yates to go after Flynn. They have really worked a number on Flynn to discredit him, and it almost worked. Now it would appear their scheme is starting to unravel a bit.

Is Obama being thrown under the bus here? Are Comey and Yates (or others) trying to cover their asses now that Flynn is free? Did Trump and his allies always know this and waited for the right moment to reveal it for better effect? The game is at hand.

Yahoo released a leaked call today of Obama criticizing Trump's response over coronavirus. Here's the big headline Yahoo is running:

Exclusive: Obama says in private call that 'rule of law is at risk' in Michael Flynn case

https://news.yahoo.com/obama-irule-of-law-michael-flynn-case-014121045.html

The Flynn case was invoked by Obama as a principal reason that his former administration officials needed to make sure former Vice President Joe Biden wins the November election against President Trump. "So I am hoping that all of you feel the same sense of urgency that I do," he said. "Whenever I campaign, I've always said, 'Ah, this is the most important election.' Especially obviously when I was on the ballot, that always feels like it's the most important election. This one -- I'm not on the ballot -- but I am pretty darn invested. We got to make this happen."
Obama misstated the charge to which Flynn had previously pleaded guilty. He was charged with false statements to the FBI, not perjury.

Misstated seems like a stretch. The call sounds scripted and I suspect the leak was deliberate.

Keith Harbaugh , 09 May 2020 at 02:12 PM
Sundance covered in great detail the context in which that 2017-01-05 meeting occurred:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/05/01/why-was-flynn-targeted-a-timeline-review-of-the-three-phases/

A YouTube video of Barry's cry of dismay (and fear) over the dismissal of charges against Flynn is here:
https://youtu.be/tbQ8P3GhD-c

EmJay72159508 , 09 May 2020 at 04:50 PM
Brennan was encouraging Comey. I just learned something recently. Brennan spent time in Indonesia around the same time that Obama's mother lived there. It has been reported that Obama and Brennan had a fairly close relationship. I wonder how long they have known each other.
JMH , 09 May 2020 at 04:58 PM
Keith Harbaugh,

O'Biden's Dad just wheeled around the corner in a wood paneled station wagon and dressed down the neighborhood kids who took O'Biden's ball. A humiliating experience for O'Biden who sits in the passenger seat as a mere spectator.

Keith Harbaugh , 09 May 2020 at 07:35 PM
Sundance just posted an astoundingly detailed account of
how illegal surveillance was conducted by unauthorized FBI-contractors
while the GOP was sorting out the candidates for its 2016 presidential nomination:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/05/09/why-is-obama-panicking-now-the-importance-of-understanding-political-surveillance-in-the-era-of-president-obama/

The open question is: Just who were those contractors?
Surely that is known to some, and is significant to current politically-charged inquiries.
Just why that information has not become public is a good question.
Can anyone provide a reliable source for that information?

Jack , 09 May 2020 at 09:30 PM
It is unsurprising @realDonaldTrump enjoys wallowing in his fetid self-indulgence, but I find it surreal that so many other government officials encourage his ignorance, incompetence, & destructive behavior.

BTW, history will be written by the righteous, not by his lickspittle.

https://twitter.com/johnbrennan/status/1259191320515616770?s=21

Is Brennan always like this? His tweets seem unhinged.

Fred , 09 May 2020 at 09:55 PM
"Deputy Attorney General Yates"

She served as Acting AG, accepting the post when Trump was inaugurated. What did she tell him about his whole affair? Was the opposition to the EO 13769 just an excuse to have herself fired so she would not have to either perjure herself or reveal the truth to Trump?

Jack,
"All this was known in DC for the past few years."

You left out that Paul Ryan was Speaker of the House because the Republicans were in the majority then and the HPSCI under his term as speaker did not subpoena a very large group of people, didn't ask relevant questions, didn't release information to the public and thus ensuring the left took over the House after the 2016 elections.

JerseyJeffersonian , 09 May 2020 at 10:33 PM
I, too, coincidentally just concluded a close reading of the Conservative Tree House post that Mr. Harbaugh just recommended. It is, indeed, well worth such a close reading. There have been various puzzling things along the way these last few years for which this post provides explanations. Of particular utility, is its inclusion of a timeline of the arc of the episodes of illegal government surveillance that began (?) with the IRS spying of 2012, and how - and why - it evolved from that episode into the massive abuses of the FISA process of which we are becoming increasingly aware as revelations are forthcoming.

CTH's work is superb, but I do want to say that I am also supremely grateful for all of the good work and analysis from Larry Johnson, and other contributors, as well as for the trenchant comments of Col. Lang. Multivalent sources of information, analysis, and comment provide one with the parallax requisite to understanding this web of perfidy. My gratitude also is owing to all of you Members of the Committee of Correspondence, each of whom brings personal observations and insights to bear, always much to my benefit.

Jack , 10 May 2020 at 03:51 AM
Fred,

I did see a clip of Matt Gaetz calling out Ryan and Trey Gowdy from preventing them from issuing subpoenas. Why do you think the Republican leadership in the House and Senate did not want to investigate?

Jim , 10 May 2020 at 05:42 AM
["One thing people will see when they look at the documents is how Director Comey purposely went around the Justice Department and ignored Deputy Attorney General Yates," Attorney General William Barr said during a Thursday interview with CBS News. "Deputy Attorney General Yates, I've disagreed with her about a couple of things, but, you know, here she upheld the fine tradition of the Department of Justice. She said that the new administration has to be treated just like the Obama administration, and they should go and tell the White House about their findings And, you know, Director Comey ran around that."]

++++++++++++

This is fascinating because: this, what Barr is discussing, on national TV, . . . this particular dimension, this Yates/Comey playing hide the bacon has nothing at all to do with actual Brady material in the Lt. Gen. Flynn case.

Barr is referring to the Special Counsel Mueller Office's interview with Yates on Aug. 15, 2017, entered into the system three weeks later. Her interview occurred more than two months prior to Flynn's coerced guilty plea.

This SCO document was released to the court May 7 as exhibit 4 attached to the DOJ motion to end the prosecution of Flynn. It was produced in line with request by defense for Brady material.

What Barr forgets to say is: This SCO interview of Yates shows that Comey and Yates talked on the phone -- prior to -- the notorious Jan. 24, 2017 FBI interview of Flynn.

"Comey . . . informed her that two agents were on their way to interview Flynn at the White House," the SCO said, according to the new court filing.

Yates took no action, -- she did nothing to order Comey to abort this soon-to-happen FBI interview of Flynn, this SCO interview of her shows.

She was Comey's boss, the Acting Attorney General, at the time.

It shows that she was upset precisely because she wanted the FBI to coordinate with the DOJ -- on getting Flynn screwed -- even suggesting, she told the SCO, that consideration that Flynn be recorded, instead of memorialized using standard 302 form – in-writing-only.

Yates wanted Flynn fired, she told the SCO.

Yates apparently was unable on her own to figure out, as the AG, the FBI and DOJ -- none of them had any predicate, no "materiality," nothing "tethered" to any crime, as there was no crime. And if she did not know these basic facts, had no awareness of them, then: why was she the AG in the first place?

And what did Yates glean, right after this Jan. 24 interview of Flynn?

"Yates received a brief readout of the interview the night it happened, and a longer readout the following day," which begs the question of why the original 302 of this was never produced by the DOJ, to the defense; and also, why Covington law firm never asked to see this before allowing Flynn to make his plea.

"Yates did not speak to the interviewing agents herself, but understood from others that their assessment was that Flynn showed no 'tells' of lying," the SCO report says.

Based on her personal preference, rather than DOJ norms, she went to the White House, and her expectation was they would fire Flynn. I fail to see how this nonsense by Yates seem to escape Barr's notice. Or, is something else also going on?

She personally went to the White House, and her smear campaign against Flynn began, went on and on and on, even after she was fired after being Acting AG for just ten days.

In her brief stint as Acting AG: Yates refused to tell the White House Counsel if Flynn was being investigated, when the WHC asked her, directly, about this, according to what she told the SCO. Can't blame this fact on the unctuous Comey.

She did tell the SCO that she wanted the WHC to know Flynn had been interviewed by the FBI – and that she had concerns about Flynn, and she said those concerns related to the Logan Act. Yates told SCO her concerns were because of the Logan Act, and that she expressed this to the White House.

The Washington Examiner reporting that "It wasn't Comey who told her, but former President Barack Obama" -- about the Flynn-Kislyak phone call --- this is interesting, very interesting, if true, assuming Yates was telling the SCO the truth. This is what she claims in her August 2017 interview with SCO.

But this bit of information is hardly Brady material [how is whether Obama or Comey told her materially germane to the Flynn case, viz. Brady material?].

The question the SCO should have been concerned about is: who actually leaked the transcript of the Flynn-Kislyak telephone call to the media?

Is this a serious crime? Or is this OK?

We still do not know this answer, and AG Barr has not told us. Nor has his boss, Trump.

It is interesting that Barr chose to highlight that Comey went around Yates' back in Comey ordering FBI to interview Flynn, but not that Yates knew of the Flynn interview before it went down, and sat on her arse about it.

In fairness to Comey, they were, as the FB of Investigations, conducting the investigation, which is their job, however rogue this FBI's I actually was, targeting Flynn.

The Flynn-Kislyak telephone call, occurring late December of 2016, was reported by the Washington Post on Jan. 12, 2017, eight days before Trump was sworn in.

And who leaked this, has anyone been prosecuted, will anyone be?

Obama still president, Loretta Lynch still AG, Yates still Deputy AG, Comey FBI director, McCabe Deputy FBI director, etc.

Starting Jan. 20 and for ten days, Yates was the AG. She appeared bent on destroying Flynn, and did nothing that I know of to prosecute who leaked the Flynn-Kislyak telephone call to WAPO. Did someone on high perhaps ask her not to?

Nor was Comey and McCabe investigating this as best I can tell. Yet this was an actual, clear cut crime we all saw, plain as day. Or maybe this is OK? Was someone on high asking them not to?

I watched Barr say, during his interview with CBS news, [following the May 7 release of documents to the court]: "One thing people will see when they look at the documents is how Director Comey purposely went around the Justice Department and ignored Deputy Attorney General Yates," Barr told Catherine Herridge.

And my first thought was: why is Barr doing an apparent CYA for Yates?

What office might she want to be running for in the future; is she a cooperating witness in the wider Durham probe, why is Yates being portrayed as someone other than what she was: A leader in the effort to destroy Michael Flynn.

She was the AG, and she failed to hold Comey accountable at the time; this is a fact, apparently, that reflects poorly on her.

She told the White House -- as best she could -- that Flynn was a piece of dung, and told the SCO, in their interview of her, that she expected the White House to fire Flynn. This reflects poorly on her.

And threatened Logan Act prosecution of Flynn to the White house. This reflects poorly on her.

She smeared Flynn in a CNN interview on May 16, the day before Mueller was appointed. This reflects poorly on her.

Well, who leaked the Flynn-Kislyak telephone call, and did Yates act on that?

Folks that "should have known better" -- far and wide, smeared Flynn, justified the lawlessness against him; one of many examples, titled: "Leaking Flynn's name to the press was illegal, but utterly justified" published by TheHill.com.

https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/the-administration/319955-yes-leaking-flynns-name-to-press-was-illegal-but

She wasn't the only one, but Yates was smack dab in the middle of enabling and perpetuating a long-running smear campaign against Flynn, to destroy him by any means necessary. This reflects poorly on her.

Why is Barr carrying water for her.

As for Obama, he did nothing to stop Comey in 2016 when Comey announced he was exonerating Clinton. Nor did AG Lynch, even though that is not the function of the FBI -- an act of insubordination, by the way, for which Rosenstein officially fired him in May 2017, which set, somehow, in motion the Mueller SC appointment by Rosenstein.

If Comey is such a rogue, and Barr is now claiming Yates tried to do the right thing, in spite of Comey, then why didn't Yates fire Comey Jan. 24 right on the spot? And end the fiasco right then and there?

In her May 16, 2017 CNN interview she only has kind words to say about him.

AS for who on high was encouraging Comey's extra legal free-lancing in the Clinton and Flynn matters is a pertinent question.

Who were the enablers, in other words?

Barr appears to imply Comey did it all on his own, which is not entirely accurate. Perhaps this also implies that Durham will prosecute Comey? I don't know if anyone will be prosecuted at all. Time will tell.

It is clear Comey's enablers would, by rank, have been, viz. the Clinton matter: Obama and Lynch.

In the Flynn matter: Trump and Yates.

Simple logic dictates that: if Main Justice was "not in the loop" then, for Clinton matter, this means Obama was enabling Comey to exonerate her; and also dictate that, for Flynn, that Trump was the one "on high" enabling Comey.

If there are others on high, they were not in the chain of command as I understand the current US Government structure.
-30-

Fred , 10 May 2020 at 09:19 AM
Jack,

"Never Trump".

Jim,

You seem to think Trump was informed of all the relevant information about the FBI's conduct during his first ten days in office. Because Barr, being appointed AG two years after these events, has yet to indict anyone in the case, Trump was actually enabling Yates in destroying Flynn? Neither appear to be logical conclusions to me.

Bobo , 10 May 2020 at 09:50 AM
So on a December 29, 2016 The Obama administration placed sanctions on Russia that evolved to Flynn, at the instruction of the incoming Trump administration, contacting the Russian ambassador requesting that they not retaliate or heighten the situation.

On January 5th Ms. Yates learned from Obama of the Flynn intervention.

Rather than contact Trump directly Obama went along with the Comey Logan Act thoughts.

The decision to enact sanctions obviously involved State, CIA, DNI and FBI but why not Justice or did it. But why was the incoming Trump administration not consulted.

There was only one Machiavellian thinker in that group and it wasn't the idiot who got his panties all twisted up.

[May 10, 2020] Did the FBI target Michael Flynn to protect Obama's policies, not national security by Kevin R. Brock

Highly recommended!
This was a coup d'état and it has little to do with the protection of Oabama policies, but a lot with protection of Clinton clan to which Obama belongs.
FBI investigators were corrupt and acted as a political police
Notable quotes:
"... Heavily redacted FBI documents that have been released indicate Flynn was one of several Trump campaign members who merited their own subfile investigation under the larger, now infamous " Crossfire Hurricane " debacle. Flynn even got his own cool codename -- "Crossfire Razor." (No, the FBI isn't usually that absurd. But absurdity colored that entire period of time.) ..."
"... FBI documents show that a Foreign Agent Registration Act ( FARA ) case was opened against Flynn. The stated reasons, in rank order, for initiating the investigation were that he was a member of the Trump campaign; he had "ties" to various Russian state-affiliated entities; he traveled to Russia; and he had a high-level top-secret clearance -- for which, by the way, he was polygraphed regularly to determine if he was a spy. ..."
"... None of the listed reasons is unusual activity for the kind of positions he held. Overall it is pretty thin justification for investigating an American citizen. Yet, most chillingly, the Crossfire Hurricane team stated it was investigating Flynn "specifically" because he was "an adviser to then Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump for foreign policy issues." ..."
"... Kevin R. Brock, former assistant director of intelligence for the FBI, was an FBI special agent for 24 years and principal deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). He is a founder and principal of NewStreet Global Solutions , which consults with private companies and public safety agencies on strategic mission technologies. ..."
May 10, 2020 | thehill.com
investigation of Michael Flynn , the more it appears he was targeted precisely because, as the national security adviser to the incoming Trump administration, he signaled that the new administration might undo Obama administration policies -- which is kind of what the American people voted for in 2016.

Some will say that Gen. Flynn was investigated for legitimate criminal or national security reasons. Yet, the FBI's ultimate interview of Flynn addressed none of the grounds that the FBI used to open the original case against him. For those of us who have run FBI investigations, that is more than odd.

Heavily redacted FBI documents that have been released indicate Flynn was one of several Trump campaign members who merited their own subfile investigation under the larger, now infamous " Crossfire Hurricane " debacle. Flynn even got his own cool codename -- "Crossfire Razor." (No, the FBI isn't usually that absurd. But absurdity colored that entire period of time.)

For the record, Flynn clearly exercised poor judgment as a result of being interviewed by the FBI. The larger question is whether the team under then-Director James Comey had a legitimate basis to conduct the interview at all.

FBI documents show that a Foreign Agent Registration Act ( FARA ) case was opened against Flynn. The stated reasons, in rank order, for initiating the investigation were that he was a member of the Trump campaign; he had "ties" to various Russian state-affiliated entities; he traveled to Russia; and he had a high-level top-secret clearance -- for which, by the way, he was polygraphed regularly to determine if he was a spy.

None of the listed reasons is unusual activity for the kind of positions he held. Overall it is pretty thin justification for investigating an American citizen. Yet, most chillingly, the Crossfire Hurricane team stated it was investigating Flynn "specifically" because he was "an adviser to then Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump for foreign policy issues."

Let me be clear: That is not a legitimate justification to investigate an American citizen.

There is a theme that runs through the entire Crossfire Hurricane disaster, which has been publicly articulated by Comey and his deputy director, Andrew McCabe : They saw themselves as stalwarts in the breach defending America from a presidential candidate who they believed was an agent of Russia .

... ... ...

Kevin R. Brock, former assistant director of intelligence for the FBI, was an FBI special agent for 24 years and principal deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). He is a founder and principal of NewStreet Global Solutions , which consults with private companies and public safety agencies on strategic mission technologies.

[May 10, 2020] Russiagate has been an obvious coup attempt from the beginning, and several attempts have followed...

The genius of Russiagate is that it managed to gaslight the whole nation
May 10, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
jinn , May 10 2020 15:20 utc | 5
Russiagate has been an obvious coup attempt from the beginning, and several attempts have followed...
__________________________________________________

That is not at all obvious.
Russiagate was obviously designed to look like a coup attempt, but you have to be extremely gullible to believe any of it is real.

The recent Flynn bruhaha is a perfect example of the phoniness surrounding Russiagate.

The FBI investigators that interviewed Flynn believed he had not been deceptive and any fool who was paying attention at the time believed he was not guilty because 2 weeks before that FBI interview the news media had reported that the phone call with Kislyak had been recorded by the FBI and that there was nothing improper or illegal that would motivate Flynn to lie about his talk with Kislyak. The story that Flynn lied to the FBI is unbelievable on its face.

Don't blame the FBI for creating this fake story. Trump is the one and only one that created the fake Flynn-lied-to-the-FBI story, Before Trump created the phony story that Flynn had lied to the FBI nobody else had at that time believed Flynn lied to the FBI.
But once Trump had created the phony story that Flynn lied to the FBI then all the gullible morons started to believe the phony story. And even Flynn himself goes along with Trump's phony story because he is a good soldier that follows command.

Trump says he fired Flynn for lying to the FBI

Before Comey's testimony to Congress that suggested that Trump was twisting Comey's arm to let Flynn go for lying to the FBI no one had ever said that Flynn lied to the FBI. That story was created by Trump and reported by Comey.
And then Mueller and Flynn and Comey all helped Trump foist that phony story that Flynn lied to the FBI onto the public.

The implication of Comey's testimony to Congress was that in order to get Flynn off a charge of Lying to the FBI Trump first tried to cajole Comey to go easy on Flynn and when that did not work Trump fired Comey.
The problem with that whole BS story is that the crux of it (that Flynn lied to the FBI) never happened. It was entirely invented by Trump to make it look like Trump was engaged in mortal combat with the deep state. But it was all staged and fake (i.e. Kayfabe)


jinn , May 10 2020 15:42 utc | 7

Russigate falls apart:

_______________________________________________
Well duh....

Russiagate was designed to fall apart.

It was obvious all along that all the stories that came out in the Mueller Report were badly written sit-com material - the script for a comic soap opera. And they were all scripted to fall apart when examined closely.

What I could never figure out was what this guy Mueller was going to say when he was dragged in front of Congress and required to answer tough questions about all the garbage he had produced. I thought for sure that for Mueller the jig would be up there was no way the farce would not be revealed for all to see.

And then it happened. Mueller testified and it turned out Mueller could not remember any of it.

Senator: Did you say XYZ?
Mueller: Is that in the report??
Senator: yes it is.
Mueller: Then it is true.

Making Mueller Senile and unable to remember anything was brilliant - pure genius. The rest of the Russiagate script was mediocre at best.

Jackrabbit , May 10 2020 17:01 utc | 16
bevin @ May 10 16:41

It was a transparently false narrative designed, by the most incompetent election campaign team in history ...

Occam's razor says Hillary threw the election. No seasoned politician would make the mistakes that she made - especially when they yearn to make history (as the first woman president) and the entire establishment (left and right) is counting on them to win.

Believing what is evidently incredible has long been a test of loyalty ...

And you prove your loyalty with the belief that Hillary lost because of an "incompetent election campaign".

!!

[May 10, 2020] Does Obama now feels his potential liability for staging coup d' tat and gaslighting the whole nation?

Highly recommended!
All-in-all Obama was a CIA sponsored fraud: In 2008 I posted at another blog this: "Obama is a fraud and my view does not hang on the controversial birther movement. " From whence he came? He made a speech at the Democratic National Convention; 3 years in the Senate, then runs to occupy the White House. The media puff pieces. "Hope and Change, Yes, We Can" Watch for the broken promises."
Notable quotes:
"... Now why is Obama against General Flynn? Hmmm. Good question. Did the FBI target Michael Flynn to protect Obama's policies, not national security? LINK ..."
"... Gen. Flynn: Obama Administration made a "wilful decision" to support Sunni extremists (a Jihadi proxy army) against Assad . This directly contradicts the phony narrative of Obama as peace-loving black man (as certified by his Nobel Prize!). ..."
"... In 2008 I posted at another blog this: "Obama is a fraud and my view does not hang on the controversial birther movement. " From whence he came? He made a speech at the Democratic National Convention; 3 years in the Senate, then runs to occupy the White House. The media puff pieces. "Hope and Change, Yes, We Can" Watch for the broken promises." ..."
May 10, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Prof K , May 10 2020 16:05 utc | 9

Posted by: Prof K | May 10 2020 16:05 utc | 9

Obama weighed in this week...on Flynn. Why?

What is he trying to preempt?

He only steps in at critical moments to stop something, as he did before SC to block Bernie.

Now this. How does it relate to Russiagate and his potential liability?


Likklemore , May 10 2020 17:08 utc | 18

@ ProfK 9

Whether or not General Flynn is loathed or liked, there is Supreme Court decisions setting precedence for dropping a case when found to be wrapped in prosecutorial misdeeds:

As for the first 'black' president out from the shadows;

Obama, the petit constitutional law scholar, signed the NDAA National Defence Authorization Act which allows imprisonment of Americans forever has no standing to claim the "rule of law is at risk" and he may want to call Eric Holder.

Certified Hypocrite.

Now why is Obama against General Flynn? Hmmm. Good question. Did the FBI target Michael Flynn to protect Obama's policies, not national security? LINK

Jackrabbit , May 10 2020 17:31 utc | 19
Likklemore @ May10 17:08
Did the FBI target Michael Flynn to protect Obama's policies, not national security?

Gen. Flynn: Obama Administration made a "wilful decision" to support Sunni extremists (a Jihadi proxy army) against Assad . This directly contradicts the phony narrative of Obama as peace-loving black man (as certified by his Nobel Prize!).

!!

Likklemore , May 10 2020 18:11 utc | 22
@ Jackrabbit 19

Thanks for that additional link. And that's why Obama could not standby with Flynn in the NSA role. Recall Hillary's on Trump- "if he is elected we'll hang" (paraphrased)

In 2008 I posted at another blog this: "Obama is a fraud and my view does not hang on the controversial birther movement. " From whence he came? He made a speech at the Democratic National Convention; 3 years in the Senate, then runs to occupy the White House. The media puff pieces. "Hope and Change, Yes, We Can" Watch for the broken promises."

Fast Forward to 2011 he signs NDAA. "How Obama disappointed the world." Der Spiegel had such an article 9 Aug.2011. But he was re-(S)-elected.

[May 08, 2020] Thiefs stole from a Russian fifth column critter: NY Times Accused Of Ripping Off Pulitzer Prize-Winning Stories From Russian Journalists For 2nd Time

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... While this elite Pulitzer jury praised the New York Times for "at great risk, exposing the predations of Vladimir Putin's regime," it is not exactly clear what that "risk" is supposed to entail – because the major US newspaper appears to have stolen at least part of its reporting from Russian journalists . ..."
"... On May 4, journalist Roman Badanin published a Facebook post accusing the Times of ripping off a story he had released months before without credit. Badanin is the founder and editor-in-chief of the liberal anti-Putin news website Proekt , known as The Project in English. ..."
"... This report is eerily similar to a report published by the New York Times eight months later, in November , titled " How Russia Meddles Abroad for Profit : Cash, Trolls and a Cult Leader." This story, which was filed in Madagascar, does not once link to or credit Proekt's original reporting . ..."
"... Another anti-Putin Russian news website, Meduza, published an article on May 7 drawing attention to these allegations, titled " 'Fuck the Pulitzer -- I just want a hyperlink' : Russian journalists say 'The New York Times' should have acknowledged their investigative work in the newspaper's award-winning reports about the Putin regime's 'predations.'" ..."
"... Meduza interviewed Badanin, who said the New York Times "report about Madagascar from November 2019 repeats all the main and even secondary conclusions from our reporting about Madagascar and Africa generally between March and April last year." ..."
"... Badanin was also given a Stanford John S. Knight international fellowship in journalism. Stanford University has established itself as an outpost for Russian pro-Western liberals, and its journalist fellowship program provides institutional support for dissidents in countries targeted by Washington for regime change. ..."
"... The Times even featured Badanin prominently in the header image of the story -- just two years before the same newspaper would go on to rip off his reporting. ..."
May 08, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

NY Times Accused Of Ripping Off Pulitzer Prize-Winning Stories From Russian Journalists For 2nd Time by Tyler Durden Fri, 05/08/2020 - 20:05 Authored by Ben Norton via TheGrayZone.com,

The New York Times has been accused for a second time of stealing major scoops from Russian journalists . One of those stories won the Times a Pulitzer Prize this May.

The journalists who have accused the Times of taking their work without credit also happen to be the same liberal media crusaders against Vladimir Putin that Western correspondents at the Times and other mainstream outlets have cast as persecuted heroes. The Pulitzer Prize Board is comprised of a who's who of media aristocrats and Ivy League bigwigs. Given the elite backgrounds of the judges, it is hardly a surprise that they rewarded reporting reinforcing the narrative of the new US Cold War against official enemies like Russia and China .

Stephen Kinzer, a former New York Times correspondent who has since become a critic of US foreign policy, noted that the three finalists in the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting "were one story about how evil Russia is and two about how evil China is. These choices encourage reporters to write stories that reinforce rather than question Washington's foreign-policy narrative."

The finalists nominated in this category were Reuters and the New York Times for two separate sets of stories.

The US newspaper of record ended up winning the 2020 award in international reporting , for what the Pulitzer jury described as "a set of enthralling stories, reported at great risk, exposing the predations of Vladimir Putin's regime."

The 3 finalists in the #PulitzerPrize2020 "international reporting" category were one story about how evil #Russia is and two about how evil #China is. These choices encourage reporters to write stories that reinforce rather than question Washington's foreign-policy narative.

-- Stephen Kinzer (@stephenkinzer) May 5, 2020

The Times was nominated again as a finalist for what the jury called its "gripping accounts that disclosed China's top-secret efforts to repress millions of Muslims through a system of labor camps, brutality and surveillance."

The staff of Reuters was selected as the third finalist for its reporting in support of anti-China protesters in Hong Kong . (The photography staff of Reuters ended up winning the Pulitzer Prize in breaking news photography for the same coverage.)

Among the five members of the Pulitzer jury who selected these finalists was Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of the neoliberal magazine The Atlantic and a former volunteer in the Israeli army who worked as a guard at a prison camp where Palestinians who rose up in the First Intifada were interned.

Joining Goldberg on the jury was Susan Chira, a former New York Times editor.

While this elite Pulitzer jury praised the New York Times for "at great risk, exposing the predations of Vladimir Putin's regime," it is not exactly clear what that "risk" is supposed to entail – because the major US newspaper appears to have stolen at least part of its reporting from Russian journalists .

I'm proud and humbled to share a Pulitzer Prize with @ddknyt , @dionnesearcey , as well as @malachybrowne and his visual investigation wizards for our reporting on Russia's shadow wars. https://t.co/yczpVAw1QW

-- Michael Schwirtz (@mschwirtz) May 4, 2020

On May 4, journalist Roman Badanin published a Facebook post accusing the Times of ripping off a story he had released months before without credit. Badanin is the founder and editor-in-chief of the liberal anti-Putin news website Proekt , known as The Project in English.

"I have no illusions about the real role of Russian journalism in the world, but I have to note: the two The New York Times's investigations, for which this honored newspaper won the Pulitzer prize yesterday, repeat the findings of The Project's articles published a few months before," Badanin wrote on Facebook.

"I would also like to note that the winners did not put a single link to the English version of our article, even when, for example, 8 months after The Project, they told about the activities of Eugene Prigozhin's emissaries in Madagascar," he added.

Badanin linked to an article he published, both in Russian and English, back in March 2019 titled " Master and Chef : How Evgeny Prigozhin led the Russian offensive in Africa." The story details how the businessman Evgenу Prigozhin, who is sanctioned by the US government, has been promoting business opportunities in Africa. The piece focuses specifically on Madagascar, where Russia also has a military agreement.

This report is eerily similar to a report published by the New York Times eight months later, in November , titled " How Russia Meddles Abroad for Profit : Cash, Trolls and a Cult Leader." This story, which was filed in Madagascar, does not once link to or credit Proekt's original reporting .

Another anti-Putin Russian news website, Meduza, published an article on May 7 drawing attention to these allegations, titled " 'Fuck the Pulitzer -- I just want a hyperlink' : Russian journalists say 'The New York Times' should have acknowledged their investigative work in the newspaper's award-winning reports about the Putin regime's 'predations.'"

Meduza interviewed Badanin, who said the New York Times "report about Madagascar from November 2019 repeats all the main and even secondary conclusions from our reporting about Madagascar and Africa generally between March and April last year."

While Badanin did not outright accuse the Times of plagiarism, he was frustrated that "nowhere in the story did they acknowledge that we'd already reported on this topic," and said it was either a "professional issue" or an "ethical problem."

A New York Times spokesperson denied that Proekt's reporting was used in any way. And the Times reporter who authored this report from Madagascar, Michael Schwirtz , responded dismissively to the accusations in a Twitter thread full of sarcastic quips.

Another anti-Putin Russian activist accuses the New York Times of lifting his reporting

Michael Schwirtz authored another New York Times article in December that was cited by the Pulitzer jury for the 2020 prize. This piece, "How a Poisoning in Bulgaria Exposed Russian Assassins in Europe," is also suspiciously similar to reporting published before by yet another anti-Putin website, called The Insider .

The Insider is edited by the Western-backed, diehard anti-Putin activist Roman Dobrokhotov. In response to Schwirtz's Twitter thread, Dobrohotov angrily asked why The Insider's reports were not credited as well. Schwirtz denied having used information from the previous stories.

Schwirtz's Twitter thread tagged four Russian accounts: Proekt, The Insider, Dobrokhotov, and Yasha Levine, the last of whom is an occasional contributor to The Grayzone and the author of " Surveillance Valley ."

Time to learn the hard truth: The New York Times -- like the Empire it represents -- doesn't give a fuck about you. It'll take whatever it wants, give nothing in return, and suffer no consequences. And who'll believe you Russians anyway? https://t.co/V1YtZ7K6OB

-- Yasha Levine (@yashalevine) May 7, 2020

Levine reflected on the scandal writing,

"Time to learn the hard truth: The New York Times -- like the Empire it represents -- doesn't give a fuck about you. It'll take whatever it wants, give nothing in return, and suffer no consequences. And who'll believe you Russians anyway?"

"The reverence with which liberal Russian journalists have treated the New York Times has always been baffling to me," Levine continued. "But that's what you get when you're a colonial subject like Russia. You fetishize the master. That reverence is starting to wear off, but it's still there."

New York Times was also accused of stealing Russian journalists' reporting back in 2017

This is not even the first time that the US newspaper of record has been accused of stealing reporting from Russian journalists.

Back in 2017, the New York Times won the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting for its reports on "Vladimir Putin's efforts to project Russia's power abroad."

At the time, journalists from the anti-Putin website Meduza accused the Times of ripping off their reporting. The website Global Voices highlighted the controversy, in an article titled "Russian Journalists Say One of NYT's Pulitzer-Winning Stories Was Stolen ."

Meduza reported Daniil Turovsky accused New York Times Moscow correspondent Andrew E. Kramer of lifting his reporting. Kramer actually took the time to respond in a Facebook comment, acknowledging that his report was based on the Russian journalist's.

"Daniil, I spoke with you while preparing this article and explained that I intended to follow in the footsteps of your fine work, that I would credit Meduza, as I did, and thanked you for your help," Kramer said.

This did not satisfy Meduza, which also reminded readers in its latest 2020 article that the Times had ripped off its 2017 reporting.

The NYT times has been honored with a Pulitzer Prize for "exposing the predations of Vladimir Putin's regime" in 2019, but several top investigative journalists in Russia say the U.S. newspaper ignored their groundbreaking work in this area -- again. https://t.co/R4WZdqHDp4

-- Meduza in English (@meduza_en) May 7, 2020

The Grayzone has also experienced this kind of shameless journalistic theft. In March 2019, the New York Times released a report acknowledging that the so-called "humanitarian aid" convoy that the US government tried to ram across the Venezuelan border in a February coup attempt had been set on fire not by government forces, but rather Washington-backed right-wing opposition hooligans.

At the time of this February 23 putsch attempt, the Times had initially joined US politicians like Senator Marco Rubio and the majority of the corporate media in blaming Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. But The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal, who was reporting in Venezuela, published a report showing that all of the available evidence pointed to the opposition being responsible.

When the Times finally admitted this fact weeks later, it made no mention whatsoever of Blumenthal's reporting. Glenn Greenwald was the only high-profile journalist to credit Blumenthal and The Grayzone.

New York Times had ironically heroized these Russian journalists before stealing their reporting

Further compounding this staggering hypocrisy is the fact that the New York Times has in fact published numerous articles lionizing these anti-Putin Russian journalists, while simultaneously ripping off their work.

Proekt founder and editor Roman Badanin is not some kind of crypto pro-Kremlin activist – far from it. He has spent years working within mainstream outlets, and was previously the editor-in-chief of the decidedly anti-Putin Russian edition of Forbes magazine.

Badanin does friendly interviews with US-based neoconservative think tanks like the Free Russia Foundation , a right-wing anti-Putin lobbying group that appointed regime-changer Michael Weiss as its director for special investigations.

In an interview conducted by Valeria Jegisman , a neoconservative anti-Russian activist who worked as a spokesperson for the government of Estonia and now works at the US government's propaganda arm Voice of America, group accused the Kremlin of spreading false information, claiming "Russia will continue its disinformation tactics."

Badanin also called for "the West" to "support independent media projects with non-profit funding," stating clearly: "I think that what the West can do is to continue to support independent media in the most transparent and clear way, and to stop being afraid of the million tricks that the Russian authorities come up with to force the West to abandon these investments."

The Russian journalist's pro-Western perspective has been rewarded. Badanin was honored by the European Press Prize , a program backed by Western governments and the top corporate media outlets in Europe, particularly The Guardian and Reuters.

Badanin was also given a Stanford John S. Knight international fellowship in journalism. Stanford University has established itself as an outpost for Russian pro-Western liberals, and its journalist fellowship program provides institutional support for dissidents in countries targeted by Washington for regime change.

Badanin's extensive links to Western regime-change institutions should not come as a surprise to the New York Times; it has in fact honored him in numerous articles.

In 2017, the Times published an entire article framed around Badanin. Reporter Jim Rutenberg explained, "I wanted to better understand President Trump's America So I went to Russia ."

In Moscow, Rutenberg met with Badanin at the headquarters of the anti-Putin station TV Rain, which he described as a "warehouse complex here, populated by young people with beards, tattoos, piercings and colored hair. (Brooklyn hipster imperialism knows no bounds.)"

While praising Badanin and TV Rain, the Times also noted that the channel published a poll suggesting that the Soviet Union "should have abandoned Leningrad to the Nazis to save lives."

The Times even featured Badanin prominently in the header image of the story -- just two years before the same newspaper would go on to rip off his reporting.

The New York Times also reported on Roman Badanin in 2016 and 2011 . It is abundantly clear the newspaper knew who he was.

The Gray Lady's willingness to snatch Badanin's reporting shows how little respect newspapers like the New York Times actually have for the anti-Putin journalists they claim to lionize . For the jet-setting correspondents of Western corporate media outlets, liberal Russian reporters are just tools to advance their own ambitions.

[May 07, 2020] Media Malpractice Is Criminalizing Better Relations With Russia by Stephen F. Cohen

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The foundational accusation of Russiagate was, and remains, charges that Russian President Putin ordered the hacking of DNC e-mails and their public dissemination through WikiLeaks in order to benefit Donald Trump and undermine Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, and that Trump and/or his associates colluded with the Kremlin in this "attack on American democracy." As no actual evidence for these allegations has been produced after nearly a year and a half of media and government investigations, we are left with Russiagate without Russia. ..."
"... This is unprecedented, preposterous, and dangerous, potentially more so than even McCarthy's search for "Communist" connections. It would suggest, for example, that scores of American corporations doing business in Russia today are engaged in criminal enterprise. ..."
"... Russiagate began sometime prior to June 2016, not after the presidential election in November, as is often said, as an anti-Trump political project. ..."
"... Leaving aside possible financial improprieties on the part of General Flynn, his persecution and subsequent prosecution is highly indicative. Flynn pled guilty to having lied to the FBI about his communications with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, on behalf of the incoming Trump administration, discussions that unavoidably included some references, however vague, to sanctions imposed on Russia by President Obama in December 2016, just before leaving office. ..."
"... Those sanctions were highly unusual-last-minute, unprecedented in their seizure of Russian property in the United States, and including a reckless veiled threat of unspecified cyber attacks on Russia. ..."
"... Finally, and similarly, Cohen points out, there is the ongoing effort by the political-media establishment to drive Secretary of State Tillerson from office and replace him with a fully neocon, anti-Russian, anti-détente head of the State Department. ..."
Dec 13, 2017 | thenation.com

Cohen offers the following general observations, which form the basis of the discussion:

  • The foundational accusation of Russiagate was, and remains, charges that Russian President Putin ordered the hacking of DNC e-mails and their public dissemination through WikiLeaks in order to benefit Donald Trump and undermine Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, and that Trump and/or his associates colluded with the Kremlin in this "attack on American democracy." As no actual evidence for these allegations has been produced after nearly a year and a half of media and government investigations, we are left with Russiagate without Russia. (An apt formulation perhaps first coined in an e-mail exchange by Nation writer James Carden.) Special counsel Mueller has produced four indictments: against Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump's short-lived national-security adviser, and George Papadopolous, a lowly and inconsequential Trump "adviser," for lying to the FBI; and against Paul Manafort and his partner Rick Gates for financial improprieties. None of these charges has anything to do with improper collusion with Russia, except for the wrongful insinuations against Flynn. Instead, the several investigations, desperate to find actual evidence of collusion, have spread to "contacts with Russia"-political, financial, social, etc.-on the part of a growing number of people, often going back many years before anyone imagined Trump as a presidential candidate. The resulting implication is that these "contacts" were criminal or potentially so.

    This is unprecedented, preposterous, and dangerous, potentially more so than even McCarthy's search for "Communist" connections. It would suggest, for example, that scores of American corporations doing business in Russia today are engaged in criminal enterprise. More to the point, advisers to US policy-makers and even media commentators on Russia must have many and various contacts with Russia if they are to understand anything about the dynamics of Kremlin policy-making. Cohen himself, to take an individual example, was an adviser to two (unsuccessful) presidential campaigns, which considered his wide-ranging and longstanding "contacts" with Russia to be an important credential, as did the one sitting president he advised. To suggest that such contacts are in any way criminal is to slur hundreds of reputations and to leave US policy-makers with advisers laden with ideology and no actual expertise. It is also to suggest that any quest for better relations with Russia, or détente, is somehow suspicious, illegitimate, or impossible, as expressed recently by Andrew Weiss in The Wall Street Journal and by The Washington Post, in an editorial. This is one reason Cohen, in a previous Batchelor broadcast and commentary, argued that Russiagate and its promoters have become the gravest threat to American national security.

  • Russiagate began sometime prior to June 2016, not after the presidential election in November, as is often said, as an anti-Trump political project. (Exactly why, how, and by whom remain unclear, and herein lies the real significance of the largely bogus "Dossier" and the still murky role of top US intel officials in the creation of that document.) That said, Cohen continues, the mainstream American media have been largely responsible for inflating, perpetuating, and sustaining the sham Russiagate as the real political crisis it has become, arguably the greatest in modern American presidential and thus institutional political history. The media have done this by increasingly betraying their own professed standards of verified news reporting and balanced coverage, even resorting to tacit forms of censorship by systematically excluding dissenting reporting and opinions. (For inventories of recent examples, see Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept and Joe Lauria at Consortium News. Anyone interested in exposures of such truly "fake news" should visit these two sites regularly, the latter the product of the inestimable veteran journalist Robert Parry.) Still worse, this mainstream malpractice has spread to some alternative-media publications once prized for their journalistic standards, where expressed disdain for "evidence" and "proof" in favor of allegations without any actual facts can sometimes be found. Nor are these practices merely the ordinary occasional mishaps of professional journalism. As Greenwald points out, all of the now retracted stories, whether by print media or cable television, were zealous promotions of Russiagate and virulently anti-Trump. They, too, are examples of Russiagate without Russia.

  • Leaving aside possible financial improprieties on the part of General Flynn, his persecution and subsequent prosecution is highly indicative. Flynn pled guilty to having lied to the FBI about his communications with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, on behalf of the incoming Trump administration, discussions that unavoidably included some references, however vague, to sanctions imposed on Russia by President Obama in December 2016, just before leaving office.

    Those sanctions were highly unusual-last-minute, unprecedented in their seizure of Russian property in the United States, and including a reckless veiled threat of unspecified cyber attacks on Russia. They gave the impression that Obama wanted to make even more difficult Trump's professed goal of improving relations with Moscow.

    Still more, Obama's specified reason was not Russian behavior in Ukraine or Syria, as is commonly thought, but Russiagate-that is, Putin's "attack on American democracy," which Obama's intel chiefs had evidently persuaded him was an entirely authentic allegation. (Or which Obama, who regarded Trump's victory over his designated successor, Hillary Clinton, as a personal rebuff, was eager to believe.) But Flynn's discussions with the Russian ambassador-as well as other Trump representatives' efforts to open "back-channel" communications with Moscow–were anything but a crime. As Cohen pointed out in another previous commentary, there were so many precedents of such overtures on behalf of presidents-elect, it was considered a normal, even necessary practice, if only to ask Moscow not to make relations worse before the new president had a chance to review the relationship. When Henry Kissinger did this on behalf of President-elect Nixon, his boss instructed him to keep the communication entirely confidential, not to inform any other members of the incoming administration. Presumably Flynn was similarly secretive, thereby misinforming Vice President Pence and finding himself trapped-or possibly entrapped-between loyalty to his president and an FBI agent. Flynn no doubt would have been especially guarded with a representative of the FBI, knowing as he did the role of Obama's Intel bosses in Russiagate prior to the election and which had escalated after Trump's surprise victory. In any event, to the extent that Flynn encouraged Moscow not to reply in kind immediately to Obama's highly provocative sanctions, he performed a service to US national security, not a crime. And, assuming that Flynn was acting on the instructions of his president-elect, so did Trump. Still more, if Flynn "colluded" in any way, it was with Israel, not Russia, having been asked by that government to dissuade countries from voting for an impending anti-Israel UN resolution.

  • Finally, and similarly, Cohen points out, there is the ongoing effort by the political-media establishment to drive Secretary of State Tillerson from office and replace him with a fully neocon, anti-Russian, anti-détente head of the State Department. Tillerson was an admirable appointee by Trump-widely experienced in world affairs, a tested negotiator, a mature and practical-minded man. Originally, his role as the CEO of Exxon Mobil who had negotiated and enacted an immensely profitable and strategically important energy-extraction deal with the Kremlin earned him the slur of being "Putin's pal." This preposterous allegation has since given way to charges that he is slowly restructuring, and trimming, the long bloated and mostly inept State Department, as indeed he should do. Numerous former diplomats closely associated with Hillary Clinton have raced to influential op-ed pages to denounce Tillerson's undermining of this purportedly glorious frontline institution of American national security. Many news reports, commentaries, and editorials have been in the same vein. But who can recall, Cohen asks, a major diplomatic triumph by the State Department or a secretary of state in recent years? The answer might be the Obama administration's multinational agreement with Iran to curb its nuclear-weapons potential, but that was due no less to Russia's president and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which provided essential guarantees to the sides involved. Forgotten, meanwhile, are the more than 50 career State Department officials who publicly protested-in the spirit of DOD-Obama's rare attempt to cooperate with Moscow in Syria. Call it by what it was: the sabotaging of a president by his own State Department. In this spirit, there are a flurry of leaked stories that Tillerson will soon resign or be ousted. Meanwhile, however, he carries on. The ever-looming menace of Russiagate compels him to issue wildly exaggerated indictments of Russian behavior while, at the same time, calling for a "productive new relationship" with Moscow, in which he clearly believes. (And which, if left unencumbered, he might achieve.) Evidently, he has established a "productive" working relationship with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, the two of them having just announced North Korea's readiness to engage in negotiations with the United States and other governments involved in the current crisis.

    Tillerson's fate, Cohen concludes, will tell us much about the number-one foreign-policy question confronting America: cooperation or escalating conflict with the other nuclear superpower, a détente-like diminishing of the new Cold War or the growing risks that it will become hot war. Politics and policy should never be over-personalized; larger factors are always involved. But in these unprecedented times, Tillerson may be the last man standing who represents the possibility of some kind of détente. Apart, that is, from President Trump himself, loathe him or not. Or to put the issue differently: Will Russiagate continue to gravely endanger American national security?

    Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University. A Nation contributing editor, his most recent book, War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate, is available in paperback and in an ebook edition. His weekly conversations with the host of The John Batchelor Show, now in their seventh year, are available at www.thenation.com.

  • [May 05, 2020] Could there be a more obvious demonstration that the man is FULL OF SHIT??

    Notable quotes:
    "... The bungling, toxic incompetence of this administration is quite something to behold. Wow... ..."
    May 05, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    farm ecologist , May 4 2020 18:53 utc | 4

    RADDATZ: Do you believe it was manmade or genetically modified?

    POMPEO: Look, the best experts so far seem to think it was manmade. I have no reason to disbelieve that at this point.

    RADDATZ: Your -- your Office of the DNI says the consensus, the scientific consensus was not manmade or genetically modified.

    POMPEO: That's right. I -- I -- I agree with that. Yes. I've -- I've seen their analysis. I've seen the summary that you saw that was released publicly. I have no reason to doubt that that is accurate at this point.

    To summarize: Pompeo does not doubt that the virus has been genetically modified, but he also does not doubt that is has not been genetically modified.

    Could there be a more obvious demonstration that the man is FULL OF SHIT??


    Jpc , May 4 2020 19:13 utc | 8

    To Farm ecologist.

    You are totally on the money. How or why is he in this job?
    It's demented!

    Sol Invictus , May 4 2020 19:16 utc | 12
    Those incompetent neo-confederates leading america into oblivion will jumble strategic defeats with winning. So much for accountability, hard work and personal responsability... Seems they can't compete fairly without superior military variable of adjustment and threat of violence against adversaries. Orange springs eternal and their great white hope has now adopted a paralizing rhetoric of victimization - republican lawmakers follow suit and are going so far as invoking a western bid for monetary reparations from Chinese depredations. # the art of winnig for maggots, derp.
    Daniel , May 4 2020 20:56 utc | 34
    The bungling, toxic incompetence of this administration is quite something to behold. Wow...

    [May 05, 2020] I can do a lot Trump blames China for Covid-19 seeking to undermine his re-election -- RT USA News

    Notable quotes:
    "... The president has ramped up attacks on China in recent weeks, insisting it concealed information about the coronavirus in the early stages of the outbreak and has all but blamed the country for the health crisis. Asked whether he would use tariffs or debt write-offs to penalize Beijing, Trump refused to offer much detail, saying only that "we're looking for what happened" and how to respond to the alleged "cover-up." ..."
    "... There are many things I can do. ..."
    Apr 30, 2020 | www.rt.com
    US President Donald Trump believes China "will do anything they can" to make him lose his re-election bid, pointing to Beijing's handling of the coronavirus outbreak that has killed over 60,000 Americans already. Taking aim at Beijing, Trump told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday that the country would prefer to see his Democratic rival Joe Biden take the Oval Office in November, stating it would pull out all the stops to see him win – though the former VP would first need to secure his party's nomination.

    China will do anything they can to have me lose this race.

    Exclusive: Trump says China 'will do anything they can' to make him lose the re-election race in 2020 https://t.co/WB0zbWYZEkhttps://t.co/WB0zbWYZEk

    -- Reuters (@Reuters) April 30, 2020

    The president has ramped up attacks on China in recent weeks, insisting it concealed information about the coronavirus in the early stages of the outbreak and has all but blamed the country for the health crisis. Asked whether he would use tariffs or debt write-offs to penalize Beijing, Trump refused to offer much detail, saying only that "we're looking for what happened" and how to respond to the alleged "cover-up."

    There are many things I can do.

    Beijing has maintained that it tackled the pandemic appropriately and that it shared information about the virus with the international community as soon as it was available. Chinese officials have also hit back at the US accusations, suggesting Washington's handling of Covid-19 has been slow and ineffective, while warning against politicizing the global crisis.

    Also on rt.com Hello 'Chinagate': Why blaming Beijing is all the rage this US election cycle

    [May 05, 2020] I hope Trump gets everything he deserves.

    May 05, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Walter , May 5 2020 13:48 utc | 158

    Circe , May 5 2020 14:09 utc | 159

    ...There's no New York Times before Covid and after Covid and intelligence was crooked before it was straight on no WMDs in Iraq before Zionists gave Bush the fake intelligence he wanted. Intelligence will be crooked and sometimes right depending, but more often it's a trained pitbull. None of that matters.

    I have long disliked the New York Times as a perfect example of Neo-liberal trash propaganda, and I really disagreed with b's whitewash of Trump until recently when his interpretation of Trump has become less clouded by his protect Russia bias and more cognizant of the avalanche of proof that Trump is a Zionist fascist in service of 1% power and specifically chosen for his unflinching loyalty to the peak of the corruption pyramid.

    Now, what I mean by this is that when your loyalty is to the unbiased truth, you don't and shouldn't care from whence it emerges cause the truth can emerge from a sewer dripping in filth as easily as it can fall out of the sky pure like driven snow. The vehicle means one iota to me; I only care about the truth, unlike some of you here who want to shoot the messenger cause right now the messenger can't help giving you the facts for whatever reason, and you can't handle the truth.

    Wise up! And learn to recognize the truth when you see it even if it's covered in what you consider shet.

    Now on the j'accuse Chine , Trump strategy. Very little of the virus travelled from China to the U.S. and what did land in the U.S. from China was mostly contained. The worst spread of infection came from Europe, but Trump being the asshole that he is got caught in his xenophobic trap, immediately shutting down flights from China but allowing hundreds of thousands of carriers from Europe to disembark for weeks. So now to cover that huge blunder that emanated from his racist skewed judgment, he's spewing fake intelligence and hate propaganda against China to cover his butt and salvage his poll numbers.

    The truth is that small and medium-sized farms are failing under the weight of his tariff blowback and now under Covid. He's starting to bleed support in rural areas so he needs to play the racist blame card to inflame patriotic loyalty to rally around him.

    I hope he also gets everything he deserves. A spectacular downfall might suffice.

    [May 05, 2020] Russia Slams NYT for 'Russophobia' Following Pulitzer Prize Win - The Moscow Times

    May 05, 2020 | www.themoscowtimes.com

    Russian diplomats have slammed The New York Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning series articles about Russia's covert activities abroad as examples of "Russophobia."

    The New York Times won the Pulitzer for international reporting Monday for six investigative articles and two videos that "expos[ed] the predations of Vladimir Putin's regime" across Africa, the Middle East and Europe. news The Global Footprints of 'Putin's Chef' Read more Russia's Embassy in the United States accused the Pulitzer Prize Board of "highlighting anti-Russian materials with statements that have been repeatedly refuted not only by Russian officials, but also by life itself."

    "We consider this series of New York Times articles about Russia a wonderful collection of undiluted Russophobic fabrications that can be studied as a guide to creating false facts," the embassy said in a Facebook post.

    Meanwhile, in a separate accusation, the editor of independent Russian investigative outlet Proekt said at least two of The New York Times' Pulitzer-winning investigations repeated its own previous reporting without citing it.

    Congrats to @nytimes on the @PulitzerPrizes for article series that echoes our „Master and Chef" series, which was written months before NYT. It's a pity that there's no even a link to The Project's piece in the awarded publication. https://t.co/MsgwqaMOn0

    -- Проект (@wwwproektmedia) May 5, 2020
    "[T]he winners did not put a single link to the English version of our article," Roman Badanin wrote on Facebook, singling out its March 14, 2019, deep dive into Putin-linked businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin's activities in Madagascar. The New York Times' investigation on the subject was published six months later in November.

    "I still don't know what is my attitude to this situation... It's probably nice, but a bit weird," Badanin wrote in an English-language post. Sign up for our free weekly newsletters covering News and Business.

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    [May 05, 2020] One thing I was horrified with, during a "quick look at" the FT Story about Putin, was the level of "Putin did it" hate in the comments section. I had thought that the "Putin did it" tripe was a thing of the past. I could not have been more wrong.

    The level of brainwashing is really staggering. Probably comparable to the USSR and Nazy Germany levels.
    May 05, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
    Stonebird , May 4 2020 20:51 utc | 31
    This anti-Chinese effort may be destined for internal US (anti-civil war) needs. To make the US population look in one direction. Obviously the why part is another question - oil, dollar collapse, lack of food etc? But I want to point out that there has been an uptick in aggression in other sensitive areas as well.

    Todays examples are; An attack east of Aleppo on a Syrian military research centre by Israeli aircraft. Overflying Jordan and then Iraq.
    A second band of mercenary bounty hunters were captured trying to infiltrate venezuela to kill Maduro (A revolt made by 8 at a time hunters could take several years at that rate.
    The presence of four Nato Aegis ships in the Baltic which coincides with the arrival of the Russian pipelaying ship in Kalingrad.

    One thing I was horrified with, during a "quick look at" the FT Story about Putin, was the level of "Putin did it" hate in the comments section. I had thought that the "Putin did it" tripe was a thing of the past. I could not have been more wrong.

    It is interesting that the rubbish Pompeo says is getting some resistance from the "intelligence" agencies themselves. It appears that not everyone wants to be forced into supporting his accusations.

    [May 05, 2020] Five eyes, the anglosphere intel and propaganda warriors are the best in the world

    Notable quotes:
    "... When the people who made fake claims about Iraq's WMD, about Russiagate, about Iran's danger, are claiming that the thing isn't manmade, then either it's not manmade or it's US-made and the claim is a lie (what we expect from US intelligence agencies) and a cover-up. ..."
    May 05, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    karlof1 , May 4 2020 20:57 utc | 35

    In many Ways, Trump reminds me of a Hitler/Stalin admirer. He demands certain results; if you don't supply them, at least Trump will just fire you instead of having you shot or sent to the Gulag -- Evidence of the many IG firings as this article notes .

    The daily lies and bald-faced propaganda is at the point where many are aware but still all too many remain oblivious or are Brown Shirts in all but outward appearance. Pompeo would be a perfect example of a clone if Hitler had a PR spokesperson spewing lies daily for the press & public to digest without any thinking. Imagine Hitler with Twitter.

    None of the above is meant to denigrate; rather, it's to put them into proper perspective. I invite barflies to click here and just look at the headlines of the posted news items--that site's biggest failing was to omit similar criticism of Obama, Clinton, and D-Party pukes in general, although that doesn't render today's headlines false.

    Will the coming Great Depression 2.0 be global or confined to NATO nations? As with the first Great Depression, it will be restricted to being Trans-Atlantic for that's where the dollar zone and Neoliberalism overlap. The emerging dollar-free Eurasian trade zone


    Peter AU1 , May 4 2020 21:32 utc | 42

    karlof1

    Many of Goering's quotes are very accurate as to human nature. US took in Nazi and Japanese scientists. It wouldn't have left the propaganda behind. Goering's quote about taking people to war - nazi's were obviously very good at it as the Germans fought until the very end. US peasants will likely do the same.

    Peter AU1 , May 4 2020 21:51 utc | 47
    The anti China crap filling the MSM is anglosphere in origin. Five eyes, the anglosphere intel and propaganda warriors will be in it up to their eyeballs.
    Clueless Joe , May 4 2020 21:52 utc | 48
    When the people who made fake claims about Iraq's WMD, about Russiagate, about Iran's danger, are claiming that the thing isn't manmade, then either it's not manmade or it's US-made and the claim is a lie (what we expect from US intelligence agencies) and a cover-up. That said, odds are on the former, as far as I'm concerned. The absolutely sure thing is that it's not the Chinese who crafted it.
    H.Schmatz , May 4 2020 22:05 utc | 49
    @Posted by: Clueless Joe | May 4 2020 21:52 utc | 48

    Indeed, this is the pattern, as happened with Skripals and Litvinenko, must be an anglo thing.

    "The best defesne is a good attack"

    [May 03, 2020] The script that Trump is following with China is the one that, his mentor in politics and much else, Roy Cohn developed for the unlamented Senator McCarthy

    This is essentially variant of Russiagate with Trump and Pompeo playing the role of Muller
    Notable quotes:
    "... Any fool in the C19th could have told Trump and his fellow members of the political class what to do: make concessions!underwrite all wages! introduce immediately, free healthcare (abandon the powerful but in the scheme of things tiny Health Insurance industry)! ..."
    "... Instead, as everything around them crumbles, they are trying to rally the people (divided into ethnic, social, racial, linguistic and pigmentary factions) into forgetting everything and blaming China. ..."
    May 03, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    bevin , May 2 2020 16:01 utc | 151

    The script that Trump is following-confident that the Democrats can be counted upon to copy it- is the one that, his mentor in politics and much else, Roy Cohn developed for the unlamented Senator McCarthy.

    But, and this will be news in Washington, it is not 1950 anymore. The conditions that made it possible to push the red scare underlying the first Cold War, including rising living standards and full employment for most of the working class, the rise of the suburbs, the GI Bill allowing unprecedented social mobility and unchallenged (in reality if not in the fevered brains on the right) hegemony of the United States, economically, financially, militarily and culturally- all that has crumbled away.

    Trump is trying the 'blame China, fear the reds' strategy because it is all that he can think of and nobody else within miles of the White House has a clue what to do. Why should they? None of them has the least interest in public policy, let alone the common welfare, the political culture in the US is so corrupted by careerism, bribery, revolving doors, oligarchical diktats and, above all, greed, greed and greed that nobody with any brains spares a moment's thought on thinking matters through.

    The US ruling class is in the position that the French Aristocracy had reached by 1789- it has no conception that it will not rule forever, only a tiny minority thinks ahead in terms of dealing with fundamental changes. And there is no understanding of the fragility of their positions.

    Any fool in the C19th could have told Trump and his fellow members of the political class what to do: make concessions!underwrite all wages! introduce immediately, free healthcare (abandon the powerful but in the scheme of things tiny Health Insurance industry)!

    Instead, as everything around them crumbles, they are trying to rally the people (divided into ethnic, social, racial, linguistic and pigmentary factions) into forgetting everything and blaming China.

    The first time it was a tragedy, leading to the deaths of millions, most of them in south east Asia, this time it promises to be something much more amusing.

    Yesterday was a rent day and a pay day- fear, frustration, anger and a justified sense of being tricked again are mounting everywhere. Unless the US government takes a U turn it will be a very long hot summer.

    Hoyeru , May 2 2020 16:31 utc | 152

    this was the main goal from the very beginning. I said that was the aim of USA the minute its fake corporate owned media began to scream about the virus. I said that in The Faker's site(The Saker). This virus was a God sent, exactly when USA needed to get the world to hate China, because that was THE ONLY WAY to stop China's rise against the West. Make the world hate China. This very fact alone proves to me the virus isnt natural but is a bio engineered bio weapon. The mere coincidence is a proof.

    [May 02, 2020] Those dastardly Russians!

    May 02, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

    Cortes April 27, 2020 at 10:24 pm

    I suppose that once in a while vital documentation (Apollo Moon missions, anyone?) goes astray, slipping down the back of the couch or misfiled on the wrong shelf in the library annexe. And occasionally the dog really did eat the homework.

    https://www.theblaze.com/news/christopher-steele-dossier-emails-documents-wiped

    Those dastardly Russians!

    Mark Chapman April 28, 2020 at 8:12 am
    Cretins like Steele openly flout the law, and are let away with it. There must be a law that directs government personnel – and he was government – to take such steps as are reasonable to preserve records they know or should know would constitute evidence, whether condemnatory or exculpatory. Steele had to be well aware there was intense interest in this material, and it is not difficult to imagine what the western reaction would be if some pivotal Russian figure deleted all his records and then did the smiling palms-up thing in court, so sorry, all gone.

    It is likewise easy to imagine the information in the records was damning, because nobody willfully wipes evidence they know will put them in the clear. And he will be allowed to get away with it without any punishment because the people who would have to punish him are likely the same people who told him to get rid of it.

    Just like Hillary, and her self-appointed deletion of tens of thousands of emails she deemed 'personal', although they were government property. No ordinary mook would be allowed to get away with that. And they wonder – or pretend to – why the people are sick to death of western corruption.

    [May 02, 2020] For brevity, I always post that our IC (Intelligence Community) is masterful in shaping U.S. public opinion and causing problems for targeted countries but terrible in collecting and analyzing Intel that would benefit the U.S. The truth of course, is more complicated.

    Notable quotes:
    "... The person trying to tell the truth is forced to defend, 'Communist China' (Tom Cotton thinks that is one word), Russia, or Iran and to the U.S. public this is toxic. ..."
    "... Someday it just won't matter anymore. We will have deceived ourselves for so long that we have squandered so much of our power that no one will pay attention to us. ..."
    "... Intelligence is a rare commodity in American politics and diplomacy even more elusive so the consequences of malicious rumours are never weighed nor assessed ..."
    "... Intelligence is a rare commodity in American politics and diplomacy even more elusive so the consequences of malicious rumours are never weighed nor assessed ..."
    May 02, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Christian J Chuba , May 1 2020 13:17 utc | 9

    Spy vs Spy

    For brevity, I always post that our IC (Intelligence Community) is masterful in shaping U.S. public opinion and causing problems for targeted countries but terrible in collecting and analyzing Intel that would benefit the U.S. The truth of course, is more complicated.

    There is a remnant that is doing their jobs properly but is shut out from higher level offices. But I cannot give long disclaimers at the start of my posts, (I'm not talking about the men and women ...) where 50 words later I finally start to make my point. It's boring, sounds insincere, and defensive.

    This is yet another effective defense mechanism that protects the troublemakers in our IC bureaucracy.
    1. The person trying to tell the truth is forced to defend, 'Communist China' (Tom Cotton thinks that is one word), Russia, or Iran and to the U.S. public this is toxic.

    2. These rogues get to use the remaining good people as human shields.

    3. They know their customers, it gives the politicians a way to turn themselves into wartime leaders rather than having to answer for their shortcomings.

    Someday it just won't matter anymore. We will have deceived ourselves for so long that we have squandered so much of our power that no one will pay attention to us.


    /div> Intelligence is a rare commodity in American politics and diplomacy even more elusive so the consequences of malicious rumours are never weighed nor assessed . The American public are easily enough fooled being constantly fed a racist diet, especially Sinophobia, Russophopia and Iranophobia and the drumbeats for war, financial or military, are easily banged to raise the public's blood pressure....but what about the consequences? America can win neither, even with he assistance of a few vassal states. What happens if, and when, normal service is resumed? If they managed to succeed with any of their hair-brained ideas, what are the consequences for American companies in China, rare earth minerals, the IT industries etc etc. Guard your words wisely for they can never be retracted.

    Posted by: Séamus Ó Néill , May 1 2020 13:46 utc | 13

    Intelligence is a rare commodity in American politics and diplomacy even more elusive so the consequences of malicious rumours are never weighed nor assessed . The American public are easily enough fooled being constantly fed a racist diet, especially Sinophobia, Russophopia and Iranophobia and the drumbeats for war, financial or military, are easily banged to raise the public's blood pressure....but what about the consequences? America can win neither, even with he assistance of a few vassal states. What happens if, and when, normal service is resumed? If they managed to succeed with any of their hair-brained ideas, what are the consequences for American companies in China, rare earth minerals, the IT industries etc etc. Guard your words wisely for they can never be retracted.

    Posted by: Séamus Ó Néill | May 1 2020 13:46 utc | 13

    dan of steele , May 1 2020 14:32 utc | 23
    GeorgeV

    I think there is very good intelligence in the US. so much data is collected and there are many analysts to go over the data and present their forecasts. The World Factbook is an example of collected intelligence made available to the unwashed masses.

    what you are thinking is that this information should be used to your benefit. that is where it goes wrong. the big players are able to access and exploit that mass of data and use it to their benefit.

    Billmon used to say that this is a feature, not a bug.

    Piero Colombo , May 1 2020 15:08 utc | 28
    s @19

    "Not precluded" are also a Fort Detrick origin and contagion taken to Wuhan by the US military, staying at a hotel where most of the first cluster of patients was identified. So why wouldn't you always mention both in the same breath?

    concerned , May 1 2020 15:27 utc | 31
    First hollywood movie I am aware of that deals with pandemics and has Fort Detrick front and center was "Outbreak" 1995. In this film, the "Expert" played by D. Huffman uncovers a plot by a rogue 2 star general sitting on the serum from another outbreak years ago, and how he witheld this information and the serum to "protect their bioweapon". There is also a very overt background sub-plot about Dod and CDC being at odds.

    DoD is not listed in the credits for Outbreak. Many of the scenes are supposed to take place in CDC and Fort Detrick.

    --

    Last hollywood movie was "Contagion" 2011. In this film, which pretty much anticipates Covid-19 madness but with an actually scary virus, the "Expert" in charge tells the DHS man that "Nature has already weaponized them!".

    So this lie about the little bitty part "function gain" man-made mutations being the critical bit for "weaponizing" viruses is turned on its head. It was "Nature" after all. A wet market, you know.

    Contagion does list DoD in its credits. Vincent C. Oglivie as US DoD Liason and Project Officer.

    Just some 'fun' trivia for us to while away our lives. Remember that consipirational thought is abberational thought. Have a shot of Victory Gin and relex!

    md , May 1 2020 15:34 utc | 32
    Ten questions the US needs to answer
    https://www.facebook.com/PeoplesDaily/posts/3243339602384501

    [May 01, 2020] Another day, another Russiagate turn: this time very surprising: NYT clams the Russia is behind 5G skepticism

    May 01, 2020 | www.unz.com

    utu , says: Show Comment April 30, 2020 at 4:20 am GMT

    Anti-vaxxers and Russia behind viral 5G COVID conspiracy theory
    https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2020/04/anti-vaxxers-and-russia-behind-viral-5g-covid-conspiracy-theory/

    5G coronavirus conspiracy theory driven by coordinated effort
    https://www.aljazeera.com/ajimpact/5g-coronavirus-conspiracy-theory-driven-coordinated-effort-200410182740380.html

    Nobel Literature Laureate Alexievich Backs 5G Coronavirus Conspiracy Theory (she also likes Felix Dzerzhinsky)
    https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/04/17/alexievichnobel-literature-laureate-alexievich-backs-5g-coronavirus-conspiracy-theory-a70030

    Your 5G Phone Won't Hurt You. But Russia Wants You to Think
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/science/5g-phone-safety-health-russia.html

    [May 01, 2020] Trump is a salesman first and foremost. As a former pharmaceutical rep I am well aware that most salesmen are suckers for most sales pitches as an intrinsic part of their personalities.

    The absence of sufficient state controls in a democracy enables the wealthy class to manipulate the economy, the press and elected representatives for its own gain. A widening gulf between poverty and affluence develops, gradually dragging the working class to ruin
    Notable quotes:
    "... Our economy is based on the wet dream of sycophants like Mnuchin who barely escaped prison for his games in the wake of devastation of the subprime loan disaster on 2008, and neoliberals who are much better at playing him then the opposite. So he's a puppet for Wall Street AND a closet neocon. Would the demonstrably senile Biden be any better? Not a chance, so once again the majority of Americans are left with a sham election whereby two flavors of the same shit are what's being fed to us. ..."
    May 01, 2020 | www.unz.com

    Gyre07 , says: Show Comment April 30, 2020 at 3:45 pm GMT

    @Priss Factor Assuming he's even motivated by a desire to make America a better Constitutional Republic, Trump is a salesman first and foremost. As a former pharmaceutical rep I am well aware that most salesmen are suckers for most sales pitches as an intrinsic part of their personalities.

    So as I watch Trump being manipulated continuously by a variety of slick and confident grifters inhabiting the world stage with their multitude of transparent agendas I can only go, "that figures". I mean, he's basically just a more alpha version of GW Bush, so the fact that we haven't gone full gonzo yet on another nation is something of a miracle. Instead he's waging war by collapsing economies he views as competitors OR those of countries he wants to invade to steal natural resources from. As for the health of America, we're fucked.

    Our economy is based on the wet dream of sycophants like Mnuchin who barely escaped prison for his games in the wake of devastation of the subprime loan disaster on 2008, and neoliberals who are much better at playing him then the opposite. So he's a puppet for Wall Street AND a closet neocon. Would the demonstrably senile Biden be any better? Not a chance, so once again the majority of Americans are left with a sham election whereby two flavors of the same shit are what's being fed to us.

    Digital Samizdat , says: Show Comment April 30, 2020 at 4:49 pm GMT
    @anon

    Government and big money seem to have formed a nexus, dominated by a very small number of people, who seem to be at war with us.

    I seem to agree.

    Emily , says: Show Comment April 30, 2020 at 9:34 pm GMT
    Until the American people demand electoral reform – you ain't going nowhere.
    You need another party and you need to vote for it.
    Stuff the neo lib or neo lib or neo lib – of the existing choice.
    You have a two headed hydra – in reality a one party state.
    Financed and controlled by puppet masters.
    The democracy in the US is a total sham
    A fraud and farce.
    And you need fair voting.
    Used by most democracies – PR – Proportional Representation.
    Where votes mean seats.
    A Ron Paul party would be a dream.
    But until America gets off its fat bots and seriously acts to become a democratic state – you are getting what you continue to vote for.
    Greed, corruption and elite rule – bought and paid for in the House and Senate down.
    Nothing but a puppet, pawn and tax collector for another foreign power.
    And you dare to mass murder and bomb in the name of 'regime change' and democracy to create your vile rule of law across the planet
    Gross, an abomination – a facist state.

    [May 01, 2020] Welcome to the era of the Great Disillusionment by Jonathan Cook

    May 01, 2020 | www.unz.com

    Now rogue academics, rogue journalists, rogue former officials – anyone, in fact – can go online and discover a myriad of things that until recently no one outside a small establishment circle was ever supposed to understand. If you know where to look, you can even find some of this stuff on Wikipedia (see, for example, Operation Timber Sycamore ).

    The effect of this information overload has been to disorientate the great majority of us who lack the time, the knowledge and the analytical skills to sift through it all and make sense of the world around us. It is hard to discriminate when there is so much information – good and bad alike – to digest.

    Nonetheless, we have got a sense from these online debates, reinforced by events in the non-virtual world, that our politicians do not always tell the truth, that money – rather than the public interest – sometimes wins out in decision-making processes, and that our elites may be little better equipped than us – aside from their expensive educations – to run our societies.

    Two decades of lies

    There has been a handful of staging posts over the past two decades to our current era of the Great Disillusionment. They include:

    lack of transparency in the US government's investigation into the events surrounding 9/11 (obscured by a parallel online controversy about what took place that day); the documented lies told about the reasons for launching a disastrous and illegal war of aggression against Iraq in 2003 that unleashed regional chaos, waves of destabilising migration into Europe and new, exceptionally brutal forms of political Islam; the astronomical bailouts after the 2008 crash of bankers whose criminal activities nearly bankrupted the global economy (but who were never held to account) and instituted more than a decade of austerity measures that had to be paid for by the public; the refusal by western governments and global institutions to take any leadership on tackling climate change , as not only the science but the weather itself has made the urgency of that emergency clear, because it would mean taking on their corporate sponsors; and now the criminal failures of our governments to prepare for, and respond properly to, the Covid-19 pandemic, despite many years of warnings.

    Anyone who still takes what our governments say at face value well, I have several bridges to sell you.

    Experts failed us

    But it is not just governments to blame. The failings of experts, administrators and the professional class have been all too visible to the public as well. Those officials who have enjoyed easy access to prominent platforms in the state-corporate media have obediently repeated what state and corporate interests wanted us to hear, often only for that information to be exposed later as incomplete, misleading or downright fabricated.

    In the run-up to the 2003 attack on Iraq, too many political scientists, journalists and weapons experts kept their heads down, keen to preserve their careers and status, rather than speak up in support of those rare experts like Scott Ritter and the late David Kelly who dared to sound the alarm that we were not being told the whole truth.

    In 2008, only a handful of economists was prepared to break with corporate orthodoxy and question whether throwing money at bankers exposed as financial criminals was wise, or to demand that these bankers be prosecuted. The economists did not argue the case that there must be a price for the banks to pay, such as a public stake in the banks that were bailed out, in return for forcing taxpayers to massively invest in these discredited businesses. And the economists did not propose overhauling our financial systems to make sure there was no repetition of the economic crash. Instead, they kept their heads down as well, in the hope that their large salaries continued and that they would not lose their esteemed positions in think-tanks and universities.

    ... ... ...

    And recently we have learnt, for example, that a series of Conservative governments in the UK recklessly ran down the supplies of hospital protective gear , even though they had more than a decade of warnings of a coming pandemic. The question is why did no scientific advisers or health officials blow the whistle earlier. Now it is too late to save the lives of many thousands, including dozens of medical staff, who have fallen victim so far to the virus in the UK.

    Lesser of two evils

    Worse still, in the Anglosphere of the US and the UK, we have ended up with political systems that offer a choice between one party that supports a brutal, unrestrained version of neoliberalism and another party that supports a marginally less brutal, slightly mitigated version of neoliberalism. (And we have recently discovered in the UK that, after the grassroots membership of one of those twinned parties managed to choose a leader in Jeremy Corbyn who rejected this orthodoxy, his own party machine conspired to throw the election rather than let him near power.) As we are warned at each election, in case we decide that elections are in fact futile, we enjoy a choice – between the lesser of two evils.

    Those who ignore or instinctively defend these glaring failings of the modern corporate system are really in no position to sit smugly in judgment on those who wish to question the safety of 5G, or vaccines, or the truth of 9/11, or the reality of a climate catastrophe, or even of the presence of lizard overlords.

    Because through their reflexive dismissal of doubt, of all critical thinking on anything that has not been pre-approved by our governments and by the state-corporate media, they have helped to disfigure the only yardsticks we have for measuring truth or falsehood. They have forced on us a terrible choice: to blindly follow those who have repeatedly demonstrated they are not worthy of being followed, or to trust nothing at all, to doubt everything. Neither position is one a healthy, balanced individual would want to adopt. But that is where we are today.

    Big Brother regimes

    It is therefore hardly surprising that those who have been so discredited by the current explosion of information – the politicians, the corporations and the professional class – are wondering how to fix things in the way most likely to maintain their power and authority.

    They face two, possibly complementary options.

    ORDER IT NOW

    One is to allow the information overload to continue, or even escalate. There is an argument to be made that the more possible truths we are presented with, the more powerless we feel and the more willing we are to defer to those most vocal in claiming authority. Confused and hopeless, we will look to father figures, to the strongmen of old, to those who have cultivated an aura of decisiveness and fearlessness, to those who look like down-to-earth mavericks and rebels.

    This approach will throw up more Donald Trumps, Boris Johnsons and Jair Bolsonaros. And these men, while charming us with their supposed lack of orthodoxy, will still, of course, be exceptionally accommodating to the most powerful corporate interests – the military-industrial complex – that really run the show.

    The other option, which has already been road-tested under the rubric of "fake news", will be to treat us, the public, like irresponsible children, who need a firm, guiding hand. The technocrats and professionals will try to re-establish their authority as though the last two decades never occurred, as though we never saw through their hypocrisy and lies.

    They will cite "conspiracy theories" – even the true ones – as proof that it is time to impose new curbs on internet freedoms, on the right to speak and to think. They will argue that the social media experiment has run its course and proved itself a menace – because we, the public, are a menace. They are already flying trial balloons for this new Big Brother world, under cover of tackling the health threats posed by the Covid-19 epidemic.

    Surveillance a price worth paying to beat coronavirus, says Blair thinktank https://t.co/AAb1nnv4pG 

    -- Guardian news (@guardiannews) April 24, 2020

    We should not be surprised that the "thought-leaders" for shutting down the cacophony of the internet are those whose failures have been most exposed by our new freedoms to explore the dark recesses of the recent past. They have included Tony Blair, the British prime minister who lied western publics into the disastrous and illegal war on Iraq in 2003, and Jack Goldsmith, rewarded as a Harvard law professor for his role – since whitewashed – in helping the Bush administration legalise torture and step up warrantless surveillance programmes.

    Fmr. Bush admin lawyer/current Harvard Law prof Jack Goldsmith goes full-Thomas Friedman, credits China's enlightened authoritarian approach to information as "largely right" and laments the US' provincial fealty to the First Amendment as "largely wrong." https://t.co/1WyQtgE8bK pic.twitter.com/1M03ybxh0I 

    -- Anthony L. Fisher (@anthonyLfisher) April 26, 2020

    Need for a new media

    The only alternative to a future in which we are ruled by Big Brother technocrats like Tony Blair, or by chummy authoritarians who brook no dissent, or a mix of the two, will require a complete overhaul of our societies' approach to information. We will need fewer curbs on free speech, not more.

    The real test of our societies – and the only hope of surviving the coming emergencies, economic and environmental – will be finding a way to hold our leaders truly to account. Not based on whether they are secretly lizards, but on what they are doing to save our planet from our all-too-human, self-destructive instinct for acquisition and our craving for guarantees of security in an uncertain world.

    That, in turn, will require a transformation of our relationship to information and debate. We will need a new model of independent, pluralistic, responsive, questioning media that is accountable to the public, not to billionaires and corporations. Precisely the kind of media we do not have now. We will need media we can trust to represent the full range of credible, intelligent, informed debate, not the narrow Overton window through which we get a highly partisan, distorted view of the world that serves the 1 per cent – an elite so richly rewarded by the current system that they are prepared to ignore the fact that they and we are hurtling towards the abyss.

    With that kind of media in place – one that truly holds politicians to account and celebrates scientists for their contributions to collective knowledge, not their usefulness to corporate enrichment – we would not need to worry about the safety of our communications systems or medicines, we would not need to doubt the truth of events in the news or wonder whether we have lizards for rulers, because in that kind of world no one would rule over us. They would serve the public for the common good.

    Sounds like a fantastical, improbable system of government? It has a name: democracy. Maybe it is time for us finally to give it a go.

    Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair" (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net .

    [May 01, 2020] It Took COVID To Expose the Fraud of 'American Exceptionalism' by Daniel Larison

    Notable quotes:
    "... The New York Times ..."
    Apr 30, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com
    |

    12:01 am

    Our leaders were so preoccupied with remaking the world they failed to see that our country was falling apart around them. Has the time come to bury the conceit of American exceptionalism? In an article for the American edition of The Spectator , Quincy Institute President Andrew Bacevich concludes just that:

    The coronavirus pandemic is a curse. It should also serve as an opportunity, Americans at long last realizing that they are not God's agents. Out of suffering and loss, humility and self-awareness might emerge. We can only hope.

    The heart of the American exceptionalism in question is American hubris. It is based on the assumption that we are better than the rest of the world, and that this superiority both entitles and obligates us to take on an outsized role in the world.

    In our current foreign policy debates, the phrase "American exceptionalism" has served as a shorthand for justifying and celebrating U.S. dominance, and when necessary it has served as a blanket excuse for U.S. wrongdoing. Seongjong Song defined it in an 2015 article for The Korean Journal of International Studies this way: "American exceptionalism is the belief that the US is "qualitatively different" from all other nations." In practice, that has meant that the U.S. does not consider itself to be bound by the same rules that apply to other states, and it reserves the right to interfere whenever and wherever it wishes.

    American exceptionalism has been used in our political debates as an ideological purity test to determine whether certain political leaders are sufficiently supportive of an activist and interventionist foreign policy. The main purpose of invoking American exceptionalism in foreign policy debate has been to denigrate less hawkish policy views as unpatriotic and beyond the pale. The phrase was often used as a partisan cudgel in the previous decade as the Obama administration's critics tried to cast doubt on the former president's acceptance of this idea, but in the years since then it has become a rallying point for devotees of U.S. primacy regardless of party. There was an explosion in the use of the phrase in just the first few years of the 2010s compared with the previous decades. Song cited a study that showed this massive increase:

    Exceptionalist discourse is on the rise in American politics. Terrence McCoy (2012) found that the term "American exceptionalism" appeared in US publications 457 times between 1980 and 2000, climbing to 2,558 times in the 2000s and 4,172 times in 2010-12.

    The more that U.S. policies have proved "American exceptionalism" to be a pernicious myth at odds with reality, the more we have heard the phrase used to defend those policies. Republican hawks began the decade by accusing Obama of not believing in this "exceptionalism," and some Democratic hawks closed it out by "reclaiming" the idea on behalf of their own discredited foreign policy vision. There may be differences in emphasis between the two camps, but there is a consensus that the U.S. has special rights and privileges that other nations cannot have. That has translated into waging unnecessary wars, assuming excessive overseas burdens, and trampling on the rights of other states, and all the while congratulating ourselves on how virtuous we are for doing all of it.

    The contemporary version of American exceptionalism is tied up inextricably with the belief that the U.S. is the "indispensable nation." According to this view, without U.S. "leadership" other countries will be unable or unwilling to respond to major international problems and threats. We have seen just how divorced from reality that belief is in just the last few months. There has been no meaningful U.S. leadership in response to the pandemic, but for the most part our allies have managed on their own fairly well. In the absence of U.S. "leadership," many other countries have demonstrated that they haven't really needed the U.S. Our "indispensability" is a story that we like to tell ourselves, but it isn't true. Not only are we no longer indispensable, but as Micah Zenko pointed out many years ago, we never were.

    It was 22 years ago when then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright publicly declared the United States to be the "indispensable nation": "If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us."

    In a recent interview with The New York T imes, Albright sounded much less sure of her old position: "There's nothing in the definition of indispensable that says "alone." It means that the United States needs to be engaged with its partners. And people's backgrounds make a difference." Albright's original statement was an aggressive assertion that America was both extraordinarily powerful and unusually farsighted, and that legitimized the frequent U.S. recourse to using force.

    After two decades of calamitous failures that have highlighted our weaknesses and foolishness, even she can't muster up the old enthusiasm that she once had. No one could look back at the last 20 years of U.S. foreign policy and still honestly say that "we see further" into the future than others. Not only are we no better than other countries at anticipating and preparing for future dangers, but judging from the country's lack of preparedness for a pandemic we are actually far behind many of the countries that we have presumed to "lead." It is impossible to square our official self-congratulatory rhetoric with the reality of a government that is incapable of protecting its citizens from disaster.

    The poor U.S. response to the pandemic has not only exposed many of the country's serious faults, but it has also caused a crisis of faith in the prevailing mythology that American political leaders and pundits have been promoting for decades. This found expression most recently in a rather odd article in The New York Times last week. The framing of the story makes it into a lament for a collapsing ideology:

    The pandemic sweeping the globe has done more than take lives and livelihoods from New Delhi to New York. It is shaking fundamental assumptions about American exceptionalism -- the special role the United States played for decades after World War II as the reach of its values and power made it a global leader and example to the world.

    The curious thing about this description is that it takes for granted that "fundamental assumptions about American exceptionalism" haven't been thoroughly shaken long before now. The "special role" mentioned here was never going to last forever, and in some respects it was more imaginary than real. It was a period in our history that we should seek to understand and learn from, but we also need to recognize that it was transitory and already ended some time ago.

    If American exceptionalism is now "on trial," as another recent article put it , it is because it offered up a pleasing but false picture of how we relate to the rest of the world. Over the last two decades, we have seen that picture diverge more and more from real life. The false picture gives political leaders an excuse to take reckless and disastrous actions as long as they can spin them as being expressions of "who we are" as a country. At the same time, they remain blind to the country's real vulnerabilities. It is a measure of how powerful the illusion of American exceptionalism is that it still has such a hold on so many people's minds even now, but it has not been a harmless illusion.

    While our leaders have been patting themselves on the back for the enlightened "leadership" that they imagine they are providing to the world, they have neglected the country's urgent needs and allowed many parts of our system to fall into disrepair and ruin. They have also visited enormous destruction on many other countries in the name of "helping" them. The same hubris that has warped foreign policy decisions over the decades has encouraged a dangerous complacency about the problems in our own country. We can't let that continue. Our leaders were so preoccupied with trying to remake other parts of the world that they failed to see that our country was falling apart all around them.

    American exceptionalism has been the story that our leaders told us to excuse their neglect of America. It is a flattering story, but ultimately it is a vain one that distracts us from protecting our own country and people. We would do well if we put away this boastful fantasy and learned how to live like a normal nation.

    [May 01, 2020] Deep State as Deep Corruption.

    May 01, 2020 | www.unz.com

    Priss Factor , says: Website Show Comment April 29, 2020 at 5:22 pm GMT

    Here's something to be disillusioned about. Deep State as Deep Corruption.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/0tO11hclNv8?feature=oembed

    But what happened to the Trump who was going to drain the swamp? He filled it with more sewage.
    He murdered Soleimani and interferes in Venezuelan politics in ways that Russia has been accused(falsely) of interfering in US politics.

    AaronInMVD , says: Website Show Comment April 29, 2020 at 9:45 pm GMT
    @Priss Factor I suspect the true backbreaker when it comes to disillusioning for me was seeing how thoroughly Trump was disconnected from the levers of power except for those few cases when he'd been surrounded by war lobby shills.

    Whatever welcome change Trump could have brought has been completely negated by the fact everyone he hired or could have hired is too stuck in the status quo to welcome change. Even the people he though could have been the "rebels" on his side lead him down that path of seeing Iranian ballistic missiles hitting US troop positions in Iraq.

    The only thing that might have worked would have been firing everyone he could during the first 7 days and filling as many posts as he could with clean cut (as opposed to neck bearded) alt-right 20-somethings.

    I voted for Trump, but Trump still wasn't enough to keep me in the US.

    [Apr 29, 2020] Historians increasingly see the term totalitarian as polemical, used more to discredit governments than to offer meaningful analyses of them

    Notable quotes:
    "... New York Times ..."
    "... The Origins of Totalitarianism ..."
    "... Origins of Totalitarianism ..."
    "... Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy ..."
    "... These seeming paradoxes illustrate that the idea of totalitarianism is a useless tool in assessing the decency of governance in any twenty-first-century state. If we are to survive in this brave new world, in which technology makes it ever easier for governments to manipulate individual decisions, but in which we also demand that the state take an ever-larger role in ensuring our safety from ourselves, we must acknowledge that the Manichean worldview implied in the term totalitarianism is an outdated relic of the Cold War. ..."
    Apr 29, 2020 | bostonreview.net

    Last Thursday, Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman issued a warning in the New York Times . "The pandemic will eventually end," he wrote, "but democracy, once lost, may never come back. And we're much closer to losing our democracy than many people realize." Citing the Wisconsin election debacle -- the Supreme Court ruled that voters would have to vote in person, risking their health -- Krugman argued that Donald Trump and the Republican Party are using the crisis for their own, authoritarian ends.

    This is the perennial critique of Trump: that he is a totalitarian at heart and, if given the chance, 'would want to establish total control over society.'

    Krugman is not alone. As early as last month, when cases of COVID-19 first began to surge in the United States, Masha Gessen wrote in the New Yorker that the virus was fueling "Trump's autocratic instincts." They argued, "We have long known that Trump has totalitarian instincts . . . the coronavirus has brought us a step closer." This is indeed the once and future critique of the Trump presidency: that Trump is a totalitarian at heart and, if given the chance, "would want to establish total control over a mobilized society." A few days ago, Salon published an article arguing that the president is using the virus to prepare "the ground for a totalitarian dictatorship." Even Meghan McCain, as unlikely a person as any to agree with Gessen, indicated recently that Trump has "always been a sort of totalitarian president" and that he might use the virus to "play on the American public's fears in a draconian way and possibly do something akin to the Patriot Act."

    These critiques make ample use of the term totalitarianism -- "that most horrible of inventions of the twentieth century," in Gessen's summation . They and other commentators also use it to describe Fidel Castro's Cuba to Vladimir Putin's Russia, which Gessen left in 2013. As right-wing populism has surged around the world in recent years, the term has had something of a renaissance. Hannah Arendt's 1951 classic The Origins of Totalitarianism became a best seller again after Donald Trump's election in November 2016.

    This uptick in the term's use runs counter to the trend among historians, for whom the idea of totalitarianism carries increasingly little weight. Many of us see the term primarily as polemical, used more to discredit governments than to offer meaningful analyses of them. Scholars often prefer the much broader term authoritarianism, which denotes any form of government that concentrates political power in the hands of an unaccountable elite. But the fact that historians who study such governments eschew the term totalitarianism, even as it enjoys wide public currency, points not only to a disconnect between the academy and the general public, but also to a problem that Americans have in thinking about dictatorship. And it underscores our collective uncertainty about the proper role of government in crises such as these.

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    Historians increasingly see the term totalitarian as polemical, used more to discredit governments than to offer meaningful analyses of them.

    The terms totalitarian and totalitarianism have a winding history. In 1922 King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy appointed Benito Mussolini, leader of the Italian fascist party, as prime minister. In subsequent years, Mussolini established an authoritarian government that provided a roadmap for other twentieth century dictators, including Adolf Hitler, and made the term fascist an enduring descriptor of right-wing authoritarianism. A year after Mussolini's appointment, Giovanni Amendola, a journalist and politician opposed to fascism, used the term totalitario , or totalitarian, to describe how the fascists presented two largely identical party lists at a local election, thereby preserving the form of competitive democracy (i.e., offering voters a choice), while, in reality, gutting it. Other writers soon took up the idea and it became a more generic descriptor of the fascist state's dictatorial powers. Mussolini himself eventually adopted the term to characterize his government, writing that it described a regime of "all within the state, none outside the state, none against the state." In the next two decades, the terms began to circulate internationally. Amendola used them in 1925 to compare Mussolini's government and the young Soviet regime in Moscow. Academics in the English-speaking world began to employ them in the 1920s and '30s in similar comparative contexts.

    In a sign of how much the meaning of the words drifted, however, those who later adopted them into political philosophy did not necessarily consider fascist Italy to have been totalitarian. Hannah Arendt, for instance, dismissed Mussolini's movement: "The true goal of Fascism was only to seize power and establish the Fascist 'elite' as uncontested ruler over the country." Even now, scholars point to the survival of pre-fascist government and bureaucratic structures, as well as lower levels of terror and violence directed against the populace, as evidence that Mussolini's Italy was not genuinely totalitarian.

    Instead, Arendt considered totalitarianism to be a way of understanding fundamental similarities between Stalinism and Hitlerism, despite their diametrical opposition on the political spectrum. This archetypal comparison remains the bedrock of studies of totalitarian dictatorship. In Origins of Totalitarianism , Arendt laid out what she saw as its internal dynamic:

    Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.

    This state of affairs, which Arendt diagnosed as the result of an increasingly atomized society, bears a striking resemblance to the state described in George Orwell's 1984 (another bestseller in the Trump era). Airstrip One, as Orwell renamed Great Britain, is dominated by an omniscient Big Brother who sees, hears, and knows all. Through a reform of language, Airstrip One even tries to make it impossible to think illegal thoughts. Newspeak, it is hoped, "shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it." Orwell and Arendt considered the obliteration of the private and internal life of individuals to be the ne plus ultra of totalitarian rule.

    Of course, what Arendt and Orwell described are systems of government that have never actually existed. Neither Nazism nor Stalinism succeeded in controlling or dominating its citizens from within. Moreover, while later scholarship has partially borne out Arendt's analysis of National Socialism, her understanding of Stalinist rule has proved less insightful.

    The other classic account of totalitarianism is Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy , published in 1956 by Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski. In it, the political scientists developed a six-point list of criteria by which to recognize totalitarianism: it has an "elaborate ideology," relies on a mass party, uses terror, claims a monopoly on communication as well as on violence, and controls the economy. Like Arendt, Friedrich and Brzezinski believed totalitarianism to be a new phenomenon -- to take Gessen's words, an invention of the twentieth century. Their goal was to understand structural similarities between different modern dictatorships.

    Even Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union -- the two archetypal examples -- were so different that historians wonder if their comparison as totalitarian really yields interesting insights.

    While scholars critiqued Friedrich and Brzezinski's model -- for example, its one-size-fits-all list fails to appreciate these regimes' dynamism -- the debate over the usefulness of the term totalitarianism continued. In the decades since, historians and political scientists have gone back and forth, defining the concept in new ways and showing how those definitions fail in one way or another.

    But, at base, these definitions have typically assumed, in the words of historian Ian Kershaw, a "total claim" made on the part of the totalitarian state over those it rules. That is, Arendt's basic characterization -- that totalitarian regimes aspire to total control over the public, private, and internal lives of their citizens -- continues to inform scholarly debate.

    Arendt's, I would venture, is also the term's folk definition: that is, in people's minds, totalitarianism distinguishes a subset of authoritarian regimes that seek to (and perhaps even sometimes succeed at) dominating the individual in every conceivable way. China's new social credit score, which curtails the rights of people who engage in so-called antisocial behaviors, is a current example of this sort of thing. It is also a clear illustration of the role technology plays in totalitarian fantasies. But China's government also has many other characteristics, such as a market economy, that traditional understandings of totalitarianism explicitly reject.

    This pared-down definition of totalitarianism is still only of dubious utility. Even Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union -- the two archetypal examples -- were so different that historians wonder if their comparison as "totalitarian" really yields interesting insights. Studies of everyday life in both countries have underscored the limits of the totalitarian model. These revisionist histories, in the words of Soviet historian Sheila Fitzpatrick, "introduced into Soviet history the notions of bureaucratic and professional interest groups and institutional and center-periphery conflict, and they were particularly successful at demonstrating inputs from middle levels of the administrative hierarchy and professional groups. They were alert to what would now be called questions of agency." Similarly nuanced approaches to Nazism have uncovered ways power worked within the regime that throw the totalitarian hypothesis into doubt.

    In my own area of research, Germany after World War II, totalitarianism plays a fraught role. During the Cold War and its immediate aftermath, politicians, journalists, and scholars all painted East Germany as a totalitarian government on par with the Nazi state. But that characterization is simply wrong. For instance, the East German and Nazi secret police forces, the Stasi and the Gestapo, functioned in fundamentally different ways. The Gestapo was a relatively small organization that relied on thousands of spontaneous denunciations. It practiced brutal torture and was embedded in a system of extralegal justice that was responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of German citizens (not to mention the millions more killed in the Holocaust). The Stasi was quite different. It employed a vast bureaucracy -- three times larger than the Gestapo in a population four times smaller -- and cultivated an even larger network of collaborators. Around 5 percent of East Germans are estimated to have worked for the Stasi at some point, blurring the lines between persecutors and persecuted. Against those unlucky enough to wind up in a Stasi prison, the secret police employed methods of psychological torture. But it never induced the same level of terror as did the Gestapo. Nor was it responsible for anywhere near the same number of deaths. For most East Germans, the Stasi's presence was more of a nuisance -- a "scratchy undershirt," historian Paul Betts argues.

    Of course, the Stasi's ubiquity and its vast surveillance apparatus have equally been taken as proof that the totalitarian hypothesis does indeed apply to East Germany. But there is ample evidence that East Germans enjoyed robust private lives, along with a sense of individual self. East Germans wrote millions of petitions to their government, for instance, complaining about everything from vacations to apartments. They showed up to quiz members of parliament about government policy. When the regime tried to outlaw public nudity in the 1950s, as historian Josie McLellan has described, East Germans disobeyed, protested, and eventually forced the government to relent. Kristen Ghodsee, among others, has contended that in many ways life was better for women in Eastern Bloc countries than in the West. And the dictatorship never tried to bring the Protestant Church, to which millions of East Germans belonged, under its full control. My own research reveals that gay liberation activists were able to pressure the dictatorship to make significant policy changes.

    In short, whatever criteria one uses to define totalitarianism, East Germany does not fit. It was a dictatorship, but certainly not a totalitarian one. In fact, the classification of East Germany has proved such a nettlesome problem, it has spawned a veritable cottage industry of neologisms. Scholars describe it, variously, as a welfare dictatorship, a participatory dictatorship, a thoroughly dominated society, a modern dictatorship, a tutelary state, and a late totalitarian patriarchal and surveillance state.

    If the obliteration of the wall between public and private is the defining characteristic of totalitarianism, can any contemporary society be described as other than totalitarian?

    This brings us back to current usage. The problem is that the term totalitarian fulfills two quite different purposes. The first, as just discussed, is taxonomic: for scholars, it has helped frame an effort to understand the nature of various twentieth-century regimes. And in this function, it finally seems to be reaching the end of its useful life.

    But the term's other purpose is ideological and pejorative, the outgrowth of a Cold War desire to classify fascist and communist dictatorships as essentially the same phenomenon. To catalog a state as totalitarian it to say it is radically other, sealed off from the liberal, capitalist, democratic order that we take to be normal. When we call a state totalitarian, we are saying that its goals are of a categorically different sort than those of our own government -- that it seeks, as Gessen suggests, to destroy human dignity.

    The ideological work that the term totalitarian performs is significant, providing a sleight-of-hand by which to both condemn foreign regimes and deflect criticism of the regime at home. By claiming that dictatorship and democracy are not simply opposed but categorically different, it disables us from recognizing the democratic parts of dictatorial rule and the authoritarian aspects of democratic rule, and thus renders us less capable of effectively diagnosing problems in our own society.

    We love to denounce foreign dictatorships. George W. Bush invented the " Axis of Evil ," for example, to provide a ready supply of villains. These "totalitarian" regimes -- Iran, Iraq, and North Korea -- we were told, all threatened our freedoms. But the grouping was always nonsensical, as the regimes bore few similarities to one another. While Iran, in particular, is authoritarian, it also bears hallmarks of pluralistic democracy. Pointing out the latter does not diminish the former -- rather it helps us understand how and why the Islamic Republic has shown such tenacity and staying power. To simply call such regimes totalitarian not only misses the point, but also whitewashes American complicity in creating and propping up authoritarian regimes -- Iran not least of all. Indeed, the United States supported a number of the past century's most brutal right-wing dictatorships.

    Moreover, by thinking of totalitarianism as something that happens elsewhere, in illiberal, undemocratic places, we ignore the ways in which our government can and has behaved in authoritarian ways within our own country. Black Americans experienced conditions of dictatorial rule in the Jim Crow South and under slavery, to name but the most prominent examples.

    The language of totalitarianism thus obscures how dictatorship and democracy exist on the same spectrum. It is imperative that we come to a clearer understanding of the fact that hybrid forms of government exist which combine elements of both. These managed democracies, to take political theorist Sheldon Wolin's term -- from Putin's Russia, to Viktor Orbán's Hungary, to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Turkey -- have hallmarks of democratic republics and use a combination of new and old methods to enforce something akin to one-party rule. These states are certainly not totalitarian, but neither are they democracies.

    Likewise, the Republican Party's efforts to manage U.S. democracy through gerrymandering and voter suppression is similar to Putin's, Orbán's, and Erdoğan's tactics of securing political power. Its strategies push the republic further toward the authoritarian end of the political spectrum. And, indeed, the sophisticated data-mining techniques of Cambridge Analytica , which assisted the 2016 Trump campaign to manipulate voter choices, would have made the Stasi, the Gestapo, or the NKVD green with envy.

    In fact, if the obliteration of the wall between public and private is the defining characteristic of totalitarianism, can any contemporary society be described as anything other than totalitarian? What, after all, does agency mean in a world in which Facebook aspires to know what we want before we know it ourselves or in a country in which the NSA collects vast troves of data on our own citizens? To my mind, totalitarianism's usefulness as a distinctive category of government simply evaporates when we begin to look at all the ways in which technology has compromised individual privacy and agency in the twenty-first century.

    Fear of totalitarianism gives the right cover to denounce measures to control the virus: if freedom means freedom from government, then the worst government is one that makes a total claim on its citizens, even in the interest of saving them from a plague.

    Use of the term also prevents us from thinking productively about COVID-19 and how governments ought to respond to it. For a state of quarantine necessarily forces everyone to give up -- whether voluntarily or no -- their rights of movement, assembly, and, to some extent, expression. It requires the private choices individuals make -- whether to have friends over for dinner, go on a morning jog, or buy groceries -- to become public in painful and sometimes even embarrassing ways. Technology companies are starting to employ their products' tracking features to trace the virus's spread, an application that many worry poses an unacceptable breach of privacy.

    Yet, the destruction of the private sphere in the interest of the public good is precisely what theorists tell us lies at the heart of totalitarianism. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben made precisely this point, arguing recently that the extraordinary response to COVID-19 is totalitarian: "The disproportionate reaction . . . is quite blatant. It is almost as if with terrorism exhausted as a cause for exceptional measures, the invention of an epidemic offered the ideal pretext for scaling them up beyond any limitation." Of course, we now know the measures the Italian government introduced went neither far nor fast enough. Now there are over 160,000 confirmed cases in Italy and over 20,000 confirmed deaths from the virus.

    The confusion the idea of totalitarianism sows over responses in the United States has also been evident since last month. On March 22, right-wing commentator Andrew Napolitano asserted that measures to combat COVID-19 were motivated by "totalitarian impulses." Meanwhile, state officials have been busy postponing primary elections, a measure that under normal circumstances would undoubtedly be denounced as totalitarian in nature.

    If we are going to arrive at a more sophisticated answer to the question of how to govern democratically in the twenty-first century, we must begin by acknowledging that all modern governments attempt to control and influence the lives of their citizens, and all governments make use of exceptional powers to combat crises. The problem with the idea of totalitarianism is that it makes no accommodation for the reasons behind such exercise of coercive power.

    It is, of course, quite right to worry about Donald Trump's response to the virus. His dilly-dallying, his narcissism, and his inability to take responsibility for anything may cost one hundred thousand or more lives. Commentators like Krugman are correct, insofar as Trump and his cronies are indeed trying to use the crisis to cement their authority. But the ways they are going about it are not totalitarian in any sense of the word. In fact, the idea of totalitarianism, as commentators such as Napolitano reveal, gives the radical right cover to denounce measures to control the virus. It is the last stage in the late-twentieth-century neoliberal critique of government: if freedom is only ever freedom from government interference, then the worst form of government is that which makes a total claim on its citizens, even in the interest of saving them from a plague. Thinking in terms of totalitarianism -- instead of the broader and more flexible term authoritarianism -- leads one into such frustrating mental thickets, in which democratic policies can plausibly be denounced as totalitarian.

    These seeming paradoxes illustrate that the idea of totalitarianism is a useless tool in assessing the decency of governance in any twenty-first-century state. If we are to survive in this brave new world, in which technology makes it ever easier for governments to manipulate individual decisions, but in which we also demand that the state take an ever-larger role in ensuring our safety from ourselves, we must acknowledge that the Manichean worldview implied in the term totalitarianism is an outdated relic of the Cold War.

    [Apr 28, 2020] Chinagate Is The New Russiagate... And Is Far More Dangerous

    Apr 28, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

    Chinagate Is The New Russiagate... And Is Far More Dangerous by Tyler Durden Tue, 04/28/2020 - 20:05 Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

    I've become convinced the next major event that'll be used to further centralize power and escalate domestic authoritarianism will center around U.S.-China tensions. We haven't witnessed this "event" yet, but there's a good chance it'll occur within the next year or two. Currently, the front runner appears to be a major aggressive move by China into Hong Kong, but it could be anything really. Taiwan, the South China Sea, currency, economic or cyber warfare; the flash points are numerous and growing by the day. Something is going to snap and when it does we better be prepared to not act like mindless imbeciles for the fourth time this century.

    When that day arrives, and it's likely not too far off, certain factions will try to sell you on the monstrous idea that we must become more like China to defeat China. We'll be told we need more centralization, more authoritarianism, and less freedom and civil liberties or China will win. Such talk is nonsense and the wise way to respond is to reject the worst aspects of the Chinese system and head the other way.

    – From my 2019 piece: Two Paths Forward with China – The Good and The Bad

    As the clownish farce that is Russiagate slinks back into the psyop dumpster from which it emerged, an even more destructive narrative has metastasized following the U.S. government's incompetent response to covid-19.

    It was clear to me from the start that Russiagate was a nonsensical narrative wildly embraced by a variety of powerful people in the wake of Trump's election merely to serve their own ends. For establishment Democrats, it was a way to pretend Hillary Clinton didn't actually lose because she was a wretched status quo candidate with a destructive track record, but she lost due to "foreign meddling." This allowed those involved in her campaign to deflect blame, but it also short-circuited any discussion of the merits of populism and widespread voter dissatisfaction (within both parties) percolating throughout the land. It was a fairytale invented by people intentionally putting their heads in the sand in order to avoid confrontation with political reality and to keep their cushy gravy-train of entrenched corruption going.

    Russiagate was likewise embraced by the national security state (imperial apparatus) for similar reasons. Like establishment Democrats, the national security state also wanted to prevent the narrative that the status quo was rejected in the 2016 election from spreading. It was incentivized to pretend Hillary's loss was the result of gullible Americans being duped by crafty Russians in order to manufacture the idea that U.S. society was healthy and normal if not for some external enemy.

    Another primary driver for the national security state was to punish Russia for acting like a sovereign state as opposed to a colony of U.S. empire in recent years. Russia has been an increasingly serious thorn in the side of unipolarism advocates over the past decade by performing acts such as buying gold, providing safe harbor for Edward Snowden, and thwarting the dreams of regime change in Syria. Such acts could not go unpunished.

    So Russiagate served its purpose. It wasted our time for much of Trump's first term and it helped prevent Bernie Sanders from winning the Democratic nomination. Now we get Chinagate.

    When the premier empire on the planet starts blaming external enemies for its internal problems, you know it's almost always an excuse to let your own elites off the hook and further erode civil liberties. While it appears the novel coronavirus covid-19 did in fact come from China, and China tried to discourage other countries from taking decisive action in the early days, our internal political actors blaming China for their own lack of preparation and timely reaction is patently ridiculous.

    The entire world saw China shutdown the entire city of Wuhan shuttering factories and the economy. Anyone with two eyes and half a brain could see they were ACTING as if this were very serious. I bought masks, hand sanitizer, lysol wipes at the end of January. Why didn't State? https://t.co/oECvvxbV0K

    -- Stacy Herbrrrt (@stacyherbert) April 23, 2020

    If Stacy and myself were able to see the situation clearly and respond early, why couldn't our government? This isn't rocket science. The Chinese were acting as if the world had ended in cities across the country and we're supposed to believe U.S. leaders simply listened to what the CCP was saying as opposed to what they were doing? How does that make any sense?

    It makes even less sense considering the Trump administration has been in an explicit cold war with China for almost two years. This concept that the American national security state just took China's word for what was going on in the early days is preposterous. So what's going on here? Similar to Russiagate, the increased focus on directing our ten minutes of hate at the Chinese provides cover for the elites, but Chinagate is far more dangerous because the narrative will prove far more convincing for many Americans.

    Although Russiagate was rapidly embraced by people with severe Trump Derangement Syndrome, most people just didn't buy into it or care. Only the most dimwitted amongst us actually believed the Russians were responsible for our major problems at home, but when it comes to China the argument can be far more persuasive because many aspects of the economic relationship between the U.S. and China are in fact problematic. Specifically, the U.S. transformed itself from a nation of producers and builders into a nation of debt-driven consumption slaves over the past five decades. While China played a key role in this process, it wasn't the driver.

    Did China force the U.S. to abandon gold convertibility in 1971, thus beginning the transition from an industrial empire into a financial one? Did China convince us to repeal Glass-Steagall, or lie about WMD in Iraq? Did China put a gun to our manufacturing executives' heads and force them to offshore manufacturing, or did the executives do that with greed filled eyes while earning billions upon billions from labor arbitrage? China may have directly benefited from five decades of avarice-driven policy crimes committed by American "elites," but they didn't cause them. They are entirely homegrown.

    Yep, the only people who benefit from the external enemy obsession are the people who actually wrecked this country.

    Our own "elites." https://t.co/bYZDH3cflW

    -- Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) April 18, 2020

    Chinagate is far more dangerous than Russiagate because very serious fundamental problems within the U.S.-China economic relationship do exist. I don't deny this, and I'm in favor of actual policies that would incentivize the American people to become producers and builders as opposed to castrated debt zombies. The problem is many of the people ratcheting up the volume on the evils of China (I don't deny the abundance of evil) aren't interested in bringing liberty and production back to America. Rather, they're trying to take away more of your freedoms, economically and politically.

    Wall Street and the national security state (empire) ransacked and hollowed out this country. It wasn't your neighbor, it wasn't immigrants and it wasn't an external enemy.

    Know who did this and never forget it.

    -- Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) April 22, 2020

    The same people who've been in charge of the country for the entire 21st century remain in charge. Presidential politics is pure theater in an empire. Think about it, the same people who brought you endless war, the surveillance panopticon and perpetual Wall Street crime and bailouts are supposed to take on China? The same China that made so many of them fabulously wealthy? Give me a fucking break.

    The elitist agenda isn't to use anger at China to bring freedom and production to our shores, but to use heightened emotional fear to tighten their domestic power grip. The idea is to use Chinese authoritarianism as a model for the U.S.

    The post covid-19 elitist wet dream here is pretty transparent. Convince everyone to be a compliant farm animal on an imperial plantation.

    To defeat China and all.

    -- Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) April 27, 2020

    Unsurprisingly, the usual suspects are already coming out of their snake holes to advocate for exactly that. We saw this a few days ago when Harvard Law Professor and former George W. Bush administration lawyer, Jack Goldsmith, explicitly called for Chinese-like censorship of speech on the internet.

    In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong. Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society's norms and values.

    By all means advocate for a reshuffling of the relationship between the U.S. and China that will lead to more freedom, resilience and economic vitality at home and I'll support it, but don't tell me we need to become China in order to defeat China. If we're dumb enough to fall for that, we'll get exactly what we deserve. Good and hard.

    * * *

    Liberty Blitzkrieg is an ad-free website. If you enjoyed this post and my work in general, visit the Support Page where you can donate and contribute to my efforts.

    [Apr 26, 2020] I believe that much of the anti-Russian propaganda has its echoes if not origins in German Nazi propaganda

    Apr 26, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Erelis , Apr 24 2020 19:31 utc | 36

    Based on my reading of popular news outlets and essays, speeches, the current term "liberal international order" was born out of anti-Russian propaganda. The Russians were not only out to get a few enemy countries (and Hillary personally), but was a civilizational threat. The term basically means the US and its European lackey allies. It is self promoting PR against the anti-Western imperialist Slavic and now Asiatic East.

    I believe that much of the anti-Russian propaganda has its echoes if not origins in German Nazi propaganda. The Nazis (and indeed their current brethren spread across Europe and North America) believed that the Jews were not only trying to destroy Germany (America), but also trying destroy the entirety of European civilization (EU). Which in current terms is the liberal international order. This term helps justify the hysterical anti-Russian rants in the mass media of North America and the EU. This is an old anti-Semitic narrative updated.

    [Apr 25, 2020] McCarthysm floring in WaPo. As As WaPo and NYT are two stooges of intelligence agiance what can you expect?

    This is a pre-emptive style against Durham investigation which might implicated John Brennan
    Apr 22, 2020 | www.washingtonpost.com

    THE SENATE Intelligence Committee has released a bipartisan report with a stark bottom line: What President Trump calls the " Russia hoax " isn't a hoax at all.

    The fourth and latest installment in lawmakers' review of Moscow's meddling examines a January 2017 assessment by the nation's spy agencies that Mr. Trump has repeatedly attempted to discredit -- and confirms it, unanimously. Russia sought to subvert Americans' belief in our democracy, bring down Hillary Clinton and bolster her rival. That these legislators from both sides of the aisle are willing to say as much after three years of thorough investigation is an encouraging sign of some independent thinking still left in government. It's also a reminder of the peril this independence is in today. The Russia hoax was never a hoax. An encouraging bipartisan report confirms it. - The Washington Post

    The committee members conclude that the intelligence community produced a "coherent and well-constructed . . . basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election" despite a tight time frame. The report also examines two matters of particular contention: first, whether the salacious dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele played an inappropriate role in the finding of interference; the senators say it did not. And second, whether former CIA director John O. Brennan pressured colleagues into arriving at a stronger conclusion than the evidence warranted.

    This latter concern is also at the center of the broad probe Attorney General William P. Barr has ordered into the origins of the Russia investigation. "There are a lot of things that are unexplained," Mr. Barr has said . "And we'll be able to sort out exactly what happened." Yet the senators have pursued the same avenues of inquiry and come up with a clear answer: The differing levels of confidence among agencies were "justified and properly represented," and the ultimate wording was reached "openly and with sufficient exchanges of views."

    [Apr 24, 2020] Ted Arison, the Israeli-American founder of Carnival [Covid] Cruise Line is among those appointed to advise president Trump on how to open up the US economy.

    Apr 24, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Paul , Apr 23 2020 20:14 utc | 53

    Ted Arison, the Israeli-American founder of Carnival [Covid] Cruise Line is among those appointed to advise president Trump on how to open up the US economy. Perhaps, as music to the ears of a seasoned New York real estate shark, he will advise Trump to blame China and then default on the China debt mountain. Litigation pays as Arison is about to find out.

    https://www.afr.com/companies/tourism/carnival-knew-it-had-a-problem-but-it-kept-the-party-going-20200420-p54lbb

    [Apr 24, 2020] With Russiagate discredited New York Times seeks a leading role in Chinagate

    Notable quotes:
    "... The New York Times ..."
    "... I spotted Yahoo News carrying this NYT hit piece today and was tempted to respond. Then I saw the general run of comments that read like the target audience it was meant for, and figured I'd be wasting my time. It might have been worth squandering five minutes, though. ..."
    "... It is a scary situation. A lot of people actually believe the New York Times. ..."
    "... Did you see this one in today's NYTimes? The pot didn't just call the kettle black: With Selective Coronavirus Coverage, China Builds a Culture of Hate: The state propaganda machine highlights other countries' mistakes while suppressing China's, fueling anger toward foreigners and domestic critics alike. see: http://nytimes.com/2020/04/22/business/china-coronavirus-propaganda.html ..."
    Apr 24, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

    UPDATED: The paper of record is again laundering, without skepticism, U.S. intelligence meant to ratchet up tensions with China, just as it did with Russia, writes Joe Lauria.

    By Joe Lauria
    Special to Consortium News

    D uring the saga of Russiagate The New York Times was the main vehicle for unnamed U.S. intelligence officials to filter uncorroborated allegations about Russia, presenting them as proven fact.

    Just as the Democratic Party attempted to shift the blame from its disastrous 2016 loss to Donald Trump onto Russia, the Trump administration is now trying to shift the blame from Trump's disastrous handling of the Coronavirus crisis onto China.


    Robert Emmett , April 23, 2020 at 12:06

    Yeah, wouldn't expect anything less than well-deserved acrimony for the Grey Hag on this site. Some of us still remember how the so-called paper of record withheld the "smoking gun" of King Geo the Younger's use of mass surveillance until after the 2004 election. Who do you suppose is their target audience for this latest fake scoop? Could it be the newly woke crowd who now raise the NYrag as their gold standard in all things considered Russia bashing? Talk about fuddy-duddy.

    Today's mass media is full of rope-a-dope tricks such as placing a tiny nugget of "truth" within a massive hairball of innuendo, exaggeration, disinformation and lies to be extracted at the exact right moment to gainsay those who would question the narrative du jour. Another well-worn deception is to let the lowest common denominator source set the dodgy agenda and then use that cue to follow the "news" as fits to serve their own agendas. Over the years, that often involves skewing reactionary and "forgetting" how to connect dots.

    You can see a prime example of this (also part of the current surge of anti-China propaganda) at that other bastion of unnamed sources, the WaPo. Blumenthal lays out how it's done at The Grayzone Project re: allegations that the Wuhan Biotech lab released the virus. Funny though how there's a yawning gap in the story about the hows & whys & wherefores of an actual shutdown of a similar Level 4 lab right in WaPo's own backyard at Fort Detrick.

    "Dodgy scoop" made me smile. Are those served on self-licking ice cream cones?

    Dan Kuhn , April 23, 2020 at 11:40

    China and Russia had better be keeping their powder dry. No telling how far this lunacy is going to go. With Pirro´s rant it looks like the crazies have been let out of the pen and is just the thing to get the mentally challenged in an up roar and demanding military action against China. I have no doubt that China can handle the American military in a conventional confrontation but if it goes nuclear all bets are going to be off. The Better Dead Than Reders seem to be riding high right now. Who knows they may just get their wish. The Pirros et all do sound like the woman in a bar just itching to get a fight going, and then screaming blue murder when her favorite gets the snot beat out of him. You just can never get them to shut up before the fight gets going. but the Pirros of the world never can quite get a grip around the fact that is proven over and over again, wars and fights are easy to start, but hard to finish and no one knows how they aill turn out. And given the lack of success of the American military in wars of choice since the Second World War I would be very careful if I was her of what I was wishing for.

    Herman , April 23, 2020 at 11:39

    As I understand it, we (our intelligence people) were aware of the "potential" threat of the virus before the Chinese leadership announced it to the world. China did announce it to the world and people can argue they should have done it sooner. But the failure, if we decide there is one, belongs to us in not acting on the intelligence. Why we didn't is a matter worth investigating although what will be learned to prevent such future errors is unclear.

    Certainly, those who want to use this as a further wedge between us and China do not serve anyone's interests other than the cui bono horde who benefits from such divisions.

    As others have stated our most serious virus is the one that causes who to seek confrontation with other governments whenever opportunity arises. It is a very destructive virus.

    DW Bartoo , April 23, 2020 at 10:38

    It may be counted upon that ALL institutions in the U$ military empire will deliver the worst possible outcomes.

    The evidence for this assertion is voluminous and growing by the hour (quite as obscenely as the "wealth" of Jeff Bezos grows at the rate of $11 thousand every second).

    Frankly, one could hardly expect anything less from The NY Times.

    Be it war-mongering, hysteria-building, or sycophantic "official" propagandizing [now fully legal thanks to the sainted Obama, who also, it is alkedged, played a highly significant role in destroying the (now obviously) pathetic campaign of Bernie Sander, that Joe Biden, clearly suffering from dementia, and poster boy of the very neoliberal policies which elevated Trump to power, will be the Dem "standard bearer seeking the same power while promising to do nothing at all – about anything, which really IS the Standard Dem policy, U$ politics being about nothing but controlling the spoils and keeping the revolving-door/lobbying graving train rolling merrily along].

    Yet the real Powers That Be, cannot only count upon all the vaunted institutions from a pretend democracy and rigged political system, to a complacent, complicit, and criminally compromised MSM to parrot absolute idiocy, they may also count on a thoroughly infantile majority of the public to rally behind any war, of words, of weapons, even of nuclear weapons, simply because the U$ is exceptional, beyond compare, and constitutionally unwilling to learn anything from any other nation, society, or people.

    It is not merely the MSM which inculcate these myths of superiority, it is the entire educational system as well.

    It is not, necessarily, a conspiracy, it is simply conveniently and comfortably profitable to buy into the idiocy and pass it happily along.

    Evidence?

    Actual facts?

    Not necessary.

    And most inconvenient.

    It might affect circulation.

    U$ian Idiocy is quite as communicable as the "novel" coronavirus.

    As my youngest daughter put it, "It's a long story."

    Just to test my wits, she then asked me if I got the joke.

    Yes, my dear, I got it.

    At some point, it is possible that most of us will

    Voice from Europe , April 23, 2020 at 08:37

    The Chinese reports to the WHO are clear and transparent and date from the end of January. Western MSM has no journalist worth that name !
    Just like the new anti Hydrochloroquine study that was reported is full of potholes just waiting for someone to be read.
    People please check the published reprints of IHU mediterranee.
    Hippocrates said: There are in fact two things, Science and Opinion. The former begets Knowledge, the latter Ignorance.
    Please people distinguish fact from opinion.

    Mike from Jersey , April 22, 2020 at 18:39

    The article states:

    "Any reputable journalism school will teach its students that you hold off publishing until you see the evidence underlying an assertion. "

    But this was not a reputable newspaper.

    So, what did you expect?

    ... ... ...

    AnneR , April 23, 2020 at 14:04

    Yastreb – Indeed worse, though less for the reality that propaganda, slanted "reportage" is the common currency of the "news" organs of both the USA and Russia (not to mention pretty much the rest of the world's MSM), than for the fact that while Russians, from USSR days, knows to take everything in the media with some salt, to question the veracity of unsupported, dubiously supported claims, here in the US of A unsubstantiated, or porously backed, weakly supported "facts" usually expressed in Newspeak, slippery ways are very often accepted by the target audience, hook, line and bloody sinker.

    I mean – it's the NYT, or WaPo, or The Atlantic, CNN, MSDNC, PBS, NPR; they would never try to mislead us. Would they? Gorblimey. One despairs, one really does.

    And *not* as if the gullible readers, audiences (largely composed of the supporters of the Dem face of the single-Janus party) have let Russiagate go, if what I hear on NPR (including its BBC World Service broadcasts) is anything to go by.

    China-gate – neither side of the single party can possibly let this opportunity to prevent the rise of China, stop this ancient culture's challenging the "rightful," exceptional(ly barbaric) world hegemon, USA, from maintaining its proper position at the top of the firmament however it is achieved.

    Tobin Sterritt , April 22, 2020 at 17:03

    I spotted Yahoo News carrying this NYT hit piece today and was tempted to respond. Then I saw the general run of comments that read like the target audience it was meant for, and figured I'd be wasting my time. It might have been worth squandering five minutes, though.

    Mike from Jersey , April 23, 2020 at 08:44

    Tobin,

    It is a scary situation. A lot of people actually believe the New York Times.

    O Society , April 22, 2020 at 16:51

    Joe ~

    Did you see this one in today's NYTimes? The pot didn't just call the kettle black: With Selective Coronavirus Coverage, China Builds a Culture of Hate: The state propaganda machine highlights other countries' mistakes while suppressing China's, fueling anger toward foreigners and domestic critics alike. see: http://nytimes.com/2020/04/22/business/china-coronavirus-propaganda.html

    AnneR , April 23, 2020 at 14:08

    O Society – well, bien sur. I mean we can blacken every people, culture, society, government (except those we install – that we never do, unless they stray from their [American] defined path) as much as we want, as often as we please and no one has the right to call us out on that, complain. Heaven forfend – we'll bomb 'em, subject them to siege warfare (via ever tightening economic sanctions no matter how many children we kill doing this – "price is worth it" in'it?

    Donald Duck , April 22, 2020 at 15:29

    "Any reputable journalism school will teach its students that you hold off publishing until you see the evidence underlying an assertion. This is especially true when quoting anonymous sources. And it is doubly true when these sources are intelligence agents, who have a long history of deception. It is part of their job description."

    True enough, but we are not talking about 'reputable journalism' – such a fuddy-duddy notion. We are talking about crude propaganda and a ruthless realpolitik. Assertion, anonymous sources, smears, lies, calumny and dancing to the tune of whatever the deep, state and national security play to us. We have entered a post-democratic age and we would be well advised to bear this in mind. The ruling elites are blatantly bereft of any type of moral scruples; Pompeo put it well, 'lie, cheat' an he might have added 'whack' anyone who gets in the way of the grand project. 'Whack' being mafia terminology for murder of ones opponents. Pompeo even looks like a mafia Godfather. Mafia ideology and methodology have permeated the structure and institutions of American society.

    bjd , April 22, 2020 at 17:00

    Exactly.
    And thus articles like these –premised on the idea that the NYT is reputable– belong to the literary genre 'fiction'.

    AnneR , April 23, 2020 at 14:17

    Donnie – Pompeo claims (proudly? loudly?) to be a christian but somehow he missed all of that stuff about helping your neighbor, turning the other cheek, taking care of the stranger (Samaritan-wise). Or avoided it like the plague.

    And given the really existing history of the USA – "mafia ideology and methodology" deriving, backed by profound supremacist racism has permeated this country since the Brits first landed and started grabbing the lands and killing the indigenous, then going to Africa and buying the Africans in order to profit from their sale and their labor While overt slavery has ended (the US Fed and State prisons continue to gain from such prisoner slave labor) and theft of the remainder of Indigenous lands and resources is largely in the shadows, the attitudes, beliefs and behaviors pretty much remain alive and ill-meaning.

    JOHN CHUCKMAN , April 22, 2020 at 15:17

    The New York Times: the house organ of America's establishment.

    Sam F , April 22, 2020 at 14:35

    The NYT story is also shaky because broadcasts to the US about a nationwide lockdown would have been implausible, discredited by simple denial, and might well reduce virus panic. The sources of such messages are easily counterfeited and therefore speculative, like the fake "Russian" messages from Ukraine, and far more likely to originate from beneficiaries than the MSM target du jour.

    Bob Van Noy , April 23, 2020 at 12:10

    Exactly Sam F and thank you Joe Lauria. We keep hearing the same scenario over and over with different characters. I recently read "The Poisoner In Chief" by Stephen Kinzer and I was stunned by the secret drug and mind control experiments of the 1950s and 1960s.

    Certainly it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that they continue. Also see the gray zone article "How a Trump media dump mainstreamed Chinese lab corona virus conspiracy theory" by Max Blumenthal and Ajit Singh.

    Sam F , April 23, 2020 at 19:19

    Good to see you back, Bob. The referenced article is indeed worthwhile.

    jaycee , April 22, 2020 at 14:15

    Provable links from lockdown protests to domestic right-wing astroturf organizations.

    The fact-free claims of foreign interference seeking to exploit divisions or "sow chaos" is itself a domestic program to exploit divisions and and direct projections onto "the other". It is directed by the federal intelligence agencies in collaboration with the major mainstream media outlets. The central "proof" of foreign perfidy is the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's Report on alleged Russian measures to interfere with America (released Nov 2018), which is one of the most vapid and factually barren "products" ever produced. The New York Times has asserted the Report represents established fact. It's all, ironically, very Soviet.

    DavidH , April 22, 2020 at 20:19

    I get your point, jaycee, I think. The stuff in the Times is all "very soviet" (ironically) by the old Soviets' standards. That's if their old system had had, in addition to domestic propaganda, an effective propaganda campaign abroad. Did they? I mean all this projecting on Russia and China (meant to be digested by the homeland) is accompanied by a considerable outlay for transmitted-outward propaganda. Did the old Soviet system really have an outlay as big as ours is now? For sure they had spies, but so did we.

    I'll have to listen again to Tuesday's Loud & Clear to know if Richard Wolff really was as down on Putin as I seem to remember. Geopolitically Putin seems to me to have been pretty much more fair than we have in the past, say, six or seven years. But, in terms of oil, all energy hegemons it seems follow sort of the same patterns of behavior. They want energy dominance for their group [they've got it], and in smaller theaters individual members will attempt to attain it for themselves. But, yes, concomitant is that they must agree some amongst each other just as crime syndicates must. This is a dimension of hegemony it is sad to contemplate but real. One would like to think Russia is more fair, but when it comes to oil Russia doesn't really seem to pay much lip service to any shade at all of some global Green New Deal. And one would like to think China in general less hypocritical, but then you have McKinsey and Prince and that whole mess [we see they had things figured out better than us on SARS-CoV-2 but while as an American maybe I have no room to talk Snowden probably had a point that civilization could have done even better preparation than China's "pretty good" preparation]. So, in thinking about all this you have to try I guess to name the overarching global paradigm and blame it. For sure the US is in it up to its neck. Maybe even we invented it, or invented the things that morphed into it. Everything Lauria wrote above makes sense, and once again we owe Consortium.

    Glad to see this written (not just me that believes it) "The early view is that hardly any government responded with the urgency required."

    [Apr 22, 2020] Especially as the insane neoliberal economy we live in, we are ruled by a group of kleptocrats and vicious stooges. Which make allegations against Biden deserving a closer look but that does not make them automatically credible

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... The Progressive ..."
    Apr 22, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    "Evidence" means testimony, writings, material objects, or other things presented to the senses that are offered to prove the existence or nonexistence of a fact. -- California Evidence Code sec 140


    JTMcPhee , April 21, 2020 at 6:19 pm

    ... ... ...

    Even the NYT acknowledged (before it erased the text in its story on Reade that noted there were no other sexual misconduct charges pending against him other than that long history of assaults and sniffing and hands-on, text removed by the Times at the instance of the Biden campaign staff?

    Here's the original text: " The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden, beyond the hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable." Waiting for the apologists to tell us why the edit to remove the last clause starting "beyond " is just "Good journalism."

    He and Trump are bad examples of the male part of the species. Nothing to choose that I can see, other than who among the people that revise those bribes to them will be the first in line at the MMT watering hole

    just_kate , April 21, 2020 at 8:54 pm

    i had a lengthy discussion about this with my brother and sil, it came down to her saying I DON'T CARE ABOUT THAT re bidens history of being a ttl letch plus possible rapist and my brother questioning what is obvious discomfort in multiple video evidence.

    They said defeating trump was paramount to anything against biden. i simply give up at this point.

    cm , April 21, 2020 at 3:28 pm

    No mention of Brett Kavanaugh or Christine Blasey Ford in the article

    michael99 , April 21, 2020 at 6:30 pm

    The Heart-Wrenching Trauma of the Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh Hearings
    It's difficult. It hurts. It's unfair. But women will keep telling our stories.
    By Joan Walsh
    September 28, 2018

    lyman alpha blob , April 21, 2020 at 5:46 pm

    Lots of partisan hackery and TDS going around in the last few years in once respectable lefty publications. Mother Jones has gone completely to hell rather than raising any, as was once their mission statement. I haven't read the Nation as much in recent years – I let my subscription lapse a while ago as I found I just couldn't keep up with reading it. Coincidentally I think that was about the time I started reading NC. The Nation has a history of sheepdogging lefties to rally behind bad Dem candidates, which was another reason I didn't feel bad letting my subscription go.

    I do still have my subscription to Harper's but they were getting on my nerves quite a bit to the point I considered cancelling them too. Rebecca Solnit wrote some truly cringe-worthy editorials for them after Trump's election. They seem to have removed her from writing the main editorial so maybe I wasn't the only one who felt she left a little to be desired. I'm quite fond of the newer woman they have doing editorials, Lionel Shriver. She seems like she'd fit in quite well here!

    sierra7 , April 21, 2020 at 3:39 pm

    I left (pun intended) the Nation pub in the dust way back in the 1990's and buried it post 9/11. Used to be a real good alternative press pub 30-40 years ago. Somewhere along the line it lost it's way and joined the wishy-washy "gatekeeper' society of "approved news."
    RIP

    urblintz , April 21, 2020 at 3:33 pm

    Joan Walsh is a partisan fraud and The Nation's worst hire since . forever.

    Olga , April 21, 2020 at 8:09 pm

    The Nation was a sanity saviour back in late 70s and through 1980s; then something happened. Not clear when or what, but I know I let my subscription lapse. Tried again later, but it was never the same. It's mostly unbearable now, except for Stephen Cohen. Walsh has been in the unbearable category for many years now.

    Voltaire Jr. , April 21, 2020 at 10:08 pm

    Subscribed to The Nation and The Progressive in 1971. Read and learned for a decade or so, moved on. Also read every Henry George book I could.

    marku52 , April 21, 2020 at 3:59 pm

    Leonard Pitts just had an editorial in my local paper where he opined that even if Biden had sexually assaulted Reade, it didn't really matter because we had to vote against Trump.

    I wrote this in reply:
    So Leonard Pitts thinks that Biden's alleged sexual attack on Tara Reade isn't disqualifying, even if true. Strange, he didn't think that way about Brett Kavanagh. I didn't want to attack the columnist as a hypocrite without being sure, so I looked it up. Here is what he wrote:

    "It's a confluence of facts that speak painfully and pointedly to just how unseriously America takes men's predations against women. You might disagree, noting that the Senate Judiciary Committee has asked Ford to testify. But if history is any guide, that will prove to be a mere formality – a sop to appearances – before the committee recommends confirmation."

    Looks very much like "Well, It's excusable when our guys do it."

    Not to me.

    ( Here is the link to his first opinion piece)
    https://www.pressherald.com/2018/09/19/leonard-pitts-fairness-statute-has-not-run-out-on-allegations-against-kavanaugh/#

    jo6pac , April 21, 2020 at 4:32 pm

    The late Alexzander Cockburn would be most proud of this take down of joan walsh.

    I don't read the nation and I'm sorry that LP feels that way.

    Thanks Lambert and NC

    I'll be voting Green again without Bernie in the race.

    Reply

    Watt4Bob , April 21, 2020 at 4:34 pm

    So disappointing.

    It was the Nation that helped wake me politically back in the early 1970s with their reporting on the Chilean coup, and later, the murder of Orlando Letelier, and Ronnie Moffet .

    Arguably, the first state-sponsored international terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

    It has has since morphed into cat box liner.

    Am I wrong to blame Katrina vanden Heuvel?

    kirk seidenbecker , April 21, 2020 at 5:43 pm

    Excuse me if this is a repeat –

    https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/04/evaluating-tara-reades-claims

    Reply

    OpenThePodBayDoorsHAL , April 21, 2020 at 5:46 pm

    Always had a crush on K v d Heuvel. (How's that for an opening to a post about misogyny and sexual misconduct)?

    But can't we disqualify Joe! as the craven proponent of the worst neo-lib policies that got us exactly where we are today? Or, in polite company, ask politely whether he is even in a mental state to hand over the keys to the to the family car, let alone the nuclear football?

    Let's take the Id out of IdPol, I don't care if the candidate has green skin and three eyes if the policies they would enact come within smelling distance of benefiting the 99% (or more precisely in Joe's case within hair smelling distance).

    We can use his personal conduct as a component in our judgement but pleeease can we focus on the stuff that would actually affect our lives. In his case, for the absolute worse.

    (Note: I sincerely doubt whether Joe is currently allowed to drive a car, please oh please Mr.God-Yahweh-Mohammed-Buddha-Obama can we not let him drive a nation).

    [Apr 21, 2020] At a time when change is most needed, Creepy Joe is asking voters to turn back, give up, and accept our country's senility

    If Biden's running on fear, he picked a pretty damn good year to do it.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Humor: One of God's small mercies. Play Hide ..."
    Apr 21, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Joe Biden's louche son Hunter -- known for his hearty indulgence in drugs and his sexual adventures with strippers -- is a perfect specimen of humanity under this system. If he gets more stimulation than others, everyone else should get enough. And if they don't, they mustn't complain, they should ask for a program.

    Kessler engineerscotty 11 hours ago

    He is though [candidate of fear]. The absolute driving impulse behind Joe Biden is fear of Trump. Who is electing Biden because of his ideas and policies? There are articles that literally say - "Joe, just have a pulse by the time of the election, that's enough for us." I think that one was in Atlantic.

    I mean what is Russiagate, that's pure scaremongering - those Red Russkies are back with vengeance. The idea of return to safe, secure "normalcy", the good old days of calm and peace, if only Trump can be removed.

    Dr. Rieux 5 hours ago
    Humor: One of God's small mercies. Play Hide

    [Apr 21, 2020] A Government Against the People by Philip Giraldi

    Notable quotes:
    "... To be sure, Trump has good reason to hate the intelligence and national security community, which utterly rejected his candidacy and plotted to destroy both his campaign and, even after he was elected, his presidency ..."
    "... While it is not unusual for presidents to surround themselves with devoted yes-men, as Trump does with his spectacularly unqualified son-in-law Jared Kushner, his administration is nevertheless unusual in its tendency to apply an absolute loyalty litmus test to nearly everyone surrounding the president ..."
    "... Most damaging to consumer interests, the rot has also affected the so-called regulatory agencies that are supposed to monitor the potentially illegal activities of corporations and industries to protect the public. As University of Chicago economist George Stigler several times predicted, under both Obama and Trump advocates of ostensibly "regulated" corporations have taken over every U.S. federal regulatory agency . The captured U.S. government regulators now represent the interests of the corporations, not the public. This is more like government by a criminal oligarchy rather than of, by and for The People. ..."
    Apr 21, 2020 | www.unz.com

    The 24/7 intensified media coverage of the coronavirus story has meant that other news has either been ignored or relegated to the back pages, never to be seen again. The Middle East has been on a boil but coverage of the Trump administration's latest moves against Iran has been so insignificant as to be invisible. Meanwhile closer to home, the declaration by the ubiquitous Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that current president of Venezuela Nicolas Maduro is a drug trafficker did generate somewhat of a ripple, as did dispatch of warships to the Caribbean to intercept the alleged drugs, but that story also died.

    Of more interest perhaps is the tale of the continued purge of government officials, referred to as "draining the swamp," by President Donald Trump as it could conceivably have long-term impact on how policy is shaped in Washington. Prior to the virus partial lockdown, some of the impending shakeup within the intelligence community (IC) and Pentagon were commented on in the media, but developments since that time have been less reported, even when several inspectors-general were removed.

    To be sure, Trump has good reason to hate the intelligence and national security community, which utterly rejected his candidacy and plotted to destroy both his campaign and, even after he was elected, his presidency. Whether one argues that what took place was due to a "Deep state" or Establishment conspiracy or rather just based on personal ambition by key players, the reality was that a number of top officials seem to have forgotten the oaths they swore to the constitution when it came to Donald Trump.

    Be that as it may, beyond the musical chairs that have characterized the senior level appointments in the first three years of the Trump administration, there has been a concerted effort to remove "disloyal" members of the intelligence community, with disloyal generally being the label applied to holdovers from the Bush and Obama administrations. The February appointment of U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard "Ric" Grenell as interim Director of National Intelligence (DNI), a position that he will hold simultaneously with his ambassadorship, has been criticized from all sides due to his inexperience, history of bad judgement and partisanship. The White House is now claiming that he will be replaced by Texas Congressman John Ratcliffe after the interim appointment is completed.

    Criticism of Grenell for his clearly evident deficiencies misses the point, however, as he is not in place to do anything constructive. He has already initiated a purge of federal employees in the White House and national security apparatus considered to be insufficiently loyal, an effort which has been supported by National Security Advisor Robert O'Brien and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Many career officers have been sent back to their home agencies while the new appointees are being drawn from the pool of neoconservatives that proliferated in the George W. Bush administration. Admittedly some prominent neocons like Bill Kristol have disqualified themselves for service with the new regime due to their vitriolic criticism of Trump the candidate, but many others have managed to remain politically viable by keeping their mouths shut during the 2016 campaign. To no one's surprise, many of the new employees being brought in are being carefully vetted to make sure that they are passionate supporters of Israel.

    While it is not unusual for presidents to surround themselves with devoted yes-men, as Trump does with his spectacularly unqualified son-in-law Jared Kushner, his administration is nevertheless unusual in its tendency to apply an absolute loyalty litmus test to nearly everyone surrounding the president, even several layers down into the administration where employees are frequently apolitical. As the Trump White House has not been renowned for its adroit policies and forward thinking, the loss of expertise will be hardly noticeable, but there will certainly be a reduction in challenges to group think while replacing officials in the law enforcement and inspector general communities will mean that there will be no one in a high enough position to impede or check presidential misbehavior. Instead, high officials will be principally tasked with coming up with rationalizations to excuse what the White House does.

    ... ... ...

    Subsequent to the defenestration of Atkinson, Trump went after another inspector general Glenn Fine, who was principal deputy IG at the Pentagon and had been charged with heading the panel of inspectors that would have oversight responsibility to certify the proper implementation of the $2.2 trillion dollar coronavirus relief package. As has been noted in the media, there was particular concern regarding the lack of transparency regarding the $500 billion Exchange Stabilizing Fund (ESF) that had been set aside to make loans to corporations and other large companies while the really urgently needed Small Business Loan allocation has been failing to work at all except for Israeli companies that have lined up for the loans. The risk that the ESF would become a slush fund for companies favored by the White House was real, and several investigative reports observed that Trump business interests might also directly benefit from the way it was drafted.

    Four days after the firing of Atkinson, Fine also was let go to be replaced by the EPA inspector general Sean O'Donnell, who is considered a Trump loyalist. On the previous day the tweeter-in-chief came down on yet another IG, the woman responsible for Health and Human Services Christi Grimm, who had issued a report stating that the her department had found "severe" shortages of virus testing material at hospitals and "widespread" shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) for healthcare workers. Trump quipped to reporters "Where did he come from, the inspector general. What's his name?"

    On the following day, Trump unleashed the tweet machine, asking "Why didn't the I.G., who spent 8 years with the Obama Administration (Did she Report on the failed H1N1 Swine Flu debacle where 17,000 people died?), want to talk to the Admirals, Generals, V.P. & others in charge, before doing her report. Another Fake Dossier!"

    A comment about foxes taking over the hen house would not be amiss and one might also note that the swamp is far from drained. A concerted effort is clearly underway to purge anyone from the upper echelons of the U.S. government who in any way contradicts what is coming out of the White House. Inspectors general who are tasked with looking into malfeasance are receiving the message that if they want to stay employed, they have to toe the presidential line, even as it seemingly whimsically changes day by day. And then there is the irony of the heads at major agencies like Environmental Protection now being committed to not enforcing existing environmental regulations at all.

    Most damaging to consumer interests, the rot has also affected the so-called regulatory agencies that are supposed to monitor the potentially illegal activities of corporations and industries to protect the public. As University of Chicago economist George Stigler several times predicted, under both Obama and Trump advocates of ostensibly "regulated" corporations have taken over every U.S. federal regulatory agency . The captured U.S. government regulators now represent the interests of the corporations, not the public. This is more like government by a criminal oligarchy rather than of, by and for The People.

    Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected] .


    Exile , says: Show Comment April 21, 2020 at 2:28 am GMT

    I yield to no one in my contempt for the fraud-failure of God Emperor Bush III but the author has to be aware that talk of "impeachable" offenses is meaningless in American politics.

    There has never been and never will be an impeachment effort that's not primarily political rather than process-motivated. It's an up-or-down vote based on a partisan head-counting and opportunism and public dissatisfaction. All the Article-this-and-that is Magic Paper Talmudry.

    Trump is a somewhat rogueish, somewhat rival Don and faction-head in the same criminal (((Commission))) that's been running America for well over a century. He's Jon Gotti to their Carlo Gambino, and his gauche nouveaux-elite style offends the sensibilities of the more snobbish Davoise, but he's just angling for a seat at the table and a cut of the spoils, not a return of power to the people.

    Impeachment would serve no purpose but what we've seen so far with Russiagate, etc.. – a sideshow distraction from the real backroom, long-knife action going down, ala the "settling scores" montage in Godfather III.

    Getaclue , says: Show Comment April 21, 2020 at 5:48 am GMT
    "To be sure, Trump has good reason to hate the intelligence and national security community, which utterly rejected his candidacy and plotted to destroy both his campaign and, even after he was elected, his presidency." -- Yes to this. This is OBVIOUS to all but the dullest rubes or those who are in on it and trying to escape what they tried to do in attempting to over throw the US Government. The rest?

    Once you have this stated– that an actual Coup which was certainly plotted/sprung by the last occupant of the Presidency along with Clinton, Brennan, Comey, and many other NWO Globalists throughout the Government (FBI, CIA, DOJ ) and outside of it (the Globalist NWO MEDIA) the rest is drivel -- they tried to take him out–JFK they used a bullet, here not yet– so to say he shouldn't put in people he absolutely trusts at this time into any position he can? Are you kidding or what? You can't be serious– I've actually had someone try and kill me they were quite serious about it– my reaction after was not anything like what I see you suggesting or mirrored in your "analysis". This is how the CIA "counsels" in response to a murderous Coup -- an attempt to overthrow the duly elected Government?

    How do you overreact to a group of the most powerful people in the World getting together to try to murder you? That's your argument basically– he's over reacting to that? He shouldn't have "Loyalists". He needs to work with these other people -- the ones who want to murder him -- keep some of those "non-Loyalists" on board who time after time have plotted against him in every way possible during the last nearly 4 years?

    You seem to be one strange dude from my life's vantage point any way, what a perspective .Maybe you would actually deal with people of this magnitude trying to destroy you in the way you state but no sane/fairly intelligent person would -- I can't get past you have that sentence in there and then follow it with all the rest -- you seem to live in some alternate reality where when someone tries to murder you the right reaction is to blow it off and work with them– give them another few shots at you– say what? You learned this from your years at the CIA– this is how they train/advise things like this should be dealt with up at Langley? Or is it just wishful thinking on your part that they get another shot at him?

    mark green , says: Show Comment April 21, 2020 at 6:33 am GMT

    While it is not unusual for presidents to surround themselves with devoted yes-men, as Trump does with his spectacularly unqualified son-in-law Jared Kushner, his administration is nevertheless unusual in its tendency to apply an absolute loyalty litmus test to nearly everyone surrounding the president

    True enough. Trump has also injected into Washington his own nest of swamp creatures and Wall St. bigwigs. However it is also true that Trump has been under unrelenting attack since the day he announced his candidacy. This is not fair. With the possible exception of Nixon, I've never seen a more ruthless campaign by political insiders to demean a public figure.

    But to whom must Trump show ceaseless and attentive loyalty to?–no matter what?

    https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/proclamation-days-remembrance-victims-holocaust-2020/

    chris , says: Show Comment April 21, 2020 at 6:51 am GMT
    @onebornfree Absolutely!

    I can't get too worked up about the firing of the prison guards; I rather enjoy the charade.

    The real problem is that: 'It's the system, stupid!' and no amount of tinkering or puting the 'right' people in these positions will ever do anything more than just changing the illusion that something is being done.

    It reminds me a little of that late Soviet Union film "Burned by the Sun" about Stalin's purges of the criminals that had ridden his coat tails to power. Try as the movie makers did, I could not and would not feel an ounce of sorrow for those (these) scumbags who had wielded immoral, arbitrary, and disproportionate power over their subjects.

    gotmituns , says: Show Comment April 21, 2020 at 10:17 am GMT
    The government has been against the people for my entire lifetime (I'm an old man now). One of the only glimmers of light in that time, JFK was snuffed out. After all, who did he think he was, trying to stop the elites from having their war in Vietnam?
    Z-man , says: Show Comment April 21, 2020 at 10:24 am GMT
    He (Trump) should have purged all of the Obama appointees on day one.
    The Vindman twins are a perfect example of the Deep State.
    While I can understand your loathing of Trump's middle East policies, I do also, what he has blatantley done vis a vis the Zionist Entity is very little different than what slick Obama did under the table, outside of the Iran deal.
    And to tell you the truth, as much as I loathe Israel the Iran deal was definitely flawed and should have been more advantageous to America and the West. Iran should have seen the advantages of totally relinquishing nuclear weapons even with mad Zionists in their neighborhood. They could have still kept their ballistic missiles, sans nuclear tips.
    Realist , says: Show Comment April 21, 2020 at 11:31 am GMT
    @Getaclue The idea that Trump is fighting the Deep State is ludacris this is a charade if the Deep State didn't want Trump to be President he wouldn't be. Trump is a Deep State minion. No matter the existential threat to the US the 1% get richer and the 99% get poorer.
    Realist , says: Show Comment April 21, 2020 at 11:40 am GMT
    @Z-man

    He (Trump) should have purged all of the Obama appointees on day one.

    That supposes that Trump is not a Deep Stater as was Obama this is a poor supposition.

    Iran should have seen the advantages of totally relinquishing nuclear weapons even with mad Zionists in their neighborhood. They could have still kept their ballistic missiles, sans nuclear tips.

    Ballistic missiles, sans nuclear tips are useless. Did anybody care when North Korea had ballistic missiles before they had something worthwhile to put on the tip? Hell no.

    fatmanscoop , says: Show Comment April 21, 2020 at 12:29 pm GMT
    Trump has had two open coup attempts in three years, and a constant barrage of leaks etc. His purges are clearly at least three years too late.

    Also, to an outsider, it's strange how some right-wing American journalists write in a way which indicates that they have faith in the due process, checks-and-balances etc afforded by the American system. I don't understand how any American right-winger could maintain their faith in the U.S. political system, it seems corrupt approaching the point that it is beyond-repair.

    A123 , says: Show Comment April 21, 2020 at 12:51 pm GMT
    Barack Hussein was Against The People

    Trump's MAGA For The People efforts, must take steps to undo the damage done by the prior criminal admistration.

    Here is an detailed explanation of how Barack Hussein intentionally undermined the rule of law:(1)

    Aside from the date the important part of the first page is the motive for sending it. The DOJ is telling the court in July 2018: based on what they know the FISA application still contains "sufficient predication for the Court to have found probable cause" to approve the application. The DOJ is defending the Carter Page FISA application as still valid.

    However, it is within the justification of the application that alarm bells are found. On page six the letter identifies the primary participants behind the FISA redactions:

    DOJ needed to protect evidence Mueller had already extracted from the fraudulent FISA authority. That's the motive.

    In July 2018 if the DOJ-NSD had admitted the FISA application and all renewals were fatally flawed Robert Mueller would have needed to withdraw any evidence gathered as a result of its exploitation. The DOJ in 2018 was protecting Mueller's poisoned fruit.

    If the DOJ had been honest with the court, there's a strong possibility some, perhaps much, of Mueller evidence gathering would have been invalidated and cases were pending. The solution: mislead the court and claim the predication was still valid.

    I am not sure why Giraldi is defending Barack Hussein and Hillary Clinton's behaviour & staff choices. All rational human beings see the damage that Hillary created at the State Department.

    PEACE
    _______

    (1) https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/04/17/declassified-doj-letter-to-fisa-court-highlights-severe-institutional-corruption-doj-blames-fbi-for-spygate/

    [Apr 19, 2020] His first and most precious redeeming feature is his crude, brazenly outspoken directness, which aggravates and strains psychopathic relations with close mafia colleagues (i.e. "allies"), opens the eyes of potential doubters, and stirs to a fever the passions of the US's many opponents and victims

    Apr 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    BM , Apr 18 2020 6:13 utc | 174

    A rant it certainly is.

    Whilst most of the text is basically true, it never at any point rises above the level of a rant. And whilst I agree that Trump is a malicious and incompetent psychopath and pathological liar, I disagree that he has no redeeming features.

    His first and most precious redeeming feature is his crude, brazenly outspoken directness, which aggravates and strains psychopathic relations with close mafia colleagues (i.e. "allies"), opens the eyes of potential doubters, and stirs to a fever the passions of the US's many opponents and victims.

    His second most important redeeming feature is his incompetence and his proclivity to surround himself by retarded idiots blinded by their hippocracy, bigotry and hubris.

    Together, these two valuable redeeming features serve to accelerate the high speed train leading to the inevitably and amply deserved collapse of Empire.

    In his maliciousness, his incompetence, his psychopathic behaviour, his pathological lying, his brutal scheming, his avidly undertaken crimes against humanity, and his gross inhumanity he differs not one single iota from all other US presidents in living memory if not beyond. All that differentiates him from those other presidents are his redeeming features. We would do well to bear that in mind when judging him. That is in sharp contrast to the slimy suave lies and crafty covering up of Obomber, from whom he differs in no other respect.

    It is very unfortunate about the Covid-19 outbreak, but that too may have a potential redeeming feature - maybe, just maybe, we will be able to see the collapse of Empire without war. Or even if there is a war initiated by these crazed psychopaths, in their drunken Covid-19 laden stupors, maybe the US military will simply fizzle out like a damp firework under their weight of gross incompetence, ineptitude and Covid-19 enstranglement.

    Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you a toast: to the collapse of Empire, may it be speedy and thorough, like a high speed train crashing headling into a cliff, and may it be without war!


    There, a rant in reply to a rant! Alas, MoA is not at its finest hour.

    [Apr 18, 2020] The New Fault Lines in a Post-Globalized World by by Marshall Auerback Jan Frel

    Apr 18, 2020 | www.counterpunch.org

    The coronavirus pandemic has upended the global economic system, and just as importantly, cast out 40 years of neoliberal orthodoxy that dominated the industrialized world.

    Forget about the " new world order ." Offshoring and global supply chains are out; regional and local production is in. Market fundamentalism is passé; regulation is the norm. Public health is now more valuable than just-in-time supply systems. Stockpiling and industrial capacity suddenly make more sense, which may have future implications in the recently revived antitrust debate in the U.S.

    Biodata will drive the next phase of social management and surveillance, with near-term consequences for the way countries handle immigration and customs. Health care and education will become digitally integrated the way newspapers and television were 10 years ago. Health care itself will increasingly be seen as a necessary public good, rather than a private right, until now in the U.S. predicated on age, employment or income levels. Each of these will produce political tensions within their constituencies and in the society generally as they adapt to the new normal.

    This political sea change doesn't represent a sudden conversion to full-on socialism, but simply a case of minimizing our future risks of infection by providing full-on universal coverage. Beyond that, as Professor Michael Sandel has argued , one has to query the "moral logic" of providing "coronavirus treatment for the uninsured," while leaving "health coverage in ordinary times to the market" (especially when our concept of what constitutes "ordinary times" has been upended).

    Internationally, there will be many positive and substantial international shifts to address overdue global public health needs and accords on mitigating climate change. And it is finally dawning on Western-allied economic planners that the military price tag that made so-called cheap oil and cheap labor possible is vastly higher than investment in advanced research and next-generation manufacturing.

    This also means that the old North (developed world) versus South (emerging world) division that long preoccupied scholars and policymakers in the post–World War II period will become increasingly stark again, particularly for those emerging economies that have hitherto attracted investment largely on the grounds of being repositories of low-cost labor. They will now find themselves picking sides as they seek assistance in an increasingly divided and multipolar world.

    The fault lines of the next economic era have already begun to surface, creating friction with the previous international structure of banking and finance, trade and industry. There is a force beyond elites and critical industries driving this: The proletariat has literally become the "precariat."

    In the U.S. and Europe, the staggering number of service economy workers are going to be quickly politicized by the shortfalls: People have seen a collapse in income, and big failures in education, and health care. Union-busting, pension fleecing, and austerity budgets and new technologies that concentrate wealth away from labor have created a circumstance where ownership and profit models must be revisited to sustain stability. The needs are too acute to be distracted by the lies of Trump, or the inadequate responses in other parts of the industrialized world. The current crisis will likely prompt geopolitical and economic shifts and dislocations we haven't seen since World War II.

    Death of Chimerica, the Rise of New Production Blocs

    One of the biggest casualties of the current order is the breakdown of " Chimerica ," the decades-old nexus between the U.S. and Chinese economies, along with other leading countries' partnerships with Chinese manufacturing. While the geopolitics of blame for the origins of coronavirus continue to shake out, the process that saw a decrease in exports from China to the U.S. from $816 billion in 2018 to $757 billion in 2019 will accelerate and intensify over the next decade.

    While a decoupling is unlikely to lead to armed conflict, a Cold War style of competition could emerge as a new global fault line. Much as the Cold War did not preclude some degree of collaboration between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union, so too today there may still be areas of cooperation between Washington and Beijing from climate to public health, advanced research to weapons proliferation.

    Nor does this shift necessarily spell the sudden collapse of Chinese power or influence -- it has a colossal and still-growing domestic market and is on the international leaderboard for a wide range of advanced indicators. But its status as the world's most desirable offshore manufacturing hub is a thing of the past, along with the economic stability that steady inflows of foreign capital brought with it. It does show a susceptibility to domestic stress, with the Hong Kong protests last year providing a hint of what is in store as the party leadership can't pivot to new realities that include slower economic growth and declining foreign investment.

    As investment flows turn inward back to industrialized countries, there will likely be corresponding diminution of the global labor arbitrage emanating from the emerging world. In general, that's a negative for the global South, but potentially a positive factor for workers elsewhere, whose wages and living standards have stagnated for decades as they lost jobs to competing overseas low-cost manufacturing centers (the increase in inequality is principally a product of 40 years of sustained attacks on unions). The jobs won't be the same, but to be sure, manufacturing incomes exceed those of the service industry.

    As each country adopts a " sauve-qui-peut " mentality, businesses and investors are drawing the necessary conclusions. Coronavirus has been a wake-up call, as countries trying to import medical goods from existing global supply chains face a shortage of air and ocean freight options to ship goods back to home markets. Already, the Japanese government has announced its plans "to spend over $2 billion to help its country's firms move production out of China," according to the Spectator Index . The EU leadership is publicly indicating a policy of subsidy and state investment in companies to prevent Chinese buyouts or undercutting prices.

    Two billion dollars is small potatoes compared to what is likely to be spent by the U.S. and other countries going forward. And it can't simply be done via research and development tax credits. The state can and must drive this redomiciling process in other ways: via local content requirements (LCRs) , tariffs, quotas and/or government procurement local sourcing requirements. And with a $750-billion-plus budget, the U.S. military will likely play a role here, as it ponders disruptions from overseas supply sources .

    Of course, if the U.S. does this, other parts of the world -- China, the EU, Japan -- will likely do the same, which will accelerate the regionalization trends in trade. This may mean that some U.S. firms will have to operate in foreign markets through local subsidiaries with local content preferences and local workforces (that is how it worked in the 1920s -- Ford UK was a mostly local British company, different from the U.S. Ford Motor Company, but with shared profits).

    An examination of U.S. planning for the post-1945 world reveals the emphasis was on free trade in raw materials mostly, not finished goods. (The U.S. only adopted one-way "free trade" with its Asian and European allies later as a Cold War measure to accelerate their development and keep them in the American orbit.)

    Domestically within the U.S., as Dalia Marin writes , the coming declines in interest rates will accelerate "robot adoption" by 75.7 percent, with concentration "in the sectors that are most exposed to global value chains. In Germany, that means autos and transport equipment, electronics, and textiles -- industries that import around 12 percent of their inputs from low-wage countries. Globally, the industries where the most reshoring activity is taking place are chemicals, metal products, and electrical products and electronics."

    As the coronavirus pandemic is illustrating, a viable industrial ecosystem cannot work effectively if it is dispersed to too many geographic extremities or there are insufficient redundancies built into the transportation of goods back into the home market (rail, highway, etc.). Proximity has become a significant competitive advantage for manufacturers, and a strategic advantage for governments. But the U.S. government must play an expanded role in the planning process. The U.S. is still a leader in many high-tech areas, but is suffering the consequences of a generation-long effort to undermine the government's natural role as an economic planner.

    In the form of the regionalized blocs that are being sketched, in the Americas, Mexico is likely to be one of the leading recipients of American foreign direct investment (FDI). It already has a $17 billion medical device industry and is sure to absorb much more capacity from China. This has already started to happen as a result of the U.S.–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA, or new NAFTA) . Furthermore, the Washington Post reports that "[a]s demand soars for medical devices and personal protective equipment in the fight against the coronavirus, the United States has turned to the phalanx of factories south of the border that are now the outfitters of many U.S. hospitals." This is in addition to the thousands of assembly plants already in place in Mexico since the establishment of NAFTA. Indeed, if the jobs that had moved to China move to Mexico, Central America, and South America, this likely addresses many long-standing social tensions in regard to immigration management, currency imbalances and corresponding black market industries (ironically, it also likely means the end of Trump's wall, as the industrial ecosystem of the Americas becomes more cohesive and widespread).

    Big Business Is Good Business

    But this will also have significant impacts closer to home: Much as Franklin Delano Roosevelt ultimately prioritized domestic ramp-ups in wartime production over trust-busting , so too national champions are likely to feature more prominently today, as domestic scale and balance sheet strength are given precedence to accommodate the drive to revive employment quickly, and work collaboratively to halt the spread of the coronavirus . The scale of companies will not be regarded as a political problem if they can both deliver for consumers and show the capacity of following political direction for what the public's needs are. Tech companies like Apple and Google are stepping up to fill the void left by massive federal government dysfunction . The " break up Big Tech " voices are nowhere to be heard at the moment.

    We still need a more robust form of regulation for these corporate behemoths, but via a system of regulation that is "function-centric," rather than size-centric. As co-author Marshall Auerback has written before , this kind of regulation "restricts the range of corporate activities (e.g., structural separation so as to prevent companies like Amazon and Google from owning both the platform as well as participating as a seller on that platform), or the prices such companies can charge (as regulators often do for utilities or railways). These considerations would be 'size neutral': they would apply independently of corporate size per se."

    Capitalism has always had its plutocrats, but scaling back America's overly financialized model (by preventing stock buybacks, to cite one example) would represent a useful reform and prevent a lot of economic waste. Instead of going to enrich executives and shareholders beyond the dreams of Croesus , that measure might help to ensure that the profits of these companies will be directed to the workers' wages (which also means supporting increased unionization), or plowed back into investment (e.g., increased robotics).

    Biodata, Privacy, and an End to Pandemic Profiteering

    And there are fault lines in the business world. The pharmaceutical and medical research industries face immense pressure from other businesses to end the pandemic so they can get back to profitability. That means temporarily setting aside profits and pooling intellectual property to encourage collaborative efforts on the part of biotech and pharmaceutical companies to find proper treatments for COVID-19, and make them freely available, especially if governments were to waive antitrust scrutiny in exchange for all of the data Big Pharma companies collectively hold. As the Guardian reports , "[t]here is a precedent. Last June, 10 of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies -- including Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline -- announced they would pool data for an AI-based search for new antibiotics, which are urgently needed as antibiotic-resistant bacteria have proliferated across the world, threatening the growth of untreatable disease."

    Privacy advocates are already expressing concerns about a growing and overweening medical surveillance state. These surveillance concerns lack historical context: From the 19th century on, serious health problems were met by hardline government policies to reduce them. Policies ranging from quarantine to vaccine were not always mandatory, but there was an understanding that personal concessions had to be made to manage a huge population and an advanced society; the Constitution was not a suicide pact. We can further alleviate those concerns today by ensuring that the information uncovered does not become a precondition or additional cost of receiving insurance coverage. In light of coronavirus, cost savings of incorporating biodata into immigration and customs are a no-brainer for governments, and are certain to cause friction with individuals who may not want to give blood or saliva to get a visa or work permit, and agribusiness leaders who know that safety measures cut into profitability. But the scales have tipped in the other direction.

    North Versus South

    What about the other countries in the developing world that don't have close geographic proximity to a home market, or abundant supplies of key commodities required for 21st-century manufacturing needs, or even a well-developed manufacturing base (in other words, the countries that have hitherto been large recipients of investment solely on the grounds of cheap labor)? Many of them have faced immediate pressure with the collapse in global trade, unprecedented capital flight that is sure to grow as the coronavirus spreads, all the while coping with COVID-19 with highly inadequate health systems.

    In the meantime, the multi-trillion-dollar market for emerging market debt , both sovereign bonds and commercial paper, has collapsed. Many of these countries, via their state pension funds and sovereign wealth funds, have become the ultimate endpoint for many of the newer asset-backed securities that finally revived years after the 2008 financial crisis. This has become the potential new stress point in the $52 trillion " shadow banking " market. The U.S. Federal Reserve has sought to ease the funding stresses of much of the developing economies by offering central bank swap lines. It has also broadened prime dealer collateral acceptance rules, and set up commercial paper swap facilities, all of which have eased short-term funding pressures in these economies that have incurred substantial dollar liabilities.

    As the emerging world central banks then start to lend on those lines to their own banks, it should start to alleviate the shortage of dollars in the offshore dollar funding markets. We are starting to see some easing of stresses, notably in Indonesia -- because it's an exporter of resources more than a cheap labor price economy.

    But whereas in previous emerging markets crises, China was able to buttress these economies via initiatives such as the " Belt and Road Initiative ," Beijing itself is likely to be buffeted by the twin shocks of declining global trade and a reversal of foreign direct investment, which declined 8.6 percent in the first two months of this year .

    Longer-term, many other countries face comparable challenges to China: Capital controls, collapsing domestic currencies, and widespread debt defaults are likely to become the norm. That's already happened to serial defaulter Argentina again . South Africa has been downgraded to junk status . Turkey remains vulnerable. The so-called "BRICS" economies -- Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa -- are all sinking like bricks. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that coronavirus and likely future pandemics will create additional stresses on developing economies that depend on their labor price advantage in the international marketplace to survive.

    By contrast, countries like South Korea and Taiwan have had a "good crisis." Both have vibrant manufacturing sectors and created successful multiparty democracies. Foreign investment in South Korea continued to grow in the first quarter of this year, as it rapidly moved to contain the spread of COVID-19 through an extensive testing regime (while keeping its economy open). Similarly in Taiwan, by activating a national emergency response system launched in 2004 (following the SARS virus), that country has mounted a thoroughly competent coronavirus intervention of unprecedented effectiveness . The results speak for themselves: as of April 15, in South Korea, a mere 225 deaths , while in Taiwan, an astonishingly low total of six deaths in a country of 24 million people -- this despite far more exposure to infected Chinese visitors than Italy, Spain or the U.S.

    Of course, the very success of Taiwan's response revives another potential fault line, namely the tension underlying the "One China" policy. Before COVID-19, it is noteworthy that the WHO "even refused to publicly report Taiwan's cases of SARS until public pressure prompted numbers to be published under the label of 'Taiwan, province of China,'" according to Dr. Anish Koka . At the very least, Taiwan's divergent approach and success at fighting the pandemic will bolster its pro-independence factions.

    The question of foreign nations upholding Taiwan's sovereignty with regard to China is increasingly thorny, given Beijing's growing military capacities. This will present an ongoing diplomatic challenge to Western parties who seek to increase engagement with Taipei without heightening tensions in the region.

    A Recalculation of 'Economic Value'

    We have outlined many fault lines likely to be exposed or exacerbated as a consequence of COVID-19. Happily, there is one fault line likely to be slammed shut: namely, the false dichotomy that has long existed between economic growth and environmentalism. The Global Assessment from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services reports that "land degradation has reduced the productivity of 23 percent of the global land surface, up to US$577 billion in annual global crops are at risk from pollinator loss and 100-300 million people are at increased risk of floods and hurricanes because of loss of coastal habitats and protection." Likewise, the study cites the fact that as of 2015, 33 percent of marine fish stocks "were being harvested at unsustainable levels," and notes the rise of plastic pollution (which "has increased tenfold since 1980 "), both of which play a key role in degrading ecosystems in a manner that ultimately destroys economic growth.

    Finally, repeated pandemics over the past few decades have shown these are not blips, but recurrent features of today's world. Hence, there is an increasing public appetite for regulation to deal with this ongoing problem. Some industries, such as agribusinesses, won't like this, but the concerns are well-founded. According to expert Josh Balk , 75 percent of new diseases start in domestic and wild-caught animals, and 2.2 million people die each year from illnesses transferred from animals. The majority of these are transferred from poorly regulated factory farm chickens, cows and pigs; still, the " wet markets" of Asia and Africa, and the trade in potential " transfer species ," such as pangolins, a major driver of the $19 billion-a-year global trade in illegal wildlife, must also be addressed. Beijing has suggested it will ban trade in illegal wildlife and seek tighter regulation of the wet markets . The latter in particular may be easier said than done, according to Dr. Zhenzhong Si , a research associate at Canada's University of Waterloo who specializes in Chinese food security, sustainability, and rural development. Dr. Si argued that "[b]anning wet markets is not only going to be impossible, but will also be destructive for urban food security in China as they play such a pivotal role in ensuring urban residents' access to affordable and healthy food."

    To be fair, this isn't the first time that the sacred tenets of the global economic framework have dealt with a crisis that seemed to usher in a new era. The same thing happened in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008. But that was largely seen as a financial crisis, a product of faulty global financial plumbing that nobody truly understood, as opposed to a widespread social collapse closely approximating the conditions of the Great Depression as we have today.

    Not only has the current lockdown put the entire global economy into deep freeze, but it also came amidst a backdrop of widespread political and social upheaval, and a faux recovery whose fruits were largely restricted to the top tier. A collateralized debt obligation is not intuitively easy to grasp. By contrast, being forced to stay at home, deprived of vital income and isolated from loved ones, while health care workers perish from overwork and lack of protective gear, is a different order of magnitude.

    Even as we re-integrate, it is hard to envisage a return to the "old normal." Trade patterns will change. Self-sufficiency and geographic proximity will be prioritized over global integration. There will be new winners and losers, but it is worth noting that the model of capitalism we are describing -- one that does not feature obscenely overcompensated CEO pay co-existing with serf labor and the widespread offshoring of manufacturing -- has existed in different forms in the U.S. from 1945 into the 1980s, and still exists in parts of Europe (Germany) and East Asia (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan) to this day.

    Our everyday lives will be impacted as selective quarantines and some forms of social distancing become the new normal (much as they were when we dealt with tuberculosis epidemics). All of this has implications for a multitude of industries: restaurants, leisure, travel, tourism, sporting events, entertainment, and media, as well as our evolving definition of "essential" industries. Even our concept of personal privacy will likely have to be amended, especially in regard to medical matters. Concerns about medical surveillance -- stigma (STDs, alcoholism, mental illness) and denial of insurance -- can be alleviated if everyone is guaranteed treatment regardless of ability to pay, which will mean greater government intrusion into the lives of citizens and activities of businesses as the public sector seeks to socialize costs.

    Taken in aggregate, we are about to experience the most profound social, economic and political changes since World War II.

    This article was produced by Economy for All , a project of the Independent Media Institute.

    [Apr 18, 2020] Endless NYT Propaganda War on Russia by Stephen Lendman

    Apr 18, 2020 | stephenlendman.org

    Endless NYT Propaganda War on Russia

    by Stephen Lendman ( stephenlendman.orgHome – Stephen Lendman )

    The Times long ago abandoned journalism the way it's supposed to be. All the news it claims fit to print isn't fit to read.

    Its daily editions feature state-approved managed news misinformation and disinformation -- notably against sovereign independent nations on the US target list for regime change.

    Russia notably has been a prime target since its 1917 revolution, ending its czarist dictatorship.

    Except during WW II and Boris Yeltsin's 1990s rule, Times anti-Russia propaganda was and remains relentless, notably throughout the Vladimir Putin era, the nation's most distinguished ever political leader.

    When Yeltsin died in April 2007, the Times shamefully called him "a Soviet-era reformer the country's democratic father and later a towering figure of his time as the first freely elected leader of Russia, presiding over the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the demise of the Communist Party (sic)."

    He presided over Russia's lost decade. Under him, over half the population became impoverished.

    His adoption of US shock therapy produced economic genocide. GDP plunged 50%. Life expectancy fell sharply.

    Democratic freedoms died. An oligarch class accumulated enormous wealth.

    Western interests profited at the expense of millions of exploited Russians.

    Yeltsin let corruption and criminality flourish. One scandal followed others. Grand theft became sport. So did money laundering.

    Billions in stolen wealth were secreted in Western banks and offshore tax havens.

    A critic reviled him, saying throughout much of his tenure, he "slept, drank, was ill, relaxed, didn't show his face before the people and simply did nothing," adding:

    "Despised by the majority of (Russians, he'll) go down in history as the first president of Russia, having corrupted (the country) to the breaking point, not by his virtues and or by his defects, but rather by his dullness, primitiveness, and unbridled power lust of a hooligan."

    He was a Western/establishment media favorite, notably by the Times, mindless of the human misery and economic wreckage he caused.

    Putin is a preeminent world leader, towering over his inferior Western counterparts, especially in the US, why the Times reviles him.

    On Monday, its propaganda machine falsely accused him of waging a long war on US science, claiming he's promoting disinformation to "encourage the spread of deadly illnesses (sic)."

    Not a shred of evidence was presented because none exists. The Times' disinformation report was slammed in a preceding article.

    On Wednesday, the self-styled newspaper of record was at it again -- reactivating the Big Lie that won't die, saying with no corroborating evidence that "Russia may have sown disinformation in a dossier used to investigate a former Trump campaign aide (sic)," adding:

    "Carter Page, a former Trump campaign aide with numerous links to Russia was probably a Russian agent (sic)."

    Disinformation the Times cited came from former UK intelligence agent Christopher Steele's dodgy dossier, financed by the DNC and Hillary campaign.

    Its spurious accusations were exposed as fake news, notably phony accusations of Russian US election interference that didn't happened.

    Probes by Robert Mueller, House and Senate committees found no credible evidence of an illegal or improper Trump campaign connection to Russia or election interference by the Kremlin -- because there was none of either.

    According to the Times, Steele's dodgy dossier "was potentially influenced by a 'Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate US foreign relations,' " citing FBI Big Lies as its source.

    Another article on Russia this week claimed "many people who don't work for the government or in deep-pocketed state enterprises face economic devastation," adding:

    Domestic violence increased because of social distancing and sheltering in place.

    Not mentioned in the article is that mass unemployment and other COVID-19 fallout affect Western and other countries adversely.

    Putin was slammed for sending COVID-19 aid to the US, calling it "a propaganda coup for the Kremlin -- tempered by an intensifying epidemic at home."

    Outbreaks in Russia are a small fraction of US numbers, around 21,000 through Wednesday -- compared to nearly 650,000 in the US and over 28,000 deaths.

    Spain, Italy, France, Germany and Britain have five-to-eightfold more outbreaks than Russia.

    NYC has over 110,000 cases. In the NY, NJ, CT tristate area, around 300,000 cases were reported, almost as many COVID-19 deaths as outbreaks in Russia -- through Wednesday.

    Putin is dealing with what's going on responsibly, stressing "we certainly must not relax, as long as outbreaks occur.

    A paid holiday is in effect through end of April for Russian workers, likely to be extended if needed.

    Essential workers continue on the job -- at home if able, otherwise operating as before.

    National efforts continue to control outbreaks, aid ordinary Russians at a time of duress, and work to restore more normal conditions.

    While dealing with outbreaks at home, Russia supplied Italy, Serbia, and the US with aid to combat the virus.

    Yet Pompeo falsely accused Russia, China, and Iran with spreading disinformation about COVID-19.

    Gratitude and good will aren't US attributes, just the opposite.

    [Apr 17, 2020] The WHO provided validated working test kits on 16th of January. The USA botched the delopyment due to CDC incompetence and NIH syndrom

    Highly recommended!
    The USA government was paralyzed by Ukrainegate and impeachment in January.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Another factor was that any real measures against the virus were a huge blow to the neoliberal globalization and the USA as the central force that pushed neoliberal globalization was vary to implement them. ..."
    "... Pentagon treatment of the USS Theodor Roosevelt epidemic was worse than incompetent because clearly, this was just the tip of the iceberg. Instead of looking into the core problem, they decided to find a scapegoat. Why they did not react as soon as problems on Diamond Princess surfaced are unclear to me. They failed even to provide masks. That's simply incredible. I think a bunch of perfumed princes of Pentagon needs to be fired. I wonder what is the situation on submarines. ..."
    Apr 17, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com
    Ulenspiegel | 17 April 2020 at 07:18 AM
    The WHO provided validated working test kits on 16th of January.

    Even if I am not happy with the Chinese policy overall, the main problem in most advanced western countries was and still is that the response of the governments are often poor:

    1. Not implementing a coherent communication strategy. It does not make sense when one minister tells that the virus situation is an real issue and another minister tell you at the same time that everything is not so bad.
    2. Downplaying the infection numbers for domestical political reasons. Complete lack of understanding of an exponential function or more precise the combination of an virus operating on an exponential function, while the own resources are more or less a constant.
    3. Too late start of testing, be it a result of faulty administrative structures, rooky mistakes during test kit development or combination of both.

    Fighting a virus is like warfare on the operational level, you start with incomplete information, but have to make important decisions, time is a very important resource, lost time is almost impossible to regain.

    likbez , 17 April 2020 at 12:22 PM

    @Ulenspiegel | 17 April 2020 at 07:18 AM

    Fighting a virus is like warfare on the operational level, you start with incomplete information, but have to make important decisions, time is a very important resource, lost time is almost impossible to regain.
    Very true. But we should not forget the role of Pelosi in this mess: Trump administration was partially paralyzed in January by impeachment proceedings. She acted like the fifth column in this respect.

    Another factor was that any real measures against the virus were a huge blow to the neoliberal globalization and the USA as the central force that pushed neoliberal globalization was vary to implement them.

    IMHO, Trump demonstrated some level of courage by closing flights from China on Jan 31. I guess pressure to postpone this measure further was tremendous. But they missed the time, and it was too late.

    3) Too late start of testing, be it a result of faulty administrative structures, rooky mistakes during test kit development, or a combination of both.
    That's true, and the CDC needs to be investigated for this blunder. But also implementing social distancing measures and the obligatory wearing of masks in large cities was completely botched.

    Retired persons can be quarantined without a major blow to the economy. And that should have been done first. The nursing homes are starkly vulnerable to the coronavirus. It was clear from the beginning. That means that the medical personnel in them need to be provided with full protection gear and isolated with patients. That was not done. On the contrary, they became hotspots that spread the disease.

    Treatment of medical personnel, who along with patients in nursing homes are the most vulnerable category, was abysmal. No free hotel stay (for those without children), no special transportation and free meals were provided for them. Even basic protection equipment was absent in home hospitals until late March.

    The USA did not have strategic storage of masks and, which is more important, equipment to make them and materials from which they are made. That was a big blunder for which previous administrations also share responsibility.

    Pentagon treatment of the USS Theodor Roosevelt epidemic was worse than incompetent because clearly, this was just the tip of the iceberg. Instead of looking into the core problem, they decided to find a scapegoat. Why they did not react as soon as problems on Diamond Princess surfaced are unclear to me. They failed even to provide masks. That's simply incredible. I think a bunch of perfumed princes of Pentagon needs to be fired. I wonder what is the situation on submarines.

    [Apr 17, 2020] The recovery will NOT be, but Trump will distract all Americans by screaming against China and how China is responsible for everything. Expect Americans to fall in line and the anti Russia hysteria to now turn into super anti China hysteria.

    Apr 17, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Hoyeru , Apr 16 2020 20:13 utc | 21

    The recovery will NOT be, but Trump will distract all Americans by screaming against China and how China is responsible for everything. Expect Americans to fall in line and the anti Russia hysteria to now turn into super anti China hysteria. Expect attacks against Asians in USA
    And all because the Chinese were greedy bastards eager to make money and they quickly forgot history and how the Ango Saxon treated them just merely 150 years ago.
    As somebody who grew up in Communist Eastern Europe it the 70s, I vividly remember how we were warned how the Americans will try to hurt us by spreading bio weapons. This was grilled into us over and over. The Communists knew. China better gt prepared, the West will try to rip them a brand new assholes. And they got nobody to blame but themselves!

    [Apr 17, 2020] Was (Russiagate) insulting to the USA electorate intelligence?

    Apr 17, 2020 | www.youtube.com

    NickelCityPixels , 2 days ago

    "(Russiagate) was insulting to people's intelligence..." uh, no. You underestimate the stupidity of the American public.

    [Apr 17, 2020] Barr just said the Russia collusion probe was a travesty, had no basis and was intended to sabotage Trump.

    Highly recommended!
    Apr 17, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    AMERICA-HYSTERICA. US Attorney General Barr just said the Russia collusion probe was a travesty, had no basis and was intended to sabotage Trump . All true of course. May we take this as a sign that at last (at last!) Durham is ready to go with indictments? Or will it prove to be another false alarm? There's certainly a lot to reveal: A recent investigation showed that every FISA application (warrant to spy on US citizens) examined had egregious deficiencies. It's not just Trump.

    MEANINGLESSNESS. Remember the Steele dossier? Now it's being spun as Russian disinformation . So we're now supposed to believe that Putin smeared Trump because he really wanted Clinton to win? Gosh, that Putin guy is so clever that it's impossible to figure out what he's doing!

    COVID BLAME I. Back in the day I read a certain amount of Soviet propaganda about the wicked West. And, while it was quite often over the top, pretty monotonous and probably – judging from what ex-Soviets have told me – not all that effective in the long run, it usually had, buried deep inside, a tiny kernel of reality. Western anti-Russia propaganda, on the other hand, is nothing but free-association nonsense. Take the NYT's latest: the headline alone tells you it's crap: " Putin's Long War Against American Science: A decade of health disinformation promoted by President Vladimir Putin of Russia has sown wide confusion, hurt major institutions and encouraged the spread of deadly illnesses ." Another difference was that Soviet propaganda at least ran on the assumption that the Soviet system was preferable: this, on the other hand, is a pitiful attempt to blame the US COVID failure on somebody else. Nonetheless, this is not rock-bottom for the NYT's anti-Russian fantasies: that target was hit a couple of years ago with " Trump and Putin: A Love Story ". (But, the goalposts keep moving: if you accuse a Dem of Trumpish grabbing, you're probably a Putinbot .) I guess it will only get more: " The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters ."

    COVID BLAME II. Maybe it's not Putin or Xi who's to blame: maybe it's your own propaganda outlet: " VOA too often speaks for America's adversaries -- not its citizens... VOA has instead amplified Beijing's propaganda. "

    [Apr 11, 2020] Tchaikovsky - Hymn of the Cherubim - USSR Ministry Of Culture Chamber Choir

    Apr 11, 2020 | www.youtube.com

    YellowDaffodil , 3 months ago

    Perhaps if the US had a Ministry of Culture producing these soul elevating music videos we would not be becoming a godless country.

    Bless Russia and May she grow in Grace and Peace.

    Louis XXV , 11 months ago

    "The music could exist even if the Universe doesn't." Schopenhauer

    [Apr 11, 2020] Trump was Bill Clinton project which went wrong

    Apr 11, 2020 | off-guardian.org

    DunGroanin

    Trump isn't a Republican – he was NOT a politician before his presidency!

    If anything Donald was a Democrat supporter – one of these liberal New York types – so happilly derided by rednecks acroos that demented continent. A big supporter of Hillary and golfing buddy of Bill.

    Trump's job was to destroy the nominees of the Republican party and be installed as their candidate so that he would then easily lose against Hillary – by being obnoxious and populist and sexist!

    It was all part of her coronation – her right, she has been an operator all her life and her marriage was of a couple of psychopaths hot housed to attain the chief executive role for the Pathocracy – she started as a Republican.

    The whole pantomime was choreographed including the stalking on stage and the 'lock her up' shtick, probably by Bill with his mesmeric political sensibility; a lot of the potus' tweets too, with their simplistic genius.

    Unfortunately the plan didn't work because the Dems couldn't control their own grassroots and young activists – the leaks of the plot to steal the nomination. And because Psycho Hillary is no Bill and couldn't campaign her way out of a wet paper bag!

    She asked the mirror who the prettiest of them was?

    The reply was the Donald! He couldn't turn round and say he was only kidding and Hillary should get it could he?

    So he ended up being the Chair of the Board of American Interests!
    All the board positions taken by the ceo's of the lobby finance – no need for proxies when they could get in without political experience just like their President – Tillerson ceo of Exxon Mobile at State! Hell who needs Hillary when he can drive himself. All the neocon shithead psychos from the last 40 years. Bolton.

    BUT – something seems to have gone wrong in the grand setup – maybe how General Flynn was targeted immediately.

    Donald maybe realised that he was expected to put new blood on his hands – start new wars. He probably realised that the Clintons weren't as straight with him as they claimed, he probably understood that the neocons foisted upon him were the same and he probably got the gen on the fake plot of Russiagate and attacks on him personally being carried on in panic by the three lettered agencies to have him resign and let their man Pence in before it was too late to put the boots on the ground in Iran, Damascus and Ukraine – take on Russia! and incite the North Koreans causing a conflagration on that front and with the Uyghurs on the other front take in China!
    And send in the troops in Venezuela!

    A full on World War.

    He seemed a bit shaken when he came out of the long briefing with Obama at the White House and appears to have decided that – he wouldn't be rubber stamping the shitshows that his 'pals' the Clintons were deep into and he wouldn't be blackmailed by the western security services conspiracy against him and his family – so his inauguration speech was something unexpected and ought to be watched again !

    "That was some weird shit" dumb pres dubya got caught saying live, to his DS cold eyed assassin daddy president as they left the platform!

    Yup – Trumps the nearest thing to an Independent President the US has had since JFK (and maybe Carter).

    I'd only consider Paul and Gabbard as the only viable alternative non deep state owned politicians independents who could be the game changers from a hundred years of FED owned and run exceptionalism.

    Trump inadvertently has found himself to be in the right place at the right time – luckily for most of us in the world.

    ( I don't know whether the Clintons and Trumps are still great buddies or he fired them!)


    Eric McCoo ,

    Fantastic. Couldn't agree more..

    New York Times

    Did Bill (Clinton) tell you that you should run?" I asked.

    "He didn't say one way or the other," Trump replied, over a plate of meatballs.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/magazine/when-hillary-and-donald-were-friends.html

    Eric McCoo ,

    Donald Trump isn't a politician. He has mostly been a Democrat during his lifetime and given more money to them.

    "Until 2008, Trump Was a Big Democratic Donor

    He donated more than $10,000 to Hillary Clinton between 2002 and 2007, and Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., is his top beneficiary, raking in $18,350 over the years".

    https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/articles/2016-01-14/donald-trump-donated-to-democrats-until-2008

    Eric McCoo ,

    How the Hillary Clinton campaign deliberately "elevated" Donald Trump with its "pied piper" strategy

    An email released by WikiLeaks shows how the Democratic Party purposefully "elevated" Trump to "leader of the pack"

    "We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to them seriously," the Clinton campaign concluded.

    http://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-hillary-clinton-campaign-intentionally-created-donald-trump-with-its-pied-piper-strate

    [Apr 06, 2020] Notwithstanding the current occupant of the White House, Crozier was correct

    Captain Crozier was in an untenable catch-22 situation. Would the USS Roosevelt have suffered a similar casualty if it's skipper stayed within his chain of command in attempting to address the burgeoning virus aboard that very well may have impacted it's crews ability to operate safely? Capt Crozier's naval career was damned if he did and damned if he didn't (ie catch-22). Capt Crozier made the right decision in putting the health/lives of sailors aboard the Roosevelt ahead of 7th Fleets need to check boxes.
    Notable quotes:
    "... I am circling around to the view that Crozier's actions were correct, honorable, and laudable, and that they also created a situation that made it impossible for the Navy, notwithstanding the current occupant of the White House, to keep him in his position. ..."
    "... The difference between a competent administration and the one we have is that Crozier would not have felt compelled to go outside the chain of command, the SecNav would not be "acting," and the Acting SecNav would not have been so terrified of his own President that he would have acted precipitously against the captain. ..."
    "... There is a disheartening present trend on who is promoted (and what comprises their value set) within organizations in America at present. ..."
    Apr 06, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Portland Sooner4 hours ago

    Robert Farley at LGM has an interesting post on Crozier,
    I am circling around to the view that Crozier's actions were correct, honorable, and laudable, and that they also created a situation that made it impossible for the Navy, notwithstanding the current occupant of the White House, to keep him in his position.

    The difference between a competent administration and the one we have is that Crozier would not have felt compelled to go outside the chain of command, the SecNav would not be "acting," and the Acting SecNav would not have been so terrified of his own President that he would have acted precipitously against the captain.

    But decisions with strategic consequences should lie firmly with the very senior leadership of the armed forces, and the civilians that the leadership serves.

    https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/04/crozier-considerations

    Tom Sadlowski Portland Sooneran hour ago
    Thank you for that link. I agree with that assessment, and I would extend that circumstance to other departments within our government, and into other sectors like business, education, and non-profits. There is a disheartening present trend on who is promoted (and what comprises their value set) within organizations in America at present.

    [Apr 06, 2020] Permanent/long term expats are usually not your best source of information about a country.

    Apr 06, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    William Gruff , Apr 6 2020 11:29 utc | 170

    dltravers @138

    Permanent/long term expats are usually not your best source of information about a country. Being informed of something concerning China by a Chinese-American friend isn't necessarily authoritative. Consider someone in China asking an expat from New England about eating habits in Mississippi: "It's disgusting! They eat opossums! Road kill raccoons that they find on the side of the highway! Raccoon balloons! People from America's South are filthy!"

    Perhaps people in America's South do not always eat road kill, but people from other parts of the US believe they do. You have the same kinds of beliefs in China about peoples in different regions.

    Anyway, here is what the insufferably jingoistic and national chauvinistic Washington Bezos Post has to say about China's wet markets reopening: "The prevalence of food-borne microbial illness in developing East Asia suggests that far from being cesspits of disease, wet markets do a good job of providing households with clean, fresh produce."

    [Apr 05, 2020] Sometimes Western courts work the way they're supposed to.

    Apr 05, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    TRIALS. One of Mueller's "triumphs" was indicting a St Petersburg company for interference on behalf of the Russian government. ( Weepy Maddow flashback ). A safe stunt because the Russians wouln't show up in court. But they did. The prosecution has dropped the case. Why? Bluster, bluster, but the short answer is that there was no evidence. Let Bernhard, who got the story right from the beginning, take you through it . Oh, and the owner of the company is going to sue . In a similar situation, the judge in the MH-17 trial has demanded the prosecution 1) say whether it did receive the claimed US evidence 2) show it to the judge . Leaks tell us that the JIT has never seen it ; not surprising because there isn't any (that's an easy deduction: if the US really did "observe it" as Kerry claimed , we would have seen it now.) Sometimes Western courts work the way they're supposed to.

    [Apr 05, 2020] Sending top shelf ventilators made by a Russian firm under U.S. sanctions? I wonder if this is some sort of ironic Russian humor

    Apr 05, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    JerseyJeffersonian , 04 April 2020 at 12:19 PM

    Here's another one for you from Clownworld, courtesy of Andrei at his Smoothiex12 blog:

    http://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2020/04/send-them-back.html?m=1

    Sending top shelf ventilators made by a Russian firm under U.S. sanctions? I wonder if this is some sort of ironic Russian humor, besides being a bridge-building gesture, of course. If it's a troll, we richly deserve it, IMHO.

    Remind me again why we are not working collegially with this talented nation of Russia.

    Lyttennburgh , 04 April 2020 at 05:50 PM
    2Ulenspiegel

    I will give you 100% TrueUkrainian (the new plucky "democratic" friends of the Great West, remember?) answer - of course not!

    As everybody knows (tm), Russian help is not just useless, but promotes this dreadful, aggressive "Russki Mir", that stands for everything wrong, compared to the bright* genderless globalist and eco-friendly progressive future.

    Western countries and their populations, that have become the subject of the brutal and aggressive Russian humanitarian help (that's Italy and US of A) in order to maintain ideological integrity and robust correct-think, have to adopt a few simple measures, already tried and tested by the great patriots of the Ukraine:

    1) Ask any Russian doctor and member of the medical personnel, that might try to treat you, about their attitude towards Putin, war in Syria and to whom really belongs the Crimea (optional for the Westerners – also ask about gays and representation quotas). If the answer is not 156% ideologically pure, refuse to be treated by such violent satrap of the Regime!

    2) Stage a raid on a warehouse with the medical masks from Russia, and expropriate every single one of them! In order to prevent innocent bystanders from ever using such vile tools of Russian propaganda in their daily life, find a new and creative way to dispose of them. One such use is beloved by all truly patriotic members of the Ukrainian civil society (like C14 and "UPA-UNSO") – use them to make torches for your next rally!

    3) Be proactive citizen – refuse to use Russian lung ventilators! Die a free person!

    _______
    *) But not too bright as not to offend epileptics.

    [Apr 02, 2020] Bloomberg spent north of $500 millions to become president with zero results, and you want me to believe that Russians spent 1% of that and got better results

    Highly recommended!
    Apr 02, 2020 | hub.jhu.edu

    PBO kenformerlyfromRI8 days ago ,

    There is no conspiracy, they didn't make up false documents to start a Russian investigation, oh wait they did.. I just read that Bloomberg spent north of $500,000,000.00 to become president and you want me to believe the Russians spent 1% of that and got better results.. You have to be a special kind of stupid.

    [Apr 02, 2020] We have two discredited old parties, incapable of dealing with the crises facing them, attempting to revive the only ideas that have ever galvanised the US public in their lifetimes: opposition to communism and the racism which underlay just about every US military adventure since 1945

    Highly recommended!
    Apr 02, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    bevin , Apr 1 2020 20:48 utc | 38

    US Politicians never forget that for the past seventy years russophobia and sinophobic racism- both of which have deep roots in the culture- formed the bases of the ideology of anti-communism.

    The Democrats, totally discredited by the 2016 Election campaign and decades of Clinton/Obama swings towards the right and away from the old New Deal constituencies, began by accusing Trump of colluding with the Russians- who most of the DNC deliberately suggested, and probably genuinely thought, were Communists.

    Trump's response is now to revive the anti-Peoples Republic witch-hunts of the past to use against the Democrats.

    We have two discredited old parties, incapable of dealing with the crises facing them, attempting to revive the only ideas that have ever galvanised the US public in their lifetimes: opposition to communism and the racism which underlay just about every US military adventure since 1945 - the all purpose anti-gook racism that saw them through the wars against Japan, Korea, IndoChina and the People's Republic.

    It is going to make the spectacle of two monkeys throwing shit at each other seem positively restrained - the Democrats howling about Russia and the Republicans, reverting to type, starting up lynch mobs against China.

    [Mar 29, 2020] The essence of Trump's psychology is that he likes to dominate people. He accomplishes this by hiring incompetent psychopaths

    Mar 29, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Timothy Hagios , Mar 28 2020 18:14 utc | 44

    The essence of Trump's psychology is that he likes to dominate people. He accomplishes this by hiring incompetent psychopaths who make him legitimately look good by comparison. This is why he's constantly overruling their worst plans. But once every so often, his incompetent underlings convince him to do something exceptionally stupid. This is because occasionally going along with them allows him to feel like a wise, discerning ruler who occasionally follows his advisors' guidance and occasionally overrules them.

    [Mar 29, 2020] 2020 election are the ultimate US Presidential election: the election in which people really have no one to vote for. Not even for fake choice like Trump and Hillary like in 2016. Absolutely none. It is "Perfect Election"

    Mar 29, 2020 | www.unz.com

    aandrews , says: Show Comment March 29, 2020 at 4:58 pm GMT

    " I always considered him a fraud for this (and many other) reasons. Now Tulsi Gabbard is doing the same thing ."

    There's really no one to vote for. I don't intend to bother. And they love it when people don't vote.

    [Mar 28, 2020] Russians again were outsmarted by the US intelligence agencies

    Highly recommended!
    By a clever move of the US intelligence agencies they are left without a choice as to support Trump in 2020 election is as idiotic as to support Biden.
    Mar 28, 2020 | www.unz.com

    U.S. intelligence community, through its preferred propaganda sheet the New York Times, is now reporting that Russia is taking advantage of the coronavirus crisis to spread disinformation through Europe and also in the U.S.

    In particular, Putin has escalated a campaign-by-innuendo to reduce confidence in the outcome of the upcoming 2020 presidential election.

    In any event, the Russians are too late as the Democratic and Republican parties' behavior has already convinced many Americans that voting in November will be a waste of time.

    [Mar 28, 2020] Why You Should Never Watch RT -- Ever!

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... RT is more vocally in support of Russia than western media ..."
    Mar 26, 2020 | russia-insider.com

    As RT UK launches, attacks on the channel in the British media have stepped up

    The latest is a piece by Mr. Cyril Waugh-Monger, a very important newspaper columnist for the NeoCon Daily, a patron of the Senator Joe McCarthy Appreciation Society and author of 'Why the Iraq War was a Brilliant Idea' and 'The Humanitarian Case for Bombing Syria.'

    Dear socially inferior person reading this article. My name is Cyril Waugh-Monger (I'm called 'Mr Terribly Pompous Neo-Con' by my friends) and I'm here to tell you why on no account should you watch RT and why you should be making complaints to Ofcom (a British bureacracy which regulates TV) about this dreadful channel so that in the interests of 'free speech' and 'democracy' we can get it off air.

    1. RT doesn't peddle Russophobia

    Outrageously, RT doesn't compare Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler. It doesn't join in with the demonization of Russia and its leader. How can we have a channel which is watched by people in Britain, which doesn't do that? We neocons say that demonization of Russia and its leader is compulsory. How dare RT not do as we say!

    RT is more vocally in support of Russia than western media
    2. RT is sometimes rude to bankers

    There's a man on RT called Max Keiser and he is often very rude to bankers. Why, he has even called for them to face the death penalty. Such disrespect to our financial elites is shocking and should not be allowed in a free society.

    3. Its coverage of the MH17 crash

    Shockingly, RT commentators didn't rush to blame Vladimir Putin for the air disaster within seconds of the news breaking. Some even said that we should wait for the forensic evidence before any statements apportioning guilt were made. Others said that we couldn't rule out that the plane was downed by an another aircraft. This failure to come and say loud and clear "Putin personally shot down the plane with a missile he made and fired with his own hands" within minutes of the crash is clear evidence of RT's bias and why it must be taken off the air.

    4. RT's 'pundits' include people who aren't neocons and 'liberal interventionists'

    This is truly scandalous: RT gives airtime to people who don't support the West's policy of endless war and who opposed airstrikes on Syria last year. Why, it's even broadcast interviews with the convener of the Stop the War coalition – and has a regular weekly show fronted by George Galloway! This is unconscionable. Only people who support Western foreign policy should be allowed to express their views on international affairs on television, not 'cranks' and 'fanatics' who oppose attacking a sovereign state in the Middle East on deceitful grounds every couple of years. Why, if RT had been around in 2003, it would no doubt have given airtime to anti-war 'conspiracy theorists' who would have told viewers that Iraq had no WMDs – and claimed, fantastically – that Bush and Blair were making it all up.

    5. RT provides airtime to genuine socialists and genuine conservatives

    This is really terrible: RT interviews people who oppose neo-liberalism and globalization, from both the left and the right. It's given the microphone to socialists, communists, greens, and 'extremists' on the right, like Ron Paul. These people should not be allowed to express their views on television; they are 'cranks' and should be totally marginalized. Only those who support the hegemonic consensus should be allowed on TV. It's very important that in order to protect free speech and democracy, alternative opinions are not heard.

    6. RT pundits have 'extremist' links

    I monitor the people who appear on RT very, very closely and I can tell you that there was once a case of an RT interviewee who had a link on his website to another website which had a link to another website which had a link to another website – which denied the Holocaust and said that little green men from Mars were ruling the US.

    After considerable research, I also found that another RT pundit once attended a conference where a fellow invitee had once sat at a restaurant table, a few days after another person who had actually praised Adolf Hitler, Chairman Mao, and Josef Stalin in a magazine article published in North Korea in 1962.

    7. RT is anti-semitic

    Ok, I've got no evidence of this, but I'll bung it in anyway as it sounds good.

    8. RT has broadcast documentaries on the wars in Yugoslavia which don't blame the Serbs for everything

    This is totally unacceptable.

    9. RT has had 'experts' on its programs who have made some very strong criticisms of Israel

    This too is totally unacceptable. Anyone with a theory or definition that differs from Western minded politicians is demonized for voicing their opinion.

    10. RT pundits have often ridiculed leading American policymakers

    For instance, when the US Secretary of State John Kerry said that "you just don't in the 21st century" invade another country on "completely trumped up pretext," some people on RT had the audacity to say "What about Iraq?" This lack of respect towards a leading American politician is appalling, and in a free society ought not to be allowed. The correct procedure whenever a leading US political figure speaks is to tug one's forelock.

    11. RT's coverage of the conflict in Syria

    In 2011-13, we had so-called 'experts' on Syria telling us on RT that some of the freedom-fighting pro-democracy rebels were actually fanatical terrorists who were guilty of committing atrocities. This was obviously a clear lie. Islamist terrorists like ISIS have only been active in Syria since 2014 and of course, it's all the fault of President Assad and Russia.

    12. RT interviews lots of people whose views I do not share

    It ought not to be allowed! Aren't we supposed to live in a democracy?

    13. The most important reason: RT is a threat

    More and more people are watching it – which is why me and my little group of neocons and 'liberal interventionists' are so worried and stepping up our attacks on the station and denigrating those people who appear on it.

    The next big war is going to be much harder for us to 'sell' to the plebs, because we are no longer in control of the narrative as we were in 2003, before the Iraq war. Oh, what happy days those were!

    Don't watch RT because we really don't want you to 'question more.' We want you to question less. It's much easier for us that way.

    [Mar 28, 2020] NYT bad habit of falling for falling for frauds and making them famous

    Highly recommended!
    Mar 26, 2020 | www.unz.com

    Stephen Paul Foster , says: Website Show Comment March 25, 2020 at 11:17 am GMT

    @niteranger "For example, New York Times Columnist Nicholas Kristof on Sunday reported the disheartening analysis of Dr. Neil Ferguson of Britain, one of the world's leading epidemiologists."

    Nicholas Kristoff has the bad habit of falling for falling for frauds and making them famous. "Three cups of tea" for starters. He's got a long track record of peddling fake stuff.

    [Mar 27, 2020] Trump's about as innocent in the coronavirus fiasco as jack the ripper

    Mar 27, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Miss Lacy , Mar 26 2020 20:32 utc | 35

    PS to vk # 1. Please think again. Trump has been in a trade war with China for what? a couple of years? AND, he specifically banned imports of medical supplies from China. Other posters wave supplied links for this idiocy.

    Trump's about as innocent as jack the ripper. You may just be seeing things relatively, as ghouls like Elliot Abrahms and disgusting Pomposity make Trump seen like an amateur.

    [Mar 26, 2020] Why You Should Never Watch RT -- Ever!

    Mar 26, 2020 | russia-insider.com

    As RT UK launches, attacks on the channel in the British media have stepped up

    The latest is a piece by Mr. Cyril Waugh-Monger, a very important newspaper columnist for the NeoCon Daily, a patron of the Senator Joe McCarthy Appreciation Society and author of 'Why the Iraq War was a Brilliant Idea' and 'The Humanitarian Case for Bombing Syria.'

    Dear socially inferior person reading this article. My name is Cyril Waugh-Monger (I'm called 'Mr Terribly Pompous Neo-Con' by my friends) and I'm here to tell you why on no account should you watch RT and why you should be making complaints to Ofcom (a British bureacracy which regulates TV) about this dreadful channel so that in the interests of 'free speech' and 'democracy' we can get it off air.

    1. RT doesn't peddle Russophobia

    Outrageously, RT doesn't compare Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler. It doesn't join in with the demonization of Russia and its leader. How can we have a channel which is watched by people in Britain, which doesn't do that? We neocons say that demonization of Russia and its leader is compulsory. How dare RT not do as we say!

    RT is more vocally in support of Russia than western media
    2. RT is sometimes rude to bankers

    There's a man on RT called Max Keiser and he is often very rude to bankers. Why, he has even called for them to face the death penalty. Such disrespect to our financial elites is shocking and should not be allowed in a free society.

    Former CEO of HSX Holdings/Hollywood Stock Exchange and host of RT''s 'Keiser Report' Max Keiser
    3. Its coverage of the MH17 crash

    Shockingly, RT commentators didn't rush to blame Vladimir Putin for the air disaster within seconds of the news breaking. Some even said that we should wait for the forensic evidence before any statements apportioning guilt were made. Others said that we couldn't rule out that the plane was downed by an another aircraft. This failure to come and say loud and clear "Putin personally shot down the plane with a missile he made and fired with his own hands" within minutes of the crash is clear evidence of RT's bias and why it must be taken off the air.

    Segment of the shot down plane
    4. RT's 'pundits' include people who aren't neocons and 'liberal interventionists'

    This is truly scandalous: RT gives airtime to people who don't support the West's policy of endless war and who opposed airstrikes on Syria last year. Why, it's even broadcast interviews with the convener of the Stop the War coalition – and has a regular weekly show fronted by George Galloway! This is unconscionable. Only people who support Western foreign policy should be allowed to express their views on international affairs on television, not 'cranks' and 'fanatics' who oppose attacking a sovereign state in the Middle East on deceitful grounds every couple of years. Why, if RT had been around in 2003, it would no doubt have given airtime to anti-war 'conspiracy theorists' who would have told viewers that Iraq had no WMDs – and claimed, fantastically – that Bush and Blair were making it all up.

    British politician, broadcaster, and writer George Galloway often speaks out against western foreign policy
    5. RT provides airtime to genuine socialists and genuine conservatives

    This is really terrible: RT interviews people who oppose neo-liberalism and globalization, from both the left and the right. It's given the microphone to socialists, communists, greens, and 'extremists' on the right, like Ron Paul. These people should not be allowed to express their views on television; they are 'cranks' and should be totally marginalized. Only those who support the hegemonic consensus should be allowed on TV. It's very important that in order to protect free speech and democracy, alternative opinions are not heard.

    Former Republican presidential candidate, Representative Ron Paul
    6. RT pundits have 'extremist' links

    I monitor the people who appear on RT very, very closely and I can tell you that there was once a case of an RT interviewee who had a link on his website to another website which had a link to another website which had a link to another website – which denied the Holocaust and said that little green men from Mars were ruling the US.

    After considerable research, I also found that another RT pundit once attended a conference where a fellow invitee had once sat at a restaurant table, a few days after another person who had actually praised Adolf Hitler, Chairman Mao, and Josef Stalin in a magazine article published in North Korea in 1962.

    7. RT is anti-semitic

    Ok, I've got no evidence of this, but I'll bung it in anyway as it sounds good.

    8. RT has broadcast documentaries on the wars in Yugoslavia which don't blame the Serbs for everything

    This is totally unacceptable.

    An elderly woman carries her belongings November 22 in Sarajevo's war shattered airport settlement. (Reuters)
    9. RT has had 'experts' on its programs who have made some very strong criticisms of Israel

    This too is totally unacceptable. Anyone with a theory or definition that differs from Western minded politicians is demonized for voicing their opinion.

    Israel's annexed Golan Heights is hosting pop up hospitals to tend to ISIS fighters
    10. RT pundits have often ridiculed leading American policymakers

    For instance, when the US Secretary of State John Kerry said that "you just don't in the 21st century" invade another country on "completely trumped up pretext," some people on RT had the audacity to say "What about Iraq?" This lack of respect towards a leading American politician is appalling, and in a free society ought not to be allowed. The correct procedure whenever a leading US political figure speaks is to tug one's forelock.

    11. RT's coverage of the conflict in Syria

    In 2011-13, we had so-called 'experts' on Syria telling us on RT that some of the freedom-fighting pro-democracy rebels were actually fanatical terrorists who were guilty of committing atrocities. This was obviously a clear lie. Islamist terrorists like ISIS have only been active in Syria since 2014 and of course, it's all the fault of President Assad and Russia.

    Intense shelling destroys buildings in the Damascus suburb of Jobar October 28
    12. RT interviews lots of people whose views I do not share

    It ought not to be allowed! Aren't we supposed to live in a democracy?

    13. The most important reason: RT is a threat

    More and more people are watching it – which is why me and my little group of neocons and 'liberal interventionists' are so worried and stepping up our attacks on the station and denigrating those people who appear on it.

    The next big war is going to be much harder for us to 'sell' to the plebs, because we are no longer in control of the narrative as we were in 2003, before the Iraq war. Oh, what happy days those were!

    Don't watch RT because we really don't want you to 'question more.' We want you to question less. It's much easier for us that way.


    Source: RT

    [Mar 26, 2020] The face of Trump in foreign policy is Pompeo and it is wicked, ungly face of a gangster

    Yet another Gofgather
    Notable quotes:
    "... The more I watch these moves by Pompeo the more sympathetic I become to the most sinister theories about COVID-19, its origins and its launch around the world. Read Pepe Escobar's latest to get an idea of how dark and twisted this tale could be . ..."
    March 24, 2020 < Older
    No Respite for the Wicked, Pompeo Unleashed Written by Tom Luongo Tuesday

    There are few things in this life that make me more sick to my stomach than watching Secretary of State Mike Pompeo talking. He truly is one of the evilest men I've ever had the displeasure of covering.

    Into the insanity of the over-reaction to the COVID-19 outbreak, Pompeo wasted no time ramping up sanctions on firms doing any business with Iran, one of the countries worse-hit by this virus to date.

    It's a seemingly endless refrain, everyday, more sanctions on Chinese, Swiss and South African firms for having the temerity in these deflating times to buy oil from someone Pompeo and his gang of heartless psychopaths disapprove of.

    This goes far beyond just the oil industry. Even though I'm well aware that Russia's crashing the price of oil was itself a hybrid war attack on US capital markets. One that has had, to date, devastating effect.

    While Pompeo mouths the words publicly that humanitarian aid is exempted from sanctions on Iran, the US is pursuing immense pressure on companies to not do so anyway while the State Dept. bureaucracy takes its sweet time processing waiver applications.

    Pompeo and his ilk only think in terms of civilizational warfare. They have become so subsumed by their big war for the moral high ground to prove American exceptionalism that they have lost any shred of humanity they may have ever had.

    Because for Pompeo in times like these to stick to his talking points and for his office to continue excising Iran from the global economy when we're supposed to be coming together to fight a global pandemic is the height of soullessness.

    And it speaks to the much bigger problem that infects all of our political thinking. There comes a moment when politics and gaining political advantage have to take a back seat to doing the right thing.

    I've actually seen moments of that impulse from the Democratic leadership in the US Will wonders never cease?!

    Thinking only in Manichean terms of good vs. evil and dehumanizing your opponents is actually costlier than reversing course right now. Because honey is always better at attracting flies than vinegar.

    But, unfortunately, that is not the character of the Trump administration.

    It can only think in terms of direct leverage and opportunity to hold onto what they think they've achieved. So, until President Trump is no longer consumed with coordinating efforts to control COVID-19 Pompeo and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper are in charge of foreign policy. They will continue the playbook that has been well established.

    Maximum pressure on Iran, hurt China any way they can, hold onto what they have in Syria, stay in Iraq.

    To that end Iraqi President Barham Salei nominated Pompeo's best choice to replace Prime Minister Adil Abdel Mahdi to throw Iraq's future into complete turmoil. According to Elijah Magnier, Adnan al-Zarfi is a US asset through and through .

    And this looks like Pompeo's Hail Mary to retain US legal presence in Iraq after the Iraqi parliament adopted a measure to demand withdrawal of US troops from the country. Airstrikes against US bases in Iraq continue on a near daily basis and there have been reports of US base closures and redeployments at the same time.

    This move looks like desperation by Pompeo et.al. to finally separate the Hashd al-Shaabi from Iraq's official military. So that airstrikes against them can be carried out under the definition of 'fighting Iranian terrorism.'

    As Magnier points out in the article above if al-Zarfi puts a government together the war in Iraq will expand just as the US is losing further control in Syria after Turkish President Erdogan's disastrous attempt to remake the front in Idlib. That ended with his effective surrender to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

    The more I watch these moves by Pompeo the more sympathetic I become to the most sinister theories about COVID-19, its origins and its launch around the world. Read Pepe Escobar's latest to get an idea of how dark and twisted this tale could be .

    It is sad that, to me, I see no reason to doubt Pompeo and his ilk in the US government wouldn't do something like that to spark political and social upheaval in those places most targeted by US hybrid war tactics.

    But, at the same time, I can see the other side of it, a vicious strike back by China against its tormentors. And China's government does itself, in my mind, no favors threatening to withhold drug precursors and having officials run their mouths giving Americans the excuse they need to validate Trump and Pompeo's divisive rhetoric.

    Remaining on the fence about this issue isn't my normal style. But everyone is dirty here and the reality may well be this is a natural event terrible people on both sides are exploiting.

    And I can only go by what people do rather than what they say to assess the situation. Trump tries to buy exclusive right to a potential COVID-19 vaccine from a German firm and his administration slow-walks aid to Iran.

    China sends aid to Iran and Italy by the container full. Is that to salve their conscience over its initial suppression of information about the virus? Good question. But no one covers themselves in glory by using the confusion and distraction to attempt further regime change and step up war-footing during a public health crisis, manufactured or otherwise.

    While Pompeo unctuously talks the talk of compassion and charity, he cannot bring himself to actually walk the walk. Because he is a despicable, bile-filled man of uncommon depravity. His prosecuting a hybrid war during a public health crisis speaks to no other conclusion about him.

    It's clear to me that nothing has changed at the top of Trump's administration. I expect COVID-19 will not be a disaster for Trump and the US. It can handle this. But the lack of humanity shown by its diplomatic corps ensures that in the long run the US will be left to fend for itself when the next crisis hits.

    Reprinted with permission from Strategic Culture Foundation .


    Related

    [Mar 24, 2020] A key element of coalition building is having a common enemy.

    Mar 24, 2020 | www.unz.com

    Divine Right , says: Show Comment March 24, 2020 at 6:49 am GMT

    @TheTotallyAnonymous

    the scenario that China and Russia become extremely hostile with each other in the near future (possibly even distant future) is extremely unlikely

    I don't believe this is as unlikely as some might think, although not in a way most would expect. And changing demographics in the United States could be a key catalyst in such a turn of events. To clarify, I don't think there will be an overtly anti-Russian sentiment running through mainland China in the near future, but I could see ethnic Asian -- particularly Chinese -- demographics in the United States turning that country against Russia, and later the whole of Europe, as a means of deflecting away from the CCP globally and ethnic Chinese domestically.

    Much of the current anti-Russian sentiment promoted by the left is just thinly veiled anti-white animus. A key element of coalition building is having a common enemy. The common enemy of POC is the white American demographic. Russia is the ruling class's whipping boy, a stand in for their white Christian domestic rivals. That's why you see racist identitarians like the South African Trevor Noah obsessing about Russia and Putin even though neither has anything to do with any American's living standard (and never mind the hypocrisy of having so many autocratic non-white allies -- a fact which is strangely omitted from their rhetoric about Russian strongmen).

    When considering past conflicts, most people falsely assume there wasn't a more base motive -- ethnic antipathy. Children in the United States, for instance, are taught that their country entered the Second World War because Hitler was bad and the imperial Japanese were bad. Perhaps, but that isn't really the true reason. The United States government and significant portions of the population lobbied for entry into both world wars due mostly to ethnic allegiances; Britain spoke English and so did an American white population descended largely from that same group. It's not a coincidence that the most anti-war sections of the country were also the most German. Charles Lindbergh, a noted anti-war celebrity, was German, IIRC; Jewish activists have spent decades trying to destroy his image.

    It's also probably not a coincidence that many Americans who opposed entry into these wars were fairly recent descendants of ethnic groups with a history of anti-Anglo sentiment. FDR's Irish ambassador, for example, to the Court of St. James's made it clear to the British Royal Family that the American public opposed entry into the war (true, but the government was working hard behind the scenes to make it happen). An enraged WASP FDR eventually sacked him. In that light, it's not inconceivable to think that had the U.S. accepted 2 or 3 times the number of German and Irish immigrants the country might have remained neutral or even joined the Axis. In contrast, the strongest supporters of these wars were WASP celebrities, politicians, and voting demographics.

    In the present, the U.S. supports Israel mainly because it has a powerful Jewish lobby that influences it to do so, even against its wider interests. The same is true of Cuba where the country sacrifices its national image in order to appeal to a small demographic of Cuban expats in southern Florida. Over in Europe, the UK -- flooded with Indian immigrants -- is now unnaturally friendly to India, even reorienting its recent domestic culture to include far more Indian history, subjects, and characters in shows like Dr. Who (a show that now no longer has a traditional Christmas episode as it went POC woke). Demography is destiny, it would seem. Immigration without assimilation is equivalent to conquest.

    Polls in the United States show Asians have the most positive opinion of the Chinese government by a fairly wide margin, and there have been numerous stories lately of Chinese ethnics protesting in favor of the interests of that country -- against the Hong Kong protests (Disney's Mulan actress, a nationalized American), against college events and monuments they deem against China, and against any description of corona as a "China virus", not that I endorse the description myself. Other demographics show a more mixed opinion. Regardless, I expect there will continue to be a steady flow of Asian immigrants to the United States with predictable consequences.

    I think it is possible that the American system could be co-opted with a concerted effort and repurposed to serve the interests of China, an effective coup similar to Israel's domination of the current establishment by means of diaspora activists. A few diversity programs, a set of prominent politicians, some money thrown around, the founding and infiltration of a few lobby groups, and a few unscrupulous people put in charge of the entertainment and news industries could see a situation where sympathetic Chinese ethnics seize control. We've already seen this several times before in United States history -- protestant then catholic then Jewish. And with few common bonds or any sense of patriotism left to deter such a thing*, this will be all the easier. Consider the recent mass arrests of American academics found to be working for the Chinese government. It was stunning, really.

    In such an event, you'll likely see coalition building against the white demographic by domestic Asian-led minority groups. This will also apply to alliances involving other countries and demographics -- all in an effort to deflect from China and Asians domestically while enhancing their power. This will involve the promotion of various propaganda and even extend to rewriting history. The media will demonize Russia and then Europe. They'll employ rhetoric involving colonialism and various events from European history, such as the Inquisition, to attack Europeans and ally rival racial groups against them for personal gain.

    Jews did something similar previously; they were at the forefront of "civil rights" in the United States and immigration reforms aimed at weakening the electoral strength of their WASP rivals. They've also rewritten history to paint themselves and their allies as the victims of their ethnic rival's hateful machinations -- continually digging up and exaggerating past events. For instance (one among many), you're told as an American that anti-Semitic Southerners murdered an innocent Jewish Leo Frank because they hated Jews for no reason. What you won't be told (because Jewish groups have banned the book that told the tale from Amazon) is that Jews in the South were generally well integrated and not persecuted to any real extent. The same book I'm referencing has tables of prominent Jewish politicians in the South and corrected much of the propaganda surrounding Frank's trial. Why would the history books lie about such a thing? Easy, because the people who wrote them saw the trial as an opportunity to build an inroad with the black demographic against the common enemy, white Christians. **

    Unz has an article on the Leo Frank trial if you're interested. It's worth a read. If anything, it understates the evidence presented in the book as it is quite compelling. No wonder Amazon banned it. BTW, the book does not promote violence, so there was no legitimate reason to ban it other than the fact that it damaged domestic Jewish ethnic interests.

    You've already seen some of this deflection in the democratic presidential primary debates with candidate Andrew Yang, an ethnic Chinese. He claimed in the second debate that Russia was the nation's greatest threat. That's nonsense. China in the near future will easily be 10x the strategic, economic and cultural competitor that Russia will ever be. It was an obvious and uncomfortable deflection away from his ethnic group to another. Expect that trend to potentially accelerate after the democrats seize permanent control of the government and ruling class sometime after 2020. What mechanism is there to stop them?

    I know Anatoly has speculated that the current China / USA rivalry is likely now permanent, but I don't see it that way. The democrats have repeatedly signaled a willingness to go back to business as usual. In the second democratic debate last year, nearly all the candidates opposed trade tariffs on China and deflected away to Russia on foreign policy. These people have one loyalty -- to their bank accounts. I expect the Democrats, spurred on by a donor class that shares practically no loyalty to the working class, to largely reverse the tensions Trump has ratcheted up. That means more economic policies that enrich the corrupt ruling class to the nation's geopolitical detriment -- more outsourcing, and particularly in critical industries that relate to national defense and the economy *** .

    The Chinese could easily exploit this vulnerability to affect a coup against their main rival. Perhaps there will be a counter-coup before 2040 or so by the American military to prevent this, but I think that is unlikely considering just how corrupt, inept, and politically correct it is.

    *Unlike other countries quarantined under Corona, the US has seen no similar patriotic singing or the like. A few celebrities tried creating a viral moment by posting themselves singing a classic John Lennon song, but it was widely mocked. The media has used every opportunity to undermine their implied ethnic enemies, the white republicans. The democrats are busy stuffing the aid bill with giveaways to their ethnic coalition like "diversity" requirements from companies in exchange for aid. The United States is a fragile domestic empire filled with various groups having practically no loyalty to each other and who take every opportunity to screw the other side over. Even in a time of relative crisis, they couldn't come together. It will only get worse.

    ** For a glimpse of the future, consider the extraordinary number of holocaust movies and books, along with media, depicting whites and their history as bad. I couldn't even begin to list it all here. It's extraordinary, and it disproportionately comes from the usual demographics.

    *** The United States is currently beholden to China for much of its pharmaceuticals, almost all the rare earth elements used in its tech industry, and many of the chemicals used in its military machine -- 100% in some cases. If a war starts in the near future, the U.S. will find that it has so many shortages that it cannot be sustained. They will lose or give up. What will the democrats do about this? Probably nothing. Only under Trump has the U.S. funded domestic rare earth mining efforts to create an alternate supply chain, but that effort could easily be shelved in the next Biden administration. The man has already proved himself corrupt over the years by receiving large amounts of corporate campaign contributions and being connected to shady Ukraine deals.

    Daniel Chieh , says: Show Comment March 24, 2020 at 1:21 pm GMT
    @Divine Right American conflicts with Russia are based partly on self-serving fictions of the military industrial complex that need an enemy for their continued existence, as well as some more realistic conflicts involving Eastern Europe and rival interests over oil prices. The US need for hegemony, which is highly tied to the value of the dollar as a reserve currency, further thrusts this forward and center(and indeed, into conflict with China as well). This all is interminged with a generalized rejection of "authoritarian" governments.

    China, on the other hand, has no real current conflicts with Russia – most conflicts involve sales of weaponry and political influence over central Asian states, nothing of vast importance at least compared to being their the target of an enormous world-spanning sanctions order or a dedicated trade war.

    Your argument has the weird self-contradiction that the CCP both is supposedly the mind-controlling alien brain of all Asians, while at the same time, not actually benefiting from any specific conflict with Russia. This also ignores the fact that Asians tend to assimilate the highest by any population(at nearly 40% intermarriage in some segments, that Chinese students in particularly no longer tend to stay in the US( only 20% by 2017 ), and that a overwhelming part of the demographic increase by immigration is Indian with long historical and cultural rivalries with China. And far more than Chinese Americans, who often engage in racial masochism(witness Gordan Chang ), Indian Americans are vastly more active and influential in American politics both due to cultural reasons as well as higher verbal IQ. This isn't even hypothetical: Indian American political writers dominate National Interest articles stressing for more hawkish Chinese attitudes and were directly contributory to renaming the South China Seas conflict to the "Indo-Pacific region."

    I do agree that the US has long since crippled its resource base. But there's no evidence that Trump, or anyone else, is demonstrating the barest inkling of trying to resolve it(or that it is even possible, given the bueaucratic overload and red tape of regulations). Gould once described evolution as a "drunkard's walk" between complexity, where organisms sometimes fall trapped inside rail tracks, unable to stumble out.

    The US seems well trapped in its rail tracks.

    Blinky Bill , says: Show Comment March 24, 2020 at 2:35 pm GMT
    @Daniel Chieh

    Indian American political writers dominate National Interest articles stressing for more hawkish Chinese attitudes and were directly contributory to renaming the South China Seas conflict to the "Indo-Pacific region."

    Prime example Saagar Enjeti.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/vkqq74knVXM?feature=oembed

    [Mar 24, 2020] With the neocon foreign policy of "full Spectrum Dominance" the USA seems well trapped in its rail tracks

    Mar 24, 2020 | www.unz.com

    Daniel Chieh , says: Show Comment March 24, 2020 at 1:21 pm GMT

    @Divine Right American conflicts with Russia are based partly on self-serving fictions of the military industrial complex that need an enemy for their continued existence, as well as some more realistic conflicts involving Eastern Europe and rival interests over oil prices. The US need for hegemony, which is highly tied to the value of the dollar as a reserve currency, further thrusts this forward and center(and indeed, into conflict with China as well). This all is intermingled with a [fake and hypocritical] generalized rejection of "authoritarian" governments.

    China, on the other hand, has no real current conflicts with Russia – most conflicts involve sales of weaponry and political influence over central Asian states, nothing of vast importance at least compared to being their the target of an enormous world-spanning sanctions order or a dedicated trade war.

    Your argument has the weird self-contradiction that the CCP both is supposedly the mind-controlling alien brain of all Asians, while at the same time, not actually benefiting from any specific conflict with Russia. This also ignores the fact that Asians tend to assimilate the highest by any population(at nearly 40% intermarriage in some segments, that Chinese students in particularly no longer tend to stay in the US( only 20% by 2017 ), and that a overwhelming part of the demographic increase by immigration is Indian with long historical and cultural rivalries with China. And far more than Chinese Americans, who often engage in racial masochism(witness Gordan Chang ), Indian Americans are vastly more active and influential in American politics both due to cultural reasons as well as higher verbal IQ. This isn't even hypothetical: Indian American political writers dominate National Interest articles stressing for more hawkish Chinese attitudes and were directly contributory to renaming the South China Seas conflict to the "Indo-Pacific region."

    I do agree that the US has long since crippled its resource base. But there's no evidence that Trump, or anyone else, is demonstrating the barest inkling of trying to resolve it(or that it is even possible, given the bueaucratic overload and red tape of regulations). Gould once described evolution as a "drunkard's walk" between complexity, where organisms sometimes fall trapped inside rail tracks, unable to stumble out.

    The US seems well trapped in its rail tracks.

    Blinky Bill , says: Show Comment March 24, 2020 at 2:35 pm GMT
    @Daniel Chieh

    Indian American political writers dominate National Interest articles stressing for more hawkish Chinese attitudes and were directly contributory to renaming the South China Seas conflict to the "Indo-Pacific region."

    Prime example Saagar Enjeti.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/vkqq74knVXM?feature=oembed

    neutral , says: Show Comment March 24, 2020 at 3:25 pm GMT
    @Blinky Bill This is just further proof that there is a growing Indian problem in America.

    [Mar 24, 2020] This weaponizing of random indignation is a classic tool of the Western propaganda

    Highly recommended!
    Mar 24, 2020 | www.unz.com

    Dacian Julien Soros , says: Show Comment March 22, 2020 at 2:54 pm GMT

    This weaponizing of random indignation is a classic tool of the Western propaganda. In Romania, we heard for a decade how the national-populists masquerading as socialists are to blame for the lack of highways. It's been a few years since idiot Romanians gather in random cities to complain that their city is not yet hooked to the Austro-Hungarian highway system, despite the lack of traffic between their city and Austro-Hungary.

    It is my understanding that, once highway construction will start, there will be protests about natural or archeological treasures presumably endangered by the construction. It has been decently working in Russia, with that Khimki forest.

    Anything that can be thrown at a government threatening to leave the NWO will be used. It's even worse for governments that are already one foot out, like Russia / China, or completely out, like Iran / North Korea. Putin will be blamed for epidemics, earthquakes, tsunamis, and even eclipses. If an earthquake would kill only a few, we will hear about "failure to respond". If the earthquake doesn't kill anybody. we will be told that Putin exploited it for propaganda.

    One of the ways that CIA and Soros use, in order to weaponize Romania's presumed lack of highways, is to pay some useful idiots, who call themselves "The Association for the Betterment of Highways", "The Pro-Infrastructura Brigade", and so on. Most of these NGOs consist of a single person, who posts videos of them ranting next to a construction site. Using the model that BoJo used for the upcoming marriage (three men and one dog), the more Soros/CIA-resistant types call them "The One-Incel-And-His-Drone Association".

    By that same standard, I suspect we call this Doctors' Alliance "Vasilievna-and-her-thermometer Association". Whatever she says about Moscow hospitals is probably informed by her thermometer anyway. I doubt you can tell how things are in a 10-million city, especially if you are a marginal clown.

    Is she an ophthalmologist, like The Part-Time Virologist Martyr of Wuhan? Dentist, perhaps?

    [Mar 24, 2020] Trump owns hotels and casinos which will be devastated. that might explain his position on the virus and initial downplaying of the danger

    Mar 24, 2020 | www.unz.com

    Tor597 , says: Show Comment March 22, 2020 at 3:30 pm GMT

    Actually, Trump was downplaying Corona Virus as late as March 9th.

    https://mobile.twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1237027356314869761

    One thing I think played a role that is not mentioned is Trumps business that he owns. He owns hotels and casinos which will be devastated. Trump wont rule out government assistance for himself.

    For Trump to shut down the economy and produce an effective containment, he would have had to do this knowing that his own business would be devastated.

    https://mol.im/a/8138335

    [Mar 24, 2020] Western Journalists Really Want There to be a Huge Corona Epidemic in Russia by Anatoly Karlin

    Mar 24, 2020 | www.unz.com

    The stream of articles suggesting that Russia is covering up its Corona numbers has increased from a stream to a veritable flood:

    Russia's coronavirus count under scrutiny as Putin government denies hiding cases Moscow Times: Russia Says It Has Very Few Coronavirus Cases. The Numbers Don't Tell the Full Story. Reuters: Sharp increase in Moscow pneumonia cases fuels fears over coronavirus statistics Business Insider: Doctors in Russia are accusing the government of covering up its coronavirus outbreak and denying them protective equipment CNN: Why does Russia, population 146 million, have fewer coronavirus cases than Luxembourg? Financial Times: Vladimir Putin keeps political plan on track despite virus crisis

    Let's take a look at that last article , written by FT's Henry Foy today, and one of the more balanced (read: less PDS-afflicted) journalists doing the Russia beat (not to mention the most prominent in the above sample, having scored an exclusive interview with Putin in 2019).

    "The present number of patients with coronavirus will be hidden from us," said Anastasia Vasilieva, chairman of Doctors' Alliance, a Russian lobby group affiliated with opposition politician Alexei Navalny.

    Now Foy, to his credit, at least has the journalistic integrity to acknowledge that this doctors' group (which I have never heard of before now) is affiliated with Navalny, whose entire shtick is to oppose everything and anything the Kremlin does.

    A political tilt that its chairwoman helpfully confirms:

    "The value of human life for our president is nil . . . We don't want to admit to any pandemic," said Ms Vasilieva. "We know of hospitals that are completely full and nurses who are asked to sew face masks from gauze."

    ***

    But otherwise it follows the usual template on Russia COVID-19 coverage.

    She claimed Moscow was instead classifying cases of the virus as pneumonia, the incidence of which increased by almost 40 per cent in January compared with a year previously, government data showed.

    The aim here is to insinuate that there was a raging coronavirus epidemic camouflaged as the flu from as early as January 2020.

    Oh Corona, where to start.

    1. Flu mortality fluctuates wildly season to season by a factor of as high as 4x . So this is a perfectly meaningless fact from the outset.

    2. Even China's epidemic only broke 1,000 cases in January 25. Where were Russians getting infected??

    3. If this was true, it is Russia, not Italy, that would be the center of the COVID-19 epidemic now -- something that would certainly be noticed, e.g. in overflowing hospitals (no sign of that to date) or in exported cases (but that was all China in February, and predominantly Italy, Iran, and other EU nations now). It is Britons that Vietnam has started barring ten days ago, not Russians.

    Here's what I guess happened. People got agitated by reports from China, and were more likely to consult doctors, producing more flu diagnoses. Even though the actual chance of Russians having COVID-19 in January if they hadn't been to Wuhan was on the order of a meteorite hitting them on the head.

    While other foreign leaders have steeled their citizens for a long crisis and have spoken of a "war" against the pandemic, Mr Putin has played down the threat and urged citizens to remain calm in an effort to minimise panic -- and ensure the nationwide ballot on April 22 takes place.

    "The virus is a challenge and comes at a very bad moment for him," said Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of R. Politik, a political analyst. "Putin doesn't want to postpone and is insisting that the referendum takes place as soon as possible . . . The longer they wait, the more risks will appear."

    LOL. Trump was saying Corona was fake news/nothingburger up until the end of February.

    The US epidemic (22k cases) is about two orders of magnitude more advanced than Russia's (306 cases), but most states have continued to hold primaries for the Dem nomination.

    And in any case Putin has allowed the possibility that the April 22 Constitutional Referendum may be postponed. There's no indication it's a hard, immovable date.

    At the same time, Mr Putin has sought to project an image of control, continuing with his diary of local visits and meetings with senior officials, shaking hands and never wearing a face mask.

    Although it would be nice for Putin to set a better example, this is the rule, internationally -- not the exception. Stressing this is so petty, LOL.

    "No matter what happens in the next 35 days, they have to lie, hush up, and deny. It doesn't matter at all what really will happen to coronavirus in Russia, whether there will be a moderate outbreak or tens of thousands are killed," said Igor Pitsyn, a doctor in Yaroslavl, a city 250km north-east of Moscow.

    "By Putin's decree all information about this is declared a state secret until April 22 . . . This 'nationwide vote' will be held at all costs."

    First time I hear of this. Searching "путин коронавирус гостайна" doesn't produce any relevant results. This doctor must have some very high placed sources.

    Or perhaps Foy had to travel all the way to Yaroslavl to get a sufficiently juicy quote.

    While officials have cited the low number as proof of the success of swiftly closing its border with China in January and steadily cutting flights to affected countries, experts have questioned how the country has proved far more immune than almost any other. Neighbouring Belarus has five times more infections per capita than Russia, and France, which has roughly half Russia's population, has more than 50 times the number of cases.

    Russia doesn't have large numbers of Gastarbeiters in the EU, unlike Belarus. Our Belorussian commenters also tell us that there are next to no control measures in place.

    But Ukraine has perhaps 20x more Gastarbeiters in the EU than Belarus, and yet 2 days ago reported only 1/3 as many Corona cases (16 vs. 51). Which suggests where Western journalists covering Eastern Europe should really focus their attention .

    If they, you know, cared about the Corona situation in Eastern Europe. As opposed to promoting the US line that Russia bad and China bad.

    ***

    Incidentally, an update on Ukraine, two days after my alarm-raising article , in which I suggested that it's likely there's a big cluster developing undetected in Ukraine.

    Even though testing in Ukraine remains extremely patchy -- even in per capita terms, its ~500 tests are two orders of magnitude lower than Russia's ~150k, or for that matter Belarus' ~16k -- the past two days have seen a surge of new cases from 16 to 41. The majority of those cases, some 25 of them, are concentrated in Chernivtsi oblast, which also saw the death of a 33 year old woman from existing problems magnified by the coronavirus.

    The unlikelihood of such a mortality profile, coupled with the flood of new cases despite continued low testing rates, strongly suggests that this is just the tip of the iceberg, and that a cluster is developing in Chernivtsi oblast.

    This suggestion is backed up by an observation by Twitter user from_kherson :

    There's a reason Chernivtsi has so many cases -- large # of people go to Italy for work.

    An acquaintance of mine from there confirmed his business partner just tested positive for the virus.

    But just in case you think I am piling on to Ukraine because of my own political obsessions you would be mistaken.

    I will say that after Ukraine, probably the second biggest undetected Corona timebomb in Europe may be Serbia. Unfortunately, the Wikipedia page on COVID-19 testing doesn't have information for Serbia. However, one of my Serbian friends on Thursday wrote me that:

    We are still testing around 50 per day, with 1/5 being positive

    So both the intensity of testing and the rate of positives is similar to Ukraine.

    This Friday, he continued:

    We still have competent health care workers (the decision not to test the wider population is purely political, as was the decision no to close schools until 5 days ago), relatively functioning health care system, about 1500 respirators on a population that is 7+ million.

    On the other hand, we have the second lowest reported total test volume anywhere in the world, after Malorossiya :), at 545 total as of this morning, one of the highest positive rates per 1000 tests (after Italy, Spain, Ecuador and the Philippines). We have seen an influx of over 250 000 gastarbeiters from Western Europe in the past 10 days Many people are breaking the 14 day mandatory self isolation. When I say many, I'm talking about thousands every day

    We have 3 things potentially on our side. God, warmth, and Sun. Or it's all just God?

    And to think that Serbia was one of the first countries in the world to eradicate smallpox in the 1830s Under the lifelong illiterate knyaz Miloš

    The large number of Gastarbeiters in Western Europe, most of whom are now going to be let go, is another similarity that Serbia shares with Ukraine. And is something that will be a very problematic issue going forwards.

    Fortunately, it appears that China (and Russia ) are going to bail Serbia out with test kits.

    Extraordinary address the president of Serbia, the largest #EU membership candidate now banned from importing medical kit. "European solidarity does not exist. It was a fairy-tale the only country who can help us out of this difficult situation is China." #coronavirus https://t.co/JTbtPCS6NK 

    -- Bojan Pancevski (@bopanc) March 16, 2020

    Despite their rather different geopolitical viewpoints, European attitudes to both Serbia and the Ukraine are quite similar. They are to be exploited to the extent they are useful; otherwise discarded as needed. It's a lesson they should mull over.


    Dmitry , says: Show Comment March 21, 2020 at 11:11 pm GMT

    Why are you sensitive about what some article said in an American newspaper about Russia? Who cares? Half of articles in Russian websites are often ten times more stupid than even articles in American websites (which are already stupid), and people in America don't care about that.

    Also, I read only CNN's article on the topic, and I notice it follows the pattern that CNN report more accurately outside America, than they do in America. I.e. They are more objective (like most people) writing about things which are far away from them
    https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/21/europe/putin-coronavirus-russia-intl/index.html

    Felix Keverich , says: Show Comment March 21, 2020 at 11:37 pm GMT

    Business Insider: Doctors in Russia are accusing the government of covering up its coronavirus outbreak and denying them protective equipment

    I have to say that on reddit this kind of conspiratorial crap gets a LOT of interest and upvotes, an order of magnitude more upvotes than the factual Russian news. It seems that a large chunk of Western public feels better about themselves and their situation, "knowing" that there is terrible epidemic going on in Russia.

    So these articles are actually having therapeutic effect on Western societies: ordinary people in West take comfort in [imaginary] Russian suffering.

    Dmitry , says: Show Comment March 21, 2020 at 11:40 pm GMT
    Serbia and Ukraine should have less developed epidemic of coronavirus, compared to most European countries, as they are one of the minority of European countries which is not in the EU.

    As a result, they should have less per capita connectivity to Northern Italy, that is the "staging point" for the coronavirus epidemic's invasion into Europe.

    Well, perhaps I am wrong about Serbia, as it is a neighbouring country to Italy. But the EU has a very intense labour mobility and incredibly amount of flights between themselves, if we would look at flightradar on a normal week.

    Of course, now flightradar is pretty crazy and not quite representative of last month. https://www.flightradar24.com/59.77,29.75/8

    But EU is still covered by flights. While planes are generally avoiding Serbia and Ukraine. Russia is almost disconnected from Europe now by planes (except for cargo planes). However, even in normal, pre-Coronavirus times, Russia (as well as Ukraine) is far more disconnected than any EU country, and is never blanketed by flights on flightradar in the same way as Europe.

    Perhaps Serbia still receives a lot of entry by people in buses and cars.

    Aedib , says: Show Comment March 22, 2020 at 12:24 am GMT
    Wishing the virus to hit hard Russia is a way Westerners try to cover their incompetence. There is an explosion of new cases in the USA but the American MSM keeps its Russophobe obsession.

    Today new cases in USA reached the numbers of Italy

    Mikhail , says: Website Show Comment March 22, 2020 at 12:36 am GMT
    @Anatoly Karlin From the MSN homepage:

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/why-does-russia-population-144-million-have-fewer-coronavirus-cases-than-luxembourg/ar-BB11vhDw?li=BBnb7Kz

    Mikhail , says: Website Show Comment March 22, 2020 at 12:47 am GMT
    In line:

    https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/coronavirus-coming-russia-134797

    Not among the worst:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/world/europe/russia-coronavirus-covid-19.html

    utu , says: Show Comment March 22, 2020 at 4:35 am GMT
    https://www.rt.com/russia/483744-russia-doctor-coronavirus-holiday/
    " A leading infectious diseases specialist in Russia's southern Stavropol region endangered the lives of dozens of her colleagues and students by failing to self-quarantine after a holiday in Spain, where she contracted coronavirus."
    last straw , says: Show Comment March 22, 2020 at 4:41 am GMT
    I think some Western journalists also want to see a second wave in China/Asia.
    JimDandy , says: Show Comment March 22, 2020 at 4:57 am GMT
    Just read the headline and thought, "Western journalists really want there to be a huge corona epidemic in America ."

    We all remember Bill Maher, to his credit, admitting to wanting what so many Progressives pray for -- a brutal recession that would sink Tump's chances of reelection -- but I am continually astounded by the fact that the MSM's hysterical, cult-like fervor for destroying Trump, even to the tragic detriment of the American people, simply will not exhaust itself. It is, if you will, a virus that keeps mutating into more and more virulent strains.

    I think American-journalist-as-suicide-bomber is the number one potential threat to the United States, and preventing this should be the FBI's number one priority. Thx.

    Alfa158 , says: Show Comment March 22, 2020 at 7:33 am GMT
    @yakushimaru The Chinese economy has at least one good thing going for it. They are the world's manufacturing floor. Ultimately they can still make things unlike the US which has hollowed itself out. Refilling the world supply chain gives them an advantage in recovering faster than the US will.
    JL , says: Show Comment March 22, 2020 at 8:04 am GMT
    @Dmitry Don't be silly, there are entire organizations in the West dedicated to fact checking Russian news agencies and publishing their mistakes. So Anatoly's counterparts in the West do seem to care, they seem to care very much. Furthermore, there is the asymmetry between the geopolitical power of the two countries which makes what Americans write about Russia much more important than the inverse.

    AK has been covering this topic for years, so it may not be interesting to you, but it is to him. And we come here, partly, because he writes about what he wants to, not what others want him to. You, yourself, pointed this out.

    Realist , says: Show Comment March 22, 2020 at 11:33 am GMT

    Western Journalists Really Want There to be a Huge Corona Epidemic in Russia

    Correction: The Deep State Really Want There to be a Huge Corona Epidemic in Russia and China.

    Beckow , says: Show Comment March 22, 2020 at 12:07 pm GMT
    Western media openly wishing that a plague strikes Russia is very low class. It has a minor therapeutic role for the West to show that the evil ones are also suffering. But it is basically a continuing descent into hysteria. Next we will hear that Putin was spotted poisoning wells in Italy. (Sneaky bastard, probably used a face-mask, he is after all a trained KGB spy.)

    Regarding facts: it is a truism that all numbers are understated. There must be at this point millions of people around the world who have been exposed and most will never know about it. Corona hurts the old and the sick, most other people probably wouldn't know it was happening without the media. In a preventive way it might actually benefit young, healthy people to be exposed when their bodies can develop immunity -- you don't in general get the same virus twice.

    But a decision was made to protect our elders and it is a humane thing to do. And the usual suspects can't avoid their low class ideological manias, attacking China, Russia and/or Trump. These days they mostly work in the Western media. One wonders how that happened.

    LondonBob , says: Show Comment March 22, 2020 at 12:16 pm GMT
    @Aedib That Russia proves, like China, to be more competent again is another nail in the coffin for the ruling sixties liberal ideology.
    Realist , says: Show Comment March 22, 2020 at 12:50 pm GMT
    @LondonBob Another excellent article by Caitlin Johnstone.

    https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/liberal-npcs-hate-russia-conservative-npcs-hate-china-9b4ac2f853

    Ms Karlin-Gerard , says: Show Comment March 22, 2020 at 1:50 pm GMT
    @utu This was actually going to be the subject of my next post. She is the chief infectious disease doctor for Stavropol!

    She went to Madrid , from March 6th- March 9th- the exact period when cases in Spain started ballooning up (420 went to 1200)

    She has infected 11 other people, at least, in Stavropol and also taken part in a conference there where about 1000 people attended.

    I don't know if it was definitely a holiday -- sure, those are weekend dates and Madrid is a wonderful place but infections there then still exceeded
    the number in Russia now.

    Dacian Julien Soros , says: Show Comment March 22, 2020 at 2:54 pm GMT
    This weaponizing of random indignation is a classic tool of the Western propaganda. In Romania, we heard for a decade how the national-populists masquerading as socialists are to blame for the lack of highways. It's been a few years since idiot Romanians gather in random cities to complain that their city is not yet hooked to the Austro-Hungarian highway system, despite the lack of traffic between their city and Austro-Hungary.

    It is my understanding that, once highway construction will start, there will be protests about natural or archeological treasures presumably endangered by the construction. It has been decently working in Russia, with that Khimki forest.

    Anything that can be thrown at a government threatening to leave the NWO will be used. It's even worse for governments that are already one foot out, like Russia / China, or completely out, like Iran / North Korea. Putin will be blamed for epidemics, earthquakes, tsunamis, and even eclipses. If an earthquake would kill only a few, we will hear about "failure to respond". If the earthquake doesn't kill anybody. we will be told that Putin exploited it for propaganda.

    One of the ways that CIA and Soros use, in order to weaponize Romania's presumed lack of highways, is to pay some useful idiots, who call themselves "The Association for the Betterment of Highways", "The Pro-Infrastructura Brigade", and so on. Most of these NGOs consist of a single person, who posts videos of them ranting next to a construction site. Using the model that BoJo used for the upcoming marriage (three men and one dog), the more Soros/CIA-resistant types call them "The One-Incel-And-His-Drone Association".

    By that same standard, I suspect we call this Doctors' Alliance "Vasilievna-and-her-thermometer Association". Whatever she says about Moscow hospitals is probably informed by her thermometer anyway. I doubt you can tell how things are in a 10-million city, especially if you are a marginal clown.

    Is she an ophthalmologist, like The Part-Time Virologist Martyr of Wuhan? Dentist, perhaps?

    [Mar 22, 2020] Best Coronavirus Trump Statements Timeline Synopsis Ever Put Together

    1 minute 22 second video with Trump statements in chonological order @ https://twitter.com/i/videos/tweet/1240985096838053889
    There is a saying the you fight the war with the army you have, not with the army you want.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Ok. Let me start by stating that I am not a "staunch" Trump supporter. However, I just really despise the constant visceral negative, hatred towards our Country's President. ..."
    "... As I am sure you are aware, it is a tremendously difficult job, especially in today's crisis. I would think it would be better serve of your time and efforts to be constructive and optimistic, and hopeful. Rather than pinpointed every single steps and missteps he makes. He is certainly no perfect - but his goal is the same as all of ours: to defeat this virus in the best manner possible with the resources available. ..."
    "... For the entire Trump Presidency it was all about the stock market. So, here we are. ..."
    Mar 22, 2020 | moneymaven.io

    Please play this.

    Anthony Scaramucci @Scaramucci

    I hope this is played everyday everywhere until Nov 8. Unless ⁦ @ realDonaldTrump ⁩ resigns as he should immediately.

    https://twitter.com/i/videos/tweet/1240985096838053889

    35.6K 8:54 AM - Mar 20, 2020 Twitter Ads info and privacy

    23.6K people are talking about this

    Mish

    20 hours ago Here is a 1 minute 22 second video timeline of Trump's amazing handling of the coronavirus.

    Please play this.

    It will take less than two minutes of your time.

    One missing key quote is a statement Trump made bragging about having natural talent coupled with a proclamation that he could have been a scientist instead of president.

    More Questions:

    Mike "Mish" Shedlock

    njbr 20 hrs

    The dumb-asses in DC still don't get it. "Top" leaders crowding around a single microphone in a stage no larger than a public restroom. Working toward a 1 time $1200 check that probably wont be issued/delivered for another couple weeks. What about the weeks after that--are they going to spend the next couple weeks going around about the next check?? Has the production of ventilators actually been accelerated-who could tell from what has been said? Why are nurses and doctors in my area asking the public for donations of PPE at the very beginning of the serious phase? What happens when the doctors and nurses start tipping over? Two partially ready hospital ships may help in one spot each on the coast, but what about everywhere else? Has anyone even checked on the production capacity for the maybe helpful malaria medicine--has anyone been directed to begin proactive super-production of this product? On and on.

    DeeDee3 20 hrs

    hard to prove deliberate neglect when you eliminate all of the evidence. No testing means "no virus" and sadly supported the hoax theory.

    Another doc died in the city today. ER's are unprotected. what conclusion can we draw from all of this?

    Zardoz 20 hrs

    Thousands will die because of his incompetence... and his followers will blame the Chinese

    egilkinc 20 hrs

    There should be a tracker of the number of cases [among medical personnle] in the US along with this

    Sechel 20 hrs

    Oh my g-d. This is excellent! I think Trump has learned some bad lessons from Goebbels. Repeat the lie and repeat it often and people will take your version of events. This really serves to correct the record! Good work!

    PecuniaNonOlet 20 hrs

    And yet there will be an avalanche of Trump supporters defending the idiot. It is truly beyond me.

    michiganmoon 20 hrs

    Actually, Trump should resign and give the GOP a chance this November.

    Had Trump not downplayed this and had tests ready, he could have played on a loop Biden on January 31st saying travel restrictions from Wuhan were racist and xenophobic.

    thesaint0013 20 hrs

    Ok. Let me start by stating that I am not a "staunch" Trump supporter. However, I just really despise the constant visceral negative, hatred towards our Country's President.

    As I am sure you are aware, it is a tremendously difficult job, especially in today's crisis. I would think it would be better serve of your time and efforts to be constructive and optimistic, and hopeful. Rather than pinpointed every single steps and missteps he makes. He is certainly no perfect - but his goal is the same as all of ours: to defeat this virus in the best manner possible with the resources available.

    To criticize previous tweets, interviews, and depict his flaws and errors does not help the common goal. The nature of some of the questions posed to him during the press conferences should be a bit more respectful and again, it doesn't serve any positive outcome to try and "catch" him in a lie, and how he may have said something that was not factual or false.

    Again, he's not perfect and neither are anyone of us. However he is our President and we should support his and all of our common goal to defeat this virus.

    Russell J 20 hrs

    Not making excuses for Trump at all but he/we have people who are specialists and are responsible for being ready at all times for something like this and are responsible for being on the look out for this. Somebody should have came forward, even as a whistleblower. I've been aware for about 2 months now.

    Thank you WWW.PEAKPROSPERITY.COM, MISH and WWW.ZEROHEDGE.COM

    This was an epic failure of Trump, his administration and America in general.

    ghoffa 20 hrs

    Hi,
    @MishTalk @Mish
    I wanted to sincerely thank you MISH from my whole extended family. I have been reading you since 2007 when Ron Paul removed the scales from my eyes on the Fed and govt., Jekyll Island book, the "financial markets" (all modern day money changers). Every picture I see of Fed chairpersons, their eyes look dead black sharks eyes (to quote a famous book which I subscribe, the eyes are the windows to the soul).

    In addition our mob style duolopoly govt and for the most part complicit MSM (all with significant influencing billionaire ownership to control the news - easily searched). I've learned so much from this blog and the many commentors in this space ( a personal fav is @Stuki ) . Nothing short of brilliant and reminds me of my fav news source Zerohedge and it's articles and commentors.

    A special thanks for pointing us to Chris Martenson (peakprosperity.com) as my wife and I have watched every day his free daily videos since JAN @24th and our extended family is as prepared as we can be. God help us all with what's coming.

    For those who haven't watched it, Dr. Martenson has a great 3 min video on exponential growth on YTube. Search his name and exponential. It will help you prepare for what our govt knows is coming in enourmous exponential growth in fatalities. Even knowing, it will be an emotional thing to prepare for. Prepping home supplies is one thing, prepping emotionally is also important per Dr. Martenson. HCWs be damned.

    As this impacts people personally, I expect insider leaks to come from many fronts. We're working with neighbors to get prepared as we're all on our own now as the money changers (evil) bail out the money changers (evil) amidst a system that is so debt leveraged it can't likely be bailed out. "everything's a nail and the Fed has a hammer".

    Lastly this brings a famous quote to mind as the people rise up against corrupt govt, corp bailouts after stock buy backs, etc. Let alone the monsters upon monsters creating lab viruses (regardless of the source of this virus), and unregulated GMOs changing the fabric of life.....

    "All it takes for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing". Margaret Mead
    G

    QE2Infinity 20 hrs

    Come on! First off, anyone can be made to look bad by taking snippets out of context and stringing them together. That said, Trump does tend towards braggadocio. If that is off putting to you, he can be annoying. I much prefer a transparent fool to the more sly variety that plays the part well while sticking a knife in your back.

    But let's be honest here. The president can do very little. The bureaucracy of the government is a jobs program for the less ambitious and politically inclined. It's staffed with incompetent bureaucrats that show up, surf the web and may get around to an hour or two of honest work. Public unions guarantee they can't be fired.

    Obama converted the CDC into a PC jobs program for lefties, just like he converted NASA into a Muslim outreach program.

    May one ask: why is a self proclaimed libertarian screaming for more government action? Wouldn't it be great if one of the outcomes of this crisis is that local communities became more self reliant and more self sufficient!

    Sechel 20 hrs

    that's from a website called therecount.com looks interesting.

    Greggg 20 hrs

    For the entire Trump Presidency it was all about the stock market. So, here we are.

    numike 20 hrs

    while we all point fingers lets look at a useful guide regarding the mess we are ALL in now https://www.seriouseats.com/2020/03/food-safety-and-coronavirus-a-comprehensive-guide.html

    Food Safety and Coronavirus: A Comprehensive Guide Questions about COVID-19 and food safety, answered. www.seriouseats.com

    Tengen 20 hrs

    The graphic at the end of the video already looks out of date and shows how rapid the spread has been. For March 2020 it shows 5,002 cases in the US (and counting) but right now I'm seeing 24,137 cases.

    So much for "in a couple of days the 15 is going to be down close to zero".

    njbr 20 hrs

    What can the President do?

    Force and organize the production of necessary goods.

    Mish Editor 19 hrs

    May one ask: why is a self proclaimed libertarian screaming for more government action? Wouldn't it be great if one of the outcomes of this crisis is that local communities became more self reliant and more self sufficient!

    Mish Editor 19 hrs

    Trump did not Drain the Swamp. He IS the swamp

    Mish Editor 19 hrs

    Anyone who still supports this President's actions is a TDS-inflicted fool.

    Jim Bob 19 hrs

    I've followed Mish for ~ 12 years online and on the radio for brilliant economic analysis. Lately his work has been undermined by irrational political opinion. Mish has turned into Krugman. I won't be back.

    abend237-04 19 hrs

    The Donald is obviously afflicted with the same narcissistic megalomania prerequisite for a successful run at any elective office above County Coroner, anywhere in this country.

    That said, he can apparently read a graph, and he's right: The two drug combination of Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin are working to treat this damn thing, BUT:

    It is, indeed, not a Covid-19 preventative.

    If you get it, and you dink around at home too long waiting for improvement, arriving at ICU needing ventilation leaves you with roughly the odds of Russian roulette of surviving, especially if you're older.

    Lacking testing, the only remaining means available to knock the transmission rate down quickly is social distancing/lockdown. But, enough of that prevention can leave us wishing we were dead anyway.

    Unfortunately, all the college kids jamming the bars and beaches is setting the stage for continued exponential growth by hordes of asymptomatic spreaders.

    The march of folly continues.

    I like what I'm seeing of Cuomo. He'd be a good guy to have in the room in a serious fight; This qualifies.

    DBG8489 19 hrs

    As someone who hates all politicians, there is zero love lost between Trump and myself. I had hopes when he was elected that he would make a difference but it was clear based on how he looked after his private meeting with Obama on inauguration day that he was in over his head.

    Having said that, I will say this:

    From at least the "major" state level up, it would appear that not one single elected official or the top advisors and bureaucrats who work for them have shown anything but complete and utter failure in their handling of this emergency.

    You have senators selling off piles of stock while either saying nothing or telling the rest of us that it was bullshit. And trust me - they were not the only ones. If anyone cares to investigate, they will likely find this problem rampant. Elected officials should not even be allowed to trade stocks when they control the entire economy - not even through alleged "blind trusts" - it's bullshit. But that's a conversation for another time.

    You have congressional reps and senators blaming each other and/or the other party and passing laws and bailouts without even reading the bills they are passing.

    You have the Treasury and the Fed printing money and throwing it at every hole that opens up without the slightest regard for what the unintended consequences of those actions may entail.

    You have governments of the "major" states (CA, NY, NJ...etc) who know they can't simply print money being exposed using any extra money they had (along with taxes based on tourism that have now disappeared) to fund God knows what now demanding that everyone else pony up to pay for their failure to plan...

    The lack of leadership in the major states and at the Federal level is abysmal ACROSS THE BOARD.

    And that includes members of BOTH parties and nearly every single bureaucratic agency involved.

    You can single Trump out if you want, but he's not alone. He's just an easy target because 49% of the population hated him before this started.

    njbr 18 hrs

    ....Top health officials first learned of the virus's spread in China on January 3, US Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said Friday. Throughout January and February, intelligence officials' warnings became more and more urgent, according to the Post -- and by early February, much of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA's intelligence reports were dedicated to warnings about Covid-19.

    All the while, Trump downplayed the virus publicly, telling the public the coronavirus "is very well under control in our country," and suggesting warm weather would neutralize the threat the virus poses....

    ...The administration did begin taking some limited action about a month after Azar says the administration first began receiving warnings, blocking non-citizens who had been to China in the last two weeks from entering the country on February 3 -- a move public experts have argued at best bought the US time to ramp up its testing capabilities, which it did not use, and at worst had no beneficial effects at all.

    Trump finally assembled a task force to address the virus, putting Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the effort on February 26, and declared a national emergency on March 13. And, just this week -- nearly three months after first receiving warnings from his intelligence officials -- the president's public tone about the crisis shifted: "I've always known this is a real -- this is a pandemic," he said Tuesday as he admitted, "[the virus is] not under control for any place in the world."....

    Realist 18 hrs

    I have been watching political leaders in my own country get on television daily. They have all done a great job of informing the public about the dangers of this virus. They have all relied on the experts to relay information to the public about what the government is doing, and what individuals should be doing. This is true at the national, regional, and local levels.

    In addition businesses have been sending out emails, radio announcements and tv messages explaining what they are doing in regard to this pandemic.

    In fact, I am amazed at what a good job everyone is doing.

    I am also watching what is happening in the US. Every US state governor and city mayor I have seen on tv has done a wonderful job of presenting the facts to the public and provided instructions as to what they are doing and what the public should be doing.

    Then there is the gong show that is Trump. I could not imagine that anyone could be as bad as he is; months of lies, denials, suppression of the truth, and a complete and utter lack of preparation for something he was warned about many times. Denying one day that the virus was a pandemic; only to claim the very next day that he had known it was a pandemic for months; and then the very next day say that no one could have seen this coming; and finally saying that his response to the virus rates a 10 out of 10.

    Worst President ever. Sadly, many, many Americans are going to suffer and die because America had this moron in charge.

    Mish keeps referring to worldometer to get stats from. Their numbers seem to match up with numbers I see in my own country and in the US.

    Disturbingly, today, the mortality rate for closed cases ticked up 1% to 12%. 12978 deaths and 94674 recovered. That is not the direction I expected it to go.

    daveyp 17 hrs

    You get what you vote for. To have such a malignant narcissist of such profoundly limited intellectual honesty and capacity "leading" your nation through this is truly tragic for your country. Even the hideously vile ultimate Washington insider Hilary would have done a better job.

    truthseeker 17 hrs

    Mish I agree with much of the criticism of Trump, yet had he done everything you and others suggest, there is this implied assumption that everything would have worked out perfectly. You know I am impressed the way the country seems to be uniting to such a great degree, that I think there is at least some hope for our country's future though there are huge challenges that lay ahead absolutely!

    abend237-04 17 hrs

    I will now proceed, once again, to bitch about the root cause of our current pandemic, which is causing many to experience cosmic scale frustration with The Donald, which I share:

    Civilization has now been hit squarely in the head with three killer coronavirus outbreaks in 18 years, yet still has no unified global new viral antigen detection system. We could have if our world "leaders" would make it happen.

    Local supercomputers, however massive, will never crack this nut, but the billions of powerful, web-accessible smartphones could if linked and used by a parallelized, intelligent scheduler to raise the alarm when a new antibody/pathogen is discovered in human blood anywhere.

    Such a system could have lifted the burden from a lonely doctor struggling to raise the alarm in Wuhan, before Covid-19 killed him, and placed it squarely in front of disease control experts, worldwide. It can be done; We must do it.

    Sars cov-3/4/5/6/7/8/9/n could kill us all if we don't.

    [Mar 22, 2020] Opinion - A Tale of Two Foreign Policies The Train-Wreck Abroad Is Bipartisan by Philip Giraldi

    Notable quotes:
    "... It is widely believed that the abrupt withdrawal of candidates Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg on the eve of Super Tuesday that targeted Sanders was arranged through an intervention by ex-President Barack Obama who made a plea in support of "party unity," offering the two a significant quid pro quo down the road if they were willing to leave the race and throw their support to Biden, which they dutifully did ..."
    "... Trump might be described as both paranoid and narcissistic, meaning that he sees himself as surrounded by enemies and that the enemies are out to get him personally. When he is criticized, he either ridicules the source or does something impulsive to deflect what is being said. He attacked Syria twice based on false claims about the use of chemical weapons when a consensus developed in the media and in congress that he was being "weak" in the Middle East. Those attacks were war crimes as Syria was not threatening the United States. ..."
    "... Biden is on a different track in that he is an establishment hawk. As head of the Senate Foreign Affairs committee back in 2002-2003 he green lighted George W. Bush's plan to attack Iraq. Beyond that, he cheer-leaded the effort from the Democratic Party benches, helping to create a consensus both in Washington and in the media that Saddam Hussein was a threat that had to be dealt with. He should have known better as he was privy to intelligence that was suggesting that the Iraqis were no threat at all. He did not moderate his tune on Iraq until after 2005, when the expected slam-dunk quick victory got very messy. ..."
    "... Biden was also certainly privy to the decision making by President Barack Obama, which include the destruction of Libya and the killing of American citizens by drone. Whether he actively supported those policies is unknown, but he has never been challenged on them. What is clear is that he did not object to them, another sign of his willingness to go along with the establishment, a tendency which will undoubtedly continue if he is elected president. ..."
    Mar 22, 2020 | www.informationclearinghouse.info

    Now that the Democratic Party has apparently succeeded in getting rid of the only two voices among its presidential candidates that actually deviated from the establishment consensus, it appears that Joe Biden will be running against Donald Trump in November. To be sure, Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard are still hanging on, but the fix was in and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) made sure that Sanders would be given the death blow on Super Tuesday while Gabbard would be blocked from participating in any of the late term debates.

    It is widely believed that the abrupt withdrawal of candidates Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg on the eve of Super Tuesday that targeted Sanders was arranged through an intervention by ex-President Barack Obama who made a plea in support of "party unity," offering the two a significant quid pro quo down the road if they were willing to leave the race and throw their support to Biden, which they dutifully did. Rumor has it that Klobuchar might well wind up as Biden's vice president. An alternative tale is that it was a much more threatening "offer that couldn't be refused" coming from the Clintons.

    ... ... ...

    Both Trump and Biden might reasonably described as Zionists, Trump by virtue of the made-in-Israel foreign policy positions he has delivered on since his election, and Biden by word and deed during his entire time in politics. When Biden encountered Sarah Palin in 2008 in the vice-presidential debate, he and Palin sought to outdo each other in enthusing over how much they love the Jewish state. Biden has said that "I am a Zionist. You don't have to be a Jew to be a Zionist" and also, ridiculously, "Were there not an Israel, the U.S. would have to invent one. We will never abandon Israel -- out of our own self-interest. [It] is the best $3 billion investment we make." Biden has been a regular feature speaker at the annual AIPAC summit in Washington.

    Trump might be described as both paranoid and narcissistic, meaning that he sees himself as surrounded by enemies and that the enemies are out to get him personally. When he is criticized, he either ridicules the source or does something impulsive to deflect what is being said. He attacked Syria twice based on false claims about the use of chemical weapons when a consensus developed in the media and in congress that he was being "weak" in the Middle East. Those attacks were war crimes as Syria was not threatening the United States.

    Trump similarly reversed himself on withdrawing from Syria when he ran into criticism of the move and his plan to extricate the United States from Afghanistan, if it develops at all, could easily be subjected to similar revision. Trump is not really the man who as a candidate indicated that he was seriously looking for a way out of America's endless and pointless wars, no matter what his supporters continue to assert.

    Biden is on a different track in that he is an establishment hawk. As head of the Senate Foreign Affairs committee back in 2002-2003 he green lighted George W. Bush's plan to attack Iraq. Beyond that, he cheer-leaded the effort from the Democratic Party benches, helping to create a consensus both in Washington and in the media that Saddam Hussein was a threat that had to be dealt with. He should have known better as he was privy to intelligence that was suggesting that the Iraqis were no threat at all. He did not moderate his tune on Iraq until after 2005, when the expected slam-dunk quick victory got very messy.

    Biden was also certainly privy to the decision making by President Barack Obama, which include the destruction of Libya and the killing of American citizens by drone. Whether he actively supported those policies is unknown, but he has never been challenged on them. What is clear is that he did not object to them, another sign of his willingness to go along with the establishment, a tendency which will undoubtedly continue if he is elected president.

    And Biden's foreign policy reminiscences are is subject to what appear to be memory losses or inability to articulate, illustrated by a whole series of faux pas during the campaign. He has a number of times told a tale of his heroism in Afghanistan that is complete fiction , similar to Hillary Clinton's lying claims of courage under fire in Bosnia.

    So, we have a president in place who takes foreign policy personally in that his first thoughts are "how does it make me look?" and a prospective challenger who appears to be suffering from initial stages of dementia and who has always been relied upon to support the establishment line, whatever it might be. Though Trump is the more dangerous of the two as he is both unpredictable and irrational, the likelihood is that Biden will be guided by the Clintons and Obamas. To put it another way, no matter who is president the likelihood that the United States will change direction to get away from its interventionism and bullying on a global scale is virtually nonexistent. At least until the money runs out. Or to express it as a friend of mine does, "No matter who is elected we Americans wind up getting John McCain." Goodnight America!

    Philip Giraldi Ph.D., Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest. A former CIA Case Officer and Army Intelligence Officer who spent twenty years overseas in Europe and the Middle East working terrorism cases. He holds a BA with honors from the University of Chicago and an MA and PhD in Modern History from the University of London. " Source "

    [Mar 22, 2020] Liberal NPCs Hate Russia, Conservative NPCs Hate China

    Mar 22, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Jackrabbit , Mar 21 2020 23:10 utc | 54

    Caitlin Johnstone also sees the response being manipulated to focus hate on China: Liberal NPCs Hate Russia, Conservative NPCs Hate China

    But she sees this China-bashing as mostly a political reaction:

    In reality these people are rallying behind the campaign to blame China for the health crisis they're now facing because they understand that otherwise the blame will land squarely on the shoulders of their president, who's running for re-election this year.
    instead of a deliberate Deep-State strategy (which is my view).

    We can argue who created the virus (I'm still looking for any rebuttal to the Chinese claim that USA must be the source because it has all five strains of the virus), but the Empire's gaming of the virus outbreak seems very clear to me.

    !!

    [Mar 21, 2020] To be fair to Trump

    Mar 21, 2020 | caucus99percent.com

    @Snode

    "The Obama-Biden Administration set up the White House National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense to prepare for future pandemics like covid-19. Donald Trump eliminated it -- and now we're paying the price."

    -- Former vice president Joe Biden, in a tweet, March 19

    BUT!!! OBAMA DID, TOO!!! (As did Dubya)

    After Barack Obama became president in 2009, he eliminated the White House Health and Security Office, which worked on international health issues. But after grappling with the 2014 Ebola epidemic, Obama in 2016 established a Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense at the NSC. A directorate has its own staff, and it is headed by someone who generally reports to the national security adviser.

    One can see the dueling narratives here, neither entirely incorrect. The office -- as set up by Obama in 2016 -- was folded into another office. Thus, one could claim the office was eliminated. But the staff slots did not disappear and at least initially the key mission of team remained a priority. So one can also claim nothing changed and thus Biden's criticism is overstated.

    Source: Washington Post -- Was the White House office for global pandemics eliminated?


    Marie on Sat, 03/21/2020 - 4:35pm

    What did the GWB and Obama Administrations

    @edg
    have against the large and presumably highly skilled public health agencies under HHS? If they had flubbed, then they should have been ordered to fix the problem; reorganize and/or replace the incompetents so that such flubs don't happen again. The Asst Secretary for Public Health, a physician, oversees those agencies and reports to the HHS Secretary who in turn reports to the POTUS.

    Why set up a WH office overseen by a person with no public health expertise or experience to report to the NSC director?

    Steven D on Sat, 03/21/2020 - 8:50am
    Yes

    One big clusterfuck isn't it.

    leveymg on Sat, 03/21/2020 - 8:56am
    "Nobody could foresee airliners used as missiles." But, who

    remembers that, too?

    Bush got away with that excuse. He even got several glorious wars out of it. Why shouldn't Trump?

    [Mar 21, 2020] When reading any article concerning current events (ie. Ukraine, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, or Coronavirus) consider how the The Seven Principles of Propaganda may apply

    Highly recommended!
    Mar 22, 2020 | https://www.moonofalabama.org

    Dick | Mar 22 2020 0:48 utc | 66

    When reading any article concerning current events (ie. Ukraine, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, or Coronavirus) consider how the The Seven Principles of Propaganda may apply. (repost):

    1. Avoid abstract ideas - appeal to the emotions. When we think emotionally, we are more prone to be irrational and less critical in our thinking. I can remember several instances where this has been employed by the US to prepare the public with a justification of their actions. Here are four examples:

      The Invasion of Grenada during the Reagan administration was said to be necessary to rescue American students being held hostage by Grenadian coup authorities after a coup that overthrew the government. I had a friend in the 82nd airborne division that participated in the rescue. He told me the students said they were hiding in the school to avoid the fighting by the US military, and had never been threatened by any Grenadian authority and were only hiding in the school to avoid all the fighting. Film of the actual rescue broadcast on the mainstream media was taken out of context; the students were never in danger.

      The invasion of Panama in the late 80's was supposedly to capture the dictator Manual Noriega for international crimes related to drugs and weapons. I remember a headline covered by all the media where a Navy lieutenant and his wife were detained by the police. His wife was sexually assaulted while in custody, according to the story. Unfortunately, it never happened. It was intended to get the public emotionally involved to support the action.

      The invasion of Iraq in the early 90's was preceded by a speech by a girl describing the Iraqi army throwing babies out of incubators so the equipment could be transferred to Iraq. It turns out the girl was the daughter of one of the Kuwait's ruling sheiks and the event never occurred. However, it served its purpose by getting the American public involved emotionally supporting the war.

      During the build up to the bombing campaign by NATO against Libya, a woman entered a hotel where reporters were staying claiming she was raped by several police officers of the Gaddafi security services. The report was carried by most media outlets as representative of the brutality of the Gaddafi regime. I was not able to verify if this story was true or not, but it fits the usual method employed to gain public support through propaganda for military interventions.

      The greatest emotion in us is fear and fear is used extensively to make us think irrationally. I remember growing up during the cold war having the fear of nuclear war or 'The Russians are coming!' After the cold war without an obvious enemy, it was Al Qaeda even before 911, so we had 'Al Qaeda is coming!' Now we have 'ISIS is coming!' with media blasting us with terrorist fears. Whenever I hear a government promoting an emotional issue or fear mongering, I ignore them knowing there is a hidden Truth behind the issue.

    2. Constantly repeat just a few ideas. Use stereotyped phrases. This could be stated more plainly as 'Keep it simple, stupid!' The most notorious use of this technique recently was the Bush administration. Everyone can remember 'We must fight them over there rather than over here' or my favourite 'They hate us for our freedoms'. Neither of these phrases made any rational sense despite 911. The last thing Muslims in the Middle East care about is American's freedoms, maybe it was all the bombs the US was dropping on them.
    3. Give only one side of the argument and obscure history. Watching mainstream media in the US, you can see all the news is biased to the American view as an example. This is prevalent within Australian commercial media and newspapers giving only a western view, but fortunately, we have the SBS and the ABC that are very good, certainly not perfect, at providing both sides of a story. In addition, any historical perspective is ignored keeping the citizenry focused on the here and now. Can any of you remember any news organisation giving an in depth history of Ukraine or Palestine? I cannot.
    4. Demonize the enemy or pick out one special "enemy" for special vilification. This is obvious in politics where politicians continuously criticise their opponents. Of course, demonization is more productively applied to international figures or nations such as Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Gaddafi in Libya, Assad in Syria, the Taliban and just recently Vladimir Putin over the Ukraine, Crimea and Syria. It establishes a negative emotional view of either a nation (i.e. Iran) or a known figure (i.e. Putin) making us again think emotionally, rather than rationally, making it easier to promote evil acts upon a nation or a known figure. Certainly some of these groups or individuals were less than benign, but not necessarily demons as depicted in the west.
    5. Appear humanitarian in work and motivations. The US has used this technique often to validate foreign interventions or ongoing conflicts where the term 'Right to Protect' is used for justification. Everyone should remember the many stories about the abuse of women in Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein's supposed brutality toward his people. The recent attack on Syria by the US, UK, and France was depicted as an Humanitarian intervention by the UK Government, which was far from the truth. One thing that always amazes me is when the US sends humanitarian aid to a country it is accompanied by the US military. In Haiti some years back, the US sent troops with no other country doing so. The recent Ebola outbreak in Africa saw US troops sent to the area. How are troops going to fight a medical outbreak? No doubt, they are there for other reasons.

    6. Obscure one's economic interests. Who believes the invasion of Iraq was for weapons of mass destruction? Or the constant threats against Iran are for their nuclear program? Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and no one has presented firm evidence Iran intends to produce nuclear weapons. The West has been interfering in the Middle East since the British in the late 19th century. It is all about oil and the control over the resources. In fact, if one researches the cause of wars over the last hundred years, you will always find economics was a major component driving the rush to war for most of them.

    7. Monopolize the flow of information. This is the most important principle and mainly entails setting the narrative by which all subsequent events can be based upon or interpreted in such a way as to reinforce the narrative. The narrative does not need to be true; in fact, it can be anything that suits the monopoliser as long as it is based loosely on some event. It is critical to have at least majority control of media and the ability to control the message so the flow of information is consistent with the narrative. This has been played out on mainstream media concerning the Ukrainian conflict, Syrian conflict, and the Skirpal affair. Just over the last couple of years, we have all been subjected to propaganda in one form or another. Remember the US wanting to bomb Syria because of the sarin gas attack, it was later determined to be false (see Seymour Hersh 'Whose Sarin'). The shoot down of MH17 was immediately blamed on Russia by the west without any convincing proof (setting the narrative). It amazes me just how fast the story died after the initial saturation in the media. When I awoke that morning in July, I heard on the news PM Tony Abbot blaming Russia for the incident only hours afterward. How could he know Russia shot down the plane? The investigation into the incident had not even begun, so I suspect he was singing from the West's hymnbook in a standard setting the narrative scenario.

    [Mar 20, 2020] This policy is unconscionable and flagrantly against international law. It is imperative that the U.S. lift these immoral and illegal sanctions to enable Iran and Venezuela to confront the epidemic as effectively and rapidly as possible

    Mar 20, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Mao , Mar 19 2020 23:25 utc | 225

    A group of economists and policy experts on Wednesday called on President Donald Trump to immediately lift the United States' crippling sanctions against Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and other countries, warning that the economic warfare -- in addition to being cruel in itself -- is "feeding the coronavirus epidemic" by hampering nations' capacity to respond.

    "This policy is unconscionable and flagrantly against international law. It is imperative that the U.S. lift these immoral and illegal sanctions to enable Iran and Venezuela to confront the epidemic as effectively and rapidly as possible," Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs said in a statement just hours after the Trump administration intensified sanctions against Iran, which has been devastated by COVID-19.

    https://truthout.org/articles/economists-demand-trump-immediately-lift-iran-cuba-venezuela-sanctions/

    Mao , Mar 19 2020 23:37 utc | 229

    Promising to "smash" Venezuela's government during a "maximum pressure March," Trump has imposed crushing sanctions that force Venezuela to spend three times as much as non-sanctioned countries on coronavirus testing kits.

    https://thegrayzone.com/2020/03/17/us-sanctions-venezuelas-health-sector-coronavirus/

    [Mar 20, 2020] Russiagater and greedy bastard. Usual combination. Nothing new, nothing interesting

    Mar 20, 2020 | www.rt.com

    Richard Burr, chair of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, has been accused of deceiving the public about the coronavirus outbreak and seeking to profit from it by dumping stocks that are crashing due to the pandemic. Burr (R-North Carolina) found himself under attack from two directions on Thursday. Early in the day, National Public Radio ran a story based on "secret recordings" from a speech he gave in North Carolina in late February, when he gave oddly specific warnings about Covid-19 to an elite group of donors, while keeping the rest of the American public in the dark.

    SCOOP: Secret recording obtained by NPR shows that Senate Intel Chairman Richard Burr raised alarms about Coronavirus weeks ago in private meeting with well-connected constituents -- concerns he never shared with the public https://t.co/afyvzaMyXK

    -- Tim Mak (@timkmak) March 19, 2020

    The North Carolina Republican struck back later in the day, accusing NPR on Twitter of "journalistic malpractice" for "knowingly and irresponsibly" misrepresenting the speech, calling the article a "tabloid-style hit piece."

    By then, however, he was taking flanking fire from a different position. Open Secrets, a "nonpartisan, independent and nonprofit" research group tracking money in politics – with George Soros' Open Society Foundation as one of their biggest donors , mind you – published his financial disclosures, showing that Burr and his wife sold over $1 million worth of stocks in corporations that took it on the chin as the Covid-19 pandemic tanked the US stock markets.

    SCOOP: NC's GOP Senator Richard Burr told the public he was confident the govt can fight off COVID-19 the same time he & his wife sold up to ~$1.5 million stock in major corporations that ended up losing most of their value during the coronavirus pandemic https://t.co/JsXkaxb2Pw pic.twitter.com/lMnnbBfoNZ

    -- Anna Massoglia (@annalecta) March 19, 2020

    Much of the outraged responses to both the NPR and Open Secrets, praising their revelations and demanding Burr be imprisoned – along with the rest of the Republican Party, President Donald Trump, and who knows who else – have been the usual suspects promoting the 'Russiagate' conspiracy theory over the past four years.

    NPR's article was authored by Tim Mak, a Daily Beast alum who famously co-authored a fake Russiagate bombshell in December 2018, accusing the president's son Donald Trump Jr of lying to Congress based on misquoting the publicly available transcript.

    Also on rt.com 'Sound conclusions': Senate panel backs 'Russiagate' intel report

    To make the irony even greater, Burr has been extremely helpful to the 'Russiagate' gang while chairing the Senate Intelligence Committee. For example, he endorsed the infamous "intelligence community assessment" based on wishful thinking . He has also treated the ranking minority member, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Virginia) as "co-chair," covering for him even when it emerged that Warner was trying to secretly communicate with the British spy who wrote the debunked anti-Trump "Steele dossier."

    None of it availed Burr one bit when they came for his head, of course – the "R" next to his name automatically made him a Trump supporter in the minds of the woke mob. If it turns out to be true that he knew far more about the dangers of the pandemic but chose to keep silent and profit from it, that would indeed be a colossal dereliction of duty. But as his prior record in overseeing the US spy community indicates, it wouldn't have been the first time.

    Like this story? Share it with a friend!

    [Mar 19, 2020] Comedian Lee Camp: "America's two-party oligarchy can't relate to those in need"

    Mar 19, 2020 | www.rt.com

    As the US teeters on the edge of abyss amid a Covid-19 pandemic, the crisis has revealed systemic flaws brought by years of two-party plutocracy that go far beyond a single president, says Lee Camp, host of RT's Redacted Tonight. While President Donald Trump bears a good portion of the blame for the sluggish US response to Covid-19, he is only one piece of a larger puzzle. America's structural defects long predate Trump's time in office, the comedian argued.

    "The fact that so many millions of Americans don't have paid sick leave, or hardly make minimum wage and therefore can't afford an emergency – that kind of system was set up under a two-party apparatus that basically agreed: 'Let's create an America where people are completely exploited,'" Camp said.

    [Mar 19, 2020] Trump has reached peak incompetence with this one. All the gains of his 'legacy' have been wiped out, but he always has his (((trusted advisers))) ready to steer him into the rocks.

    Mar 19, 2020 | www.unz.com

    Sick of Orcs , says: Show Comment March 18, 2020 at 9:17 pm GMT

    @Poco Globalism is not harmed at all. The machine didn't blow up, it simply shut off. Unfortunately, it supplies life-giving goods and services to billions, regardless of Globohomo using it to spread FOURTH-worlders everywhere in the West (US Southern order remains wide open.)

    Trump has reached peak incompetence with this one. All the gains of his 'legacy' have been wiped out, but he always has his (((trusted advisers))) ready to steer him into the rocks. Time to reminisce about record low black unemployment numbers.

    [Mar 19, 2020] Trump administration pandemic priorities

    Mar 19, 2020 | caitlinjohnstone.com

    Pandemic priorities:

    Priority #1 – Make sure everyone is aware that this virus indisputably originated in China. China, China, China. Call it the China virus or the Wuhan virus so everyone knows. China is very, very bad and we must say so over and over and over again.

    Priority #2 – Deal with virus if we have time.

    [Mar 19, 2020] Here s a link to a video of the President saying he is not responsible for the closing of the pandemic office

    Mar 19, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    gnt sglovera day ago

    You should know by now that repeating the actual words of administration officials, including the President, is clear evidence of irrational partisan bias. The surgeon general chided the press on Saturday for writing stories about the past.

    Here's a link to a video of the President saying he is not responsible for the closing of the pandemic office, linked to a video of the press conference in which he explained why he closed the pandemic office:

    Play Hide
    engineerscotty gnta day ago
    Obviously a deep fake. Dear Leader would never say such a thing, and even if he did, if he says he didn't, he didn't. If you bout this, please report to Room 101.
    TISO_AX2 gnt14 hours ago • edited
    No, the White House Didn't 'Dissolve' Its Pandemic Response Office
    gnt TISO_AX29 hours ago
    As near as I can interpret the article you reference, the leading experts on global pandemics were fired. The remaining staff responsible for building the response to global pandemics were assigned new duties. The function of dealing with global pandemics was assigned to an existing department that was also assigned other new responsibilities at the same time. In that sense, there is still an office that is responsible for dealing with global pandemics. But that office no longer has the same resources for doing that, and has many other responsibilities.
    TISO_AX2 gnt6 hours ago
    When I joined the National Security Council staff in 2018, I inherited a
    strong and skilled staff in the counterproliferation and biodefense
    directorate. This team of national experts together drafted the National Biodefense Strategy of 2018 and an accompanying national security presidential memorandum to implement it; an executive order to modernize influenza vaccines; and coordinated the United States' response to the Ebola epidemic in Congo, which was ultimately defeated in 2020.

    Seems pretty open to obvious interpretation. This was post the so-called firing that is being blamed on the president. And if you have evidence that the administration medical team is not today staffed at a level even higher than before 2017, let's see it.

    gnt TISO_AX22 hours ago
    So the bureaucrat who picked up the extra responsibilities writes an editorial saying that he had the whole thing handled all along. He doesn't have much credibility; he's got no future as a Republican apparatchik if he doesn't say something here. He ran the office with the responsibility, but there's still no evidence of having kept anyone with expertise in pandemics. Expertise still matters.
    TISO_AX2 sglover15 hours ago
    No, one wouldn't. But public hypocritical comments (like here) is not the remedy. It's just hypocrisy.
    sglover TISO_AX211 hours ago
    OK, I'm guessing everybody can use a giggle. So please tell me what "the remedy" is. This should be good.
    TISO_AX2 sglover11 hours ago • edited
    You could start by not trafficking in falsehoods such as your "pandemic team" claim. And then you should stop whining about division while sowing division.
    sglover TISO_AX211 hours ago
    I don't understand what "claim" you're referring to. Have you got your lines crossed, managing all the Trump apologetics? I know it's a full-time job.

    But actually, Trump, via his surrogate Bolton (you know, the guy Trump appointed as part of "draining the swamp") *did* gut that office. Senior staff left, other staff got reassigned, and the whole shop was reduced to something like two people.

    See? I knew you'd be good for a laugh!

    TISO_AX2 sglover11 hours ago
    Asked and answered. You should read the thread..all of it.
    sglover TISO_AX210 hours ago
    You are objecting to a video in which Trump admits to the very thing that you claim didn't happen. Truly you're living up to your messiah's words: I take no responsibility .

    Aren't you embarrassed? Even a little?

    TISO_AX2 sglover10 hours ago
    Are you embarrassed to contradict yourself? What are you trying to say...did the President admit to the very thing ...or take no responsibility ?
    gnt TISO_AX28 hours ago
    The problem is that the President tries to have it both ways. When he thought he was just getting rid of excess staff, he was proud to take responsibility for his choice. When it later became clear that there were bad consequences for that same choice, the President denied responsibility for that specific action.

    Trump routinely makes statements that contradict each other, leaving it to his supporters to decide which ones they want to hear. Maybe you're comfortable with the changes in direction, but many of us have memories that go back more than a few hours.

    TISO_AX2 gnt7 hours ago • edited
    Whatever happened at the NSC was planned long ago. Even Obama knew that it was an overbloated bureaucracy. And your assertion that the reorganization resulted in "bad consequences is just that..a claim. You have not established it as a fact or common knowledge. Based on those conclusions your narrative is uncompelling.

    https://www.realclearpoliti...

    sglover TISO_AX28 hours ago
    My God you are beyond parody. Your big score, the point that you believe is going to show me what's what, is -- My Messiah walked back one of his lies, and you don't want to give him credit . Most people hold toddlers to a higher standard -- do you understand that?
    TISO_AX2 sglover7 hours ago
    If he's anyone's messiah it's yours. You expect him to walk on water, or save you from coronavirus. I don't expect that of him at all. There's your parody.

    [Mar 17, 2020] DOJ drops charges against Russian trolls after they dared demand evidence in US court -- RT USA News

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... "promotes neither the interests of justice nor the nation's security," ..."
    "... "recent events and a change in the balance of the government's proof due to a classification determination, ..."
    "... "information warfare against the United States of America ..."
    "... The DOJ rationalizes the motion to dismiss by arguing that Concord is "a Russian company with no presence in the United States and no exposure to meaningful punishment in the event of a conviction." That has always been the case, however. What really changed since the indictment was filed is the complete implosion of Mueller's case, helped in part by Concord fighting the case in court. ..."
    "... The motion inadvertently reveals that Mueller's prosecutors never intended the case against Concord, two other entities and 13 individuals to actually go to trial, otherwise they would have anticipated what ended up happening: Concord's lawyers demanding discovery documents from the DOJ, which the US authorities say risks "exposure of law enforcement's tools and techniques." ..."
    "... Mueller's team tried to fight the discovery proceedings by arguing in January 2019 that Concord was leaking them to "discredit " the investigation. Within two months, however, the investigation discredited itself, by having to admit there was no "collusion " between US President Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election. ..."
    Mar 17, 2020 | www.rt.com

    The US is dropping the much-hyped indictment for 'election meddling' against a company supposedly behind the so-called Russian troll farm, closing the opening chapter of special counsel Robert Mueller's Russiagate investigation. Further pursuing the case against Concord Management & Consulting LLC, "promotes neither the interests of justice nor the nation's security," the Department of Justice wrote to the federal judge overseeing the case on Monday, in a motion to drop the charges.

    DOJ lawyers cited "recent events and a change in the balance of the government's proof due to a classification determination, " saying only that they submitted further details in a classified addendum.

    Wow.The DOJ moves to dismiss the charges against the Russian Company (Concord) who conducted the alleged "information warfare against the US"The troll case will be dismissed w/ prejudice.How embarrassing for Team Mueller. pic.twitter.com/wfZ78EWgKc

    -- Techno Fog (@Techno_Fog) March 16, 2020

    Concord was one of the three companies – the Internet Research Agency is another – and 13 individuals charged in February 2018 with waging "information warfare against the United States of America " using social media.

    Also on rt.com US indicts 13 Russians for 2016 election meddling, but 'no allegations' they influenced outcome

    The DOJ rationalizes the motion to dismiss by arguing that Concord is "a Russian company with no presence in the United States and no exposure to meaningful punishment in the event of a conviction." That has always been the case, however. What really changed since the indictment was filed is the complete implosion of Mueller's case, helped in part by Concord fighting the case in court.

    The motion inadvertently reveals that Mueller's prosecutors never intended the case against Concord, two other entities and 13 individuals to actually go to trial, otherwise they would have anticipated what ended up happening: Concord's lawyers demanding discovery documents from the DOJ, which the US authorities say risks "exposure of law enforcement's tools and techniques."

    But the Russians *did* show up, got to claim they were innocent until proven guilty, availed themselves of discovery, tied up the court in time, cost hundreds of thousands of $ in legal bills for DOJ, and gave Mueller a few black eyes in the process, and ended up victorious

    -- Undercover Huber (@JohnWHuber) March 17, 2020

    Mueller's team tried to fight the discovery proceedings by arguing in January 2019 that Concord was leaking them to "discredit " the investigation. Within two months, however, the investigation discredited itself, by having to admit there was no "collusion " between US President Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election.

    Also on rt.com Another nail in Russiagate coffin? Federal judge destroys key Mueller report claim

    They still insisted that Russia had "meddled " in the election, but there too the case proved a problem. Concord successfully petitioned Judge Dabney L. Friedrich in May last year to rebuke the prosecutors for presenting their allegations as facts.

    This is not to say that the DOJ is ready to disavow 'Russiagate' as a debunked conspiracy theory, however. Though the Concord case was dropped, the charges against the Internet Research Agency and the 13 Russian individuals were not. Given that none of them have a presence in the US, and have not dignified the indictment with a response, it is unclear how – if at all – the DOJ intends to proceed with the case.

    Keeping it on the books may keep the flames of 'Russiagate' alive, though, which is very convenient for the media and others heavily invested in the narrative of Moscow somehow menacing US elections, despite not a shred of actual evidence being presented to back it up.

    For a snapshot in time, this was the NYT homepage after the Russian troll farm indictment back in February 2018. Russia, we were told, "is engaged in a virtual war against the United States." pic.twitter.com/Z0xXCZoT9P

    -- Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) March 16, 2020

    Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!

    [Mar 14, 2020] Trump rightly announced a national emergency, marking a sharp shift in his approach to the greatest crisis of his presidency. by Jacob Heilbrunn

    Mar 13, 2020 | nationalinterest.org

    It was a somber Donald Trump who spoke at the White House today to declare a "national emergency" and that "we're doing a great job." Gone was his language about exaggerated fears and a "hoax" surrounding the coronavirus. His own daughter, Ivanka, stayed home rather than visit the White House because of her exposure to an Australian official who has the coronavirus.

    Not only was the shift in tone marked, but Trump also referred constantly to the numerous public health experts and corporate CEOs flanking him as he faced the biggest crisis of his presidency. Dr. Anthony Fauci indicated that the coronavirus may remain virulent for another eight to nine weeks: "I can't give you a number. It depends how successful we are." Trump himself sought to convey confidence by emphasizing that his administration had moved quickly to impede the spread of the coronavirus, including quickly ordering travel bans. How effective will his emergency declaration prove?

    The most important thing that the administration can do is work to remove the uncertainty surrounding the extent of the spread of the virus. Until there is more clarity, economic activity will be hobbled as investors and businesses retreat from incurring any additional risk. In this regard, Trump's decision to announce an emergency was a case of better late than never. Failure is not an option. Left unchecked, the worst-case estimates are that the coronavirus could kill up to 1.5 million people and turn America into Italy writ large. Writing in the Washington Post today, the Italian journalist Monica Maggioni underscores just how grim that prospect would be: "I find myself confined in a place where time is suspended. All the shops are closed, except for groceries and pharmacies. All the bars and restaurants are shuttered. Every tiny sign of life has disappeared. The streets are totally empty; it is forbidden even to take a walk unless you carry a document that explains to authorities why you have left your house. The lockdown that began here in Lombardy now extends to the entire country."

    Some of the most important pledges Trump made were that he would offer up to $50 billion in federal funding to states to battle the coronavirus. He indicated that hospitals can now "do as they want. They could do as they have to." He added, "I'm urging every state to set up emergency operations centers effective immediately." He indicated, in response to a question after his opening statement, that he himself would undergo a coronavirus test, something that he had previously resisted. Trump also said that up to five million tests would be available by the end of the month-a lofty goal. The danger for Trump is that, as is his wont, he is overpromising. Still, the move to establish drive-thru testing at places like Walgreens and Walmart parking lots makes good sense. Trump's weakest moment by far came when he responded to a question about the lack of testing that until now has badly hampered efforts to stop the virus-"No, I don't take responsibility at all."

    To help prop up the economy, he indicated that government purchases for the strategic reserve would be increased. Wall Street responded positively to Trump's remarks as the stock market rose, ending up almost two thousand points on Friday. But Trump also pooh-poohed a multi-billion dollar bill backed by House Democrats to address the coronavirus crisis, remarking that they "are not doing what's right for the country." Among other things, it does not include the payroll tax relief that Trump is supporting. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is vowing to vote on the bill.

    For now, the measures that Trump announced today will mark a significant shift in his administration's approach to the pandemic. Former Food and Drug Administration head Scott Gottlieb tweeted, "Actions by White House today to sharply increase testing capacity and access, declare a national emergency, implement new steps to protect vulnerable Americans, support assistance for those hardest hit by mitigation steps, all very important. Will meaningfully improve readiness."

    [Mar 13, 2020] Trump's Coronavirus Address, Blooper Reel Included The Daily Show - YouTube

    Mar 13, 2020 | www.youtube.com

    https://youtu.be/BWO6i8cH8SA


    Dan L , 4 hours ago (edited)

    "As calming as a firecracker dropped into a bag of cocaine" lmao I lost it there.. Hilariously accurate.

    berlineczka , 4 hours ago

    Fun fact: the European Union actually has no authority over health issues whatsoever. This is a strict Member State prerogative. The countries can coordinate voluntarily (which is what is currently arranged by the European Commission, but since there is no precedence it takes time) - but there was no way to make any decision about that in Brussels.

    KingM , 5 hours ago (edited)

    Greetings from Europe. In these hard times I'd like to thank Trump for providing such gold comedy material from just being a moron and reminding us all that it could always be worse.

    [Mar 13, 2020] Some freedom with facts: pease note that the current COVID-18 coronavirus was discovered in January 2020 and compare this fact with the White House statement

    That might be a different coronavirus ;-)
    Mar 13, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Doug Chance engineerscotty 8 hours ago

    Oh, they have. This is from the email I got from the White House listserv:

    "Some 150,000 illegal immigrants from 72 nations with cases of the coronavirus have been apprehended or deemed inadmissible from entering the United States since November," according to officials. These apprehensions underscore the need for border security and proper vetting. Read more from Paul Bedard in the Washington Examiner.

    [Mar 13, 2020] In 2018, Trump fired the entire US pandemic response team.

    Notable quotes:
    "... The New New Deal ..."
    Mar 13, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    deplorado , March 12, 2020 at 2:17 pm

    From Twitter:

    Judd Legum @JuddLegum

    WORTH REPEATING: In 2018, Trump fired the entire US pandemic response team.
    These were the experts with decades of experience dealing with precisely the kind of situation we are in today.

    Trump did not replace them.

    He eliminated the positions.

    https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/1238108656950001666?s=20

    allan , March 12, 2020 at 3:10 pm

    Another fun fact from Twitter:

    Michael Grunwald @MikeGrunwald
    I had forgotten my own reporting that @SenatorCollins
    stripped $870M for pandemic preparations out of the 2009 stimulus.

    [page image from Grunwald's book, The New New Deal ]

    11:30 AM · Mar 12, 2020· Twitter for iPhone

    There was some discussion here the other day about who's responsible for the sorry state of the CDC
    and pandemic preparation in particular. Now, the Dems controlled all the WH, Senate and House in 2009,
    so obviously they share some of the blame, but if Collins hadn't demanded this,
    it probably wouldn't have happened.

    I'm very disappointed with Susan Collins.

    Louis Fyne , March 12, 2020 at 3:26 pm

    Typical modern, bipartisan American short-termism.

    In my opinion, things would not have been not better under a Hillary admin. -- -but at least we'd have a no-fly zone in Syria. USA!

    ambrit , March 12, 2020 at 5:42 pm

    Now we have a no fly zone in Continental Europe!

    [Mar 13, 2020] Mounting backlush against Trump admnistration handling of the coronavirus epidemic will affect elections

    Mar 13, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Clueless Joe , Mar 13 2020 14:11 utc | 2

    Curious to read your thoughts about the impact.

    Considering how pretty much all Western governments fucked up big time, I expect a backlash against current governing parties, if not a serious questioning of the ways current "liberal" democracies are working. And they won't be able to blame it on Putin's or Xi's troll army; everyone can see they brought this upon themselves.

    This is the time where the Four Stages system from Yes Minister - which is blatantly used by our political leaders - is out in the open, because the consequences won't appear decades in the future but will be obvious before this year is over.

    Of couse, globalization of trade, free-trade, free movement of people will have to be reconsidered. And last but not least, if people have to live for months under lockdown or quarantine, it might have an impact on the economic and productive system -- and also on the environment --, because our societies will have to focus on what's truly needed for them to survive as societies, and not on the fanciful bullshit like marketing, spin doctors, traders and countless bureaucratic jobs.

    [Mar 13, 2020] In Ancient Greek Thought, Plagues Follow on Bad Leadership

    Notable quotes:
    "... Myths help their audiences understand the causes of things. As narrative theorists like Mark Turner and specialists in memory like Charles Fernyhough emphasize, people learn how to behave from stories and concepts of cause and effect in childhood. The linear sequence of before, now and after communicates the relationships between things and how we, as human beings, understand our own responsibility in the world. ..."
    Mar 13, 2020 | www.truthdig.com
    Zeus, the head Greek god, who lamented humans' tendency to bring suffering upon themselves. (Carole Raddato/Flickr, CC BY-SA)
    Zeus, the head Greek god, who lamented humans' tendency to bring suffering upon themselves. (Carole Raddato/Flickr, CC BY-SA)
    In the fifth century B.C., the playwright Sophocles begins " Oedipus Tyrannos " with the title character struggling to identify the cause of a plague striking his city, Thebes. (Spoiler alert: It's his own bad leadership.)

    As someone who writes about early Greek poetry, I spend a lot of time thinking about why its performance was so crucial to ancient life. One answer is that epic and tragedy helped ancient storytellers and audiences try to make sense of human suffering.

    From this perspective, plagues functioned as a setup for an even more crucial theme in ancient myth: a leader's intelligence. At the beginning of the "Iliad," for instance, the prophet Calchas – who knows the cause of a nine-day plague – is praised as someone " who knows what is, what will be and what happened before ."

    This language anticipates a chief criticism of Homer's legendary King Agamemnon: He does not know " the before and the after ."

    The epics remind their audiences that leaders need to be able to plan for the future based on what has happened in the past. They need to understand cause and effect. What caused the plague? Could it have been prevented?

    People's recklessness

    Myths help their audiences understand the causes of things. As narrative theorists like Mark Turner and specialists in memory like Charles Fernyhough emphasize, people learn how to behave from stories and concepts of cause and effect in childhood. The linear sequence of before, now and after communicates the relationships between things and how we, as human beings, understand our own responsibility in the world.

    Plague stories provide settings where fate pushes human organization to the limit. Human leaders are almost always crucial to the causal sequence, as Zeus observes in Homer's "Odyssey," saying, as I've translated it, "Humans are always blaming the gods for their suffering / but they experience pain beyond their fate because of their own recklessness."

    The problems humans create go beyond just plagues: The poet Hesiod writes that the top Greek god, Zeus, showed his disapproval for bad leaders by burdening them with military failures as well as pandemics . The consequences of human failings are a refrain in the ancient critique of leaders, with or without plagues: The "Iliad," for instance, describes rulers who " ruin their people through recklessness ." The "Odyssey" phrases it as " bad shepherds ruin their flocks ."

    Devastating illness

    Plagues were common in the ancient world, but not all of them were blamed on leaders. Like other natural disasters, they were frequently blamed on the gods.

    But historians, like Polybius in the second century B.C. and Livy in the first century B.C., also frequently recount epidemics striking armies and people in swamps or cities with poor sanitation. Philosophers and physicians also searched for rational approaches – blaming the climate , or pollution .

    When the historian Thucydides recounts how a plague with alleged origins in Ethiopia hit Athens in 430 B.C., he vividly describes patients suffering a sudden high fever , shortness of breath and an array of sickly discharges. Those who survived the sickness had endured such delirious fevers that they might have no memory of it all.

    Athens as a state was unprepared to meet the challenge of that plague. Thucydides describes the futility of any human response: Appeals to the gods and the work of doctors – who died in droves – were equally useless . The disease wreaked havoc because the Athenians were massed within the city walls to wait out the Spartan armies during the Peloponnesian War.

    Yet despite the plague's terrible nature, Thucydides insists that the worst part was the despair people felt from fear and the " horror of human beings dying like sheep ."

    Sick people died of neglect, of the lack of proper shelter and of disease spreading from improper burials in an unprepared and overcrowded city, followed by looting and lawlessness.

    Athens, set up as a fortress against its enemies, brought ruin upon itself.

    Making sense out of human flaws

    Left out of plague accounts are the names of the multitudes who died in them. Homer, Sophocles and Thucydides tell us that masses died. But plagues in ancient narratives are usually the beginning, not the end of the story. A plague didn't stop the Trojan War, prevent Oedipus' sons from waging civil war or give the Athenians enough reasons to make peace.

    For years after the ravages of the plague, Athens still suffered from in-fighting, toxic politics and selfish leaders. Popular politics led to the disastrous Sicilian Expedition of 415 B.C., killing thousands of Athenians – but still Athens survived.

    A decade later, the Athenians again broke into civil factions and eventually prosecuted their own generals after a naval victory in 406 B.C. at Arginusae . In 404 B.C., after a siege, Sparta defeated Athens. But, as we learn from Greek myth, it was – again – really Athens' leaders and people who defeated themselves.

    Joel Christensen , Associate Professor of Classical Studies, Brandeis University

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

    [Mar 12, 2020] Trump's Botched Coronavirus Speech

    If comments reflect sentiments of moderate Republicans, Trump has no chances in November.
    Notable quotes:
    "... What over the last three years - and specifically in the last three weeks made you think Trump was going to come out of this on top? That would require him to actually be on top of things, which he never has been. Ever. And you thinking he's just doing 'poorly' just highlights your delusion that he is capable of being even mildly competent. ..."
    "... Trump spent the first years of his presidency doing favors for Wall Street, Israel, and Saudi Arabia instead of focusing on the America First promises that got him elected. The trillions he wasted on advancing foreign interests was badly needed to rebuild American infrastructure, including America's disease testing capacity. ..."
    "... Fair enough, we Americans may be stumbling along somewhat unsteadily into unchartered territory, but the important thing is we're now stumbling in the right general direction. We'll make it through this, people - most of us at least. All we can do as we enter into this miasma is our level best as responsible, compassionate humans, keeping a stiff upper lip and a stoic constitution. Amor fati : as precious as life is, death is always and evermore its close companion. ..."
    "... All the hallmarks of a Trump operation, offensive, ineffective, poorly thought out and will be retracted in the end. The travel ban against China, did help when China was the only source of the disease, so kudos to Trump. However now the monster is in the castle so pulling up the drawbridge won't help anymore. ..."
    Mar 12, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    engineerscotty 11 hours ago

    Before the speech, I opined on Dreher's blog that Trump still had a chance of coming out of this crisis on top politically--that he might demonstrably use the bully pulpit of his office in a constructive manner, and be able to claim credit for a successful outcome.

    After the speech... well, it was widely panned in the more liberal sectors of the media, and FOX News has this bit of tripe as its current headline: https://www.foxnews.com/us/... The speech is mentioned in a sidebar, without commentary. When the friendly media outlets ignore you, it's a good sign you've done poorly.

    Matthew Kuhl engineerscotty 10 hours ago
    What over the last three years - and specifically in the last three weeks made you think Trump was going to come out of this on top? That would require him to actually be on top of things, which he never has been. Ever. And you thinking he's just doing 'poorly' just highlights your delusion that he is capable of being even mildly competent.
    marku52 Matthew Kuhl 10 hours ago
    When you base your team selection on political loyalty, you get fawning toadies. Mr Redfield (CDC), a homophobe associated with a group that regards HIV as God's judgement on gay people, was never going to be competent at epidemic control. He doesn't even believe in it.
    engineerscotty Matthew Kuhl 9 hours ago
    Note, I said "still had a chance". Such an observation should not be interpreted as any sort of praise for Trump, but as an observation that should he manage to string a couple coherent sentences together on the teevee, more than a few talking heads in the newsmejia will offer unto him hosannas about being "presidential".

    Lots of people, still, grade him on the curve. And that's including a fair number that aren't die-hard partisans... but would rather have an exciting horse race to write about this November.

    But other than that, I agree with you. He's an imbecile, and isn't going to stop being an imbecile over this. But lots of people will offer up the tiniest shreds to argue otherwise.

    IanDakar engineerscotty 6 hours ago
    Don't feel bad. That's where I was when he declared we were leaving Syria the first time (when nothing happened). I thought "Well if he carries this out he has a chance of doing something good."

    By the other time he said we were leaving Syria (when we did....not and decided to let a wast start and steal oil fields) I was done. Now I don't even trust the afgan deal to work out.

    The raw mess up speech is a new low. He's normally good at reading a script.

    Feral Finster 10 hours ago
    Correct me if I am wrong, but we can still travel to South Korea, etc. all we want?

    Also, I know that Trump owns numerous properties in the UK, but how does that stack up to Ireland (also, IIRC, not subject to the ban) and the rest of Europe? Does that explain anything, or is it just a way of supporting his fellow imbecile BoJo?

    Good thing that the UK doesn't get any foreign travelers.

    engineerscotty Feral Finster 10 hours ago
    Boris Johnson's government, to his credit, appears to be handling the crisis well, or at least competently. While there is much that BoJo and Trump have in common, there is also much they do not.
    KevinS engineerscotty 10 hours ago
    Boris can be a bit clownish at times....but he is not a stupid person, unlike you know who....
    HenionJD KevinS 8 hours ago
    Neither leader is stupid. One is simply unprincipled and the other suffers from a profound personality disorder. One can rise to the crisis when it's in his interest to do so and the other thinks the crisis is a plot to make him look bad.
    Per engineerscotty 7 hours ago
    i think you should recheck your sources on that topic and widen the search to other sources too. The brit bobs i have spoken with say the response there is a joke.. I will not bet my life on this tho, bc i am in Norway..

    The response here have been slow but it seems to get better, no mass testing yet so we dont know the real number of sick at all yet..

    JonF311 engineerscotty 6 hours ago
    Johnson may be a bombastic boob at times, but he's been in government for a while and knows his way around the place.
    Rkramden66 Feral Finster 9 hours ago
    No kidding. 1M foreign visitors on any given day in London, I seem to remember. Makes no sense at all, except in crude political terms.
    failure 10 hours ago
    "The U.S. has the lowest per capita testing of any country."

    Trump spent the first years of his presidency doing favors for Wall Street, Israel, and Saudi Arabia instead of focusing on the America First promises that got him elected. The trillions he wasted on advancing foreign interests was badly needed to rebuild American infrastructure, including America's disease testing capacity.

    Brasidas 10 hours ago
    This is the problem and it has always been the problem with an uncurious President who doesn't read and who works off hunches and believes he's a "stable genius". He can't even be bothered to understand the contours of his own policies. After all, it's just a game show.
    Nomuka Brasidas 8 hours ago
    In a few short lines, you've captured the situation perfectly. Our president is worse than ineffectual....
    John Achterhof 10 hours ago
    Fair enough, we Americans may be stumbling along somewhat unsteadily into unchartered territory, but the important thing is we're now stumbling in the right general direction. We'll make it through this, people - most of us at least. All we can do as we enter into this miasma is our level best as responsible, compassionate humans, keeping a stiff upper lip and a stoic constitution. Amor fati : as precious as life is, death is always and evermore its close companion.
    IanDakar John Achterhof 7 hours ago • edited
    A travel ban when the disease is here [makes no sense]. When infected citizens can travel from and TO infected areas:

    Where some countires are exempt so infected foreigners can just go to one of those countries then come here:

    Is not the right direction. It would be a half step forward in January. Now it's [like] installing a faulty smoke detector in the middle of a roaring fire. We screwed up. We are still screwing up. Acting like It's ok and we will be fine is not helping.

    We don't need motivation posters. We don't need panic. We need the public to realize this is NOT ok and to get these people at the top to realize this is Not Ok behavior.

    THEN, we can buckle down and hope for the best with that poster

    I Am Sorry 10 hours ago
    I voted for him. I still don't know whether HRC would have been worse, but this is really, really bad.
    john 9 hours ago
    All the hallmarks of a Trump operation, offensive, ineffective, poorly thought out and will be retracted in the end. The travel ban against China, did help when China was the only source of the disease, so kudos to Trump. However now the monster is in the castle so pulling up the drawbridge won't help anymore.
    engineerscotty john 9 hours ago
    I'm surprised Mexicans haven't been blamed for this yet.
    Doug Chance engineerscotty 8 hours ago
    Oh, they have. This is from the email I got from the White House listserv:

    "Some 150,000 illegal immigrants from 72 nations with cases of the coronavirus have been apprehended or deemed inadmissible from entering the United States since November," according to officials. These apprehensions underscore the need for border security and proper vetting. Read more from Paul Bedard in the Washington Examiner.

    engineerscotty Doug Chance 7 hours ago
    It's one of those carefully-constructed sentences that can be ambiguously parsed.

    If you read it as "Some 150,000 illegal immigrants from (72 nations with cases of the coronavirus) have been apprehended", it's likely true but unremarkable. Many nations now have coronovirus cases.

    If you read it as "Some 150,000 (illegal immigrants from 72 nations) with cases of the coronavirus have been apprehended", it would be remarkable if true, but is absolutely false based on what we currently know.

    And the November reference is particularly cheeky.

    FL Transplant john 7 hours ago
    But the travel ban wasn't against China--meaning anyone there who could have been exposed--it was against Chinese from anywhere in the country. Americans and others potentially infected were free to enter the US from impacted areas with no restrictions--quarantines, etc.

    Just like the current ban against Europe. US citizens/permanent residents are free to travel to/from without restriction. We're only banning nationals from European countries. And there's going to be a massive influx of those eligible returning from Europe in the next couple of days--do you think any of them might, just might, be bring Covid 19 back along with themselves?

    Name 9 hours ago
    When is the next MAGA Rally?
    Chris Chuba Name 7 hours ago
    Don't worry, just keep watching FOX and you'll see it broadcasted on prime time.
    Old Man Shadow 8 hours ago
    Before I watched his speech, I thought that this was a serious situation, but we should avoid panic.

    After I watched his speech, my impulse was to run out, start hording, and lock myself and my family in our home for the next six months.

    This was not a good speech is what I'm saying.

    Donna Saggia 7 hours ago
    Health care under uber-capitalism. We seem to have all the money in the world to throw at military toys, but very little for the health of the nation. If Americans keep voting for these priorities, the inevitable consequences will prevail. The US may be just a bad social experiment.
    Chris Chuba 7 hours ago
    As others have stated, no mention of paid sick leave which would go a long way towards encouraging infected people to self-quarantine rather than go to work and keep spreading the virus.

    On an even more dire topic, a U.S. General is blaming Iran for a rocket attack in Iraq that killed two U.S. serviceman. This is Trump's 'red line', if everyone does what they have publicly stated then Trump just gave ISIS the golden key to force us into a war with Iran.

    IanDakar Chris Chuba 7 hours ago
    The US House has a bill to offer paid leave among other measures. Republicans have said it goes beyond the scope of what's needed. The Senate has said that they aren't reviewing anything until after the week long break they are about to have.

    So yeah.

    Ken T Feral Finster 2 hours ago
    True market insiders easily make just as much money in a downward moving market as in an upward moving market. As long as it is moving , that is all that matters. That means that people are buying and selling, and Wall Street is profiting from every transaction. The people being hurt the most by the market losses are the middle class folks whose 401k's are losing value.
    PeerReview 4 hours ago
    Trump is much better at doing stuff for Israel and Saudi Arabia. He always has plenty of time, money, and focus for doing what they want him to do. If he spent as much time controlling our borders and defending the lives, health, and economic well-being of Americans as he does on fighting wars for Israel and Saudi Arabia, we'd be better prepared for this virus.

    [Mar 10, 2020] The Long Roots of Our Russophobia by Jeremy Kuzmarov

    Notable quotes:
    "... Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria ..."
    "... Mettan defines Russophobia as the promotion of negative stereotypes about Russia that associate the country with despotism, treachery, expansion, oppression and other negative character traits. In his view, it is "not linked to specific historical events" but "exists first in the head of the one who looks, not in the victim's alleged behavior or characteristics." ..."
    "... The New York Times ..."
    "... Russophobia in the United States has been advanced most insidiously by the nation's foreign policy elite who have envisioned themselves as grand chess-masters seeking to checkmate their Russian adversary in order to control the Eurasian heartland. ..."
    "... This view is little different than European colonial strategists who had learned of the importance of molding public opinion through disinformation campaigns that depicted the Russian bear as a menace to Western civilization. ..."
    Mar 06, 2020 | www.counterpunch.org
    For the last five years, the American media has been filled with scurrilous articles demonizing Russian President Vladimir Putin.

    Putin has been accused of every crime imaginable, from shooting down airplanes, to assassinating opponents, to invading neighboring countries, to stealing money to manipulating the U.S. president and helping to rig the 2016 election.

    Few of the accusations directed against Putin have ever been substantiated and the quality of journalism has been at the level of "yellow journalism."

    In a desperate attempt to sustain their political careers, centrist Democrats like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton accused their adversaries of being Russian agents – again without proof.

    And even the progressive hero Bernie Sanders – himself a victim of red-baiting – has engaged in Russia bashing and unsubstantiated accusations for which he offers no proof.

    Guy Mettan's book, Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2017) provides needed historical context for our current political moment, showing how anti-Russian hysteria has long proliferated as a means of justifying Western imperialism.

    Mettan is a Swiss journalist and member of parliament who learned about the corruption of the media business when his reporting on the world anticommunist league rankled his newspapers' shareholders, and when he realized that he was serving as a paid stenographer for the Bosnian Islamist leader Alija Izetbegovic in the early 1990s.

    Mettan defines Russophobia as the promotion of negative stereotypes about Russia that associate the country with despotism, treachery, expansion, oppression and other negative character traits. In his view, it is "not linked to specific historical events" but "exists first in the head of the one who looks, not in the victim's alleged behavior or characteristics."

    Like anti-semitism, Mettan writes, "Russophobia is a way of turning specific pseudo-facts into essential one-dimensional values, barbarity, despotism, and expansionism in the Russian case in order to justify stigmatization and ostracism."

    The origins of Russophobic discourse date back to a schism in the Church during the Middle Ages when Charlemagne was crowned emperor of the Roman empire and modified the Christian liturgy to introduce reforms execrated by the Eastern Orthodox Churches of the Byzantine empire.

    Mettan writes that "the Europe of Charlemagne and of the year 1000 was in need of a foil in the East to rebuild herself, just as the Europe of the 2000s needs Russia to consolidate her union."

    Before the schism, European rulers had no negative opinions of Russia. When Capetian King Henri I found himself a widower, he turned towards the prestigious Kiev kingdom two thousand miles away and married Vladimir's granddaughter, Princess Ann.

    A main goal of the new liturgy adopted by Charlemagne was to undermine any Byzantine influence in Italy and Western Europe.

    Over the next century, the schism evolved from a religious into a political one.

    The Pope and the top Roman administration made documents disappear and truncated others in order to blame the Easterners.

    Byzantium and Russia were in turn rebuked for their "caesaropapism," or "Oriental style despotism," which could be contrasted which the supposedly enlightened, democratic governing system in the West.

    Russia was particularly hated because it had defied efforts of Western European countries to submit to their authority and impose Catholicism.

    In the 1760s, French diplomats working with a variety of Ukrainian, Hungarian and Polish political figures produced a forged testament of Peter 1 ["The Great"] purporting to reveal Russia's 'grand design' to conquer most of Europe.

    This document was still taken seriously by governments during the Napoleanic wars; and as late as the Cold War, President Harry Truman found it helpful in explaining Stalin.

    In Britain, the Whigs, who represented the liberal bourgeois opposition to the Tory government and its program of free-trade imperialism, were the most virulent Russophobes, much like today's Democrats in the United States.

    The British media also enflamed public opinion by taking hysterical positions against Russia – often on the eve of major military expeditions.

    The London Times during the 1820s Greek Independence war editorialized that no "sane person" could "look with satisfaction at the immense and rapid overgrowth of Russian power." The same thing was being written in The New York Times in the 2010s.

    A great example of the Orientalist stereotype was Bram Stoker's novel Dracula , whose main character was modeled after Russian ruler, Ivan the Terrible. As if no English ruler in history was cruel either.

    The Nazis took Russo-phobic discourse to new heights during the 1930s and 1940s, combining it with a virulent anti-bolshevism and anti-semitism.

    A survey of German high school texts in the 1960s found little change in the image of Russia. The Russians were still depicted as "primitive, simple, very violent, cruel, mean, inhuman, cupid and very stubborn."

    The same stereotypes were displayed in many Hollywood films during the Cold War, where KGB figures were particularly maligned. No wonder that when a former KGB agent, Vladimir Putin, took power, people went insane. Russophobia in the United States has been advanced most insidiously by the nation's foreign policy elite who have envisioned themselves as grand chess-masters seeking to checkmate their Russian adversary in order to control the Eurasian heartland.

    This view is little different than European colonial strategists who had learned of the importance of molding public opinion through disinformation campaigns that depicted the Russian bear as a menace to Western civilization.

    Guy Mettan has written a thought-provoking book that provides badly needed historical context for the anti-Russian delirium gripping our society.

    Breaking the taboo on Russophobia is of vital importance in laying the groundwork for a more peaceful world order and genuinely progressive movement in the United States. Unfortunately, recent developments don't inspire much confidence that history will be transcended. Join the debate on Facebook More articles by: Jeremy Kuzmarov Jeremy Kuzmarov is the author of The Russians are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce (Monthly Review Press, 2018) and Obama's Unending Wars: Fronting for the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019).

    [Mar 09, 2020] The Coronavirus Debacle by Daniel Larison

    Right the major fiasco was with CDC testing kits. I do not see any other. Exaggerating the threat would only make hoarding panic that engult the USA worse. Of source Trump desire to protect stock market at any human or other cost was cruel and silly, but Trump is cruel and silly in many other areas as well.
    Quarantine for retired persons might really help in areas with high number of infections.
    Notable quotes:
    "... For the last several weeks, we have seen the president and top administration officials presenting the public with misleading and outright false information in an effort to conceal the magnitude of the problem and the extent of their initial failures. The president has been unwilling to tell the public the truth about the situation because he evidently cares more about the short-term political implications than he does about protecting the public: ..."
    Mar 07, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    The AP reports on more of the Trump White House's bungling of the coronavirus response:

    The White House overruled health officials who wanted to recommend that elderly and physically fragile Americans be advised not to fly on commercial airlines because of the new coronavirus, a federal official told The Associated Press.

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention submitted the plan this week as a way of trying to control the virus, but White House officials ordered the air travel recommendation be removed, said the official who had direct knowledge of the plan. Trump administration officials have since suggested certain people should consider not traveling, but they have stopped short of the stronger guidance sought by the CDC.

    There is no good reason for the White House to prevent this recommendation from being made public. This is another example of how the president and his top officials are trying to keep up the pretense that the outbreak is much less dangerous than it actually is, and in doing so they are helping to make the outbreak worse than it has to be.

    For the last several weeks, we have seen the president and top administration officials presenting the public with misleading and outright false information in an effort to conceal the magnitude of the problem and the extent of their initial failures. The president has been unwilling to tell the public the truth about the situation because he evidently cares more about the short-term political implications than he does about protecting the public:

    Even as the government's scientists and leading health experts raised the alarm early and pushed for aggressive action, they faced resistance and doubt at the White House -- especially from the president -- about spooking financial markets and inciting panic.

    "It's going to all work out," Mr. Trump said as recently as Thursday night. "Everybody has to be calm. It's going to work out."

    Justin Fox comments on the president's terrible messaging:

    The biggest problem, though, is simply the way that the president talks about the disease. His instinct at every turn is to downplay its danger and significance.

    Minimizing the danger and significance of the outbreak ensured that the government's response was less urgent and focused than it could have been. It encouraged people to take it less seriously and thus made it more likely that the virus would spread. Then when the severity of the problem became undeniable, the earlier discredited happy talk makes it easier for people to disbelieve what the government tells them in the future.

    The administration had time to prepare a more effective response, but as I said last week the administration frittered away the time they had. They were still preoccupied with keeping the virus out rather than trying to manage its spread once it arrived here, as it was inevitably going to do:

    "We have contained this. I won't say airtight but pretty close to airtight," White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said in a television interview on Feb. 25, echoing Trump's tweeted declaration that the virus was "very much under control" in the United States.

    But it wasn't, and the administration's rosy messaging was fundamentally at odds with a growing cacophony of alarm bells inside and outside the U.S. government. Since January, epidemiologists, former U.S. public health officials and experts have been warning, publicly and privately, that the administration's insistence that containment was -- and should remain -- the primary way to confront an emerging infectious disease was a grave mistake.

    The initial response and the stubborn refusal to adapt to new developments have meant that the U.S. is in a much worse position in handling this outbreak than many other countries. Max Nisen comments on the lack of testing in the U.S.:

    Don't cheer just yet. The lower case count doesn't mean Americans are doing a better job of containing the virus; rather, it reflects the fact that the U.S. is badly behind in its ability to test people. The Centers for Disease Control stopped disclosing how many people it has tested as of Monday, but an analysis by The Atlantic could only confirm 1,895 tests. Switzerland, a country with fewer residents than New Jersey, has tested nearly twice as many people. The U.K., which has far fewer cases, has tested over 20,000. This gap is particularly worrisome given evidence of community spread in a number of different states and a high death count, both of which suggest the number of cases will jump as more tests are conducted.

    Capacity is finally ramping up, but only after weeks of delays prompted by unforced errors and botched early test kits from the CDC. The continuing inability to test broadly is leading to missed cases, more infections, and an outbreak that will be bigger than it needed to be.

    The administration not only bungled their initial response, but they have also been extremely resistant to admitting error. Trump's appointees are reluctant to contradict the president when he spouts nonsense about the outbreak, and that in turn makes it more difficult for them to communicate clearly and consistently with the public. All of this serves to undermine public trust in the government's response, and it prevents health officials from being able to do their jobs without political interference. The federal government's response has been hampered by a president who wants to make people think that the problem isn't that bad and is already being dealt with successfully:

    At the White House, Trump and many of his aides were initially skeptical of just how serious the coronavirus threat was, while the president often seemed uninterested as long as the virus was abroad. At first, when he began to engage, he downplayed the threat -- "The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA," he tweeted in late February -- and became a font of misinformation and confusion, further muddling his administration's response.

    On Friday, visiting the CDC in Atlanta, the president spewed more falsehoods when he claimed, incorrectly: "Anybody that needs a test, gets a test. They're there. They have the tests. And the tests are beautiful."

    When the president lies about such a serious matter, he is causing unnecessary confusion and he is sending exactly the wrong message that remedying earlier failures is not an urgent priority. Because Trump's primary concern is making himself look good in the short term, he is willing to risk a worse outbreak. During his visit to the CDC, the president went on in an even more bizarre vein to praise the tests by comparing them to his "perfect call" with the Ukrainian president last summer that led to his impeachment:

    In an attempt to express confidence in the CDC's coronavirus test (the agency's second attempt after the first one it developed failed), Trump offered an unorthodox comparison from the last enormous crisis to swamp his presidency. The tests are just like his impeachment-causing attempt to pressure a foreign government to help him get reelected. "The tests are all perfect like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. Right? This was not as perfect as that but pretty good," Trump told reporters after falsely stating, again, that anyone who needed a test right now could get one.

    This morning the president was back at it this morning with more self-serving misinformation:

    We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on CoronaVirus. We moved VERY early to close borders to certain areas, which was a Godsend. V.P. is doing a great job. The Fake News Media is doing everything possible to make us look bad. Sad!

    -- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 8, 2020

    The president needs people to think that everything he does is perfect, so he is incapable of acknowledging his failures and prefers to vilify accurate reporting about those failures. He cannot help but mismanage the government response because he cannot put the national interest ahead of his own selfishness. An untold number of Americans will be paying a steep price for the president's unfitness for office in the weeks and months to come.

    − +

    Englewood12 hours ago

    "An untold number of Americans will be paying a steep price for the president's unfitness for office in the weeks and months to come."

    We've been paying it for a while. It's just more obvious now. I wish I never voted for him.

    SFBay1949 Englewood6 hours ago • edited
    I wish you had thought a bit into the future before you voted him. Did you really think things wouldn't turn out EXACTLY the way they have? Honestly, it's to rime tell the truth here.
    Englewood SFBay19495 hours ago
    It's the Democrats who should have thought a bit into the future. It was the identity and known character and policies of Trump's opponent that tipped my vote to Trump. And no, obviously I didn't think things would turn out "exactly" this way. I thought if I put up with his repulsive manner I'd get maybe a third of his main campaign promises and that the GOP establishment would get the hiding it deserves. Boy, was I wrong.
    SFBay1949 Englewood3 hours ago
    I take you believe Hillary Clinton was worse than Trump. Fair enough, but do you still think our country would be in the state it is now? In what way could she possibly be worse than what we have now with Trump?
    Brandon Falusi SFBay19494 hours ago
    It's better for Trumpism to have burst like a zit onto the mirror, no matter how disgusting, because it was all there anyway under Bush and Cheney, it was there alongside "Barack the magic... birth certificate!" You can fairly easily wash off the stain of Bush and Rumsfeld, you can sort of start to forget their sublime horror, the exact same level of lies and utter mismanagement, but you can't wash off a man like Trump, ever. His portrait will be in the White House so future Americans can see what we're capable of, and hopefully be more vigilant about the subtle and polished lies and civilized outrages. We needed this barbaric display to get some clarity.
    King George12 hours ago
    "The president has been about the situation because he evidently cares more about the
    short-term political implications than he does about protecting the public"

    It's no different from the first two years of his presidency. He already betrayed those of us who voted for the America First promises on immigration and ending the wars. He spent most of his doing favors for Wall Street, Israel, and Saudi Arabia instead. Now he's going to betray the many vulnerable elders who voted for him, risking their illness and even death by his selfish evasions and lies. He's a con artist. A fake.

    [Mar 09, 2020] President Trump's (and by extension, prayerful Vice President Pence's) incompetence and his self-serving, empathy-free approach to the coronavirus

    Notable quotes:
    "... This article first appeared NewVandal . ..."
    Mar 09, 2020 | www.counterpunch.org

    As COVID-19 begins its inevitable "community transmission" phase around the United States, the purveyors of the conventional wisdom are largely focused on President Trump's (and by extension, prayerful Vice President Pence's) incompetence and his self-serving, empathy-free approach to the coronavirus. And it is true that, as with all things Trump, it seems that all he really cares about is the stock market and its effect on his reelection bid. But Trump's narcissism obscures something both far more pernicious and far more permanent than his oft-televised obsession with himself and that's the fact that he's been busily making Milton Friedman's "Supply Side/The Bottom Line Is The Only Line" dream an intractable reality.

    It was a dream that first took flight when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. The dream was often made manifest by the neoliberal lurch and deregulatory impulses of President Bill Clinton. But it is Trump who's come closest to fully realizing the dream of ending responsive government. It should come as no surprise, though. Trump lifted, among other things , his " Make America Great Again " slogan from the Gipper. He's also taken Reagan's anti-FDR pitch about the dangers of government (see "The Deep State") and, with the help of a motley crew of Tea Partiers, Evangelicals and corporate Republicans, transformed it into, as Steve Bannon calls it, a " War on the Administrative State ."

    Since taking office and taking complete control of the news-cycle, Trump has been systematically starving Federal agencies of resources, personnel and attention. He has, through the sycophants and lobbyists he's installed around the Executive Branch, been pushing out career professionals and barely replacing them with also-rans. And he is dismantling every aspect of government he cannot use to reward his corporate clients or punish political apostates.

    The idea is to cripple the Federal government from within instead of doing the hard legislative work of changing the laws that legally compel government action. As a result, many of the regulations on the books are becoming functionally irrelevant . Some laws are being rewritten by the lobbyists who used to lobby against 'em, but mostly the Executive Branch is being systematically emaciated by the political equivalent of chronic wasting disease.

    It's an approach first pioneered by Reagan devotee Grover Norquist, who advocated " starving the beast " of government down to a manageable size before "drowning it" in a bathtub. It's an idea currently being implemented with wide-ranging effect by Trump, who, like Reagan before him , is accelerating the bankrupting of the already debt-laden treasury with a combo of tax cuts and massive spending on a world-dwarfing defense industry. Eventually, the theory goes, the "safety net," a.k.a. "entitlements," and other "common good" spending will collapse under the weight of the financial limitations generated by profuse borrowing to fund market-distorting tax cuts and to dole out subsidies and tax gifts to cronies and key corporations. All the while, the ever-less regulated chemical, oil, defense, agricultural and (most importantly of all) financial industries will continue to hoard assets through the rinsing and repeating of the supply side boom-and-bust scheme, a.k.a. the business cycle.

    Frankly, this all looks like the endgame of a long plan to undo the demand side economy created by the New Deal. Along with the seemingly (but not) contradictory spike in Unitary Executive power (which is about protecting rackets, shielding enforcers from prosecution and about enforcing political compliance), this is a transformation decades in the making and Trump is the perfect salesman for this final episode even better than Reagan or Clinton because his "flood the zone" narcissism is the ultimate, 24/7 distraction for a people addicted to binge watching, inured to scripted reality shows and motivated by belligerent infotainment.

    Reagan was the first actor to hit his marks on a stage set for him by the interlocking forces of Big Oil, Big Defense and Wall Street. Not coincidentally, this same Venn Diagram of power has profited mightily from Trump's Presidency. Rather than an actor, though, Trump is the barking emcee of the final season of the American Dream Gameshow a program that was initially cancelled in 1980, but somehow kept running in syndication on one of the two crappy channels a "free" people have been given to chose from. But now, the final credits are closer to rolling that ever before.

    As such, Trump is the omega to Reagan's alpha. And any coronavirus-related "incompetence" you see being reported is a feature, not a bug, of this Re-Great'd America. And that's because Trump is not an outlier. He is a culmination.

    This article first appeared NewVandal .

    JP Sottile is a freelance journalist, published historian, radio co-host and documentary filmmaker (The Warning, 2008). His credits include a stint on the Newshour news desk, C-SPAN, and as newsmagazine producer for ABC affiliate WJLA in Washington. His weekly show, Inside the Headlines w/ The Newsvandal, co-hosted by James Moore, airs every Friday on KRUU-FM in Fairfield, Iowa. He blogs under the pseudonym " the Newsvandal ".

    [Mar 08, 2020] Looks like Trump is opening himself up to defeat.

    Mar 08, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Pft , Mar 7 2020 0:07 utc | 54

    When Trump was first elected I figured it was a 1 term deal. After all, why does a billionaire want to waste all of his twighlight years as President for any longer. But the Dems failed to run anyone that could relieve him from duty. What to do? Well Covid-19. Knowing how fearful Americans are, not taking a overhyped health care crisis seriously is political suicide. Yet he chooses to do so. If politicians know nothing they know the people demand "to be kept safe". Yet Trump seems oblivious, opening himself up to defeat.

    ... ... ...

    Otherwise I guess people might vote for Biden if they get scared enough, and if they get the chance to vote. Stay tuned though.

    [Mar 07, 2020] Donald Trump was always only about himself, even when the Twin Towers fell

    Mar 07, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    So it goes. I cannot for the life of me understand why, leaving aside the public health aspects of the president's response, people cannot see what a political disaster he's making for himself and the GOP. He doesn't have to act like the zombie apocalypse is upon us. He only has to behave like Rudy Giuliani did as Mayor of New York City in the fall of 2001. But then, as we know, Donald Trump saw the Twin Towers fall, and thought about himself:

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/PcKlPhFIE7w?start=105


    Hmmm a day ago

    I just watched that 9/11 clip. I'd never seen or heard it and I figured, oh boy, what asinine, self-centered things did he say back then. That's what I've come to expect from him. But -- I don't really see the problem. They asked him about his nearby tower, and his observation that it was the second tallest downtown after the WTC is typical of him. But he didn't dwell on that. And the rest of the interview was just fine, typical platitudes of that day, in response to some typical stupid (and obsequious) questions from the reporters. If he sounded like that more often over the last 3 years, I'd be much happier.
    AlfredEN Hmmm a day ago
    Despite his many faults, Trump was once a much better, more articulate communicator. There's an old recording of a Larry King interview in which he sounds like an entirely different person from what we see today.
    Hmmm AlfredEN 7 hours ago
    That's my impression as well. I haven't seen this remarked on much, in all the virtual ink spilled about Trump. Sometimes in old age, one's distinguishing traits and habits become more pronounced (or as my mother says, one becomes "the same but more so"). Not sure if that's the case with Trump. It could also be that his cognitive and verbal abilities have declined, or that he hit on a winning formula and has stuck with it.

    If nothing else, this election will give us a lot of opportunity to think about what old men are like.

    [Mar 06, 2020] Brainwashing works: I have heard people evoke Russia in conspiracies, in real life. Not just on the internet.

    Mar 06, 2020 | www.unz.com

    songbird , says: Show Comment February 26, 2020 at 12:17 am GMT

    @Bill If you view China as a Han ethnic construct, antipathy to it (in the West) is very low compared to most other ethnic constructs: such as core-Americans, European nationalists, or worse still, Russia.

    I've heard people evoke Russia in conspiracies, in real life. Not just on the internet.

    The only large, noteworthy, homogeneous country with lessor antipathy in the West is Japan. But it is something of a double-edged sword, as Japan is nowhere near as praised as China because it doesn't have the same power and has been stagnating.

    [Mar 05, 2020] Swamp russsiagators at work again: Apparent US Intel Meddling in US Election, With 'Report' Russia is Aiding Sanders Consortiumnews

    Looks like Putin have always been eating CIA homework...
    Notable quotes:
    "... The New York Times ..."
    "... Washington Post ..."
    "... The New York Times ..."
    "... Consortium News ..."
    Feb 21, 2020 | consortiumnews.com
    Apparent US Intel Meddling in US Election, With 'Report' Russia is Aiding Sanders

    96 Comments

    Without any proof, The New York Times and Washington Post run "Russia helping Sanders" stories, and Sanders responds by bashing Russia, writes Joe Lauria.

    By Joe Lauria
    Special to Consortium News

    W ith Democratic frontrunner Bernie Sanders spooking the Democratic establishment, The Washington Post Friday reported damaging information from intelligence sources against Sanders by saying that Russia is trying to help his campaign.

    If the story is true and if intelligence agencies are truly committed to protecting U.S. citizens, the Sanders campaign would have been quietly informed and shown evidence to back up the claims.

    Instead the story wound up on the front page of the Post , "according to people familiar with the matter." Zero evidence was produced to back up the intelligence agencies' assertion.

    "It is not clear what form that Russian assistance has taken," the Post reported. That would tell any traditional news editor that there was no story until it is known.

    Instead major U.S. media are again playing the role of laundering totally unverified "information" just because it comes from an intelligence source. Reporting such assertions without proof amounts to an abdication of journalistic responsibility. It shows total trust in U.S. intelligence despite decades of deception and skullduggery from these agencies.

    Centrist Democratic Party leaders have expressed extreme unease with Sanders leading the Democratic pack. Politico reported Friday that former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg's entry into the race is explicitly to stop Sanders from winning on the first ballot at the party convention.

    A day after The New York Times reported , also without evidence, that Russia is again trying to help Donald Trump win in November, the Post reports Moscow is trying to help Sanders too, again without substance. Both candidates whom the establishment loathes were smeared on successive days.

    In a Tough Spot

    The Times followed the Post report Friday by making it appear that Sanders himself had chosen to make public the intelligence assessment about "Russian interference" in his campaign.

    But Sanders had known for a month about this assessment and only issued a statement after the Post asked him for comment before publishing its uncorroborated story based on anonymous sources.

    Sanders was put in a difficult spot. If he said, "Show me the proof that Russia is trying to help me," he ran the risk of being attacked for disbelieving (even disloyalty to) U.S. intelligence, and, by default, defending the Kremlin.

    So politician that he is, and one who is trying to win the White House, Sanders told the Post :

    "I don't care, frankly, who Putin wants to be president. My message to Putin is clear: Stay out of American elections, and as president I will make sure that you do. In 2016, Russia used Internet propaganda to sow division in our country, and my understanding is that they are doing it again in 2020."

    The Times quoted Sanders as calling Russian President Vladimir Putin an "autocratic thug." The paper reported Sanders saying in a statement: "Let's be clear, the Russians want to undermine American democracy by dividing us up and, unlike the current president, I stand firmly against their efforts and any other foreign power that wants to interfere in our election."

    Responding to a cacophony of criticism that Sanders' supporters are especially vicious online, as opposed to the millions of other vicious people online, Sanders attempted to use Russia as a scapegoat, the way the Clinton campaign did in 2016. He said: "Some of the ugly stuff on the Internet attributed to our campaign may well not be coming from real supporters."

    But no matter how strong Sander's denunciations of Russia, his opponents will now target him as being a tool of the Kremlin.

    Mission accomplished.

    Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former correspondent for T he Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe , Sunday Times of London and numerous other newspapers. He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter @unjoe .


    Juan M Escobedo , February 24, 2020 at 10:55

    Let`s face it,even though Bernie is a moderate Social Democrat,at best.He`s the only one capable of beating "the Orange"version of Hitler.But he sounds as if the DNC,big wigs,decide to deny him the nomination;he`d go along with it.Just like before;when he even campaigned for the"Crooked One(Hillary).I guess we`ll see.

    Kim Dixon , February 24, 2020 at 04:31

    The most-important element missed in this piece is this: Sanders is helping the DNC and the MIC gin up fear of, and hatred for, the only other nuclear superpower on earth.

    If you were around during the McCarthy years, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the '73 Arab/Israeli war, and all the other almost-Armageddon crises of Cold War One, you know that nothing could be stupider and more-dangerous than that. The missiles still sit in their silos, waiting for the next early-warning misunderstanding or proxy-war miscalculation to send them flying.

    Sanders lived through it all. He's supposed to be the furthest-Left pol in Congress. So how can he possibly advocate for anything but detente and disarmament?

    SteveK9 , February 24, 2020 at 20:18

    I would really like to support Bernie, but statements like this make me shake my head. It's more a reflection of America today I guess. Politicians believe to a man (or woman) that they must put the hate on Putin and Russia or they have no chance. It doesn't matter that the Russia garbage is 100% false. And, I don't mean they 'interfered' only a little there was nothing, nothing at all. Even Trump has to go along with this propaganda. I don't know how anyone can believe this idiotic (and incredibly dangerous, as you point out) rubbish at this point. But you can't call your friends blanking morons.

    J Gray , February 25, 2020 at 02:55

    I think he successfully dodged a bullet but set himself up to offer comprehensive election reform if he pulls out a victory .

    or it is an early sign that he, the DNC & MIC are coming to terms. It doesn't have that ring to it to me, like when Trump called for regime-change war in Venezuela & defunding schools to build a space army. That was a clear on-the-record sell-out & got him off the Impeachment hook the next day. Similar to when the Clinton signed the Telecom Act to get off his.

    They are still coming after Sanders too hard w/their McCarthiast attacks to feel like he is siding with them. I think he has to do this because they are bundling his movement, Venezuela and Russia into the new Red Scare.

    Tony Kevin , February 23, 2020 at 21:49

    "#JoeLauria's piece in #ConsortiumNews is excellent. He calmly sets out #Sanders' political dilemma. The latest line from US intelligence agency stenographer media like #NYTimes is that #Russians are helping both #Trump and Sanders because they simply want to sow discord and cynicism about US democracy , they do not care who wins. #CaitlinJohnstone neatly satirises this by writing a spoof article claiming that US intelligence agencies have discovered #Bloomberg is being helped by Russians because he has two Russian grandfathers.

    It has reached the point , as Lauria shows, where any criticism of such US MSM nonsense leaves the speaker open to the allegation that he is soft on/ naive about/complicit in Russian election meddling. Without being a Trump supporter, one can understand Trump's rage and contempt for what is going on .

    Justin Glyn. Consortium News. Joe Lauria. Tony Kevin"

    Tony Kevin , February 23, 2020 at 21:32

    Sanders and Trump will survive this Deep State manipulation and attempted blackmail . They will see off the Clintonistas and Deep State moles, and will go on to fight a tough but fair election. Americans are sick of Russophobia.

    jack , February 24, 2020 at 15:25

    agreed – the Russiagate psyop is past its shelf life – BUT Deep State will carry on – it's a global entity and they're into literally everything – no idea how any known, normal governing structure can deal with it

    Susan J Leslie , February 23, 2020 at 10:40

    Enough with the "Russia" BS already! It is clear to me the wealthy corporate Dems and the MSM are behind all of the smear tactics against Bernie and anyone else who serves the people

    Susan J Leslie , February 23, 2020 at 10:40

    Enough with the "Russia" BS already! It is clear to me the wealthy corporate Dems and the MSM are behind all of the smear tactics against Bernie and anyone else who serves the people

    Dfnslblty , February 23, 2020 at 09:07

    Front page drama plus zero evidence began long ago with 'anonymous sources said "!
    Complete lack of accountability on the part of the sources and on the part of the reporters.
    Thus we receive a "reality teevee " potus , and we are pleased to be hypnotised and titillated.
    A true revolution would demand CN-quality reportage and reject msm pablum.

    JohnDoe , February 23, 2020 at 03:43

    It's enough to look at the news on mainstream media to understand who's, as usual, meddling in the elections. In the latest period for the first time I saw a lot of enthusiastic comments and articles about Bernie Sanders. It's clear they are pushing him. But why those who isolated him in during the primaries against Clinton are now supporting him? It's obvious, that they want to get rid of Elizabeth Warren, first push ahead the weaker candidates, then they'll switch their support towards another candidate, probably Bloomberg.

    delia ruhe , February 23, 2020 at 00:14

    Well, thank you Joe Lauria! I am in trouble in several comment threads for suggesting that the intel community is at it again, trying to ruin two campaigns by identifying the candidates with Putin and the Kremlin. Now I can quote you. Excellent piece, as usual.

    Deniz , February 22, 2020 at 22:44

    Imagine Sanders and Trump, putting their differences aside and declaring war on the deep state during a debate. They have the same enemies.

    The same people who planted Steele's dirty dosier are going to try to steal Sanders election from him. It wont be Trump and the Republicans who rigs the election against Sanders.

    SteveK9 , February 24, 2020 at 20:21

    Trump actually seemed to want to help Bernie a bit (well, he keeps calling him 'Crazy Bernie as well). He put out some tweet calling this latest rubbish, Hoax #7. But Bernie would rather say something stupid, like 'I'm not a friend of Putin he is' talk about 5-year olds.

    Deniz , February 25, 2020 at 00:49

    Its disappointing. Sanders heart seems to be in the right place, but when it comes time to face the sinister forces that run the country for their own benefit, he will be absolutely crushed.

    Linda Jean Doucett , February 22, 2020 at 21:32

    This will never end.
    No president will ever change anything.
    The deep state tentacles will eventually kill us all.
    I am going to go and enjoy what's left.

    Marko , February 22, 2020 at 20:24

    " But Sanders had known for a month about this assessment and only issued a statement after the Post asked him for comment before publishing its uncorroborated story based on anonymous sources Sanders was put in a difficult spot. If he said, "Show me the proof that Russia is trying to help me," he ran the risk of being attacked for disbelieving (even disloyalty to) U.S. intelligence, and, by default, defending the Kremlin. "

    I suspect that Sanders was given a classified briefing a month ago , which he couldn't disclose to the public. If so , and given that he didn't make this clear immediately after being accused of withholding this information , he has only himself to blame for the resulting "bad look".

    JWalters , February 22, 2020 at 19:06

    The corporate media has revealed itself to be a monopoly behind the scenes, working in unison to trash Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard. Even though Gabbard is only at a few percent in the polls, her message is potentially devastating to the war profiteers who own America's Vichy MSM.

    "Congressman Oscar Callaway lost his Congressional election for opposing US entry into WW 1. Before he left office, he demanded investigation into JP Morgan & Co for purchasing control over America's leading 25 newspapers in order to propagandize US public opinion in favor of his corporate and banking interests, including profits from US participation in the war."
    war * profiteerstory. * blogspot. * com/p/war-profiteers-and-israels-bank.html

    Thankfully, there is still a free American press, of which Consortium News is a stellar example.

    elmerfudzie , February 22, 2020 at 13:25

    The CIA and DIA (it has about a dozen agencies under it and is much larger than any other Intel agency) are supposed to monitor threats to our national security, that originate abroad. Aside from a few closed door sessions with a select group of congresspersons, our Intel agencies have practically no real democratic oversight and remain, for all intents and purposes, a parallel government(s) well hidden from public view. In particular how they are financed and what their actual annual budgets really are. How these agencies every managed to seep into any electioneering process what so ever, is beyond me, since they are all intentionally very surreptitious- by design. We ask questions and these Intel agencies are quick to tout the usual phrase; that subject area is secret and needs to be addressed in closed session, blah, blah, blah. Of course "secrecy" translates into, we do what we want when we want and use information any way we want because our parallel governments represent the best example(s) of a perpetual motion machine that does not require outside monitoring. The origins of these "parallel entities" can be traced to the Rockefeller brothers and their associated international corporations. There's the rub folks. Our citizens at large will never overtake for the purposes of real monitoring, this empire and elephant in the room, directly. However we do have one avenue left and it requires a rank and file demand from the people to their state representatives demanding two long standing issues, they remain unresolved and until a solution is found, will permit dark powers to side step every level of democratic governments-anywhere.

    The first is true campaign finance reform and the second is assigning, or rather, removing the status of person-hood to corporate entities. The Rockefeller's used their corporate power and wealth to influence legislative, judicial and executive bodies. They cannot help but do as the puppet master commands! Be it some form of, corporatism, fascism, feudalism, monarchy, oligarchy, even bankster-ism or any other "ism We as citizens at large must make every effort to again, obtain true campaign finance reform and remove the lobbying presence inside the beltway. Today, the corporate entity has risen to a level that completely overtakes and smothers any authentic democratic representation, of and by the people. Originally (circa the early1800's) American corporations were permitted to exist and papers were drawn based on the specific duties they were about to perform, this for the benefit of the local community for example, building a bridge. Once the job was completed, the incorporation was either liquidated or remanded over to the relevant governing body for the purposes of reevaluating the necessity of re-certifying the original incorporation papers. Old man Rockefeller changed the governance and oversight privilege by forcing and promulgating legislation(s) such as limited liability clauses, strategies to oppose competition, tax evasion schemes and (eventually) assigning person-hood to corporate entities, thus creating a parallel government within the government. It all began in Delaware and until we clear our heads and assign names to the actual problems, as I've itemized here, our citizenry will never experience the freedom to fashion our destiny. Please visit TUC radio's two part expose' by Richard Grossman. It will help CONSORTIUMNEWS readers to understand just what a monumental task is ahead for all of us. Work for a fair and equitable future in America, demand campaign finance reform and kick the hustling lobbyists out of our government. Voters being choked to death with senseless debates and useless candidates.

    Jeff Harrison , February 22, 2020 at 12:36

    The real threats to our democracy are our unaccountable surveillance state and the craven politicians in Washington, DC. And, no, Ben, we can't keep our republic because we don't have a sufficient mass of critical thinkers to run it. If we did, this kind of BS, having been shot full of holes once, wouldn't get any air.

    Alan Ross , February 22, 2020 at 10:37

    Sanders may win the nomination and the election but he cannot get a break from some purists on the left. His reaction may have been quite astute. When Sanders says that we should station troops on the borders of Russia or arm the Ukrainians, then you can say he really is anti-Russian. I have not heard all that he has said, but what I have heard sounds so much like hot air put out by a left politician trying to deal with the ages-old establishment and right wing smear that he is a pawn of the commies, a fellow traveler, a pinko, and now an agent of a foreign power, a Russian asset and so on. There is real criticism of Sanders, but his statements about Putin and Russia do not add up to much.

    Skip Scott , February 22, 2020 at 09:51

    Anyone who is still under the influence of the MSM hypnosis of RussiaGate, led by Rachel Madcow, needs to think long and hard about this latest propaganda campaign. The real message here is unless you support corporate sponsored warmonger from column A or B, you are a tool of the "evil Rooskies". And the funny thing is, Sanders is "weak tea" when it comes to issues of war and peace, and the feeding of the war machine at the government trough with no limits.

    The purpose of this BIG LIE of the "Intelligence" agencies is to make it impossible for someone to be against the Forever War without being tarred as a "Foreign Agent", or at least a "useful idiot", of the "EVIL ROOSKIES". To simply want peaceful coexistence on its own merits is impossible.

    Imagine if Sanders dared to mention that Putin enjoys substantial majority support inside Russia, and seeks peaceful coexistence in a multi-polar world, instead of calling him an "autocratic thug". Often for politicians, speaking the truth is a "bridge too far". I wonder if Sanders (like Hillary) finds it necessary to hold "private" positions that differ from his "public" positions? Or does he really believe his own BS?

    Jacquelynn Booth , February 22, 2020 at 09:19

    I had not seen Mr Joe Lauria's article when I commented on Mr Ben Norton's story, but my reply could fit here as well.
    The idiot American public dismays me. To them, the "MSM news" and "celebrity gossip reports" are equal and both to be wholeheartedly believed.
    There is no point in trying to educate a resistant public in the differences between data and gossip -- public doesn't care.
    I weep for what we have lost -- a Constitution, a nation of free thinkers. My heart breaks for the world's people, and what my country tries to do to them, with only a few resistant other countries confronting and challenging America.
    It is so difficult to know the truth of a situation and yet to know that almost no one (statistically speaking) believes you.

    Jim Hartz , February 23, 2020 at 12:04

    A better distinction might be, concerning the intelligence of the American public, the one Chomsky has used, rooted in Ancient Greek culture, that between KNOWLEDGE and OPINION. Americans, of course, have OPINIONS about everything, but little KNOWLEDGE about much of anything. And it seems their idea of FREEDOM is related to, bound up with, their having OPINIONS about virtually EVERYTHING.

    So much for our being a HIGHER life form.

    We're in the process of destroying EVERYTHING, not just HIGHER LIFE FORMS [us], but all flora and fauna, water and air on the planet–as I said, EVERYTHING. To paraphrase from memory a citation by Perry Anderson from the work of heterodox Italian Marxist, Sebastiano Timpanaro, "What we are witnessing is not the triumph of man over history, but the victory of nature over man."

    Tony , February 22, 2020 at 07:40

    The Trump administration has pulled out of the INF missile treaty citing totally unproven claims of Russian violations.
    It also looks like allowing the START treaty on strategic nuclear missiles to lapse if we do not stop it.

    And so, in what sense would Putin want Trump to get re-elected?

    Van Jones of CNN once described the original allegations of Russian meddling in US elections as a 'great big nothing burger'.

    Sounds right to me.

    Sam F , February 22, 2020 at 07:24

    When the secret agencies and mass media stop manipulating public opinion, despite their oligarchy masters' ability to control election results anyway, we will know that they no longer need deception to control the People. Simple force will do the job, with a few marketing claims to assist in hiring goons to suppress any popular movement. Democracy is completely lost, and the pretense of democracy will soon follow.

    michael , February 22, 2020 at 07:03

    Another foray into domestic politics by the CIA, with anonymous sources and no evidence shown (as no evidence exists). Perhaps the CIA (which probably works for Putin, or Bloomberg, or anyone who pays them best, but they are loyal to the US dollar only; and maybe heroin?) is even now making up another Chris Steele/ Fusion GPS/ CrowdStrike dossier, getting that Russian caterer to the Kremlin to pump out clickbait and sink both Trump and Sanders. Because RUSSIANS!!! are "genetically driven" to interfere in American democracy. Next we'll have the DNC (CIA) pushing Superpredator tropes such as "this enormous cohort of black and Latino males" who "don't know how to behave in the workplace" and "don't have any prospects." With this Clintonian (and Biden and Bloomberg) mindset, America will be increasing incarceration once again. That $500,000 bribe the Clintons took from Putin in 2010 when Hillary was Secretary of State probably plays a role.
    Meanwhile, the Pentagon and Defense Secretary Mark Esper have surprisingly noted that China, not Russia, is America's #1 concern: "America's concerns about Beijing's commercial and military expansion should be your concerns as well." Since Bill Clinton's Chinagate fiasco in 1996, Communist China, for a measly $million or so in illegal campaign donations, gained permanent trade status, took millions of American jobs, and suddenly were allowed access to advanced, even military technologies. This was the impetus for China's rise to be the strongest nation in the world. There are no doubt statues of the Clintons all over China, and soon to Hunter Biden, if his Chinese backed hedge funds do well. There are some rumors that Bloomberg has transacted business with China, although doubtful he tried to build a hotel in Beijing or Moscow, or the CIA would be all over it (for a cut)!

    Realist , February 24, 2020 at 00:22

    Esper is a dangerously deranged man who seems, at least to me, to be telegraphing his intent, and certainly his desire, to get into a kinetic war with both Russia and China (Washington already has most of the hybrid war tactics already fully operational), unless English usage has changed so drastically that insults, overt threats and unrestrained bombast are now part of calm, rational cordial diplomacy. I would not be surprised if neocon mouthpieces like Esper are not secretly honing their rhetorical style to emulate the exaggerated volume and enunciation of der ursprüngliche Führer.

    Ma Laoshi , February 22, 2020 at 06:04

    "So politician that he is" -- isn't this already on the slippery slope towards double standards, that is, would say Hillary get a similar pass for making McCarthyite statements like this? Isn't a dispassionate reading of the situation that Bernie is an inveterate liar , and moreover specializing in the particular brand of lies that could get us all into nuclear war? Whether it's character or merely age, haven't we seen enough to conclude that Mr. Sanders would be much weaker still vis-a-vis the Deep State than Donald Trump turned out to be?

    For those without a dog in this fight, shouldn't it cause great merriment if the various RussiaGaters devour each other? Mr. Sanders has seen for years that the "muh Putin" hoax will be turned against him whenever needed. If he nonetheless persists, doesn't that show his resignation that his role in this election circus is a very temporary one, like in '16? How was that definition of insanity again?

    If you want to fix America, then the Empire and Zionism are your enemies; so is the Dem party that is inextricably wedded to these forces. Play along with them and–well what can you expect.

    aNanyMouse , February 22, 2020 at 13:29

    Yeah, and Bernie sucked up to the Dem brass on the impeachment crap, even tho Tulsi had the stones to at least abstain. How sad.

    GMCasey , February 21, 2020 at 22:33

    Dear DNC:
    KNOCK IT OFF! The only person I am voting for President is the only one who is capable -- and that is Bernie Sanders.
    And really, with NATO breaking the agreement where they agreed to NOT go up to Russia's border : it is getting very sad and embarrassing to be an American because the elected ones make agreements and yet break so many. What with Turkey and Israel and Saudi Arabia trying to disrupt the area, I am sure that Russia is too busy to bother disrupting America . Lately America seems to disrupt itself for many ridiculous reasons. I am sorry that the gossip rags, which used to be important newspapers have failed in supporting their First Amendment right of Free speech . I just finished reading "ALL the Presidents Men. " What has happened to you, Washington Post, because as a newspaper, you really used to be somebody. Please review your past and become what you once were, a real genuine news source.

    Sam F , February 23, 2020 at 09:18

    Wikipedia: "In October 2013, the paper's longtime controlling family, the Graham family, sold the newspaper to Nash Holdings, a holding company established by Jeff Bezos, for $250 million in cash."

    Jim Hartz , February 23, 2020 at 12:37

    One of the craziest ongoing media phenomena, prevalent in the Impeachment Hearings, is the repeated claim that RUSSIA IS AT WAR WITH UKRAINE.

    What kind of "Higher Life Form" enthusiastically EATS IT'S OWN SHIT?

    Sam F , February 21, 2020 at 22:10

    Mass media denouncing politicians based upon "information" from secret agencies are propaganda operations, and should be sued for proof of their claims. But of course the judiciary are tools of oligarchy as much as the mass media. No one has constitutional rights in the US under our utterly corrupt judiciary, only paid party privileges.

    Eddie S , February 21, 2020 at 21:55

    Hmmm.. so those oh-so-clever Russkies (I mean they MUST-BE if they were able to outwit ALL the US politicos -- who are immersed in the US political culture 24/7 as well as having grown-up in this country and having billions of $ to spend -- in 2016 with a mere $100k of Facebook ads) messed-up this time! They're supporting OPPOSING candidates, effectively canceling-out their efforts ? Kinda strange, unless that whole 'Russia meddling' thing was a vastly exaggerated distraction by a losing hawkish candidate and her party, further inflated by a sensationalistic media and a predictably antagonistic military & intelligence community??

    dale t hood , February 21, 2020 at 22:42

    There is NO "intel"; plenty of un-intel, shameless mendacity from these info=dictators zionazi NYT and Wapoop drivel; hopefully the insouciant public is starting to see what a sham these rats are. Hearst outdistanced.

    Daniel , February 22, 2020 at 10:45

    "Kinda strange, unless that whole 'Russia meddling' thing was a vastly exaggerated distraction by a losing hawkish candidate and her party, further inflated by a sensationalistic media and a predictably antagonistic military & intelligence community??"

    Exactly. Shame on Hillary Clinton and all who view the electorate with such disdain as to have pushed this propaganda on us for the last three years, and continue to do so, obviously. If either Hillary Clinton or the "sensationalistic media and a predictably antagonistic military & intelligence community" had any integrity at all, they would have beaten Trump handily in 2016, just as they condescendingly told us they would. They did not, though, and have been outraged to have been exposed as the frauds they are ever since.

    When your political party is nothing more than a marketing scheme designed to fool the population, that population will turn on you. Imagine that. And no amount of Russia-gating will save you. Shame on all who would continue this charade.

    John Drake , February 21, 2020 at 21:33

    Gosh I wish those so called intel people could make up their mind about whom the big bad Ruskies are trying to help. One week its Trump, the next it is Sanders. Frankly on the face, it sounds like bad intel to me.
    But fortunately I am a regular reader of this site and Ray McGovern; and know it's all, to put it politely , disinformation; or less politely a pile of diarrhea invented by Hillarybots after a really really bad election day three years ago.
    The only thing that disturbs me is the way Bernie buys into this Russiagate thing himself. Maybe you all could send him a trove of articles debunking the whole mess, especially Ray and Bill's forensics.

    Fred Dean , February 23, 2020 at 03:52

    When Durham starts indicting people and the story of the Deep State coup against the President becomes common knowledge, Bernie's statements on Russiagate will be a liability. Trump's people are digging up whatever videos they can of Bernie talking smack about Trump/Russia. It is a crack in Bernie's armor and we can expect Trump to exploit. Bernie has been such a toadie to the DNC. He cowers to the Democratic establishment because he fears they will pull his credentials to run as a Democrat.

    OlyaPola , February 23, 2020 at 08:08

    "Gosh I wish those so called intel people could make up their mind about whom the big bad Ruskies are trying to help."

    Output is a function of framing and consequently the intelligence community/opponents are helping others including the Russians who encourage such help by doing nothing.

    KiwiAntz , February 21, 2020 at 21:26

    What a shambolic mess of a Nation that America is! Nothing more than a Billionaire's Banana Republic? A International laughingstock ruled by a Oligarchy, masquerading as a Democracy? And if all else fails to get rid of Bernie Saunders by vote rigging or gerrymandering or other nefarious acts of sabotage with Superdelegates stealing the nominations then resurrect the bogus Russiagate Conspiracy, a ridiculous failed & faked experiment to gaslight, spook & confuse the population again? Wouldn't it be delicious if Russiagate was actually TRUE, it would be payback for the USA, a Nation that meddles in the affairs & politics of every other Country on Earth, overthrowing & regime changing everyone who doesn't "bend the knee" to America, the most corrupt & evil Nation on Earth since Nazi Germany! I've never seen a more propagandised or mindf**ked People on Earth than the American people! It must be soul destroying to live in this Country & have to put up with this nonsense, day in, day out?

    Ian , February 22, 2020 at 02:47

    Yes, it is. Living with the infuriating unreality and militaristic worldview that is so cultivated here takes a personal emotional and intellectual toll. No place is perfect, but when I travel to Europe I feel a weight lifted.

    Broompilot , February 22, 2020 at 03:50

    Kiwi you may have a point.

    ML , February 22, 2020 at 09:19

    Yep. But for those of us with our critical thinking skills intact, we won't let it be soul destroying, Kiwi. Still, the daily crapload of bs we are fed in the "legacy" press is aggravating beyond the beyonds. Cheers, fellow Earthling.

    Daniel , February 22, 2020 at 11:09

    I hear you, KiwiAntz. It IS soul destroying to withstand this onslaught of disinformation each and every day. There is a rhythm to it that is undeniable, too. One can almost predict when the next propaganda hit will come, as here – after their latest would-be savior, Mike Bloomberg, imploded on live TV, and with Bernie looking more and more inevitable.

    Our reality in the US today is that we have to fight against our own media to approach anything resembling a reasonable discussion about what is important to vast majorities (mean tweets and fake memes aren't it) or to champion candidates who display even the slightest integrity. But, of course, it is not 'our' media. It is 'theirs.' And they will continue to abuse us with it until we reject it completely.

    robert e williamson jr , February 23, 2020 at 20:31

    I see things pretty clearly for what they are and the billionaire democrats are heading for a train wreck and I hate to admit I cannot look away.

    Trump is just another self serving U.S. president leaving a stain in America's underwear adding to the humongous pile of America's dirty laundry.

    When the demographics finally dictate it change will come and likely not before. On that note I wold like to reach out here. Justin King, who goes as Beau on the net runs a site called the Fifth Column News and does a ton of informative and educational videos on many various topics. .

    If you go to youtube, search and watch each of the videos I'm about to list here you stand to learn quite a lot about how Americans got screwed by the two party system without really realizing it. Plenty of blame to go around , no doubt though. You will also learn of the changing demographics in American politics. Many of the poor, minorities and youth of the country are coming into politics for they stand to lose everything if they don't change the status quo.

    Feb 11 2020 runs 6:21 minutes and seconds- Search terms, Beau Lets talk about the parties switching and the party of trump

    Feb 15 2020 runs 4:11 Search terms, Beau Lets talk about dancing left and dancing right

    Feb 20 2020 runs 10:44 Search terms, Beau Lets talk about misunderstanding Bernie's supporters

    This last video is a long video by Justin's standards. Most of his videos are under 7 minutes.

    Much thanks to CN this site and the Fifth Column New site give me strength and bolster my courage by allowing me to know that there are those of us who know what gong on and know things must change.

    [Mar 05, 2020] Who needs the Russians to meddle in the US elections when the DNC is much better at undermining the democratic process?

    NY Times is citing "people familiar with the situation." How the mighty have fallen. What about Shadow, and the Iowa caucuses, and Buttigieg? That was real. This is absolute horseshit.
    Mar 05, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

    jmg , February 22, 2020 at 11:32

    > Apparent US Intel Meddling in US Election With 'Report' Russia is Aiding Sanders

    It looks like the CIA is short of ideas on how to meddle in the elections. Trump had a very similar briefing on January 6, 2017 -- with Brennan, Clapper, Rogers, and Comey -- on Russia allegedly aiding his campaign. As well without any evidence.

    Charlene Richards , February 22, 2020 at 14:47

    Russia couldn't possibly do the damage to Sanders that the DNC and Democrat Establishment elites are doing out in the open every day with the MSM as their prime propagandists.

    As they say in wrestling, it's all "a work".

    richard baker , February 22, 2020 at 10:55

    Bart Hansen , February 22, 2020 at 18:27

    Looking at the comments at the Post and Times, I'd say you are on target. Oh, for the Kool Aid contract at those organs of misinformation and omission.

    [Mar 05, 2020] Intelligence Officials Sow Discord By Stoking Fear of Russian Election Meddling by Dave DeCamp

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Under Trump, NATO has strengthened and held its largest war games since the cold war. The Trump administration withdrew from the Reagan-era nuclear arms treaty, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), an arms control agreement that prohibited Russia and the US from developing medium-range nuclear and ballistic missiles. Shortly after tearing up the treaty, the Pentagon began developing and testing missiles that were banned under the INF. ..."
    "... Despite all the drama over military aid to Ukraine, Trump never actually delayed it, and the new National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) includes $300 million in lethal aid to Ukraine , $50 million more than the previous year. The NDAA also calls for mandatory sanctions against any companies working on completing the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a natural gas pipeline that connects Russia and Germany. Of all Trump's hawkish policies, his effort to kill the Nord Stream 2 and the pressure he puts on Germany not to buy gas from Russia can do the most damage to Russia's economy. ..."
    "... The policies listed above are just a few examples of Trump's hostility towards Russia. Others include attempting to overthrow Russia's ally in Venezuela, maintaining a troop presence in Syria to "secure the oil," sanctioning Russian officials and businessman, and much more . ..."
    "... Despite all these provocations towards Russia, Trump is still accused of being a "puppet" of Vladimir Putin. No matter how much the president moves the US closer to direct confrontation with Russia, the talking heads and pundits of the mainstream media take superficial examples – like the 2018 Helsinki conference – as proof of Trump's loyalty to Putin. Trump's words are put under a microscope, while his policies that make nuclear war more possible are largely ignored. ..."
    Feb 24, 2020 | original.antiwar.com
    Another presidential election year is upon us, and the intelligence agencies are hard at work stoking fears of Russian meddling. This time it looks like the Russians do not only like the incumbent president but also favor who appears to be the Democratic front-runner, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

    On Thursday, The New York Times ran a story titled , "Lawmakers Are Warned That Russia Is Meddling to Re-elect Trump." The story says that on February 13 th US lawmakers from the House were briefed by intelligence officials who warned them, "Russia was interfering in the 2020 campaign to try to get President Trump re-elected."

    The story provides little detail into the briefing and gives no evidence to back up the intelligence officials' claims. It mostly rehashes old claims from the 2016 election, such as Russians are trying to "stir controversy" and "stoke division." The intelligence officials also said the Russians are looking to interfere with the 2020 Democratic primaries.

    It looks like other intelligence officials are already undermining the leaked briefing. CNN ran a story on Sunday titled "US intelligence briefer appears to have overstated assessment of 2020 Russian interference." The CNN article reads, "The US intelligence community has assessed that Russia is interfering in the 2020 election and has separately assessed that Russia views Trump as a leader they can work with. But the US does not have evidence that Russia's interference this cycle is aimed at re-electing Trump, the officials said."

    According to The Times, President Trump was upset with acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire for letting the briefing happen, and Republican lawmakers did not agree with the conclusion since Trump has been "tough" on Russia. In his three years in office, Trump certainly has been tough on Russia, and it is hard to believe that Putin would work to reelect such a Russia hawk.

    Under Trump, NATO has strengthened and held its largest war games since the cold war. The Trump administration withdrew from the Reagan-era nuclear arms treaty, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), an arms control agreement that prohibited Russia and the US from developing medium-range nuclear and ballistic missiles. Shortly after tearing up the treaty, the Pentagon began developing and testing missiles that were banned under the INF.

    The Trump Administration might let another nuclear arms treaty lapse. The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) limits the number of nuclear warheads that Russia and the US can have deployed. The US does not want to re-sign the treaty and is using the excuse that it wants to include China in the deal. China's nuclear arsenal is estimated to be around 300 warheads , which is just one-fifth of the amount that Russia and the US are allowed to have deployed under the New START. It makes no sense for China to limit its deployment of nuclear warheads when its arsenal is nothing compared to the other two superpowers. China appears to be a scapegoat for the US to blame if the treaty does not get renewed. Without the New START, there will be nothing limiting the number of nukes the US and Russia can deploy, making the world a much more dangerous place.

    Despite all the drama over military aid to Ukraine, Trump never actually delayed it, and the new National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) includes $300 million in lethal aid to Ukraine , $50 million more than the previous year. The NDAA also calls for mandatory sanctions against any companies working on completing the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a natural gas pipeline that connects Russia and Germany. Of all Trump's hawkish policies, his effort to kill the Nord Stream 2 and the pressure he puts on Germany not to buy gas from Russia can do the most damage to Russia's economy.

    The policies listed above are just a few examples of Trump's hostility towards Russia. Others include attempting to overthrow Russia's ally in Venezuela, maintaining a troop presence in Syria to "secure the oil," sanctioning Russian officials and businessman, and much more .

    Despite all these provocations towards Russia, Trump is still accused of being a "puppet" of Vladimir Putin. No matter how much the president moves the US closer to direct confrontation with Russia, the talking heads and pundits of the mainstream media take superficial examples – like the 2018 Helsinki conference – as proof of Trump's loyalty to Putin. Trump's words are put under a microscope, while his policies that make nuclear war more possible are largely ignored.

    The leaked briefing harkens back to an intelligence assessment that came out in January 2017 during the last days of the Obama administration. The assessment concluded that Vladimir Putin himself ordered the election interference to help Trump get elected. At first, a falsehood spread through the media that all 17 US intelligence agencies agreed with the conclusion. But later testimony from Obama-era intelligence officials revealed the assessment was prepared by hand-picked analysts from the CIA, FBI, and NSA. The assessment offered no evidence for the claim and mostly focused on media coverage of the presidential candidates on Russian state-funded media.

    On Friday, The Washington Post piled on to the Russia hysteria and ran a story titled "Bernie Sanders briefed by US officials that Russia is trying to help his campaign." The story says Sanders received a briefing on Russian efforts to boost his campaign. The details are again scant and The Post admits that "It is not clear what form that Russian assistance has taken."

    The few progressive journalists that have been right on Russiagate all along had the foresight to see how accusations of Russian meddling would ultimately be used to hurt Sanders' campaign. Unfortunately, Sanders did not have that same foresight and frequently played into the Russiagate narrative.

    Last week, during a Democratic primary debate in Las Vegas, when criticized for his supporters' behavior on social media, Sanders pointed the finger at Russia . "All of us remember 2016, and what we remember is efforts by Russians and others to try to interfere in our elections and divide us up. I'm not saying that's happening, but it would not shock me," Sanders said.

    In comments after The Post story was published, Sanders said he was briefed on Russian interference "about a month ago." Sanders raised the issue with the timing of the story, having been published on the eve of the Nevada caucus. But the story did not slow down Sanders' momentum in the polls, and he came out the clear victor of the Nevada caucus. Sanders' victory seemed to rattle the Democratic establishment, and some wild accusations were thrown around during coverage of the caucus.

    Political analyst James Carville appeared on MSNBC as Sanders took an early and substantial lead in Nevada. Carville said, "Right now, it's about 1:15 Moscow time. This thing is going very well for Vladimir Putin. I promise you. He's probably staying up watching this right now." What could be played off as a joke was followed up with some serious accusations from Carville, "I don't think the Sanders campaign in any way is collusion or collaboration. I think they don't like this story, but the story is a fact, and the reason that the story is a fact is Putin is doing everything that he can to help Trump, including trying to get Sanders the Democratic nomination."

    This delusional attitude about the Russians rigging the Democratic primary is underpinned by claims of meddling from the 2016 election. Central to Robert Mueller's claim that Russia engaged in "multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election" is the St. Petersburg based company, the Internet Research Agency (IRA).

    The IRA is accused of running a troll farm that sought to interfere in the 2016 election in favor of Trump over Hillary Clinton. Mueller failed to tie the IRA directly to the Kremlin, and further research into their social media campaign shows most of the posts had nothing to do with the election. A study on the IRA by the firm New Knowledge found just "11 percent" of the IRA's content "was related to the election."

    Many believe the Russian government is responsible for hacking the DNC email server and providing the emails to WikiLeaks. But there are many holes in Mueller's story to support this claim. And WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange – who Mueller did not interview – has said the Russian government was not the source of the emails.

    Regardless of who leaked the DNC emails to WikiLeaks, they show that DNC leadership had a clear bias against Bernie Sanders back in 2016. The emails' contents were never disputed, and Democratic voters had every right to see the corruption within the DNC. With the release of the DNC emails, and later the Podesta emails, the American people were able to make a more informed choice in the presidential election. This type of transparency provided by WikiLeaks would be celebrated in a healthy democracy, not portrayed as the work of a foreign power.

    Sanders would be wise to keep a watchful eye on how the DNC operates over the next few months. The debacle that was the Iowa caucus shows the Democrats can "stoke division" and "stir controversy" just fine on their own.

    These claims of Russian meddling will continue throughout the election season. President Trump's defense that he is "tough" on Russia is nothing to be proud of, but that is inevitably where these accusations lead. Trump is encouraged to be more hawkish towards Russia in an effort to quiet the claims of Putin's preference for him. And if Bernie Sanders plays into this narrative now, can we believe that he will make any real foreign policy change towards Russia if he gets the nomination and beats Trump?

    Dave DeCamp is assistant editor at Antiwar.com and a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn NY, focusing on US foreign policy and wars. He is on Twitter at @decampdave .

    [Mar 04, 2020] Russiagate should be viewed as classic, textbook case of gaslighting and projecting election interference

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... I tried to sorta warm people on other sites that while they were looking for Russians at the front door, the gop was coming in the bad door for some rather nasty election interference. ..."
    "... Of course what we are seeing now is democrats cheating other democrats. But that reality will never be acknowledged because, hey, it never happened before. Just unintentional mistakes like in Iowa (farm folk cheating -- no way) or Brooklyn. ..."
    Mar 04, 2020 | caucus99percent.com

    MrWebster on Wed, 03/04/2020 - 1:00pm

    What you describe is probably why Russiagate spread so easily to so many people. Nothing happened in previous elections? Everything you describe never happened as you point out. The American electoral system was and is pristine and virginal.

    Until the Russians came and destroyed American democracy through social media themes, memes, and retweets.

    The American electoral system was never brutally corrupted by rigged votes, voter suppression on the scale of hundreds of thousands, deliberately miscounted votes, voter fraud, etc. Americans never did to each other anything as bad as what the Russians did to Americans.

    Of course, for me never worked as I worked in primaries of a democratic machine dominated city. I tried to sorta warm people on other sites that while they were looking for Russians at the front door, the gop was coming in the bad door for some rather nasty election interference.

    Of course what we are seeing now is democrats cheating other democrats. But that reality will never be acknowledged because, hey, it never happened before. Just unintentional mistakes like in Iowa (farm folk cheating -- no way) or Brooklyn.

    [Mar 03, 2020] The "Russian meddling" fraud: Tulsi Gabbard denounces election interference by US intelligence agencies by Patrick Martin

    Notable quotes:
    "... Washington Post ..."
    "... Washington Post, ..."
    "... World Socialist Web Site ..."
    "... The author also recommends: ..."
    Mar 03, 2020 | www.wsws.org

    In a remarkable statement that has gone virtually unreported in the American media, Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, publicly denounced US intelligence agencies for interfering in the presidential contest and attempting to sabotage the campaign of Democratic frontrunner Bernie Sanders.

    In an opinion column published February 27 by the Hill , Gabbard attacked the article published by the Washington Post on February 21, the eve of the Nevada caucuses, which claimed that Russia was intervening in the US election to support Sanders. She also criticized the decision of billionaire Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, to repeat the anti-Russia slander against Sanders during the February 25 Democratic presidential debate in South Carolina.

    Gabbard is a military officer in a National Guard medical unit who has been deployed to Iraq and Kuwait and has continuing and close contact with the Pentagon. She is obviously familiar with the machinations of the US military-intelligence apparatus and knows whereof she speaks. Her harsh and uncompromising language is that much more significant.

    She wrote:

    Enough is enough. I am calling on all presidential candidates to stop playing these dangerous political games and immediately condemn any interference in our elections by out-of-control intelligence agencies. A "news article" published last week in the Washington Post, which set off yet another manufactured media firestorm, alleges that the goal of Russia is to trick people into criticizing establishment Democrats. This is a laughably obvious ploy to stifle legitimate criticism and cast aspersions on Americans who are rightly skeptical of the powerful forces exerting control over the primary election process.

    We are told the aim of Russia is to "sow division," but the aim of corporate media and self-serving politicians pushing this narrative is clearly to sow division of their own -- by generating baseless suspicion against the Sanders campaign. It's extremely disingenuous for "journalists" and rival candidates to publicize a news article that merely asserts, without presenting any evidence, that Russia is "helping" Bernie Sanders -- but provides no information as to what that "help" allegedly consists of.

    Gabbard continued:

    If the CIA, FBI or any other intelligence agency is going to tell voters that "Russians" are interfering in this election to help certain candidates -- or simply "sow discord" -- then it needs to immediately provide us with the details of what exactly it's alleging.

    After pointing out that the Democratic Party establishment and the corporate media have had little interest in measures to actually improve election security, such as requiring paper ballots or some other form of permanent record of how people vote, Gabbard demanded:

    The FBI, CIA or any other intelligence agency should immediately stop smearing presidential candidates with innuendo and vague, evidence-free assertions. That is antithetical to the role those agencies play in a free democracy. The American people cannot have faith in our intelligence agencies if they are pushing an agenda to harm candidates they dislike.

    As socialists, we do not share Gabbard's belief that the intelligence agencies have a positive role to play or that the American people need to have faith in them. As her military career demonstrates, she is a supporter of American imperialism and of the capitalist state. However, her opposition to the "dirty tricks" campaign against Sanders is entirely legitimate and puts the spotlight on a deeply anti-democratic operation by the military-intelligence apparatus.

    Gabbard denounces this "new McCarthyism" and calls on her fellow candidate to rebuff the CIA smears and "defend the freedoms enshrined in our Constitution." Not a single one of the remaining candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination -- including Sanders himself -- has responded to her appeal.

    Her statement concludes that the goal of the "mainstream corporate media and the warmongering political establishment" was either to block Sanders from winning the nomination, or, if he does become the nominee, to "force him to engage in inflammatory anti-Russia rhetoric and perpetuate the new Cold War and nuclear arms race, which are existential threats to our country and the world."

    Despite Gabbard's appeal for the Democratic candidates not to be "manipulated and forced into a corner by overreaching intelligence agencies," the Democratic Party establishment has been working in lockstep with the intelligence agencies in the anti-Russia campaign against Trump, which began even before election day in 2016, metastasized into the Mueller investigation and then the effort to impeach Trump over his delay in the dispatch of military aid to Ukraine for its war with Russian-backed separatist forces.

    Her comments are a complete vindication of what the World Socialist Web Site has written about the anti-Russia campaign and impeachment: these were efforts by the Democratic Party, acting as the representative of the military-intelligence apparatus, to block the emergence of genuine left-wing popular opposition to Trump, and to channel popular hostility to this administration in a right-wing and pro-imperialist direction.

    Gabbard herself was the only House Democrat to abstain on impeachment, although she did not voice any principled grounds for her vote, such as opposition to the intelligence agencies. She has based her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination largely on an appeal to antiwar sentiment, particularly opposing US intervention in Syria. She has also said that if elected, she would drop all charges against Julian Assange and pardon Edward Snowden.

    These views led to a vicious attack by Hillary Clinton, the defeated Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, who last October called Gabbard "a Russian asset," claiming that she was being groomed by Russia to serve as a third-party candidate in 2020 who would take votes away from the Democratic nominee and help re-elect President Trump. "She's the favorite of the Russians," Clinton claimed.

    Since Clinton's attack, the Democratic National Committee has excluded Gabbard from its monthly debates, manipulating the eligibility requirements so that billionaire Michael Bloomberg would qualify even for debates held in states where he was not on the ballot but Gabbard was, such as Nevada and South Carolina.

    The author also recommends:

    Democratic Party deploys Russian meddling smear against Sanders
    [24 February 2020]

    US intelligence agencies meddle in Nevada primary to sabotage Sanders
    [22 February 2020]

    Hillary Clinton slanders Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, Green Party candidate Jill Stein as Russian spies

    [Mar 03, 2020] Russia isn't backing Sanders and Trump as much as hoping for chaos

    Highly recommended!
    This is simply pretty dirty and pretty effective propaganda trick. And it make intelligence agencies the third political party participating in the USA elections. With the right of veto.
    Mar 03, 2020 | www.usatoday.com

    Based on the tone of Tuesday's Democratic debate, you would think the Kremlin has already determined the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Former Vice President Joe Biden said Russians are "engaged now, as I speak, in interfering in our election." Billionaire Tom Steyer said there is "an attack by a hostile foreign power on our democracy right now." Former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg charged that Russia was backing Sen. Bernie Sanders , I-Vt., to ensure a Trump victory in November.

    Clearly, the Russia scaremongering is in full swing. Last week's intelligence community testimony that the Kremlin is backing President Donald Trump made headline news. Another report emerged alleging Moscow is backing Sanders . Biden claimed that Bernie-backing Russian bots have been attacking him on Facebook. And Hillary Clinton told a foreign audience that " Russians are back in our cyber systems ," and that "anyone who tries to deny it" is living in a "sad dreamworld."

    ... ... ...

    But the Russian interference narrative has become entrenched. When intelligence community election expert Shelby Pierson speculated to the House Intelligence Committee in a closed-door meeting that Russia was trying to help President Trump get reelected, it quickly leaked, became a front-page story in The New York Times and precipitated the usual outrage. It took a few days for the less dramatic truth to catch up -- that there was no evidence for the "misleading" supposition that the Kremlin is pro-Trump; at best Russia may have a "preference" for a "deal-maker."

    However, it is not clear how Russia would benefit from a Trump second term, since the first one has not worked out well for them. President Trump has imposed sanctions on Russia , expelled Russian diplomats , sent arms to Ukraine , sold Patriot missiles to Poland , undercut Russia's natural gas markets in Europe, pursued strategic nuclear modernization while not rushing to renew the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and even killed hundreds of Russian mercenaries in Syria.

    [Mar 03, 2020] Americans "must remain aware that foreign actors continue to try to influence public sentiment and shape voter perceptions

    Is not this a direct attempt of intelligence agencies to influence election by delegitimizing Sanders and Tulsi ?
    Mar 03, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
    Mao , Mar 3 2020 22:20 utc | 57
    NBC News:

    JUST IN: State Dept., DOJ, FBI and others issue joint statement ahead of #SuperTuesday:

    Americans "must remain aware that foreign actors continue to try to influence public sentiment and shape voter perceptions."

    https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESImtGRWoAYJyus.jpg

    [Mar 03, 2020] Russia hysteria re-purposed by the neoliberal establishment to attack the left of the center politicians like Sanders

    Mar 03, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com
    Originally from: Dems Converge Around Dementia-Addled Warmonger Ahead Of Super Tuesday Zero Hedge

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

    Back in January, well before the Democratic primary race had taken on its current composition, independent journalist Ruth Ann Oskolkoff reported that a source had heard from high-level Democratic Party insiders that they were planning to install Joe Biden as the party's nominee, and to smear Bernie Sanders as a Russian asset.

    "On January 20, 2020 at 8:20 p.m. PDT I received a communication from a reliable source," Oskolkoff wrote.

    "This person had interactions earlier that evening with high level party members and associates of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) who said that they have now selected Biden as the Democratic Party nominee, with Warren as the VP. They also said the plan is to smear Bernie as a Russian asset."

    Now, immediately before Super Tuesday, we are seeing establishment candidates Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar drop out of the race, both of whom, along with former candidate Beto O'Rourke , are now suddenly endorsing Biden. Elizabeth Warren, the only top-level candidate besides Sanders who could be labeled vaguely "left" by any stretch of the imagination, has meanwhile outraged progressives by remaining in the race, to the Vermont senator's detriment.

    The day before Super Tuesday also saw The Daily Beast , whose corporate owner IAC has Chelsea Clinton on its board of directors , publishing an article titled " Kremlin Media Still Like Bernie, 'Cause They Love Trump " which aggressively smears Sanders as a tool of the Kremlin.

    Prior to the South Carolina primary, Russian state media were touting Bernie Sanders as the most likely Democratic nominee, and it won't be surprising if they do the same after Super Tuesday https://t.co/mH98PVmcjr

    -- The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) March 2, 2020

    This latter development is becoming a conspicuously common line of attack against Sanders and, while we're on the subject, also tracks with a prediction made by journalist Max Blumenthal back in July of 2017. Blumenthal told Fox's Tucker Carlson that "this Russia hysteria will be re-purposed by the political establishment to attack the left and anyone on the left -- a Bernie Sanders-like politician who steps out of line on the issues of permanent war or corporate free trade, things like that -- will be painted as Russia puppets. So this is very dangerous, and people who are progressive who are falling into it need to know what the long-term consequences of this cynical narrative are."

    So we're seeing things unfold exactly as some have predicted. We're seeing the clear frontrunner smeared as a tool of Vladimir Putin, accompanied by a deluge of op-eds and think pieces from all the usual warmongering mass media narrative managers calling on so-called "moderates" to rally around the former Vice President on Super Tuesday.

    Sanders has not been pulling in anywhere near the numbers he'd need to pull to prevent a contested convention. This means that even if he gets more votes than any of his primary opponents, party leaders can still overrule those votes and appoint Biden as their nominee to run against Trump. Establishment spinmeisters as well as all Sanders' primary opponents have been working to normalize this ahead of time.

    "Whatever the case for either Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren...neither is going to be the nominee. And...it's not going to be Mike Bloomberg either. So it's Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden." Tomorrow, if you live in one of 14 states, you can choose Biden. https://t.co/btuPbGtWxG

    -- Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) March 2, 2020

    And the prediction markets have seen a massive surge for Biden and plunge for Bernie...

    With Biden now surging into the lead

    The only problem? Biden's brain is turning into sauerkraut.

    There are two new clips of video footage making the rounds today, one featuring Biden at a rally telling his supporters that tomorrow is "Super Thursday" , and another featuring the former VP saying (and this is a direct quote ), "We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women created -- by the -- you know, you know the thing."

    I've written about Biden's recent struggles to form coherent sentences before, and it seems to be getting worse. There's simply no comparing the befuddled, fuzz-brained man we see before us today with the sharp, lucid speaker we were seeing even a few years ago . The man's brain does not work.

    And yeah, it's unpleasant to have to keep pointing this out. I'm not loving it myself. I resent Biden's handlers and the Democratic Party establishment for making it necessary to continually point out an old man's obvious symptoms of cognitive decline. But it does need to be pointed to, and it's creepy and weird that they're continuing to prop up this crumbling husk of a man while pretending that everything's fine.

    Imagine putting all your eggs in the Joe Biden basket. https://t.co/nRPX4gqol5

    -- Krystal Ball (@krystalball) March 3, 2020

    Not that Biden would be an acceptable leader of the most powerful government on earth even with a working brain; he's a horrible war hawk with an inexcusable track record of advancing right-wing policies. But even rank-and-file Americans who don't pay attention to that stuff would plainly see a man on the debate stage opposite Trump who shouldn't be permitted near heavy machinery, much less the nuclear codes. And Trump will happily point that out.

    It's been obvious since 2016 that the Dems were going to once again sabotage the only candidate with a chance of beating Trump in favor of a scandalously inappropriate candidate, but wheeling out an actual, literal dementia patient for the role is something not even I would have imagined.

    2020 is weird, folks. And it's going to get a whole lot weirder . Buckle up.

    [Mar 02, 2020] Trump already under fire for Coronarovirus response. More to come

    Mar 02, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    bumbershoot 7 hours ago • edited

    Trump closed the White House office of pandemic control simply because Obama started it. That fact alone should tell you all you need to know about the competence of Trump and his merry band of bootlickers.
    Springfield 6 hours ago
    For nearly two months Trump did nothing while it spread.

    All that crap about "America First", but after three years there's no wall, immigrants still pouring in, illegals, foreign workers, and foreign students everywhere you look, and we're still dependent on foreign supply chains and manufacturing.

    And we wonder how the disease got here and why we are economically vulnerable to it. Making matters worse, while he was doing all those favors for Wall Street and foreign countries and spending trillions on the wars he was elected to end, he was also gutting government departments and programs that do stuff for actual Americans, like protect them from plagues.

    Chris Chuba 6 hours ago • edited
    "The federal agency shunned the World Health Organization test guidelines used by other countries and set out to create a more complicated test of its own"

    I know we are in full information war against China and we already have senators drafting sanctions against them but if we really wanted to treat this as a medical and not a political issue we would copy the Chinese test kits.

    ZizaNiam 2 hours ago • edited
    People who vote for Trump don't believe in science, logic or mathematics.
    fuow ZizaNiam 38 minutes ago
    They also don't believe in the US Constitution.
    fuow 38 minutes ago • edited
    The CDC today deleted essential information on the outbreak's spread from their website.You conservatives are going to be blamed for this. Try, just try telling a grieving parent or child that this is somehow the 'cost of freedom' or 'the Democrats are to blame (Hillary is really at fault).
    You did this to our country, don't count on people forgetting about it by November.

    [Mar 01, 2020] A Very Stable Genius book excerpt Inside Trump s stunning tirade against generals by Carol D. Leonnig & Philip Rucker

    This book "A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America, looks like the second volume of Wolff. And probably has the same set of flaws
    Jan 17, 2020 | www.washingtonpost.com

    This article is adapted from "A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America," which will be published on Jan. 21 by Penguin Press.

    'You're a bunch of dopes and babies': Inside Trump's stunning tirade against generals

    There is no more sacred room for military officers than 2E924 of the Pentagon, a windowless and secure vault where the Joint Chiefs of Staff meet regularly to wrestle with classified matters. Its more common name is "the Tank." The Tank resembles a small corporate boardroom, with a gleaming golden oak table, leather swivel armchairs and other mid-century stylings. Inside its walls, flag officers observe a reverence and decorum for the wrenching decisions that have been made there.

    Hanging prominently on one of the walls is The Peacemakers, a painting that depicts an 1865 Civil War strategy session with President Abraham Lincoln and his three service chiefs -- Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, Major General William Tecumseh Sherman, and Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter. One hundred fifty-​­two years after Lincoln hatched plans to preserve the Union, President Trump's advisers staged an intervention inside the Tank to try to preserve the world order.

    By that point, six months into his administration, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had grown alarmed by gaping holes in Trump's knowledge of history, especially the key alliances forged following World War II. Trump had dismissed allies as worthless, cozied up to authoritarian regimes in Russia and elsewhere, and advocated withdrawing troops from strategic outposts and active theaters alike.

    [ New book portrays Trump as erratic, 'at times dangerously uninformed' ]

    Trump organized his unorthodox worldview under the simplistic banner of "America First," but Mattis, Tillerson, and Cohn feared his proposals were rash, barely considered, and a danger to America's superpower standing. They also felt that many of Trump's impulsive ideas stemmed from his lack of familiarity with U.S. history and, even, where countries were located. To have a useful discussion with him, the trio agreed, they had to create a basic knowledge, a shared language.

    So on July 20, 2017, Mattis invited Trump to the Tank for what he, Tillerson, and Cohn had carefully organized as a tailored tutorial. What happened inside the Tank that day crystallized the commander in chief's berating, derisive and dismissive manner, foreshadowing decisions such as the one earlier this month that brought the United States to the brink of war with Iran. The Tank meeting was a turning point in Trump's presidency. Rather than getting him to appreciate America's traditional role and alliances, Trump began to tune out and eventually push away the experts who believed their duty was to protect the country by restraining his more dangerous impulses.

    The episode has been documented numerous times, but subsequent reporting reveals a more complete picture of the moment and the chilling effect Trump's comments and hostility had on the nation's military and national security leadership.

    Just before 10 a.m. on a scorching summer Thursday, Trump arrived at the Pentagon. He stepped out of his motorcade, walked along a corridor with portraits honoring former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs, and stepped inside the Tank. The uniformed officers greeted their commander in chief. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Joseph F. Dunford Jr. sat in the seat of honor midway down the table, because this was his room, and Trump sat at the head of the table facing a projection screen. Mattis and the newly confirmed deputy defense secretary, Patrick Shanahan, sat to the president's left, with Vice President Pence and Tillerson to his right. Down the table sat the leaders of the military branches, along with Cohn and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon was in the outer ring of chairs with other staff, taking his seat just behind Mattis and directly in Trump's line of sight.

    Mattis, Cohn, and Tillerson and their aides decided to use maps, graphics, and charts to tutor the president, figuring they would help keep him from getting bored. Mattis opened with a slide show punctuated by lots of dollar signs. Mattis devised a strategy to use terms the impatient president, schooled in real estate, would appreciate to impress upon him the value of U.S. investments abroad. He sought to explain why U.S. troops were deployed in so many regions and why America's safety hinged on a complex web of trade deals, alliances, and bases across the globe.

    An opening line flashed on the screen, setting the tone: "The post-war international rules-based order is the greatest gift of the greatest generation." Mattis then gave a 20-minute briefing on the power of the NATO alliance to stabilize Europe and keep the United States safe. Bannon thought to himself, "Not good. Trump is not going to like that one bit." The internationalist language Mattis was using was a trigger for Trump.

    "Oh, baby, this is going to be f---ing wild," Bannon thought. "If you stood up and threatened to shoot [Trump], he couldn't say 'postwar rules-based international order.' It's just not the way he thinks."

    For the next 90 minutes, Mattis, Tillerson, and Cohn took turns trying to emphasize their points, pointing to their charts and diagrams. They showed where U.S. personnel were positioned, at military bases, CIA stations, and embassies, and how U.S. deployments fended off the threats of terror cells, nuclear blasts, and destabilizing enemies in places including Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, the Korea Peninsula, and Syria. Cohn spoke for about 20 minutes about the value of free trade with America's allies, emphasizing how he saw each trade agreement working together as part of an overall structure to solidify U.S. economic and national security.

    Trump appeared peeved by the schoolhouse vibe but also allergic to the dynamic of his advisers talking at him. His ricocheting attention span led him to repeatedly interrupt the lesson. He heard an adviser say a word or phrase and then seized on that to interject with his take. For instance, the word "base" prompted him to launch in to say how "crazy" and "stupid" it was to pay for bases in some countries.

    Trump's first complaint was to repeat what he had vented about to his national security adviser months earlier: South Korea should pay for a $10 billion missile defense system that the United States built for it. The system was designed to shoot down any short- and medium-range ballistic missiles from North Korea to protect South Korea and American troops stationed there. But Trump argued that the South Koreans should pay for it, proposing that the administration pull U.S. troops out of the region or bill the South Koreans for their protection.

    "We should charge them rent," Trump said of South Korea. "We should make them pay for our soldiers. We should make money off of everything."

    Trump proceeded to explain that NATO, too, was worthless. U.S. generals were letting the allied member countries get away with murder, he said, and they owed the United States a lot of money after not living up to their promise of paying their dues.

    "They're in arrears," Trump said, reverting to the language of real estate. He lifted both his arms at his sides in frustration. Then he scolded top officials for the untold millions of dollars he believed they had let slip through their fingers by allowing allies to avoid their obligations.

    "We are owed money you haven't been collecting!" Trump told them. "You would totally go bankrupt if you had to run your own business."


    (Penguin Press)

    Mattis wasn't trying to convince the president of anything, only to explain and provide facts. Now things were devolving quickly. The general tried to calmly explain to the president that he was not quite right. The NATO allies didn't owe the United States back rent, he said. The truth was more complicated. NATO had a nonbinding goal that members should pay at least 2 percent of their gross domestic product on their defenses. Only five of the countries currently met that goal, but it wasn't as if they were shorting the United States on the bill.

    More broadly, Mattis argued, the NATO alliance was not serving only to protect western Europe. It protected America, too. "This is what keeps us safe," Mattis said. Cohn tried to explain to Trump that he needed to see the value of the trade deals. "These are commitments that help keep us safe," Cohn said.

    Bannon interjected. "Stop, stop, stop," he said. "All you guys talk about all these great things, they're all our partners, I want you to name me now one country and one company that's going to have his back."

    Trump then repeated a threat he'd made countless times before. He wanted out of the Iran nuclear deal that President Obama had struck in 2015, which called for Iran to reduce its uranium stockpile and cut its nuclear program.

    "It's the worst deal in history!" Trump declared.

    "Well, actually . . .," Tillerson interjected.

    "I don't want to hear it," Trump said, cutting off the secretary of state before he could explain some of the benefits of the agreement. "They're cheating. They're building. We're getting out of it. I keep telling you, I keep giving you time, and you keep delaying me. I want out of it."

    Before they could debate the Iran deal, Trump erupted to revive another frequent complaint: the war in Afghanistan, which was now America's longest war. He demanded an explanation for why the United States hadn't won in Afghanistan yet, now 16 years after the nation began fighting there in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Trump unleashed his disdain, calling Afghanistan a "loser war." That phrase hung in the air and disgusted not only the military leaders at the table but also the men and women in uniform sitting along the back wall behind their principals. They all were sworn to obey their commander in chief's commands, and here he was calling the war they had been fighting a loser war.

    "You're all losers," Trump said. "You don't know how to win anymore."

    Trump questioned why the United States couldn't get some oil as payment for the troops stationed in the Persian Gulf. "We spent $7 trillion; they're ripping us off," Trump boomed. "Where is the f---ing oil?"

    Trump seemed to be speaking up for the voters who elected him, and several attendees thought they heard Bannon in Trump's words. Bannon had been trying to persuade Trump to withdraw forces by telling him, "The American people are saying we can't spend a trillion dollars a year on this. We just can't. It's going to bankrupt us."

    "And not just that, the deplorables don't want their kids in the South China Sea at the 38th parallel or in Syria, in Afghanistan, in perpetuity," Bannon would add, invoking Hillary Clinton's infamous "basket of deplorables" reference to Trump supporters.

    Trump mused about removing General John Nicholson, the U.S. commander in charge of troops in Afghanistan. "I don't think he knows how to win," the president said, impugning Nicholson, who was not present at the meeting.

    Dunford tried to come to Nicholson's defense, but the mild-mannered general struggled to convey his points to the irascible president.

    "Mr. President, that's just not . . .," Dunford started. "We've been under different orders."

    Dunford sought to explain that he hadn't been charged with annihilating the enemy in Afghanistan but was instead following a strategy started by the Obama administration to gradually reduce the military presence in the country in hopes of training locals to maintain a stable government so that eventually the United States could pull out. Trump shot back in more plain language.

    "I want to win," he said. "We don't win any wars anymore . . . We spend $7 trillion, everybody else got the oil and we're not winning anymore."

    Trump by now was in one of his rages. He was so angry that he wasn't taking many breaths. All morning, he had been coarse and cavalier, but the next several things he bellowed went beyond that description. They stunned nearly everyone in the room, and some vowed that they would never repeat them. Indeed, they have not been reported until now.

    "I wouldn't go to war with you people," Trump told the assembled brass.

    Addressing the room, the commander in chief barked, "You're a bunch of dopes and babies."

    For a president known for verbiage he euphemistically called "locker room talk," this was the gravest insult he could have delivered to these people, in this sacred space. The flag officers in the room were shocked. Some staff began looking down at their papers, rearranging folders, almost wishing themselves out of the room. A few considered walking out. They tried not to reveal their revulsion on their faces, but questions raced through their minds. "How does the commander in chief say that?" one thought. "What would our worst adversaries think if they knew he said this?"

    This was a president who had been labeled a "draft dodger" for avoiding service in the Vietnam War under questionable circumstances. Trump was a young man born of privilege and in seemingly perfect health: six feet two inches with a muscular build and a flawless medical record. He played several sports, including football. Then, in 1968 at age 22, he obtained a diagnosis of bone spurs in his heels that exempted him from military service just as the United States was drafting men his age to fulfill massive troop deployments to Vietnam.

    Tillerson in particular was stunned by Trump's diatribe and began visibly seething. For too many minutes, others in the room noticed, he had been staring straight, dumbfounded, at Mattis, who was speechless, his head bowed down toward the table. Tillerson thought to himself, "Gosh darn it, Jim, say something. Why aren't you saying something?"

    But, as he would later tell close aides, Tillerson realized in that moment that Mattis was genetically a Marine, unable to talk back to his commander in chief, no matter what nonsense came out of his mouth.

    The more perplexing silence was from Pence, a leader who should have been able to stand up to Trump. Instead, one attendee thought, "He's sitting there frozen like a statue. Why doesn't he stop the president?" Another recalled the vice president was "a wax museum guy." From the start of the meeting, Pence looked as if he wanted to escape and put an end to the president's torrent. Surely, he disagreed with Trump's characterization of military leaders as "dopes and babies," considering his son, Michael, was a Marine first lieutenant then training for his naval aviator wings. But some surmised Pence feared getting crosswise with Trump. "A total deer in the headlights," recalled a third attendee.

    Others at the table noticed Trump's stream of venom had taken an emotional toll. So many people in that room had gone to war and risked their lives for their country, and now they were being dressed down by a president who had not. They felt sick to their stomachs. Tillerson told others he thought he saw a woman in the room silently crying. He was furious and decided he couldn't stand it another minute. His voice broke into Trump's tirade, this one about trying to make money off U.S. troops.

    "No, that's just wrong," the secretary of state said. "Mr. President, you're totally wrong. None of that is true."

    Tillerson's father and uncle had both been combat veterans, and he was deeply proud of their service.

    "The men and women who put on a uniform don't do it to become soldiers of fortune," Tillerson said. "That's not why they put on a uniform and go out and die . . . They do it to protect our freedom."

    There was silence in the Tank. Several military officers in the room were grateful to the secretary of state for defending them when no one else would. The meeting soon ended and Trump walked out, saying goodbye to a group of servicemen lining the corridor as he made his way to his motorcade waiting outside. Mattis, Tillerson, and Cohn were deflated. Standing in the hall with a small cluster of people he trusted, Tillerson finally let down his guard.

    "He's a f---ing moron," the secretary of state said of the president.

    The plan by Mattis, Tillerson, and Cohn to train the president to appreciate the internationalist view had clearly backfired.

    "We were starting to get out on the wrong path, and we really needed to have a course correction and needed to educate, to teach, to help him understand the reason and basis for a lot of these things," said one senior official involved in the planning. "We needed to change how he thinks about this, to course correct. Everybody was on board, 100 percent agreed with that sentiment. [But] they were dismayed and in shock when not only did it not have the intended effect, but he dug in his heels and pushed it even further on the spectrum, further solidifying his views."

    A few days later, Pence's national security adviser, Andrea Thompson, a retired Army colonel who had served in Afghanistan and Iraq, reached out to thank Tillerson for speaking up on behalf of the military and the public servants who had been in the Tank. By September 2017, she would leave the White House and join Tillerson at Foggy Bottom as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs.

    The Tank meeting had so thoroughly shocked the conscience of military leaders that they tried to keep it a secret. At the Aspen Security Forum two days later, longtime NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell asked Dunford how Trump had interacted during the Tank meeting. The Joint Chiefs chairman misleadingly described the meeting, skipping over the fireworks.

    "He asked a lot of hard questions, and the one thing he does is question some fundamental assumptions that we make as military leaders -- and he will come in and question those," Dunford told Mitchell on July 22. "It's a pretty energetic and an interactive dialogue."

    One victim of the Tank meeting was Trump's relationship with Tillerson, which forever after was strained. The secretary of state came to see it as the beginning of the end. It would only worsen when news that Tillerson had called Trump a "moron" was first reported in October 2017 by NBC News.

    [Mar 01, 2020] Review of the book The Russians Are Coming, Again or New, imporved Soviet Threat by Harry Targ

    Notable quotes:
    "... In fact, Kuzmarov and Marciano say, Russia’s foreign policy in the Middle East, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe today reflects its perception of a threat from the United States and the NATO countries. For example, President George Herbert Walker Bush promised Mikhail Gorbachev, that NATO would not establish new military installations in Eastern Europe. With new NATO forward bases in Poland and the United States’ support of a coup in Ukraine, the Russians see the United States as having aggressive intent. From Russia’s vantage point United States threats to Soviet/Russian security have been a feature of East/West relations from the Russian Revolution, through the Cold War, to hostile relations with the United States in the twenty-first century. ..."
    Mar 01, 2020 | monthlyreview.org

    The Russians Are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce
    240 pp, $19 pbk, ISBN 978-1-58367-694-3
    By Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano

    Reviewed by Harry Targ for Socialism and Democracy, vol. 33 (2019), no. 2

    The primary purpose of this book is to challenge the popular view that Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, represents a challenge to U.S. democracy much as the former Soviet Union was alleged to have been during the Cold War. The authors, taking The New York Times as their prime source, argue that what is called Russiagate, a story about the nefarious use of computer hacking, spying, and bribing and threatening to expose public figures, including President Trump, is being promoted day-after-day as the root cause of the outcome of the 2016 election. In addition, they suggest that those who vigorously embrace the Russiagate explanation of the 2016 election are claiming that Russia’s interference might be part of a longer-term Russian threat to American democracy. This is so because alleged hackers spread misinformation about candidates and issues, thus distorting dialogue and debate.

    The Russians Are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce

    The authors review the charges of subversion of the elections that have been “proven”, or so The New York Times claims. The “proof” includes statements released by spokespersons from the FBI, the CIA and other national security agencies that Russian operatives, agencies, and private institutions have hacked social media with “fake news” about candidates running for office (especially, Hillary Clinton). Advocates of this view presume that such misinformation influenced the voter choices of the American electorate. These are the same institutions that figured so prominently in presenting distorted views of a Soviet “threat” during the Cold War that justified the arms race and massive U.S. military expenditures.

    To illustrate the seriousness of the charges of the impact of Russia’s interference in the election they quote Thomas Friedman who claimed that the Russian hacking of the election was “…a 9/11 scale event. …that goes to the very core of our democracy.” Along with similar opinion pieces by Charles Blow, Timothy Snyder, and other columnists, news stories, Kuzmarov and Marciano say, have been replete with similar claims. The New York Times narrative concludes that the hacking and interference in the U.S. election is designed to promote victories of candidates for public office who would be sympathetic, and subservient to Russia. The long-range goal of Russia, their stories suggest, is to promote Russian expansionism and its restoration to great power status.

    After developing their critique of the Russiagate narrative, Kuzmarov and Marciano, make the case that United States foreign policy since 1917 has been motivated by the desire to crush the Russian Revolution and limit the influence and power of the Soviet Union in world affairs. The Russiagate narrative, they suggest, is primarily a continuation of the story each U.S. administration told the American people about a “Soviet threat” to justify the escalation of the arms race and military spending. They argue that proponents of the Russiagate scenario promote the idea of a new “Russian threat.”

    In fact, Kuzmarov and Marciano say, Russia’s foreign policy in the Middle East, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe today reflects its perception of a threat from the United States and the NATO countries. For example, President George Herbert Walker Bush promised Mikhail Gorbachev, that NATO would not establish new military installations in Eastern Europe. With new NATO forward bases in Poland and the United States’ support of a coup in Ukraine, the Russians see the United States as having aggressive intent. From Russia’s vantage point United States threats to Soviet/Russian security have been a feature of East/West relations from the Russian Revolution, through the Cold War, to hostile relations with the United States in the twenty-first century.

    All too briefly, Kuzmarov and Marciano review the history of the root causes of the United States’ Cold War policy, the lies perpetrated about the Soviet threat, and the enormous damage Cold War policies did to the American people and the victims of war around the world. For those who have not lived through the Cold War and students who are not taught about alternative narratives to “American exceptionalism” this brief volume is very useful. It draws upon the best of historical revisionist scholarship, including the works of William Appleman Williams, Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, Gar Alperowitz, and Ellen Schrecker. It has chapters on the onset of the Cold War and its causes; the attack by Cold War advocates on democracy; Truman, McCarthy, and anti-communism; and the war against the Global South. In sum, the story begins with the substantial U.S. military intervention during the Russian civil war after the Bolshevik victory and continues to Russiagate today.

    The authors effectively develop their two main themes. First, they challenge the argument that Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, represents a threat to U.S. democracy much as the former Soviet Union was alleged to have done during the Cold War. They argue that the Russiagate narrative is fraudulent. Second, they briefly revisit the history of United States/Soviet/Russian relations to argue that the one-hundred-year conflict between the two sides was largely caused by United States’ imperial policies and that proponents of the Russiagate thesis seek to rekindle a new Cold War with Russia.

    Harry Targ. Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN

    [Mar 01, 2020] Hollywood Goes Full Blacklist and Fails to Grasp the Irony by Larry C Johnson

    Notable quotes:
    "... It is especially galling to see how the Hollywood Community has embraced the era of red-baiting Joseph McCarthy as the new standard for what is acceptable. There was a time that a few brave souls in Hollywood (I am thinking Lucille Ball, Kirk Douglas and Gregory Peck), spoke out against the blacklisting of actors, writers and directors for their past political ties to the Soviet Union. ..."
    "... This was an ugly, awful and evil time in America. It was a period of time fed by fear and ignorance. While it is true that there were Americans who identified as Communists and embraced the politics of the Soviet Union, we scared ourselves into believing that communist subversion was everywhere and that America was teetering on the brink of being submerged in a red tide. ..."
    "... Hillary Clinton's crazy rant accusing U.S. Army Major and Member of Congress, Tulsi Gabbard, as a Kremlin puppet is not a deviation from the norm. Clinton exemplifies the terrifying norm of the political and cultural elite in this country. Accusing political opponents of being controlled by foreign enemies, real or imagined, is an old political tactic. Makes me wonder what Edward R. Murrow or Dalton Trumbo would say if we could bring them back from the dead. ..."
    "... "Hillary Clinton's crazy rant accusing U.S. Army Major and Member of Congress, Tulsi Gabbard, as a Kremlin puppet is not a deviation from the norm." ..."
    "... Ms. President is the closest facsimile to Lady Macbeth that American politics has been able to produce. She'd have murdered her own husband if she had thought succession would have fallen to her. As it was, the only thing that kept him alive was that she needed him for the run she had in mind for herself. The debris that this woman has left in her wake boggles the mind. That she came within a whisker of the job where she would perhaps have left the country in that debris field is a sobering thought to think about what American presidential politics has become in the 21st c. Alas, what passes for her failure and the Country's good fortune, her loved ones in the Arts are still not over. And so they are left commiserating and caterwauling over the Donald this, and the Donald that, while all this good material and their celebrity goes down the tube. Good riddance to them both. ..."
    "... Trump campaigned on Drain the Swamp in 2016. The Swamp attempted to take him down with the Russia Collusion hoax that included Spygate and the Mueller special counsel investigation. ..."
    Feb 14, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    In the wake of the latest Hollywood buffoonery displayed at the Oscars, I think it is time for the American public to denounce in the strongest possible terms the rampant hypocrisy of sanctimonious cretins who make their living pretending to be someone other than themselves. Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix and Barbara Streisand pop to mind as representative examples. All three are eager to lecture the American public on the need for equality and non-discrimination. Yet, not one of the recipients of the Oscar gift bags worth $225,000 spoke out against that extraordinary excess nor demanded that the money spent purchasing these "gifts" be used to benefit the poor and the homeless. Nope, take the money and run.

    It is especially galling to see how the Hollywood Community has embraced the era of red-baiting Joseph McCarthy as the new standard for what is acceptable. There was a time that a few brave souls in Hollywood (I am thinking Lucille Ball, Kirk Douglas and Gregory Peck), spoke out against the blacklisting of actors, writers and directors for their past political ties to the Soviet Union.

    Now I have lived long enough to see the so-called liberals in Hollywood rail against Donald Trump and his supporters as "agents of Russia." Many in Hollywood, who weep crocodile tears over the abuses of the Hollywood Blacklist, are now doing the same damn thing without a hint of irony.

    If you are a film buff (and I consider myself one) you should be familiar with these great movies that remind the viewer of the horrors visited upon actors, writers and directors during the Hollywood Blacklist:

    This was an ugly, awful and evil time in America. It was a period of time fed by fear and ignorance. While it is true that there were Americans who identified as Communists and embraced the politics of the Soviet Union, we scared ourselves into believing that communist subversion was everywhere and that America was teetering on the brink of being submerged in a red tide.

    Thirty years ago I reflected on this era and wondered how such mass hysteria could happen. Now I know. We have lived with the same kind of madness since Donald Trump was tagged as a Russian agent in the summer of 2016. And the irony is extraordinary. The very same Hollywood elite that heaped opprobrium on Director Elia Kazan for naming names in Hollywood in front of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, are now leading the charge in labeling anyone who dares speak out against the failed coup as "stooges" of the Kremlin or Putin.

    Hillary Clinton's crazy rant accusing U.S. Army Major and Member of Congress, Tulsi Gabbard, as a Kremlin puppet is not a deviation from the norm. Clinton exemplifies the terrifying norm of the political and cultural elite in this country. Accusing political opponents of being controlled by foreign enemies, real or imagined, is an old political tactic. Makes me wonder what Edward R. Murrow or Dalton Trumbo would say if we could bring them back from the dead.


    Bill H , 11 February 2020 at 10:20 AM

    Very well said. And I would extend the same opprobrium to those who label as "racist" anyone who does not agree with their open border policies. Etc.
    plantman , 11 February 2020 at 10:32 AM
    Trump Derangement Syndrome is a vast understatement. You never could have convinced me 4 years ago that virtually all of my liberal friends would have completely lost touch with reality due to their visceral hatred of one man.

    It no longer matters if you agree with people on social policy, entitlements, student loans, homelessness, drug addiction or even wealth distribution.

    If you do not share their irrational hatred of Trump, you're going to be lambasted, shunned and treated like a pariah.

    I've never seen anything like it. It's whacko!

    Jim Henely , 11 February 2020 at 10:34 AM
    Hillary Clinton has become the poster child for the corruption that has captured and paralyzed our political parties and government institutions. Why is she above prosecution? Is the corruption complete? Can we look to any individual or group to restore our Republic? Wake me when the prosecutions begin.
    Flavius , 11 February 2020 at 11:35 AM
    "Hillary Clinton's crazy rant accusing U.S. Army Major and Member of Congress, Tulsi Gabbard, as a Kremlin puppet is not a deviation from the norm."

    Ms. President is the closest facsimile to Lady Macbeth that American politics has been able to produce. She'd have murdered her own husband if she had thought succession would have fallen to her. As it was, the only thing that kept him alive was that she needed him for the run she had in mind for herself. The debris that this woman has left in her wake boggles the mind. That she came within a whisker of the job where she would perhaps have left the country in that debris field is a sobering thought to think about what American presidential politics has become in the 21st c. Alas, what passes for her failure and the Country's good fortune, her loved ones in the Arts are still not over. And so they are left commiserating and caterwauling over the Donald this, and the Donald that, while all this good material and their celebrity goes down the tube. Good riddance to them both.

    Dave Schuler , 11 February 2020 at 12:32 PM
    I agree that HUAC's conduct was excessive but you really ought to show the other side of the coin as well.
    1. Communism was genuinely awful. To this day we don't know how many people died, murdered by their own governments, in Soviet Russia and Communist China.
    2. The U. S. government was infiltrated at the very pinnacle of government (as in presidential advisors) by Soviet agents. We know this from Kremlin documents.
    3. We now know (based on Kremlin documents) that the American Communist Party was run by knowing Soviet agents and was funded by the Soviet Union.
    4. The motion picture industry had been heavily infiltrated by Communists including some actual Soviet agents (while Reagan was head of SAG he rooted them out).

    We resolved those issues the wrong way but they desperately needed to be resolved.

    Vegetius , 11 February 2020 at 02:04 PM
    >This was an ugly, awful and evil time in America

    This is self-righteous baby boomer nonsense. It was a brief and slightly uncomfortable time for a handful of people in Hollywood, after which the subversion of American culture and institutions chugged along merrily along to the present day.

    But this episode has been re-purposed and often reduced to caricature as part of a long ideological project aimed at convincing generations of otherwise intelligent white people that their past is a shameful parade of villains.

    They don't call it 'programming' for nothing.

    optimax , 11 February 2020 at 03:53 PM
    Kirk Douglas bravely defied the blacklist by giving Dalton Trumbo credit on Spartacus under his real name, effectively breaking the blacklist.

    I saw part of the Academy Awards and all I heard over and over again were the words race and gender, no female directors nominated.

    On a side note, this being Black History month, teevee is usually filled with the appropriate programing. But because it is the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Aushwitz the Jews are stealing the Blacks thunder by hogging the programming. When the oppressed collide.

    Fred , 11 February 2020 at 04:02 PM
    Just how big is the carbon footprint on a $225,000 swag bag? So nice to see Hollywood integrity in action. I wonder what the Bernie Tax will be on them in 2021?
    bjd , 11 February 2020 at 04:16 PM
    Chills run down my spine that you start your list with 'The Front'.

    Woody Allen's 'The Front', a 'film noir' about the beast and about courage in trying to slay it, is an absolute masterpiece, its end is unmeasurably spectacular and encouraging, and... somehow the movie never got the acclaim it deserves, and lives as one of those quiet orphans.

    But it is highly actual, and that is why you must have come to place it first.

    Thank you for naming it. Extremely recommended.

    blue peacock , 11 February 2020 at 07:26 PM
    Trump campaigned on Drain the Swamp in 2016. The Swamp attempted to take him down with the Russia Collusion hoax that included Spygate and the Mueller special counsel investigation.

    Rep. Devin Nunes uncovered many of the shenanigans while he investigated the claims of Russian interference in the 2016 election. He implored Trump to use his prerogative as POTUS to declassify many documents and communications. Trump instead took the advice of Rod Rosenstein acting as AG who initiated the Mueller investigation and did not declassify. He then passed the buck to AG Barr, who has yet to declassify.

    The question that needs to be asked in light of this: Is Trump a conman who has duped the electorate with Drain the Swamp as he has not used his exclusive powers of classification to present to the voter all the documents and communications about the actions of law enforcement and intelligence agencies relating to claims about Russian influence operations during the 2016 election?

    Fred , 11 February 2020 at 08:13 PM
    Blue,

    Maybe Trump conned the swamp into outing themselves, which hasn't proven that hard since they have even bigger ego's than he.

    D , 11 February 2020 at 09:39 PM
    Blue Peacock, the question that needs to be asked is do you blow your wad all at once on one play. Or do you drip, drip, drip it out strategically. I suggest the latter in this endless game of gotcha politics. Yes, Trump is a con man. That is how he made his billions - selling sizzle. One quality that does translate well into the political arena. No one is surprised - his life has been on the front pages for decades.

    The only newly revealed quality that I find remarkable is his remarkable staying power - the most welcome quality of all. It takes ego maniacs to play this game. Surprised anyone still thinks politics is an avocation for normal people. It isn't. And we the people are the ones that demand this to be the case.

    Sol Invictus , 11 February 2020 at 10:30 PM
    I left the american sh*thole a long time ago and my choice never felt better. I look forward to seeing 50% of americans trying to slaughter the other 50% over socialism. Here we're doing just fine with socialist medecine, and social programs for just about everyting. The Commons are still viable where common sense resides... Oligarchs love cartels, socialism and piratization: it's all about privatizing the gains and socializing the losses to the hoi polloi.
    james , 12 February 2020 at 12:35 AM
    blue peacock... does an alligator want to drain the swamp? the answer is no... that is just a lot of hokum for the naive or illiterate...
    james , 12 February 2020 at 12:36 AM
    @ sol... your first sentence is pretty harsh and more of a reflection on you then anything else..
    anon , 12 February 2020 at 02:26 AM
    Great movie "the front". As to draining the swamp, well trump has to finish the job and here lies the problem. Once done what do you put in its place.

    Bernie of course.

    Diana Croissant , 12 February 2020 at 10:11 AM
    I wonder if Hollywood knows how small some of the audiences in actual movie theaters are now. It's always surprising to me that I am sitting in almost empty theaters now when I decide I want actual movie theater popcorn and so will pay to watch a movie that I have read about and heard about from friends who have already seen the movie. I don't attend unless I've heard good things from my friends about the movie.


    I am constantly surprised that some people even consider watching the Oscars now. I feel the same about professional sports.

    You would be surprised at how good high school plays are and how good high school bands, orchestras, choirs are. The tickets are cheap, and a person actually gets to greet the performers.

    I feel the same about my local university (my Alma Mater). It's Performing Arts departments are excellent. As a student long ago, my student pass allowed me to attend wonderful performances.

    The Glory Days of Hollywood are no more. The actors and directors need to be humbled by having to go to towns across the country to see how sparse the audience in a movie theater is now. It's not at all as I remember as a child when there were long lines at the ticket window.

    [Feb 29, 2020] Covid-19 is probably 3 times more contagios that a "regular" flu

    Feb 29, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Sackerson , Feb 29 2020 19:47 utc | 2

    ...focus on precautions, preparations and resources for the elderly and those with certain chronic health conditions.
    https://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.com/2020/02/covid-19-keep-calm-and-make-plan.html

    Krollchem , Feb 29 2020 19:57 utc | 4

    Tulsi Gabbard on why politics as usual must be discarded in order to prevent a public health crisis:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj_tMTmZn-U&t=95s
    Ilya Grushevskiy , Feb 29 2020 20:33 utc | 17
    @14

    The risk is limited - this kills the old and infirm.

    MOA was accurate in all the panic - China controlled its initial outbreak (although a re-entry is not unlikely imo). That the rest of the world didn't react fast enough, is expected though, but saying that before it was a thing would have been unnecessarily scare-mongering I'd say.

    Jackrabbit , Feb 29 2020 22:26 utc | 42
    Normal flu has R0 of about 1.3

    Los Alamos Labs calculates Covid-19 R0 at between 4.7 to 6.6.

    Bottomline: Covid-19 is much easier to spread / quick to spread.

    !!

    CJ , Feb 29 2020 22:15 utc | 38
    Hi B,
    looks like the guys at New England Biolabs have a very rapid assay for COVID-19 --- Rapid Molecular Detection of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) Virus RNA Using Colorimetric LAMP

    Yinhua Zhang, Nelson Odiwuor, Jin Xiong, Luo Sun, Raphael Ohuru Nyaruaba, Hongping Wei, Nathan A Tanner

    Its a preprint -- but this is the way to go an isothermal loop mediated amplification (LAMP) assay. You ought to be able to get a result in about 30 minutes -- faster once they really automate it. Should cost virtually nothing a few cents.

    Other versions of it might be adapted so you can use them in the field so a general practitioner or even a soldier will be able to make the diagnosis at the bed side-- its a simple color change in a tube. All you need is a pipette the assay tube a hot block and a timer. True positive rate 99.99% false positive about 1% or less. This what the CDC needs. Problem is that they have to mass produce the assay tubes -- we need 100 million like yesterday. The other thing is that we might need martial law to quarantine people and we need to train people to use the kits and fast.

    All the best
    CJ

    Venom , Feb 29 2020 22:16 utc | 39
    All of a sudden, "freedom isn't free" axiom acquires a really macabre meaning. The inevitable devastation in countries with laissez-faire approach to this emergency will eventually prove "totalitarian" Chinese measures as being vastly superior.
    The US will undoubtedly - if grudgingly - adopt Beijing MO, but only after hundreds of thousands of people die needlessly, and America's healthcare system falls apart under the pressure of millions of patients unable to pay exorbitant bills.
    oldhippie , Feb 29 2020 22:26 utc | 43
    The American mind does not know what "public health" is.

    "Public health" is not a thinkable thought. b's paragraph beginning with "Tests must be freely available..." is a sequence of events that cannot exist even in fiction in America. Only someone who has never lived here could write that paragraph. None of b's suggestions are happening. And because these simple measures cannot happen, a price will be paid.

    Spike , Feb 29 2020 22:54 utc | 46
    The overreaction to this will cause much, much more damage than the virus would have if it were responded to in a conventional, sensible way. Those in positions of responsibility are terrified of underreacting, and it's easy to rationalize that it's better to be safe than sorry.

    If measures taken cause unnecessary disruption, if they increase the level of stress, the levels of disease and the amount of death will rise rather than fall. There is more to disease than just microbes.

    This is not to say that we should be laissez-faire. Our response to the yearly outbreak of the flu is, in my opinion, insufficient. Schools are an unprecedented institution of prolonged propinquity. Children go to school, are with their classmates in enclosed rooms all day, and bring the disease home. Children survive, but grandma and grandpa might not. Schools can be shuttered during outbreaks, and the technology exists, at least for the relatively fortunate, to continue the instruction online. People should also be encouraged to avoid stressful prolonged propinquity situations such as travel on planes, trains, and interstate buses.

    It's occurred to me that the death rate statistics might be misleading. Since China closed their schools, one can assume that the disease rate among children fell substantially. However, elderly people who live in care facilities, which is a high density living situation, would not enjoy the falling infection rate, and they are exactly the population most susceptible to a fatal outcome. This alone, perhaps, might make the death rate higher for COVID19 than for the flu.

    Here, I think, is a very good take.


    jadan , Feb 29 2020 22:56 utc | 47
    The US healthcare system, the privatized system of exploitation of the sick for greater investor profits, is not capable of dealing with a pandemic. Trump and his gang of thieves, charlatans, and unapologetically incompetent followers of Ayn Rand and graduates of the Koch Brothers University, will prevent the socialization of medicine if they possibly can. Will a future cover of Time Magazine show them all hanging from lamp posts?

    Whether this pandemic provokes the rapture of Pence & his 144,000 elect and the much anticipated End Times, or whether it fizzles out, I do heartily wish for one outcome: the disenfranchisement of Donald J Trump, his heirs & assigns, and all those who seem unable to smell the stink of his bullshit.

    Thank you Jesus! Amen.

    Pft , Feb 29 2020 21:53 utc | 33
    Jackrabbit@30

    CDC estimates 30 million flu cases each year with 30,000 deaths and 500,000 hospitalizations. I think we are a long way from any real concern. The US is nowhere near as polluted or densely populated as China. Also, I don't think we know how the disease spreads among non Asians. They are keeping that under wraps. Aside from those captives on the cruise ship there really has not been much spread from those who returned from China (visitors or citizens).

    Mark2 , Feb 29 2020 21:12 utc | 26
    Let s see America pass the 'Build a 2000 bed hospital in ten day test.
    ... ... ...
    Krollchem , Feb 29 2020 21:12 utc | 24
    Russ@ 12

    Agreed that the US leadership is clueless and their thrashing around in order to protect corporate capitalism is xenophobic and dangerous to the world. Came across this research on a plant bioflavonoid that you might find useful in the treatment of SARS COV-1 (aka COVID-19).

    Michel Chretien is setting up trials for combatting COVID-19 using a derivative of quercetin, which is a natural anti-inflammatory plant component.
    https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/a-made-in-canada-solution-to-the-coronavirus-outbreak/

    In depth interview of this research in Canadian French:
    https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/1538011/quercetine-coronavirus-michel-chretien-ircm-montreal-patrice-roy

    Dr. Michel Chretien's background and research:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6H0VJZG2Pjk

    Quercetin and the mixture of isoquercitrin have already been found to suppress the arthropod-borne Mayaro virus (MAYV) occurring in forested areas in tropical South America:
    https://parasitesandvectors.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1756-3305-7-130

    Numerous other research articles on plant bioflavonoids such as Quercetin are readily available in the medical literature.

    stephen laudig , Feb 29 2020 20:47 utc | 20
    It's always Groundhog Day in the USA.
    It's always late August 2005.
    It's always New Orleans.
    It's always Hurricane Katrina [or something else] on the horizon.
    It's always a Republican Administration in power.
    Who needs external enemies when we have such internal incompetents available to do the work of sabotage?
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_Day_(film)
    Russ , Feb 29 2020 20:21 utc | 12
    Neither Reps nor Dems are psychologically capable even of conceiving the kinds of measures the post calls for. Trump's stooge already proclaimed that profit is the one and only goal of any response ("the market must decide"), while the Dem leadership as well can speak and think only in terms of making care "affordable", IOW the main purpose of the whole process still has to be corporate control and profit, even if a few stray Dems do want government to subsidize some victims. The purpose still is money changing hands, profit, commerce. Until the Big One levels the karma of this place that will never change.

    It seems almost like fate is teeing up one practice play each time, just to show the US how hollowed out it is, before the real play begins. First was the Iranian reprisal strike which could have been so much more devastating. And now, although it's too early to tell how severe this pest ultimately will be, it looks so far like it won't completely cleanse the place. But if so that won't be for the lack of the US economic and cultural system giving it every opportunity it can use.

    I have no doubt the US learns zero from either test case. By now the US is too berserk and stupid to deduce anything from its very survival than confirmation of the excellence of its policy and encouragement to further escalate and accelerate.

    Trailer Trash , Feb 29 2020 19:59 utc | 6
    The idea that Uncle Sam will do something useful and timely is simply laughable. I have been mostly housebound due to severe illness for the past five years. Imagine a five year quarantine! In all that time I have had zero social support besides receiving a disability pension. I hire a personal shopper every two weeks to bring groceries; everything else comes via UPS or FedEx. I frequently go two weeks at a time and never see anyone except maybe a delivery driver.

    There is no system to take care of housebound people. For me there is no medical personal to make housecalls, no social support, no personal care workers, nothing. And this at a time when nationwide there are only small numbers of people like myself. Multiply this non-system by 100 or 1000 and people will die at home and no one will even notice.

    Uncle Sam's Day of Reckoning may be fast approaching. And we will have well-earned every bit of suffering headed our way.

    Ilya G Poimandres , Feb 29 2020 19:59 utc | 5
    Funny thing, b was right - China (and online deliveries as well really) managed to snuff the spread out well, and it seems that the rest of the world and their 'representative bureaucracies' will show all how limited they are when a fast acting 'unknown unknown' (Rummy, how you made sense here!) does its thing.

    [Feb 28, 2020] "Abort operation! Russian agent Bernie Sanders has been compromised!"

    Notable quotes:
    "... I would suggest amending this to: Official D policy: "no candidate who intends to govern in the interest of the entirety of the citizenry should seek the nomination of this Party" ..."
    Feb 28, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    clarky90 , , February 27, 2020 at 5:04 pm

    "Abort operation! Russian agent Bernie Sanders has been compromised!"

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=71&v=4xQTr14WMMs&feature=emb_logo

    RT admits that Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are both Russian Agents!

    USAian Patriot, Michael Bloomberg has uncovered the truth and heroically, "pulled aside the curtain". (sarc)

    Mel , , February 27, 2020 at 5:13 pm

    A candidate should not be trying to win the nomination.

    LET'S give medals to EVERYbody!

    Samuel Conner , , February 27, 2020 at 8:16 pm

    I would suggest amending this to: Official D policy: "no candidate who intends to govern in the interest of the entirety of the citizenry should seek the nomination of this Party"

    [Feb 28, 2020] Conversational Points about Coronavirus and the White House's Panic

    If "Trump recession" materialize, he and Melania can start packing. As as he will most probably repeat Bush II blunders in handling the epidemics, his chances are already lower that they were before.
    Feb 28, 2020 | angrybearblog.com

    "Trump is highly concerned about the market and has encouraged aides not to give predictions that might cause further tremors .In a Twitter post, he misspelled the word 'coronavirus' as 'caronavirus' and wrote that two cable news stations "are doing everything possible to make the Caronavirus look as bad as possible, including panicking markets, if possible. Likewise their incompetent Do Nothing Democrat comrades are all talk, no action. USA in great shape!"

    As far as the markets, I would be concerned with the China supply chain to the US. At most there is 5-weeks, three on the ocean and a week on each side getting board ship, unloading, and customs. Perhaps companies will have 2 -4 weeks in stock already. We are two-3 weeks into this. China plants are more than likely closed or are half-staffed. Ships woill not call on Chinese ports till the crisis is over or is pronounced safe.

    1. EMichael , February 28, 2020 9:31 am

      So Trump keeps trying to reassure investors about the market when there is not a single person in the world that would pay attention to his comments on the market.

    [Feb 28, 2020] The impact of coronavirus on Trump reelection chances

    Highly recommended!
    Feb 28, 2020 | angrybearblog.com

    likbez , February 27, 2020 10:57 pm

    There is a silver lining in any dark cloud.

    Trump might not survive the Coronavirus, literally (he is over 70 and has a high range of contacts; the mortality to this age group is close to 10%), or figuratively as voters might not forgive him inadequate and/or incompetent response (which is given) .

    Unfortunately, Bernie is at even higher risk as mortality for 80+ is over 15%, and pre-existing cardiovascular disease is a serious negative factor.

    One can wonder if this will be " Straw that broke the camel's back " for Trump. With 10% drop of S&P500 (aka "correction") it is difficult to talk about booming economy on rallies ( 20% decline marker defines a recession and some stocks -- like oil sector are already in this territory ). High yield bonds are also going down, although more slowly. Now suddenly, Trump has nothing to talk about on his rallies, and he knows it.

    A part of rich retirees who are overexposed to stocks constitutes a sizable part of remaining avid "Trumpers" voter block (kind of double stupidity, if you wish :-) , and some of them might not forgive Trump the liberty of depriving them honestly earned in 2019 ~10% of their 401K accounts.

    IMHO troubles for Trump just started. Being incompetent DJT and his merry band of grifters will almost definitely botch the response.

    They already made three blunders.

    1. When asked if, and when, a vaccine is produced, would the vaccine be affordable to everyone? They replied; We'll let the "market" decide that. And some part of electorate probably noted that.

    2. The last December, they cut the budget for the CDC (center for disease control).

    3. They exposed government workers to the virus without any need to do that, only due to bureaucratic incompetence: https://science.slashdot.org/story/20/02/27/2353236/us-health-workers-responding-to-coronavirus-lacked-training-and-protective-gear-whistle-blower-says

    In this sense appointing Pence as the head of the coronavirus response may be a smart move by Trump. When and if the pandemic hits big time, exposing the mass incompetence and unpreparedness of the US government, in combination with the tanking of the stock market, Trump can, of course, blame Christian Zionist neoconservative Israeli apartheid supporter Pence for his troubles :-)

    But, unfortunately, that will not do him any good.

    [Feb 26, 2020] How many more years will we be blessed with fables about those dastardly Russians and their omnipotent control of US elections?

    Feb 26, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    SteveR , Feb 26 2020 18:03 utc | 31

    Darn Russians made people pay $1750 to $3200 to attend the debates last night and clap for Bloomberg. The Russians also aired a long Bloomberg informercial and an anti-Medicare for All commercial during the ad breaks - to divide us. Putin will stop at nothing.

    [Feb 25, 2020] A last-ditch effort to derail the Sanders campaign fails as voters finally reject the Russia con by Matt Taibbi

    Feb 24, 2020 | www.rollingstone.com

    The latest act in the comedy began Friday, just before voting opened in the Nevada Democratic caucus. The Washington Post ran a story -- sourced, I'm not joking, to "people familiar with the matter" -- explaining that Bernie Sanders had been briefed that " Russia is attempting to help his presidential campaign as part of an effort to interfere with the Democratic contest."

    Sanders was quick to see through the gambit. "I'll let you guess about one day before the Nevada caucus," he said. "Why do you think it came out?" He pointed to a Post reporter: "It was The Washington Post ? Good friends." The Post, after all, has spent years dumping on Sanders , a fervent critic of the paper's billionaire creep of an owner, Jeff Bezos.

    Intelligence officials and pundits have been screeching for years that patriotism demands voters reject the foreign agent Donald Trump and the Russian asset Bernie Sanders, and support a conventional establishment politician. Voters responded by moving toward Trump in national approval surveys and speeding Sanders to the top of the Democratic Party ticket. A more thorough disavowal of official propaganda would be difficult to imagine.

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    Russiagate will soon be four years old. For the first three years, it pushed parallel themes: that Russia had "interfered" in the 2016 election, and Trump conspired in the fraud.

    The latter theme at times garnered literal around-the-clock coverage. CNN and MSNBC especially (but also the The New York Times , the The Washington Post , the Daily Beast, and other major outlets) preached to audiences that the fall of the Trump administration was imminent. Special counsel Robert Mueller, news audiences were told, would reveal the Trump-Russia conspiracy and save the world.

    After this story died a violent death when Mueller's probe ended with no new charges, conventional wisdom shifted to a new gospel: Russiagate was about foreign interference.

    Russiagate from the start smelled funny , like bad food. Multiple developments worsened the odor. Stories kept coming up wrong. There were too many unnamed sources, too frequently contradicting one another and/or overstating facts. Every hoof print was a zebra's. Outlets stopped worrying about relaying unconfirmed rumors, which is how terms like " blackmail ," " Trump ," " Russia " and even " Golden Showers " kept appearing in headlines, without proof there ever had been blackmail.

    Moreover, while ordinary citizens like Reality Winner went straight to jail for leaking, senior government officials in the past four years repeatedly and with impunity leaked Russia-related tales. The leaks often pushed still more incorrect narratives, like for instance that that Trump aide Carter Page was a foreign agent.

    But the biggest red flag of all was the way in which "Russia" over the past few years became shorthand to describe any brand of political deviance. I wrote this two years ago :

    "Since Trump's election, we've been told Putin was all or partly behind the lot of it: the Catalan independence movement, the Sanders campaign, Brexit , Jill Stein's Green Party run , Black Lives Matter , the resignations of intraparty Trump critics Bob Corker and Jeff Flake "

    Unnamed "officials" have since added the Corbyn movement in England , the gilets jaunes , protesters in Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia , militias in Africa , pro-government disinformation campaigns in Hong Kong , the presidential campaign of Tulsi Gabbard , and countless other undesirables to what has amounted to an ongoing, cumulative blacklist.

    The extraordinary thing about this campaign to identify basically the entire universe of political thought outside of establishment Democrats in the U.S. as Russian assets has been the obvious projection involved.

    The plot running through all of these stories has been the idea that Russia is trying to " undermine our democracy " by " sowing division ." But these charges are coming from the same people who spent the past four years describing Republicans as deplorable fascists, and progressives on the other side as racist, sexist, Nazis, and " digital brownshirts ."

    This has resulted in a four-year parade of official cranks muttering about Russian efforts to "divide" us, when their own relentless message has been that America is besieged by a pair of Hitlerian movements on the left and right that must be put down at all costs. The only vision of "unity" they promote is one of obedience to the crackpot anti-utopia of neoliberalism that populations around the world are currently rejecting at the ballot box.

    The core of the argument about Russian interference rested upon two major news stories: the hack of the DNC in 2016, and a campaign by the "Internet Research Agency" to push "divisive" social media content.

    The former is a leak of true information about the correspondence of senior Democratic Party officials (Jeremy Corbyn was similarly accused of abetting Russian disinformation efforts when damning-but-real materials about the British National Health Service were leaked). The latter? A story about a group of silly memes, amplified a billionfold by the American commercial news reports about these same efforts.

    Did the Russians actually do these things? Maybe. It's not confirmed either way. The sourcing even today remains tied to the same people who've lied about a thousand other things, both in the course of this story and before, from WMDs to the missile gap. As we saw this week, when officials quietly began admitting their ideas about "what Russia wants" rested upon perhaps " overstated " interpretations of intelligence, many of these narratives have been elaborate exercises in reading tea leaves. And they won't let us see the tea leaves.

    But if there is an official Russian agency behind, say, the Internet Research Agency, those efforts pale in comparison to the enormous institutional effort in the United States to use the narrative for other ends.

    The United States, whose spending on intelligence and the military alone nearly equals Russia's GDP, could crush Russia for breakfast and take the rest of the day off for beer and volleyball. But officials have spent the past few years furiously constructing a popular vision of the Russian enemy far bigger than the actual country, which the likes of Rachel Maddow and Barack Obama not long ago were correctly calling a " gnat on the butt of an elephant ."

    Last week was a perfect example. Intelligence officials briefed Sanders about a belief on their part that Russia wanted to "help" his campaign, although the nature of this assistance was not specific enough to be disclosed.

    The Post noted "U.S. prosecutors found a Russian effort in 2016 to use social media to boost Sanders' campaign against Hillary Clinton," a typically deceptive construction.

    Prosecutors asserted a Russian effort to boost Sanders rather than finding it as true. Nobody has seen the "proof" of this story, not even the Russians charged by Robert Mueller with the conspiracy to help Sanders. In fact, that evidence was deemed so sensitive that Mueller sought to prevent the Russian defendants from seeing it in discovery. The proof was somehow so dangerous, we had to overturn centuries of legal tradition to keep it hidden.

    No matter, the press had no problem repeating the story, because why not? The notion that Russians want to help Sanders always fit nicely into establishment propaganda.

    As a result, we get situations like last week, where there was an assertion about an unknown level of Russian support -- presumably, social media boosting -- that could not possibly equal the impact of a single news story leaked to the Post on the eve of the Nevada primary. Every news consumer in America heard that story last week. Russians could only dream of such saturation.

    The logic of Russiagate is now beyond absurd. Vladimir Putin, somehow in perfect sync with American voting trends, seeks to elevate both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, apparently to compete against himself in the general election, in a desperate effort to suppress the terrifying political might of, say, Joe Biden. I doubt even Neera Tanden in the depths of a wine coma could believe this plot now.

    That this is a dumb story is characteristic. The people pushing it don't have any smart arguments left for remaining in power. Through decades of corporate giveaways, trickle-up economics, pointless wars, and authoritarianism, they've failed the entire population. They are the ones directly threatened by any hint that the population is awakening to its decades-long disenfranchisement.

    They are also the ones who benefit most from "disinformation." Who's trying to divide us? Our own leaders, and as results like the Nevada primary show, the public now knows it.

    [Feb 25, 2020] Russiagate II: Return of the Low Intelligence Zombies

    Notable quotes:
    "... CNN concluded that "America's Russia nightmare is back." Maddow was ecstatic, bleating "Here we go again," recycling her failed conspiracy theories whole. Everybody quoted Adam Schiff firing off that Trump was "again jeopardizing our efforts to stop foreign meddling." Tying it all to the failed impeachment efforts, another writer said , "'Let the Voters Decide' doesn't work if Trump fires his national security staff so Russia can help him again." The NYT fretted , "Trump is intensifying his efforts to undermine the nation's intelligence agencies." John Brennan (after leaking for a while, most boils dry up and go away) said , "we are now in a full-blown national security crisis." The undead Hillary Clinton tweeted , "Putin's Puppet is at it again." ..."
    "... But it's still a miss on Bernie. He did well in Nevada despite the leaks, though Russiagate II has a long way to go. Bernie himself assured us of that. Instead of pooh-poohing the idea that the Russians might be working for him, he instead gave it cred, saying , "Some of the ugly stuff on the internet attributed to our campaign may well not be coming from real supporters." ..."
    "... The world's greatest intelligence team can't seem to come up with anything more specific than "interfering" and "meddling," as if pesky Aunt Vladimir is gossiping at the general store again. CBS reports that House members pressed the ODNI for evidence, such as phone intercepts, to back up claims that Russia is trying to help Trump, but briefers had none to offer. Even Jake Tapper , a Deep State loyalty card holder, raised some doubts. WaPo , which hosted one of the leaks, had to admit "It is not clear what form that Russian assistance has taken." ..."
    "... Yes, yes, they have to protect sources and methods, but of course the quickest way to stop Russian influence is to expose it. Instead the ODNI dropped the turd in the punchbowl and walked away. Why not tell the public what media is being bought, which outlets are working, willingly or not, with Putin? Did the Reds implant a radio chip in Biden's skull? Will we be left hanging with the info-free claim "something something social media" again? ..."
    "... Because the intel community learned its lesson in Russiagate I. Details can be investigated. That's where the old story fell apart. The dossier wasn't true. Michael Cohen never met the Russians in Prague. The a-ha discovery was that voters don't read much anyway, so just make claims. You'll never really prosecute or impeach anyone, so why bother with evidence (see everything Ukraine)? Just throw out accusations and let the media fill it all in for you. ..."
    "... The intel community crossed a line in 2016, albeit clumsily (what was all that with Comey and Hillary?), to play an overt role in the electoral process. When that didn't work out and Trump was elected, they pivoted and drove us to the brink of all hell breaking loose with Russiagate I. The media welcomed and supported them. The Dems welcomed and supported them. Far too many Americans welcomed and supported them in some elaborate version of the ends justifying the means. ..."
    "... The good news from 2016 was that the Deep State turned out to be less competent than we originally feared. ..."
    Feb 25, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    The Russians are back, alongside the American intelligence agencies playing deep inside our elections. Who should we fear more? Hint: not the Russians.

    On February 13, the election security czar in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) briefed the House Intelligence Committee that the Russians were meddling again and that they favored Donald Trump. A few weeks earlier, the ODNI briefed Bernie Sanders that the Russians were also meddling in the Democratic primaries, this time in his favor. Both briefings remained secret until this past week, when the former was leaked to the New York Times in time to smear Trump for replacing his DNI, and the latter leaked to the Washington Post ahead of the Nevada caucuses to try and damage Sanders.

    Russiagate is back, baby. Everyone welcome Russiagate II.

    You didn't think after 2016 the bad boys of the intel "community" (which makes it sound like they all live together down in Florida somewhere) weren't going to play their games again, and that they wouldn't learn from their mistakes? Those errors were in retrospect amateurish. A salacious dossier built around a pee tape? Nefarious academics befriending minor Trump campaign staffers who would tell all to an Aussie ambassador trolling London's pubs looking for young, fit Americans? Falsified FISA applications when it was all too obvious even Trumpkin greenhorns weren't dumb enough to sleep with FBI honeypots? You'd think after influencing 85 elections across the globe since World War II, they'd be better at it. But you also knew that after failing to whomp a bumpkin like Trump once, they would keep trying.

    Like any good intel op, you start with a tickle, make it seem like the targets are figuring it out for themselves. Get it out there that Trump offered Wikileaks' Julian Assange a pardon if he would state publicly that Russia wasn't involved in the 2016 DNC leaks. The story was all garbage, not the least of which because Assange has been clear for years that it wasn't the Russians. And there was no offer of a pardon from the White House. And conveniently Assange is locked in a foreign prison and can't comment.

    Whatever. Just make sure you time the Assange story to hit the day after Trump pardoned numerous high-profile, white-collar criminals, so even the casual reader had Trump = bad, with a side of Russian conspiracy, on their minds. You could almost imagine an announcer's voice: "Previously, on Russiagate I "

    Then, only a day after the Assange story (why be subtle?), the sequel hit the theaters with timed leaks to the NYT and WaPo . The mainstream media went Code Red (the CIA has a long history of working with the media to influence elections).

    CNN concluded that "America's Russia nightmare is back." Maddow was ecstatic, bleating "Here we go again," recycling her failed conspiracy theories whole. Everybody quoted Adam Schiff firing off that Trump was "again jeopardizing our efforts to stop foreign meddling." Tying it all to the failed impeachment efforts, another writer said , "'Let the Voters Decide' doesn't work if Trump fires his national security staff so Russia can help him again." The NYT fretted , "Trump is intensifying his efforts to undermine the nation's intelligence agencies." John Brennan (after leaking for a while, most boils dry up and go away) said , "we are now in a full-blown national security crisis." The undead Hillary Clinton tweeted , "Putin's Puppet is at it again."

    It is clear we'll be hearing breaking and developing reports about this from sources believed to be close to others through November. Despite the sense of desperation in the recycled memes and the way the media rose on command to the bait, it's intel community 1, Trump 0.

    But it's still a miss on Bernie. He did well in Nevada despite the leaks, though Russiagate II has a long way to go. Bernie himself assured us of that. Instead of pooh-poohing the idea that the Russians might be working for him, he instead gave it cred, saying , "Some of the ugly stuff on the internet attributed to our campaign may well not be coming from real supporters."

    Sanders handed Russiagate II legs, signaling that he'll use it as cover for the Bros' online shenanigans, which were called out at the last debate. That's playing with fire: it'll be too easy later on to invoke all this with "Komrade Bernie" memes in the already wary purple states. "Putin and Trump are picking their opponent," opined Rahm Emanuel to get that ball rolling.

    Summary to date: everyone is certain the Russians are working to influence the election (adopts cartoon Russian accent) but who is the cat and who is the mouse?

    Is Putin helping Trump get re-elected to remain his asset in place? Or is Putin helping Bernie "I Honeymooned in the Soviet Union" Sanders to make him look like an asset to help Trump? Or are the Russkies really all in because Bernie is a True Socialist sleeper agent, the Emma Goldman of his time (Bernie's old enough to have taken Emma to high school prom)? Or is it not the Russians but the American intel community helping Bernie to make it look like Putin is helping Bernie to help Trump? Or is it the Deep State saying the Reds are helping Bernie to hurt Bernie to help their man Bloomberg? Are Russian spies tripping over American spies in caucus hallways trying to get to the front of the room? Who can tell what is really afoot?

    See, the devil is in the details, which is why we don't have any.

    The world's greatest intelligence team can't seem to come up with anything more specific than "interfering" and "meddling," as if pesky Aunt Vladimir is gossiping at the general store again. CBS reports that House members pressed the ODNI for evidence, such as phone intercepts, to back up claims that Russia is trying to help Trump, but briefers had none to offer. Even Jake Tapper , a Deep State loyalty card holder, raised some doubts. WaPo , which hosted one of the leaks, had to admit "It is not clear what form that Russian assistance has taken."

    Yes, yes, they have to protect sources and methods, but of course the quickest way to stop Russian influence is to expose it. Instead the ODNI dropped the turd in the punchbowl and walked away. Why not tell the public what media is being bought, which outlets are working, willingly or not, with Putin? Did the Reds implant a radio chip in Biden's skull? Will we be left hanging with the info-free claim "something something social media" again?

    If you're going to scream that communist zombies with MAGA hats are inside the house , you're obligated to provide a little bit more information. Why is it when specifics are required, the response is always something like "Well, the Russians are sowing distrust and turning Americans against themselves in a way that weakens national unity" as if we're all not eating enough green vegetables? Why leave us exposed to Russian influence for even a second when it could all be shut down in an instant?

    Because the intel community learned its lesson in Russiagate I. Details can be investigated. That's where the old story fell apart. The dossier wasn't true. Michael Cohen never met the Russians in Prague. The a-ha discovery was that voters don't read much anyway, so just make claims. You'll never really prosecute or impeach anyone, so why bother with evidence (see everything Ukraine)? Just throw out accusations and let the media fill it all in for you. After all, they managed to convince a large number of Americans Trump's primary purpose in running for president was to fill vacant hotel rooms at his properties. Let the nature of the source -- the brave lads of the intelligence agencies -- legitimize the accusations this time, not facts.

    It will take a while to figure out who is playing whom. Is the goal to help Trump, help Bernie, or defeat both of them to support Bloomberg? But don't let the challenge of seeing the whole picture obscure the obvious: the American intelligence agencies are once again inside our election.

    The intel community crossed a line in 2016, albeit clumsily (what was all that with Comey and Hillary?), to play an overt role in the electoral process. When that didn't work out and Trump was elected, they pivoted and drove us to the brink of all hell breaking loose with Russiagate I. The media welcomed and supported them. The Dems welcomed and supported them. Far too many Americans welcomed and supported them in some elaborate version of the ends justifying the means.

    The good news from 2016 was that the Deep State turned out to be less competent than we originally feared. But they have learned much from those mistakes, particularly how deft a tool a compliant MSM is. This election will be a historian's marker for how a decent nation, fully warned in 2016, fooled itself in 2020 into self-harm. Forget about foreigners influencing our elections from the outside; the zombies are already inside the house.

    Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People , Hooper's War: A Novel of WWII Japan , and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent .

    [Feb 25, 2020] Glenn Greenwald: Intelligence agencies interfere in the US election using Russia scare

    Feb 25, 2020 | www.youtube.com

    Glenn Greenwald MSNBC's laughable Russiagate meltdown - YouTube


    Al Kene , 1 day ago

    MSNBC is SNL for the sardonic.

    Mike D , 1 day ago

    I can't believe the media keeps accusing politicians they don't like of being Russian assets. Trump, Tulsi, Bernie....seriously....how is CNN and MSNBC still on the air relentlessly pushing crap like that....

    Oathkeeper1992 , 1 day ago

    Norwegian officials just came out in support of a Bernie Sanders presidency....they democratically voted on it. So is Bernie a Norwegian asset? I actually would like that. :p

    flashfloodarea3 , 1 day ago

    A hero of journalism!

    Alan Parker , 1 day ago (edited)

    Russia Isn't Interfering In The Election But Israel & Saudi Arabia Is!

    Arctic Ruffner , 1 day ago

    🤨 Chris Matthews said Bernie supporters would hang him in Central Park and compared his NV win to the Nazi conquest of France. He also suggested Dem leaders let Trump win rather than Bernie take over the party. Chuck Todd called Bernie supporters "brwn shrts". Bernie's Jewish and his family fled the Nazis to America. I can't even tell you the horrible thing Jason Johnson said about women of color or YouTube will block the comment. This 👏🏾 Isn't 👏🏾 a 👏🏾News 👏🏾Channel.

    Nathan Hamilton , 1 day ago

    People who think they can drag Glenn Greenwald on Twitter, are more delusional than people who follow Max Boot.

    JGfromSpace , 1 day ago

    Glenn said Putin is the "Russian Nate Silver"

    Robbie 333 , 1 day ago

    Krystal, Saagar, and Glenn.... doesn't get much better!!

    RawMaterialENT , 1 day ago

    Fun Fact: Putin's biggest detractor in Russia, endorsed Sanders

    SawdEndymon 1312 , 1 day ago

    Glenn Greenwald is a hero

    Lisa Kennedy , 1 day ago

    MSNBC showed their true self after Bernie's win in Nevada and I am completely done with them.

    Steve Joseph , 1 day ago

    When you staff your network chock full of DNC establishment hacks and NatSec partisans, you get the results you have seen on MSNBC

    Brian Loftus , 1 day ago

    My folks told me over and over about hiding under desks from the big one in the 50s.. This tactic goes way back to freaking out the massive generation of children after WW2.

    Prophis , 1 day ago

    Bernie for the win!!!!

    D. Fab , 1 day ago

    The CIA going back to their old routine now that it's becoming more and more clear that they need to overhaul their first version of the cyborg candidate to make him more human like.

    John Siman , 1 day ago (edited)

    0:42 Krystal reads Glenn's description of Rising: "The super-perky radical trans-ideological 21st-century subversive sequel to the Katie Couric Matt Lauer Morning Today Show in its heyday minus all that unpleasantness."

    SeaRose , 1 day ago

    Love ya Glen! One of the bravest journalists of our time.

    [Feb 24, 2020] Seven signs of the neoliberal apocalypse by Van Badham

    Highly recommended!
    Yes, neo-McCarthyism is a sign of the collapse of neoliberal ideology and the crisis within the neoliberal ruling elite, which is trying to patch the cracks int he neoliberal facade of the US society and require the control over the population (which rejected neoliberalism at voting booth in 2016) with Russophobia
    Apr 26, 2018 | www.theguardian.com

    5. The reds are back under the beds

    There's always a bit of judgment and vengeance inherent to the factional shenanigans of Australia's Liberal party, but its refreshed vocabulary warrants inclusion as the fifth sign. Michael Sukkar, the member for Deakin, has been recorded in a dazzling rant declaring war on a "socialist" incursion into a party whose leader is a former merchant banker who pledged to rule for "freedom, the individual and the market" the very day he was anointed.

    Sukkar's insistence is wonderful complement to the performance art monologues of former Liberal MP Bronwyn Bishop on Sky, where she weekly decries socialism is to blame for everything from alcoholism to energy prices.

    The reds may not be under the beds quite yet, but if Sukkar's convinced some commie pinkos are already gatecrashing cocktail events with the blue-tie set, they're certainly on his mind.

    [Feb 24, 2020] The Russia Interference Hoax--Deja Vu All Over Again by Larry C Johnson

    Notable quotes:
    "... Admiral Bill McRaven is proving himself to be an ignorant buffoon. Yes, I'm calling a so-called military hero a clown. He is out today with a despicable op-ed attacking President Trump for removing ACTING DNI Joe Maguire. Here is a sampling of McRaven's stupidity: ..."
    "... Maguire's role as DNI was a temporary appointment. It was not permanent and was not submitted to the Senate as part of a confirmation process. He was a mere place holder. Yet McRaven and others in the anti-Trump crowd display their profound ignorance and insist, wrongly, that Trump fired Maguire. ..."
    "... Guess what? Maguire's resignation coincides with the 210 day limit. ..."
    "... Donald Trump is now on the offensive against a corrupt, dishonest intelligence and law enforcement community as well as their enablers in the festering establishment--the whole crowd is panicked. ..."
    "... If there really was intelligence that Russia had embarked on a new, more expansive round of meddling then that intelligence should have been briefed to the President as part of Presidential Daily Briefing. But that has not taken place. Trump's National Security Advisor, Robert O'Brien says pointedly that he has seen no intelligence to substantiate The NY Times report. NONE : ..."
    "... "I haven't seen any intelligence that Russia is doing anything to attempt to get President Trump reelected," Robert O'Brien, who was appointed by Trump to the post in September, said in an ABC News interview to be broadcast on Sunday. ..."
    "... "Immediately after President Trump won election, opponents inaugurated what they called "The Resistance," and they rallied around an explicit strategy of using every tool and maneuver to sabotage the functioning of the Executive Branch and his Administration. Now, "resistance" is the language used to describe insurgency against rule imposed by an occupying military power. It obviously connotes -- It obviously connotes that the government is not legitimate. This is a very dangerous -- and indeed incendiary -- notion to import into the politics of a democratic republic. What it means is that, instead of viewing themselves as the "loyal opposition," as opposing parties have done in this country for over 200 years, they essentially see themselves as engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government." ..."
    "... Now don't go troubling yourself, Admiral, over finding a reason why people outside your beltway circle don't give a rat's ass about you and your pals getting disrespected. It's been a long time coming, a very long time, but ya'll have earned in spades the right to be ignored. Get used to it. Fool us for a year, for two years, three... but for eighteen years??? Sorry Admiral. Stop whining. ..."
    "... Caity Johnstone has written a parody piece in which the intelligence community labels every candidate other than Buttigieg to be a Secret Russian Agent. ..."
    Feb 24, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    The Russia Interference Hoax--Deja Vu All Over Again by Larry C Johnson

    Admiral Bill McRaven is proving himself to be an ignorant buffoon. Yes, I'm calling a so-called military hero a clown. He is out today with a despicable op-ed attacking President Trump for removing ACTING DNI Joe Maguire. Here is a sampling of McRaven's stupidity:

    Edmund Burke, the Irish statesman and philosopher, once said : "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." Over the course of the past three years, I have watched good men and women, friends of mine, come and go in the Trump administration -- all trying to do something -- all trying to do their best. Jim Mattis, John Kelly, H.R. McMaster, Sue Gordon, Dan Coats and, now, Joe Maguire, who until this week was the acting director of national intelligence. . . .

    But, of course, in this administration, good men and women don't last long. Joe was dismissed for doing his job: overseeing the dissemination of intelligence to elected officials who needed that information to do their jobs. As Americans, we should be frightened -- deeply afraid for the future of the nation. When good men and women can't speak the truth, when facts are inconvenient, when integrity and character no longer matter, when presidential ego and self-preservation are more important than national security -- then there is nothing left to stop the triumph of evil.

    Bill, you are wrong as you can be. Are you too damn lazy to do some simple reading and research?

    Maguire's role as DNI was a temporary appointment. It was not permanent and was not submitted to the Senate as part of a confirmation process. He was a mere place holder. Yet McRaven and others in the anti-Trump crowd display their profound ignorance and insist, wrongly, that Trump fired Maguire.

    Here is the dishonest NY Times spin:

    On Wednesday, the president announced that he was replacing Mr. Maguire with Richard Grenell, the ambassador to Germany and an aggressively vocal Trump supporter. And though some current and former officials speculated that the briefing might have played a role in that move, two administration officials said the timing was coincidental. Mr. Grenell had been in discussions with the administration about taking on new roles, they said, and Mr. Trump had never felt a kinship with Mr. Maguire.

    Donald Trump did not fire Maguire. He followed the law. The specious claim that Trump fired Maguire exposes McRaven and his ilk as either liars or ignoramuses. The statute governing temporary appointments (i.e., the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998) is quite clear:

    Once a vacancy occurs, the position is eligible to be filled by an acting officer for 210 days from the date of the vacancy, as well as any time when a nomination is pending before the Senate.

    Guess what? Maguire's resignation coincides with the 210 day limit.

    Facts do not matter to the anti-Trumpers. Remember all of the hysteria surround Attorney General Barr's legitimate and proper submission of a RECOMMENDATION for reduced sentencing in the case of Roger Stone. The media and punditry reacted as if Barr was calling for the mass extermination of physically handicapped children. Hardly any took time to note that Barr's "RECOMMENDATION" was just that--a recommendation. Nothing Barr said or wrote could compel or coerce Judge Berman to act according to Barr's wishes. And guess what? Judge Berman decided that Barr was right. The key point being that, SHE DECIDED. Not Barr.

    Donald Trump is now on the offensive against a corrupt, dishonest intelligence and law enforcement community as well as their enablers in the festering establishment--the whole crowd is panicked.

    The faux outrage over Trump replacing Maguire is just one indicator of this fear. Another is the fact that we are once again being bombarded with the recycled propaganda that Russia meddled in our 2016 election and is poised to do the same in 2020. What next? Resurrect Jussie Smollet and hire a group of pretend rednecks to stage another faux attack on him during the night on the wintry streets of Chicago?

    The most recent installment in Putin on the prowl comes courtesy of The NY Times, doing its damndest to masquerade as Pravda.

    Intelligence officials warned House lawmakers last week that Russia was interfering in the 2020 campaign to try to get President Trump re-elected, five people familiar with the matter said, a disclosure to Congress that angered Mr. Trump, who complained that Democrats would use it against him.

    The day after the Feb. 13 briefing to lawmakers, the president berated Joseph Maguire, the outgoing acting director of national intelligence, for allowing it to take place, people familiar with the exchange said. Mr. Trump was particularly irritated that Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and the leader of the impeachment proceedings, was at the briefing.

    During the briefing to the House Intelligence Committee, Mr. Trump's allies challenged the conclusions, arguing that he had been tough on Russia and that he had strengthened European security.

    Just another scurrilous lie. Pure propaganda being spun for the sole purpose of smearing Trump and tainting his election. The real truth is that Russia, under Vladimir Putin, is doing less "meddling" in our elections than did his predecessors. We meddled in their elections and domestic politics going back to the end of World War II. Meddling is a natural consequence of having professional intelligence services like the CIA, the FSB, the GRU, the DIA, etc. Another uncomfortable fact is that social media makes it more difficult for the traditional intelligence actors to interfere in politics. Michael Bloomberg's spending in the 2020 Democrat primary dwarfs all efforts to control the social media message. Yet, there are limits to the effectiveness of such "meddling."

    If there really was intelligence that Russia had embarked on a new, more expansive round of meddling then that intelligence should have been briefed to the President as part of Presidential Daily Briefing. But that has not taken place. Trump's National Security Advisor, Robert O'Brien says pointedly that he has seen no intelligence to substantiate The NY Times report. NONE :

    "I haven't seen any intelligence that Russia is doing anything to attempt to get President Trump reelected," Robert O'Brien, who was appointed by Trump to the post in September, said in an ABC News interview to be broadcast on Sunday.

    "I have not seen that, and I get pretty good access," he said, according to excerpts released on Saturday.

    Another meme in the latest propaganda push by deranged Democrats and discredited media is to portray Maguire's temporary replacement, Ambassador Richard Grenell, as some sort of ignorant, unqualified political hack.

    Senator Mark Warner of Virginia offers up an excellent example of this kind of malicious stupidity :

    "The President has selected an individual without any intelligence experience to serve as the leader of the nation's intelligence community in an acting capacity. This is the second acting director the President has named to the role since the resignation of Dan Coats, apparently in an effort to sidestep the Senate's constitutional authority to advise and consent on such critical national security positions, and flouting the clear intent of Congress when it established the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in 2004.

    "The intelligence community deserves stability and an experienced individual to lead them in a time of massive national and global security challenges. And at a time when the integrity and independence of the Department of Justice has been called into grave question, now more than ever our country needs a Senate-confirmed intelligence director who will provide the best intelligence and analysis, regardless of whether or not it's expedient for the President who has appointed him.

    Warner conveniently forgets that Trump named Dan Coats as DNI and the Senate, along with Warner's vote, approved him. Coats had trouble spelling CIA and DNI. He was completely unqualified for the position, yet the Senate rolled over for him with barely a whimper. How about the first DNI? Ambassador John Negroponte was not an intelligence professional. He was career Foreign Service.

    Ambassador Grenell has experience comparable to Negroponte's. Grenell has dealt with all elements of the intelligence community during his tenure working within the realm of the U.S. foreign service. The good news is that Grenell is now on the job as DNI and is starting to clean house. This should have been done four years ago. The DNI, like many other parts of the bureaucracy, is infested with anti-Trump haters doing their best to sabotage his Presidency.

    Robert O'Brien has cleaned out the NSC. There are a lot of empty desks there now. And persons through out the National Security bureacracy, including DOD and CIA, are being emptied. This is a prelude. When prosecutor John Durham starts dropping indictments expect the screaming to intensify.


    blue peacock , 23 February 2020 at 02:59 PM

    "When prosecutor John Durham starts dropping indictments....."

    Larry, it looks like you have a lot of confidence in Durham. What gives you this confidence? The actions of the DOJ to date should make people skeptical that they'll prosecute their own leadership.

    Larry Johnson , 23 February 2020 at 03:10 PM
    If Barr and Durham were going to play ball with the Deep Staters and the anti-Trumpers they would not be attacked as is happening. The hysterical over wrought accusations leveled at Barr last week are merely a symptom of the fear seizing these seditionists.
    D , 23 February 2020 at 03:52 PM
    Americans still retain their keen sense of fair play. Nothing wrong with wanting to be surrounded by those loyal to the elected President.

    It is the President's duty to the office itself to demand those appointed also be competent and act with integrity. The President pays the price if they do not.

    English Outsider , 23 February 2020 at 04:25 PM
    Larry Johnson,

    When it comes to telling us where he's coming from Barr has certainly set out his stall. I have been very interested in AG Barr recently. I quoted this fine lecture - https://americanrhetoric.com/speeches/williambarrfederalistsociety.htm

    - on an English blog in order to underline some parallels between the parliamentary crisis in England last year and the very similar constitutional crisis in the US. But there's a lot more to the lecture than that -

    "Immediately after President Trump won election, opponents inaugurated what they called "The Resistance," and they rallied around an explicit strategy of using every tool and maneuver to sabotage the functioning of the Executive Branch and his Administration. Now, "resistance" is the language used to describe insurgency against rule imposed by an occupying military power. It obviously connotes -- It obviously connotes that the government is not legitimate. This is a very dangerous -- and indeed incendiary -- notion to import into the politics of a democratic republic. What it means is that, instead of viewing themselves as the "loyal opposition," as opposing parties have done in this country for over 200 years, they essentially see themselves as engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government."

    That, together with some penetrating remarks about the difference between Progressive and Conservative - and making it amply clear how destructive Progressivism was - was perhaps more than William Barr merely setting out his stall. It was a declaration of intent and if it's held to then we may expect some dramatic results.

    So I'm not surprised the Democrats are attacking him. The wonder is that they're not tearing him limb from limb.

    Upstate NY'er , 23 February 2020 at 07:53 PM
    Chris Murphy - the dolt from CT - on TV whining about Grenell being unqualified and a Trump loyalist. This is the same stooge who just met with the Iranian Foreign Minister (and a head of hair looking for a brain John Kerrey) in Munich.
    Flavius , 23 February 2020 at 08:43 PM
    Admiral McRaven and his gumba Pentagon bureaucrats should be doing a little belly button gazing to determine how after 2 decades they've managed with considerable sturm und drang to win nothing but have succeeded magnificently in piloting the country into Cold War II with a real adversary.

    Well done, Admiral!

    Now don't go troubling yourself, Admiral, over finding a reason why people outside your beltway circle don't give a rat's ass about you and your pals getting disrespected. It's been a long time coming, a very long time, but ya'll have earned in spades the right to be ignored. Get used to it. Fool us for a year, for two years, three... but for eighteen years??? Sorry Admiral. Stop whining.

    Upstate NY'er , 23 February 2020 at 09:41 PM
    Flavius:

    You mean all those VERY important people - dressed like doormen -who haven't won a war since WWII? BTW, Gulf Storm doesn't count - you'd probably get more fight back from the NY State Troopers.

    These politicians in uniform know all about "diversity", pissing away LOTS of money, transgenders, sucking up and especially landing Beltway bandit contracts. Fighting, not so much.

    Note, I'm referring to the General Officer ranks, not actual troops.

    JerseyJeffersonian , 23 February 2020 at 10:33 PM
    I assess with 100% certainty that this fake scandal was contrived to coincide with the end of this Maguire's "service". Indeed, all of this time he has been acting as an agent of the Borg, only chucking this stinkbomb as his last, spiteful act. Contemptible.
    prawnik , 24 February 2020 at 10:46 AM
    Caity Johnstone has written a parody piece in which the intelligence community labels every candidate other than Buttigieg to be a Secret Russian Agent.
    PRC90 , 24 February 2020 at 07:17 PM
    Unless someone in the DNC or numerous affiliates can come up with an actual Russian, this kind of hoax will begin to be be seen as dated.

    However, with the Weinstein conviction, the MeToo movement will get new life and a wave of similar high profile pursuits will begin.

    Undoubtedly this will include one DJT, featuring accusers going back to the 1960's in a orchestrated 24/7 chorus of unproven horror that they hope will succeed where Mueller and Schiff et al have failed.

    Who knows, perhaps one accuser (two for corroboration) will even allege some vague Russian presence.

    Fred , 24 February 2020 at 08:12 PM
    PRC90,

    So a democratic megadoner is convicted of multiple accounts of sexual assault and surprise! Others in the moral cesspool that is Hollywood won't be brought to "justice", social or otherwise but we'll see Stormy Daniels 2.0. Except her lawyer's already in jail. The left better come up with something better than that.

    Jack , 24 February 2020 at 10:43 PM
    Fred,

    How about Epstein and his pals? That would be a good start. However nothing will happen on that since too many powerful people would likely be ensnared like Billy Clinton and a British prince.

    [Feb 24, 2020] The Russia Interference Hoax--Deja Vu All Over Again by Larry C Johnson - Sic Semper Tyrannis

    Feb 24, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    The Russia Interference Hoax--Deja Vu All Over Again by Larry C Johnson

    Admiral Bill McRaven is proving himself to be an ignorant buffoon. Yes, I'm calling a so-called military hero a clown. He is out today with a despicable op-ed attacking President Trump for removing ACTING DNI Joe Maguire. Here is a sampling of McRaven's stupidity:

    Edmund Burke, the Irish statesman and philosopher, once said : "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." Over the course of the past three years, I have watched good men and women, friends of mine, come and go in the Trump administration -- all trying to do something -- all trying to do their best. Jim Mattis, John Kelly, H.R. McMaster, Sue Gordon, Dan Coats and, now, Joe Maguire, who until this week was the acting director of national intelligence. . . .

    But, of course, in this administration, good men and women don't last long. Joe was dismissed for doing his job: overseeing the dissemination of intelligence to elected officials who needed that information to do their jobs. As Americans, we should be frightened -- deeply afraid for the future of the nation. When good men and women can't speak the truth, when facts are inconvenient, when integrity and character no longer matter, when presidential ego and self-preservation are more important than national security -- then there is nothing left to stop the triumph of evil.

    Bill, you are wrong as you can be. Are you too damn lazy to do some simple reading and research?

    Maguire's role as DNI was a temporary appointment. It was not permanent and was not submitted to the Senate as part of a confirmation process. He was a mere place holder. Yet McRaven and others in the anti-Trump crowd display their profound ignorance and insist, wrongly, that Trump fired Maguire.

    Here is the dishonest NY Times spin:

    On Wednesday, the president announced that he was replacing Mr. Maguire with Richard Grenell, the ambassador to Germany and an aggressively vocal Trump supporter. And though some current and former officials speculated that the briefing might have played a role in that move, two administration officials said the timing was coincidental. Mr. Grenell had been in discussions with the administration about taking on new roles, they said, and Mr. Trump had never felt a kinship with Mr. Maguire.

    Donald Trump did not fire Maguire. He followed the law. The specious claim that Trump fired Maguire exposes McRaven and his ilk as either liars or ignoramuses. The statute governing temporary appointments (i.e., the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998) is quite clear:

    Once a vacancy occurs, the position is eligible to be filled by an acting officer for 210 days from the date of the vacancy, as well as any time when a nomination is pending before the Senate.

    Guess what? Maguire's resignation coincides with the 210 day limit.

    Facts do not matter to the anti-Trumpers. Remember all of the hysteria surround Attorney General Barr's legitimate and proper submission of a RECOMMENDATION for reduced sentencing in the case of Roger Stone. The media and punditry reacted as if Barr was calling for the mass extermination of physically handicapped children. Hardly any took time to note that Barr's "RECOMMENDATION" was just that--a recommendation. Nothing Barr said or wrote could compel or coerce Judge Berman to act according to Barr's wishes. And guess what? Judge Berman decided that Barr was right. The key point being that, SHE DECIDED. Not Barr.

    Donald Trump is now on the offensive against a corrupt, dishonest intelligence and law enforcement community as well as their enablers in the festering establishment--the whole crowd is panicked.

    The faux outrage over Trump replacing Maguire is just one indicator of this fear. Another is the fact that we are once again being bombarded with the recycled propaganda that Russia meddled in our 2016 election and is poised to do the same in 2020. What next? Resurrect Jussie Smollet and hire a group of pretend rednecks to stage another faux attack on him during the night on the wintry streets of Chicago?

    The most recent installment in Putin on the prowl comes courtesy of The NY Times, doing its damndest to masquerade as Pravda.

    Intelligence officials warned House lawmakers last week that Russia was interfering in the 2020 campaign to try to get President Trump re-elected, five people familiar with the matter said, a disclosure to Congress that angered Mr. Trump, who complained that Democrats would use it against him.

    The day after the Feb. 13 briefing to lawmakers, the president berated Joseph Maguire, the outgoing acting director of national intelligence, for allowing it to take place, people familiar with the exchange said. Mr. Trump was particularly irritated that Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and the leader of the impeachment proceedings, was at the briefing.

    During the briefing to the House Intelligence Committee, Mr. Trump's allies challenged the conclusions, arguing that he had been tough on Russia and that he had strengthened European security.

    Just another scurrilous lie. Pure propaganda being spun for the sole purpose of smearing Trump and tainting his election. The real truth is that Russia, under Vladimir Putin, is doing less "meddling" in our elections than did his predecessors. We meddled in their elections and domestic politics going back to the end of World War II. Meddling is a natural consequence of having professional intelligence services like the CIA, the FSB, the GRU, the DIA, etc. Another uncomfortable fact is that social media makes it more difficult for the traditional intelligence actors to interfere in politics. Michael Bloomberg's spending in the 2020 Democrat primary dwarfs all efforts to control the social media message. Yet, there are limits to the effectiveness of such "meddling."

    If there really was intelligence that Russia had embarked on a new, more expansive round of meddling then that intelligence should have been briefed to the President as part of Presidential Daily Briefing. But that has not taken place. Trump's National Security Advisor, Robert O'Brien says pointedly that he has seen no intelligence to substantiate The NY Times report. NONE :

    "I haven't seen any intelligence that Russia is doing anything to attempt to get President Trump reelected," Robert O'Brien, who was appointed by Trump to the post in September, said in an ABC News interview to be broadcast on Sunday.

    "I have not seen that, and I get pretty good access," he said, according to excerpts released on Saturday.

    Another meme in the latest propaganda push by deranged Democrats and discredited media is to portray Maguire's temporary replacement, Ambassador Richard Grenell, as some sort of ignorant, unqualified political hack.

    Senator Mark Warner of Virginia offers up an excellent example of this kind of malicious stupidity :

    "The President has selected an individual without any intelligence experience to serve as the leader of the nation's intelligence community in an acting capacity. This is the second acting director the President has named to the role since the resignation of Dan Coats, apparently in an effort to sidestep the Senate's constitutional authority to advise and consent on such critical national security positions, and flouting the clear intent of Congress when it established the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in 2004.

    "The intelligence community deserves stability and an experienced individual to lead them in a time of massive national and global security challenges. And at a time when the integrity and independence of the Department of Justice has been called into grave question, now more than ever our country needs a Senate-confirmed intelligence director who will provide the best intelligence and analysis, regardless of whether or not it's expedient for the President who has appointed him.

    Warner conveniently forgets that Trump named Dan Coats as DNI and the Senate, along with Warner's vote, approved him. Coats had trouble spelling CIA and DNI. He was completely unqualified for the position, yet the Senate rolled over for him with barely a whimper. How about the first DNI? Ambassador John Negroponte was not an intelligence professional. He was career Foreign Service.

    Ambassador Grenell has experience comparable to Negroponte's. Grenell has dealt with all elements of the intelligence community during his tenure working within the realm of the U.S. foreign service. The good news is that Grenell is now on the job as DNI and is starting to clean house. This should have been done four years ago. The DNI, like many other parts of the bureaucracy, is infested with anti-Trump haters doing their best to sabotage his Presidency.

    Robert O'Brien has cleaned out the NSC. There are a lot of empty desks there now. And persons through out the National Security bureacracy, including DOD and CIA, are being emptied. This is a prelude. When prosecutor John Durham starts dropping indictments expect the screaming to intensify.


    blue peacock , 23 February 2020 at 02:59 PM

    "When prosecutor John Durham starts dropping indictments....."

    Larry, it looks like you have a lot of confidence in Durham. What gives you this confidence? The actions of the DOJ to date should make people skeptical that they'll prosecute their own leadership.

    Larry Johnson , 23 February 2020 at 03:10 PM
    If Barr and Durham were going to play ball with the Deep Staters and the anti-Trumpers they would not be attacked as is happening. The hysterical over wrought accusations leveled at Barr last week are merely a symptom of the fear seizing these seditionists.
    D , 23 February 2020 at 03:52 PM
    Americans still retain their keen sense of fair play. Nothing wrong with wanting to be surrounded by those loyal to the elected President.

    It is the President's duty to the office itself to demand those appointed also be competent and act with integrity. The President pays the price if they do not.

    English Outsider , 23 February 2020 at 04:25 PM

    Larry Johnson,

    When it comes to telling us where he's coming from Barr has certainly set out his stall.

    I have been very interested in AG Barr recently. I quoted this fine lecture -

    https://americanrhetoric.com/speeches/williambarrfederalistsociety.htm

    - on an English blog in order to underline some parallels between the parliamentary crisis in England last year and the very similar constitutional crisis in the US. But there's a lot more to the lecture than that -

    "Immediately after President Trump won election, opponents inaugurated what they called "The Resistance," and they rallied around an explicit strategy of using every tool and maneuver to sabotage the functioning of the Executive Branch and his Administration. Now, "resistance" is the language used to describe insurgency against rule imposed by an occupying military power. It obviously connotes -- It obviously connotes that the government is not legitimate. This is a very dangerous -- and indeed incendiary -- notion to import into the politics of a democratic republic. What it means is that, instead of viewing themselves as the "loyal opposition," as opposing parties have done in this country for over 200 years, they essentially see themselves as engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government."

    That, together with some penetrating remarks about the difference between Progressive and Conservative - and making it amply clear how destructive Progressivism was - was perhaps more than William Barr merely setting out his stall. It was a declaration of intent and if it's held to then we may expect some dramatic results.

    So I'm not surprised the Democrats are attacking him. The wonder is that they're not tearing him limb from limb.

    Upstate NY'er , 23 February 2020 at 07:53 PM
    Chris Murphy - the dolt from CT - on TV whining about Grenell being unqualified and a Trump loyalist. This is the same stooge who just met with the Iranian Foreign Minister (and a head of hair looking for a brain John Kerrey) in Munich.
    Flavius , 23 February 2020 at 08:43 PM
    Admiral McRaven and his gumba Pentagon bureaucrats should be doing a little belly button gazing to determine how after 2 decades they've managed with considerable sturm und drang to win nothing but have succeeded magnificently in piloting the country into Cold War II with a real adversary.

    Well done, Admiral!

    Now don't go troubling yourself, Admiral, over finding a reason why people outside your beltway circle don't give a rat's ass about you and your pals getting disrespected. It's been a long time coming, a very long time, but ya'll have earned in spades the right to be ignored. Get used to it. Fool us for a year, for two years, three... but for eighteen years??? Sorry Admiral. Stop whining.

    Upstate NY'er , 23 February 2020 at 09:41 PM
    Flavius:

    You mean all those VERY important people - dressed like doormen -who haven't won a war since WWII?

    BTW, Gulf Storm doesn't count - you'd probably get more fight back from the NY State Troopers.

    These politicians in uniform know all about "diversity", pissing away LOTS of money, transgenders, sucking up and especially landing Beltway bandit contracts. Fighting, not so much.

    Note, I'm referring to the General Officer ranks, not actual troops.

    JerseyJeffersonian , 23 February 2020 at 10:33 PM
    I assess with 100% certainty that this fake scandal was contrived to coincide with the end of this Maguire's "service". Indeed, all of this time he has been acting as an agent of the Borg, only chucking this stinkbomb as his last, spiteful act. Contemptible.
    prawnik , 24 February 2020 at 10:46 AM
    Caity Johnstone has written a parody piece in which the intelligence community labels every candidate other than Buttigieg to be a Secret Russian Agent.
    PRC90 , 24 February 2020 at 07:17 PM
    Unless someone in the DNC or numerous affiliates can come up with an actual Russian, this kind of hoax will begin to be be seen as dated.

    However, with the Weinstein conviction, the MeToo movement will get new life and a wave of similar high profile pursuits will begin.

    Undoubtedly this will include one DJT, featuring accusers going back to the 1960's in a orchestrated 24/7 chorus of unproven horror that they hope will succeed where Mueller and Schiff et al have failed.

    Who knows, perhaps one accuser (two for corroboration) will even allege some vague Russian presence.

    Fred , 24 February 2020 at 08:12 PM
    PRC90,

    So a democratic megadoner is convicted of multiple accounts of sexual assault and surprise! Others in the moral cesspool that is Hollywood won't be brought to "justice", social or otherwise but we'll see Stormy Daniels 2.0. Except her lawyer's already in jail. The left better come up with something better than that.

    Jack , 24 February 2020 at 10:43 PM
    Fred,

    How about Epstein and his pals? That would be a good start. However nothing will happen on that since too many powerful people would likely be ensnared like Billy Clinton and a British prince.

    [Feb 24, 2020] US Intel Briefer Who Gave Overblown Russian Interference Assessment Has Reputation For Hyperbole

    This is not "the reputation for hyperbole". This is attempt to defend the interests of MIC, including the interests of intelligence agencies themselves in view of deteriorating financial position of the USA. And first of all the level of the current funding. Like was the case in 2016 elections, the intelligence agencies and first of all CIA should now be considered as the third party participating in the 2020 election which attempts to be the kingmaker. They are interested in continuing and intensifying the Cold War 2, as it secured funding for them and MIC (of this they are essential part)
    Notable quotes:
    "... The official, Shelby Pierson, "appears to have overstated the intelligence community's formal assessment of Russian interference in the 2020 election, omitting important nuance during a briefing with lawmakers earlier this month," according to CNN . ..."
    "... " The intelligence doesn't say that ," one senior national security official told CNN. "A more reasonable interpretation of the intelligence is not that they have a preference, it's a step short of that. It's more that they understand the President is someone they can work with, he's a dealmaker." - CNN ..."
    "... To recap - Pierson told the House Intelligence Committee a lie , which was promptly leaked to the press - ostensibly by Democrats on the committee, and it's just now getting walked back with far less attention than the original 'bombshell' headline received. ..."
    "... No biggie... the media just ran with hysteria for 3 years as gospel accusing people of treason ..."
    "... Well guess what? It turns out the media and the DNC were the ones working for Russia, executing their long standing goal to create chaos better than Russia could have ever dreamed of. https://t.co/PhrJiES9ui ..."
    Feb 24, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

    The US intelligence community's top election security official who appears to have overstated Russian interference in the 2020 election has a history of hyperbole - described by the Wall Street Journal as "a reputation for being injudicious with her words."

    The official, Shelby Pierson, "appears to have overstated the intelligence community's formal assessment of Russian interference in the 2020 election, omitting important nuance during a briefing with lawmakers earlier this month," according to CNN .

    The official, Shelby Pierson, told lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee that Russia is interfering in the 2020 election with the goal of helping President Donald Trump get reelected .

    The US intelligence community has assessed that Russia is interfering in the 2020 election and has separately assessed that Russia views Trump as a leader they can work with. But the US does not have evidence that Russia's interference this cycle is aimed at reelecting Trump , the officials said.

    " The intelligence doesn't say that ," one senior national security official told CNN. "A more reasonable interpretation of the intelligence is not that they have a preference, it's a step short of that. It's more that they understand the President is someone they can work with, he's a dealmaker." - CNN

    Pierson was reportedly peppered with questions from the House Intelligence Committee, which 'caused her to overstep and assert that Russia has a preference for Trump to be reelected,' according to the report. CNN notes that one intelligence official said that her characterization was "misleading," while a national security official said she failed to provide the "nuance" required to put the US intelligence conclusions in proper context.

    To recap - Pierson told the House Intelligence Committee a lie , which was promptly leaked to the press - ostensibly by Democrats on the committee, and it's just now getting walked back with far less attention than the original 'bombshell' headline received.

    Sound familiar?

    No biggie... the media just ran with hysteria for 3 years as gospel accusing people of treason

    Well guess what? It turns out the media and the DNC were the ones working for Russia, executing their long standing goal to create chaos better than Russia could have ever dreamed of. https://t.co/PhrJiES9ui

    -- Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) February 24, 2020

    [Feb 23, 2020] Sick trash by PaulR

    Notable quotes:
    "... In 2017, a woman working with frontline families told me why she didn't want reintegration. 'These [the population of rebel-held Donbass] are people with a minimum level of human development, people raised by their TVs. Okay, so we live together, then what? We're trying to build a completely new society.' ..."
    "... And there once again you have it – one of the primary causes of the war in Ukraine: the contempt with which the post-Maidan government and its activist supporters regard a significant portion of their fellow citizens, the 'sick trash' of Donbass with their 'minimum level of human development'. ..."
    Feb 18, 2020 | irrussianality.wordpress.com

    I'd never heard of the Euro-Atlantic Security Leadership Group (EASLG) until today, even though it turns out that one of its members has the office next door to mine. Its website says that it seeks to respond to the challenge of East-West tensions by convening 'former and current officials and experts from a group of Euro-Atlantic states and the European union to test ideas and develop proposals for improving security in areas of existential common interest'. It hopes thereby to 'generate trust through dialogue.'

    It's hard to object to any of this, but its latest statement , entitled 'Twelve Steps Toward Greater Security in Ukraine and the Euro-Atlantic Region', doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. The 'twelve steps' the EASLG proposes to improve security in Eastern Ukraine are generally pretty uninspiring, being largely of the 'set up a working group to explore' variety, or of such a vaguely aspirational nature as to be almost worthless (e.g. 'Advance reconstruction of Donbas An essential first step is to conduct a credible needs assessment for the Donbas region to inform a strategy for its social-economic recovery.' Sounds nice, but in reality doesn't amount to a hill of beans).

    For the most part, these proposals attempt to treat the symptoms of the war in Ukraine without addressing the root causes. In a sense, that's fine, as symptoms need treating, but it's sticking plaster when the patient needs some invasive surgery. At the end of its statement, though, the EASLG does go one step further with 'Step 12: Launch a new national dialogue about identity', saying:

    A new, inclusive national dialogue across Ukraine is desirable and could be launched as soon as possible. Efforts should be made to engage with perspectives from Ukraine's neighbors, especially Poland, Hungary, and Russia. This dialogue should address themes of history and national memory, language, identity, and minority experience. It should include tolerance and respect for ethnic and religious minorities in order to increase engagement, inclusiveness, and social cohesion.

    This is admirably trendy and woke, but in the Ukrainian context somewhat explosive, as it implicitly challenges the identity politics of the post-Maidan regime. Unsurprisingly, it's gone down like a lead balloon in Kiev. The notorious website Mirotvorets even went so far as to add former German ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger to its blacklist of enemies of Ukraine for having had the temerity to sign the EASLG statement and thus 'taking part in Russia's propaganda events aimed against Ukraine.' Katherine Quinn-Judge of the International Crisis Group commented on Twitter, 'As the idea of dialogue becomes more mainstream, backlash to the concept grows fiercer.' 'In Ukraine, prominent pro-Western politicians, civic activists, and media, have called Step 12 "a provocation" and "dangerous",' she added

    Quinn-Judge comes across as generally sympathetic to the Ukrainian narrative about the war in Donbass, endorsing the idea that it's largely a product of 'Russian aggression'. But she also recognizes that the war has an internal, social dimension which the Ukrainian government and its elite-level supporters refuse to acknowledge. Consequently, they also reject any sort of dialogue, either with Russia or with the rebels in Donbass. As Quinn-Judge notes in another Tweet:

    An advisor to one of Ukraine's most powerful pol[itician]s told us recently of his concern about talk of dialogue in international and domestic circles. 'We have all long ago agreed among ourselves. We need to return our territory, and then work with that sick – sick – population.'

    This isn't an isolated example. Quinn-Judge follows up with a couple more similar statements:

    Social resentments underpin some opposition to disengagement, for example. An activist in [government-controlled] Shchastye told me recently that she feared disengagement and the reopening of the bridge linking the isolated town to [rebel-held] Luhansk: 'I don't want all that trash coming over here.'

    In 2017, a woman working with frontline families told me why she didn't want reintegration. 'These [the population of rebel-held Donbass] are people with a minimum level of human development, people raised by their TVs. Okay, so we live together, then what? We're trying to build a completely new society.'

    And there once again you have it – one of the primary causes of the war in Ukraine: the contempt with which the post-Maidan government and its activist supporters regard a significant portion of their fellow citizens, the 'sick trash' of Donbass with their 'minimum level of human development'. You can fiddle with treating Donbass' symptoms as much as you like, ŕ la EASLG, but unless you tackle this fundamental problem, the disease will keep on ravaging the subject for a long time to come. In due course, I suggest, the only realistic cure will be to remove the patient entirely from the cause of infection.

    Mao Cheng Ji says: February 18, 2020 at 5:02 pm Yeah, but that's just their standard narrative.

    See here, for example:

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/uNupUPjLdUI?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

    And it's been there, either officially or beneath the surface, since forever. Since the Habsburgs, probably, when it was first introduced in Ruthenia.

    Guest says: February 21, 2020 at 5:27 am

    This person speaks so casually of genocide!!!

    It's disgusting that such people have been empowered and such ideas are mainstream.
    Calling people sick trash is the start on the road to genocide

    Mao Cheng Ji says: February 22, 2020 at 1:46 pm

    He's still there, working. Popular journalist and blogger.

    dewittbourchier says: February 18, 2020 at 6:01 pm
    All that you have described above is very sad, but not very surprising – which is itself very sad. I think Patrick Armstrong is right that a lot of the reason Ukraine is not and has never been a functional polity is because much if not most of the population cannot accept that the right side won WWII.
    Mikhail says: February 18, 2020 at 10:15 pm

    Hypocritically denounces the USSR, while seeking that entity's Communist created/inherited boundaries

    akarlin says: February 18, 2020 at 6:48 pm

    Contempt and loathing towards the Donbass is a pretty popular feeling amongst Ukrainian svidomy. E.g., one of the two regular pro-Ukrainian commenters on my blog.

    To his credit, he supports severing the Donbass from Ukraine (as one would a gangrenous limb – his metaphor) as opposed to trying to claw it back. Which is an internally consistent position.

    Mikhail says: February 18, 2020 at 10:13 pm

    Same guy who doesn't consider Yanukovych as having been overthrown under coup like circumstances, while downplaying Poland's past subjugation of Rus territory.

    Lyttenburgh says: February 19, 2020 at 8:18 pm

    In Part I and II we saw how much truth is there in Herr Karlin's claim of being a model of the rrrracially purrrre Rrrrrrrussian plus some personal views.

    Part III (this one) gives a peek into his cultural and upbringing limits, which "qualify" him as an expert of all things Russian, who speaks on behalf of the People and the Country.

    Exhibit "A"

    " I left when I was six, in 1994 , so I'm not really the best person to ask this question of – it should probably be directed to my parents, or even better, the Russian government at the time which had for all intents and purposes ceased paying academics their salaries.

    I went to California for higher education and because its beaches and mountains made for a nice change from the bleakness of Lancashire.

    I returned to Russia because if I like Putler so much, why don't I go back there? Okay, less flippancy. I am Russian, I do not feel like a foreigner here, I like living in Moscow, added bonus is that I get much higher quality of life for the buck than in California ."

    Exhibit "B"

    "I never went to school, don't have any experience with writing in Russian, and have been overexposed to Anglo culture , so yes, it's no surprise that my texts will sound strange."

    Vladimir says: February 20, 2020 at 8:46 am

    The Russian branch of Carnegie Endowment did a piece on this issue. It mostly fits your ideas, but the author suggests it was a compromise, short-term solution – what steps can be taken right now, without crossing red lines of either side – but compromise is unwelcome among both parties. The official Russian reaction was quite cold too.

    "Удаленные 12 шагов. Почему в Мюнхене испугались собственных предложений по Донбассу"
    https://carnegie.ru/commentary/81093

    Mikhail says: February 20, 2020 at 4:54 pm

    Upon a quick perusal of the website of the org at issue, Alexey Arbatov and Susan Eisenhower have some kind of affiliation with it, thus maybe explaining the compromise approach you mention.

    This matter brings to mind Trump saying one thing during his presidential bid – only to then bring in people in key positions who don't agree with what he campaigned on.

    In terms of credentials and name status, the likes of Rand Paul, Tulsi Gabbard, Stephen Cohen and Jim Jatras, are needed in Trump's admin for the purpose of having a more balanced foreign policy approach that conforms with US interests (not to be necessarily confused with what neocons and neolibs favor).

    Instead, Trump has been top heavy with geopolitical thinking opposites. He possibly thought that having them in would take some of the criticism away from him.

    The arguably ideal admin has both sides of an issue well represented, with the president intelligently deciding what's best.

    Guest says: February 21, 2020 at 5:23 am

    On the BBC and on other media there are films of Ukrainians attacking a bus with people evacuated from China. These people even wanted to burn down the hospital where the peoplew were taken (along with other unrelated patients)

    This is a sign of a degraded society – attacking people who may or may not be ill!!!

    Ukraine will eventually break up
    The nationalist agenda is just degrading the society.

    -The economy is failing
    -People who can, are leaving
    -The elected government has no control over the violent people who take to the streets

    It's clear Zelensky is a puppet no different to Poroshenko – this destroys the idea that democracy is a good thing.

    It's very sad that the EU and the Americans under Obama – empowered these decisive elements and then blame Russia.

    Crimea did the right thing leaving Ukraine – Donbass hopefully will follow.

    Lyttenburgh says: February 21, 2020 at 11:16 am

    "And there once again you have it – one of the primary causes of the war in Ukraine: the contempt with which the post-Maidan government and its activist supporters regard a significant portion of their fellow citizens, the 'sick trash' of Donbass"

    [ ]

    Only them?

    [ ]

    Yesterday marks yet another milestone on the Ukrainian glorious шлях перемог and long and arduous return to the Family of the European Nations. The Civil Society ™ of the Ukraine rose as one in the mighty CoronavirusMaidan, against the jackbooted goons of the crypto-Napoleon (and agent of Putin) Zelensky. Best people from Poltava oblast' (whose ancestors without doubt, welcomed Swedish Euro-integrators in 1709) and, most important of all, from the Best (Western) Ukrajina, who 6 years ago made the Revolution of Dignity in Kiev the reality and whom pan Poroshenko called the best part of the Nation, said their firm "Геть вiд Москви!"

    to their fellow Ukrainian citizens, evacuated from Wuhan province in China

    The Net is choke full of vivid, memorable videos, showing that 6 years after Maidan, the Ukraine now constitute a unified, эдiна та соборна country. You all, no doubt, already watched these clips, where a brave middle-aged gentleman from the Western Ukraine, racially pure Ukr, proves his mental acuity by deducing, that crypto-tyrant (and "не лох") Zelensky wants to settle evacuees in his pristine oblast out of vengeance, because the Best Ukrajina didn't vote for him during the election. Or a clip about a brave woman from Poltava oblast, suggesting to relocate the Trojan-horse "fellow countrymen" to Chernobol's Zone. Or even the witty comments and suggestions by the paragons of the Ukrainian Civil Society, " волонтэры ":


    Shy and conscientious members of the Ukrainian (national!) intelligentsia had their instincts aligned rrrrrright. When they learned about that their hospital will be the one receiving the evacuees from Wuhan, the entire medical personell of that Poltava oblast medical facility rose to their feet and sang "Shenya vmerla". Democracy and localism proved once again the strongest suit of the pro-European Ukraine, with Ternopol's oblast regional council voting to accept the official statement to the crypto-tyrant Zelensky, which calls attempts to place evacuees on their Holy land "an act of Genocide of the Ukrainian People" (c)

    Just the headlines .

    [ ]

    That's absolutely "normal", predictable reaction of the "racially pure Ukrainians" to their own fellow citizens. Now, Professor, are you insisting on seeking or even expecting "compromise" with them ? What to do, if after all these years, there is no such thing as the united Ukrainian political nation?

    Like Like Reply

    Lyttenburgh says: February 21, 2020 at 2:12 pm

    "Ukraine's democracy is flourishing like never before due to the tireless efforts of grassroots, pro-democracy, civil-society groups. Many Ukrainians say their country is now firmly set on an irreversible, pro-Western trajectory. Moreover, the country has also undertaken a top-to-bottom cultural, economic, and political divorce from its former Soviet overlord.

    Today, Ukraine is a democratic success story in the making, despite Russia's best efforts to the contrary."
    – Nolan Peterson, a former special operations pilot and a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, is The Daily Signal's foreign correspondent based in Ukraine

    International recognition of the fact:

    [Feb 22, 2020] Mike Bloomberg Is Putin's Agent

    Feb 22, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Peter , Feb 22 2020 10:27 utc | 4

    This should have been obvious for some time.

    The PUTIN's aim is to sow distrust among the US population. The USA, a peaceful civilized society with apparently no internal conflicts maintains a similar peaceful empire for the benefit of all humanity.
    The impersonate evil of the PUTIN has of course every intention to destroy the present state of tranquility and therefore aims to destruct the undisputed peaceful leader of this empire by sowing internal conflict.
    This is why from Sanders to Warren to Gabbard to Bloomberg to Trump everyone is on the PUTIN payroll or subconsciously exposed to some mind controlling rays he sends via satellite to the USA.
    The PUTIN is the invention by the Russian Federation after their successful evil attempt to evade the good intentions of the EMPIRE to embrace Russia in its sphere of peaceful tranquility.

    Bad PUTIN.


    Jen , Feb 22 2020 10:36 utc | 5

    I suppose when Jeff Bozo's Blog discovers that Putin is playing three-dimensional chess with himself using Bernie Sanders as the White Side and Mike Bloomberg as the Black Side, it will finally declare that to save the US from Russian meddling, the very notion and institution of regular elections, and the massive organisation, funding systems and networks, and marketing campaigns and promotions associated with the 4-year election cycle must finally be declared harmful to American interests and done away with. WaPo will finally advocate for a one-man police state. Democracy truly dies in the darkness of delirium and derangement. Thank you, WaPo.
    Harry law , Feb 22 2020 10:57 utc | 7
    This is hilarious, 'nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people' H L Mencken. But seriously, Putin does now have the power to decide US elections, he simply makes his preferred choice [now the obvious loser]one day before the election. You could not make this up.
    Timothy Hagios , Feb 22 2020 12:25 utc | 10
    Russia is 1984's Emmanuel Goldstein in the form of a country.
    Christoph , Feb 22 2020 12:54 utc | 14
    "The prospect of two rival campaigns both receiving help from Moscow appears to reflect what intelligence officials have previously described as Russia's broader interest in sowing division in the United States and uncertainty about the validity of American elections" WaPo, 2/21/20.

    This level if clinical delusion is reminiscent of the Führer's last days in the bunker.


    How about free passage to (swampy) Latin America?

    Brendan , Feb 22 2020 13:10 utc | 15
    I know, I know, it's a waste of time trying to ridicule the media when they're already doing that to themselves. Satire is definitely dead when the Washington Post reports about "two rival campaigns both receiving help from Moscow". WaPo's attempts to explain that the purpose of this bizarre behavior is "sowing division" makes it look even more incredible.
    bjd , Feb 22 2020 13:13 utc | 16
    The concept of democracy was invented by the Kremlin, to sow discord.
    b , Feb 22 2020 13:16 utc | 17
    Here is a candidate who gets it:

    Tulsi Gabbard: How Democrats' impeachment campaign helped Trump

    For years I have stressed the need for our leaders to make decisions based on thoughtfulness and foresight -- not just emotion, or what may "feel good" in a given moment. This is especially important in the area of foreign policy, as politicians' desire to "do something" too often overrides careful consideration of the unintended consequences of the actions they take. Time and time again, their poor judgment has led to worse outcomes in the countries where we recklessly intervene, and for our own country's national security.

    An egregious lack of foresight also led to this counterproductive impeachment of Trump.

    Those who wish to lead our country should have had the foresight to know that this result was inevitable. They need to understand that their decisions should not be dictated by what makes them temporarily feel good or look good, but rather by what will be good for the American people. Emotional gratification or political advantage should never determine one's votes or actions.

    jared , Feb 22 2020 14:02 utc | 25
    Perhaps the intelligence community would just tell us who we should vote for so as not to fall into Putins trap.
    gottlieb , Feb 22 2020 15:22 utc | 37
    Of course the 'sky is falling' Russia revelation/leak/false flag is part of the CIA's ongoing (failed) coup against Trump. But most importantly these revelations are meant to destroy the Bernie Sanders campaign as he gains an insurmountable lead and momentum. The desperate, debauched CIA stooge Democratic Party launches another salvo in its ongoing coup against Sanders. This is nothing to do with Russian interference of US elections, but the interference by Intelligence, working for the Money Power, to preserve the status quo of greed, and murder hope for change in its cradle.
    naiverealist , Feb 22 2020 15:23 utc | 38
    IMO the "Russia meddling" trope is just cover for the real meddlers (ReMs) in our elections. The ReMs don't bother with click bait ads, they use the most effective tool out there to influence voters, candidates, and deep state operatives: the US$. The ReMs give cash to candidates who prefer their policies, and if the candidate does toe the line on their policies, they give the money to their opponent. This is the real meddling, but we don't hear about it because any mention of it results in major shaming as "anti-*******" from the ReMs. The ReMs (even though they are supporting a foreign country) do not have to register as foreign agents in the US (very special treatment) due to specific legislation passed in previous years. The ReMs have bragged about their "support of" (really, buying of) state and federal level legislatures to the point of denying basic Constitutional rights and have been vehemently protected by those bought off people.
    This is the most effective fifth column, the principal criminal, not the Russkies.
    Copeland , Feb 22 2020 16:46 utc | 48
    Give them yellow cake and circuses. 24/7
    vk , Feb 22 2020 17:11 utc | 51

    Sanders on why the story of the briefing from the intelligence came out today

    Sanders on why the story of the briefing from the intelligence community he received a month ago came out today:

    "I'll let you guess. One day before the Nevada caucuses. Why do you think it came out? It was the Washington Post? Good friends."

    blues , Feb 22 2020 17:18 utc | 52
    Let's be honest with ourselves. We all know that American minds are extremely weak and fragile and Americans cannot be exposed to any informations which they are far too helpless to process correctly.

    We absolutely need to be protected from any ideas that might derail our defenceless little minds.

    Thank heaven that the kindly US Government is defending us from wrongful ideas that we cannot possibly handle ourselves.

    james , Feb 22 2020 18:22 utc | 59
    keep taking everything serious and sooner or later you are going to be seriously dead!
    corvo , Feb 22 2020 18:34 utc | 60
    Bit early for April Fool's, isn't it?

    But seriously, even if the notion that Bloomie were a Putin operative were true, I still wouldn't like Bloomie.

    Miss Lacy , Feb 22 2020 18:48 utc | 62
    I hate to break circe's bubble, but here's Saunders responding to a WaPoo trash article:

    "I don't care, frankly, who Putin wants to be president. My message to Putin is clear: Stay out of American elections, and as president I will make sure that you do. In 2016, Russia used Internet propaganda to sow division in our country, and my understanding is that they are doing it again in 2020."

    Sorry dear. Russia did not use internet propaganda to sow division in 2016.... the Dims did it all by themselves. So Saunders is a.) delusional or b.) just another lying politician or c.) hoping the J. Bozo drops a check in the mail?

    Question: the WaPoo seems to have become the new National Inquirer, yes? Does J. Bozo really need the money?

    Norwegian , Feb 22 2020 19:12 utc | 66
    Posted by: Bemildred | Feb 22 2020 13:41 utc | 20
    The "social" is "social media" is in contrast to "professional" or "business" or "commercial" media, i.e. the MSM and other commercial media.

    I understand "social media" literally in the Orwellian sense, it is "social" media just like war is peace. The true meaning is "asocial media" which prevents real interaction, and under complete control by big brother, you can become a non-person at any moment.
    Nathan Mulcahy , Feb 22 2020 19:20 utc | 68
    The American "D"emocracy is a theater of the absurd - not sure if it is a tragedy or a comedy or a tragicomedy. But one thing I am absolutely sure about is the high level of intelligence of the Sheeple.
    karlof1 , Feb 22 2020 20:05 utc | 78
    Yesterday, Pepe Escobar made a similar entry on his Facebook page to which I replied as follows:

    "Why would Russia do that when Trump's doing such a good job of further ruining the USA and Bloomberg would do an even better job of it, whereas Sanders would actually improve the nation and make it a stronger competitor. 100% illogical and spastic!"

    One of his entries today deals with the Iranian election which saw the "Conservatives" gain ground, which in the circumstances was a likely result. And if you haven't yet, check out Pepe's article at Strategic Culture .

    michaelj72 , Feb 22 2020 20:18 utc | 81
    "... Russia's broader interest in sowing division in the United States and uncertainty about the validity of American elections..."

    hell, I think there's been sizeable skepticism about the validity of US elections since the Supreme Court pulled off a coup d'etat against Gore in 2000, and then went ahead again to load the dice in Citizens United to give it all away to the oligarchs and Ruling Class with their truck loads of money and dirty laundrying

    no 'russian assets' need to add anything to that pathetic track record of American 'democracy'.... and that's just from the past short 20 years

    I always thought the thing about 'sowing division in the US' was one of the Elites most hilarious and laughable memes - what we need is a satirist as great as Moliere

    Erelis , Feb 22 2020 20:54 utc | 86
    To quote: "Russia's broader interest in sowing division in the United States and uncertainty about the validity of American elections."

    A democracy without division, really dissent, is not a democracy. "Hey hey we must not have division over Wall Street or police abuse.....let's have harmony. No no no say no more or you create division."

    Want to get a prespective on American democracy? Ask African Americans and other minority groups (such as Hispanics and the wrong sort of European immigrants) what has been done to their right to vote and dissent both now (see Georgia) or in the past (see Jim Crow).

    Kadath , Feb 22 2020 20:58 utc | 87
    I said this back in 2016 when Russiagate started that it was a poisoned well that the Democrats and the Deep State/National Security establishment would never stop returning to. And here we are, within the space 72 hours the Democrats have accused Russia of "meddling" in the 2020 election by supporting Trump AND Sanders, so I take it that from now on whenever any candidate appears that might upset the establishment even a little bit, they will be accused of being Russian puppets.

    This gives the Democrat Party leadership yet another potential weapon to use against Bernie Sanders in the event of a brokered convention, they'll just bleat out "we can't nominate Bernie, the Russians tainted the process to support him". Trump at least can call the Democrats out on their B.S. and call them liars right to their faces, but poor Bernie wont have the courage to do that (at least from what I've seen so far). His own words about Russian "meddling" in 2016 will haunt him, he'll say that the Russians shouldn't have meddled but it won't have impacted his support, but they'll counter that the nomination process was tainted and the DNC has no choice but to discuss how to proceed with the nomination process. That's how they'll try to kill Bernie's candidacy, the "discussion" will just be a bunch of declarations, ultimatums and public commitments they will extract from Bernie to try and break Bernie from his base and either halt his movement's momentum or kill it outright.

    I don't know if it will work but the DNC has a history of doubling down against the people's favorite. If the DNC pursue this stratagem I imagine we'll see some talking heads show up in March pushing for a discussion among the candidates on how to respond to Russian meddling, maybe even some debate questions. Either way, Sander needs to come out swinging against whatever the DNC suggests (ideally he should put forth his own suggestion and steer the conversation down a path he choses). Rest assured whatever the DNC puts forth, the goal won't be to protect the electoral process it will be to bog down the nomination process with a dead horse debate in order to blunt Sander's momentum so that a brokered convention to pick someone else won't be such an obvious democratic betrayal.

    If the DNC succeeds in screwing Bernie (and more importantly Bernie's supporters) out of a presidential nomination for an election they could have won, It will be a paradigm shift in US internal politics, a second 9/11 that will radically alter how all elections within the US are perceived by the public forever. in the same way 9/11 normalized the concept of the Forever War within the US (also called "Generational War" for those who wish to obscure truth), a "Milwaukee Screw job 2020" will normalize the concept of a moribund political establishment within the DNC that will strangle even mild political reform movement conducted within the system itself. While this will preserve the political establishment for a time, the economic and political crises that created these movements will remain unresolved and having de-facto declared maintaining these crises official party policy by blocking reform efforts within the existing political system, these movements will become radicalized and we'll see return of radical movements similar to those of the 1970s (or 1900s). Eventually either the political system will be reformed or it will collapse, but this will take time (a generation perhaps more). At the very least, this period time and all of the people who lived during it will be robbed of their full political agency, a massive lose to US society and political sophistication. In the worst case, it will result in a political collapse of the US, which will entail a massive cost to the US's human, economic, political and international capital comparable to Russian in 1917

    S , Feb 22 2020 23:42 utc | 117
    The prospect of two rival campaigns both receiving help from Moscow appears to reflect what intelligence officials have previously described as Russia's broader interest in sowing division in the United States and uncertainty about the validity of American elections.

    (In Rachel Maddow's voice.) Sounds crazy, but what if that's the whole point? What if Russia is making all these nonsensical moves on purpose, knowing full well they'll be detected by the U.S. intelligence and reported in the press, thus hurting the credibility of the U.S. intelligence, as no sane individual will believe these allegations?

    [Feb 21, 2020] Why Both Republicans And Democrats Want Russia To Become The Enemy Of Choice by Philip Giraldi

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Schiff insisted that Trump must be removed now to "assure the integrity" of the 2020 election. He elaborated somewhat ambiguously that "The president's misconduct cannot be decided at the ballot box, for we cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won." Schiff also unleashed one of the most time honored but completely lame excuses for going to war, claiming that military assistance to Ukraine that had been delayed by Trump was essential for U.S. national security. He said "As one witness put it during our impeachment inquiry, the United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there, and we don't have to fight Russia here." ..."
    "... Schiff, a lawyer who has never had to put his life on the line for anything and whose son sports a MOSSAD t-shirt, is one of those sunshine soldiers who finds it quite acceptable if someone else does the dying. Journalist Max Blumenthal observed that "Liberals used to mock Bush supporters when they used this jingoistic line during the war on Iraq. Now they deploy it to justify an imperialist proxy war against a nuclear power." Aaron Mate at The Nation added that "For all the talk about Russia undermining faith in U.S. elections, how about Russiagaters like Schiff fear-mongering w/ hysterics like this? Let's assume Ukraine did what Trump wanted: announce a probe of Burisma. Would that delegitimize a 2020 U.S. election? This is a joke." ..."
    "... On Wednesday, Schiff maintained that "Russia is not a threat to Eastern Europe alone. Ukraine has become the de facto proving ground for just the types of hybrid warfare that the twenty-first century will become defined by: cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, efforts to undermine the legitimacy of state institutions, whether that is voting systems or financial markets. The Kremlin showed boldly in 2016 that with the malign skills it honed in Ukraine, they would not stay in Ukraine. Instead, Russia employed them here to attack our institutions, and they will do so again." Not surprisingly, if one substitutes the "United States" for "Russia" and "Kremlin" and changes "Ukraine" to Iran or Venezuela, the Schiff comment actually becomes much more credible. ..."
    "... Donald Trump's erratic rule has certainly dismayed many of his former supporters, but the Democratic Party is offering nothing but another helping of George W. Bush/Barack Obama establishment war against the world. We Americans have had enough of that for the past nineteen years. Trump may indeed deserve to be removed based on his actions, but the argument that it is essential to do so because of Russia lurking is complete nonsense. Pretty scary that the apparent chief promoter of that point of view is someone who actually has power in the government, one Adam Schiff, head of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee. ..."
    "... It is scary, but what else can Schiff say? They have no credible arguments against Trump, or for their own party. They are a bunch of lying scumbags that will kill, cheat, steal, mislead, carpet-bag and anything else unethical to achieve their sleazy goals. ..."
    "... Since the US Sociopaths In Charge have totally Effed up the nation, and a significant portion of the world, they have to have SOMEBODY to blame. They certainly won't take the blame they deserve themselves. ..."
    "... What the ZOG wants the ZOG gets ..."
    "... It is appropriate to recall the words of Joseph Goebbels: "Give me the media, and I will make a herd of pigs from any nation," and pigs are easy to drive to the slaughterhouse. Only Russia can really resist such a situation in the world. Therefore, she is the enemy. ..."
    "... The Centrist Democrats and Republicans want to paint the old school God and Country Conservatives Equality and Justice for the USA (Nationalist) into being Russian ..."
    Feb 07, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com
    Authored by Philip Giraldi via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    One of the more interesting aspects of the nauseating impeachment trial in the Senate was the repeated vilification of Russia and its President Vladimir Putin.

    To hate Russia has become dogma on both sides of the political aisle, in part because no politician has really wanted to confront the lesson of the 2016 election, which was that most Americans think that the federal government is basically incompetent and staffed by career politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell who should return back home and get real jobs .

    Worse still, it is useless, and much like the one trick pony the only thing it can do is steal money from the taxpayers and waste it on various types of self-gratification that only politicians can appreciate. That means that the United States is engaged is fighting multiple wars against make-believe enemies while the country's infrastructure rots and a host of officially certified grievance groups control the public space.

    It sure doesn't look like Kansas anymore.

    The fact that opinion polls in Europe suggest that many Europeans would rather have Vladimir Putin than their own hopelessly corrupt leaders is suggestive. One can buy a whole range of favorable t-shirts featuring Vladimir Putin on Ebay , also suggesting that most Americans find the official Russophobia narrative both mysterious and faintly amusing. They may not really be into the expressed desire of the huddled masses in D.C. to go to war to bring true U.S. style democracy to the un-enlightened.

    One also must wonder if the Democrats are reading the tea leaves correctly. If they think that a slogan like "Honest Joe Biden will keep us safe from Moscow" will be a winner in 2020 they might again be missing the bigger picture. Since the focus on Trump's decidedly erratic behavior will inevitably die down after the impeachment trial is completed, the Democrats will have to come up with something compelling if they really want to win the presidency and it sure won't be the largely fictionalized Russian threat.

    Nevertheless, someone should tell Congressman Adam Schiff, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, to shut up as he is becoming an international embarrassment. His "closing arguments" speeches last week were respectively two-and-a-half hours and ninety minutes long and were inevitably praised by the mainstream media as "magisterial," "powerful," and "impressive." The Washington Post 's resident Zionist extremist Jennifer Rubin labeled it "a grand slam" while legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin called it "dazzling." Gail Collins of the New York Times dubbed it "a great job" and added that Schiff is now "a rock star." Daily Beast enthused that the remarks "will go down in history " and progressive activist Ryan Knight called it "a closing statement for the ages." Hollywood was also on board with actress Debra Messing tweeting "I am in tears. Thank you Chairman Schiff for fighting for our country."

    Actually, a better adjective would have been "scary" and not merely due to its elaboration of the alleged high crimes and misdemeanors committed by President Trump, much of which was undeniably true even if not necessarily impeachable. It was scary because it was a warmongers speech, full of allusions to Russia, to Moscow's "interference" in 2016, and to the ridiculous proposition that if Trump were to be defeated in 2020 he might not concede and Russia could even intervene militarily in the United States in support of its puppet.

    Schiff insisted that Trump must be removed now to "assure the integrity" of the 2020 election. He elaborated somewhat ambiguously that "The president's misconduct cannot be decided at the ballot box, for we cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won." Schiff also unleashed one of the most time honored but completely lame excuses for going to war, claiming that military assistance to Ukraine that had been delayed by Trump was essential for U.S. national security. He said "As one witness put it during our impeachment inquiry, the United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there, and we don't have to fight Russia here."

    Schiff, a lawyer who has never had to put his life on the line for anything and whose son sports a MOSSAD t-shirt, is one of those sunshine soldiers who finds it quite acceptable if someone else does the dying. Journalist Max Blumenthal observed that "Liberals used to mock Bush supporters when they used this jingoistic line during the war on Iraq. Now they deploy it to justify an imperialist proxy war against a nuclear power." Aaron Mate at The Nation added that "For all the talk about Russia undermining faith in U.S. elections, how about Russiagaters like Schiff fear-mongering w/ hysterics like this? Let's assume Ukraine did what Trump wanted: announce a probe of Burisma. Would that delegitimize a 2020 U.S. election? This is a joke."

    Over at Antiwar Daniel Lazare explains how the Wednesday speech was "a fear-mongering, sword-rattling harangue that will not only raise tensions with Russia for no good reason, but sends a chilling message to [Democratic Party] dissidents at home that if they deviate from Russiagate orthodoxy by one iota, they'll be driven from the fold."

    The orthodoxy that Lazare was writing about includes the established Nancy Pelosi/Chuck Schumer narrative that Russia invaded "poor innocent Ukraine" in 2014, that it interfered in the 2016 election to defeat Hillary Clinton, and that it is currently trying to smear Joe Biden. One might add to that the growing consensus that Russia can and will interfere again in 2020 to help Trump. Absent from the narrative is the part how the U.S. intervened in Ukraine first to remove its government and the fact that there is something very unsavory about Joe Biden's son taking a high-paying sinecure board position from a notably corrupt Ukrainian oligarch while his father was Vice President and allegedly directing U.S. assistance to a Ukrainian anti-corruption effort.

    On Wednesday, Schiff maintained that "Russia is not a threat to Eastern Europe alone. Ukraine has become the de facto proving ground for just the types of hybrid warfare that the twenty-first century will become defined by: cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, efforts to undermine the legitimacy of state institutions, whether that is voting systems or financial markets. The Kremlin showed boldly in 2016 that with the malign skills it honed in Ukraine, they would not stay in Ukraine. Instead, Russia employed them here to attack our institutions, and they will do so again." Not surprisingly, if one substitutes the "United States" for "Russia" and "Kremlin" and changes "Ukraine" to Iran or Venezuela, the Schiff comment actually becomes much more credible.

    The compulsion on the part of the Democrats to bring down Trump to avoid having to deal with their own failings has brought about a shift in their established foreign policy, placing the neocons and their friends back in charge. For Schiff, who has enthusiastically supported every failed American military effort since 9/11, today's Russia is the Soviet Union reborn, and don't you forget it pardner! Newsweek is meanwhile reporting that the U.S. military is reading the tea leaves and is gearing up to fight the Russians. Per Schiff, Trump must be stopped as he is part of a grand Russian conspiracy to overthrow everything the United States stands for. If the Kremlin is not stopped now, it's first major step, per Schiff, will be to "remake the map of Europe by dint of military force."

    Donald Trump's erratic rule has certainly dismayed many of his former supporters, but the Democratic Party is offering nothing but another helping of George W. Bush/Barack Obama establishment war against the world. We Americans have had enough of that for the past nineteen years. Trump may indeed deserve to be removed based on his actions, but the argument that it is essential to do so because of Russia lurking is complete nonsense. Pretty scary that the apparent chief promoter of that point of view is someone who actually has power in the government, one Adam Schiff, head of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee.


    Chain Man , 10 hours ago link

    If the USA doesn't have a bogey man to be afraid of, the USA might worry more and to insist on fixing the problems within the Nation.

    So many of our politicians are guilty of allowing un constitutional on going act like the removal of Due Process of law for some people and the on going bailout of Global Markets with the US Dollar. The Patriot act and FISA Courts should have been gone.

    J Frank Parnell , 11 hours ago link

    I never saw the problem with Russians. They practice the same religion as I do and are mostly the same color...

    Sid Finch , 10 hours ago link

    Agreed. He seems as about as close as a leader can get to genuinely liking his country and people. It seems the ones here only give a **** about carbon, Central and South Americans, and cutting off my kids genitalia.

    Archeofuturist , 11 hours ago link

    Well let see.... Who has a historical beef with Russia and controls both parties. I wonder?

    globalintelhub , 11 hours ago link

    It is scary, but what else can Schiff say? They have no credible arguments against Trump, or for their own party. They are a bunch of lying scumbags that will kill, cheat, steal, mislead, carpet-bag and anything else unethical to achieve their sleazy goals. When Trump wins in a landslide in 2020, they will claim it's because the Russians 'fixed' the election, and the Democratic party will break into pieces arguing about how they failed and what they did wrong. See www.splittingpennies.com

    Alice-the-dog , 11 hours ago link

    Since the US Sociopaths In Charge have totally Effed up the nation, and a significant portion of the world, they have to have SOMEBODY to blame. They certainly won't take the blame they deserve themselves.

    John Hansen , 10 hours ago link

    Don't leave out Israel, they aren't the American peoples friend either.

    motiveunclear , 13 hours ago link

    There used to be this thing we don't hear used much anymore called "diplomacy" and another useful thing in international politics called "tact".

    https://skulltripper.com/2020/01/18/statesmanship/

    44magnum , 12 hours ago link

    What the ZOG wants the ZOG gets

    toady , 13 hours ago link

    McCarthyism II. Will the US be able put down a second "red scare"? Tune in next week. Same bat time, same bat channel.

    sillycat , 13 hours ago link

    lots of words and no answer to the title question. Giraldi does not see the deep ideological problems: Russia is not trying to diversify into a PoC country, they do not worship gays and may be the only white people nation with sustaining birth rate. The US will go to war there is no way to let this continue.

    hispanicLoser , 13 hours ago link

    The level of Russia hate coming out of the dems is so much greater than that coming out of repubs that one can safely ignore this retarded article.

    Jeffersonian Liberal , 12 hours ago link

    True. But their hatred is pretended hatred. It is a form of projection.

    Dan The Man , 13 hours ago link

    Its our own fault.

    The smart ppl are doing a lousy job of informing the dumb ones about accepted policy like "America Always Needs An Enemy". Smart ones understand that, and see the bigger game because of it.

    We fight the dumb ones who believe Russian boogeyman crap, instead of helping them understand they are being misled on who the enemy really is. The dumb ones then fight back and further entrench that brainwashing.

    vasilievich , 13 hours ago link

    I'm trying to imagine the Russian Army marching down Pennsylvania Avenue. But first, across the Atlantic Ocean.

    ombon , 13 hours ago link

    It is appropriate to recall the words of Joseph Goebbels: "Give me the media, and I will make a herd of pigs from any nation," and pigs are easy to drive to the slaughterhouse. Only Russia can really resist such a situation in the world. Therefore, she is the enemy.

    Dan The Man , 13 hours ago link

    Coming Soon... Why the Gullibles Will Believe Anything

    south40_dreams , 14 hours ago link

    ....and the many thieves are gulping at the money spigot.....time to shut that sucker OFF

    whatisthat , 14 hours ago link

    I would observe there is evidence the corrupt establishment has done more damage to the US than any other country could ever imagine...

    Chain Man , 15 hours ago link

    The Centrist Democrats and Republicans want to paint the old school God and Country Conservatives Equality and Justice for the USA (Nationalist) into being Russian. How dare we expect enforcement of the Laws on the books against them. They want to be deemed Royalty with all the Elitist Rights.

    The old rally call about Russia was always Communist Russia but, they don't do that anymore? Why ? They love their Communist China wage slaves. The Centrist love Communist labor in the name of profits . Human rights be damned it's all about the Global Elitist to them now.

    [Feb 21, 2020] US Jewish Finanical Oligarchy is the most anti-russian group in the US according to various polls, so there is nothing "surprising" in that.

    Edited for clarity
    Feb 21, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
    Passer by , Feb 21 2020 0:11 utc | 77
    >>his foreign policies are still too aggressive

    >>Where please is Putin "authoritarian"? When has Putin "exploited paranoia and intolerance of minorities"?

    Oh please b.

    UUS Jewish Finanical Oligarchyare the most anti-russian group in the US according to various polls, so there is nothing "surprising" in that.

    Israeli Oligarchy have better relations with Russia.

    ... ... ...

    [Feb 20, 2020] Zombie Senator McCarthy is now employed by NYT: NYT Secret Sources Claim Russia Backing Trump Re-Election

    They had learned nothing and forgotten nothing ~Taleyrand
    Feb 20, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

    Clearly the only way Trump can win, right?

    It's Putin again, right?

    Moments after the Times report was published, CNN immediately picked it up for their dozens of viewers.

    And of course, the hot-takes:

    This story doesn't say how Russia is supposedly doing this https://t.co/6IiamPtSPI

    -- Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) February 20, 2020

    This story claims that it had five (5!) people criminally leaking alleged content from a classified briefing. And why not, since no one gets prosecuted for these crimes. Still, we have a serious problem with our supposedly professional "intelligence" and "oversight" communities. https://t.co/zuAdwXpU2L

    -- Mollie (@MZHemingway) February 20, 2020

    Until heads roll and hoaxers are sent to prison, the seditious Russian collusion hoaxers will never stop. They will lie and leak and fabricate evidence, whatever it takes, to prevent the American people from taking charge of their own government. https://t.co/wijJ07QKOO

    -- Sean Davis (@seanmdav) February 20, 2020

    [Feb 19, 2020] During the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, a "neoliberal revolution from above" was staged in the USA by "managerial elite" which like Soviet nomenklatura (which also staged a neoliberal coup d' tat) changed sides and betrayed the working class

    Highly recommended!
    This was an outright declaration of "class war" against working-class voters by a "university-credentialed overclass" -- "managerial elite" which changed sides and allied with financial oligrchy. See "The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite" by Michael Lind
    Notable quotes:
    "... By canceling the class compromise that governed the capitalist societies after World War II, the neoliberal elite saws the seed of the current populist backlash. The "soft neoliberal" backbone of the Democratic Party (Clinton wing) were incapable of coming to terms with Hillary Clinton's defeat -- the rejection of the establishment candidate by the US population and first of all by the working class. The result has been the neo-McCarthyism campaign and the attempt to derail Trump via color revolution spearheaded by Brennan-Obama factions in CIA and FBI. ..."
    Feb 19, 2020 | angrybearblog.com

    likbez , February 19, 2020 12:31 pm

    Does not matter.

    It looks like Bloomberg is finished. He just committed political suicide with his comments about farmers and metal workers.

    BTW Bloomberg's plan is highly hypocritical -- like is Bloomberg himself.

    During the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, a "neoliberal revolution from above" was staged in the USA by "managerial elite" which like Soviet nomenklatura (which also staged a neoliberal coup d'état) changed sides and betrayed the working class.

    So those neoliberal scoundrels reversed the class compromise embodied in the New Deal.

    The most powerful weapon in the arsenal of the neoliberal managerial class and financial oligarchy who got to power via the "Quiet Coup" was the global labor arbitrage in which production is outsourced to countries with lower wage levels and laxer regulations.

    So all those "improving education" plans are, to a large extent, the smoke screen over the fact that the US workers now need to compete against highly qualified and lower cost immigrants and outsourced workforce.

    The fact is that it is very difficult to find for US graduates in STEM disciplines a decent job, and this is by design.

    Also, after the "Reagan neoliberal revolution" ( actually a coup d'état ), profits were maximized by putting downward pressure on domestic wages through the introduction of the immigrant workforce (the collapse of the USSR helped greatly ). They push down wages and compete for jobs with their domestic counterparts, including the recent graduates. So the situation since 1991 was never too bright for STEM graduates.

    By canceling the class compromise that governed the capitalist societies after World War II, the neoliberal elite saws the seed of the current populist backlash. The "soft neoliberal" backbone of the Democratic Party (Clinton wing) were incapable of coming to terms with Hillary Clinton's defeat -- the rejection of the establishment candidate by the US population and first of all by the working class. The result has been the neo-McCarthyism campaign and the attempt to derail Trump via color revolution spearheaded by Brennan-Obama factions in CIA and FBI.

    See also recently published "The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite" by Michael Lind.

    One of his quotes:

    The American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not exist, but the success of its disappearing act depends on equally strenuous efforts on the part of an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian fictions and unwilling to see what is hidden in plain sight.

    [Feb 19, 2020] On Michael Lind's "The New Class War" by Gregor Baszak

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... To writer Michael Lind, Trump's victory, along with Brexit and other populist stirrings in Europe, was an outright declaration of "class war" by alienated working-class voters against what he calls a "university-credentialed overclass" of managerial elites. ..."
    "... Lind cautions against a turn to populism, which he believes to be too personality-centered and intellectually incoherent -- not to mention, too demagogic -- to help solve the terminal crisis of "technocratic neoliberalism" with its rule by self-righteous and democratically unaccountable "experts" with hyperactive Twitter handles. Only a return to what Lind calls "democratic pluralism" will help stem the tide of the populist revolt. ..."
    "... Many on the left have been incapable of coming to terms with Hillary Clinton's defeat. The result has been the stifling climate of a neo-McCarthyism, in which the only explanation for Trump's success was an unholy alliance of "Putin stooges" and unrepentant "white supremacists." ..."
    "... To Lind, the case is much more straightforward: while the vast majority of Americans supports Social Security spending and containing unskilled immigration, the elites of the bipartisan swamp favor libertarian free trade policies combined with the steady influx of unskilled migrants to help suppress wage levels in the United States. Trump had outflanked his opponents in the Republican primaries and Clinton in the general election by tacking left on the economy (he refused to lay hands on Social Security) and right on immigration. ..."
    "... Then, in the 1930s, while the world was writhing from the consequences of the Great Depression, a series of fascist parties took the reigns in countries from Germany to Spain. To spare the United States a similar descent into barbarism, President Franklin D. Roosevelt implemented the New Deal, in which the working class would find a seat at the bargaining table under a government-supervised tripartite system where business and organized labor met seemingly as equals and in which collective bargaining would help the working class set sector-wide wages. ..."
    "... This class compromise ruled unquestioned for the first decades of the postwar era. It was made possible thanks to the system of democratic pluralism, which allowed working-class and rural constituencies to actively partake in mass-membership organizations like unions as well as civic and religious institutions that would empower these communities to shape society from the ground up. ..."
    "... But then, amid the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, a "neoliberal revolution from above" set in that sought to reverse the class compromise. The most powerful weapon in the arsenal of the newly emboldened managerial class was "global labor arbitrage" in which production is outsourced to countries with lower wage levels and laxer regulations; alternatively, profits can be maximized by putting downward pressure on domestic wages through the introduction of an unskilled, non-unionized immigrant workforce that competes for jobs with its unionized domestic counterparts. By one-sidedly canceling the class compromise that governed the capitalist societies after World War II, Lind concludes, the managerial elite had brought the recent populist backlash on itself. ..."
    "... American parties are not organized parties built around active members and policy platforms; they are shifting coalitions of entrepreneurial candidate campaign organizations. Hence, the Democratic and Republican Parties are not only capitalist ideologically; they are capitalistically run enterprises. ..."
    "... In the epigraph to the book, Lind cites approvingly the 1949 treatise The Vital Center by historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. who wrote that "class conflict, pursued to excess, may well destroy the underlying fabric of common principle which sustains free society." Schlesinger was just one among many voices who believed that Western societies after World War II were experiencing the "end of ideology." From now on, the reasoning went, the ideological battles of yesteryear were settled in favor of a more disinterested capitalist (albeit New Deal–inflected) governance. This, in turn, gave rise to the managerial forces in government, the military, and business whose unchecked hold on power Lind laments. The midcentury social-democratic thinker Michael Harrington had it right when he wrote that "[t]he end of ideology is a shorthand way of saying the end of socialism." ..."
    "... A cursory glance at the recent impeachment hearings bears witness to this, as career bureaucrats complained that President Trump unjustifiably sought to change the course of an American foreign policy that had been nobly steered by them since the onset of the Cold War. In their eyes, Trump, like the Brexiteers or the French yellow vest protesters, are vulgar usurpers who threaten the stability of the vital center from polar extremes. ..."
    Jan 08, 2020 | lareviewofbooks.org

    A FEW DAYS AFTER Donald Trump's electoral upset in 2016, Club for Growth co-founder Stephen Moore told an audience of Republican House members that the GOP was "now officially a Trump working class party." No longer the party of traditional Reaganite conservatism, the GOP had been converted instead "into a populist America First party." As he uttered these words, Moore says, "the shock was palpable" in the room.

    The Club for Growth had long dominated Republican orthodoxy by promoting low tax rates and limited government. Any conservative candidate for political office wanting to reap the benefits of the Club's massive fundraising arm had to pay homage to this doctrine. For one of its formerly leading voices to pronounce the transformation of this orthodoxy toward a more populist nationalism showed just how much the ground had shifted on election night.

    To writer Michael Lind, Trump's victory, along with Brexit and other populist stirrings in Europe, was an outright declaration of "class war" by alienated working-class voters against what he calls a "university-credentialed overclass" of managerial elites. The title of Lind's new book, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite , leaves no doubt as to where his sympathies lie, though he's adamant that he's not some sort of guru for a " smarter Trumpism ," as some have labeled him.

    Lind cautions against a turn to populism, which he believes to be too personality-centered and intellectually incoherent -- not to mention, too demagogic -- to help solve the terminal crisis of "technocratic neoliberalism" with its rule by self-righteous and democratically unaccountable "experts" with hyperactive Twitter handles. Only a return to what Lind calls "democratic pluralism" will help stem the tide of the populist revolt.

    The New Class War is a breath of fresh air. Many on the left have been incapable of coming to terms with Hillary Clinton's defeat. The result has been the stifling climate of a neo-McCarthyism, in which the only explanation for Trump's success was an unholy alliance of "Putin stooges" and unrepentant "white supremacists."

    To Lind, the case is much more straightforward: while the vast majority of Americans supports Social Security spending and containing unskilled immigration, the elites of the bipartisan swamp favor libertarian free trade policies combined with the steady influx of unskilled migrants to help suppress wage levels in the United States. Trump had outflanked his opponents in the Republican primaries and Clinton in the general election by tacking left on the economy (he refused to lay hands on Social Security) and right on immigration.

    The strategy has since been successfully repeated in the United Kingdom by Boris Johnson, and it looks, for now, like a foolproof way for conservative parties in the West to capture or defend their majorities against center-left parties that are too beholden to wealthy, metropolitan interests to seriously attract working-class support. Berating the latter as irredeemably racist certainly doesn't help either.

    What happened in the preceding decades to produce this divide in Western democracies? Lind's narrative begins with the New Deal, which had brought to an end what he calls "the first class war" in favor of a class compromise between management and labor. This first class war is the one we are the most familiar with: originating in the Industrial Revolution, which had produced the wretchedly poor proletariat, it soon led to the rise of competing parties of organized workers on the one hand and the liberal bourgeoisie on the other, a clash that came to a head in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Then, in the 1930s, while the world was writhing from the consequences of the Great Depression, a series of fascist parties took the reigns in countries from Germany to Spain. To spare the United States a similar descent into barbarism, President Franklin D. Roosevelt implemented the New Deal, in which the working class would find a seat at the bargaining table under a government-supervised tripartite system where business and organized labor met seemingly as equals and in which collective bargaining would help the working class set sector-wide wages.

    This class compromise ruled unquestioned for the first decades of the postwar era. It was made possible thanks to the system of democratic pluralism, which allowed working-class and rural constituencies to actively partake in mass-membership organizations like unions as well as civic and religious institutions that would empower these communities to shape society from the ground up.

    But then, amid the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, a "neoliberal revolution from above" set in that sought to reverse the class compromise. The most powerful weapon in the arsenal of the newly emboldened managerial class was "global labor arbitrage" in which production is outsourced to countries with lower wage levels and laxer regulations; alternatively, profits can be maximized by putting downward pressure on domestic wages through the introduction of an unskilled, non-unionized immigrant workforce that competes for jobs with its unionized domestic counterparts. By one-sidedly canceling the class compromise that governed the capitalist societies after World War II, Lind concludes, the managerial elite had brought the recent populist backlash on itself.

    Likewise, only it can contain this backlash by returning to the bargaining table and reestablishing the tripartite system it had walked away from. According to Lind, the new class peace can only come about on the level of the individual nation-state because transnational treaty organizations like the EU cannot allow the various national working classes to escape the curse of labor arbitrage. This will mean that unskilled immigration will necessarily have to be curbed to strengthen the bargaining power of domestic workers. The free-market orthodoxy of the Club for Growth will also have to take a backseat, to be replaced by government-promoted industrial strategies that invest in innovation to help modernize their national economies.

    Under which circumstances would the managerial elites ever return to the bargaining table? "The answer is fear," Lind suggests -- fear of working-class resentment of hyper-woke, authoritarian elites. Ironically, this leaves all the agency with the ruling class, who first acceded to the class compromise, then canceled it, and is now called on to forge a new one lest its underlings revolt.

    Lind rightly complains all throughout the book that the old mass-membership based organizations of the 20th century have collapsed. He's coy, however, about who would reconstitute them and how. At best, Lind argues for a return to the old system where party bosses and ward captains served their local constituencies through patronage, but once more this leaves the agency with entities like the Republicans and Democrats who have a combined zero members. As the third-party activist Howie Hawkins remarked cunningly elsewhere ,

    American parties are not organized parties built around active members and policy platforms; they are shifting coalitions of entrepreneurial candidate campaign organizations. Hence, the Democratic and Republican Parties are not only capitalist ideologically; they are capitalistically run enterprises.

    Thus, they would hardly be the first options one would think of to reinvigorate the forces of civil society toward self-rule from the bottom up.

    The key to Lind's fraught logic lies hidden in plain sight -- in the book's title. Lind does not speak of "class struggle ," the heroic Marxist narrative in which an organized proletariat strove for global power; no, "class war " smacks of a gloomy, Hobbesian war of all against all in which no side truly stands to win.

    In the epigraph to the book, Lind cites approvingly the 1949 treatise The Vital Center by historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. who wrote that "class conflict, pursued to excess, may well destroy the underlying fabric of common principle which sustains free society." Schlesinger was just one among many voices who believed that Western societies after World War II were experiencing the "end of ideology." From now on, the reasoning went, the ideological battles of yesteryear were settled in favor of a more disinterested capitalist (albeit New Deal–inflected) governance. This, in turn, gave rise to the managerial forces in government, the military, and business whose unchecked hold on power Lind laments. The midcentury social-democratic thinker Michael Harrington had it right when he wrote that "[t]he end of ideology is a shorthand way of saying the end of socialism."

    Looked at from this perspective, the break between the postwar Fordist regime and technocratic neoliberalism isn't as massive as one would suppose. The overclass antagonists of The New Class War believe that they derive their power from the same "liberal order" of the first-class peace that Lind upholds as a positive utopia. A cursory glance at the recent impeachment hearings bears witness to this, as career bureaucrats complained that President Trump unjustifiably sought to change the course of an American foreign policy that had been nobly steered by them since the onset of the Cold War. In their eyes, Trump, like the Brexiteers or the French yellow vest protesters, are vulgar usurpers who threaten the stability of the vital center from polar extremes.

    A more honest account of capitalism would also acknowledge its natural tendencies to persistently contract and to disrupt the social fabric. There is thus no reason to believe why some future class compromise would once and for all quell these tendencies -- and why nationalistically operating capitalist states would not be inclined to confront each other again in war.

    Gregor Baszak is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His Twitter handle is @gregorbas1.

    Stourley Kracklite 20 days ago • edited ,

    Reagan was a free-trader and a union buster. Lind's people jumped the Democratic ship to vote for Reagan in (lemming-like) droves. As Republicans consolidated power over labor with cheap goods from China and the meth of deficit spending Democrats struggled with being necklaced as the party of civil rights.
    The idea that people who are well-informed ought not to govern is a sad and sick cover story that the culpable are forced to chant in their caves until their days are done, the reckoning being too great.

    [Feb 19, 2020] One bonfire that refuses to die and flamed up again today - Crowdstrike and the media's total refusal to even mention its name, which was the really critical part of the Ukrainian phone call. Not their phony quid pro quo.

    Feb 19, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    D , 16 February 2020 at 01:06 PM

    One bonfire that refuses to die and flamed up again today - Crowdstrike and the media's total refusal to even mention its name, which was the really critical part of the Ukrainian phone call. Not their phony quid pro quo.

    All Democrat candidates need to questioned about Crowdstrike, since it led to two failed major Democrat-led actions against President Trump - The Mueller investigation and the Democrat impeachment.

    Following article underscores what Larry Johnson has been reporting for years:

    https://thenationalsentinel.com/2020/02/15/crowdstrike-claim-that-russia-hacked-dnc-server-remains-at-center-of-2016-spygate-scandal-hoax/

    [Feb 18, 2020] The West "Weeps" for What It Has Sowed by Stormy

    Feb 16, 2020 | angrybearblog.com
    At the Munich Security Conference the U.S. and its allies had no idea of how to handle China, a problem of their greed and stupidity. The West is divided, confused. What to do about Huawei? Really, what to do with China?

    So when Mike Pompeo proclaimed "we are winning," the largely European audience was silent and worried in what sense "we" existed longer.
    In the meantime, Europe, including the U.K, finds itself in a mincer between the U.S. and China

    Unfortunately for us. China has followed the U.S. playbook and has outplayed the West, especially the U.S.

    Walter Rostow of the Johnson administration, an avid anti-communist, wrote the playbook: How can an undeveloped nation take its place among the leaders of the world.

    The answer : Industrialize as rapidly as possible. Do whatever it takes. China did just that.

    In its five year plans, China acknowledged its debt to Rostow and started to industrialize. While I have described this process many years ago, I again outline it briefly here.

    First : China entered the W.T.O. Bill Clinton and Congress were accommodating and instrumental:

    Last fall, as all of you know, the United States signed an agreement to bring China into the W.T.O, on terms that will open its markets to American products and investments.
    Bill Clinton speaking before Congress, March 9, 1998

    Second : China offered dirt cheap labor, labor that had no effective right to bargain
    Third : China did not require a company to obey any environmental regulations.
    Fourth : China often offered a ten-year grace period without any taxation. If there were taxes they were less than those on its own indigenous firms.
    Fifth : China manipulated its currency, making products cheaper to make but getting higher profits in the West.

    The net resul t: Massive trade imbalance in favor of China. CEOs and their henchmen made enormous profits. Devastated American workers were told to go to school, to work harder, to make themselves invaluable to their companies. A cruel joke.

    In droves, Western companies outsourced to China, emptying one factory after another. Anything that could be outsourced was outsourced. China, of course, was not the sole beneficiary of U.S. foolishness. India, Mexico, Vietnam wherever environmental standards were non-existent, wherever workers had no effective rights these were the third world countries the U.S. used. The health and safety of third world workers was of no concern. They were many–and they were expendable.

    U.S. companies were so profitable that special arrangements were made to repatriate those profits back to the states: pennies on the dollar. Many billionaires should really be thanking China.

    Americans were considered only consumers/ The more they consumed, the richer the rich became. Credit was made easy. George Bush's answer to 911 was: Go out and shop.+

    Between The Financial Modernization Act of 1999 and Free trade insanity, the working class of American faced the crash of 2008.

    China became the factory of the world, not through automation, but through dirt cheap labor. China poisoned its atmosphere and polluted its water. Face masks were everywhere. Nonetheless, China had become undeniable economic power, challenging the U.S.

    At the same time, China educated great numbers of engineers, inventors, and scientists. Huwaii became the problem really, Huwaii is just an emblem of it.

    The U.S. in its greed had became lazy. It poured money into weapons. The U.S. decided to build a space force. U.S. bullied countries with foolish sanctions if those countries did not make their billionaire class more profitable. Sanctions instead of competition became last gasp, the last grasp at profit. Flabby and greedy, the U.S.is no longer competitive. It has become just a bully, a threat to everyone.

    Trump, of course, played both sides of the problem. He railed against the outsourcing, but has done little to correct it, giving instead massive tax breaks to the wealthy, gutting environmental regulations laying waste to everything he touches. Pelosi and Schumer pretend to care, but they have nothing to offer. Like Trump, they worry about China. Like Trump, they have no answer, except for more wars and more sanctions.

    Hillary and Bill should take a bow. They began this debacle. Once things were made in the U.S.A. Go to any Walmart store and read the label: Made in China.

    Pelosi and the free trade Democrats should take a bow as should all the Republicans. All of them should hold hands, give each other a quick hug and smile. They and their friends are rich.

    To China belongs the future.


    Terry , February 16, 2020 8:27 pm

    Economics 101 says trade benefits all participants. The problem is not China but the United States. The oligarchs have sucked up all the benefits of trade and have bought the government to keep the good times going. Obama played along unlike FDR with the result that the oligarchs came out stronger than ever while everyone else had a second rate rather than a third rate health care system which Trump and the GOP are struggling to return to a third rate system. You can blame China or the "laziness " of Americans, but the real problem is the moneyed class who do not give a crap about the country or its citizens but only how to hang onto their privileged existence. I hate to even think it but I do not see this thing ending peacefully.

    MARK LOHR , February 16, 2020 8:27 pm

    And in turn funding China's considerable, unabated, and ongoing military expansion.
    The screws are turning; the noose tightening.
    That Western governments of all leanings have not counter-vailed for many decades now is a tale of enormous short-sightedness and cultural hubris.

    davebarnes , February 16, 2020 9:24 pm

    Didn't I read the same thing about Japan 20+ years ago?

    MARK LOHR , February 16, 2020 10:50 pm

    Yes. And to be sure, China faces all the limits inherent to a totalitarian system. However, unlike Japan, they have remilitarized and have demonstrated expansionist goals – artificial island military outposts, Belt and Road, etc.
    Besides stealing/extorting etc our IP.

    doug higgins , February 17, 2020 1:00 am

    Mark,
    Where do you get your information? China has one military base outside its borders. The U.S. has over 800. China does not pour its money into a military budge; the U.S. does.

    Try the actual facts, for a change.

    likbez , February 17, 2020 9:34 am

    To China belongs the future.

    I think it is too early to write down the USA. Historically the USA proved to be highly adaptable society (look at the New Deal). And I think that still there is a chance that it might be capable of jumping the sinking ship of neoliberalism. Although I have problems with Sanders's economic program, Sanders's victory might be instrumental for that change.

    China adopted neoliberalism, much like the USA. It was just lucky to be on the receiving end of the outflow of the capital from the USA. It has a more competent leadership and avoided the fate of the USSR for which the attempt to the adoption of neoliberalism ( aka Perestroika ) proved to be fatal.

    I suspect that the main problem for China is that Neoliberalism, as a social system, is incompatible with the rule of the Communist Party.

    Fundamentally what China has now is a variation of the Soviet "New Economic Policy" (NEP) invented by Bolsheviks after the Civil War in Russia, and while providing a rapid economic development, China has all the problems that are known for this policy.

    One is the endemic corruption of state officials due to the inability of capital to rise above a certain level of political influence and systematic attempts to buy this influence.

    That necessitates periodic campaigns against corruption and purges/jailing of officials, which does not solve the fundamental problem which is systemic.

    The other problem is that the Communist Party is such mode degrades into something like amorphous "holding company" staff for the country (managing state tier in the two tie economy -- state capitalism at the top; neoliberalism at the middle and the bottom)

    Which necessitates the rule of a strong leader, the Father of the Nation, who is capable to conduct purges and hold the Party together by suppressing the appetite of local Party functionaries using brutal repressions. But the Party functionaries understand that they no longer conduct Marxist policies, and that undermines morale. That they are essentially renegades, and that creates a huge stimulus for "make money fast" behavior and illicit self-enrichment.

    Which paradoxically necessitate the hostility with the USA as the mean to cement the Party and suppress the dissent. So not only the USA neocons and MIC are interested in China, China, China (and/or Russia, Russia, Russia) bogeyman.

    That also creates for Chinese senior Communist Party leadership an incentive at some point to implement "Stalin-style solution" to the problems with New Economic Policy.

    So it looks like Neo-McCarthyism in the USA has a long and prosperous future, as both sides are interested in its continuation 🙂

    BTW another example of NEP as a policy was Tito Yugoslavia, which no longer exists.

    Yet another example was Gorbachov's "Perestroika," which logically led to the dissolution of the USSR. With the subjective factor of the total incompetence of Gorbachov as a leader -- with some analogies as for this level of incompetence with Trump.

    As well as general "simplification," and degeneration of Politburo similar to what we observe with the USA Congress now: the USSR in the 1980th has become a gerontocracy.

    But the major factor was that the top KGB officials and several members of Politburo, including Gorbachov, became turncoats and changed sides attempting to change the system to neoliberalism, which was at the time on the assent; Russia always picks the worst possible time for the social change 😉

    While neoliberalism is definitely in decline and its ideology is discredited, I still think there are fundamental problems in tis interaction with the Communist Party rule, that might eventually cause the social crisis for China.

    But only time will tell

    BTW Professor Stephen Cohen books contain very interesting information about NEP, Russia adoption of neoliberalism (and related dissolution of the USSR) and Russia social development in general

    [Feb 16, 2020] Presidential Election Politics are Damaging U.S. Foreign Policy by Robert E. Hunter

    Actions of Trump are dictated by his handlers. He is just a marionette.
    Notable quotes:
    "... wealth on tap. ..."
    "... There's more than an echo of McCartthism in this -- policies are championed to further the business and ideological interests of powerful individuals that don't necessarily reflect the priorities and interests of the country as a whole. People, often those who really should know better, then bandwaggon on those policies, not only to avoid being labeled unpatriotic but to also prove that they're just as or even more patriotic than the people originally promulgating them. We've seen this time and again, probably the most egregious recent example being the miasma of lies that were used to invade Iraq. Its a mindset that might appear to work but I believe that its ultimately a road to nowhere. ..."
    Feb 05, 2020 | responsiblestatecraft.org

    During every presidential election cycle, pundits argue that foreign policy will play a decisive role. Every time -- at least in my experience of 14 election cycles, nine in campaigns -- they have been proved wrong. This year will almost surely be no different.

    On the hustings, presidential candidates rarely get questions from voters on foreign policy. However, during the televised debates , journalist-questioners looking to make news quiz candidates on what they might do in thus-and-so circumstance, although they can't possibly know until faced in the Oval Office with real-world choices.

    Election Campaign Damage: Israel and Palestine

    By contrast, presidential campaigns often have a serious impact on U.S. national security interests. This year, three foreign policy issues tightly linked to U.S. domestic politics stand out. First, last week, Trump joined with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House to launch the " deal of the century " on Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking. The deal is so one-sided as to be risible and is " dead on arrival." It's good politics for Trump with U.S. constituencies that are strongly pro-Israel, though with less impact with American Jews (most of whom are almost certain to vote for the Democratic nominee) than with many American evangelicals.

    But does it matter that, with Trump's proposal, the United States has abandoned any pretense of being an " honest broker" in the Middle East? To be sure, keen observers rightly note that most Arab governments give no more than ritual support to the Palestinian cause. Many have joined Israel in seeing Iran as their common enemy, and the Palestinians be damned.

    But most Arab leaders still must look over their shoulders: can they be sure that their populations will forget about the Palestinians' decades-long perception of humiliation by Israel, the United States, and most Arab leaders? Thus, to guard against giving a hostage to fortune, both the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIG) have formally rejected the Trump plan.

    Still, a third Palestinian Intifada (or "uprising") has so far not started. But these are early days. In any event, U.S. chances of promoting stability in the region have been seriously damaged.

    Damage: Iran

    More consequential is the standoff between the Trump administration and Iran ' s clerical leadership, with the U.S. being egged on by regional partners. Trump probably does not want an open war with Iran. But heightened tensions raise doubts that either Trump or the Iranians can control the pattern of escalation/de-escalation. Little would be needed to spark a major conflict, even by accident. After the United States assassinated Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, Iran responded only by launching pin-prick missile attacks against two Iraqi airbases used by the U.S. military, with advanced warning to keep from killing Americans. Trump -- and the world -- might not be so lucky next time.

    It takes strong nerves to bet that the Trump administration ' s " maximum pressure" strategy against Iran will remain controlled , much less that Iran will accede to U.S. demands before negotiations even begin. Meanwhile, following Trump ' s amazing folly two years ago of withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which effectively trammeled any chance that Iran could get nuclear weapons for at least a decade, Iran is now ramping up its nuclear activities. Given that Trump has pledged that " Iran will never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon," at some point a " red line" can get crossed, not just in politics-driven perceptions but in reality. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo still has on the table 12 demands that Iran must meet before any negotiations can begin. No country will accept unconditional surrender as the opening bid for talking.

    Several of the Democratic candidates for president, while deeply concerned about Iran's behavior, oppose the Trump-Pompeo approach, with all of the risks of open conflict. Amid deep unease on Capitol Hill, the Democratic-controlled House has voted to repeal the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), originally the legal basis for the invasion of Iraq, and to prevent funding of military action against Iran without congressional authorization. (Yet neither House bill has much chance of passing the Republican-controlled Senate.) But these concerns could be swept aside if an incident in the Persian Gulf region led to Americans getting killed, provoking a national outcry. So long as Trump favors confrontation with Iran over any consideration of compromise or conciliation, the dangers will continue. "Hair trigger" continues to be an apt metaphor.

    Damage: The Democrats on Russia

    It's not just the White House that is doing serious damage to U.S. interests abroad during this year's election campaign. Of even greater consequence (absent a new Middle East war) is the U.S. relationship with Russia. It's currently unthinkable that Washington will try to move beyond the status quo, even if Russian President Vladimir Putin were prepared to do so. Even before Trump was inaugurated, many Democrats began calling for his impeachment . Leading Democrats laid Hillary Clinton ' s defeat at the feet of Russian interference in the U.S. election -- a claim that stretched credulity past the breaking point. Further, as Democrats looked for grounds to impeach Trump (or at least terminally to reduce his reelection chances), the " Russia factor" was the best cudgel available. Charges included the notion that " Putin has something on Trump," which presumes he would sell out the nation ' s security for a mess of pottage.

    All this domestic politicking ignores a geopolitical fact: while the Soviet Union lost the Cold War and, for some time thereafter, Russia could be dismissed, it was always certain that it would again become a significant power, at least in Europe. Thus, even before the Berlin Wall fell, President George H. W. Bush proposed creating a " Europe whole and free" and at peace. Bill Clinton built on what Bush began. Both understood that a renascent Russia could embrace revanchism, and for several years their efforts seemed to have a chance of succeeding.

    Then the effort went off the rails. Putin took power in Russia, which made cooperation with the West difficult if not impossible. He worked to consolidate his domestic position, in part by alleging that the West was " disrespecting" Russia and trying to encircle it. For its part, the U.S. played into the Putin narrative by abandoning the Bush-Clinton vision of taking legitimate Russian interests into account in fashioning European security arrangements. The breaking point came in 2014, when Russia seized Crimea and sent " little green men" to fight in some other parts of Ukraine. The West necessarily responded, with economic sanctions and NATO's buildup of " trip wire" forces in Central Europe.

    But despite the ensuing standoff, the critical requirement remains: the United States has to acknowledge Russia's inevitable rise as a major power while also impressing on Putin the need to trim his ambitions, if he is to avoid a new era of Russian isolation. There is also serious business that the two countries need to pursue, including strategic arms control, the Middle East (especially Iran), and climate change. Despite deep disagreements, including over Ukraine and parts of Central Europe, the U.S. needs to engage in serious discussions with Russia, which means the renewal of diplomacy which has been in the deep freeze for years.

    All of this has been put in pawn by the role that the "Russia factor" has been permitted to play in American presidential politics, especially by Democrats. Longer-term U.S. interests are suffering, along with those of the European allies and Middle East partners. The task has been made even more difficult by those U.S. politicians, think tanks , and journalists who prefer to resurrect the term "cold war" rather than clearly examining the nation's strategic needs because of the blinkers imposed by domestic politics. Open discussion about alternatives in dealing with Russia is thus stifled, at serious cost to the United States and others.

    In all three of these areas, the U.S. is paying a high price in terms of its national interests to the games political leaders, both Republicans and Democrats, are playing. Great efforts will be needed to dig out of this mess, beginning with U.S. willingness to do so. Leaders elsewhere must also be prepared to join in -- far from a sure thing! Unfortunately, there is currently little hope that, at least in the three critical areas discussed above, pursuit of U.S. interests abroad will prevail over today's parochial domestic politics. David G. Horsman You apparently do not appreciate these sociopaths live for this crap. It keeps their juices flowing. Cackling Killary may yet get on Stop and Frisk your Bloomer's ticket and be VP. For a price of course.
    This is a fantasy. Once fascism gets established it is nearly impossible to stop it if history teaches us anything.
    Pseudo-religious talk about Karma is very reminiscent of the decent Christians comforting themselves that all those badies will be punished in hell for an eternity. IE. Because they won't be in this life.
    It's a way of coping with total defeat after 50 years of neoliberalcon supremacy and proto fascism. After a 100 year war on labour.

    It's already over. What do think this is? France 🇫🇷 ?

    I don't fight fascism because I believe we will win. It's because they are fascist. And we know who has all the guns. Gezzah Potts How many human beings have now died as a result of the draconian sanctions unleashed on the Venezuelan people by this rogue terrorist state?
    I also wonder how the people of Detroit are faring considering 33.4% live below the poverty line, or in Cleveland where 35% live in poverty.
    And yet Trump brags of defending 'American liberty' (oxymoron) by spending $2.2 trillion dollars in maintaining the hegemony of this debauched Empire.
    Yet, in the land of the free (another oxymoron) vast swathes of people live in poverty – or live in their cars, or in the burgeoning tent cities.
    How's the water in Flint? Is it still undrinkable?
    As if any of the creatures in Washington care about any of this. Anything to maintain control over much of the Planet. Tim Jenkins And with the highest incarcerated prison population and highest record in private prison profits in California, most recent, it seems the solution to corporate 'societal' wealth is to have 50,000 homeless on the streets in L.A. , just 'hanging' around, the corner . . .

    wealth on tap.

    (datsa' rap trap 😉 ) 5 0 Reply Feb 16, 2020 9:24 AM Gezzah Potts Gezzah Potts Just watched John Pilger's searing documentary 'The Dirty War On The NHS' which included segments on the wondrously caring and compassionate US 'health system' in places like Chicago and such quaint notions as 'patient dumping' where, to further save costs, and make more billions $$$$ – patients are evicted from hospitals early and dumped at homeless shelters.
    My god, the barbarians are not just at the gate. They're already inside the building.
    These completely dehumanised psychopathic neoliberal ideologues who only care about money and profits.
    More and more for us and all you useless eaters can just fuck off and die.
    That's the mentality. It's so sick.
    No, that wasn't a pun. It is truly sick how warped society has become. Seamus Padraig

    Despite the turmoil Trump has experienced since 2016, it has been his karmic responsibility to grow from those challenges, to use each obstacle as a path to align with a higher vibration and become a more conscious person, fully aware of his global responsibility to humanity – that has not appeared to have happened.

    What appears to have happened is that Trump finally caved in to the Deep State, and that's why things are going better for him. I am starting to suspect we may see a war against Iran in Term II.

    Pelosi and the Dems have also created 'bad' karma with their own abuse of power; they too will reap the results of their own behavior.

    What they're gonna reap is more Trump after next November! Martin Usher There's more than an echo of McCartthism in this -- policies are championed to further the business and ideological interests of powerful individuals that don't necessarily reflect the priorities and interests of the country as a whole. People, often those who really should know better, then bandwaggon on those policies, not only to avoid being labeled unpatriotic but to also prove that they're just as or even more patriotic than the people originally promulgating them. We've seen this time and again, probably the most egregious recent example being the miasma of lies that were used to invade Iraq. Its a mindset that might appear to work but I believe that its ultimately a road to nowhere.

    I'm less concerned about the current emphasis on military spending than I would have been in the past because I sincerely doubt the ability of the US to carry through on these plans. The writing's been on the wall for some time and they can certainly spend the money but the chronic shortage of engineering talent, the systematic shortchanging of education and our steady erosion of manufacturing knowhow will limit our ability to turn political wishful thinking into reality. Sure, we'll still be able to produce boutique products, eye-wateringly expensive munitions that we can use to intimidate people who can't shoot back, but we're already in an era where serious cost overruns and performance deficiencies are the rule rather than the exception. This problem has been brewing for a generation or more and it will take a generation or more to fix it. Unfortunately our politicians are still living in the reflected glory of past empires, they seem to be unable to recognize that WW2 was 75 years ago, so I expect we'll stumble along business as usual alienating more and more people until all we have left are those we can buy with our increasingly useless dollars.

    [Feb 16, 2020] Looking at various indices like median household income and average wage, it seems as if living standards in Russia are substantially below western European levels and even slightly below central Europe

    Feb 16, 2020 | www.quora.com

    Likbez,

    Looking at various indices like median household income and average wage, it seems as if living standards in Russia are substantially below western European levels and even slightly below central Europe. (Estonia and Poland are consistently slightly higher, Hungary often a bit lower.) Compared to China, going by the same sources and others, Russian wages are roughly twice as high as China's

    That creates separatist movements within the country, including Islamist movements in Muslim-dominated regions.

    So their posture is strictly defensive, and probably is not much more than a mild defensive reaction to "Full-spectrum Dominance" doctrine and the aggressive foreign policy conducted by the USA neocons (which totally dominate NSC and the State Department, as we saw from Ukrainegate testimonies)

    The USA coup d'état in Ukraine actually have a blowback for the USA -- it neutralized influence and political status of Russia neoliberal fifth column (neoliberal compradors), and if not Putin (who is paradoxically a pro-Western neoliberal; although of "national neoliberalism" flavor similar to Trumpism ) some of them probably would be now hanging from the lamp posts. They are really hated by population after hardships, comparable with WWII hardships, imposed on ordinary Russian during Western-enforced neoliberalization under marionette Yeltsin government and attempt to grab Russian resources for pennies on a dollar. "Marshall plan" for Russia instead of economic rape would be a much better policy.

    I think Obama-Nuland plot to turn Ukraine into the USA vassal state was yet another very dangerous move, which hurts the USA national security and greatly increased chances of military confrontation with Russia (aka mutual annihilation)

    It was worse then a crime, it was a blunder. And now the USA needs to support this vassal with money we do not have.

    The role of NSC in militarizing the USA foreign policy is such that it neutralizes any impulses of any US administration (if we assume they exist) to improve relations with Russia.

    Neoliberal Dems now is a second war party which bet on neo-McCarthyism to weaken Trump. They went into the complete status of psychosis in this area. I view it as a psychotic reaction to the first signs of the collapse of the USA-centered global neoliberal empire (which will happen anyway independently of Russian moves)

    That's actually a very dangerous situation indeed, and I am really afraid that the person who will replace Putin will not have Putin steel nerves, diplomatic talent, and the affinity with the West. Then what ? another Sarajevo and another war?

    With warmongering "raptured" crazies like Mike, "we killed up to 200 Russians" Pompeo, the situation can really become explosive like before WWI. Again, after Putin leaves the political scene, the Sarajevo incident is easy to stage, especially with such incompetent marionette of the military-industrial complex like Trump at the helm.

    I believe antagonizing Russia was a reckless, very damaging to the USA interest move, the move initiated by Clinton administration and supported by all subsequent administration as weakening and possibly dismembering Russia is one of the key aspect of Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine. . And we will pay a huge price for this policy.

    See also Professor Stephen Cohen books on the subject.

    Barkley Rosser February 16, 2020 9:19 pm

    JimH,

    Why do you pose this as antagonizing either Russsia or Iran? They are somewhat allied, so in fact antagonizing Iran as we are doing also antagonizes Russia.

    Likbez,

    The relative economic position of Russia in terms of median income is no different today than it was 30 years ago before Yeltsin, except for the rise of China. It was behind the European nations to its west, both those that were under its domination and those that were not, and it still is. So no big deal.

    And somehow you have this fantasy that if it were not for Obama-Nuland, Ukrainians would just loooove to be under Russian domination. f you think this, you ser both foolish and very ignorant.

    likbez February 16, 2020 10:30 pm

    And somehow you have this fantasy that if it were not for Obama-Nuland, Ukrainians would just loooove to be under Russian domination. f you think this, you ser both foolish and very ignorant.

    I might well be foolish and ignorant (I am far from being the specialist in the region), but I suspect Ukrainians do prefer the exchange rate ~8.5 hrivnas to a dollar (before the coup) to the current 25 hrivnas to a dollar.

    Especially taking into account stagnant salaries and actual parity of prices in dollars for many types of food (especially meat), industrial products, and services between the USA and Ukraine.

    I recently talked with one Ukrainian woman who told me that the "bribe" (unofficial payments due to low salaries for doctors and nurses in state clinics) for the child delivery was $1000 in Kiev in 2014 and she gave birth exactly at the time when hrivna jumped from 8.5 to over 20 per dollar. That was a tragedy for her and her family.

    And please remember that the average SS pension in Ukraine is around 1500 hrivna a month (~ $60). So to me, it is completely unclear how pensioners can survive at all while the government is buying super expensive American weapons "to defend the country from Russian aggression."

    I would strongly recommend you to read the recent Consortium news story https://consortiumnews.com/2020/02/14/understanding-the-ukraine-story/

    [Feb 16, 2020] Imperialism and Liberation in the Middle East Feb 14, 2020 Written by P l Steigan, translated by Terje Maloy

    Notable quotes:
    "... Imperialism – the highest stage of capitalism ..."
    "... Without the natives' consent and without the neighbouring countries approval, Moroccans, Somalis, and later Afghans and Syrians, found home in the EU thanks to madame Merkel. ..."
    "... How ligitimate is that? ..."
    Feb 16, 2020 | off-guardian.org

    At the moment, the United States has great difficulty in retaining its hegemony in the Middle East. Its troops have been declared unwanted in Iraq; and in Syria, the US and their foreign legion of terrorists lose terrain and positions every month. The US has responded to this with a significant escalation, by deploying more troops and by constant threats against Iran. At the same time, we have seen strong protest movements in Lebanon, Iraq and Iran.

    When millions of Iraqi took to the streets recently, their main slogan was "THE UNITED STATES OUT OF THE MIDDLE EAST!"

    How should one analyze this?

    Obviously, there are a lot of social tensions in the Middle East – class based, ethnic, religious and cultural. The region is a patchwork of conflicts and tensions that not only goes back hundreds of years, but even a few thousand.

    There are always many reasons to rebel against a corrupt upper class, anywhere in the world. But no rebellion can succeed if it is not based on a realistic and thorough analysis of the specific conditions in the individual country and region.

    Just as in Africa, the borders in the Middle East are arbitrarily drawn. They are the product of the manipulations of imperialist powers, and only to a lesser extent products of what the peoples themselves have wanted.

    During the era of decolonization, there was a strong, secular pan-Arab movement that wanted to create a unified Arab world. This movement was influenced by the nationalist and socialist ideas that had strong popular support at the time.

    King Abdallah I of Jordan envisaged a kingdom that would consist of Jordan, Palestine and Syria. Egypt and Syria briefly established a union called the United Arab Republic . Gaddafi wanted to unite Libya, Syria and Egypt in a federation of Arab republics .

    In 1958, a quickly dissolved confederation was established between Jordan and Iraq, called the Arab Federation . All these efforts were transient. What remains is the Arab League, which is, after all, not a state federation and not an alliance. And then of course we have the demand for a Kurdish state, or something similar consisting of one or more Kurdish mini-states.

    Still, the most divisive product of the First World War was the establishment of the state of Israel on Palestinian soil. During the First World War, Britain's Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour issued what became known as the Balfour Declaration , which " view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people."

    But what is the basis for all these attempts at creating states? What are the prerequisites for success or failure?

    The imperialist powers divide the world according to the power relations between them

    Lenin gave the best and most durable explanation for this, in his essay Imperialism – the highest stage of capitalism . There, he explained five basic features of the era of imperialism:

    The concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; The merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this "finance capital", of a financial oligarchy; The export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; The formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves; The territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed.

    But Lenin also pointed out that capitalist countries are developing unevenly, not least because of the uneven development of productive forces in the various capitalist countries.

    After a while, there arises a discrepancy between how the world is divided and the relative strength of the imperialist powers. This disparity will eventually force through a redistribution, a new division of the world based on the new relationship of strength. And, as Lenin states :

    The question is: what means other than war could there be under capitalism to overcome the disparity between the development of productive forces and the accumulation of capital on the one side, and the division of colonies and spheres of influence for finance capital on the other?"

    The two world wars were wars that arose because of unevenness in the power relationships between the imperialist powers. The British Empire was past its heyday and British capitalism lagged behind in the competition. The United States and Germany were the great powers that had the largest industrial and technological growth, and eventually this misalignment exploded. Not once, but twice.

    Versailles and Yalta

    The victors of the First World War divided the world between themselves at the expense of the losers. The main losers were Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia (the Soviet Union) and the Ottoman Empire. This division was drawn up in the Versailles treaty and the following minor treaties.

    Europe after the Versailles Treaties (Wikipedia)

    This map shows how the Ottoman Empire was partitioned:

    At the end of World War II, the victorious superpowers met in the city of Yalta on the Crimean peninsula in the Soviet Union. Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin made an agreement on how Europe should be divided following Germany's imminent defeat. This map shows how it was envisaged and the two blocs that emerged and became the foundation for the Cold War.

    Note that Yugoslavia, created after Versailles in 1919, was maintained and consolidated as "a country between the blocs". So it is a country that carries in itself the heritage of both the Versailles- and Yalta agreements.

    The fateful change of era when the Soviet Union fell

    In the era of imperialism, there has always been a struggle between various great powers. The battle has been about markets, access to cheap labor, raw materials, energy, transport routes and military control. And the imperialist countries divide the world between themselves according to their strength. But the imperialist powers are developing unevenly.

    If a power collapses or loses control over some areas, rivals will compete to fill the void. Imperialism follows the principle that Aristotle in his Physics called horror vacui – the fear of empty space.

    And that was what happened when the Soviet Union lost the Cold War. In 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and soon the Eastern bloc was also history. And thus the balance was broken, the one that had maintained the old order. And now a huge area was available for re-division. The weakened Russia barely managed to preserve its own territory, and not at all the area that just before was controlled by the Soviet Union.

    Never has a so large area been open for redivision. It was the result of two horrible world wars that anew was up for grabs. It could not but lead to war." Pål Steigan, 1999

    "Never has a so large area been open for re-division. It was the result of two horrible world wars that anew was up for grabs. It could not but lead to war." Map: Countries either part of the Soviet Union, Eastern Bloc or non-aligned (Yugoslavia)

    When the Soviet Union disintegrated, both the Yalta and Versailles agreements in reality collapsed, and opened up the way for a fierce race to control this geopolitical empty space.

    This laid the foundation for the American Geostrategy for Eurasia , which concentrated on securing control over the vast Eurasian continent. It is this struggle for redistribution in favor of the United States that has been the basis for most wars since 1990: Somalia, the Iraq wars, the Balkan wars, Libya, Ukraine, and Syria.

    The United States has been aggressively spearheading this, and the process to expand NATO eastward and create regime changes in the form of so-called "color revolutions" has been part of this struggle. The coup in Kiev, the transformation of Ukraine into an American colony with Nazi elements, and the war in Donbass are also part of this picture. This war will not stop until Russia is conquered and dismembered, or Russia has put an end to the US offensive.

    So, to recapitulate: Because the world is already divided between imperialist powers and there are no new colonies to conquer, the great powers can only fight for redistribution. What creates the basis and possibilities for a new division is the uneven development of capitalism. The forces that are developing faster economically and technologically will demand bigger markets, more raw materials, more strategic control.

    The results of two terrible wars are again up for grabs

    World War I caused perhaps 20 million deaths , as well as at least as many wounded. World War II caused around 72 million deaths . These are approximate numbers, and there is still controversy around the exact figures, but we are talking about this order of magnitude.

    The two world wars that ended with the Versailles and Yalta treaties thus caused just below 100 million dead, as well as an incredible number of other suffering and losses.

    Since 1991, a low-intensity "world war" has been fought, especially by the US, to conquer "the void". Donald Trump recently stated that the United States have waged wars based on lies, which have cost $ 8 trillion ($ 8,000 billion) and millions of people's lives. So the United States' new distribution of the spoils has not happened peacefully.

    "The Rebellion against Sykes-Picot"

    In the debate around the situation in the Middle East, certain people that would like to appear leftist, radical and anti-imperialist say that it is time to rebel against the artificial boundaries drawn by the Sykes-Picot and Versailles treaties. And certainly these borders are artificial and imperialist. But how leftist and anti-imperialist is it to fight for these boundaries to be revised now?

    In reality, it is the United States and Israel that are fighting for a redistribution of the Middle East. This is the basis underlying Donald Trump's "Deal of the Century", which aims to bury Palestine forever, and it is stated outright in the new US strategy for partitioning Iraq.

    Again, this is just an updated version of the Zionist Yinon plan that aimed to cantonize the entire Middle East, with the aim that Israel should have no real opponents and would be able to dominate the entire region and possibly create a Greater Israel.

    It is not the anti-imperialists that are leading the way to overhaul the imperialist borders from 1919. It is the imperialists. To achieve this, they can often exploit movements that are initially popular or national, but which then only become tools and proxies in a greater game.

    This has happened so many times in history that it can hardly be counted.

    Hitler's Germany exploited Croatian nationalism by using the Ustaša gangs as proxies. From 1929 to 1945, they killed hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Roma people. And their ideological and political descendants carried out an extremely brutal ethnic cleansing of the Krajina area and forced out more than 200,000 Serbs in their so-called Operation Storm in 1995.

    Hitler also used the extreme Ukrainian nationalists of Stepan Bandera's OUN, and after Bandera's death, the CIA continued to use them as a fifth column against the Soviet Union.

    The US low-intensity war against Iraq, from the Gulf War in 1991 to the Iraq War in 2003, helped divide the country into enclaves. Iraqi Kurdistan achieved autonomy in the oil-rich north with the help of a US "no-fly zone". The United States thus created a quasi-state that was their tool in Iraq.

    Undoubtedly, the Kurds in Iraq had been oppressed under Saddam Hussein. But also undoubtedly, their Iraqi "Kurdistan" became a client state under the thumb of United States. And there is also no doubt that the no-fly zones were illegal, as UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali admitted in a conversation with John Pilger .

    And now the United States is still using the Kurds in Northern Iraq in its plan to divide Iraq into three parts. To that end, they are building the world's largest consulate in Erbil. What they are planning to do, is simply "creating a country".

    As is well known, the United States also uses the Kurds in Syria as a pretext to keep 27 percent of the country occupied. It does not help how much the Kurdish militias SDF and PYD invoke democracy, feminism and communalism; they have ended up pleading for the United States to maintain the occupation of Northeast Syria.

    Preparations for a New World War

    Israel and the US are preparing for war against Iran. In this fight, they will develop as much "progressive" rhetoric as is required to fool people. Real dissatisfaction in the area, which there is every reason to have, will be magnified and blown out of all proportion. "Social movements" will be equipped with the latest news in the Israeli and US "riot kits" and receive training and logistics support, in addition to plenty of cold hard cash.

    There may be good reasons to revise the 1919 borders, but in today's situation, such a move will quickly trigger a major war. Some say that the Kurds are entitled to their own state, and maybe so. The question is ultimately decided by everyone else, except the Kurds themselves.

    The problem is that in today's geopolitical situation, creating a unified Kurdistan will require that "one" defeats Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. It's hard to see how that can happen without their allies, not least Russia and China, being drawn into the conflict.

    And then we have a new world war on our hands. And in that case, we are not talking about 100 million killed, but maybe ten times as much, or the collapse of civilization as we know it. The Kurdish question is not worth that much.

    This does not mean that one should not fight against oppression and injustice, be it social and national. One certainly should. But you have to realize that revising the map of the Middle East is a very dangerous plan and that you run the risk of ending up in very dangerous company. The alternative to this is to support a political struggle that undermines the hegemony of the United States and Israel and thereby creates better conditions for future struggles.

    It is nothing new that small nations rely on geopolitical situations to achieve some form of national independence. This was the case, for example, for my home country Norway. It was France's defeat in the Napoleonic War that caused Denmark to lose the province of Norway to Sweden in 1814, but at the same time it created space for a separate Norwegian constitution and internal self rule.

    All honor to the Norwegian founding fathers of 1814, but this was decided on the battlefields in Europe. And again, it was Russia's defeat in the Russo-Japanese War that laid the geopolitical foundation for the dissolution of the forced union with Sweden almost a hundred years later, in 1905. (This is very schematically presented and there are many more details, but there is no doubt that Russia's loss of most of its fleet in the Far East had created a power vacuum in the west, which was exploitable.)

    Therefore, the best thing to do now is not to support the fragmentation of states, but to support a united front to drive the United States out of the Middle East. The Million Man March in Baghdad got the ball rolling. There is every reason to build up even more strength behind it. Only when the United States is out, will the peoples and countries in the region be able to arrive at peaceful agreements between themselves, which will enable a better future to be developed.

    And in this context, it is an advantage that China develops the "Silk Road" (aka Belt and Road Initiative), not because China is any nobler than other major powers, but because this project, at least in the current situation, is non-sectarian, non-exclusive and genuinely multilateral. The alternative to a monopolistic rule by the United States, with a world police under Washington's control, is a multipolar world. It grows as we speak.

    The days of the Empire are numbered. What this will look like in 20 or 50 years, remains to be seen.

    This article is Creative Commons 4.0. Pål Steigan is a Norwegian veteran journalist and activist, presently editor of the independent news site Steigan.no . Translated by Terje Maloy. Facebook Twitter Reddit Pinterest WhatsApp vKontakte Email Filed under: 20th Century , historical perspectives , latest Tagged with: Croatia , Egypt , historical perspectives , imperialism , Israel , Jordan , Lenin , Middle East , Pal Steigan , Palestine , russia , Saudi Arabia , Stepan Bandera , Terje Maloy , ukraine , WWII can you spare $1.00 a month to support independent media

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    George Mc ,

    Off topic – but there's nowhere else to put this at the moment:

    https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/feb/16/fran-unsworth-bbc-election-coverge-licence-fee

    The BBC was taken aback by leftwing attacks on its general election coverage

    No idea what they are talking about. They patiently explained that Corbyn was Hitler. What more could they do?

    Dungroanin ,

    Ok roll up the sleeves, time to concentrate. I've had enough of being baited as a judae- phobe.

    The 'Balfour Declaration' – he didn't write it and it was a contract published in the newspapers within hours of it being inveigled.

    Ready?

    'Balfour and Lloyd George would have been happy with an unvarnished endorsement of Zionism. The text that the foreign secretary agreed in August was largely written by Weizmann and his colleagues:

    "His Majesty's Government accept the principle that Palestine should be reconstituted as the national home of the Jewish people and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object and will be ready to consider any suggestions on the subject which the Zionist Organisation may desire to lay before them."

    Got that – AUGUST?

    Dungroanin ,


    The leading figure in that drama was a charismatic chemistry professor from Manchester, Chaim Weizmann – with his domed head, goatee beard and fierce intellect. Weizmann had gained an entrée into political circles thanks to CP Scott, the illustrious editor of the Manchester Guardian, and had then sold his Zionist project to government leaders, including David Lloyd George when he was chancellor of the exchequer.

    Dungroanin ,

    Author(s)
    Walter Rothschild, Arthur Balfour, Leo Amery, Lord Milner

    Signatories
    Arthur James Balfour

    Recipient
    Walter Rothschild

    Dungroanin ,

    'In due course the blunt phrase about Palestine being "reconstituted as the national home of the Jewish people" was toned down into "the establishment of a home for the Jewish people in Palestine" – a more ambiguous formulation which sidestepped for the moment the idea of a Jewish state. '

    Dungroanin ,

    'Edwin Montagu, newly appointed as secretary of state for India, was only the third practising Jew to hold cabinet office. Whereas his cousin, Herbert Samuel (who in 1920 would become the first high commissioner of Palestine) was a keen supporter of Zionism, Montagu was an "assimilationist" – one who believed that being Jewish was a matter of religion not ethnicity. His position was summed up in the cabinet minutes:

    Mr Montagu urged strong objections to any declaration in which it was stated that Palestine was the "national home" of the Jewish people. He regarded the Jews as a religious community and himself as a Jewish Englishman '

    Dungroanin ,

    'Montagu considered the proposed Declaration a blatantly anti-Semitic document and claimed that "most English-born Jews were opposed to Zionism", which he said was being pushed mainly by "foreign-born Jews" such as Weizmann, who was born in what is now Belarus.'

    Dungroanin ,

    The other critic of the proposed Declaration was Lord Curzon, a former viceroy of India, who therefore viewed Palestine within the geopolitics of Asia. A grandee who traced his lineage back to the Norman Conquest, Curzon loftily informed colleagues that the Promised Land was not exactly flowing with milk and honey, but nor was it an empty, uninhabited space.

    According to the cabinet minutes, "Lord Curzon urged strong objections upon practical grounds. He stated, from his recollection of Palestine, that the country was, for the most part, barren and desolate a less propitious seat for the future Jewish race could not be imagined."

    And, he asked, "how was it proposed to get rid of the existing majority of Mussulman [Muslim] inhabitants and to introduce the Jews in their place?"

    Dungroanin ,

    Sorry for the length of this bit – but it only makes sense in the whole:

    'Between them, Curzon and Montagu had temporarily slowed the Zionist bandwagon. Lord Milner, another member of the war cabinet, hastily added two conditions to the proposed draft, in order to address the two men's respective concerns. The vague phrase about the rights of the "existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine" hints at how little the government knew or cared about those who constituted roughly 90 per cent of the population of what they, too, regarded as their homeland.

    After trying out the new version on a few eminent Jews, both of Zionist and accommodationist persuasions, and also securing a firm endorsement from America's President Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George and Balfour took the issue back to the war cabinet on 31 October. By now the strident Montagu had left for India, and on this occasion Balfour, who could often be moody and detached, led from the front, brushing aside the objections that had been raised and reasserting the propaganda imperative. According to the cabinet minutes, he stated firmly: "The vast majority of Jews in Russia and America, as, indeed, all over the world, now appeared to be favourable to Zionism. If we could make a declaration favourable to such an ideal, we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and America."

    This was standard cabinet tactics: a strong lead from a minister supported by the PM, daring his colleagues to argue back. And this time Curzon did not, though he did make another telling comment. He "attached great importance to the necessity of retaining the Christian and Moslem Holy Places in Jerusalem and Bethlehem". If this were done, Curzon added, he "did not see how the Jewish people could have a political capital in Palestine".'

    Dungroanin ,

    Dates again crucial and the smoking gun:

    'securing a firm endorsement from America's President Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George and Balfour took the issue back to the war cabinet on 31 October.'

    Dungroanin ,

    The two conditions had bought off the two main critics. That was all that seemed to matter, even though the reference to the "rights of the existing non-Jewish communities" stood in potential conflict with the first two clauses about the British supporting and using their "best endeavours" for the "establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people".

    Dungroanin ,

    There is MORE but I'll pause and see how many are really interested in FACTS, as opposed to invented History, Economics and Capital instead of the only real human motivations of the ages – Money and Power.

    George Mc ,

    the only real human motivations of the ages – Money and Power.

    If this is true then we are all doomed.

    Dungroanin ,

    Not if we are aware of it George.

    Dungroanin ,

    Ok a summary fom Brittanica:

    'Balfour Declaration Quick Facts

    The Balfour Declaration, issued through the continued efforts of Chaim Weizmann and Nahum Sokolow, Zionist leaders in London, fell short of the expectations of the Zionists, who had asked for the reconstitution of Palestine as "the" Jewish national home. The declaration specifically stipulated that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine." The document, however, said nothing of the political or national rights of these communities and did not refer to them by name. Nevertheless, the declaration aroused enthusiastic hopes among Zionists and seemed the fulfillment of the aims of the World Zionist Organization (see Zionism).

    The British government hoped that the declaration would rally Jewish opinion, especially in the United States, to the side of the Allied powers against the Central Powers during World War I (1914–18). They hoped also that the settlement in Palestine of a pro-British Jewish population might help to protect the approaches to the Suez Canal in neighbouring Egypt and thus ensure a vital communication route to British colonial possessions in India.

    The Balfour Declaration was endorsed by the principal Allied powers and was included in the British mandate over Palestine, formally approved by the newly created League of Nations on July 24, 1922.

    In May 1939 the British government altered its policy in a White Paper recommending a limit of 75,000 further immigrants and an end to immigration by 1944, unless the resident Palestinian Arabs of the region consented to further immigration.

    Zionists condemned the new policy, accusing Britain of favouring the Arabs. This point was made moot by the outbreak of World War II (1939–45) and the founding of the State of Israel in 1948.'

    Dungroanin ,

    But what about the timing?

    Well there are twin tracks, here is the first.

    'But talking about the return of the Jews to the land of Israel was only meaningful because that land seemed up for grabs after the Ottoman Empire sided with Germany in 1914. For Britain, France and Russia – though primarily focused on Europe – war against a declining power long dubbed the "Sick Man of Europe" opened up the prospect of vast gains in the Levant and the Middle East.

    The Ottoman army, however, proved no walkover. In 1915 it threatened the Suez Canal, Britain's imperial artery to India, and then repulsed landings by British empire and French forces on the Dardanelles at Gallipoli. Although Baghdad fell in March 1917, two British assaults on Gaza that spring were humiliatingly driven back, with heavy losses. Deadlock in the desert added to Whitehall's list of woes.

    In this prescribed narrative of remembrance for 1914-18, what happened outside the Western Front has been almost entirely obscured. The British army's "Historical Lessons, Warfare Branch" has published in-house a fascinating volume of essays about what it tellingly entitles "The Forgotten Fronts of the First World War" – with superb maps and illustrations. The collection covers not only Palestine and Mesopotamia (roughly modern-day Iraq and Kuwait), but also Italy, Africa, Russia, Turkey and the Pacific – indeed much of the world – but sadly it is not currently available to the public. '

    Dungroanin ,

    The second track is the 'money' track and what everything is about and why we live in such a miasma of blatant lies.

    IT can only make sense by asking questions such as :

    Can we follow the money?

    When was the Fed set up? Why? By whom?
    How much money did it lend &
    to whom?

    When was the first world war started?

    When did US declare war?

    When did US troops arrive in numbers to enter that war?

    What happened in Russia at the same time?

    And in Mesopotamia?

    How did it end?

    How did it fail to end?

    What happened to the contract?

    Etc.

    I have attempted to research and answer some of these already above.

    Next I will attempt to walk the other track but be warned that opens more ancient tracks.

    Dungroanin ,

    'On 2 November, Balfour sent his letter to Lord Rothschild.

    7 November, Lenin and the Bolsheviks had seized power in Petrograd. ransacked the Tsarist archives, they published juicy extracts from the "secret treaties" that the Allied powers had made among themselves in 1915-16 to divide the spoils of victory.
    The same day the Ottoman Seventh and Eighth Armies evacuated the town of Gaza

    9 November Letter published in Times.

    Mid November – The Bolsheviks did not discover that the British were also playing footsie with the Turks. In the middle of November 1917, secret meetings took place with Ottoman dissidents in Greece and Switzerland about trying to arrange an armistice in the Near East. The war cabinet recognised that, as bait, it might have to let the Ottomans keep parts of their empire in the region, or at least retain some appearance of control. When Curzon got wind of this, he was incensed: "Almost in the same week that we have pledged ourselves, if successful, to secure Palestine as a national home for the Jewish people, are we to contemplate leaving the Turkish flag flying over Jerusalem?"

    End November. The Manchester Guardian's correspondent in Petrograd, Morgan Philips Price, was able to examine the key documents overnight, and his scoop was published by the paper at the end of November. It revealed to the world, among other things, that the British also had an understanding with the French – the Sykes-Picot agreement of January 1916 – to carve up the Near East between them once the Ottoman empire had been defeated. In this, Palestine was slated for some kind of international condominium – not the British protectorate envisaged in the Balfour Declaration.

    11 December Allenby formally entered Jerusalem. '

    So just a few loose ends left to tie up anyone actually want to go there?

    George Mc ,

    No.

    Dungroanin ,

    🤣

    Dungroanin ,

    Ok on the back stretch:

    https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/feds_formative_years

    The paramount goal of the Fed's founders was to eliminate banking panics, but it was not the only goal. The founders also sought to increase the amount of international trade financed by US banks and to expand the use of the dollar internationally. By 1913 the United States had the world's largest economy, but only a small fraction of US exports and imports were financed by American banks. Instead, most exports and imports were financed by bankers' acceptances drawn on European banks in foreign currencies. (Bankers' acceptances are a type of financial contract used for making payments in the future, for example, upon delivery of goods or services. Bankers' acceptances are drawn on and guaranteed, i.e., "accepted," by a bank.) The Federal Reserve Act allowed national banks to issue bankers' acceptances and open foreign branches, which greatly expanded their ability to finance international transactions Further the Act authorized the Reserve Banks to purchase acceptances in the open market to ensure a liquid market for them, thereby spurring growth of that market.

    President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act on December 23, 1913.

    The task of determining the specific number of districts, district boundaries, and which cities would have Reserve Banks was assigned to a Reserve Bank Organization Committee.

    On April 2, 1914, the Committee announced that twelve Federal Reserve districts would be formed, identified the boundaries of those districts, and named the cities that would have Reserve Banks.1 The Banks were quickly organized, officers and staff were hired, and boards of directors appointed. The Banks opened for business on November 16, 1914.
    ..

    The Federal Reserve Act addressed perceived shortcomings by creating a new national currency -- Federal Reserve notes -- and requiring members of the Federal Reserve System to hold reserve balances with their local Federal Reserve Banks.

    World War I began in Europe in August 1914, before the Federal Reserve Banks had opened for business. The war had a profound impact on the US banking system and economy, as well as on the Federal Reserve.

    War disrupted European financial markets and reduced the supply of trade credit offered by European banks, providing US banks with an opening. Low US interest rates, abundant reserves, and new authority to issue trade acceptances enabled American banks to finance a growing share of world trade.

    Dungroanin ,

    So the denouement :

    It appears that the 'first world war' was designed to diminish European banks and boost the US banks.

    However the fuller history of the US bankers is worth knowing- the Jekyll Islanders story is widely publicised.

    Into this time track enters the Balfour Declaration addressed to Lord Rothschild, steered by Milner (heir to Rhodes empire building and the old EIC), approved by the potus Wilson (another hireling) that finally sent US troops to overwhelm the Germans, while the great gamers took out the Romanovs and the Ottoman Empire.
    -- --

    When we try to understand such facts and timelines and are attacked as Judaeo-phobes, because we identify Bankers and Robber Barons, it becomes even clearer how deep and wide they have controlled history and it has NOTHING to do with RELIGION (except perhaps Ludism). Nothing to do with Judaism (except perhaps Old Jewry in the City, but Lombard Street was most powerful!) and EVERYTHING to do with POWER and it's representation MONEY. The obscuring of that through various Economic theories including Marxism is the work of the same old bastards who are responsible for all our current malaises.

    Thankyou and good evening, if anyone made it this far!

    😉

    George Mc ,

    Well OK Dunnie, let's say I go along with you and assume that all the shit we are facing has nothing to do with religion or all that "Marxian porridge" (as Guido Giacomo Preparata called it). The question is: What do we do about it?

    Speaking of GGP , it seems to me that you and him have much in common. He also goes on about "Power" but seems to be on the verge of referring this "Power" to mystical entities in a disconcertingly Ickean manoeuvre. Not that I'm attibuting such a thing to yourself. (No irony intended.)

    Dungroanin ,

    George – i don't want you or anyone to just go along with me.

    I want everyone to make their minds up on FACTS. That is the only way humanity has actually progressed by inventing the only self correcting philosophical system and method of the ages that goes beyond 'personal responsibility teligions' – SCIENTIFIC METHOD – that takes away arbitrary power to rule, from these that inhabit the top of the human pyramid by virtue of being born there and having control over the money and so the power to remain in these positions, which does not benefit the totality of humanity or all life on Earth.

    I am not a messiah, I am angry as fuck and I am not going to sit around enjoying whatever soma has been handed to us to keep compliant and leave this Planet worse than I found it. That is the scientific conclusion I have reached.

    I suppose some proto buddhist / zoroastrianism / animalist / Shinto / Jain & Quakers seek religious truth in inner experience, and place great reliance on conscience as the basis of morality.

    I suppose Ghandi's non-violence rebellion against Imperialists is a model as are various peasants revolts – the Russian / Chinese / Korean / Vietnamese couldn't have survived without the literal grassroots!
    ..

    As for Guido Giacomo Preparata that you have introduced to me – i had nevet heard of him before this morning – my first take on him is that he seems to have arrived at similar conclusions by similar methodology. He seems to have a lot of formal education and a enviable career so far – i'll have to look into him further but the interview that i just read seems to indicate concurrence with what i said above. I see no Ickean references – please give a link.

    -- -

    As a observation do you not find it funny that there is not a single objection to the verity of the facts which I have presented above?

    Good luck George if you are a real seeker of truth. If not insta-karma awaits.

    George Mc ,

    The Preparata statement I was referring to is in this interview:

    https://www.larsschall.com/2012/06/10/the-business-as-usual-behind-the-slaughter/

    The statement itself is this:

    Power is a purely human suggestion. Suggested by whom? That is the question. The NSDAP thus appeared to have been a front for some kind of nebula of Austro-German magi, dark initiates, and troubling literati (Dietrich Eckhart comes to mind), with very plausible extra-Teutonic ramifications of which we know next to nothing. Hitler came to be inducted in a lodge of this network, endowed as he seemed with a supernatural gift of inflaming oratory.

    This is a theme that I am still studying, but from what I gathered, the adepts of the Thule Gesellschaft communed around the belief of being the blood heirs of a breed that seeks redemption / salvation / metempsychosis in some kind of eighth realm away from this earth, which is the shoddy creation of a lesser God -- the archangel of the Hebrews, Jehovah. It all sounds positively insane to post-modern ears, but it should be taken very seriously, I think.

    Admittedly it isn't quite interdimensional reptiles but there is a distinct metaphysical flavour there.

    I wouldn't go along with everything Preparata says but he is a wonderful writer and I have bought almost everything I can find by him. His "biggie" is "Conjuring Hitler". It was Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed that brought GGP to my attention via that book.

    milosevic ,

    images on this website look terrible, with very little colour. the problem seems to be caused by this rule, from the file "OffGstyle.css":

    .content-wrap-spp img {

    filter: sepia(20%) saturate(30%);

    }

    Open ,

    This sepia effect usually works well with Off-Guardian articles, but with these maps in today's article it is definitely terrible. Why have maps if they don't want to show them clearly?
    (any extra steps for the user to see the pictures clearly is not the answer)

    Another area neglected on this website is crediting photos. The majority of images carry no atribution/credit, despite it [crediting photos] is the best ethical practice even for public domain pictures. I wish Admin gets expert advice on this.

    Open ,

    Look at the language used by the americans:

    On feb. 12 [2020], Coalition forces, conducting a patrol near Qamishli, Syria , encountered a checkpoint occupied by pro-Syrian .. forces .

    So, the supremacist unites states' army has found that Syrian forces are occupying Syrian land .. wow wow wow .. according to this logic, Russian forces are occupying Russian land. Iranian forces are occupying Iranian land (how dare they?!). But american forces are not occupying any land, and Israel is not occupying Palestinian and Syrian lands.

    This language needs to be known more widely.

    Open ,

    The americans always use the term 'Coalition forces' when they talk about their illegal presence in Syria. I tried to search online for what countries are in this coalition. I recall I was able to find that in the past, but now, it seems this information is being pushed under wrap.

    What are they afraid of? What are they hiding?

    Joe ,

    Just bring about the end of "Israel" and there'll be peace in the Middle East, and probably in the wider world, too.

    Open ,

    Ending the Israeli project is certainly a step in the right direction to improve global stability. However, alone, it will not bring about peace because the British/Five-Eyes/Washington's doctrine of spreading disorder and chaos permeates (saturates) the planet.

    In fact, current disorders are the results of convergence of Israeli interests with those of Western White Supremacy's* resolve to dominate, erh, eveything.

    * Western White Supremacy can also be called Western White Idiocy and Bigotry.

    Israel manipulates the West's political and military might. The West also uses Israel to spread Chaos and Disorder.

    Antonym ,

    Right, back to the good old peace of the graveyard inspired by Mohamed's male sex riot ideology and plunder legitimization before the Westerners showed up with their superior (arms) tech legitimization for their plunder.
    Before Israel's 1947 creation the world was a bed of roses .

    Open ,

    "srael's 1947 creation"

    Without the natives' consent and without the neighbouring countries approval, Ukranians and Germans, and later South Americans, found home in the Middle East.

    How ligitimate is that?

    Antonym ,

    Without the natives' consent and without the neighbouring countries approval, Moroccans, Somalis, and later Afghans and Syrians, found home in the EU thanks to madame Merkel.

    How ligitimate is that?

    Open ,

    "Moroccans, Somalis, and later Afghans and Syrians .. etc.."

    Do these comments reflect the Zionists' perspective? This is important because they prove that the whole existence of Israel is based on total fabrication and lies.

    Maggie ,

    Did you have to practice at being THAT stupid! Or did they lobotomise you in Langley?
    Somalis, Afghans, Syrians would not have had any cause to leave their homeland had it not been for your employers the CIA/MOSSAD facilitating the raping and pillaging of their homes by the Oil Magnates, leaving them starving and desolate.
    https://www.hiiraan.com/op2/2007/may/somalia_the_other_hidden_war_for_oil.aspx
    and where does our Aid money go?

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/5OInaYenHkU?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent
    But of course Antonym, if you were in their situation, you would just stick it out?
    Shame on you .

    To those who care, read "The confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins" to understand how this corrupt system is conducted.

    Richard Le Sarc ,

    Its 'creation' in blood, murder, rape and terror, in a great ethnic cleansing-the sign of things to come, ceaselessly, for seventy years and ongoing.

    paul ,

    Ask the people in Gaza about the Zionist "peace of the graveyard."

    Antonym ,

    Gaza before 2005 was relatively peaceful + prosperous. After the Israeli withdrawal the inhabitants messed up their own economy but kept on making lots of babies just like before.
    Quite the opposite of a graveyard or a Warsaw ghetto or a Dachau.

    George Mc ,

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_Gaza

    Despite the disengagement, the United Nations, international human rights organisations and most legal scholars regard the Gaza Strip to still be under military occupation by Israel, though this is disputed by Israel and other legal scholars. Following the withdrawal, Israel has continued to maintain direct external control over Gaza and indirect control over life within Gaza: it controls Gaza's air and maritime space, and six of Gaza's seven land crossings, it maintains a no-go buffer zone within the territory, and controls the Palestinian population registry, and Gaza remains dependent on Israel for its water, electricity, telecommunications, and other utilities.

    Interesting definition of "withdrawal". It's amazing those Gazans even managed to have babies!

    Richard Le Sarc ,

    You would have made a grand Nazi, Antsie-cripes, you have!

    paul ,

    Gaza was, and is, a huge Zionist concentration camp hermetically sealed off from the outside world and blockaded just like the Warsaw Ghetto. With Zionist thugs and kiddie killers shooting hundreds of kids in the head for the fun of it with British sniper rifles and dum dum bullets, and periodically dropping 20,000 tons of bombs at a time on it, a higher explosive yield than Hiroshima. With parties of Jews going along to hold barbecues and picnics to watch all the fun. Nice people, those chosen folk.

    Richard Le Sarc ,

    I rather think that Epstein, Weinstein, Moonves and all those orthodox and ultra-orthodox who are such prolific patrons of the sex industry in Israel, know a bit about 'male sex riot ideology', Antsie.

    Dungroanin ,

    Pathetic.
    'Nandy won a major boost when members of the Labour affiliate Jewish Labour Movement gave her their backing after a hustings, saying she understood the need to change the party's culture.'
    From the Groaniad

    How many members? How many by denomination?

    As for the Balfour Contract there were actual English Jewish establishment figures against its premise. Actual imperial servants. The declaration was a stitch up by the new banking powers in the US which then sent in the yanks to stop the Germans in 1917.

    History is rewritten daily to memory hole such facts.

    Capricornia Man ,

    The 'Jewish Labour Movement' is so Jewish that most of its members are not Jewish. And it is so Labour-affiliated that it did not support Labour in the December general election. But it has no shortage of money. It exists solely to prosecute the interests of a foreign power. Much the same could be said for any politician who accepts its endorsement.

    Rhys Jaggar ,

    Given that Jews are vastly outnumbered by non Jews, the simplest way to stop Jewish manipulation of politics is to form a party from which Jews are specifically banned.

    You will not propose any policies harming Jews in any way, you will just make it clear that this is a party free from any Jewish influence in its constitution.

    If Jews cannot accept that, then they are utterly racist and must be dealt with without sensibility.

    Maggie ,

    A better solution Rhys would be to form a party that denies all and any dual citizens
    That way all the Zionists would be barred.

    Richard Le Sarc ,

    Full public financing of political parties would end Zionist control.

    paul ,

    Thornberry has just thrown in the towel.
    She will now have more time to "get down on her hands and knees" and "beg forgiveness" from the Board of Deputies.
    Those good little Shabbos are so easily trained.

    Dungroanin ,

    BoD's??? Another random organisation!

    Who are they? Who do they represent? How many people? Which people? How did they get elected? How can they be fired?

    Richard Le Sarc ,

    The next world war has already started, with the bio-warfare atttack on China aka Covid19.

    lundiel ,

    Why no comment on the government reshuffle? I don't agree with the Indian middle-class uplifting but totally agree with neutering the ultra-conservative treasury.

    Maggie ,

    I think it's a case of who gives a fck. We now know that our elections are rigged, and so there is no point in us being involved. My family and I all realised and voted for the last time.
    They are all bloody crap actors reading their scripts and playing their parts, whilst the never changing suits in the background pull the strings.
    I had to explain to my 10 year old Grandson how politics work, and he said "Why doesn't anyone know the names of, or see the suits?"
    What I want to know is why no-one ever asks this question or demands an answer?

    tonyopmoc ,

    Completely Brilliant Article, but it is Valentines Day, so as I am 66 years old, and in love with my wife (nearly 40 years together = LOVE), I wrote this in response to Craig Murray, who has banned me again.

    It may be off topic for him, but it ain't off topic for me. I am still in Love.

    "Churchill's mental deterioration from syphilis – which the Eton and Oxford ."

    Never had it, and she didn't either. We were young and in love, but we didn't know, if either of us had sex before, but I had a spotty dick, and went to the VD clinic. I had a blood test, and they gave me some zinc cream.

    She also had the same thing, and showed her Mum.

    We were both completely innocent, and had a sexually transmitted disease called Thrush. It is relatively harmless, but can also give you a sore throat.

    We both laughed at each other, and nearly got married.

    Natural Yoghurt, is completely brilliant at preventing it.

    Far better than Canestan.

    Happy Valentines Day, for Everyone still In Love.

    Let us all look forwad to a Brighter Day for our Grandchildren.

    Tony

    Loverat ,

    Hey Tony

    Dont worry. Craig Murray might not like you but I do. Your stories, here and elsewhere have entertained me for many years.

    Mind you, if I were your other half I would have chucked you years ago.

    paul ,

    Tell him how much you like haggis and tossing your caber.

    Dungroanin ,

    Without Stalins say so Poland would not have had its borders at the end of ww2.
    Also,
    On these maps just off the right hand edges is missing Afghanistan.. which the imperialists invaded in 2002 as the Taliban wiped out the opium crops. Back to full production immediately after invasion and 18 years later secret negotiations to hand over to Taliban while leaving 8,000 CUA troops delivering the huge cash crop.

    binra ,

    Seeking possession and control – in competition with those you see as seeking to dispossess and control or deny you – is the identity or belief in 'kill or be killed'.
    This belief overrides and subordinates others – such as to subsume all else to such private agenda that will seek alliance against common threat but only as a shifting strategy of possession and control.

    One of the things about this 'game' of power struggle, is that it loses any sense of WHY – and so it is a driven mind or dictate of power or possession for it own sake that cannot really ENJOY or HAVE and share what it Has. The image of the hungry ghost comes to mind here. It will never have enough until you are dead – and even then will offer you torment beyond the grave.

    Until this mindset is recognised and released as an 'insanity' it operates as accepted currency of exchange, and maps our a world of its own conflicting and conflicted meanings.

    The willingness to destroy or kill, deny or undermine and invalidate others in order to GET for a private agenda set over the whole instead of finding balance within the whole – is destructive to life, no matter how ingenious the thinking that frames it to seem to be progressive, protective, or in fact powerful.
    But in our collective alignment and allegiance with such a way of thinking and identifying – we all give power to the destructive – as if to protect the life that it gives us.

    The hungry ghost is also in the mass population when separated from their land and lives to seek connection or meaning in proffered 'products and services' instead of creating out of our own lives. Products and services that operate a hidden agenda of possession and control or market and mind capture under threat of fear of pain of loss in losing even the little that we have.

    Having – on a spiritual level is our being – and not a matter of stuffing a hole.
    Madness that can no longer mask as anything else is all about – and brings a choice to conscious awareness as to whether to persist in it or decide to find another way of seeing and being.

    This is not to say there is no place to call upon or seek to limit people in positions of trust from serving an unjust outcome by calling for transparency and accountability – but not to wait on that or make that the be all and end all.

    If there is another way and a better way than war masking in and misusing and thus corrupting anything and everything, then it has to be lived one to another.

    Everyone seeks a better experience – but many seek it in a negative framing. Negative in the sense of self-lack seeking power in the terms of its current identity. Evils work their own destruction, but find sustainability in selling destructive agenda or toxic debt as ingeniously complex instruments of deceit – by which the targeted buyer believes they have or shall save their 'self' or add to their 'self' rather than growing hollow to a driven mindset of reactive fear-addiction.

    I don't need to 'tell this to those who refuse to listen' – but I share it with any moment of a willingness to listen. In the final analysis, we are the ones who live the result of choices in our lives, whatever the times and conditions.

    The 'repackaging' of reality to self-deceit, is not new but part of the human mind and experience throughout history. The evil changes forms – as if the good has and shall triumph. But truth undoes illusion by being accepted. It doesn't war on illusion and thus make it real – and remain truth.

    Judgement divides to rule.
    Discernment arises from the unwillingness to division.
    One is set apart from and over life as the invocation of an alien will, dealing death, and the other as the will of true desire revealed.

    The idea of independent autonomy is relative to a limited sphere of responsibilities in the world.
    The idea of living our own life is an alignment within the same for others and the freedom to do so cannot take from others without becoming possessed by our denials, debts and transgressions – no less so in the driven mind of ingeniously repackaged and wilfully defended narrative identity.

    In our own experience, this is not a matter of applied analysis, so much as awareness or space in which to seek and find truth in some willingness of recognition and acceptance or choice, while the triggering or baiting to madness is loud or compelling as the dictate of fear seeking protection and grievance seeking retribution – as if these give freedom and power rather than locking into a fear-framed limitation as substitution for life set in defiance and refusal to look on or share in truth – and so to such a one, war is truth, and love is weakness to exploit, use and weaponise for getting.

    paul ,

    If you look at the proposed new map of the Middle East, it mirrors Kushner's Deal Of The Century for Palestine – because it has the same Zionist authorship.
    The same old dirty Zionist games of divide and rule – break up countries in the region into tiny defenceless little statelets setting different ethnic and religious groups at each others' throats, so that they can rule the roost and steal whatever they wish.
    You see this in the past and the recent past. The way Lebanon was torn away from Syria. Or Kuwait from Iraq. Or the Ruritanian petty Gulf dictatorships like Bahrain, Qatar, Dubai.
    Trump was being honest for the first time in his miserable life when he said none of these satellites and satraps would last a fortnight if they were not propped up by the US.

    paul ,

    George Galloway described the whole region as a flock of sheep surrounded by ravenous wolves.

    At the same time, there is more than a grain of truth in the Zionists' contention that the people of the region are to some extent the authors of their own misfortune.

    They always fall for the divide-and-rule games of outside powers, Britain, America, Israel, who invade, bomb, slaughter, humiliate and exploit them. If they had been united, Israel would not have been created. Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, would not have been destroyed and bombed back to the Stone Age. These countries would be genuinely independent and at peace.

    When I speak to ordinary moslems, it is surprising and depressing to see how much visceral hatred they express for Shia moslems. They seem blind to the way they are being manipulated to serve outside interests.

    So we see moslem Saudi Arabia trying to incite America and Israel to destroy Iran, and offering to pay for the whole cost of the war. Or S. Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, UAE et al, in bed with Israel, paying billions to bankroll the terrorist head choppers in Syria. Or Egypt, which does not even protest, let alone lift a finger, when Israeli aircraft use its air space to carpet bomb Gaza. Or going further back in history, when countries like Egypt and Syria sent troops to join the 1991 US invasion of Iraq. Even though Iraq had sent its forces to the Golan Heights in 1973 to fight and die to prevent Syria being overrun by Israel. How contemptible is all that? Yet those are just a few of many examples of all the backstabbing that has occurred over the years. If these people don't respect themselves, why should anybody else?

    paul ,

    And this has been going on for hundreds of years.
    1096 marked the beginning of The Crusades, a disaster for the region on a par with the creation of Israel.
    At that time, London was a little village of 25,000. Baghdad and Alexandria and Cordoba were sophisticated modern cities with populations of hundreds of thousands. They dismissed the Crusaders as mere bandits who would do some looting, steal some cattle, and go home. But 3 years later Jerusalem had been conquered and its inhabitants slaughtered, the start of a 200 year disaster for the region. How? Why?
    Because the Arabs were so busy fighting a civil war at the time they barely noticed the foreign invaders. The old, old story. Civil war between Sunnis and Shias.

    One day, they will wake up and realise that they have to hang together, or hang separately.
    But I wouldn't hold your breath.
    There seems to be an endless supply of quisling stooge dictators ready to do the bidding of hostile outside powers. The Mubaraks, the Sisis, the King Abdullahs, the Sinioras, the MBS's, to name but a few.
    Conforming to all the worst stereotypes about Arabs and moslems.
    You could argue that they deserve all they get, when they are ever ready to bend over and drop their trousers.
    Is it really any surprise that they have been invaded, slaughtered, bombed back to the Stone Age, robbed, exploited and humiliated from time immemorial.
    Maybe one day they will discover an ounce of dignity and self respect. Who knows?

    Maggie ,

    "1096 marked the beginning of The Crusades, a disaster for the region on a par with the creation of Israel.
    At that time, London was a little village of 25,000. Baghdad and Alexandria and Cordoba were sophisticated modern cities with populations of hundreds of thousands. They dismissed the Crusaders as mere bandits who would do some looting, steal some cattle, and go home. But 3 years later Jerusalem had been conquered and its inhabitants slaughtered, the start of a 200 year disaster for the region. How? Why?"
    Because despite the mendacious lies that are told about Muslims, they are tolerant and forgiving. They believe in one God, and live exemplary modest, generous lives in the belief that they will enter in to the kingdom of heaven.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/_2LEgowbzSc?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGz6nrWTsEI

    And these are the people we are being encouraged to hate and fear? To enable the neo cons to invade and destroy everything in their path to get their oil.

    Hundreds of millions of Muslims the world over 'live in democracies' of some shape or form, from Indonesia to Malaysia to Pakistan to Lebanon to Tunisia to Turkey. Tens of millions of Muslims' live in -- and participate in' -- Western democratic societies. The country that is on course to have the biggest Muslim population in the world in the next couple of decades is India, which also happens to be the world's biggest democracy. Yet a persistent pernicious narrative exists, particularly in the West, that Islam and democracy are incompatible. Islam is often associated with dictatorship, totalitarianism, and a lack of freedom, and many "well paid" analysts and pundits claim that Muslims are philosophically opposed to the idea of democracy .

    Richard Le Sarc ,

    'Democracy' as practised in the neo-liberal capitalist West, is a nullity, a fiction, a smoke-screen behind which the one and only power, that of the rich owners of the economy, acts alone.

    Gall ,

    I know. These Zionist morons droning on about how violent Islam is as religion yet ignoring the fact that the Bible is based on the God of Abraham granting them Canaan (like Trump giving the Israelis the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank) and urging them to commit complete and utter genocidal annihilation of the inhabitants by not leaving a single living thing breathing.

    No violence there folks. Nope. The book of love my ass!

    paul ,

    Their God was a demented estate agent, rather like Trump or Kushner.

    Gall ,

    Personally I believe that the chapters of the bible were written after their genocidal blood lust simply to justify their despicable acts. Claiming that God made 'em do it.

    Loverat ,

    My experience of muslims in the UK is many express support for the Palestinians but don't identify or understand those states which still speak up for their rights, Syria, Iran and a few others.

    Sadly like the general UK population they have been exposed to propaganda which excuses evil and mass murder carried out by Saudi Arabia and their lackeys and Israel. This is changing however. People are gradually waking up. Muslims and the general UK public if they really knew the extent of this would be out demonstrating on the streets.

    The realisation these policies have exposed all of us to nuclear wipe out in seconds should be enough motivation for any normal person.
    The wipe out or (preferably) demonstrations will happen. Just a question of when. You can see why the establishment and people like Higgins, Lucas and York are so active recently. These idiots, blinded by their pay checks can't see the harm they are causing through their irresponsible lies even to their own families. Perhaps they all have nuclear shelters in their back garden.

    Richard Le Sarc ,

    Saudi Arabia is NOT 'Moslem'. It is Wahhabist, a genocide cult created by doenmeh, ie crypto-Jewish followers of the failed 17th century Messiah, Sabbatai Zevi, which is homicidally opposed to all Moslems but fellow Wahhabists.

    milosevic ,

    I thought it was created by the British Empire, in order to provide reliable stooges and puppet regimes.

    Richard Le Sarc ,

    What people must realise is that,for the Zionassty secular and Talmudic religious leaderships, by far the dominant forces in Israel and among many of the Diaspora sayanim, the drive to create 'Eretz Yisrael', '..from the Nile to the Euphrates' (and some include the Arabian Peninsula as well), is a real, religious, ambition-indeed an obligation. With the alliance with the 'Christian Zionist' lunatics in the USA, the fate of humanity is in the hands of the Evil Brain Dead.

    BigB ,

    I despair. This is why there is 'No Deal For Nature' because the hegemonic cultural movement is to extend cultural hegemony over nature. We cannot seem to help it or stop ourselves. Do we suppose a glossy website will change that? Or empty sloganneering subvertisements? Or waiving placards outside banks? Or some other futile conscience salving symbolic gesture?

    No, we have to subvert the cultural hegemony over nature at every point at every chance. Which is thankless because cultural normativity is ubiquitous. And it's killing us. And BRI is the very antithesis of alternative an eternal return into the cultural consumerism and commodification that is the global hegemony at least at an elite level. And we are among that elite – in terms of consumption and pollution. We are the problem. If we seek to extend or preserve our own Eurocentric priviliges and consumptions we can only do so by extracting evermore global resources and maldeveloping the Rest. Which is also what Samir Amin said: following Wallerstein's World Systems Theory.

    The progressive packaging of all our sins and transferring them to something called 'American Imperialism' is nothing less than mass psychological transference to a Fetish. By which we maintain autonomy from any blame in the ecological disaster we are co-creating. Which is why it is a powerful cultural narrative constructivism. 'We' do not have to reform: the scapegoated Otherised 'they' do. Whilst we all sit smugly in our inauthentic imaginary autonomy: the ecological destruction caused entirely by our collectivist consumption carries on. 'They' have to clean up 'their' act – not us. 'We' align with the 'counter-hegemonic alliance': the alternative BRI. 'We' are so bourgeois and progressive in our invented independence and totally aligned with the destructive forces of capitalist endocolonised culture because of our own internalised screening discourse. Which is why there is #NoDealForNature. 'We' don't actually give a flying fuck not beyond some hollow totemic gestures in transference of our own responsibility.

    'We' are pushing for the financialisation of nature: as the teleology of our particular complicit cultural narratives. It's not just 'them'. Supply and demand are dialectically exponential. Who is demanding less, more fairly distributed North to South? Exponential expansionism via BRI is no more alternative than colonising the Moon or Mars. For nature to have a deal: we have to stop demanding growth. And in doing that: become self-responsible right through to the narratives we produce. For which every person in the global consumer bourgeoisie – that's us – will have to change their imperatives from culture to nature. Which means a new naturalised culture: not just complicitly advocating the 'same old, same old' exponential expansionism of the extractivist commodification of every last standing resource. Under the guise of new narrative constructions like this. That's not progress: it's capitalist propaganda and personal self-propaganda. We are among the consumer elite. Which is driving the financialisation and commodification of everything. For us.

    #NoDealForNature until we take full and honest self-responsibility to create one with our every enaction including speech-enactivism.

    Gall ,

    I'm sure Thomas Robert Malthus and Charles Darwin are smiling upon you my child from their very special place in hell.

    Richard Le Sarc ,

    Charles Darwin? What on Earth are you on about?

    Gall ,

    Ever heard of social Darwinism? This is how the elite justify genocide and theft of resources. It is one of the basics of Neoliberalism.

    Richard Le Sarc ,

    Darwin had NOTHING to do with 'social Darwinism'. It's like blaming Jesus for the KKK.

    Gall ,

    Uh huh:

    "With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

    The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with a certain and great present evil. Hence we must bear without complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely the weaker and inferior members of society not marrying so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased, though this is more to be hoped for than expected, by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage."
    ― Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

    BigB ,

    Every appraisal from a cultural POV extends the cultural hegemony over nature – with no exceptions. If we do not address the false dichotomy of culture and nature – and invert the privileged status of cultural domination over nature – this never changes. If nothing changes its going to be a very short century the last in the history of culture.

    I'm expressing my own private POV with the intention of at least highlighting the issue of only ever expressing the distorted cultural-centric POV. It would be nice if we could all agree to do something other than waste our privileged status and access to resources for other than meaningless sarcasm. It's not like we'd all benefit from a change in POV and the entailed potential in a change of course that can only happen if we think of nature first, is it? 😉

    Gall ,

    The only thing I don't like about the environmentally "woke" is that many are easily manipulated by the neoliberal elite. Greta is a perfect example.

    That is they go after the little guy while the Military and big industry continue to pollute unhampered.

    George Mc ,

    I despair.

    Well that's what you do.

    Dungroanin ,

    The M5 highway is secured. Allepo access points too and Idlib is surrounded- where are the US backed /Saudi paid / Tukish passport holding Uighars and various Turkmen proxy jihadist anti Chinese / anti Russian, Central asian caliphate establishing mercenaries supposed to go now??

    Pompeo is buzzing around Africa now like a blue bottomed cadaverous fly, non-stop buzzing from piles of shot, trying to find them homes – no Libya doesn't want anymore of them, nor the UAE and Saudis, or Turks maybe dump them in Canada with all these ex Ukrainian still nazis? Its a big country nobody will know!
    Or bring them to the US and give them a ticker tape parade?

    Or let them surrender and have them testify as to how the fuck they let themselves be bought for $$$$ maybe just fry them with the low yield nuke and blame Assad for it!

    Dumbass yanks, fukus, 5+1 eyed gollum and Nutty- 'it's the Belgian airforce bombing Russian weapons in Syria' -yahoo!

    Up-Pompeos farce and buzzing is about to sizzle in the blue light of death for dumbfuck poison spreading flies.

    normal wisdom ,

    so much disrespect here hare here.

    these takfiri these giants these beards are hero

    of the oded yinon plan

    they raped murdered and stole
    dustified atomised the syriana so
    is rael can become real

    the red heffers have been cloned the temple will grow

    the semites must leave for norway,sweden wales scotland and detroit
    already

    the khazar ashkanazim need the land returned to it's true owners from the turkic russio steppe

    tonight back to back i watch reality
    fiddler on the roof and exodus and schindlers lists.
    i watch bbc simon scharmas new rabbi revised history of mighty israel.
    every day it grows massive every day hezbollah become weak husk

    shirley you can sea more that

    my life already

    Francis Lee ,

    Very interesting and informative article. Lenin's 5 conditions of the imperialism of his time have been matched by similar conditions in our own time, as listed by the Egyptian Marxist, Samir Amin. These conditions being as follows.

    1. Control of technology.

    2. Access to natural resources.

    3. Finance.

    4. Global media.

    5. The means of mass destruction.

    Only by overturning these monopolies can real progress be made. Easily said. But a life and death struggle for humanity.

    The collapse of the Soviet Union opened up the space for increased penetration of Europe to the East by the US and its West European allies in NATO. At that time the subaltern US powers in Europe were the UK and West Germany, as it then was. There was a semblance of sovereignty in France under De Gaulle, but this has since disappeared. Europe as a whole is now occupied and controlled by the US which has used EU/NATO bloc to push right up to the Russian border. Most, if not all, the non-sovereign quasi states, in Europe, particularly Eastern Europe, are Quisling-Petainist puppet regimes regardless of whether they are inside our outside of the EU. (I say 'states' but of course if a country is not sovereign it cannot be a 'state' in the full meaning of the word).

    A political, social and economic crisis in Europe seems to be taking taking shape. Perhaps the key problem, particularly Eastern Europe, has been depopulation. There is not one European state in which fertility (replacement) rates has reached 2.1 children. Western European imperial states have to large degree been able to counter-act this tendency by immigration from their former colonies, particularly the UK and France. But this has not been possible in states such as Sweden and Germany where the migration of non-christian guest workers from Turkey to Germany and Islamic refugees
    from the middle-east hot-spots have had a free passage to Sweden. This has become a serious social and economic problem; a problem resulting from a neoliberal open borders policy. The fact of the matter is that radically different cultures will tend to clash. Thank you Mr Soros.

    British immigration policy was successful in so far as immigrants from the Caribbean were English speakers, they were also protestant Christians, and the culture was not very different from the UK. Later immigration from the Indian sub-continent and Indian settled East Africa were generally professional and middle-class business people. Again English speakers. Assimilation of these newcomers was not unduly difficult.

    However it wouldn't be exaggerating to say that Eastern Europe is facing a demographic disaster. This particular zone is literally bleeding people. Ukraine for example has lost 10 million people since 1990. Every month it is estimated that 100,000 Ukrainians leave the country, usually for good. In terms of migration – no-one wants to go to Eastern Europe, but everyone wants to leave, asap. This process is complemented by low birth rates, and high death rates. These are un-developing states in an un-developing world. But now we have new kids on the bloc. A counter-hegemonic alliance. No guesses who.

    BigB ,

    Rubbish. There is no 'counter-hegemonic alliance' to humanities rapacious demand for fossil fuels and ecological resources. Where are the material consumption resources for BRI coming from – the Moon, Mars? Passing asteroids? Or from the Earth?

    When its gone: its gone. Russia and China provide absolutely no alternative to this. China's consumption alone is driving us over the brink. To which the real alternative is a complicit silence. As we all align with culture-centric capitalist views: there is no naturalistic 'counter-hegemonic alliance'. Just some hunters in the Amazon we are having shot right now so we can have the privilige of extending cultural hegemony over nature.

    When it's gone: it's gone. And so will we be too. Probably as we are still praising the wonders of the 'counter-hegemonic alliance' that killed us.

    Gall ,

    Actually there is a naturalistic alliance forming but it seems you haven't been paying attention because you seem stuck in some Malthusian mind set. In order to defeat capitalism you have to defeat Globalism so you first have to eliminate the Anglo-American Hegemony and get back to a multipolar world.

    Ranting on about like Gretchen doesn't do any good.

    BigB ,

    Resources are finite and thermodynamics exist. These are the ineliminable, indisputable, and rock solid epistemology of the Earth System. Everything else is metaphysics – literally 'beyond nature; beyond physics'. Or, as it is more commonly known – economics. The imaginary epistemology of political economics and political theory. 'Theory' is the non-scientific sense of unfounded opinion and non-sense. A philosophical truth-theory that is not and cannot ever be true. Hypothetical non-sense.

    I get my information from a wide range of sources that realise these foundational predicates. That is: a foundational set of beliefs that require no underpinning. I can only paraphrase Eddington on thermodynamics: "if your theory is found to be against the second law I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."

    Which is to say all modern political theory and economics – and by extension all opinions based on its internalisation – is the product of vivid and unfounded imagination. To which a naturalised epistemology is the only remedy.

    There are lots of people working on the problem: but not in the political sphere. Which is why we are stuck in a hallucinated metaphysical political-economic theatre of the absurd and absolutised cultural non-sense. Which is not beyond anyone to rectify: if and when we accept the limitations of the physical-material Earth System. And apply them to our thinking.

    #NoDealForNature until we accept that the thermodynamics of depletion naturally limit growth. Anything anyone says to the contrary should be treated with scepticism and cause a collapse into deepest humiliation of any rational thinker.

    Richard Le Sarc ,

    'Depopulation' is only a problem if you believe in the capitalist cancer cult of infinite growth on a finite planet, ie black magic. If you value Life on Earth, and its continuance, human depopulation is necessary. Best done slowly and humanely, by redistributing the wealth stolen by the capitalist parasites. The process seen in the Baltics and Ukraine is the capitalist way, cruel and inhumane. Even worse is planned for the Africans, south Asians and Chinese etc.

    Gall ,

    They don't for a minute believe in "infinite growth". They believe in the "bottom line","instant gratification" and "primitive accumulation". "Infinite growth" is a sales pitch that they use to sell the unwary on their rapaciousness. That is all. If they actually believed in "infinite growth" they've be investing in renewable resources not fracking, strip mining and other environmentally unfriendly practices.

    Gall ,

    The problem for Imperialists is that they only know how to plunder, rape and destroy thus all their weaponry and tactics is used for aggression they know nothing about actual defense which is their weak point. General George C Custer found this out some time back and so did Trump just recently when the American were assaulted by a barrage of missiles they couldn't stop.

    Iran, Russia and China have one of the most advanced arsenal of defensive weapons ever developed such as the S- series of air defense system that can turn a Tomahawk attack into a turkey shoot. What was it? I think it was 100 Tomahawks fired on Syria after that false flag chemical attack and only 15 or so got through and this was the earlier version of the S missile defense S-300. They've already developed 500 which practically makes them impervious and is a true iron dome compared the iron sieve that the Israelis got for free during GW1 and then repackaged and sold back to the US Military for 15B with very few improvements except maybe for a pretty blue bow.

    Not only that but they can return fire with hypersonic weapons that are unstoppable and can turn a base or Aircraft Carrier into a floating pinnate.

    lundiel ,

    Very well presented. Excellent article.

    Gall ,

    Actually the US proudly waving the banner of the East India Company is following in the footsteps of the deceased British Empire into the boneyard of empires which is Afghanistan. Iraq, Syria and Ukraine are just side shows. America can not escape history no matter what it does now since its days of empire are now numbered. Just as they were for the late unlamented Soviet Union.

    The "New American Century" is ending preemptively early like Hitler's "Thousand Year Reich" and we can all breath a sigh of relief when it does.

    Frank ,

    The only thing that will get the bastard yanks out of the middle east is dead Americans.

    Lots and lots of dead Americans.

    Enough dead Americans to make the braindead jingoistic American masses notice.

    Enough dead Americans to touch every family that produces grunts that serve their criminal state by raping and pillaging foreign countries.

    Enough dead Americans to make dumbfuck Americans who say, 'Thank you for your service" squirm in literal pain at the words.

    Dungroanin ,

    They got brain damage in their bunkers in the best US base in the ME from just a handful of Kinetic energy missiles.

    Their low yield nuke is their response.

    The Israelis keep prodding the Bear – they even targeted a Russian Pantir system in Syria!

    I suppose only a downing or infact destroying on the ground of a squadron of useless F35's with a threat to escalate into a full blown mobilisation is ever going to stop these imperialist chancers. Or a fully coordinated assassination campaign of the leads and their heirs as they frolic on their superyachts and space stations and secret Tracey islands.

    And they can pay their taxes in full.

    The Third world war is already fought – this really is a world war rather than some Anglo Imperialist bankers playing king of the castle – and they have LOST – the Empire is dead.

    Long live the new Empire – the first not beholden to the bankers.

    wardropper ,

    Even with a new empire, our godless world would soon enough breed another generation of bankers to which we would be beholden.
    That's what the fundamentally dishonest people in any society do.
    Something wrong? Oh, well, we'll form a committee to discuss it, and in future we will look into creating a banking system which will enable us pay ourselves high wages for our invaluable contribution to human evolution.
    It's MORALITY which is lacking today, not more legislation or a new constitution.

    Gall ,

    All one has to do is move off the centralized banking system developed and controlled by the Rothschilds that is totally based on creating finance out of thin air and return to a commodity based currency (not gold!!) that represents actual value like scrip or wampum or barter and the bankers will eventually starve.

    Actually this system is starting to take hold in the US to a small extend to avoid the depredations of the IRS since Tax is based mostly on currency.

    Stop using fiat currency and the problem's solved.

    After WW II the French didn't have a press to press Francs so their standard of exchange became cigarettes and chocolate. It worked quite well until the presses started churning out paper again.

    wardropper ,

    My fear is that without the Rothschilds, some other over-ambitious family would simply step in and fill their shoes. It's the motivation to be greedy and wicked which needs addressing. How that would be done, of course, I have no idea.

    Gall ,

    This is only if you embrace the concept of centralized banking and the "magic" of compound interest. Current "banking" is all smoke and mirrors that favors the parasite who lives on the production of others through what is called "unearned income".

    wardropper ,

    I agree. But how to stop it?

    Gall ,

    Ignore the bastards instead. Just go off the grid.

    wardropper ,

    I can't deny the wisdom in that.

    Dungroanin ,

    The Red Shield ancient silk road trader and slaving company employees are only a family as say the Vatican is a family

    wardropper ,

    I know, but "only a family" with the wealth to buy whole nations
    I find that very unsettling, to say the least.

    Dungroanin ,

    Indeed but there is always hope as the poet saw – THEY are the few, we are many.

    Gall ,

    Actually the Israelis are going a little slower now that isolated reports indicate that those flying turkeys AKA F-35s are getting popped out of the skies of Syria by antiquated Soviet SAMs. Of course there is no mention of this in the Mainstream Press. Just like there wasn't a word of a IDF General and his staff taken out by a shoulder launched RPG fired by Hezbollah in retaliation for attacking their media center in Beirut.

    Antonym ,

    Anybody who believes that the Israeli tail wags the US mil-ind. complex dog is contributing to the Jewish superiority myth.

    Ken ,

    They're not superior, but they do wag the US MIC dog in and ebb-and-flow kind of way. That 9/11 thing was quite the wag. Read Christopher Bollyn and study other aspects of the event if you're not sure of this.

    Antonym ,

    Langley and Riyadh love you; you fell for their ploy. See: Tel Aviv is much worse them.
    The CIA/FBI failure explained.

    The Mossad loves you too: for keeping mum on this Entebbe Mach 2.0 on their familiar New York crap they got huge US support in the ME.
    Makes them look invincible too as a bonus .

    5 dancing guys was all the proof needed – cheapest op in history.

    Ken ,

    "5 dancing guys was all the proof needed – cheapest op in history"

    Oh please, that was such a minor bit of evidence of any Zionist/Israeli involvement, which spanned nearly every facet of the event and its aftermath.

    The list of false flagging Zionist Jews in love with you is too long to list.

    Gall ,

    Oh please. What about the close to 200 Israelis who were arrested that day? Not to mention the helpful warning by Odigo which was only given to citizens of Israel?

    Also one has to act who benefitted? Definitely not the Saudis or the Americans leaving Sharon who was trying to suppress a Palestinian uprising that he arrogantly started.

    Speaking of your friendly five doing a fiddler on the roof on top of an Urban Moving Van that just happened to owned by another Israeli who fled the country. Didn't they say something stupid when arrested like "we are not your problem. It's the Palestinians who are your problem!"?

    A pathetic frame up attempt but a frame none the less. Speaking of frame ups wasn't Fat Katz at SiteIntel (propaganda) who posted some stock footage of Palestinians celebrating which has been proven to be false since the only people who seem to celebrating that day was your friends the Dancing Israelis which doesn't prove their mental superiority at all but their arrogant stupidity,

    Richard Le Sarc ,

    The three, the USA, Saudi Arabia and the USA, are allies in destruction-the Real Axis of Evil. The dominant force, these days, given the control of the USA by Israel First Fifth Columnists, in the MSM, political 'contributions', the financial Moloch etc, is most certainly the Zionassties. Why don't you, like so many other Zionassties, glory in your power, Antsie. Nobody believes your ritual denials.

    Gall ,

    They don't really wag the dog by themselves. They have a lot of help from the Stand with Israel brain dead Christian Zionists who like Israelis consider themselves the chosen ones as well.

    Ken ,

    @Gall Yep! I had a long time friend who went Pentecostal and we drifted apart but still kept in touch. I lost him completely just after telling him that Israelis played a big part in 9/11.

    Gall ,

    Chuck Baldwin and a few other it seems have seen the light and are now questioning their colleagues undying support of Israel. Maybe you could show this article to your friend who seems enthralled by the terrorist snake er I mean state:
    https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/02/13/emperor-trump/

    Ken ,

    Thanks for that article. Were I ever able to get it in front of my estranged friend, it would make his head explode and kill him. Baldwin does seem to nail it. Chuck for president! I came across this rather intersting piece on 9/11 while at VT for your article.
    https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/02/10/9-11-the-bottom-line-an-open-letter-to-all-researchers/

    Gall ,

    Yes that pretty much sums up how 9/11 was carried on. Both Heinz Pommer and VT have done some excellent research based on facts not fantasy.

    As far as your friend and many Christian Zionists in general. They seem to live in some alternative universe and dislike being confused by such irrelevant things as facts.

    binra ,

    It is a story that can be told in some detail – but when you say myth do you actually mean fallacy – ie – are you saying that Jewish power doesn't exercise considerable influence – if not control over US social and political and corporate development across of broad spectrum of leverages?

    Richard Le Sarc ,

    Yes-all those addresses of Congress, by Bibi, where the Congress critters compete to display the most extreme groveling and adulation, are just the natural expression of reverence and awe at his semi-Divine moral excellence. Denying the undeniable is SOP for Zionassties.

    normal wisdom ,

    what jews?
    i do not see any jews
    just a sea of khazar ashkanazim pirates
    a kaballa talmudick race trick
    a crime syndicate pretending to be semite
    jew is just the cover
    init

    [Feb 14, 2020] More Lies on Iran The White House Just Can t Help Itself as New Facts Emerge by Philip Giraldi

    Notable quotes:
    "... It soon emerged that the Iranian was in fact in Baghdad to discuss with the Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi a plan that might lead to the de-escalation of the ongoing conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, a meeting that the White House apparently knew about may even have approved. If that is so, events as they unfolded suggest that the US government might have encouraged Soleimani to make his trip so he could be set up and killed. Donald Trump later dismissed the lack of any corroboration of the tale of "imminent threat" being peddled by Pompeo, stating that it didn't really matter as Soleimani was a terrorist who deserved to die. ..."
    "... It now appears that the original death of the American contractor that sparked the tit-for-tat conflict was not carried out by Kata'ib Hezbollah at all. An Iraqi Army investigative team has gathered convincing evidence that it was an attack staged by Islamic State. In fact, the Iraqi government has demonstrated that Kata'ib Hezbollah has had no presence in Kirkuk province, where the attack took place, since 2014. It is a heavily Sunni area where Shi'a are not welcome and is instead relatively hospitable to all-Sunni IS. It was, in fact, one of the original breeding grounds for what was to become ISIS. ..."
    Feb 14, 2020 | www.unz.com

    Admittedly the news cycle in the United States seldom runs longer than twenty-four hours, but that should not serve as an excuse when a major story that contradicts what the Trump Administration has been claiming appears and suddenly dies. The public that actually follows the news might recall a little more than one month ago the United States assassinated a senior Iranian official named Qassem Soleimani. Openly killing someone in the government of a country with which one is not at war is, to say the least, unusual, particularly when the crime is carried out in yet another country with which both the perpetrator and the victim have friendly relations. The justification provided by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, speaking for the administration, was that Soleimani was in Iraq planning an "imminent" mass killing of Americans, for which no additional evidence was provided at that time or since.

    It soon emerged that the Iranian was in fact in Baghdad to discuss with the Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi a plan that might lead to the de-escalation of the ongoing conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, a meeting that the White House apparently knew about may even have approved. If that is so, events as they unfolded suggest that the US government might have encouraged Soleimani to make his trip so he could be set up and killed. Donald Trump later dismissed the lack of any corroboration of the tale of "imminent threat" being peddled by Pompeo, stating that it didn't really matter as Soleimani was a terrorist who deserved to die.

    The incident that started the killing cycle that eventually included Soleimani consisted of a December 27th attack on a US base in Iraq in which four American soldiers and two Iraqis were wounded while one US contractor, an Iraqi-born translator, was killed. The United States immediately blamed Iran, claiming that it had been carried out by an Iranian supported Shi'ite militia called Kata'ib Hezbollah. It provided no evidence for that claim and retaliated by striking a Kata'ib base, killing 25 Iraqis who were in the field fighting the remnants of Islamic State (IS). The militiamen had been incorporated into the Iraqi Army and this disproportionate response led to riots outside the US Embassy in Baghdad, which were also blamed on Iran by the US There then followed the assassinations of Soleimani and nine senior Iraqi militia officers. Iran retaliated when it fired missiles at American forces , injuring more than one hundred soldiers, and then mistakenly shot down a passenger jet , killing an additional 176 people. As a consequence due to the killing by the US of 34 Iraqis in the two incidents, the Iraqi Parliament also voted to expel all American troops.

    It now appears that the original death of the American contractor that sparked the tit-for-tat conflict was not carried out by Kata'ib Hezbollah at all. An Iraqi Army investigative team has gathered convincing evidence that it was an attack staged by Islamic State. In fact, the Iraqi government has demonstrated that Kata'ib Hezbollah has had no presence in Kirkuk province, where the attack took place, since 2014. It is a heavily Sunni area where Shi'a are not welcome and is instead relatively hospitable to all-Sunni IS. It was, in fact, one of the original breeding grounds for what was to become ISIS.

    This new development was reported in the New York Times in an article that was headlined "Was US Wrong About Attack That Nearly Started a War With Iran? Iraqi military and intelligence officials have raised doubts about who fired the rockets that started a dangerous spiral of events." In spite of the sensational nature of the report it generally was ignored in television news and in other mainstream media outlets, letting the Trump administration get away with yet another big lie, one that could easily have led to a war with Iran.

    Iraqi investigators found and identified the abandoned white Kia pickup with an improvised Katyusha rocket launcher in the vehicle's bed that was used to stage the attack. It was discovered down a desert road within range of the K-1 joint Iraqi-American base that was hit by at least ten missiles in December, most of which struck the American area.

    There is no direct evidence tying the attack to any particular party and the improvised KIA truck is used by all sides in the regional fighting, but the Iraqi officials point to the undisputed fact that it was the Islamic State that had carried out three separate attacks near the base over the 10 days preceding December 27th. And there are reports that IS has been increasingly active in Kirkuk Province during the past year, carrying out near daily attacks with improvised roadside bombs and ambushes using small arms. There had, in fact, been reports from Iraqi intelligence that were shared with the American command warning that there might be an IS attack on K-1 itself, which is an Iraqi air base in that is shared with US forces.

    The intelligence on the attack has been shared with American investigators, who have also examined the pick-up truck. The Times reports that the US command in Iraq continue to insist that the attack was carried out by Kata'ib based on information, including claimed communications intercepts, that it refuses to make public. The US forces may not have shared the intelligence they have with the Iraqis due to concerns that it would be leaked to Iran, but senior Iraqi military officers are nevertheless perplexed by the reticence to confide in an ally.

    If the Iraqi investigation of the facts around the December attack on K-1 is reliable, the Donald Trump administration's reckless actions in Iraq in late December and early January cannot be justified. Worse still, it would appear that the White House was looking for an excuse to attack and kill a senior Iranian official to send some kind of message, a provocation that could easily have resulted in a war that would benefit no one. To be sure, the Trump administration has lied about developments in the Middle East so many times that it can no longer be trusted. Unfortunately, demanding any accountability from the Trump team would require a Congress that is willing to shoulder its responsibility for truth in government backed up by a media that is willing to take on an administration that regularly punishes anyone or any entity that dares to challenge it

    That is the unfortunate reality in America today.



    AnonStarter , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 12:25 am GMT

    Well, the 9/11 Commission lied about Israeli involvement, Israeli neocons lied America into Iraq, and Netanyahu lied about Iranian nukes, so this latest news is just par for the course.
    KA , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 12:59 am GMT
    @04398436986 lets stay focused.

    Pompeo had evidence of immediate catastrophic attack. That turned out to be a lie and plain BS.
    Why should we believe Pompeo or White House or intelligence about the situation developing around 27-29 Dec ? Is it because it's USA who is saying so?

    anonymous [307] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 1:12 am GMT
    [it would appear that the White House was looking for an excuse to attack and kill a senior Iranian official to send some kind of message, a provocation that could easily have resulted in a war that would benefit no one.]

    The Jewish mafia stooge and fifth column, Trump, is a war criminal and an ASSASSIN.

    ... ... ...

    melpol , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 1:13 am GMT
    War with Iran is off the table. Carpet bombing Iran would lead to the destruction of Israel and its nuclear facility...
    Sean , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 2:23 am GMT

    Worse still, it would appear that the White House was looking for an excuse to attack and kill a senior Iranian official to send some kind of message, a provocation that could easily have resulted in a war that would benefit no one.

    Soleimani was a soldier involved in covert operations, Iran's most celebrated hero, and had been featured in the Iraq media as the target of multiple Western assassination attempts. He did not have diplomatic status.

    As it happens Iran did not declare war on America and America did not declare war on Iran. If Americans soldiers killed in Iraq should not have been there in the first place, then the same goes for an Iranian soldier killed there too.

    KA , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 2:30 am GMT
    @04398436986 There is western assertion and western assertion only that Iran influences Iraqi administration and intelligence . It can be a projection from a failing America . It can be also a valid possibility .

    But lying is America's alter ego . It comes easily and as default explanation even when admitting truth would do a better job .

    Now let's focus on ISIS 's claims . Why is Ametica not taking it ( claim of ISIS) as truth and fact when USA has for last 19 years has jailed , bombed, attacked mentally retarded , caves and countries because somebody has pledged allegiance to Al Quida or to ISIS!!!

    It seems neither truth nor lies , but what suits a particular psychopath at a particular time – that becomes USA's report ( kind of unassigned sex – neither truth nor lies – take your pick and find the toilet to flush it down memory hole) – so Pompeo lies to nation hoping no one in administration will ask . When administrative staff gets interested to know the truth , Pompeo tells them to suck it up , move on and get ready to explain the next batch of reality manufactured by a regime and well trained by philosopher Karl Rove

    AnonStarter , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 4:06 am GMT
    @04398436986 conspiracy mongers

    To what "conspiracy" are you referring? It's a well established fact that your ilk was, at the very least, aware that the 9/11 attacks would occur and celebrated them in broad daylight. No conspiracy theory needed. Mossad ordnance experts were living practically next door to the hijackers. Well established fact.

    It's also undeniable that the 9/11 Commission airbrushed Israeli involvement from their report. No conspiracy theory there, either.

    Same goes for Israeli neocons and their media mandarins using "faulty intel" to get their war in Iraq. "Clean Break"? "Rebuilding America's Defenses"? Openly written and published. Judith Miller's lies? Also no conspiracy.

    And Israel's own intelligence directors were undermining Netanyahu's lies on Iran. Not a conspiracy in sight.

    contemplating the outcome of normal everyday competition, influenced by good & bad luck, is just too much truth for some psychological makeups

    That's one of the lamest attempts at deflection I've seen thus far, and I've seen quite a few here.

    Those who deny the official version of 9/11 are in the majority now:

    https://www.livescience.com/56479-americans-believe-conspiracy-theories.html

    We've reached critical mass. Clearly, that's just too much truth for your psychological makeup. Were we really that worthy of ignoring, your people wouldn't be working 24/7/365 to peddle your malarkey in fora of this variety.

    JUSA , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 5:23 am GMT
    I have thought that Trump's true impeachable crime was the illegal assassination of a foreign general who was not in combat. Pence should also be impeached for the botched coup in Venezuela. That was true embarrassment bringing that "El Presidente" that no one recognizes to the SOTU.

    USA is basically JU-S-A now, Jews own and run this country from top to bottom, side to side, and because of it, pretty much run the world. China-Russia-Iran form their new "Axis of Evil" to be brought in line. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if the Covid-19 is a bioweapon, except not one created by China. Israel has been working on an ethnic based bioweapon for years. US sent 172 military "athletes" to the Military World Games in Wuhan in October, 2019, two weeks before the first case of coronavirus appeared. Almost too coincidental.

    animalogic , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 6:20 am GMT
    @Sean He wasn't there as a soldier -- he was there in a diplomatic role. (regardless of his official "status"). It also appears he was lured there with intent to assaninate.
    Your last para is not only terrible logic but ignores the point of the article. Iran likely was not responsible for the US deaths. Even had it been responsible it would still not legitimate such a baldly criminal action.
    Sean , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 6:29 am GMT
    @JUSA

    [I]illegal assassination of a foreign general who was not in combat

    Lawful combat according to the Geneva Convention in which war is openly declared and fought between two countries each of which have regular uniformed forces that do all the actual fighting is an extremely rare thing. It is all proxy forces, deniability and asymmetric warfare in which one side (the stronger) is attacked by phantom combatants.

    The Israeli PM publically alluded to the fact that Soleimani had almost been killed in the Mossad operation to kill Imad Mughniyeh a decade ago. The Iranian public knew that Soleimani had narrowly escaped death from Israeli drones, because Soleimani appeared on Iranian TV in October and told the story. A plot kill him by at a memorial service in Iran was supposedly foiled. He came from Lebanon by way of Syria into Iraq as if none of this had happened. Trump had sacked Bolton and failed to react to the drone attack on Saudi oil.

    Iran seems to have thought that refusal to actually fight in the type of war that the international conventions were designed to regulate is a licence to exert pressure by launch attacks without being targeted oneself. Now do they understand.

    Ace , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 8:41 am GMT
    @Sean American troops invaded Iraq under false pretenses, killed thousands, and caused great destruction. Chaos and vengeful Sunnis spilled over into Syria where the US proceeded to grovel before the terrorists we fret about. Soleimani was effective in organizing resistance in Iraq and Syria and was in both countries with the blessing of their governments.

    How you get Soleimani shouldn't be there out of that I have no idea.

    Zen , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 12:04 pm GMT
    @04398436986 Yet you ignore that the Neocons have lied about virtually every cause if war ever. Lied about Iraq, North Korea and Iran nuclear info actions, about chem weapons in Syria, lied about Kosovo, lied about Libya, lied about Benghazi, lied about Venezuela. So Whom I gonna believe, no government, but a Neocon led one least of all
    Vojkan , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 1:05 pm GMT
    @Sean American soldiers went there uninvited. Soleimani went there because he was invited. That makes a hell of a difference.
    Robjil , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 1:05 pm GMT
    It is common knowledge that ISIS is a US/Israeli creation. ISIS is the Israeli Secret Intelligence Service. Thus, the US/Israel staged the attack on the US base on 12.27.2019.

    https://www.globalresearch.ca/isis-is-a-us-israeli-creation-top-ten-indications/5518627

    ISIS is a US-Israeli Creation: Indication #2: ISIS Never Attacks Israel

    It is more than highly strange and suspicious that ISIS never attacks Israel – it is another indication that ISIS is controlled by Israel. If ISIS were a genuine and independent uprising that was not covertly orchestrated by the US and Israel, why would they not try to attack the Zionist regime, which has attacked almost of all of its Muslim neighbors ever since its inception in 1948? Israel has attacked Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, and of course has decimated Palestine. It has systemically tried to divide and conquer its Arab neighbors. It continually complains of Islamic terrorism. Yet, when ISIS comes on the scene as the bloody and barbaric king of Islamic terrorism, it finds no fault with Israel and sees no reason to target a regime which has perpetrated massive injustice against Muslims? This stretches credibility to a snapping point.

    ISIS and Israel don't attack each other – they help each other. Israel was treating ISIS soldiers and other anti-Assad rebels in its hospitals! Mortal enemies or best of friends?

    Coward Corps , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 1:07 pm GMT
    The MQ-9 pilot and sensor operator will be looking over their shoulders for a long time. They're as famous as Soleimani. Their command chain is well known too, hide though they might far away.

    And who briefed the president that terror Tuesday? The murder program isn't Air Force.

    Eek , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 1:25 pm GMT
    Hey now, you learn to put the best gloss on things when your troops are pathetic little timmies scared of rocks and 12-year olds. Bunch of pussies.

    https://southfront.org/dumbfucks-russian-troops-react-to-us-forces-using-firearms-against-syrian-villagers/

    The IRGC is going to make mincemeat of these chumps.

    Moi , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 1:36 pm GMT
    @anonymous The kind of crap Trump pulled in the assassination of Soleimani is what he should be impeached about–not the piss-ant stuff about Hunter Biden's job in the Ukaranian gas company and his pappy's role in it.
    Sick of Orcs , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 1:49 pm GMT
    We're really benefitting, carrying water for (((our greatest ally.)))
    Really No Shit , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 1:59 pm GMT
    Iraq an ally of the United States! Is it some kind of a joke? How can a master and slave be equal? We, the big dog want their oil and the tail that wags us, Israel, want all Muslims pacified and the Congress, which is us wether we like or not, compliant out of financial fears. Unless we curb our own greedy appetite for fossil fuels and at the same time tell an ally, which Israel is by being equal in a sense that it can get away with murder and not a pip is raised, to limit its ambition, nothing is going to be done to improve the situation. Until then it's an exercise in futility, at best!
    anonymous [307] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 2:46 pm GMT
    @Ozymandias You are so ignorant.

    Iran has NO choice but to defend itself from the savages. It has not been Iran that invaded US, but US with a plan that design years before 9/11 invaded many countries. Remember: seven countries in five years. Soleimani was a wise man working towards peace by creating options for Iran to defend itself. Iran is not the aggressor, but US -Israel-UK are the aggressor for centuries now. Is this so difficult to understand. 9/11 was staged by US/Israel killing 3000 Christians to implement their criminal plan.

    Soleimani, was on a peace mission, where was assassinated by Trump, an Israeli firster and a fifth column and the baby killer Netanyahu. Is this difficult to understand by the Trump worshiper, a traitor.

    Now, Khamenie is saying the same thing: "Iran should be strong in military warfare and sciences to prevent war and maintain PEACE.

    Only ignorant, arrogant, and racists don't understand this fact and refuse to understand how the victims have been pushed to defend themselves.

    The Assassin at the black house should receive the same fate in order to bring the peace.

    anonymous [307] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 2:48 pm GMT
    @Moi I totally agree with you. Both parties are a fifth column and criminals.
    Fiendly Neighbourhood Terrorist , says: Website Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 2:57 pm GMT
    When does Amerikastan *not* lie about anything? If an Amerikastani tells you the sun rises in the east, you're probably on Venus, where it rises in the west.
    DaveE , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 3:05 pm GMT
    I think this article is getting close to the truth, that this whole operation was and is an ISIS (meaning Israeli Secret Intelligence Service) affair designed to pit America against the zionists' most formidable enemy thus far, Iran.

    I'm of the opinion that Trump did not order the hit on Soleimani, but was forced to take credit for it, if he didn't want to forfeit any chance of being reelected this year. The same ISIS (Israeli) forces that did the hit also orchestrated the "retaliation" that Mr. Giraldi so heroically documents in this piece.

    As usual, this is looking more and more like a zionist /jewish false flag attack on the Muslim world, with the real dirty-work to be done by the American military.

    Ahoy , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 3:17 pm GMT
    The dealer in the M.E. poker game is Putin. This is what drives the very elite crazy. How could this have happened? We had conquered Russia in 1917.

    Well, you must have made a small mistake along the way. Trumpstein can't save you. Soon the dollar won't have any value. There is nothing behind it.

    The new policeman in the M.E. will be Iran. The legacy of Lawrence of Arabia has died long time ago.

    Greg Bacon , says: Website Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 3:33 pm GMT

    It soon emerged that the Iranian was in fact in Baghdad to discuss with the Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi a plan that might lead to the de-escalation of the ongoing conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, a meeting that the White House apparently knew about may even have approved.

    It's now obvious that the slumlord son-in-law Jared Kushner is really running the USA's ME policy.
    Kushner is not only a dear friend of at-large war criminal Bibi Nuttyahoo, he also belongs to the Judaic religious cult of Chabad Lubavitcher, whom make the war-loving Christian Evangelicals almost look sane. Chabad also prays for some kind of Armageddon to bring forth their Messiah, just like the Evangelicals.

    One can tell by Kushner's nasty comments he makes about Arabs/Persians and Palestinians in particular, that he loathes and despises those people and has an idiotic ear to cry into in the malignant form of Zion Don, AKA President Trump.

    It's been said that Kushner is also a Mossad agent or asset, which is a good guess, since that agency has been placing their agents into the WH since at least the days of Clinton, who had Rahm Emmanuel to whisper hate into his ear.

    That the Iranian General Soleimani was lured into Iraq so the WH could murder the man probably most responsible for halting the terrorist activities of the heart-eating, head-chopping US/Israel/KSA creation ISIS brings to mind the motto of the Israeli version of the CIA, the Mossad.

    "By way of deception thou shalt make war."

    Between Trump's incompetence, his vanity–and yes, his stupidity– and his appointing Swamp creatures into his cabinet and allowing Jared to run the ME show, Trump is showing himself to be a worse choice than Hillary.
    If that maniac gets another 4 years, humanity is doomed. Or at least the USA for sure will perish.

    [Feb 14, 2020] Between Trump's incompetence, his vanity and yes, his stupidity and his appointing Swamp creatures into his cabinet and allowing Jared to run the ME show, Trump is showing himself to be a worse choice than Hillary.

    Feb 14, 2020 | www.unz.com

    Greg Bacon , says: Website Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 3:33 pm GMT

    It soon emerged that the Iranian was in fact in Baghdad to discuss with the Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi a plan that might lead to the de-escalation of the ongoing conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, a meeting that the White House apparently knew about may even have approved.

    It's now obvious that the slumlord son-in-law Jared Kushner is really running the USA's ME policy.
    Kushner is not only a dear friend of at-large war criminal Bibi Nuttyahoo, he also belongs to the Judaic religious cult of Chabad Lubavitcher, whom make the war-loving Christian Evangelicals almost look sane. Chabad also prays for some kind of Armageddon to bring forth their Messiah, just like the Evangelicals.

    One can tell by Kushner's nasty comments he makes about Arabs/Persians and Palestinians in particular, that he loathes and despises those people and has an idiotic ear to cry into in the malignant form of Zion Don, AKA President Trump.

    It's been said that Kushner is also a Mossad agent or asset, which is a good guess, since that agency has been placing their agents into the WH since at least the days of Clinton, who had Rahm Emmanuel to whisper hate into his ear.

    That the Iranian General Soleimani was lured into Iraq so the WH could murder the man probably most responsible for halting the terrorist activities of the heart-eating, head-chopping US/Israel/KSA creation ISIS brings to mind the motto of the Israeli version of the CIA, the Mossad.

    "By way of deception thou shalt make war."

    Between Trump's incompetence, his vanity–and yes, his stupidity– and his appointing Swamp creatures into his cabinet and allowing Jared to run the ME show, Trump is showing himself to be a worse choice than Hillary.
    If that maniac gets another 4 years, humanity is doomed. Or at least the USA for sure will perish.

    [Feb 09, 2020] Trump demand for 50% of Iraq oil revenue sound exactly like a criminal mob boss

    Highly recommended!
    Jan 21, 2020 | www.unz.com

    Tucker , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 12:27 pm GMT

    I've heard and read about a claim that Trump actually called PM Abdul Mahdi and demanded that Iraq hand over 50 percent of their proceeds from selling their oil to the USA, and then threatened Mahdi that he would unleash false flag attacks against the Iraqi government and its people if he did not submit to this act of Mafia-like criminal extortion. Mahdi told Trump to kiss his buttocks and that he wasn't going to turn over half of the profits from oil sales.

    This makes Trump sound exactly like a criminal mob boss, especially in light of the fact that the USA is now the world's #1 exporter of oil – a fact that the arrogant Orange Man has even boasted about in recent months. Can anyone confirm that this claim is accurate? If so, then the more I learn about Trump the more sleazy and gangster like he becomes.

    I mean, think about it. Bush and Cheney and mostly jewish neocons LIED us into Iraq based on bald faced lies, fabricated evidence, and exaggerated threats that they KNEW did not exist. We destroyed that country, captured and killed it's leader – who used to be a big buddy of the USA when we had a use for him – and Bush's crime gang killed close to 2 million innocent Iraqis and wrecked their economy and destroyed their infrastructure. And, now, after all that death, destruction and carnage – which Trump claimed in 2016 he did not approve of – but, now that Trump is sitting on the throne in the Oval office – he has the audacity and the gall to demand that Iraq owes the USA 50 percent of their oil profits? And, that he won't honor and respect their demand to pull our troops out of their sovereign nation unless they PAY US back for the gigantic waste of tax payers money that was spent building permanent bases inside their country?

    Not one Iraqi politician voted for the appropriations bill that financed the construction of those military bases; that was our mistake, the mistake of our US congress whichever POTUS signed off on it.

    melpol , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 1:41 pm GMT
    ...Trump learned the power of the purse on the streets of NYC, he survived by playing ball with the Jewish and Italian Mafia. Now he has become the ultimate Godfather, and the world must listen to his commands. Watch and listen as the powerful and mighty crumble under US Hegemony.
    World War Jew , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 1:42 pm GMT
    Right TG, traditionally, as you said up there first, and legally too, under the supreme law of the land. Economic sanctions are subject to the same UNSC supervision as forcible coercion.

    UN Charter Article 41: "The Security Council may decide what measures not involving the use of armed force are to be employed to give effect to its decisions, and it may call upon the Members of the United Nations to apply such measures. These may include complete or partial interruption of economic relations and of rail, sea, air, postal, telegraphic, radio, and other means of communication, and the severance of diplomatic relations."

    https://www.un.org/en/charter-united-nations/index.html

    US "sanctions" require UNSC authorization. Unilateral sanctions are nothing but illegal coercive intervention, as the non-intervention principle is customary international law, which is US federal common law.

    The G-192, that is, the entire world, has affirmed this law. That's why the US is trying to defund UNCTAD as redundant with the WTO (UNCTAD is the G-192's primary forum.) In any case, now that the SCO is in a position to enforce this law at gunpoint with its overwhelmingly superior missile technology, the US is going to get stomped and tased until it complies and stops resisting.

    Charlie , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 7:53 pm GMT
    @Tucker This idea that the US is any sort of a net petroleum exporter is just another lie.

    https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=268&t=6

    In 2018 total US petroleum production was under 18 million barrels per day, total consumption north of 20 mmb/d. What does it matter if the US exports a bunch of super light fracked product the US itself can't refine if it turns around and imports it all back in again and then some.

    The myths we tell ourselves, like a roaring economy that nevertheless generates a $1 trillion annual deficit, will someday come back to bite us. Denying reality is not a winning game plan for the long run.

    Christophe GJ , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 8:00 pm GMT
    I long tought that US foreign policies were mainly zionist agenda – driven, but the Venezuelan affair and the statements of Trump himself about the syrian oil (ta be "kept" (stolen)) make you think twice.

    Oil seems to be at least very important even if it's not the main cause of middle east problems

    So maybe it's the cause of illegal and cruel sanctions against Iran : Get rid of competitor to sell shale oil everywhere ?( think also of Norstream 2 here)

    Watch out US of A. in the end there is something sometimes referred to as the oil's curse . some poor black Nigerians call oil "the shit of the devil", because it's such a problem – related asset Have you heard of it ? You get your revenues from oil easily, so you don't have to make effort by yourself. And in the end you don't keep pace with China on 5G ? Education fails ? Hmm
    Becommig a primary sector extraction nation sad destiny indeed, like africans growing cafe, bananas and cacao for others. Not to mention environmental problems
    What has happened to the superb Nation that send the first man on the moon and invented modern computers ?
    Disapointment
    Money for space or money for war following the Zio. Choose Uncle Sam !
    Difficult to have both

    OverCommenter , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 8:24 pm GMT
    Everyone seems to forget how we avoided war with Syria all those years ago It was when John Kerry of all people gaffed, and said "if Assad gives up all his chemical weapons." That was in response to a reporter who asked "is there anything that can stop the war?" A intrepid Russian ambassador chimed in loud enough for the press core to hear his "OK" and history was averted. Thinking restricting the power of the President will stop brown children from dying at the hands of insane US foreign policy is a cope. "Bi-partisanship" voted to keep troops in Syria, that was only a few months ago, have you already forgotten? Dubya started the drone program, and the magical African everyone fawns over, literally doubled the remote controlled death. We are way past pretending any elected official from either side is actually against more ME war, or even that one side is worse than the other.

    The problem with the supporters Trump has left is they so desperately want to believe in something bigger than themselves. They have been fed propaganda for their whole lives, and as a result can only see the world in either "this is good" or "this is bad." The problem with the opposition is that they are insane. and will say or do anything regardless of the truth. Trump could be impeached for assassinating Sulimani, yet they keep proceeding with fake and retarded nonsense. Just like keeping troops in Syria, even the most insane rabid leftoids are just fine with US imperialism, so long as it's promoting Starbucks, Marvel and homosex, just like we see with support for HK. That is foreign meddling no matter how you try to justify it, and it's not even any different messaging than the hoax "bring democracyhumanrightsfreedom TM to the poor Arabs" justification that was used in Iraq. They don't even have to come up with a new play to run, it's really quite incredible.

    Just passing through , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 8:44 pm GMT
    @OverCommenter A lot of right-wingers also see military action in the Middle East as a way for America to flex its muscles and bomb some Arabs. It also serves to justify the insane defence budget that could be used to build a wall and increase funding to ICE.

    US politics has become incredibly bi-partisan, criticising Trump will get you branded a 'Leftist' in many circles. This extreme bipartisanship started with the Obama birth certificate nonsense which was being peddled by Jews like Orly Taitz, Philip J. Berg, Robert L. Shulz, Larry Klayman and Breitbart news – most likely because Obama was pursuing the JCPOA and not going hard enough on Iran – and continued with the Trump Russian agent angle.

    Now many Americans cannot really think critically, they stick to their side like a fan sticks to their sports team.

    Weston Waroda , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 9:11 pm GMT
    The first person I ever heard say sanctions are acts of war was Ron Paul. The repulsive Madeleine Albright infamously said the deaths of 500,000 Iranian children due to US sanctions was worth it. She ought to be tried as a war criminal. Ron Paul ought to be Secretary of State.

    [Feb 08, 2020] Age is starting to catch up to Trump. He appears to be tiring and his rhetoric is becoming repetitive.

    Feb 08, 2020 | www.unz.com

    melpol , says: Show Comment February 7, 2020 at 2:02 am GMT

    Age is starting to catch up to Trump. He appears to be tiring and his rhetoric is becoming repetitive. He might have to resort to energy boosting drugs which is illegal in sporting contests but his opponents might demand a doping test. Bloomberg and Sanders are also old men but they might cause Trump to become confused and disoriented. If that happens Trump will quit the debates and go into the elections based on his low black unemployment achievements.

    [Feb 08, 2020] I want to float a theory about Bernie, Chris Mathews and Russiagate. caucus99percent

    Feb 08, 2020 | caucus99percent.com

    caucus99percent free-range politics, organic community

    I want to float a theory about Bernie, Chris Mathews and Russiagate.

    entrepreneur on Sat, 02/08/2020 - 4:42pm Chris Mathews' conflating democratic socialism with communism under a dictator demonstrates a rabid hatred of policies that help average Americans. It also demonstrates that he is an idiot, but that is beside the point. Let's assume for second that his radical pants pooping hysteria against a strong public safety net, healthcare and higher education is a fear shared by many of the 1% and their surrogates. Although most aren't as vocal about it as Chris Mathews, I am confident that his blind abhorrence for any program or politician who helps the 99% is common in the DNC and their billionaire donors.

    Now let's go back to the 2016 primary. Remember, President Hillary was a sure thing in 2016 and she would certainly be the nominee again in 2020. So Bernie wouldn't have a chance to implement any of his policies for at least 8 years, if ever. But when Trump won that all changed. Even with Hillary and her surrogates lying and cheating their asses off, and utilizing all of her media and deep state connections, she still barely beat Bernie, and ultimately lost to Trump.

    It was at that point, when she lost to Trump, that the establishment had to suspect that Bernie would be back. Because they had thrown everything they had at him in 2016 and he damn near won anyway, against all odds. Even though they botched 2016, they learned something important for 2020. They learned that there was a public appetite for Bernie's policies, and that he could possibly win without taking big donor money. They also learned that people weren't buying the policies that the DNC is selling. Which is a huge problem since their big donors won't allow them to sell anything else.

    So immediately after their loss to Trump the neo-liberals assembled all of their brightest rocket surgeons to concoct a way to shut down Bernie before he would become a problem in 2020. So how do you smear a guy like Bernie? Regular smears like sex scandals or corruption allegations would not stick to a guy like Bernie. They would have to go after his polices. "Hey! Why not smear his policies as communist?" They reasoned. The problem with that approach in 2016 is that the word communism doesn't really evoke fear like it once did. In order to be successful they would need to incite anti-Russian hysteria. And so Russiagate was hatched. Once they thought about it they realized that they could blame all kinds of shit on the Russians, and at the same time avoid accountability for their own incompetence.

    Russiagate :
    * Demonizes Russia, lays groundwork for future smears of Bernie's policies as communist.
    * Blames Russia for Hillary's loss so she doesn't have to admit that she is a failure.
    * Removes need to re-examine neo-liberal policies, which makes billionaire donors happy.
    * Fosters cold-war mentality which makes the MIC billionaire donors and deep state happy.
    * Provides a scapegoat for election irregularities if DNC is investigated by Trump DOJ.

    This is speculation, of course. But Russiagate was pulled out of someone's ass. And I am just trying to cobble together a reasonable theory about whose ass and why. After watching Chris Mathews blubber and pee his pants because he's afraid if Bernie becomes president that Fidel Castro's ghost will take a shit in his mouth while he's sleeping, it makes sense to me that Russiagate may have been inspired by a deep-seated fear of Bernie's policies, and an attempt to smear them before they take root for 2020.

    Raggedy Ann on Sat, 02/08/2020 - 4:56pm
    It seems to me

    Russiagate was invented as soon as Herr Drumpf was elected as an effort to oust him for colluding with Russia and cheating her heinous out of the election. When that didn't work, the deep state went back to work and concocted the impeachment move. That failed, too. They are 0-2. Will they try again? Maybe - if they want to ensure he gets a second term and deny Bernie.

    entrepreneur on Sat, 02/08/2020 - 4:59pm
    Definitely possible. And most commonly accepted.

    @Raggedy Ann

    Russiagate was invented as soon as Herr Drumpf was elected as an effort to oust him for colluding with Russia and cheating her heinous out of the election. When that didn't work, the deep state went back to work and concocted the impeachment move. That failed, too. They are 0-2. Will they try again? Maybe - if they want to ensure he gets a second term and deny Bernie.

    Raggedy Ann on Sat, 02/08/2020 - 5:22pm
    WOW!

    @entrepreneur
    I thought I was the only person who came up with that!

    #1

    Bisbonian on Sat, 02/08/2020 - 7:18pm
    It makes good since,

    @Raggedy Ann . Good observation.

    #1.1
    I thought I was the only person who came up with that!

    brae-70 on Sat, 02/08/2020 - 5:03pm
    That's an apt description

    of what Matthews is doing: "radical pants pooping hysteria". As opposed, say, to moderate pants pooping hysteria.

    Not Henry Kissinger on Sat, 02/08/2020 - 8:40pm
    Enough is enough.

    @brae-70
    In light of the problems that have emerged in the implementation of the delegate selection Chis Matthews' "Scare the Bejeezus Out of His Core Boomer Audience' plan and in order to assure public confidence in the results, I am calling on the Iowa Democratic Party MSNBC to immediately begin a recanvass of Chris Matthews' brain .

    of what Matthews is doing: "radical pants pooping hysteria". As opposed, say, to moderate pants pooping hysteria.

    WoodsDweller on Sat, 02/08/2020 - 5:25pm
    Russia == Communism ==

    Russia == Communism == Socialism only works for old folks. Communist Russia has been gone for a generation. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union the propaganda machine shifted to Moslem Terrorists. A whole generation has grown up not remotely fussed about socialism. Young voters prefer "socialism" to "capitalism".
    So for this to work at all it has to be directed at the 65+ voters. So far they've been supporting Biden, but that may not last much longer. They won't sit out the election. They'll maybe be undecided for a while, but will come home to New Dealer Bernie.

    janis b on Sat, 02/08/2020 - 7:54pm
    I wonder, WD

    @WoodsDweller

    So for this to work at all it has to be directed at the 65+ voters. So far they've been supporting Biden, but that may not last much longer. They won't sit out the election. They'll maybe be undecided for a while, but will come home to New Dealer Bernie.

    Judging from my conversations with my 91 year-old mom, she and her friends have transitioned from Biden to Bloomberg, and she refuses to consider Sanders. When I ask her why she is so averse to Sanders she says, "I just don't like him, period, and I can't explain why"! So I just shut up, knowing it would be a waste of breath.

    Russia == Communism == Socialism only works for old folks. Communist Russia has been gone for a generation. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union the propaganda machine shifted to Moslem Terrorists. A whole generation has grown up not remotely fussed about socialism. Young voters prefer "socialism" to "capitalism".
    So for this to work at all it has to be directed at the 65+ voters. So far they've been supporting Biden, but that may not last much longer. They won't sit out the election. They'll maybe be undecided for a while, but will come home to New Dealer Bernie.

    chuckutzman on Sat, 02/08/2020 - 5:32pm
    One of my major disappointments with Bernie was when

    he signed up for Russia, Russia, Russia. I can't decide if he is dumb or just lacks the balls to do this job.

    entrepreneur on Sat, 02/08/2020 - 5:43pm
    I am very disappointed about that also. Hypothetically, if

    he saw the anti-capitalist smears coming (he's been doing this a long time) maybe he didn't want to do anything to play into that trap.

    @chuckutzman

    he signed up for Russia, Russia, Russia. I can't decide if he is dumb or just lacks the balls to do this job.

    Pricknick on Sat, 02/08/2020 - 6:35pm
    That's the reason

    @chuckutzman
    I have refused to support him monetarily this time.

    he signed up for Russia, Russia, Russia. I can't decide if he is dumb or just lacks the balls to do this job.

    on the cusp on Sat, 02/08/2020 - 6:50pm
    Me, too.

    @Pricknick He had agreed to support Hillary, and he honored his commitment. That was initially my reason for non-support. I might have been convinced to throw money at his campaign, until he started on the Russia Cold War bs.
    Russian interference was never proven, and I lived through the Cold War doing nuclear bomb drills. Not only is it endangering the globe, it is a horrible fear to instill in little kids who have to cope with the fear of their family being vaporized.
    We have enough global fear over climate change. Do we really need to foist another existential threat on everyone?

    #4
    I have refused to support him monetarily this time.

    janis b on Sat, 02/08/2020 - 7:56pm
    Maybe?

    @Pricknick

    you could just give 2/3 or 3/4 of a donation, to cover the other things you support Sanders for ; ).

    #4
    I have refused to support him monetarily this time.

    Pricknick on Sat, 02/08/2020 - 8:26pm
    Sorry

    @janis b
    but no.
    The russia bullshit was propagated by a loser he worked so hard to support.
    He knows this but most americans don't. He's in a conundrum. How many tinfoils will he lose if he calls it out? How many clear thinkers will he wins if he does?
    Unless he stands up to those that wish him bad, he will never prevail.
    I like Bernie.

    #4.2

    you could just give 2/3 or 3/4 of a donation, to cover the other things you support Sanders for ; ).

    janis b on Sat, 02/08/2020 - 8:55pm
    I know you like him

    @Pricknick

    He knows this but most americans don't. He's in a conundrum. How many tinfoils will he lose if he calls it out? How many clear thinkers will he wins if he does?

    I think if the answers to those questions were more clear Sanders might be more forthright. I support being sincere regardless of outcomes in most cases, because I think ultimately it is the basis for genuine understanding. But for Sanders it is critical to 'pick his fights', an approach that seems to apply even more to politics (unfortunately) than relationships.

    #4.2.2
    but no.
    The russia bullshit was propagated by a loser he worked so hard to support.
    He knows this but most americans don't. He's in a conundrum. How many tinfoils will he lose if he calls it out? How many clear thinkers will he wins if he does?
    Unless he stands up to those that wish him bad, he will never prevail.
    I like Bernie.

    Pricknick on Sat, 02/08/2020 - 9:08pm
    That's the issue.

    @janis b

    But for Sanders it is critical to 'pick his fights'

    He needs to stop picking and fight all the time.
    He's in the bully pulpit and he needs to show it.
    He has it in him.

    #4.2.2.1

    He knows this but most americans don't. He's in a conundrum. How many tinfoils will he lose if he calls it out? How many clear thinkers will he wins if he does?

    I think if the answers to those questions were more clear Sanders might be more forthright. I support being sincere regardless of outcomes in most cases, because I think ultimately it is the basis for genuine understanding. But for Sanders it is critical to 'pick his fights', an approach that seems to apply even more to politics (unfortunately) than relationships.

    janis b on Sat, 02/08/2020 - 9:16pm
    I understand where you're coming from.

    @Pricknick

    But, as long as bullying is the strategy I lose a sense of comfortable.

    He needs to stop picking and fight all the time.
    He's in the bully pulpit and he needs to show it.
    He has it in him.

    #4.2.2.1.1

    But for Sanders it is critical to 'pick his fights'

    He needs to stop picking and fight all the time.
    He's in the bully pulpit and he needs to show it.
    He has it in him.

    snoopydawg on Sat, 02/08/2020 - 9:28pm
    I won't give him a pass because Russia Gate is

    @janis b

    bogus. There is no reason anyone should be parroting the new Cold War propaganda. This only leads to one thing. We have already put mini nukes on submarines. Russia responded by launching a new plane that can carry nukes. This has no happy ending.

    #4.2.2.1.1.1

    But, as long as bullying is the strategy I lose a sense of comfortable.

    He needs to stop picking and fight all the time.
    He's in the bully pulpit and he needs to show it.
    He has it in him.

    The Voice In th... on Sat, 02/08/2020 - 7:53pm
    He's not dumb

    @chuckutzman
    Sadly, that leaves the alternative.

    he signed up for Russia, Russia, Russia. I can't decide if he is dumb or just lacks the balls to do this job.

    Not Henry Kissinger on Sat, 02/08/2020 - 8:07pm
    Hillary...

    was pushing the anti Russia narrative all through the Fall of 2016, in one debate explicitly calling Trump ' Putin's puppet '.

    The narrative was initially weaponized against Trump. Only later did they try it on Bernie.

    Dr. John Carpenter on Sat, 02/08/2020 - 8:09pm
    Definitely part of the plan

    @Not Henry Kissinger I'm pretty sure the leaked emails Wikileaks got have an outline of the RUSSIA plan. Restarting the Cold War was always the goal (or rather oil and pipelines were the actual goal.)

    was pushing the anti Russia narrative all through the Fall of 2016, in one debate explicitly calling Trump ' Putin's puppet '.

    The narrative was initially weaponized against Trump. Only later did they try it on Bernie.

    entrepreneur on Sat, 02/08/2020 - 8:48pm
    Ok. Interesting. So the timing wouldn't work then.

    @Not Henry Kissinger

    was pushing the anti Russia narrative all through the Fall of 2016, in one debate explicitly calling Trump ' Putin's puppet '.

    The narrative was initially weaponized against Trump. Only later did they try it on Bernie.

    Not Henry Kissinger on Sat, 02/08/2020 - 9:01pm
    Right...

    @entrepreneur @entrepreneur

    but the thing to remember here is that Russiagate is a multi-headed beast that can be used to further a lot of different agendas. So it's not JUST about Trump or Bernie or McConnell or any other single person.

    It's about weaponizing Russiagate against ALL Deep State opponents.

    Bernie's just one of many projects.

    #5

    snoopydawg on Sat, 02/08/2020 - 8:17pm
    I read that Obama's crew cooked up Russia Russia

    in the chance Trump lost but wouldn't accept the results. If he made a stink about losing then Obama would've accused him of working with Russia. This was at the start of this 3 year long crap show so I don't know if I can find the article on it.

    Joe posted a link in the EBs that talks about how both parties are in on on the scam because the new Cold War is great business for defense companies and their profits will make their way into congress hands. And is what the space force is about too. Containing Russia and China and making lots of money that will of course have to come from social programs. Yippee.

    The Voice In th... on Sat, 02/08/2020 - 8:57pm
    Lots of luck containing China

    @snoopydawg
    They have a stranglehold on our economy. The only thing we produce is weapons and about half of our vehicles. In fact, CHINA produces ROM's for our weapons!

    in the chance Trump lost but wouldn't accept the results. If he made a stink about losing then Obama would've accused him of working with Russia. This was at the start of this 3 year long crap show so I don't know if I can find the article on it.

    Joe posted a link in the EBs that talks about how both parties are in on on the scam because the new Cold War is great business for defense companies and their profits will make their way into congress hands. And is what the space force is about too. Containing Russia and China and making lots of money that will of course have to come from social programs. Yippee.

    entrepreneur on Sat, 02/08/2020 - 8:59pm
    Yep. We outsourced all of our electronics production. No

    national security issues there. {snark}
    @The Voice In the Wilderness

    #6
    They have a stranglehold on our economy. The only thing we produce is weapons and about half of our vehicles. In fact, CHINA produces ROM's for our weapons!

    [Feb 08, 2020] Its the same people, the same Empire fanboys

    Feb 08, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    William Gruff , Feb 8 2020 19:58 utc | 18

    ITT: Empire fanbois trying to hype the impact of their "team's" latest weapon.

    It is the same people and motivation behind the loud assertions that America killed "thousands and thousands of Russians!" when bombing in Dier ez-Zor. Just masturbatory wishcasting.

    [Feb 08, 2020] Pushing Russia out of the circle of friends of the United States (and Russia has never been an enemy of the United States, who knows the history of relations between the United States and Russia, knows what I'm talking about) can only double suckers and boobies

    Feb 08, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

    Helg Saracen , 3 hours ago link

    My favorite phrase - Americans are suckers and boobies. Pushing Russia out of the circle of friends of the United States (and Russia has never been an enemy of the United States, who knows the history of relations between the United States and Russia, knows what I'm talking about) can only double suckers and boobies. In general, the ship "Russia" finally sailed from the US coast. It's a pity.

    [Feb 07, 2020] Just one subjective opinion ;-)

    Feb 07, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

    Rusty Trombone , 43 minutes ago link

    Trump is in many ways a narcissistic scumbag...but given the alternative of any of these degenerate limp wristed faggots and gun grabbing communists who want to pay reparations for slavery to people who were never slaves, transgender 7 year olds and have their mental illness rammed down our throats, open borders, and whatever assorted lunacy is in vogue with their purple haired minions ?

    Yeah, go **** yourself.

    Trump, it's not even close.

    Gaius Petronius , 13 minutes ago link

    Instant classic. Love it.

    [Feb 07, 2020] Russia, Russia, Russia

    Feb 07, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Likklemore , Feb 6 2020 17:48 utc | 32

    Kudos b.

    Demrats gave Trump the best week of his presidency.

    Sadly, this is an example of not letting go.

    US Senate Panel Finds No Evidence of Alleged Russian Interference in 2016 Vote
    LINK


    The Senate Intelligence Committee said in a report released on Thursday that again it saw no evidence of alleged Russian interference changing any votes or manipulating voting machines in the 2016 US presidential election.

    "The Committee has seen no evidence that any votes were changed or that any voting machines were manipulated", the Intelligence Committee said in its report into allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election.[.]

    found no evidence but Russia, Russia, Russia the bogeyman. Will someone remind D.C. of U.S. interference in, and overthrow of elected governments in countries around the world?

    karlof1 , Feb 6 2020 19:04 utc | 55

    Several online items worth reading. First is Giraldi's "Why Both Republicans and Democrats Want Russia to Become the Enemy of Choice" , which refers to the D-Party Establishment with Sanders not getting any mention.

    Then there're several items at Common Dreams , the first having an excellent vid featuring Krystal Ball of The Hill reporting how the election was rigged . It also links to an important Twitter thread by Naomi Klein . I found this message perhaps the most important part:

    "If we honestly believe we are building a movement, not just an electoral campaign, then the relationships we forge, and the political education we do along the way, is never wasted. It's all part of building power, which we badly need no matter what happens. Nothing is wasted."

    There's more on Iowa, but IMO this new info on DNC Chair Perez's corruption needs to be exposed--IMO, Bloomberg is now the DNC's man despite the favors bestowed on Buttigieg.

    [Feb 05, 2020] Trump as a middle level gangster

    There is a real danger for gangstrism mode of forign policy -- policimakers live in a bubble, an echo chamber, and all of their conclusions are based on faulty inputs...
    Feb 05, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

    Diplomacy, accommodation, compromise, mutuality, the perspectives of others: It is already clear these are among the defining features of 21 st century statecraft. Jealous of its dissipating preeminence, the U.S. proves indifferent to all such considerations. There is no longer even the pretense of deriving authority by way of example, so radical is Washington's preference for coercive might alone. The paradox is not difficult to grasp: In displays of unadorned power we also find the limits of power. The Trump administration's conduct of foreign policy -- primarily but not only in the Mideast -- makes failure and an American comeuppance inevitable.

    ... ... ...

    Many years ago, during the first term of George W. Bush, Karl Rove gave an interview in which he asserted that the U.S. was no longer bound by "discernible reality," as the White House aide put it. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," Rove explained. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out."

    Rove Warning Overlooked

    This singularly arrogant remark was much noted at the time but was thought to reflect only the kookier extremes of the Bush II administration. What a misinterpretation that has proven to be. Rove was effectively warning us that the U.S. had already begun its fundamental shift toward sheer power as the instrument of its foreign policies. This is plain in hindsight.

    ... These policies share two features. They rest on power alone -- in this they are Karl Rove's dream made flesh -- and they are bound to fail, if they are not already failing.

    It is evident now that the European allies will defy U.S. efforts to sabotage NordStream 2 and keep Huawei out of 5–G. London announced last week that it will allow Huawei to participate in its 5–G development program. Germany made a similar decision last autumn.

    In the Middle East, it is equally clear that Iran has no intention of buckling under U.S. sanctions and military threats. U.S. influence in the region has already begun to decline since the drone assassination of a top Iranian general on Iraqi soil early last month. The Pentagon now faces popular Iraqi demands to withdraw its troops.

    And now the Mideast -- Israel and Palestine. The Trump administration sacrificed all claim to "honest broker" status when it recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital in December 2017 -- a unilateral move that prompted the Palestinians to stop talking to the U.S. about the plan Jared Kushner was by then developing. Of all that is wrong with the new Trump–Kushner plan, the absence of Palestinian input more or less assures that it will prove dead on arrival.

    Power alone is power blind. Power blind is certain to fail, for it cannot see its way.

    [Feb 05, 2020] Stumbling Into Catastrophe by Daniel McAdams

    Feb 04, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Daniel McAdams via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

    There is a real danger for foreign policy advisors and analysts – and especially those they serve – when they are in a bubble, an echo chamber, and all of their conclusions are based on faulty inputs. Needless to say it's even worse when they believe they can create their own reality and invent outcomes out of whole cloth.

    Things seldom go as planned in these circumstances.

    President Trump was sold a bill of goods on the assassination of Iran's revered military leader, Qassim Soleimani, likely by a cabal around Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the long-discredited neocon David Wurmser. A former Netanyahu advisor and Iraq war propagandist, Wurmser reportedly sent memos to his mentor, John Bolton, while Bolton was Trump's National Security Advisor (now, of course, he's the hero of the #resistance for having turned on his former boss) promising that killing Soleimani would be a cost-free operation that would catalyze the Iranian people against their government and bring about the long-awaited regime change in that country. The murder of Soleimani – the architect of the defeat of ISIS – would "rattle the delicate internal balance of forces and the control over them upon which the [Iranian] regime depends for stability and survival," wrote Wurmser.

    As is most often the case with neocons, he was dead wrong.

    The operation was not cost-free. On the contrary. Assassinating Soleimani on Iraqi soil resulted in the Iraqi parliament – itself the product of our "bringing democracy" to the country – voting to expel US forces even as the vote by the people's representatives was roundly rejected by the people who brought the people the people's representatives. In a manner of speaking.

    Trump's move had an effect opposite to the one promised by neocons. It did not bring Iranians out to the street to overthrow their government – it catalyzed opposition across Iraq's various political and religious factions to the continued US military presence and further tightened Iraq's relationship with Iran. And short of what would be a catastrophic war initiated by the US (with little or no support from allies), there is not a thing Trump can do about it.

    Iran's retaliatory attack on two US bases in Iraq was initially sold by President Trump as merely a pin-prick. No harm, no foul, no injuries. This despite the fact that he must have known about US personnel injured in the attack. The reason for the lie was that Trump likely understands how devastating it would be to his presidency to escalate with Iran. So the truth began to trickle out slowly – 11 US military members were injured, but it was just "like a headache." Now we know that 50 US troops were treated for traumatic brain injury after the attack. This may not be the last of it – but don't count on the mainstream media to do any reporting.

    The Iranian FARS news agency reported at the time of the attack that US personnel had been injured and the response by the US government was to completely take that media outlet off the Internet by order of the US Treasury !

    Last week the US House voted to cancel the 2002 authorization for war on Iraq and to prohibit the use of funds for war on Iran without Congressional authorization. It is a significant, if largely symbolic, move to rein in the oft-used excuse of the Iraq war authorization for blatantly unrelated actions like the assassination of Soleimani and Obama's thousands of airstrikes on Syria and Iraq .

    President Trump has argued that prohibiting funds for military action against Iran actually makes war more likely, as he would be restricted from the kinds of military-strikes-short-of-war like his attack on Syria after the alleged chemical attack in Douma in 2018 (claims which have recently fallen apart ). The logic is faulty and reflects again the danger of believing one's own propaganda. As we have seen from the Iranian military response to the Soleimani assassination, Trump's military-strikes-short-of-war are having a ratchet-like effect rather than a pressure-release or deterrent effect.

    As the financial and current events analysis site ZeroHedge put it recently:

    [S]ince last summer's "tanker wars", Trump has painted himself into a corner on Iran, jumping from escalation to escalation (to this latest "point of no return big one" in the form of the ordered Soleimani assassination) -- yet all the while hoping to avoid a major direct war. The situation reached a climax where there were "no outs" (Trump was left with two 'bad options' of either back down or go to war).

    The Iranians have little to lose at this point and America's European allies are, even if impotent, fed up with the US obsession with Saudi Arabia and Israel as a basis for its Middle East policy.

    So why open this essay with a photo of Trump celebrating his dead-on-arrival "Deal of The Century" for Israel and Palestine? Because this is once again a gullible and weak President Trump being led by the nose into the coming Middle East conflagration. Left without even a semblance of US sympathy for their plight, the Palestinians after the roll-out of this "peace" plan will again see that they have no friends outside Syria, Iran, and Lebanon. As Israel continues to flirt with the idea of simply annexing large parts of the West Bank, it is clear that the brakes are off of any Israeli reticence to push for maximum control over Palestinian territory. So what is there to lose?

    Trump believes he's advancing peace in the Middle East, while the excellent Mondoweiss website rightly observes that a main architect of the "peace plan," Trump's own son-in-law Jared Kushner, "taunts Palestinians because he wants them to reject his 'peace plan.'" Rejection of the plan is a green light to a war of annihilation on the Palestinians.

    It appears that the center may not hold, that the self-referential echo chamber that passes for Beltway "expert" analysis will again be caught off guard in the consequence-free profession that is neocon foreign policy analysis. "Gosh we didn't see that coming!" But the next day they are back on the teevee stations as great experts.

    Clouds gathering...


    Minamoto , 23 minutes ago link

    It is hard to believe that Trump has any confidence in Jared Kushner. Yet, he does enough to go public with a one-sided plan developed without Palestinian input.

    francis scott falseflag , 41 minutes ago link

    a real danger for foreign policy advisors and analysts – and especially those they serve – when they are in a bubble, an echo chamber, and all of their conclusions are based on faulty inputs.

    The same is true of the economists and financial analysts who live in the bubble of the NSYE and the echo chamber of Manhattan. All of their conclusions are based on faulty inputs.

    Ruler , 1 hour ago link

    The problem all incompetent leaders have, is seeing how their opponents see them.

    Bokkenrijder , 1 hour ago link

    If Trump continues to be 'dumb' enough to consistently hire these people and consistently listen to them, and if his supporters continue to be dumb enough to consistently believe all the lies and excuses, then Trump and his supporters are 100% involved in the neoCON.

    RafterManFMJ , 1 hour ago link

    Dude, it's 666D chess!

    The Real John Bolton

    [Feb 03, 2020] Fake interference, real Israel firms with deep ties to Israeli intelligence

    Feb 03, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Likklemore , Feb 2 2020 17:16 utc | 8

    Russia, China and Iran are already being blamed for using tech to undermine the 2020 election. Yet, the very technologies they are allegedly using were created by a web of companies with deep ties to Israeli intelligence.

    Manufacturing Fear with a click "Bring down nations to their knees"

    [Feb 02, 2020] Russiagate Regrets Why Washington Remains Focused on the Wrong Foreign Influence by Lyle J. Goldstein

    Jan 28, 2020 | nationalinterest.org

    ... ... ...

    The farce has claimed all kinds of convictions, but hardly any related to the actual case at hand. In fact, the Washington Post , a paper that has done much to whip up Russiagate hysteria, actually conducted a thorough analysis of the so-called Russian social media campaign and concluded, "there's no evidence that [Russians] did any particularly sophisticated targeting." Rather, Occam's Razor-type reasoning implies that Russian "trolls," like most other entities active on the web, were simply looking for clicks in order to make a buck from advertisers. In a sign that the Washington Post might not be completely oblivious to journalistic ethics, one of their reporters has surprisingly started a systematic effort to review the journalistic excesses of the last few years related to Russiagate. The New York Times has not attempted any similar soul-searching as regards the Russiagate hysteria regrettably, but had itself to admit that when it comes to "meddling in elections . . . we do it too."

    As someone who is occasionally forced to tread water in the Beltway swamp, I would also be very eager to see a certain draining of foreign influence from the American political process. But, at this point, I am at least as concerned with Bahrain influence , British influence , Chinese influence , German influence , Indian influence , Israeli influence , Japanese influence , Nigerian influence , Norwegian influence , Pakistani influence , Polish influence , Philippine influence , Saudi influence , South Korean influence , Taiwan influence , Turkish influence , Ukrainian influence , UAE influence , Vietnamese influence , etc. Sorry, President Putin, you are likely not even in the top twenty foreign powers currently manipulating the conduct of U.S. foreign policy, but Russiagate sure has made for an entertaining drama.

    As for those various espionage escapades, well, when the Hollywood blockbuster film Argo captured "Best Film" back in 2012, that moment seemed to crystallize a new and glorious era for America's intelligence agencies. Are our spies amazing or what -- not just creative -- but low-budget and good looking too? Perhaps now is the time for Hollywood to pick up another CIA script with Iran: the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953? That event, as much as any other, forms the essential backdrop for today's ominous developments in the Persian Gulf.

    Lyle J. Goldstein is Research Professor in the China Maritime Studies Institute (CMSI) at the United States Naval War College in Newport, RI. In addition to Chinese, he also speaks Russian and he is also an affiliate of the new Russia Maritime Studies Institute (RMSI) at Naval War College. You can reach him at [email protected] . The opinions in his columns are entirely his own and do not reflect the official assessments of the U.S. Navy or any other agency of the U.S. government.

    [Feb 02, 2020] Despite being told for years that "Internet Research Agency" was working for Putin the DOJ admits it's not going to offer any evidence in the case "that the Russian Government sponsored the alleged conspiracy"

    Feb 02, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Qparticle , Feb 2 2020 16:13 utc | 2

    Russiagate:

    Rosie memos @almostjingo - 1:40 UTC · Jan 30, 2020

    Well geez this is awkward. Despite being told for years that "Internet Research Agency" was working for Putin the DOJ admits it's not going to offer any evidence in the case "that the Russian Government sponsored the alleged conspiracy" MUH RUSSIA. @TheJusticeDept
    -- --

    Neither The DoJ or the FBI are aware of the fact that more than 60% of Israeli army speak Russian fluently just like their native hebrew, or better!?

    JUST SAYING...

    [Feb 01, 2020] Elites Have Destroyed A Possible US-Russia Alliance To Contain China

    Feb 01, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning,

    There's no need to rehash the sordid politics of the U.S.-Russia relationship since 2014. That relationship became collateral damage to gross corruption in Ukraine.

    The U.S. and its allies, especially the UK under globalists like David Cameron, wanted to peel off Ukraine from the Russian orbit and make it part of the EU and eventually NATO.

    From Russia's perspective, this was unacceptable. It may be true that most Americans cannot find Ukraine on a map, but a simple glance at a map reveals that much of Ukraine lies East of Moscow.

    Putting Ukraine in a Western alliance such as NATO would create a crescent stretching from Luhansk in the South through Poland in the West and back around to Estonia in the North. There are almost no natural obstacles between that arc and Moscow; it's mostly open steppe.

    Completion of this "NATO Crescent" would leave Moscow open to invasion in ways that Napoleon and Hitler could only dream. Of course, this situation was and is unacceptable to Moscow.

    Ukraine itself is culturally divided along geographic lines. The Eastern and Southern provinces (Luhansk, Donetsk, Crimea and Dnipro) are ethnically Russian, follow the Orthodox Church and the Patriarch of Moscow, and welcome commercial relations with Russia.

    The Western provinces (Kiev, Lviv) are Slavic, adhere to the Catholic Church and the Pope in Rome, and look to the EU and U.S. for investment and aid.

    Prior to 2014, an uneasy truce existed between Washington and Moscow that allowed a pro-Russian President while at the same time permitting increasing contact with the EU. Then the U.S. and UK overreached by allowing the CIA and MI6 to foment a "color revolution" in Kiev called the "Euromaidan Revolution."

    Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych resigned and fled to Moscow. Pro-EU protestors took over the government and signed an EU Association Agreement.

    In response, Putin annexed Crimea and declared it part of Russia. He also infiltrated Donetsk and Luhansk and helped establish de facto pro-Russian regional governments. The U.S. and EU responded with harsh economic sanctions on Russia.

    Ukraine has been in turmoil (with increasing corruption) ever since. U.S.-Russia relations have been ice-cold, exactly as the globalists intended.

    The U.S- induced fiasco in Ukraine not only upset U.S.-Russia relations, it derailed a cozy money laundering operation involving Ukrainian oligarchs and Democratic politicians. The Obama administration flooded Ukraine with non-lethal financial assistance.

    This aid was amplified by a four-year, $17.5 billion loan program to Ukraine from the IMF, approved in March 2015. Interestingly, this loan program was pushed by Obama at a time when Ukraine did not meet the IMF's usual borrowing criteria.

    Some of this money was used for intended purposes, some was skimmed by the oligarchs, and the rest was recycled to Democratic politicians in the form of consulting contracts, advisory fees, director's fees, contributions to foundations and NGOs and other channels.

    Hunter Biden and the Clinton Foundations were major recipients of this corrupt recycling. Other beneficiaries included George Soros-backed "open society" organizations, which further directed the money to progressive left-wing groups in the U.S.

    This cozy wheel-of-fortune was threatened when Donald Trump became president. Trump genuinely desired improved relations with Russia and was not on the receiving end of laundered aid to Ukraine.

    Hillary Clinton was supposed to continue the Obama policies, but she failed in the general election. Trump was a threat to everything the globalists, Democrats and pro-NATO elites had constructed in the 2010s.

    The globalists wanted China and the U.S. to team up against Russia. Trump understood correctly that China was the main enemy and therefore a closer union between the U.S. and Russia was essential.

    The elites' efforts to derail Trump gave rise to the "Russia collusion" hoax. While no one disputes that Russia sought to sow confusion in the U.S. election in 2016, that's something the Russians and their Soviet predecessors had been doing since 1917. By itself, little harm was done.

    Yet, the elites seized on this to concoct a story of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. The real collusion was among Democrats, Ukrainians and Russians to discredit Trump.

    It took the Robert Mueller investigation two years finally to conclude there was no collusion between Trump and the Russians. By then, the damage was done. It was politically toxic for Trump to reach out to the Russians. That would be spun by the media as more evidence of "collusion."

    Russian President Vladimir Putin (l.) has recently named a new Prime Minister, Mikhail Mishustin (r.). This is part of a complex government reorganization designed to extend Putin's rule beyond existing term limits. This is a setback for democracy, but may be a plus for the economy because it adds stability and continuity to Putin's programs.

    This whirl of false charges, cover-ups, and deep state sabotage finally led to Trump's impeachment on December 18, 2019.

    Fortunately, the Senate impeachment trial may soon be behind us with Trump's exoneration in hand (although new impeachment charges and false accusations cannot be ruled out).

    Is the stage finally set for improved U.S.-Russia relations, relief from U.S. sanctions, and a significant increase in U.S. direct foreign investment in Russia?

    Right now, my models are telling us that Russia is one of the most attractive targets for foreign investment in the world. Just because U.S. policymakers missed the boat does not mean that investors must do the same.

    Russia is often denigrated by Wall Street analysts and mainstream economists who know little about the country. Russia is the world's largest country by area and has the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons of any country in the world.

    It has the world's 11th largest economy at over $1.6 trillion in annual GDP, ahead of South Korea, Spain and Australia and not far behind Canada, Brazil and Italy.

    It also is the world's third largest producer of oil and related liquids, with output of 11.4 million barrels per day, about 11% of the world's total. The U.S. (17.8 million b/d), Saudi Arabia (12.4 million b/d) and Russia combine to provide 41% of the world's liquid fuels. The latter two countries effectively control the world's oil price by agreeing on output quotas.

    Russia has almost no external dollar-denominated debt and has a debt-to-GDP ratio of only 13.50% (the comparable ratio for the United States is 106%).

    In short, Russia is too big and too powerful to ignore despite the derogatory and uninformed claims of globalists. Importantly, Russia is emerging from the oil price shock of 2014-2016 and is in a solid recovery.

    The stage is now set for significant economic expansion as illustrated in the chart below from Moody's Analytics:

    This graphic analysis from Moody's Analytics divides major economies into categories of Recovery, Expansion, Slowdown and Recession. Economies revolve clockwise through these four phases. The U.S. is in a Slowdown phase with some risk of Recession. Russia is in the Recovery phase heading toward Expansion. The Russian situation is the most attractive for investors because it offers cheap entry points with high returns as the Expansion phase begins.

    Russia has also gone to great lengths to insulate itself from U.S. economic sanctions. Their reserves have recovered to the $500 billion level that existed before the 2014 oil price collapse with one important difference. The dollar component of reserves has shrunk substantially while the gold component has increased to over 20%.

    With the recent surge in gold prices, Russia's reserves get a significant boost (when expressed in dollars) because of the higher dollar value of the gold reserves. Gold cannot be hacked, frozen or seized, as is the case with digital dollar assets.

    Russia's fortunes have been improving not only because of low debt and higher gold prices but also because of higher oil prices. The country is poised for a strong expansion, even if U.S. hostility caused by the Democrats continues.

    If Trump regains his footing after impeachment and wins a second term (which I expect), investors can expect warmer relations with Russia and an even more powerful Russian economic expansion than the one already underway. Tags

    [Jan 31, 2020] Tucker John Bolton has always been a snake

    Bolton was appointed by Adelson.
    Jan 27, 2020 | www.youtube.com

    Bolton's tell-all book leaks during Senate trial. #FoxNews


    Yamaha Venture , 3 days ago

    Mitt Romney is a joke.

    Michael Harvey , 2 days ago

    John Bolton wants war everywhere to line his pockets with money.

    Stephen C , 1 day ago

    The "right" gets the left, but doesn't agree with them. The "left" doesn't understand the "right".

    Citizen Se7en , 2 days ago

    "Bolton's resignation was one of the highlights of the president's first term." Truer words have never been spoken.

    Jack Albright , 2 days ago

    This story is also called "the scorpion and the frog".

    Ragnar Lothbrok , 3 days ago

    John Bolton should be given a helmet and a gun and sent to the next war. Let's see how he likes it.

    Stratchona , 1 day ago

    Trump.." I don't know John Bolton,never met him,don't know what he does."

    Jaret Glenn , 2 days ago

    Time to investigate Romney's son working for the oil company in the Ukraine.

    Regan Orr , 2 days ago

    Romney's Holy Underwear is Cutting off the Blood Supply to his Deep St Brain!

    Marjo , 2 days ago (edited)

    I never liked Bolton. I sensed he was out for himself, at anyone's expense. War monger too. He had many people fooled.

    Shara Kirkby , 3 days ago

    Bolton wants war anywhere and forever!

    David Dorrell , 1 day ago (edited)

    Frickin' Globalist peckerwoods. John Bolton and his pal, Mitt Romney.

    Olivier Bolton , 2 days ago

    Bolton wanted war so he got the boot...the fact he brings out his book now just looks like vengean$$

    Max Liftoff , 2 days ago

    2:30 Because Bolton never served in the military he truly passionately loved war :)) LMAO Tucker nailed it.

    ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ , 1 day ago

    The left's championing of John Bolton is further proof that TDS has made their minds turn to sludge.

    j abe , 3 days ago

    Can someone expaine to me how mit romney is still geting votes from ppl

    Mark Whitley , 2 days ago

    Bolton is a war mongering narcissist that wanted his war, didn't get it, & is now acting like a spoilt child that didn't get his way & is laying on the floor kicking & screaming!

    Tim Fronimos , 2 days ago

    Regarding John Bolton's book, is this the first book that he's colored. just curious

    newuserandhiscrew 22 , 2 days ago

    Everyone: Bolton: "take me in oh tender woman, take me in for heaven's sake"

    Brittany Ward , 1 day ago

    I can't fathom that people actually believe everything the media says!

    [Jan 31, 2020] Trump excoriates Bolton in tweets this morning

    Highly recommended!
    Trump is lying. Bolton was appointed by Adelson and Trump can't refuse Adelson protégé.
    Jan 31, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    Trump excoriates Bolton in tweets this morning:
    "For a guy who couldn't get approved for the Ambassador to the U.N. years ago, couldn't get approved for anything since, 'begged' me for a non Senate approved job, which I gave him despite many saying 'Don't do it, sir,' takes the job, mistakenly says 'Libyan Model' on T.V., and ... many more mistakes of judgement [sic], gets fired because frankly, if I listened to him, we would be in World War Six by now, and goes out and IMMEDIATELY writes a nasty & untrue book. All Classified National Security. Who would do this?"

    IMO, Trump is a fantastic POTUS for this day and age, but he wasn't on his A game when he brought Bolton onboard. He should have known better and, was, apparently, warned. Maybe Trump thought he could control him and use him as a threatening pit bull. Mistake. Bolton is greedy as well as vindictive.

    Posted by: Eric Newhill | 29 January 2020 at 09:30 AM

    [Jan 29, 2020] For the last three years, all the "resistance oxygen" was sucked up by the warmongering against Russia

    Highly recommended!
    Jan 29, 2020 | off-guardian.org

    Charlotte Russe ,

    Trump doesn't have a thing to fear he's been a huge asset to the security state, whose Russiagate theatrics provided mainstream media news with just enough bullshit to distract the public, so that Trump could never be aggressively attacked from the Left. For the last three years, all the "resistance oxygen" was sucked up by the warmongering against Russia. Meanwhile, this enabled Trump to successfully pass a slew of reactionary legislation and fasttrack numerous lifetime appointments to the federal court without barely a whimper from the phony Dems. In fact, the Democrats unanimously voted for Trump's military budget. The same idiot they called unhinged was given the power to start WWIII.

    No matter how much liberals complain–the wealthy are happy with the status quo and the right-wing Evangelicals are as pleased as punch. However, there's quite a large number of disaffected Trump voters looking at Tulsi, but could eventually come Bernie's way. Especially, if Tulsi endorses Bernie. This discontented bunch includes the working-poor, the indebted young, and all the folks who are not doing economically well under Trump's fabulous stock market. It especially includes the military families who were promised an end to the miserable foreign interventions. Bernie, has some appeal to these folks. His platform certainly resonates with all those who can barely pay their health insurance
    premiums, and whose salary is NOT nearly considered a living wage. But Bernie could win hands-down and steal Trump's base, if he only had the courage to UNAPOLOGETICALLY speak out against US imperialism and connect all the dots explaining how the security state plundered the treasury for decades f–king over the working-class.

    [Jan 29, 2020] How The U.S. Regime And Its Allies Enforce Their Smears And Their Other Lies by Eric Zuesse

    Notable quotes:
    "... the West's equivalent to the former Soviet Union's systematic, and equally pervasive, truth-suppression, to fool the public into thinking that the Government represents them, no matter how much it does not. ..."
    "... (The chief trick in this regard is to fool them into thinking that since there is more than one political party, one of them will be "good," even though the fact may actually be that each of the parties represents simply a different faction of a psychopathically evil aristocracy. After all: each party lied and supported invading Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, and Syria constantly; and no party acknowledges that the 2014 regime-change in Ukraine was a U.S. coup instead of a domestic Ukrainian democratic revolution. On such important matters, they all lie, and in basically the same ways. These lies are bipartisan, even though most of the other political lies are heavily partisan.) ..."
    "... The great then-independent investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald headlined about that interview, at Salon on 18 April 2012, "Attacks on RT and Assange reveal much about the critics: Those who pretend to engage in adversarial journalism will invariably hate those who actually do it." How true that was, and unfortunately still is! And Assange himself is the best example of it. ..."
    "... Let's examine the unstated premises at work here. There is apparently a rule that says it's perfectly OK for a journalist to work for a media outlet owned and controlled by a weapons manufacturer (GE/NBC/MSNBC), or by the U.S. and British governments (BBC/Stars & Stripes/Voice of America), or by Rupert Murdoch and Saudi Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal (Wall St. Journal/Fox News), or by a banking corporation with long-standing ties to right-wing governments (Politico), or by for-profit corporations whose profits depend upon staying in the good graces of the U.S. government ( Kaplan/The Washington Post ), or by loyalists to one of the two major political parties (National Review/TPM/countless others), but it's an intrinsic violation of journalistic integrity to work for a media outlet owned by the Russian government. Where did that rule come from? ..."
    "... This is the American gospel, and it is called "capitalism." Oddly, after Russia switched to capitalism in 1991, the American gospel switched instead to pure global conquest -- über -imperialism -- and the American public didn't even blink. So: nowadays, capitalism has come to mean über-imperialism. That's today's American gospel. Adolf Hitler would be smiling, upon today's Amerika. ..."
    Jan 29, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    Without enforced suppression of truth, there would be no way that the U.S. and its allied regimes could continue hiding the lies that were behind their invasions of Iraq in 2003 , and of Syria since 2012 , and their coup against Ukraine in 2014 , and also of their takeovers and attempted takeovers of other countries that had refused to be bullied by the U.S. regime into complying with its obsessive anti-Russian demands -- America's subterranean continuation of the Cold War, even after Russia had quit the Cold War in 1991 .

    All of the lies are still being propounded by the U.S. regime and remain fully enforced by suppression of the truth about these matters.

    That's being done in all news-media except a few of the non -mainstream ones.

    So: this is about an actual Western samizdat - the West's equivalent to the former Soviet Union's systematic, and equally pervasive, truth-suppression, to fool the public into thinking that the Government represents them, no matter how much it does not.

    (The chief trick in this regard is to fool them into thinking that since there is more than one political party, one of them will be "good," even though the fact may actually be that each of the parties represents simply a different faction of a psychopathically evil aristocracy. After all: each party lied and supported invading Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, and Syria constantly; and no party acknowledges that the 2014 regime-change in Ukraine was a U.S. coup instead of a domestic Ukrainian democratic revolution. On such important matters, they all lie, and in basically the same ways. These lies are bipartisan, even though most of the other political lies are heavily partisan.)

    Right now, Julian Assange is rotting to death inside Britain's equivalent to the U.S. regime's Guantanamo Bay prison, which is Belmarsh Prison, in London. As the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia's article on Belmarsh Prison retrospectively admits, "Between 2001 and 2002, Belmarsh Prison was used to detain a number of people indefinitely without charge or trial under the provisions of the Part 4 of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, leading it to be called the 'British version of Guantanamo Bay'." However, only because of the case of Julian Assange is it now publicly known that this characterization of that prison is -- at least for him -- equally true today . And Assange is, indeed, being held there "indefinitely without charge or trial," even after his having previously been held in various other forms of confinement, ever since at least 12 April 2012, when -- being then 'temporarily' under house-arrest in Norfolk England, while awaiting trial on a manufactured rape-charge against him which was reluctantly abandoned by the Government only when the alleged victim refused to testify against him -- Assange broadcast an interview for RT, Russian Television, an interview of the head of Lebanon's Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah.

    The U.S.-and-allied regimes' billionaires-owned-and-controlled 'news'-media condemned Assange for this interview, because it enabled whomever still had an open mind, amongst the Western public, to hear from one of those billionares' destruction-targets (Nasrallah), and for Assange's doing this on the TV-news network of the main country that America's billionaires are especially trying to conquer, which is (and since 26 July 1945 has consistently been ) Russia.

    The great then-independent investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald headlined about that interview, at Salon on 18 April 2012, "Attacks on RT and Assange reveal much about the critics: Those who pretend to engage in adversarial journalism will invariably hate those who actually do it." How true that was, and unfortunately still is! And Assange himself is the best example of it. Greenwald wrote:

    Let's examine the unstated premises at work here. There is apparently a rule that says it's perfectly OK for a journalist to work for a media outlet owned and controlled by a weapons manufacturer (GE/NBC/MSNBC), or by the U.S. and British governments (BBC/Stars & Stripes/Voice of America), or by Rupert Murdoch and Saudi Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal (Wall St. Journal/Fox News), or by a banking corporation with long-standing ties to right-wing governments (Politico), or by for-profit corporations whose profits depend upon staying in the good graces of the U.S. government ( Kaplan/The Washington Post ), or by loyalists to one of the two major political parties (National Review/TPM/countless others), but it's an intrinsic violation of journalistic integrity to work for a media outlet owned by the Russian government. Where did that rule come from?

    But from 'temporary' house-arrest there, Assange was allowed asylum by Ecuador's progressive President Rafael Correa on 20 June 2012 , to stay in London's Ecuadoran Embassy, so as not to be seized by the UK regime to be sent to prison and probable death-without-trial in the U.S. To Correa's shock, it turned out that Correa's successor, Vice President Lenin Moreno, was actually a U.S. agent, who promptly forced Assange out of the Embassy, into Belmarsh prison, to die there or else become extradited to die in a U.S. prison, also without trial.

    And, for what, then, is Assange being imprisoned, and perhaps murdered? He divulged government secrets that should never even have been secrets! He raised the blanket of lies, which covers over these actually dictatorial clandestine international operations. He exposed these evil imperialistic operations, which are hidden behind (and under) that blanket of imperialists' lies. For this, he is being martyred -- a martyr for democracy, where there is no actual democracy (but only those lies).

    Here is an example:

    On December 29th, I headlined "Further Proof: U.S., UK, & France Committed War-Crime on 14 April 2018" and reported highlights of the latest Wikileaks document-dumps regarding a U.S.-UK-French operation to cover-up (via their control over the OPCW) their having committed an international war-crime when they had fired 105 missiles against Syria on 14 April 2018, which was done allegedly to punish Syria for having perpetrated a gas-attack in Douma seven days before -- except that there hadn't been any such gas-attack, but the OPCW simply lied and said that there might have been one, and that the Syrian Government might have done it! That's playing the public for suckers.

    Back on 3 November 2019, Fox News bannered "Fox News Poll: Bipartisan majorities want some U.S. troops to stay in Syria" and reported that when citing ISIS as America's enemy that must be defeated, 69% of U.S. respondents wanted U.S. troops to stay in Syria. But when did ISIS ever constitute a threat to U.S. national security? And under what international law is any U.S. soldier, who is inside Syria, anything other than an invader there? The answer, to both of these questions, is obviously "never" and "none." But if you are an investor in Lockheed Martin, don't you want Americans to be suckers about both ? And, so, they are . People such as Julian Assange don't want the public anywhere to be lied-to. Anyone who is in the propaganda-business -- serving companies such as Lockheed Martin -- wants the public to be suckers.

    This is the way the free market actually works. It works by lying, and in such a country the Government serves the people who have the money, and not the people who don't. The people who don't have the money are supposed to be lied-to. And, so, they are. But this is not democracy.

    Democracy, in fact, is impossible if the public are predominantly deceived.

    If the public are predominantly deceived, then the people who do the deceiving will be the dictators there. And if a country has dictators, then it's no democracy. In a totally free market, only the people with the most money will have any freedom at all; everyone else will be merely their suckers, who are fooled by the professionals at doing that -- lying.

    The super-rich enforce their smears, and their other lies, by hiring people to do this.

    When Barack Obama said that "The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation" - so that each other nation is "dispensable" - he was merely exemplifying the view that only the most powerful is indispensable, and that therefore everyone else is dispensable. Of course, this is the way that he, and Donald Trump, both have governed in the U.S. And Americans overwhelmingly endorse this viewpoint . They're fooled by both parties, because both parties serve only their respective billionaires -- and billionaires are above the law; they are the law, in America and its allied regimes. That's the way it is.

    This is the American gospel, and it is called "capitalism." Oddly, after Russia switched to capitalism in 1991, the American gospel switched instead to pure global conquest -- über -imperialism -- and the American public didn't even blink. So: nowadays, capitalism has come to mean über-imperialism. That's today's American gospel. Adolf Hitler would be smiling, upon today's Amerika.

    And as far as whistleblowers -- such as Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning, and other champions of honesty and of democracy -- are concerned: Americans agree with the billionaires, who detest and destroy such whistleblowers. Champions of democracy are shunned here, where PR reigns and real journalism is almost non-existent.

    [Jan 28, 2020] Pompeo's Petty Despotism

    Pompeo proved to be impulsive bully. Like Bolton, he is yet another "wise" Trump choice that disqualifies Trump for running in 2020 elections.
    Jan 28, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com
    Nomuka 15 hours ago • edited
    Well, it looks like I'll need to start contributing to NPR again. They are a little too woke for my tastes, but Pompeo is a liar, and frankly beyond the pale. A perfect representative of the current administration by the way. Kudos to NPR for standing up to him.
    TomG 10 hours ago
    One correction--instead of "by acting as if he is a petty despot" it should read "evermore blatantly showing the world the petty despot he is."
    bumbershoot 10 hours ago
    The Secretary of State has all of the vanity and arrogance of a diva, but none of the talent.

    Hmm, that seems to remind me of someone else in this administration...

    FL_Cottonmouth 9 hours ago
    Much like U.S. foreign policy, it seems that Mike Pompeo is going to ignore the facts and keep recklessly escalating the conflict. Surely he's aware that The Washington Post published the email correspondence between Ms. Kelley and press aide. This just makes him look like a coward.
    ZizaNiam 9 hours ago
    From the Trump voter perspective, this journalist should feel lucky that she wasn't sent to Guantanamo Bay. All Trump voters think this way, there is no exception.
    Taras77 6 hours ago
    Absolutely no longer any surprises about this pathetic individual!

    [Jan 27, 2020] Trump's Faith Advisor Paula White: To say no to president Trump would be saying no to God

    From comments: "The Christian Taliban." George Carlin: "GOD NEEDS MORR MONNEEYYY"
    Nov 05, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    'When I walk on White House grounds, God walks on White House grounds.' -- Meet Paula White, spiritual adviser to President Trump and the latest addition to the White House staff.
    " Subscribe to NowThis: http://go.nowth.is/News_Subscribe

    Hansel Ontaneda , 2 months ago

    "To say no to president Trump would be saying no to God" this s**t is just mind blowing

    [Jan 27, 2020] The end of Trump? Trump betrayed all major promises of his 2016 election campaign. Trump needs to go...

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... This may well be a fatal mistake of his. And while i have thought Trump to be the lesser evil compared to Clinton, i am now at a point where i seriously fear what his ignorance and slavery to the neocon doctrine may bring the world in 4 more years. ..."
    "... besides much talk and showmastery, he has not really changed anything substantial in this regard; Nothing that could seriously change the course. ..."
    "... So he stripped himself of any true argument to vote for him, besides for ultra neocons and ultra fundamental evangelical Christians. And even they don't seem to trust in his intentions. ..."
    Jan 27, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    EveryoneIsBiased , 26 January 2020 at 04:40 PM

    Thank you Colonel; I have been waiting for your take on this. And thank you for opening the comments again. If there is a problem with my post, please point them out to me.

    And i agree. This may well be a fatal mistake of his. And while i have thought Trump to be the lesser evil compared to Clinton, i am now at a point where i seriously fear what his ignorance and slavery to the neocon doctrine may bring the world in 4 more years.

    Still, immigration is another important issue, but besides much talk and showmastery, he has not really changed anything substantial in this regard; Nothing that could seriously change the course.

    So he stripped himself of any true argument to vote for him, besides for ultra neocons and ultra fundamental evangelical Christians. And even they don't seem to trust in his intentions.

    And China? He may have changed some small to medium problems for the better, but nothing is changed in the overall trend of the US continuing to loose while China emerges as the next global superpower.

    It may have been slowed for some years; It may even have been accelerated, now that China has been waken up to the extend of the threat posed by the US.

    North Korea? They surely will never denuclearize. Even less after how Trump showed the world how he treats international law and even allies.

    With Trump its all photo ops and showmanship. And while he senses what issues are important, it is worth a damn if he butchers the execution, or values photo ops more than substantial progress.

    Not that i would see a democratic alternative. No. But at least now everyone who wants to know can see, that he is neither one.

    4 years ago, democracy was corrupted, but at least there was someone who presented himself as an alternative to that rotten establishment.
    Now, even that small ray of light is as dark as it gets.
    And that is the saddest thing. What worth is democracy, when one does not even have a true alternative, besides Tulsi on endless wars, and Bernie for the socialist ;) ?

    I just have watched again the Ken Burns documentary of the civil war. I know it is not perfect (Though i love Shelby Foote's parts), but the sense of the divided 2 Americas there, is still the same today. Today, America seems to break apart culturally, socially and economically on the fault lines that have sucked it into the civil war over 150 years ago.

    And just like with seeing no real way out politically, i sadly can see no way to heal and unite this country, as it never was truly united after the civil war, if not ever before. As you Colonel said some weeks ago, the US were never a nation.

    And looking at other countries, only a major national crisis may change this.
    A most sad realization. But this hold true also for other western countries, including my own.

    An even worse decade seems to be ahead.

    [Jan 27, 2020] Guess Who Was In Charge Of Reviewing Bolton's Leaked Book At The NSC

    Bolton is pretty dangerous neocon scum... Now he tried to backstab Trump, so Trump gets what he deserves as only complete idiot or a fully controlled puppet would appoint Bolton to his Administration.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Breitbart News ..."
    "... Wall Street Journal ..."
    Jan 27, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com
    Breitbart News , which would include the recently leaked manuscript of former National Security adviser John Bolton.

    The report describes the reviews as a "standard process that allows the NSC to review book manuscripts, op-eds, or any other material for any classified material to be eliminated before publication."

    The New York Times reported Sunday evening that Bolton's draft book manuscript, which had been submitted to the NSC for prepublication review on Dec. 30, alleged that President Trump told Bolton in August 2019 that he wanted to withhold security assistance to Ukraine until it agreed to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, among others.

    It was not clear if the Times had seen the Bolton manuscript; its sources were "multiple people" who "described Mr. Bolton's account of the Ukraine affair."

    Bolton's lawyer, Chuck Cooper, issued a statement in which he said: "It is clear, regrettably, from The New York Times article published today that the prepublication review process has been corrupted ." He did not confirm or deny the Times ' reporting on the content of the manuscript. - Breitbart News

    What a coincidence! While Alexander Vindman at the NSC testifies against Trump at the House impeachment, the other brother (Yevgeny) appears to be in charge of clearing John Bolton's book for publication.

    If you believe in coincidences. https://t.co/qtpoqeGpaj

    -- Emerald Robinson ✝️ (@EmeraldRobinson) January 27, 2020

    Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman famously testified against President Trump during House impeachment hearings in November, where he admitted to violating the chain of command when he reported his concerns over a July 25 phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky.

    Nunes: Did you know that financial records show a Ukrainian natural gas company, Burisma, routed more than $ 3 million to American accounts tied to Hunter Biden?

    Vindman, whose job is to handle Ukraine policy: "I'm not aware of this fact." pic.twitter.com/6yFbWkufmH

    -- Nate Madden (@NateOnTheHill) November 19, 2019

    Breitbart notes that the Vindman brothers have offices across from each other at the NSC , and that the Wall Street Journal describes Vindman as "an NSC lawyer handling ethics issues." Alexander Vindman, meanwhile, has said that his brother was the " lead ethics official " at the agency.

    Meanwhile, looks like people are already distancing themselves from Bolton's claims that President Trump explicitly linked Ukraine aid with an investigation into the Bidens.

    And now contradicted by Mick Mulvaney. https://t.co/1dhuCQ8UHZ

    -- Sean Davis (@seanmdav) January 27, 2020

    hooligan2009 , 39 seconds ago link

    remember seth rich!

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/01/breaking-exclusive-christopher-wrays-fbi-caught-in-another-lie-and-cover-up-fbi-emails-on-seth-rich-uncovered/

    "Today, January 27, 2020, we have a stunning update ==>>

    After previously claiming no FBI records could be found related to Seth Rich, emails have been uncovered. These emails weren't just from anybody. These emails were between FBI lovebirds Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the two most corrupt individuals involved in the Russia Collusion Hoax.

    In a set of emails released by Judicial Watch on January 22, 2020, provided by a FOIA request on Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, two pages on emails refer to Seth Rich:"

    https://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/JW-v-DOJ-Strzok-Page-Prod-16-00154.pdf

    Moneycircus , 1 minute ago link

    The Vindman brothers are being "handled" by someone.

    I wager they have political "groomers", just like Obama did.

    A Jewish photographer has been capturing Alexander Vindman and his twin for nearly 4 decades
    https://www.jta.org/2019/11/06/culture/a-jewish-photographer-has-been-capturing-alexander-vindman-and-his-twin-for-nearly-4-decades

    They were also featured in a 1985 Ken Burns documentary about immigrants.

    Crush the cube , 7 minutes ago link

    These guys are Ukrainian mob moles, sent here by their Ukie Jewish oligarchs when their positions of privilege went into decline with the collapse of communism. Because its typical for three first generation schmucks fresh off the immigrant boat to end up with two as officers both working in the white house, and the third brother back in Ukie Euro land controlling a major bank hip deep in all the scandal.

    Think any investigative agency will touch it, don't **** with the mossad.

    Attitude_Check , 7 minutes ago link

    The rats are starting to tear into each other - good.

    Moneycircus , 13 minutes ago link

    Retired Army Officer Remembers Lt. Col. Vindman as Partisan Democrat Who Ridiculed America

    https://tennesseestar.com/2019/11/05/retired-army-officer-remembers-lt-col-vindman-as-partisan-democrat-who-ridiculed-america/

    Nov 5, 2019In an eye-opening thread on Twitter last week, retired U.S. Army Lt. Colonel Jim Hickman said that he "verbally reprimanded " Vindman after he heard some of his derisive remarks for himself. " Do not let the uniform fool you," Hickman wrote. "He is a political activist in uniform."

    Harley Vet , 14 minutes ago link

    Donald Trump is the most unqualified person ever to be elected president.

    Southern_Boy , 19 minutes ago link

    So why isn't Vindman doing contracts in North Alaska or deputy attache in Namibia tonight until he gets passed over 3 times for promotion and forced to retire unless Durham can find evidence of his guilt?

    Obake158 , 26 minutes ago link

    Speaking of Vindman, an Obama holdover, White House HR head, has prohibited Vindman's removal from the NSC. He even gets a $30k raise and is permitted to serve out his term until June. You can't make this **** up:

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AV9-7R5or6w

    Deep Snorkeler , 30 minutes ago link

    John Bolton Trump's Sidekick

    1. manifestly guilty of the planning, preparation, initiation and execution of the crime of aggression against Iraq
    2. promoted the US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal
    3. setting the stage for an unlawful US military intervention in Venezuela - plotting a coup against a foreign government
    4. hates the United Nations and international law
    5. protected Israel by vetoing all UN resolutions targeting Israel and supported Jerusalem as Israel's capital
    6. against the International Criminal Court

    [Jan 27, 2020] Trump, yes Trump, screamed at the top of his lungs and I believe took out a full page ad in the newspapers that we should close the borders to all travelers from Africa. On the advise of the CDC, Obama refused to do this. The people, sensing that Obama was not interested in their welfare, elected a Republican Congress in a landslide. Trump basically was saying that Obama was soft on his birthplace, Africa.

    Jan 27, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    Stephanie , 26 January 2020 at 07:39 PM

    One other thing. Coronavirus. He could emerge the Hero of Wuhan, like a modern Flashman, but there are many forces at play. Or I should say, there is *a* force at play going against his ability to do that.

    A little history. I believe it was the first midterms of Obama's Presidency, the Ebola scare hit right before the election. Trump, yes Trump, screamed at the top of his lungs and I believe took out a full page ad in the newspapers that we should close the borders to all travelers from Africa. On the advise of the CDC, Obama refused to do this. The people, sensing that Obama was not interested in their welfare, elected a Republican Congress in a landslide. Trump basically was saying that Obama was soft on his birthplace, Africa.

    Well, the shoe is on the other foot now. The force that is now in play, that was definitely not in play with Ebola, is money. The economic consequences of a serious epidemic, a bit or maybe a lot more intense than SARS, because that is what they're talking about, will wreak havoc on the world economy. Just start with China. However severe the disease is, the Chinese are going completely nuts about it. The second largest economy on earth.

    Trump's tweets thus far do not mention coronavirus. Schiff exists, but the coronavirus doesn't. Eventually, he will have to say something, and it will be very hard for him to say anything except that health professionals are doing an incredibly good job... without going into the details of what that might mean. Sort of like saying we have the best military on earth and brushing off traumatic brain injuries to 34 service men and women as headaches. Because if he says anything that isn't happy talk, the markets, the rentiers, are not going to like it. Essentially, he can close the borders to illegal Latin Americans, but he can't tamper with China.

    Viruses are spread by touching something with living virus on it and then touching your nose. We touch are noses countless times a day. Handwashing is the absolute key. True droplet spread--someone across the room sneezes and you inhale the droplets--is exceedingly rare.

    Artemesia -> Stephanie... , 27 January 2020 at 09:09 AM
    Iran Lawmaker Warns About Spread Of Coronavirus By Chinese Tourists
    https://en.radiofarda.com/a/iran-lawmaker-warns-about-spread-of-coronavirus-by-chinese-tourists/30397701.html

    Significant part is that the legislator for a province where an annual festival is to take place, that attracts many Chinese tourists, is seeking to ban Chinese participation this year.

    Gutsy move, to forego tourist revenue to protect the locals.

    [Jan 27, 2020] American Pravda Mossad Assassinations by Ron Unz

    Jan 27, 2020 | www.unz.com

    From the Peace of Westphalia to the Law of the Jungle

    The January 2nd American assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani of Iran was an event of enormous moment.

    Gen. Soleimani had been the highest-ranking military figure in his nation of 80 million, and with a storied career of 30 years, one of the most universally popular and highly regarded. Most analysts ranked him second in influence only to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's elderly Supreme Leader, and there were widespread reports that he was being urged to run for the presidency in the 2021 elections.

    The circumstances of his peacetime death were also quite remarkable. His vehicle was incinerated by the missile of an American Reaper drone near Iraq's Baghdad international airport just after he had arrived there on a regular commercial flight for peace negotiations originally suggested by the American government.

    Our major media hardly ignored the gravity of this sudden, unexpected killing of so high-ranking a political and military figure, and gave it enormous attention. A day or so later, the front page of my morning New York Times was almost entirely filled with coverage of the event and its implications, along with several inside pages devoted to the same topic. Later that same week, America's national newspaper of record allocated more than one-third of all the pages of its front section to the same shocking story.

    But even such copious coverage by teams of veteran journalists failed to provide the incident with its proper context and implications. Last year, the Trump Administration had declared the Iranian Revolutionary Guard "a terrorist organization," drawing widespread criticism and even ridicule from national security experts appalled at the notion of classifying a major branch of Iran's armed forces as "terrorists." Gen. Soleimani was a top commander in that body, and this apparently provided the legal figleaf for his assassination in broad daylight while on a diplomatic peace mission.

    But consider that Congress has been considering legislation declaring Russia an official state sponsor of terrorism , and Stephen Cohen, the eminent Russia scholar, has argued that no foreign leader since the end of World War II has been so massively demonized by the American media as Russian President Vladimir Putin. For years, numerous agitated pundits have denounced Putin as "the new Hitler," and some prominent figures have even called for his overthrow or death. So we are now only a step or two removed from undertaking a public campaign to assassinate the leader of a country whose nuclear arsenal could quickly annihilate the bulk of the American population. Cohen has repeatedly warned that the current danger of global nuclear war may exceed that which we faced during the days of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and can we entirely dismiss such concerns?

    Even if we focus solely upon Gen. Solemaini's killing and entirely disregard its dangerous implications, there seem few modern precedents for the official public assassination of a top-ranking political figure by the forces of another major country. In groping for past examples, the only ones that come to mind occurred almost three generations ago during World War II, when Czech agents assisted by the Allies assassinated Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1941 and the US military later shot down the plane of Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto in 1943. But these events occurred in the heat of a brutal global war, and the Allied leadership hardly portrayed them as official government assassinations. Historian David Irving reveals that when one of Adolf Hitler's aides suggested that an attempt be made to assassinate Soviet leaders in that same conflict, the German Fuhrer immediately forbade such practices as obvious violations of the laws of war.

    The 1914 terrorist assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, was certainly organized by fanatical elements of Serbian Intelligence, but the Serbian government fiercely denied its own complicity, and no major European power was ever directly implicated in the plot. The aftermath of the killing soon led to the outbreak of World War I, and although many millions died in the trenches over the next few years, it would have been completely unthinkable for one of the major belligerents to consider assassinating the leadership of another.

    A century earlier, the Napoleonic Wars had raged across the entire continent of Europe for most of a generation, but I don't recall reading of any governmental assassination plots during that era, let alone in the quite gentlemanly wars of the preceding 18th century when Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa disputed ownership of the wealthy province of Silesia by military means. I am hardly a specialist in modern European history, but after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War and regularized the rules of warfare, no assassination as high-profile as that of Gen. Soleimani comes to mind.

    The bloody Wars of Religion of previous centuries did see their share of assassination schemes. For example, I think that Philip II of Spain supposedly encouraged various plots to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I of England on grounds that she was a murderous heretic, and their repeated failure helped persuade him to launch the ill-fated Spanish Armada; but being a pious Catholic, he probably would have balked at using the ruse of peace-negotiations to lure Elizabeth to her doom. In any event, that was more than four centuries ago, so America has now placed itself in rather uncharted waters.

    Different peoples possess different political traditions, and this may play a major role in influencing the behavior of the countries they establish. Bolivia and Paraguay were created in the early 18th century as shards from the decaying Spanish Empire, and according to Wikipedia they have experienced nearly three dozen successful coups in their history, the bulk of these prior to 1950, while Mexico has had a half-dozen. By contrast, the U.S. and Canada were founded as Anglo-Saxon settler colonies, and neither history records even a failed attempt.

    During our Revolutionary War, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and our other Founding Fathers fully recognized that if their effort failed, they would all be hanged by the British as rebels. However, I have never heard that they feared falling to an assassin's blade, nor that King George III ever considered such an underhanded means of attack. During the first century and more of our nation's history, nearly all our presidents and other top political leaders traced their ancestry back to the British Isles, and political assassinations were exceptionally rare, with Abraham Lincoln's death being one of the very few that come to mind.

    At the height of the Cold War, our CIA did involve itself in various secret assassination plots against Cuba's Communist dictator Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders considered hostile to US interests. But when these facts later came out in the 1970s, they evoked such enormous outrage from the public and the media, that three consecutive American presidents -- Gerald R. Ford , Jimmy Carter , and Ronald Reagan -- issued successive Executive Orders absolutely prohibiting assassinations by the CIA or any other agent of the US government.

    Although some cynics might claim that these public declarations represented mere window-dressing, a March 2018 book review in the New York Times strongly suggests otherwise. Kenneth M. Pollack spent years as a CIA analyst and National Security Council staffer, then went on to publish a number of influential books on foreign policy and military strategy over the last two decades. He had originally joined the CIA in 1988, and opens his review by declaring:

    One of the very first things I was taught when I joined the CIA was that we do not conduct assassinations. It was drilled into new recruits over and over again.

    Yet Pollack notes with dismay that over the last quarter-century, these once solid prohibitions have been steadily eaten away, with the process rapidly accelerating after the 9/11 attacks of 2001. The laws on our books may not have changed, but

    Today, it seems that all that is left of this policy is a euphemism.

    We don't call them assassinations anymore. Now, they are "targeted killings," most often performed by drone strike, and they have become America's go-to weapon in the war on terror.

    The Bush Administration had conducted 47 of these assassinations-by-another-name, while his successor Barack Obama, a constitutional scholar and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, had raised his own total to 542. Not without justification, Pollack wonders whether assassination has become "a very effective drug, but [one that] treats only the symptom and so offers no cure."

    Thus over the last couple of decades American policy has followed a very disturbing trajectory in its use of assassination as a tool of foreign policy, first restricting its use to only the most extreme circumstances, next targeting small numbers of high-profile "terrorists" hiding in rough terrain, then escalating those same such killings to the many hundreds. And now under President Trump, the fateful step has been taken of America claiming the right to assassinate any world leader not to our liking whom we unilaterally declare worthy of death.

    Pollack had made his career as a Clinton Democrat, and is best known for his 2002 book The Threatening Storm that strongly endorsed President Bush's proposed invasion of Iraq and was enormously influential in producing bipartisan support for that ill-fated policy. I have no doubt that he is a committed supporter of Israel, and he probably falls into a category that I would loosely describe as "Left Neocon."

    But while reviewing a history of Israel's own long use of assassination as a mainstay of its national security policy, he seems deeply disturbed that America might be following along that same terrible path. Less than two years later, our sudden assassination of a top Iranian leader demonstrates that his fears may have been greatly understated.

    "Rise and Kill First" ORDER IT NOW

    The book being reviewed was Rise and Kill First by New York Times reporter Ronen Bergman, a weighty study of the Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence service, together with its sister agencies. The author devoted six years of research to the project, which was based upon a thousand personal interviews and access to some official documents previously unavailable. As suggested by the title, his primary focus was Israel's long history of assassinations, and across his 750 pages and thousand-odd source references he recounts the details of an enormous number of such incidents.

    That sort of topic is obviously fraught with controversy, but Bergman's volume carries glowing cover-blurbs from Pulitzer Prize-winning authors on espionage matters, and the official cooperation he received is indicated by similar endorsements from both a former Mossad chief and Ehud Barak, a past Prime Minister of Israel who himself had once led assassination squads. Over the last couple of decades, former CIA officer Robert Baer has become one of our most prominent authors in this same field, and he praises the book as "hands down" the best he has ever read on intelligence, Israel, or the Middle East. The reviews across our elite media were equally laudatory.

    Although I had seen some discussions of the book when it appeared, I only got around to reading it a few months ago. And while I was deeply impressed by the thorough and meticulous journalism, I found the pages rather grim and depressing reading, with their endless accounts of Israeli agents killing their real or perceived enemies, with the operations sometimes involving kidnappings and brutal torture, or resulting in considerable loss of life to innocent bystanders. Although the overwhelming majority of the attacks described took place in the various countries of the Middle East or the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza, others ranged across the world, including Europe. The narrative history began in the 1920s, decades before the actual creation of the Jewish Israel or its Mossad organization, and ranged up to the present day.

    The sheer quantity of such foreign assassinations was really quite remarkable, with the knowledgeable reviewer in the New York Times suggesting that the Israeli total over the last half-century or so seemed far greater than that of any other country. I might even go farther: if we excluded domestic killings, I wouldn't be surprised if the body-count exceeded the combined total for that of all other major countries in the world. I think all the lurid revelations of lethal CIA or KGB Cold War assassination plots that I have seen discussed in newspaper stories might fit comfortably into just a chapter or two of Bergman's extremely long book.

    [Jan 27, 2020] The ME may yet destroy Trump

    Trump outlived his shelf life. Money quote: "This may well be a fatal mistake of his. And while i have thought Trump to be the lesser evil compared to Clinton, i am now at a point where i seriously fear what his ignorance and slavery to the neocon doctrine may bring the world in 4 more years."
    Notable quotes:
    "... Some combination of the disasters that may emerge from these ME factors might well turn Trump's base against him and this result would be entirely of his own making ..."
    "... This may well be a fatal mistake of his. And while i have thought Trump to be the lesser evil compared to Clinton, i am now at a point where i seriously fear what his ignorance and slavery to the neocon doctrine may bring the world in 4 more years. ..."
    "... besides much talk and showmastery, he has not really changed anything substantial in this regard; Nothing that could seriously change the course. ..."
    "... So he stripped himself of any true argument to vote for him, besides for ultra neocons and ultra fundamental evangelical Christians. And even they don't seem to trust in his intentions. ..."
    "... Trump stands no chance if things get hot with Iran. He didn't win by enough to sacrifice the antiwar vote. ..."
    "... Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo have got themselves in a no-win situation. NATO cannot occupy both Syria and Iraq, illegally. There are way too few troops. The bases in these nations are sitting ducks for the next precision ballistic missile attack. Any buildup would be contested. Ground travel curtailed. A Peace Treaty and Withdrawal is the only safe way out. ..."
    "... Donald Trump is blessed with his opponents. Democrats who restarted the Cold War with Russia in 2014 are now using it to justify his Impeachment. If leaders cannot see reality clearly, they will keep making incredibly stupid mistakes. If Joe Biden is his opponent, I can't vote for either. Both spread chaos. ..."
    "... President Trump controls part of the White House -- definitely not the NSC ..."
    "... His hold elsewhere in the DC bureaucracy may be 5 - 15%. When the President decided to pull US troops out of Syria, his NSC Director flew to Egypt and Turkey to countermand the order. Facing the opposition of a united DC SWAMP, the President caved, and thereby delayed his formal impeachment by a year. ..."
    "... Going out on a limb, President Trump continues to play a very weak hand and may survive to fight another day. Fortunately for the US, his tax and regulatory policies, as well as his economic negotiations with China, Japan, Korea and Mexico seem to be on target and successful. ..."
    Jan 26, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    President Trump will easily be acquitted in the senate trial. This may occur this week and there will probably be no witnesses called. That will be an additional victory for him and will add to the effect of his trade deal victories and the general state of the US economy. These factors should point to a solid victory in November for him and the GOP in Congress.

    Ah! Not so fast the cognoscenti may cry out. Not so fast. The Middle East is a graveyard of dreams:

    1. Iraq. Street demonstrations in Iraq against a US alliance are growing more intense. There may well have been a million people in Muqtada al-Sadr's extravaganza. Shia fury over the death of Soleimani is quite real. Trump's belief that in a contest of the will he will prevail over the Iraqi Shia is a delusion, a delusion born of his narcissistic personality and his unwillingness to listen to people who do not share his delusions. A hostile Iraqi government and street mobs would make life unbearable for US forces there.

    2. Syria. The handful of American troops east and north of the Euphrates "guarding" Syrian oil from the Syrian government are in a precarious position with the Shia Iraqis at their backs across the border and a hostile array of SAA, Turks, jihadis and potentially Russians to their front and on their flanks.

    3. Palestine. The "Deal of the Century" is approaching announcement. From what is known of its contours, the deal will kill any remaining prospects for Palestinian statehood and will relegate all Palestinians (both Israeli citizens and the merely occupied) to the status of helots forever . Look it up. In return the deal will offer the helotry substantial bribes in economic aid money. Trump evidently continues to believe that Palestinians are untermenschen . He believe they will sell their freedom. The Palestinian Authority has already rejected this deal. IMO their reaction to the imposition of this regime is likely to be another intifada.

    Some combination of the disasters that may emerge from these ME factors might well turn Trump's base against him and this result would be entirely of his own making . pl


    Elora Danan , 26 January 2020 at 11:24 AM

    ...and his unwillingness to listen to people who do not share his delusions...

    That precisely is the problem, apart from explosive shouting Pompeo, it seems he has recruited this extravanza of woman as adviser into the WH...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5w0kSkvusjI&feature=emb_title

    Could it be true? If that is the case, it´s more scary than Elora thought when that of Soleimani happened....This starts to look as a frenopatic...isn´t it?

    HK Leo Strauss , 26 January 2020 at 01:12 PM
    With Iran and her allies holding the figurative Trump Card on escalation, will they ramp up the pressure to topple him? They could end up with a Dem who couldn't afford to "lose" Syria or Iraq.
    JamesT , 26 January 2020 at 04:14 PM
    I submit to you, Colonel, that the biggest threat to Trump is a Bernie/Tulsi ticket. Bernie is leading in the Iowa and NH polls, and the recent spat with Warren (in my opinion) leaves Bernie with no viable choice for VP other than Tulsi.
    Barbara Ann said in reply to JamesT ... , 26 January 2020 at 05:32 PM
    JamesT

    Judging by what just happened at the embassy in Baghdad, the intentions of the Iraqi electorate would seem to be a more pressing concern.

    EveryoneIsBiased , 26 January 2020 at 04:40 PM
    Thank you Colonel; I have been waiting for your take on this. And thank you for opening the comments again. If there is a problem with my post, please point them out to me.

    And i agree. This may well be a fatal mistake of his. And while i have thought Trump to be the lesser evil compared to Clinton, i am now at a point where i seriously fear what his ignorance and slavery to the neocon doctrine may bring the world in 4 more years.

    Still, immigration is another important issue, but besides much talk and showmastery, he has not really changed anything substantial in this regard; Nothing that could seriously change the course.

    So he stripped himself of any true argument to vote for him, besides for ultra neocons and ultra fundamental evangelical Christians. And even they don't seem to trust in his intentions.

    And China? He may have changed some small to medium problems for the better, but nothing is changed in the overall trend of the US continuing to loose while China emerges as the next global superpower.

    It may have been slowed for some years; It may even have been accelerated, now that China has been waken up to the extend of the threat posed by the US.

    North Korea? They surely will never denuclearize. Even less after how Trump showed the world how he treats international law and even allies.

    With Trump its all photo ops and showmanship. And while he senses what issues are important, it is worth a damn if he butchers the execution, or values photo ops more than substantial progress.

    Not that i would see a democratic alternative. No. But at least now everyone who wants to know can see, that he is neither one.

    4 years ago, democracy was corrupted, but at least there was someone who presented himself as an alternative to that rotten establishment.
    Now, even that small ray of light is as dark as it gets.
    And that is the saddest thing. What worth is democracy, when one does not even have a true alternative, besides Tulsi on endless wars, and Bernie for the socialist ;) ?

    I just have watched again the Ken Burns documentary of the civil war. I know it is not perfect (Though i love Shelby Foote's parts), but the sense of the divided 2 Americas there, is still the same today. Today, America seems to break apart culturally, socially and economically on the fault lines that have sucked it into the civil war over 150 years ago.

    And just like with seeing no real way out politically, i sadly can see no way to heal and unite this country, as it never was truly united after the civil war, if not ever before. As you Colonel said some weeks ago, the US were never a nation.

    And looking at other countries, only a major national crisis may change this.
    A most sad realization. But this hold true also for other western countries, including my own.

    An even worse decade seems to be ahead.

    turcopolier , 26 January 2020 at 05:15 PM
    everyoneisbiased

    The economy is actually quite good and he is NOT "a dictator." Dictators are not put on trial by the legislature. He is extremely ignorant and suffers from a life in which only money mattered.

    emboil , 26 January 2020 at 05:27 PM
    Once Bernie wins the nomination, it's going to be escalation time. Trump stands no chance if things get hot with Iran. He didn't win by enough to sacrifice the antiwar vote.
    walrus , 26 January 2020 at 06:14 PM
    I'm starting to think that Trumps weakness is believing that everyone and everything has a monetary price. I think perhaps his dealings with China may reinforce his perception, as, also, his alleged success in bullying the Europeans over Iran -- with the threat of tariffs on European car imports. His almost weekly references to Iraqi and Syrian oil, allies "not paying their way", financial threats to the Iraq Government, all suggest a fixation on finance that has served him well in business.

    The trouble is that one day President Trump is going to discover there is something money can't buy, to the detriment of America.

    VietnamVet , 26 January 2020 at 07:28 PM
    Colonel,

    Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo have got themselves in a no-win situation. NATO cannot occupy both Syria and Iraq, illegally. There are way too few troops. The bases in these nations are sitting ducks for the next precision ballistic missile attack. Any buildup would be contested. Ground travel curtailed. A Peace Treaty and Withdrawal is the only safe way out.

    Donald Trump is blessed with his opponents. Democrats who restarted the Cold War with Russia in 2014 are now using it to justify his Impeachment. If leaders cannot see reality clearly, they will keep making incredibly stupid mistakes. If Joe Biden is his opponent, I can't vote for either. Both spread chaos.

    My subconscious is again acting out. The mini-WWIII with Iran could shut off Middle Eastern oil at any time. The Fed is back to injecting digital money into the market. China has quarantined 44 million people. Global trade is fragile. Today there are four cases of Wuhan Coronavirus in the USA.

    If confirmed that the virus is contagious without symptoms and an infected person transmits the virus to 2 to 3 people and with a 3% mortality rate and a higher 15% rate for the infirmed, the resupply trip to Safeway this summer could be both futile and dangerous.

    Haralambos , 26 January 2020 at 07:48 PM
    Two Greek words: "hubris" and "nemesis" come to mind.
    Patrick Armstrong , 26 January 2020 at 08:19 PM
    It's an old story. Mr X is elected POTUS; going to do this and that; something happens in the MENA. That's all anyone remembers. Maybe time to kiss Israel goodbye, tell SA to sell in whatever currency it wants, and realise that oil producers have to sell the stuff -- it's no good to them in the ground...
    Petrel , 26 January 2020 at 08:31 PM
    President Trump controls part of the White House -- definitely not the NSC -- and much of the Department of Commerce & Treasury. His hold elsewhere in the DC bureaucracy may be 5 - 15%. When the President decided to pull US troops out of Syria, his NSC Director flew to Egypt and Turkey to countermand the order. Facing the opposition of a united DC SWAMP, the President caved, and thereby delayed his formal impeachment by a year.

    Going out on a limb, President Trump continues to play a very weak hand and may survive to fight another day. Fortunately for the US, his tax and regulatory policies, as well as his economic negotiations with China, Japan, Korea and Mexico seem to be on target and successful.

    Godfree Roberts , 26 January 2020 at 09:19 PM
    As Richard Nixon told a young Donald Rumsfeld when he asked about specializing in Latin America, "Nobody gives a shit about Latin America."

    Nobody gives a shit about the Middle East.

    Johnb , 26 January 2020 at 11:27 PM
    We may yet see John McCains Revenge in the Senate Colonel, it only requires 4 Republican votes to move into Witnesses.
    EEngineer , 26 January 2020 at 11:27 PM
    Carthage must be destroyed! I don't know if Trump is going to war with Iran willingly or with a Neocon gun to his head, but if he's impeached I expect Pence to go on a holy crusade.

    [Jan 24, 2020] Peter Hitchen to Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat: You're not in the ladies' lingerie trade now, sweetie

    Highly recommended!
    Kevin Smith: "Higgins is currently frantically trying to prop up the Douma narrative against a mountain of evidence disproving his conclusions. For those who’ve followed his story, it’s clear that Higgins is an intelligence asset, set up to take the fall when the currently collapsing narratives take hold in the mainstream.
    Jan 24, 2020 | off-guardian.org

    "You didn't think that one through, did you, @eliothiggins sweetie? You're not in the ladies' lingerie trade now. This discussion is about truth, which endures, is not held together by elastic, and is not for sale." ~Peter Hitchens responding to Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat over the OPCW scandal on Twitter – 2 January 2020.

    [Jan 24, 2020] Crimes of the century truth, perception and punishment

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... I believe more people nowadays recognise that the devastating wars in Iraq and Libya and events in Syria were pushed by our governments and media. They can even accept, when you explain, that we've been assisting terrorists to unseat governments for years. But they seem hesitant of taking the next step and we need to encourage them on this path. ..."
    "... This path leads to recognising the sheer evil in our midst and getting out of this mindset that criminal behavior and lying in governments and in our media is normal or should in any way be tolerated. Perhaps some people appreciate this already but don't want to address it out of concern to what they might find. Maybe some people dread the thought of a global conflict so ignore it. But we need to hammer home the consequences of simply doing nothing. ..."
    "... I've been trying to think of an analogy to try to get this point across. I sometimes say to people, we wouldn't have released a serial killer like Harold Shipman from prison and appointed him Foreign Secretary. Therefore, why do we tolerate a long line of Foreign Secretaries complicit in laying waste to the world? Sadly, with this analogy most people usually look back at me blankly so I have been searching for one more complete and rooted in history which people can relate better to events today. ..."
    Jan 24, 2020 | off-guardian.org

    Kevin Smith

    "You didn't think that one through, did you, @eliothiggins sweetie? You're not in the ladies' lingerie trade now. This discussion is about truth, which endures, is not held together by elastic, and is not for sale."
    Peter Hitchens responding to Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat over the OPCW scandal on Twitter – 2 January 2020.

    Like many, I've been following the Douma scandal for some time and particularly since the OPCW whistleblowers and leaked emails blew the lid off the official narrative that Assad used chemical weapons there.

    This issue is being discussed on one of my 'go to' accounts on Twitter – Peter Hitchens who has brought this to the attention of the mainstream .

    For the past few weeks he's been debating the topic with Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat, Scott Lucas and various Middle East based journalists who created and then pushed the false narrative.

    In fact, it's not really a debate. Peter Hitchens is quite literally slaughtering these narrative managers – his logic and clear thinking – and wit exposing the numerous gaps in their story and their desperate deflections.

    Hitchens position is not exactly the same as many of us here hold – that Douma was a clear false flag. What he is saying is the evidence points to there being no chemical attack by the Syrian government, the pretext used for the attack on Syria. He doesn't wish to speculate on matters which aren't conclusively proven, for example precisely on what did actually happen.

    I respect that position in many ways and his refusal to comment on the dead civilians in the Douma images makes sense from a journalist in the mainstream. I think by having a position which is clear and unassailable enables him to easily brush off his online detractors and not allow them to deflect to other issues.

    While I don't agree with everything he says, Hitchens has a calm and rational argument for all the issues he covers. This puts clear ground between him and his online opponents who often resort to childish abuse.

    My 80-year old mum admires him too. She describes him as 'frightfully posh'. Perhaps someone who might have belonged in a previous age – but I'm glad we have him in this one.

    Anyway, I think we can be sure that Hitchens will continue his important work within the remit he's chosen and others will investigate the unanswered questions which arise from the Douma incident.

    Ultimately the question about the dead civilians in the images is simply too dreadful to ignore.

    This is because if a chemical attack did not take place and Assad was not responsible it seems highly likely that the civilians including children were murdered to facilitate a fabrication.

    And were our own intelligence agencies involved in a staged event, considering the refusal to even establish the basic facts in the days following?

    And then, of course, the resulting air strikes nearly caused us to go to war with Russia, with all that would entail.

    While these investigations continue, I think it's timely to see where these events fit into the way the general public think and perceive wrongdoing and to try to radically to change this.

    I believe more people nowadays recognise that the devastating wars in Iraq and Libya and events in Syria were pushed by our governments and media. They can even accept, when you explain, that we've been assisting terrorists to unseat governments for years. But they seem hesitant of taking the next step and we need to encourage them on this path.

    This path leads to recognising the sheer evil in our midst and getting out of this mindset that criminal behavior and lying in governments and in our media is normal or should in any way be tolerated. Perhaps some people appreciate this already but don't want to address it out of concern to what they might find. Maybe some people dread the thought of a global conflict so ignore it. But we need to hammer home the consequences of simply doing nothing.

    I've been trying to think of an analogy to try to get this point across. I sometimes say to people, we wouldn't have released a serial killer like Harold Shipman from prison and appointed him Foreign Secretary. Therefore, why do we tolerate a long line of Foreign Secretaries complicit in laying waste to the world? Sadly, with this analogy most people usually look back at me blankly so I have been searching for one more complete and rooted in history which people can relate better to events today.

    So, here follows an analogy of a character who lived in the 17th century. His traits, his crimes, the political climate and peoples misguided perceptions in response can be compared to recent events and one particular individual causing havoc in the world today.

    Of course I refer to Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat.

    Eliot ( 'suck my balls' ) Higgins and Titus Oates 1. Eliot Higgins and Bellingcat

    Higgins probably doesn't need much of an introduction here. It seems he has no specific qualifications relevant to his role and a bit of a drop-out in terms of education.

    Higgins has been quoted as saying :

    Before the Arab spring I knew no more about weapons than the average Xbox owner. I had no knowledge beyond what I'd learned from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rambo."

    But this didn't prevent him blogging about world events and then setting himself up and his site as investigator for several incidents most notably the shooting down of the MH17 passenger plane over Ukraine and allegations of chemical weapons use in Syria. It's now known that Bellingcat is funded by pro-war groups including the Atlantic Council

    Higgins has been accused by chemical weapons experts, academics and independent journalists on the ground of fabricating evidence to reach a predetermined outcome decided on by his funders.

    His rise to prominence was fast and apparently some media editors now refer their journalists to Bellingcat fabrications rather than allowing them to do any journalism themselves.

    Higgins is currently frantically trying to prop up the Douma narrative against a mountain of evidence disproving his conclusions.

    For those who've followed his story, it's clear that Higgins is an intelligence asset, set up to take the fall when the currently collapsing narratives take hold in the mainstream.

    2. Titus Oates and the Popish Plot

    Oates was a foul-mouthed charlatan , serial liar and master of deception who lived in the 17th century. His earlier life included being expelled from school and he was labelled a 'dunce' by people who knew him. He became a clergyman and later joined the Navy. His career was plagued by various sex scandals and charges of perjury.

    In the 1670s during the time of Charles II, religious tensions threatened to spill over into civil war but the pragmatic King, by and large, kept a lid on it.

    However, along with Dr Israel Tonge an anti-Catholic rector, Oates started writing conspiracy theories and inventing plots and later began writing a manuscript alleging of a plan to assassinate King Charles II and replace him with his openly Catholic brother.

    When the fabrication started to gather momentum, the King had an audience with Oates and was unconvinced and was said to have found discrepancies in his story.

    However, the tense political and religious climate at that time was ideal for conspiracy theories and scaremongering. The King's ministers took Oates at his word and over a dozen Catholics were executed for treason. This story created panic and paranoia lasting several years taking the nation to the brink of civil war.

    Over time Oates lies were exposed and when the Catholic King James II came to the throne, he tried Oates with perjury and he was whipped and placed in the pillory.

    After James II fled England during the so-called 'Glorious Revolution' King William and Queen Mary pardoned Oates and gave him a pension.

    For me, this whole episode has many obvious parallels with Higgins, the long-running Russia and the anti-Semitism witch-hunts in the media and the false narratives over Iraq, Libya and Syria. Like those in power today, Oates had a knack for getting away with it. And I guess we can all relate this to Julian Assange – the victims or whistleblowers being punished and the perpetrators getting off.

    I had wondered why James II, often ruthless and unforgiving had not executed Oates. But apparently the crime of perjury even then didn't carry the death sentence. The judge who convicted Oates was said to have tried his best to finish him off through the whipping, though he survived.

    But perhaps even the King and judiciary in failing in this or not using other means at their disposal, couldn't comprehend the enormity of his crimes. Oates was after all a rather absurd character, open to ridicule.

    Perhaps this is a bit similar to people today when discovering that Eliot Higgins is also a foul-mouthed fraud – but they can't reconcile this comical ex-lingerie employee as a menace to humanity.

    3. Modern day

    In the past few weeks I've read various older articles on Iraq and Syria. US troops shooting people for fun from a helicopter . The perpetrators are still free – the whistle-blowers who exposed that, and other events in prison or exile.

    Last year we learned about a shocking massacre of Syrian children, unreported in the mainstream media . Mainstream journalists through their one-sided distortions of the conflict and silence, perpetuating the myth that the terrorists who carried out this mass murder are freedom fighters.

    And as I've mentioned, we've seen firmer evidence of what many of us knew along – that Douma was a staged fabrication as a pretext for air-strikes and dangerously escalating the Syrian war. The likes of Eliot Higgins and others in the media, colluding in the cover-up of mass murder which likely facilitated this event. And for those honest journalists and experts who bring the truth of these staged events to us, smears will no doubt continue .

    Higgins and others in the media who lie, misinform or remain silent are no better than those shooting civilians from helicopters or starting these wars in the first place. In fact, they have killed more and keep killing.

    This modern-day Titus Oates, and others share a big responsibility for death and destruction in the Middle East and a dangerous new Cold War.

    As I say, I think people are waking up to the distorted narratives and misdirections which have inflicted war on others. Now they need to take the next step and grasp the sheer enormity of the crimes and the risks of global conflict if we don't act.

    So, how do we achieve this and get in a position of holding the criminals and war propagandists to account?

    By confronting them directly and mercilessly. As Jeremy Corbyn should have done over the anti-Semitism hoax. Perhaps we should adopt some of the tactics they use against the truth-tellers and whistle-blowers. I don't mean by lies or smears. Maybe even ridiculing these people and their nonsense might have the effect of trivialising the crimes they have committed.

    No, I think it is time for plainer, no-holds-barred language describing these people for the true evil they are – until the truth and label sticks.

    We need to recognise more the seriousness of the crimes. This commentary from the usually measured Piers Robinson about the staged event in Douma reflects the true gravity of the situation in terms of the OPCW complicity .

    4. The hijacking of OPCW

    The cover-up of evidence that the Douma incident was staged is not merely misconduct. As the staging of the Douma incident entailed mass murder of civilians, those in OPCW who have suppressed the evidence of staging are, unwittingly or otherwise, colluding with mass murder."

    We need to now apply this strong language to all crimes committed, be it from the soldiers on the ground, the governments starting these wars or supplying terrorists or the media which promote mass murder through their lies, distortions and silence when presented with the true facts.

    We need to go on the offensive and call out the criminals and spell out in no uncertain terms what we are dealing with. With the evidence and fact-based analogies or arguments we publish we should be using more commentary such as 'mass murderer', 'traitor' or 'terrorist propagandist'.

    This is particularly important in light of events in recent days. The assassination of General Qasem Soleimani has been normalised in both mainstream and on social media. The people legitimising state-sponsored murder in offices thousands of miles away from Iran, woefully ignorant of the potential of this causing a chain of events which could visit our door soon.

    Above all, we should specifically name and shame the individuals promoting war. This needs to be relentless. The official war narratives which have crumbled so far are ample evidence of wrongdoing on a vast scale. So, we can be confident in doing this with the truth firmly on our side.

    Filed under: Douma "Chemical Attack" , historical perspectives , latest , Syria Tagged with: Bellingcat. Eliot Higgins , douma chemical attack , Glorious Revelution , Kevin Smith , OPCW , Peter Hitchens , Titus Oates can you spare $1.00 a month to support independent media

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    wardropper ,

    No, I think it is time for plainer, no-holds-barred language describing these people for the true evil they are – until the truth and label sticks.
    Yes indeed.
    I was, however, reminded today of the huge mountain we yet have to climb before it can be normal again NOT to be corrupt and wicked. The scenario was a session of acrimony in a US Senate chamber, and according to the NYTimes, "Tensions grew so raw after midnight that Chief Justice Roberts cut in just before 1 a.m. to admonish the managers and the president's lawyers to "remember where they are" and return to "civil discourse." "
    "Remembering where you are", when dealing with Titus Oates and other vulgar frauds is perhaps not entirely appropriate ?

    wardropper ,

    Apologies, I forgot to set the first sentence in quotes

    Thom ,

    Hitchens may be on the level on this particular issue but it is part of a wider deception where Hitchens poses as a friend to critical thinkers and then tells them they are helpless and/or can do nothing about it. If he really had journalistic integrity he wouldn't be taking a salary from the Mail on Sunday, a newspaper that relentlessly lied for the Tories at the last election, with the help of the itelligence agencies.

    Koba ,

    As good as Hitchens has done here he's still at heart a Trotskyist he lives a good split and a toothless display just like the Trotskyists he used to side with. His brother went from Trotskyist to soft neocon and peter went from Trotskyist to an ardent Christian Conservative in a veeeeeery short space of time. Plus there dad was deeeeep in with the establishment and his mum Jewish. So .

    Richard Le Sarc ,

    what?

    Gall ,

    Bellingcrap is just another scam like Dupes (Snopes) and Politi"facts". All of them are funded by the Atlantic Council and the CIA front National Endowment for "Democracy". Their cover as an "independent objective fact checking service" is about as transparent as Saran Wrap.

    tonyopmoc ,

    I really liked this when I read it this morning, before the grandkids came round, but I thought some of the comments a bit severe..

    I mean this photo is of some 40 year old kid, who lives in Leicester, and his Mum/wife/sister or whatever works in the local Post Office .

    I personally had never heard of Brown Noses, and I have never personnally succeeded in getting anything I wrote, posted above our below the line, since The Manchester Guardian moved from Manchester to London, and whilst I do love reading some of the posters' comments well look face it.

    Even though Rhys probabaly doesn't like what this kid writes – Elliot is it? he is hardly going to come round with a chainsaw, to cut his head off is he? He probably never even thought of it.

    He did say he is small fry, and he probably is still a virgin (been brainwashed – so he actually belives the model doll is better. What has he got to compare it to?)

    So I can't blame any of them.

    There are alternatives as well as Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, and all those Dating Websites, when almost everything you write gets deleted.

    Just go down the local pub when there is a good band on. Even I can pull there, but I am better looking than both Rhys and Elliot

    I Like Girls.

    I am a man. It's Normal

    Just keep fit dancing and smiling, and you will be O.K.

    Tony

    paul ,

    The prime importance of these endless hoaxes, smears, lies, fabrications and official approved conspiracy theories, lies not so much in the events themselves as what it says about the nature of the people who rule over us and their courtiers and handmaidens in the MSM.

    It would take a whole forest of trees merely to catalogue all their lies over the years, whether it's the Iraq Incubator Babies, the black Viagra fuelled rape gangs in Libya, the Syrian Gas Hoaxes, 9/11, Iraq's WMD, Iran's non existent nuclear weapons, Skripal, Russiagate, Ukrainegate, or the communist spy/ terrorist/ anti semitic smear campaign against Corbyn. And that is only the tip of a very large iceberg. You could go back further to Gladio, Operation Northwoods, Tonkin Gulf, the "Holocaust", Zinoviev Letter, Bayonetted Belgian Babies, Raped Belgian Nuns, Human Bodies Made Into Soap. The list is endless.

    We have been lied to consistently for years, decades, and generations. And these lies have been peddled endlessly in the MSM, no matter how ludicrous and transparently false they are. In the absence of direct personal knowledge or very convincing evidence to the contrary, you just have to assume that everything we have ever been told, are being told, and will be told, and most of the accepted historical record, are simply false. Nothing, nothing at all, can ever be taken at face value.

    And those who rule over us and who are responsible for these lies are psychopathic subhuman filth devoid of any moral values or any redeeming features whatsoever. They are a thousand times worse than the worst mass murderers or child killers who have ever been through our courts. The Moors Murderers, the Ted Bundys, the Jeffrey Dahmers, were seriously damaged individuals who killed a handful of victims. And they did their own dirty work. The Blairs, the Campbells, the Straws, the Bushes, the Cheneys, the Rumsfelds, the Allbrights, the Macrons, the Camerons, the Netanyahus, the Trumps, have the blood of millions on their hands. They and their wire pullers are responsible for the death, starvation and misery of tens and hundreds of millions.

    So when Blair, or Johnson, or Trump or whoever is interviewed on television, you have to remember that individual is a thousand times worse than the Moors Murderers, and we would actually be that much better off if Brady or Hindley were ruling over us. They deserve no respect or deference or legitimacy. They plot the murders of millions and the starvation of tens of millions – and laugh and giggle as they do so. They should be simply recognised for what they awe – psychopathic subhuman filth.

    austrian peter ,

    I do agree with you Paul and of course all you say is true. One of the main problems is that these people have the power to build artificial constructs sufficient for the masses to believe and perpetuated through their bought and paid for MSM whose journalists are mere foot soldiers and wish only to get their pay checks. They have no reason to question the lies and distortions pedaled to them by TPTB – they merely repeat the false narrative:
    "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" – Upton Sinclair

    And we, the great 99%, have little power to change things except within our local network. We can shout all we like on social media but it changes nothing until the great crisis reoccurs and perhaps the masses will rise and demand a just and equitable system. Until that day perhaps this little video will provide an understanding:

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/rStL7niR7gs?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

    Roberto ,

    The business of the MSM throughout the ages has been to traumatise or at least just generally worry the public with headlines focused on fear, envy, anger, revenge, and hate. Include all five in your story and you're well on the way to a Pulitzer Prize, bestowed on the profession by one of the great muckrakers of all time. It's not incidental that there have been a disturbing number of winners that have turned out to be dissembling frauds. Add to this the fact that 'journalism' training apparently does not teach entrants to distinguish the difference between opinion and news, and the die is cast: propaganda as news.

    Dungroanin ,

    Here is what BellEndScat supporting Rusbridger is moaning about.

    "For some years now – largely unreported – two chancery court judges have been dealing with literally hundreds of cases of phone hacking against MGN Ltd and News Group, the owners, respectively, of the Daily Mirror and the Sun (as well as the defunct News of the World).
    The two publishers are, between them, forking out eye-watering sums to avoid any cases going to trial in open court. Because the newspaper industry lobbied so forcefully to scrap the second part of the Leveson inquiry, which had been due to shine a light on such matters, we can only surmise what is going on.

    But there are clues. Mirror Group (now Reach) had by July 2018 set aside more than £70m to settle phone-hacking claims without risking any of them getting to court. The BBC reported last year that the Murdoch titles had paid out an astonishing £400m in damages and calculated that the total bill for the two companies could eventually reach £1bn."

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/19/there-is-a-reason-why-royals-demonised-but-wont-read-all-about-it-prince-harry-meghan-markle

    On the overall perfidious msm he quips:

    "Because the newspaper industry lobbied so forcefully to scrap the second part of the Leveson inquiry, which had been due to shine a light on such matters, we can only surmise what is going on."

    -- --

    Completely ignoring that the Integrity Iniative infested Guardian ITSELF objected to the recommendation of Levesons thoroughly public Inquiry and opposition to a independent press regulator!

    It would have been a building block and certainly stopped most of the continued press misbehaviour over the last 5 years.

    Neither Fish nor Fowl Mr Rusbridger. More sinner that saint, more like.

    Hugh O'Neill ,

    Going to the heart of what Bellingcat, MI6 and CIA is Pompeo's: "We lie, we cheat, we steal." These evil filth are devoid of any moral code and have no respect whatsoever for the laws of God or Man. At which point, consider Moses' (how apt) Ten Commandments. There among them is: "Thou shalt not bear false witness". Think what you will of these Ten, but as a moral code, they were quite useful.

    Richard Le Sarc ,

    Would that all these scum could share the fate of their progenitor, Streicher-without the ' necktie party'. Life at hard labour would do the lot of them much good.

    Brianeg ,

    I looked at the Veterans Today link and it all sounds very plausible'

    However in today's world nothing makes sense especially when the questions arise.

    Is it possible to change the signal of an aircrafts transponder remotely. Can the target acquisition radar on the missile be spoofed remotely. Just why did the flight control officer sanction the take off of this plane in the middle of a war unless they were party to the whole thing.. Just what were the six Israeli F-35 jets doing flying close to the Iranian border?

    Okay there is a lot of smoke but just where is the fire.

    Just as interesting is that none of the twelve Iranian missiles was intercepted and there are rumours that the Iranians were able to take out of action American air defences.

    I am sure that like with Douma when the majority of NATO missiles were intercepted by missiles that were decades old, you wonder what might happen when most of the middle east is covered by the S-300 and later versions.

    This is a story that has got a long way to run and we might never hear the ending.

    Dungroanin ,

    Facts are inconvenient.
    Many planes took off.
    This one was delayed by the pilot 'to remove overloading'.
    Reports of Cruise missiles heading in.

    Mucho ,

    For the best info on this, go to Brendon O' Connell's channel and watch 1 to 3 and number 22. You will get answers there.
    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYaLxbD7Rix3p1rdGY3IMjg?pbjreload=10

    Also go to the Antedote and listen to Greg and Jeremy's latest offering.
    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMf1qGR8km1c8vg_dtpzzVQ

    Dungroanin ,

    It sounds a bit MAGA.

    The thing about 'chips' is they could easily be identified by putting them in a black box and watching what they do using a chip which only does that!

    The whole bs about it's THEM not US crap falls away. Just need some open source simple 'custodian' chip manufacturer to make that available. If it can be made a 'gate keeper' than we are all safe.

    Mucho ,

    "It sounds a bit MAGA. "
    After this, I will never, ever read any of your comments ever again. Get lost!

    Mucho ,

    You talk so much crap. Please, keep it to yourself

    Dungroanin ,

    I ain't saying that is your opinion am I?

    The bit I watched was him being gung-ho about getting back 'control of microprocessors' !!!

    There is a big difference between designing chips and 'manufacturing' facilities'.

    Have you never wondered why most actual building of small electrical component equipment takes place in Asia?

    I don't care wherher you read my comments- i am free to post what I want on whatevet article and whoevers comment. And stick to facts.

    Mucho ,

    "The bit I watched ".
    Honestly, I am so tired of people who comment on things they know nothing about. Everything you say is wrong, because you are speaking from a position of total ignorance, because you haven't watched the films.
    Watch 1 to 3. Watch 22 and 23 ALL THE WAY THROUGH, not skimming. Then comment. Every inaccurate comment you make is covered in detail. Honestly it's no wonder we're so fucked.

    From 2005 after one google search, time spent on this, 10 seconds:
    "While Yona was developed in partnership with one of Intel's California centers, the 65nm microprocessor product is the first to be developed in its entirety, both the architecture and strategy, by Intel engineers at its Israel plants in Haifa and Yakum. "
    https://www.israel21c.org/intels-new-chip-design-developed-in-israel/

    You know zilch, you understand nothing, you make assumptions, you don't watch or read the material, and then in your total ignorance, you spew your feeble thoughts on this forum. Moron

    Mucho ,

    You define the phrase "ignorant Brit"

    Dungroanin ,

    Mucho since you FAILED instantly in your promise to ignore me – i will respond to your toy throwing out of the parambulator.

    First just telling people to WATCH something without explaining what the salient point to be learnt – is not the way to influence or educate.

    I prefer reading an argument- I definitely do not spend hours watching TV or listening to propaganda by msm / indy or 'shock jocks' – that last was the personality I saw and didn't feel the need to hear anymore as I don't when Nigel Farage and his ilk do on the radio here.

    If you want to inform or prove something to me or anyone else kindly post a link to a written piece.

    Second, chips are designed eveywhere there is such competence. Chip manufacturing mainly improved theough research in top universities.
    The UK was a lead chip designer too.

    None of that means the Israelis haven't monopolosed tech and own many patents. The fact is the Israelis ARE part of the 5+1 eyed world Empire – they are the plus one. Snowdens whistleblowing makes absolutely clear that the +1 gets a higher clearance than the +4.

    That's as nice as I am prepared to be, so finally, that last paragraph is what is known as PROJECTION. Look it up and learn that it comes from your fav bogeymen brainfuckers.

    That is some serious self-hate you have going on – work on it.

    Take it easy ok?

    Mucho ,

    Number 23 is totally relevant too, going deep into chips, backdooring and kill switch usage

    Koba ,

    So the mocking of maga is what set you off? Fuck maga and it's idiot supporters great nations don't slaughter civilians for capital

    bevin ,

    Has this link been cited?
    https://thewallwillfall.org/2020/01/19/important-douma-opcw-update-from-prof-piers-robinson/

    norman wisdom ,

    chris morris is very funny has a fine body of twisted comedick works
    for all his charm his role is too destroy society degrade
    he is khazar after all

    sacha baron co hen the names speaks for itself an empty cruel tool
    never trust a coen cohen khan or cowen or co they cookoo

    eliot mcfuck higgins is not oirish
    he is not certainly related to snooker loopy or is it darts i cannot remember hero alex higgins.

    eliot"s dad is rita katz from site intel group amaq news
    his mom barbera lerner spector
    or is it vice versa
    versa vice
    whatever
    shirley you

    get my the friends of the oirish israel drift
    so to speaks
    or sum such

    Mucho ,

    Brilliant, insightful, logical hypothesis of the recent plane downing over Iran by Jeremy Rothe Kushel. Ignore the video, this is about the written article.

    The Prime Suspect in Ukrainian PS752 Shootdown: Israel's Unit 8200
    https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/01/10/ps752/

    Mucho ,

    For further info about Israeli tech domination, what it is, where it comes from and the implications of this, go to Brendon O Connell's YT channel. Number 22 in his list is very important.

    Mucho ,

    Jeremy Rothe-Kushel is a very important member of the truth community, in no small part due to the fact that he is an Ashkenazi Jew. My personal belief is that in the end, the Jewish community will play a pivotal role in weeding out the evil that rules over us. I wish we didn't have these labels, that we could have true freedom to play our chosen role in our God created realm, but at this stage in the game, we're stuck with our divide and rule labels and systems of control.
    Jeremy's style is to the point, he has great depth of knowledge, an encyclopedic knowledge of his field and is a highly astute commentator. He presents a lot of complex information in fairly easy to digest chunks with his co-host, Greg McCarron, on their show "The Antedote" on YT, as well as doing a lot of guerilla style activism in US politics. Highly recommended.

    norman wisdom ,

    i met elliot many years ago
    the chap on the 8 year old lap top above
    we called him fat face down the synagogue ohh how we laughed
    he laughed as well everytime someone said it
    such fun
    are rabbi one day organised a trip and lecture tour of chatham house the belly of the beast.
    we learnt all about how tough regime change was and how difficult it is to do on a bbc size budget.

    what we learnt was that having are people everywhere really helped
    scripted up to speed influencer roles in media in public on track on page working cog like.
    a kind of khazar collective non semites only for security reasons of course.
    we could work from a very low pound dollar and shekels base and still be very effective.

    never under estimate the benjamins or elliots it is folks like this that are the real hero of the oded yinon
    yes sir
    already my life
    fat face eliot boy done good

    and like all khazar he hates the sephardim jewisher and the unclean arab which is shirley a bonus is it not

    George Mc ,

    First off, if folks haven't a clue who Harold Shipman is, you're not going to get far with Titus Oats. At the most they might think it's a character from Gormenghast.

    Second, I initially misread the article and thought that the figure from the 17th century actually WAS Higgins of Bellingcat. And if that seems an absurd assumption to make, even temporarily, it doesn't seem much more absurd than some of the stuff he says e.g.

    I had no knowledge beyond what I'd learned from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rambo.

    The point has been raised that there are psyops perpetrated with a malicious sense of humour as if to say, "These suckers will swallow anything". Higgins with his "education" from Arnold and Rambo may be an example of one of those jokes.

    Third, and to end on an optimistic note, I like the 17th century sentencing and recommend we bring it back:

    and he was whipped and placed in the pillory.

    Dungroanin ,

    Admin – a suggestion on keeping recent articles available from the top of the page.

    Problem: As you add new aricles at top left the ones on the very right drop away! Almost as if being binned into a memory hole.

    Solution: allow a scroll at the right hand edge so that these older links are easily available to readers. Only a minor coding change without any change to your front page.

    Tallis Marsh ,

    I concur! I'm sure many of us will appreciate a scroll on the right hand edge so we can access the older articles. Thanks in advance, OffG!

    Oliver ,

    HM Armed Forces operations in Syria follow the doctrine of Major General Sir Frank Kitson who learnt his stuff in Kenya in the 1950s. Murder, torture, rape the staples of the British military's modern terrorist ability. NATO doctrine too.

    Joe ,

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/0oLfNr4JjeI?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

    BigB ,

    This is an important article: one of the few that dares to express that Douma et al are not mere false flags they a darkly psychotic form of 'snuff propaganda porn' (including the recycling and rearanging of 'props' that were until recently animate human souls with a lifetime of possibility abnegated for ideology). The Working Group on Syria is part of a small counter-narrative subset – along with Sister Agnes Mariam, Vanessa Beeley, RT (on occasion), UK Column, The Indicter, Prof. Marcello Ferrada de Noli – who are willing to state plainly that this is child murder. Now I wholeheartedly commend Kevin that we should name and shame the culprits and their supporters.

    "No, I think it is time for plainer, no-holds-barred language describing these people for the true evil they are – until the truth and label sticks."

    I had a similar epiphany in early 2016. The barbaric of murder of starved and thirsty children at Rashidin – Syrian innocence lured by much needed sweets and drinks only to be blown apart in front of their mothers. Anyone who supports the White Helmets terrorist construct and their NATO-proxy child-murderers needs to be exposed. But what if that trail of exposure leads back to the leader of the Labour party: who had just personally endorsed the charity funding of the White Helmets? And continued to support the Jo Cox Foundation of Syrian humanitarian bombers and R2P interventionists? Which itself is a front for the dark money web of 'philanthrocapitalism' that is the shadow support network for regime change crimes against humanity. This is when righteous indignation meets the dark wall of silence around the social construction of reality. Especially if you put Jeremy Corbyn in the frame.

    What this means is the ability to frame dark actors for the true evil they are has to be a two-way flow. Meaning is created across networks, not just by naming but by naming and agreeing across narrative communities. Again, this is not abstruse: it is social reality. Social reality is not reality: it is a consensual constructivism. Significant numbers of others have to be in a position of consensual agreement in order to challenge the dominant narrative(s). So I echo the sentiment that many can see that the dominant narrative – especially concerning Syria – is deeply flawed. But they are as yet unwilling to admit that the depth of the flaw is in fact a tear in social reality that cannot be easily healed.

    This is the aspect of social reality called 'universe maintenance'. Doxa is the reality constructing belief set – the episteme of interacting beliefs. The narrative has two main aspects: ortho-doxa and hetero-doxa – the orthodox maintaining and heterodox subverting discourses. In order to truly subvert the hegemonic orthodoxy – there has to be a social moment of criticality when the heterodox is no longer deniable. To reach that point: the intrajecting true has to be believable to the hegemonic orthodoxy. Now we have a third mode: para-doxa when the true 'state of affairs' is not believable – it is easily rejected as paradoxical to the reigning consensus covenant of the true. This is universe maintaining: whereby the the totality of the dominant discourse actually subsumes or repels any paradox as a half-truth or ameliorated, disarmed less-than-true ('conspiracy theory'). This is known as 'recuperation'. Anything that meets the dominant discourse has to be explained in the terms of the dominant discourse accommodative and recommending itself to the dominant discourse. Which then becomes a part of the dominant universe of discourse.

    A moment of the true is like a barb to a bubble. It has to be contained and wrapped in narrative that describes and explains it into a consumable form. The full realisation of the propagandic child murder in Syria – tacitly supported by the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn in particular – would destroy the symbolic universe of social reality. Of which it is my personal experience no one really wants to do. The correlations, direct and indirect links, and universally maintained orthodoxy of narrative discourse point to an accomodation. An explanation or multivariate set of explanations that problem shift and ascribe blame to imaginary actors. To deflect or defend the personal self. Because the personal self is independently situated outside the social sphere. Or is it?

    Seeing the real event as it happens requires the perspicacity of social inclusion. We all create social reality together: with our without layers of dualising exclusion that protects us from the way the world really is. Who would vote to legitimise the supporters of NATO and the child-murderers of Syria? 31 million legitimising independent social actors just did. Do you suppose they did so in full knowledge that it is child-murder they were supporting? Or did they create universe maintaining accommodations to the truth? That is how powerful the screening discourses and legitimising orthodoxic narrative mythology is. It is not that it cannot be subverted: its just that calling out the true evil has to be heard in unison by large or social small assemblages willing to totally change everything – including themselves. In order to transition to a different social reality one that accommodates the truth. One which will look nothing like the social reality we choose to maintain as is.

    Francis Lee ,

    My first attempt didn't get through. Herewith second.

    It seems to me that the internal affairs of the Russian Federation, although they may have some impact on external geopolitical issues, are a matter for them. At the present time the relevant question regarding the RF is as follows: Question 1. Is Russia a revionist state intent on an expansionist foreign policy? Answer NO. But it is not going to tolerate NATO expansion into its own strategic zones, namely, Ukraine, Georgia and the North Caucusas. Question 2. Is the Anglo-Zionist empire in open of pursuit of a world empire intent on destroying any sovereign state – including first and foremost Russia – which stands in its way? Answer YES. This really is so blatant that anyone who is ethnically challenged should seek psychiatric help. In Polls conducted around the world the US is always cited as the most dangerous enemy of world peace, including in the US itself. Thus a small influential (unfortunately deranged) cabal based in the west has insinuated its way into the institutions of power and poses a real and present danger to world peace.

    This being the case it is imperative to push all and any 'normal' western governments and shape public opinion and discourse (except the nut-jobs like Poland and the Baltics) into diplomacy. Wind down NATO just as the Warsaw Pact was wound down. that will do for starters. Of course the PTB in all the western institutions – the media (whores) the deep state, the Atlantic Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, Chatham House the Arms merchants, the security services GCHQ, the CIA, Mossad and the rest will oppose this with all the power at their command. This is the present primary site of struggle, mainly propagandistic, cultural and economic, but with overtones of kinetic warfare.

    Similar diplomatic initiatives must be directed at China. Yes, I know all about China's social credit policy, I don't particularly like the idea of 24 hour system of surveillance, and I wouldn't want to live there, but is already a virtual fait accompli in the west. Again it bears repeating that sovereign states should be left to their own devices. After all 'States have neither permanent friends of allies, only permanent interests. (Lord Palmerston, 19 century British Statesman). No more 'humanitarian interventions' thank you very much. How about Mind our own Business non-interventions.

    I make no apologies for being a foreign policy realist – if that hasn't become apparent by this stage!

    BigB ,

    Francis:

    The Russian Federation is involved is strategic partnership with China in consolidating the Eurasian 'supercontinent' into the world island. One which is slowly being drawn together into a massive market covering 70% of the world's population, 75% of energy resources, and 70% of GDP. I'd call that expansionist, wouldn't you?

    Market mechanisms and methodology are exponentially expansionist, extractivist, and extrapolative. Market propaganda is free and equal exchange coupled with mutual development through comparative advantage. Everyone benefits, right?

    No: markets operate as vast surplus value extractors that only operate unequally to deliver maximum competitive advantage to the suprasovereign core. Surplus value valorises surplus capital which cannot be contained in a single domestic market: so it seeks to exploit underdeveloped foreign markets setting up dependencies and peripheries in the satellite states. Which keeps them maldeveloped. In short: Russia and China's wealth is not just their own.

    Russia and China are globalisation now. Globalist exponential expansionism, extractivism, and extrapolation is the repression of humanism and destruction of the biosphere. It can't stop growing in the cancer stage of hyper-capitalism. We are currently consuming every resource at a material throughput increase of 3% per annum year on year. That's a 23 year exponential doubling of material resources. And a 46 year doubling of the doubling. How long before globalisation uses everything? How far into the race to the bottom will the market collapse?

    It would be really nice to return to a Westphalian System of non-expansionist, non-extractivist sovereign nation states. It is just not even plausible under market mechanisms of extraction. There can be no material decoupling and development remains contingent on an impossible infinity: because development remains parallel and assymetrically maintained. And all major resources are depleting exponentially too. Including the nominative renewable and sustainable ones.

    Degrowth; self-sufficiency; localised 'anti-fragility', steady-state; asymmetric development of the marginalised and the peripheralised; regenerative agroecological agriculture; human development not abstract market development; are just some of the pre-requisites of a return to sovereign states. Russia 'sovereigntist' globalisation is the expansionist opposite to that. The RF is part of the biggest market in the world that hoovers up as much surplus value as it can before sending a large tranche of it to London. As much as $25bn a year in capital flight into the offshore nexus of secrecy jurisdictions. It's a globalist expansionist market mechanism that hoovers all vitality out of the life-ground. That: I call expansionist and imperialist of which Russia and China are now the major part.

    Francis Lee ,

    "The Russian Federation is involved is strategic partnership with China in consolidating the Eurasian 'supercontinent' into the world island. One which is slowly being drawn together into a massive market covering 70% of the world's population, 75% of energy resources, and 70% of GDP. I'd call that expansionist, wouldn't you?"

    No, I wouldn't actually. Building roads, rail connections and other trade routes doesn't strike me as imperial expansion. No-one is being forced to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) or into reconfiguring their internal political and economic structures, as the US does in Latin America or as the British did in India and Southern Africa. (East India Company and the British British South Africa Chartered Company). The SCO is a voluntary arrangement. Uzbekistan for example has decided not to join the central Asian Eurasian Economic Union – well that's its prerogative. No-one is going to send any gun-boats to force them. (I am aware that Uzbekistan is a landlocked country, but I was talking figuratively.)

    The EEU's genesis has along with the SCO and BRI has been forced upon the China/Russia axis as part of an emerging counter-hegemonic alliance against the US's imperial aggrandisement with its kowtowing vassals in tow. Russia has no claims on any of its neighbours since it is already endowed with ample land and mineral deposits. China is a key part of this essentially geopolitical bloc quite simply because the US imperial hegemon is determined to stop China's development by all means necessary including the dragooning of contiguous military bases in US proxy states around China's maritime borders.

    A distinction should be made between rampant imperialism of the Anglo-zi0nist empire, and the response of an increasingly bloc of states who find both their sovereignty and even their existence threatened by the imperial juggernaut. What exactly did you expect them to do given the hostility and destructive intent of the Empire? Defence against imperialism is not imperialism. The defence of autonomy and sovereignty of international society and the creation of an anti-hegemonic have the potential to finally create a transformative new world order (and goodness knows we need one) announced at the end of the Cold War in 1991. This ambition finds support not only in Russia and China but in other countries ready to align with them, but also in many western countries. I obviously need to put the question again. Who is and who is not the greatest threat to world peace? Surely to pose the question is to answer it.

    Dungroanin ,

    Agree Francis.
    There is a move to suggest that the Old Empire retains a 'maritime' world and the SCO confines itself to the Eurasian land mass.
    Dream on.
    The Empire is DEAD. Long live the new Empire!

    BigB ,

    Who is the greatest threat to world peace and to the world itself? We are. The global carbon consumption/pollution bourgeoisie. It is the global expansionist mindset that is increasing its demands for growth – as the only solution to social problems, maldevelopment, and maldistribution caused by excessive growth. Supply has to be met by exponentially expanding markets. Whether this is voluntaristic or coerced makes very little difference to the market cancer subsuming the globe. Benign or aggressive forms of cancer are still cancer. And the net effect is the same.

    Russia and China – the 'East' – uphold exactly the same corporate model of global governance that the 'West' does. Which has been made clear in every joint communique – especially BRICS communiques. I have made the case – following Professor Patrick Bond – that BRICS in particular (a literal Goldman Sachs globalist marketing ploy) – are sub-imperial, not anti-imperial. All their major institutions are dollar denominated for loans; BRI finance is in dollars; BRICS re-capitalised the IMF; Contingency Reserve Arrangements come with an IMF neoliberalising structural adjustment policy; etc. It is the same model East and West. One is merely the pseudo-benign extension of the other. The alternative to neoliberal globalisation is neoliberal globalisation. This became radiantly clear at SPIEF 2019: TINA there is no alternative.

    The perceived alternative is the reproduction of neoliberalism – which has long been think-tanked and obvious – and its transformation from 'globalisation 3.0' to 'globalisation 4.0' trade in goods and services, with the emphasis on a transition to high-speed interconnectivity and decoupled service economies. Something like the Trans-Eurasian Information Super Highway (TASIM)? With a sovereigntist and social inclusivity compact. So the neoliberal leopard can change its spots?

    No. Whilst your argument is sound and well constructed: it is reliant on the early 20th century Leninist definition of 'imperialism' as a purely militarist phenomena. Imperialism mutated since then – from military to financial (which are not necessarily exclusive sets) – and is set to metastasise again into 'green imperialism' of man over man (and it is an andrarchic principle) and man (culture) over nature. Here your argument falls down to an ecological and bio-materialist critique. Cancer is extractivist and expansionist wherever it grows.

    Russia is the fourth largest primary energy consumer on the planet. Disregarding hydro – which is not truly ecological – it has a 1% renewable penetration. It is a hydrocarbon behemoth set to grow the only way it knows how – consuming more hydrocarbons. They cannot go 'green': no one can. And a with a global ecological footprint of 3.3 planets per capita, per annum, this is not sustainable. Now or ever.

    So a distinction needs to be made between the old rampant neoliberal globalisation model (3.0) – the Anglo-Zionist imperialist model – and the emergent neoliberal globalisation model (4.0) of Russia/China's rampant ecological imperialism? And a further distinction needs to be made about what humanity has to do to survive this distinction between aggressive and quasi-benign cancer forms. Because we will be just as dead, just as quick if we cannot even identify the underlying cancer we are all suffering from.

    Koba ,

    Big B sit down ultra! China and Russia rent empires and have no desire to be! If you're a left winger you're another poor example of one and more than likely a Trotskyist

    Richard Le Sarc ,

    Love the nickname, Josef.

    Louis Proyect ,

    This is because if a chemical attack did not take place and Assad was not responsible it seems highly likely that the civilians including children were murdered to facilitate a fabrication.

    And were our own intelligence agencies involved in a staged event, considering the refusal to even establish the basic facts in the days following?

    -- -

    This is the sort of conclusion you must come to if you are into Islamophobic conspiracy theories. The notion that this kind of slaughter took place to "facilitate" a false flag is analogous to the 9/11 conspiracism that was on display here a while back and that manifested itself through the inclusion of NYU 9/11 Truther Mark Crispin Miller on Tim Hayward's Assadist propaganda team.

    Sad, really.

    Harry Stotle ,

    Go on Louis, remind us about the 'terrorist passport' miraculously found at the foot of the collapsed tower with a page coveniently left open displaying a 'Tora Bora' stamp – I kove that bit.

    I mean who, apart from half the worlds scientific community is not totally convinced by such compelling evidence, especially when allied to the re-writing of the laws of physics in order to rationlise the ludicrous 2 planes 3 towers conspiracy theory?

    Next you'll be telling us it was necessary for the US to invade Afghanistan and Iraq for reasons few American'srecall beyond the neocon fantasy contructed on 11th Septemember, 2001.

    Dave Hansell ,

    It's clear to a blind man on a galloping horse from this comment of yours Mr Proyect that concepts such as objective evidence, logical and rational deduction, the scientific method etc are beyond your ken.

    Faced with the facts of a collapsing narrative of obvious bullshit and lies you have bought into, which you are incapable of facing up to, it is unsurprising that you are reduced to such puerile school playground level deflections.

    So come on, try getting out of the gutter and upping your game. Because this fare is nothing short of sad and pathetic.

    We know from the evidence of those who actually know their arse from their elbow on these matters that the claims of an attack using chemical weapons on this site are unsustainable.

    Which leaves the issue of the bodies at the site. Given they did not lose their lives as a result of the unscientific bullshit explanation you desperately and clearly want to be the case the question is how did those civilians lose their lives? How did their corpses find their way to that location?

    Did Assad and his "regime" murder them and move the bodies to that site (over which they had no control) in order to create a false flag event to get themselves falsely accused of an NBC attack Louis? Because that's the only reasonable and rational deduction one can imply from your argument and approach.

    It is certainly more reasoned, rational and in keeping with the scientific method (you might want to try it sometime) to surmise that the bodies on site, having not been the result of the claimed and unsustainable narrative you have naively committed to, either died on site from some other cause or were brought to the site for the purpose of creating your fantasy narrative.

    In the latter case it is further a matter of rational and reasoned deduction that such an occurrence could only be carried it in circumstances in which whoever carried it out had actual, effective and physical control of a geographical location and area situated within a wider conflict zone.

    Again, it remains a piece of factual reality that this location was not under the control of the Assad 'regime.' Not least because otherwise there would be no logical or rational military reason for the de facto Syrian Government and it's armed forces to waste resources attacking it.

    Unless of course he buys I to the conspiracy theory and hat they somehow organised a false flag implicating themselves?

    I'm sure everyone else here in the reality based community is waiting with bated breath for you to 'explain' how they did this Louis.

    I know I am. I could do with a good laugh.

    George Mc ,

    This is the sort of conclusion you must come to if you are into Islamophobic conspiracy theories.

    Umm – the assumption that Muslims DIDN'T do it is "Islamophobic"? Even on your own terms you're not making much sense these days, Louis.

    lundiel ,

    There was little doubt that British special forces were captured in Eastern Ghouta when the SAA prevented an all out attack on Damascus. European precursors and British munitions were uncovered along with factories within the tunnel complex, itself a product of western engineering and slave labour. This was no propaganda, evidence was collected, statements were taken and everything was documented. Douma was a direct follow-on from that failure and yet, you refuse the evidence piling up, but accept testimony of journalists based in Jordan and Turkey? The "conspiracy" is wholly yours Louis and you are guilty of malicious intent, false representation and pretending to be a "Marxist" when you are a Zionist neocon.

    lundiel ,

    Hi I'm Louis an unrepentant Marxist and I willfully refuse to use block-quotes.

    Richard Le Sarc ,

    More proyectile vomitus in defence of child-murdering salafist vermin. How low can this creature descend?

    Louis Proyect ,

    Richard, such abusive language only indicates your inability to discuss the matter at hand. In general, a detached sarcasm works much better in polemics. You need to read Lenin to see how it is done. I should add that I am referring to V.I. Lenin, not John Lenin who wrote "Crippled Inside".

    Richard Le Sarc ,

    You defended the salafist butchers with lies, proyectile-do you not even comprehend your own sewage? Or did someone else write it and you just appended your paw-print?

    Dave Hansell ,

    Apologies here. There is an open goal and the ball needs to be put in the back of the net:

    Seems that Louis here is well ahead of the curve in terms of Fukuyama's well known observation about the end of history.

    For Louise history, in terms of the progress and development of human knowledge, stopped around a century ago with whatever Lenin wrote.

    But that's what happens to those who only read one book.

    Sad really.

    Dungroanin ,

    You come across more as Yaxley – Lenin mr Tommy Proyect – but he is a MI5 stooge unlike you cough cough.

    Koba ,

    Lenin hates Trotsky! Trotsky was a power mad maniac who wanted a permanent war state to somehow spread his specific brand of "ahem" socialism, which won't win you friends! "Hi yeah sorry we killed your family in a war we started to save you but yippee Trotsky is now in charge so stop complaining"! You're just a bunch of liars the trots

    Maggie ,

    learn to use the internet which has the information you need to learn the truth:

    Acting out a chemical attack?

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/o63VnLJpwuc?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

    Jimmy Dore hits the nail every time!!

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/FLRQSfSKoJo?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

    Didn't you just love George Carlin, identifies just what the problem is with dicks like Proyect.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/KLODGhEyLvk?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

    Maggie ,

    Here's another Jimmy Dore Vid from 2017
    Watch and learn

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/MnSAB4qeDug?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

    Koba ,

    Maggie don't take jimmy bore as some truth teller he's a bland progressive with revolutionary slogans like proyect! He also has a habit of equating Stalin with Hitler in that god awful nasal accent of his

    Richard Le Sarc ,

    Thems White Helmets is always so neat and tidy. Their mammies must have insisted that they always look their best.

    paul ,

    The British taxpayer funded head choppers and throat slitters in Syria routinely committed massacres and filmed their victims. The resulting footage was passed off by tame media hacks as "evidence" of regime atrocities.

    Koba ,

    Death to the Trotskyists
    Fuck proyect your name calling says it all!
    Islamophobes indeed?! What an idiot

    Harry Stotle ,

    The alternative media, and a smattering of truth tellers are locked in an asymmetrical information-war with the establishment – with an all too obvious 'David & Goliath' sort of dynamic underlying it.

    The question asked at the heart of this article is how to break the vice like grip information managers hold over various geopolitical narratives, referencing events in Douma in particular.

    Alnost reflexively 9/11 comes to mind – a fairly unambiguous example of mass murder for which the official account does not withstand even the most cursory form of scrutiny.
    Professionals even went so far as to purger themselves while the investigating committee admitted they were 'set up to fail' (to quote its chairman).

    Yet the public, instead of shredding Bush, limb from limb (for the lies that were told) rolled onto their back while the neoncons tickled their collective belly as you might do with a particulalrly adorable puppy,
    So if we can't even get to the bottom of events in the middle of New York what realistic chance of doing so in a hostile war zone like Douma?

    On balance racism, together with other forms of collective loathing is the most likely reason why this unsatisfactory state of affairs is unlikely to change.

    A collective 'them and us' mindset makes it far easier for information managers to manipulate a visceral hatred and fear of 'the other'.
    Today it is Qasem Soleimani westerners are taugyt to despise, yesterday it was Bashar al-Assad, before that Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussein, Muammar al-Gaddafi, Nicolás Maduro . the list just goes on and on.
    Information managers simply wind the public up so that collective anger can be directed toward governments or individuals they are trying to bring down – recent history tells us that the public are largely oblivious to this process, so thus never learn from their mistakes.

    Perhaps one thing western leaders, and the US in particular can always rely on, is the ease with which the public can be persuaded to believe that certain bogeymen pose a grave threat to 'our way of life' while failing to notice that it is in fact our own leaders who are carrying out the worst atrocities.

    harry law ,

    Harry Stotle, .."Perhaps one thing western leaders, and the US in particular can always rely on, is the ease with which the public can be persuaded to believe that certain bogeymen pose a grave threat to 'our way of life'. That's true Hermann Goring had it about right with this quote
    "Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or fascist dictatorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peace makers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

    [Jan 24, 2020] Dennis Kucinich, Antiwar to His Core by Adam Dick

    Jan 10, 2020 | ronpaulinstitute.org

    A Thursday article by Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone discusses Dennis Kucinich's work in politics, from Kucinich's eight terms in the United Sates House of Representatives to his two presidential campaigns to his activities since leaving political office. Taibbi, in the article focused much on Kucinich's long-term devotion to advancing the case for peace, describes Kucinich as "antiwar to his core."

    Read Taibbi's article here .

    Kucinich is an Advisory Board member for the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.


    Copyright © 2020 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.
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    [Jan 23, 2020] Guinness record in Presidential twits: Trump broke his previous Twitter record

    Jan 23, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    On Wednesday, Jan 22 Donald Trump wrote his name in the Guinness records books setting Presidential record in Twits. According @FactbaseFeed, an account which tracks Trump's Twitter habits, Trump sent 142 tweets and retweets on Wednesday -- eclipsing his previous single-day presidential record of 123.

    pretzelattack , Jan 23 2020 16:06 utc | 8

    According to the US diplomat, President Trump has made it very "clear that any attack on Americans or American interests will be met with a decisive response, which the president demonstrated on January 2".

    And American interests are defined very flexibly, sometimes in conflicting tweets.

    [Jan 22, 2020] Who is a real "Russian asset" is an on-trivial question ;-)

    Jan 22, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

    pparalegal , 1 hour ago link

    Stay out of Arkansas.

    Best President Ever , 2 hours ago link

    Nobody likes Hillary even liberals like myself won't vote for her and that is why Trump won. She is the Russian asset.

    RG_Canuck , 1 hour ago link

    Please don't insult the Russians like that.

    [Jan 22, 2020] Trump is Right Afghanistan is a 'Loser War'

    Notable quotes:
    "... Washington Post ..."
    "... A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America ..."
    "... But it was and is true. Indeed, when I visited Afghanistan back when U.S. troop levels were near their highest, "off camera," so to speak, military folks were quite skeptical of the war. So were Afghans, who had little good to say about their Washington-created and -supported government unless they were collecting a paycheck from it. An incoming president could be forgiven for suspecting that his predecessor had poured more troops into the conflict only to put off its failure until after he'd left office. ..."
    "... Accounts like that from Rucker and Leonnig are beloved by the Blob. America's role is to dominate the globe, irrespective of cost. Those officials pursuing this objective, no matter how poorly, are lauded. Any politician challenging Washington's global mission is derided. ..."
    "... President Trump has done much wrong. However, he deserves credit for challenging a failed foreign policy that's been paid for by so many while benefiting so few. It is "crazy" and "stupid," as he reportedly said. Why should Americans keep dying for causes that their leaders cannot adequately explain, let alone justify? Let us hope that one day Americans elect a president who will act and not just talk. ..."
    Jan 22, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    fter three years of the Trump presidency, the Washington Post is breathlessly reporting that Donald Trump is a boor who insults everyone, including generals used to respect and even veneration. He's had the impertinence to ask critical questions of his military briefers. For shame!

    President Trump's limitations have been long evident. The Post 's discussion, adapted by Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker from their upcoming book, A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America , adds color, not substance, to this concern. It seems that in the summer of 2017, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and others were concerned about the president's international ignorance and organized a briefing at the Pentagon to enlighten him.

    Was that a worthwhile mission? Sure. Everyone in the policy world marvels at the president's lack of curiosity, absent knowledge, bizarre assumptions, and perverse conclusions. He doesn't get trade, bizarrely celebrates dictatorship, fixates on Iran, doesn't understand agreements, acts on impulse, and exudes absolute certainty. Yet he also captures the essence of issues and shares a set of inchoate beliefs held by millions of Americans, especially those who feel ignored, insulted, disparaged, and dismissed. Most important, he was elected with a mandate to move policy away from the bipartisan globalist conventional wisdom.

    The latter was evidently the main concern of these briefers. The presentation as described by the article exuded condescension. That attitude very likely was evident to Trump. The briefing was intended to inform, but even more so to establish his aides' control over him. While they bridled at Trump's manners, they were even more opposed to his substantive opinions. And that made the briefing sound like a carefully choreographed attack on his worldview.

    For instance, Mattis used charts with lots of dollar signs "to impress upon [the president] the value of U.S. investments abroad. [Mattis] sought to explain why U.S. troops were deployed in so many regions and why America's safety hinged on a complex web of trade deals, alliances, and bases across the globe." Notably, Mattis "then gave a 20-minute briefing on the power of the NATO alliance to stabilize Europe and keep the United States safe."

    No doubt Secretary Mattis sincerely believed all that. However, it was an argument more appropriately made in 1950 or 1960. The world has since changed dramatically.

    Of course, this is also the position of the Blob, Ben Rhodes' wonderful label for the Washington foreign policymaking community. What has ever been must ever be, is the Blob's informal mantra. America's lot in life, no matter how many average folks must die, is to litter the globe with bases, ships, planes, and troops to fight endless wars, some big, some small, to make the world safe for democracy, sometimes, and autocracy, otherwise. If America ever stops fulfilling what seems to be the modern equivalent of Rudyard Kipling's infamous "white man's burden," order will collapse, authoritarianism will advance, trade will disappear, conflict will multiply, countries will be conquered, friends will become enemies, allies will defect, terrorists will strike, liberal values will be discarded, all that is good and wonderful will disappear, and a new dark age will envelope the earth.

    Trump is remarkably ignorant of the facts, but he does possess a commonsensical skepticism of the utter nonsense that gets promoted as unchallengeable conventional wisdom. As a result, he understood that this weltanschauung, a word he would never use, was an absolute fantasy. And he showed it by the questions he asked.

    For instance, he challenged the defense guarantee for South Korea. "We should charge them rent," he blurted out. "We should make them pay for our soldiers." Although treating American military personnel like mercenaries is the wrong approach, he is right that there is no need to protect the Republic of Korea. The Korean War ended 67 years ago. The South has twice the population and, by the latest estimate, 54 times the economy of the North. Why is Seoul still dependent on America?

    If the Blob has its way, the U.S. will pay to defend the ROK forever. Analysts speak of the need for Americans to stick around even after reunification. It seems there is no circumstance under which they imagine Washington not garrisoning the peninsula. Why is America, born of revolution, now acting like an imperial power that must impose its military might everywhere?

    Even more forcefully, it appeared, did Trump express his hostile views of Europe and NATO. Sure, he appeared to mistakenly believe that there was an alliance budget that European governments had failed to fund. But World War II ended 70 years ago. The Europeans recovered, the Soviet Union collapsed, and Eastern Europeans joined NATO. Why is Washington expected to subsidize a continent with a larger population than, and economy equivalent to, America's, and far larger than Russia's? Mattis apparently offered the standard bromides, such as "This is what keeps us safe."

    How? Does he imagine that without Washington's European presence, Russia would roll its tanks and march to the Atlantic Ocean? And from there launch a global pincer movement to invade North America? How does adding such behemoths as Montenegro keep the U.S. "safe"? What does initiating a military confrontation with Moscow over Ukraine, historically part of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, have to do with keeping Americans "safe"? The argument is self-evidently not just false but ridiculous.

    Justifying endless wars is even tougher. Rucker and Leonnig do not report what the president said about Syria, which apparently was part of Mattis's brief. However, Trump's skepticism is evident from his later policy gyrations. Why would any sane Washington policymaker insist that America intervene militarily in a multi-sided civil war in a country of no significant security interest to the U.S. on the side of jihadists and affiliates of al-Qaeda? And stick around illegally as the conflict wound down? To call this policy stupid is too polite.

    Even more explosive was the question of Afghanistan, to which the president did speak, apparently quite dismissively. Unsurprisingly, he asked why the U.S. had not won after 16 years -- which is longer than the Civil War, World Wars I and II, and the Korean War combined. He also termed Afghanistan a "loser war." By Rucker's and Leonnig's telling, this did not go over well: "That phrase hung in the air and disgusted not only the military men and women in uniform sitting along the back wall behind their principals. They all were sworn to obey their commander in chief's commands, and here he was calling the way they had been fighting a loser war."

    But it was and is true. Indeed, when I visited Afghanistan back when U.S. troop levels were near their highest, "off camera," so to speak, military folks were quite skeptical of the war. So were Afghans, who had little good to say about their Washington-created and -supported government unless they were collecting a paycheck from it. An incoming president could be forgiven for suspecting that his predecessor had poured more troops into the conflict only to put off its failure until after he'd left office.

    The fault does not belong to combat personnel, but to political leaders and complicit generals, who have misled if not lied in presenting a fairy tale perspective on the conflict's progress and prognosis. And for what? Central Asia is not and never will be a vital issue of American security. Afghanistan has nothing to do with terrorism other than its having hosting al-Qaeda two decades ago. Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan. In recent years, it's Yemen that's hosted the most dangerous national affiliate of al-Qaeda. So why are U.S. troops still in Afghanistan?

    Accounts like that from Rucker and Leonnig are beloved by the Blob. America's role is to dominate the globe, irrespective of cost. Those officials pursuing this objective, no matter how poorly, are lauded. Any politician challenging Washington's global mission is derided.

    President Trump has done much wrong. However, he deserves credit for challenging a failed foreign policy that's been paid for by so many while benefiting so few. It is "crazy" and "stupid," as he reportedly said. Why should Americans keep dying for causes that their leaders cannot adequately explain, let alone justify? Let us hope that one day Americans elect a president who will act and not just talk.

    Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He is a former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan and author of several books, including Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire .

    [Jan 22, 2020] Wikipedia is nothing but a tool for the concealment of truth.

    Jan 22, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Arch Mangle , Jan 21 2020 14:04 utc | 3

    The Wikipedia article on the Douma attack makes no mention of the recent OPCW leaks:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Douma_chemical_attack

    It's clear to me that Wikipedia is nothing but a tool for the concealment of truth.

    somebody , Jan 22 2020 12:39 utc | 96

    Posted by: Walter | Jan 22 2020 12:30 utc | 95

    Of course. Intelligence services wordwide and their governments knew this as soon as they saw the image.

    But Western main stream media does not report on it.

    [Jan 22, 2020] Tulsi Gabbard Sues Hillary Clinton Over 'Russian Asset' Remark

    Jan 22, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

    Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) has filed a lawsuit against Hillary Clinton, accusing the former Secretary of State of defamation for remarks characterizing the Democratic presidential candidate as a Russian asset .

    Filed on Wednesday in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, Gabbard's attorneys allege that Clinton "smeared" Gabbard's "political and personal reputation," according to The Hill .

    Tulsi Gabbard is suing Hillary Clinton and the first page of the filing is WILD AF pic.twitter.com/DXHLPfy016

    -- Alec Sears (@alec_sears) January 22, 2020

    "Tulsi Gabbard is a loyal American civil servant who has also dedicated her life to protecting the safety of all Americans," said Gabbard's attorney Brian Dunne in a statement.

    "Rep. Gabbard's presidential campaign continues to gain momentum, but she has seen her political and personal reputation smeared and her candidacy intentionally damaged by Clinton's malicious and demonstrably false remarks."

    In a podcast released in October, Clinton said she thought Republicans were "grooming" a Democratic presidential candidate for a third-party bid. She also described the candidate as a favorite of the Russians.

    Clinton did not name the candidate but it was clear she was speaking about Gabbard.

    "They're also going to do third party. I'm not making any predictions, but I think they've got their eye on somebody who's currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate ," Clinton said.

    " She's the favorite of the Russians, they have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far , and that's assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not, because she's also a Russian asset. Yeah, she's a Russian asset, I mean totally. They know they can't win without a third party candidate," Clinton said. - The Hill

    Read the filing below:


    GotAFriendInBen , 1 hour ago link

    Go Gabby Go!!

    Smack that smirk off that face

    Ulna P Radius , 2 hours ago link

    I love Tulsi. She's done more to attack the Democrat globalist neo-Con scumbags than Trump and the GoP put together. What a hero.

    Maxamillia , 2 hours ago link

    Best Wishes. Tulsi. Better Hope You Draw A Sympathetic Judge...

    This Black Witch Hillary R Clinton... Has Been Under Satan So Long, His Radar Has Nearly Made Her Untouchable..

    Except When It Comes To The Majority of American Voters...

    [Jan 21, 2020] Maybe we should put sanctions on Pompeo

    Jan 21, 2020 | www.unz.com

    Old and grumpy , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 3:48 pm GMT

    Maybe we should put sanctions on Pompeo. He could use the diet. Maybe raiding his pantry would feed Iraqi for a couple months. He is truly perfect spokesman American empire. Sadistic, bloated, and corrupt.
    Just passing through , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 4:20 pm GMT
    @Old and grumpy Trump also needs to have food sanctions placed on him. His body is being oppressed and is crying out for (diet) regime change.

    [Jan 21, 2020] Russian Hackers May Have Interfered With Vote on Church Potluck, Local Man Suspects

    Dec 23, 2019 | www.anti-empire.com

    Putin “needs to keep his commie hands” off of the sovereign Independent Baptist church’s affairs

    According to sources, local man Clarence Williams has urged his church’s lead pastor as well as local law enforcement to move forward with an investigation into Russian hacking, claiming that there was ample evidence to support the theory that malicious foreign agents infiltrated and influenced the outcome of a vote on the date for next month’s potluck at Second Baptist Church.

    ... ... ...

    The Babylon Bee 23 Dec 19 Society 625 0

    [Jan 21, 2020] WaPo columnist endorses all twelve candidates

    Highly recommended!
    Are WaPo and NYT both encouraging their readerships to split the 'Anybody But Bernie' vote six ways from Super Tuesday? Fantastic!
    Jan 21, 2020 | caucus99percent.com

    Cassiodorus on Mon, 01/20/2020 - 11:44am Alexandra Petri tells us:

    In a break from tradition, I am endorsing all 12 Democratic candidates.

    Of course, this is a parody of the NYT's endorsement of Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren , trying to encourage the "who cares about policy we want an identity-politics win" vote. Petri's funniest moment is:

    One of two things is wrong with America: Either the entire system is broken or is on the verge of breaking, and we need someone to bring about radical, structural change, or -- we don't need that at all! Which is it? Who can say? Certainly not me, and that is why I am telling you now which candidate to vote for.

    [Jan 21, 2020] BBC faces existential threat. In the 21st century, it has nobody left to lie to -- RT Op-ed

    Jan 21, 2020 | www.rt.com

    George Galloway was a member of the British Parliament for nearly 30 years. He presents TV and radio shows (including on RT). He is a film-maker, writer and a renowned orator.

    Whoever replaces outgoing BBC Director General Tony Hall, be sure that establishment interests will be in safe hands. But multiple scandals the broadcaster has been involved in damaged it quite possibly beyond repair.

    ... ... ...

    Corbyn had to be destroyed at almost ANY cost. Their news and current affairs output (and appointments) over the Corbyn era of 2015-2019 was as crude, and crudely effective, as any screaming, screeching Rupert Murdoch tabloid. Perhaps they were worried the ghost of Sir Alasdair Milne would return to haunt them in the form of his son Seumas Milne, Corbyn's director of communications and strategy and right-hand man. The junior Milne – also Winchester and Oxford – is a considerably harder nut to crack than anyone the BBC had ever had to deal with before

    [Jan 21, 2020] HBO hires 'king of fake news' Brian Stelter from CNN to produce documentary on the dangers of fake news

    Notable quotes:
    "... "disinformation and the cost of fake news." ..."
    "... "how post-truth culture has become an increasingly dangerous part of the global information environment," ..."
    "... To say Stelter's involvement in the documentary attracted mockery online would be an understatement. "This is like Harvey Weinstein doing a documentary on sexual assault," lawyer and journalist Rogan O'Handley wrote. ..."
    "... "HBO has hired Brian Stelter to do a documentary on Fake News. That's like hiring Bernie Madoff to teach accounting. Like hiring Michael Moore to host a fashion show. Not to mention [Stelter] is the dullest human ever on television," ..."
    Jan 21, 2020 | www.rt.com

    If you were making a documentary on fake news and wanted to get journalists involved behind the scenes, there are a few people you may want to avoid. One of those is CNN host Brian Stelter. The HBO network is rightly being mocked for putting Stelter – the host of a CNN show ironically named 'Reliable Sources' – on the team for an upcoming documentary on fake news.

    According to Stelter himself, the documentary will investigate "disinformation and the cost of fake news." The film, for which Stelter was executive producer, will dive into "how post-truth culture has become an increasingly dangerous part of the global information environment," according to WarnerMedia.

    HBO just announced something I've been working on for a couple of years: A documentary titled "AFTER TRUTH: DISINFORMATION AND THE COST OF FAKE NEWS." The film will premiere on TV and online this March. Directed by @a_rossi !

    -- Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) January 15, 2020

    To say Stelter's involvement in the documentary attracted mockery online would be an understatement. "This is like Harvey Weinstein doing a documentary on sexual assault," lawyer and journalist Rogan O'Handley wrote.

    "HBO has hired Brian Stelter to do a documentary on Fake News. That's like hiring Bernie Madoff to teach accounting. Like hiring Michael Moore to host a fashion show. Not to mention [Stelter] is the dullest human ever on television," radio host Mark Simone added.

    [Jan 21, 2020] Trump probably has very little actual control over foreign policy.

    Jan 21, 2020 | off-guardian.org

    paul

    The idea that Trump's recent actions in the Middle East were part of some incredibly cunning plan to avoid war with Iran, strikes me as somewhat implausible, to put it (very) charitably.

    Even Hitler didn't want war. He wanted to achieve his objectives without fighting. When that didn't work, war was Plan B. Trump probably has very little actual control over foreign policy. He is surrounded by people who have been plotting and scheming against him from long before he was elected. He heads a chaotic and dysfunctional administration of billionaires, chancers, grifters, conmen, superannuated generals, religious nut jobs, swamp creatures, halfwits and outright criminals, lurching from one crisis and one fiasco to the next. Some of these people like Bolton were foisted upon him by Adelson and various other backers and wire pullers, but that is not to absolve Trump of personal responsibility.

    Competing agencies which are a law unto themselves have been free to pursue their own turf wars at the expense of anything remotely resembling a rational and coherent strategy. So have quite low level bureaucrats, formulating and implementing their own policies with little regard for the White House. In Syria, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the State Department went their own way, each supporting competing and mutually antagonistic factions and terrorist groups. Agreements that were reached with Russia over Syria, for example, were deliberately sabotaged by Ashton Carter in 24 hours. Likewise, Bolton did everything he could to wreck Trump's delicate negotiations with N. Korea.

    paul ,

    Seen in this light, US policy (or the absence of any coherent policy) is more understandable. What passes for US leadership is the worst in its history, even given a very low bar. Arrogant, venal, corrupt, delusional, irredeemably ignorant, and ideologically driven. The only positive thing that can be said is that the alternative (Clinton) would probably have been even worse, if that is possible.

    That may also be the key to understanding the current situation. For all his pandering to Israel, Trump is more of a self serving unprincipled opportunist than a true Neocon/ Zionist believer in the mould of Pence, Bolton and Pompeo. For that reason he is not trusted by the Zionist Power Elite. He is too much of a loose cannon. They will take all his Gives, like Jerusalem and the JCPOA, but without any gratitude.

    It has taken them a century of plotting, scheming and manoeuvring to achieve their political, financial, and media stranglehold over the US. but America is a wasting asset and they are under time pressure. It is visibly declining and losing its influence. And the parasite will find it difficult to find a similar host. Who else is going to give Israel billions a year in tribute, unlimited free weaponry and diplomatic cover? Russia? Are Chinese troops "happy to die for Israel" asUS ones are (according to their general)?

    paul ,

    And they are way behind schedule. Assad was supposed to be dead by now, and Syria another defenceless failed state, broken up into feuding little cantons, with Israel expanding into the south of the country. The main event, the war with Iran, should have started lond ago.

    That is the reason for the impeachment circus. This is not intended to be resolved one way or the other. It is intended to drag on indefinitely, for months and years, to distract and weaken Trump and make it possible to extract what they want. One of the reasons Trump agreed to the murder of Soleimani and his Iraqi opposite number was to appease some Republican senators like Graham whose support is essential to survive impeachment. They were the ones who wanted it, along with Bolton and Netanyahu.

    [Jan 21, 2020] Trump is "dangerous" because he's a "misinformed idiot," and as such is extremely malleable.

    Jan 21, 2020 | off-guardian.org

    Charlotte Russe

    Bush, Obama, and Clinton are despicable. In fact, they're particularly disgusting, inasmuch, as they were much more "cognizant" than Trump of how their actions would lead to very specific insidious consequences. In addition, they were more able to cleverly conceal their malevolent deeds from the public. And that's why Trump is now sitting in the Oval Office–he won because of public disgust for lying politicians.

    However, Trump is "dangerous" because he's a "misinformed idiot," and as such is extremely malleable. Of course, ignorance is no excuse when the future of humanity is on the line

    In any event, Trump is often not aware of the outcome of his actions. And when you're surrounded and misinformed by warmongering neoconservative nutcases, especially ones who donated to your campaign chances are you'll do stupid things. And that's what they're counting on

    [Jan 21, 2020] Trump is a bully who openly violates international law as well as basic constitutional norms and rules by Paul Street

    I think Paul is wrong. Neo-fascist movements are based on far right party. Trump does not have its own party. He has a faction with the Republican Party, and this faction is not even a majority.
    Notable quotes:
    "... an incoherent program of national revenge led by a strongman; a contempt for parliamentary government and procedures; an insistence that the existing, democratically elected government, whether Léon Blum's or Barack Obama's, is in league with evil outsiders and has been secretly trying to undermine the nation; a hysterical militarism designed to no particular end than the sheer spectacle of strength; an equally hysterical sense of beleaguerment and victimization; and a supposed suspicion of big capitalism entirely reconciled to the worship of wealth and "success." ..."
    "... The idea that it can be bounded in by honest conservatives in a Cabinet or restrained by normal constitutional limits is, to put it mildly, unsupported by history ..."
    "... Paul Street's latest book is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014) ..."
    Jan 21, 2020 | www.counterpunch.org

    When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

    – Maya Angelou

    "It's amazing," fellow CounterPuncher Eric Draitser recently wrote me, "that people ever thought a Trump administration would be something other than this."

    "This" is the demented neofascistic Trump-Pence regime, which openly violates basic constitutional norms and rules while conducting itself in barefacedly racist, sexist, and eco-cidal ways.

    The long record of this presidency's transgressions now includes the open dog-wagging assassination – on brazenly false pretexts – of a foreign military commander atop a state (Iran) with which the United States is not at war and without the permission of a government (Iraq) on whose soil the monumental war crime took place.

    ... ... ...

    Another person likely unsurprised by Trump's horrifying presidency is New Yorker columnist Adam Gopnik. "Trump," Gopnik wrote in July of 2016, summarizing elementary facts of Trump' life: "is unstable, a liar, narcissistic, contemptuous of the basic norms of political life, and deeply embedded among the most paranoid and irrational of conspiracy theorists. There may indeed be a pathos to his followers' dreams of some populist rescue for their plights. But he did not come to political attention as a 'populist'; he came to politics as a racist, a proponent of birtherism." As Gopnik had explained two months before, the correct description of Trump needed to include the world "fascist" in one way or another:

    "There is a simple formula for descriptions of Donald Trump: add together a qualification, a hyphen, and the word "fascist." The sum may be crypto-fascist, neo-fascist, latent fascist, proto-fascist, or American-variety fascist -- one of that kind, all the same. Future political scientists will analyze (let us hope in amused retrospect, rather than in exile in New Zealand or Alberta) the precise elements of Poujadisme, Peronism and Huck Finn's Pap that compound in Trump's 'ideology.' But his personality and his program belong exclusively to the same dark strain of modern politics: an incoherent program of national revenge led by a strongman; a contempt for parliamentary government and procedures; an insistence that the existing, democratically elected government, whether Léon Blum's or Barack Obama's, is in league with evil outsiders and has been secretly trying to undermine the nation; a hysterical militarism designed to no particular end than the sheer spectacle of strength; an equally hysterical sense of beleaguerment and victimization; and a supposed suspicion of big capitalism entirely reconciled to the worship of wealth and "success." It is always alike, and always leads inexorably to the same place: failure, met not by self-correction but by an inflation of the original program of grievances, and so then on to catastrophe. The idea that it can be bounded in by honest conservatives in a Cabinet or restrained by normal constitutional limits is, to put it mildly, unsupported by history (emphasis liberally added) ." [Adam Gopnik, "Going There With Donald Trump," The New Yorker , May 11, 2016].

    Paul Street's latest book is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014)

    [Jan 21, 2020] Bernie Sanders Walks Straight Into the Russiagate Trap

    Jan 21, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

    Daniel Lazare January 20, 2020 © Photo: Wikimedia The New York Times caused a mini-commotion last week with a front-page story suggesting that Russian intelligence had hacked a Ukrainian energy firm known as Burisma Holdings in order to get dirt on Joe Biden and help Donald Trump win re-election.

    But the article was flimsy even by Russiagate standards, and so certain questions inevitably arise. What was it really about? Who's behind it? Who's the real target?

    Here's a quick answer. It was about boosting Joe Biden, and its real target was his chief rival, Bernie Sanders. And poor, inept Bernie walked straight into the trap.

    The article was flimsy because rather than saying straight out that Russian intelligence hacked Burisma, the company notorious for hiring Biden's son, Hunter, for $50,000 a month job, reporters Nicole Perlroth and Matthew Rosenberg had to rely on unnamed "security experts" to say it for them. While suggesting that the hackers were looking for dirt, they didn't quite say that as well. Instead, they admitted that "it is not yet clear what the hackers found, or precisely what they were searching for."

    So we have no idea what they were up to, if anything at all. But the Times then quoted "experts" to the effect that "the timing and scale of the attacks suggest that the Russians could be searching for potentially embarrassing material on the Bidens – the same kind of information that Mr. Trump wanted from Ukraine when he pressed for an investigation of the Bidens and Burisma, setting off a chain of events that led to his impeachment." Since Trump and the Russians are seeking the same information, they must be in cahoots, which is what Democrats have been saying from the moment Trump took office. Given the lack of evidence, this was meaningless as well.

    But then came the kicker: two full paragraphs in which a Biden campaign spokesman was permitted to expound on the notion that the Russians hacked Burisma because Biden is the candidate that they and Trump fear the most.

    "Donald Trump tried to coerce Ukraine into lying about Joe Biden and a major bipartisan, international anti-corruption victory because he recognized that he can't beat the vice president," the spokesman, Andrew Bates, said. "Now we know that Vladimir Putin also sees Joe Biden as a threat. Any American president who had not repeatedly encouraged foreign interventions of this kind would immediately condemn this attack on the sovereignty of our elections."

    If Biden is the number-one threat, then Sanders is not, presumably because the Times sees him as soft on Moscow. If so, it means that he could be in for the same neo-McCarthyism that antiwar candidate Tulsi Gabbard encountered last October when Hillary Clinton blasted her as "the favorite of the Russians." Gabbard had the good sense to blast her right back.

    "Thank you @Hillary Clinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know – it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine ."

    If only Sanders did the same. But instead he put out a statement filled with the usual anti-Russian clichés:

    "The 2020 election is likely to be the most consequential election in modern American history, and I am alarmed by new reports that Russia recently hacked into the Ukrainian gas company at the center of the impeachment trial, as well as Russia's plans to once again meddle in our elections and in our democracy. After our intelligence agencies unanimously agreed that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, including with thousands of paid ads on Facebook, the New York Times now reports that Russia likely represents the biggest threat of election meddle in 2020, including through disinformation campaigns, promoting hatred, hacking into voting systems, and by exploiting the political divisions sewn [sic] by Donald Trump ."

    And so on for another 250 words. Not only did the statement put him in bed with the intelligence agencies, but it makes him party to the big lie that the Kremlin was responsible for putting Trump over the top in 2016.

    Let's get one thing straight. Yes, Russian intelligence may have hacked the Democratic National Committee. But cybersecurity was so lax that others may have been rummaging about as well. (CrowdStrike, the company called in to investigate the hack, says it found not one but two cyber-intruders.) Notwithstanding the Mueller report, all the available evidence indicates that Russia did not then pass along thousands of DNC emails that Wikileaks published in July 2016. (Julian Assange's statement six months later that "our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party" remains uncontroverted.) Similarly, there's no evidence that the Kremlin had anything to do with the $45,000 worth of Facebook ads purchased by a St. Petersburg company known as the Internet Research Agency – Robert Mueller's 2018 indictment of the IRA was completely silent on the subject of a Kremlin connection – and no evidence that the ads, which were politically all over the map, had a remotely significant impact on the 2016 election.

    All the rest is a classic CIA disinformation campaign aimed at drumming up anti-Russian hysteria and delegitimizing anyone who fails to go along. And now Bernie Sanders is trying to cover his derrière by hopping on board.

    It won't work. Sanders will find himself having to take one loyalty oath after another as the anti-Russia campaign flares anew. But it will never be enough, and he'll only wind up looking tired and weak. Voters will opt for the supposedly more formidable Biden, who will end up as a bug splat on the windshield of Donald Trump's speeding election campaign. With impeachment no longer an issue, he'll be free to behave as dictatorially as he wishes as he settles into his second term.

    After inveighing against billionaire's wars, he'll find himself ensnared by the same billionaire war machine. The trouble with Sanders is that he thinks he can win by playing by the rules. But he can't because the rules are stacked against him. He'd know that if his outlook was more radical. His problem is not that he's too much of a socialist. Rather, it's that he's not enough.

    [Jan 20, 2020] Important clarification about MadCow disease

    Jan 15, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

    DC_rez , January 16, 2020 at 16:08

    Are you insinuating Rachel Maddow is a journalist?

    [Jan 20, 2020] Fake Investigations... Designed To Fool by Bryce Buchanan

    Highly recommended!
    Money quote: "The Deep State and the media appear to believe that we are fooled by these fraudulent investigations. We are not fooled. We are tired of the lies and the arrogance."
    Notable quotes:
    "... For the Deep State, hiding and destroying evidence of guilt is standard operating procedure. They simply report a "glitch" that destroyed the key evidence and that's the end of it. Or, they simply redact the portions of the record that would expose the truth. To my memory, no one ever suffers any consequences for this. Even now, Director Wray and others are tenaciously withholding evidence. ..."
    "... When Anthony Weiner's laptop was found to contain over 340,000 Hillary emails in a file named "insurance", the FBI did not rejoice about finally getting the 'lost' email. No, they hid the discovery for weeks until a New York agent threatened to go public. Then, quite miraculously, Peter Strzok found a way to very quickly examine 340,000 messages and found that there was nothing at all that was incriminating. No rational person would believe that. ..."
    "... The dirty cops are so confident in their ability to deceive the public that they just announced that the FISA court reforms will be managed by David Kris. Kris has been a defender of FBI misconduct and he attacked Devin Nunes for telling the truth about the FISA court. They don't even care about the appearance of fairness. They do what they want. ..."
    "... Because there was nothing, and because it was known from the start that, " there is no big there, there ", the Mueller Team used several irrelevant legal actions to prolong the belief that they were closing in on Trump. Mueller arranged for their media partner, CNN, to film the early morning swat team raid on 67 year old Roger Stone's home. It was very dramatic and very un-necessary. Also, some small-time Russian troll farms were indicted so that the word "Russia" could fill the news, prolonging the desired myth. One of the indicted firms did not even exist. The others did not appear to favor any one candidate and much of their activity was after the election ..."
    "... Mueller led a 40 million dollar investigation looking for a crime. That effort failed at finding any collusion, but it did play a role in the Democrats winning a majority in the House of Representatives. That then enabled another investigation of an imaginary crime for political purposes. A scripted hearsay 'whistleblower' submitted lies that allowed Adam Schiff to continue his own campaign of lies. You know the rest of the story. Trump is being falsely charged for doing what Biden bragged about doing. ..."
    Jan 20, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Bryce Buchanan via The Burning Platform blog,

    Many government officials with long entrenched power are unwilling to give up any of that power. In their minds, they have a right to control our lives as they see fit, with complete indifference to our wishes. To avoid rebellion, they need to hide this fact as much as possible. They want the citizens to believe the lie that we are a nation of laws with equal justice under the law. To advance this lie, they have staged many theatrical productions that they call "investigations". They try to give us the impression that they want to expose the facts and punish wrongdoing.

    Most of the big 'investigations' in the news in recent years have not been at all what they pretended to be. The sham investigations of Hillary's email, or the Clinton Foundation, or Weiner's laptop, or Uranium One, or Mueller's witch hunt, or Huber's big nothing, or the IG's whitewash, or the Schiff-Pelosi charades, have all been premeditated deceptions.

    There are three types of investigations that call for different deceptions by the Deep State.
    1. The first type is the rare honest investigation . Examples would be the attempt to find the truth about Fast and Furious (Obama's gunrunning operation), or the IRS scandal (Obama's weaponizing of government). In response to real investigations, the criminals do two things lie and hide evidence. Key evidence, even if it is under subpoena, just disappears. In the IRS case, Lois Lerner's relevant email and the email of 6 others involved in the scheme was just "lost". The IRS "worked tirelessly" to find the email, but hard drives had been destroyed and back-up drives were missing, so the subpoenaed evidence could not be provided.

      For the Deep State, hiding and destroying evidence of guilt is standard operating procedure. They simply report a "glitch" that destroyed the key evidence and that's the end of it. Or, they simply redact the portions of the record that would expose the truth. To my memory, no one ever suffers any consequences for this. Even now, Director Wray and others are tenaciously withholding evidence.

    2. The second type of 'investigation' is when the Deep State pretends to investigate the Deep State . In these 'investigations' the outcome is known in advance, but the script calls for pretending, sometimes for years, that it an honest investigation is underway.

      There was nothing about the Hillary investigations that had anything to do with finding facts. The purpose from the beginning was exoneration. Key witnesses were given immunity and many were allowed to attend each other's interviews. There were no early morning swat team raids to gather evidence. Evidence was destroyed with no consequences.

      When Anthony Weiner's laptop was found to contain over 340,000 Hillary emails in a file named "insurance", the FBI did not rejoice about finally getting the 'lost' email. No, they hid the discovery for weeks until a New York agent threatened to go public. Then, quite miraculously, Peter Strzok found a way to very quickly examine 340,000 messages and found that there was nothing at all that was incriminating. No rational person would believe that.

      The dirty cops are so comfortable about getting away with lies like this that Huber can announce that he found no corruption, when it is readily apparent that he did not interview key witnesses . He even turned away whistleblowers who wanted to submit evidence. A real investigator, Charles Ortel, could have given Huber a long list of Clinton Foundation crimes . Like the Weiner laptop fake investigation, you don't find crimes if you don't really look for them.

      The dirty cops are so confident in their ability to deceive the public that they just announced that the FISA court reforms will be managed by David Kris. Kris has been a defender of FBI misconduct and he attacked Devin Nunes for telling the truth about the FISA court. They don't even care about the appearance of fairness. They do what they want.

      IG investigations have proven to be flimsy exonerations of Deep State criminality. Any honest observer can see that there was a carefully organized plan by top officials to control the outcome of the Presidential election. This corrupt plan involved lying to the FISA court, illegal surveillance and unmasking of citizens and conspiring with media partners to make sure lies were widely circulated to voters. The government conspirators and the majority of the media were functioning as nothing more than a branch of Hillary's campaign. That's a lot of power aimed at destroying Trump.

      To an IG investigator, this monumental scandal was presented to us as nothing to be very concerned about. Yes, a few minor rules were inadvertently broken and there did appear to be some bias, but there was no reason at all to think that bias effected any actions. If the agencies involved make a training video and set aside a day for a training meeting, then that should satisfy us completely.

    3. The third type of investigation involves investigating an imaginary crime for political reasons . The Mueller investigation and the impeachment investigation are two examples of this. Probably as a justification for illegal surveillance they were already doing, the conspirators pretended that there was powerful evidence that Trump was colluding with Putin to win the election. Lies about this issue propelled the country into 3 years of stories about nothing stories and investigations about something that never happened. Never in the history of nothing has nothing been so thoroughly covered.

      Because there was nothing, and because it was known from the start that, " there is no big there, there ", the Mueller Team used several irrelevant legal actions to prolong the belief that they were closing in on Trump. Mueller arranged for their media partner, CNN, to film the early morning swat team raid on 67 year old Roger Stone's home. It was very dramatic and very un-necessary. Also, some small-time Russian troll farms were indicted so that the word "Russia" could fill the news, prolonging the desired myth. One of the indicted firms did not even exist. The others did not appear to favor any one candidate and much of their activity was after the election .

      Mueller led a 40 million dollar investigation looking for a crime. That effort failed at finding any collusion, but it did play a role in the Democrats winning a majority in the House of Representatives. That then enabled another investigation of an imaginary crime for political purposes. A scripted hearsay 'whistleblower' submitted lies that allowed Adam Schiff to continue his own campaign of lies. You know the rest of the story. Trump is being falsely charged for doing what Biden bragged about doing.

    The Deep State and the media appear to believe that we are fooled by these fraudulent investigations. We are not fooled. We are tired of the lies and the arrogance.

    We are increasingly angry that there is a double standard of justice in this country. There is a protected class of people who are not prosecuted for their crimes. This needs to end.


    insanelysane , 9 minutes ago link

    The sheeple are easily led including the opposition sheeple. Two quick examples:

    1. In the email scandal, Hillary was guilty, beyond a shadow of a doubt, of violating the FOIA by conducting all State Department business via a personal email She was guilty. Yet her team, listen up sheeple, her team made it about whether or not classified information was transmitted. This is a gray area which could be defended. She knew she was guilty of the FOIA violation because it was the whole reason the server was set up in the first place. Yet she got away with it because everyone focused on the classifications of emails which was a gray area.

    2. In the Weiner / Abedin laptop matter, it is and was illegal for any of these emails to be on a personal computer. Again, guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt. Yet again everyone focused on what was in the emails and not the fact that just possessing the emails was illegal. So the FBI was able to say nothing new here and let it drop. If another group such as the US Marshals was in charge of this investigation, Weiner / Abedin would have been fully charged with possessing these emails. They would have been pressured to reveal why it was named Insurance and have been asked to cut a deal.

    DonGenaro , 10 minutes ago link

    Assange rots in jail, and Maxwell walks free, while Trump is busy pleasuring every Zionist in sight

    East Indian , 23 minutes ago link

    A comment in 'The Gateway Pundit':

    "Andy McCabe admits lying to the FBI and nothing happens. The FBI lies to Gen. Flynn and he faces jail time. Justice in Deep State America."

    - reader ricocat1

    hardmedicine , 38 minutes ago link

    his name was Seth Rich!

    hoffstetter , 40 minutes ago link

    The purpose of show trials is to fool those that don't pay attention. There are millions of US citizens that get their news from their neighbor or a narrow set of information that is disseminated by media that parrot their providers verbatim without challenge. Such people are quite regularly fooled and some vote.

    buckboy , 57 minutes ago link

    We, the People are free to bitch and moan.

    marlin2009 , 1 hour ago link

    The double standard justice system in America is appalling and even worse than communists. Americans really don’t have any credit to criticize communist countries. The ruling class is no better than them.

    The media and ruling classes have tried decades to brainwashed the mass to believe that the less or even not corrupted.

    Deep Snorkeler , 1 hour ago link

    Trump's Non-Crimes

    Trump University Fraud: Trump paid fine

    Trump Taj Mahal Casino Money Laundering: Trump paid fine

    Trump Foundation Fraud: Trump paid fine

    Trump Campaign Law Violations: pending

    Trump Obstruction:

    Trump Abuse of Power:

    Trump...

    Old Hippie Patriot , 1 hour ago link

    They could have never pulled off the JFK assassination had the internet existed back in 1963. Time for the Epstein *********** to be posted on the internet. Even the asleep would realize the unimaginable evil that has been controlling this world for millenia.

    HANGTHEOWL , 1 hour ago link

    I am not sure about that,,we have the net now,,and although there are many of us that pay attention and figure out their crimes and hoax's,,,,they still get away with them,,,,,,NASA still gets 59 million a day to fake the space program,,,

    monty42 , 1 hour ago link

    Why not? They pulled off 9/11. And what do we have? The same as with the JFK murder. People still arguing over how it was done, and ignoring the obvious, historically established now, of who benefited and why. Grassy knoll, 2nd shooter, or directed energy weapons or explosives, internet or not, still chasing the tail.

    HANGTHEOWL , 57 minutes ago link

    True, they murdered 3,000 of us on 9-11,,right on TV, using plainly obvious controlled demolitions, and to date they have still gotten away with it...

    [Jan 20, 2020] NYT Editors Hedge Their Bets, Endorse Warren Klobuchar

    Fake news are consistent: Klobuchar and not Tulsi ?
    Jan 20, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

    ...

    in what the paper described as a "significant break with convention", the members of its editorial board have selected not one, but two candidates - both of them women.

    Its chosen candidates are: Elizabeth Warren, the Republican-turned-progressive who for years posed as a Native American to game America's system of affirmative action - and Amy Klobuchar, the midwestern senator from the great state of Minneapolis with a reputation for being an unhinged dragon-lady boss.

    That the NYT selected the two remaining women among the top tier of contenders is hardly a surprise: This is, after all, the same newspaper that kicked off #MeToo by dropping the first expose about Harvey Weinstein's history of abusing, harassing and assaulting women just days before the New Yorker followed up with the first piece from Ronan Farrow.

    ...After all, if the editors went ahead with their true No. 1 choice, Klobuchar, a candidate who has very little chance of actually capturing the nomination, they would look foolish.


    DeePeePDX , 2 hours ago link

    NYT is like that ex you dumped that won't stop trying to get your attention with increasingly desperate and pathetic acts.

    Griffin , 2 hours ago link

    Warren is a much better candidate than Biden is in my view.

    Warren seems to get into trouble sometimes for all kinds of reasons like most people do, but the problems are usually trivial, more silly than dangerous. There is tendency in her to stick to her guns even when she does not know what she is doing.

    When i run into something unexpected or something that seems to be something i don't understand, i usually backtrack and look at the problem from some distance to see what happened and why before trying to correct or fix the problem, rather than just doing something.

    Its not a perfect plan, but it seems to work most of the time.

    https://9gag.com/gag/ap5AO19

    Someone Else , 2 hours ago link

    The tennis shoe I threw away last week is a better candidate than Biden. So that's not saying much.

    TheManj , 3 hours ago link

    NYT remains a joke. Their endorsement is straight up virtue-signalling.

    Here's some reality: Warren's latest antics have cemented her image as dishonest and high-strung. Knoblocker has no charisma and remains practically unknown.

    John Hansen , 3 hours ago link

    Why are foreign ownedNew York Times allowed to meddle in the election?

    Where is the investigation?

    pitz , 4 hours ago link

    I've personally sat down and talked with Klobuchar. Not a lot of depth of intelligence in her, that's for sure, easily manipulated by lobbyists. Warren, at least, knows what the problem is, although she might have swallowed the proverbial Democratic party "kool aid".

    spam filter , 4 hours ago link

    Warren is the deep state establishment pick. If you must vote Dem, pick someone that isn't, or one the establishment seems to work against. Better yet, vote Trump, safe bet on gun rights, freedoms.

    SheHunter , 5 hours ago link

    Here's the link. It is a gd editorial.

    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/19/opinion/amy-klobuchar-elizabeth-warren-nytimes-endorsement.html

    [Jan 20, 2020] Trump bragged about Soleimani killing to a crowd at a big fundraising dinner.

    Jan 20, 2020 | www.unz.com

    John Chuckman , says: Website Show Comment January 18, 2020 at 3:04 pm GMT

    Yes, but we also have this

    It is reported this morning (CNN) that Trump bragged about the killing to a crowd at a big fundraising dinner.

    Just sick, official state murder for campaign donations.

    That's what America is reduced to.

    [Jan 19, 2020] The anti-China conservative faction which Trump represents is screwing up the Pax Americana and petrodollar recycling into Treasury Bonds, by destroying the monetary scam they set up to control the world

    Notable quotes:
    "... The "movement conservatives" leader was Barry Goldwater who Trump's dad was a big supporter of, and Trump was raised in and among AND represents that faction of elite power. ..."
    "... The LIEO or Rules Based Order is based on being closely allied with European elites against Russia to contain the Middle East and Central Asia (Iran and Afghanistan) based on Zbigniew Brzezinski's Grand Chessboard theory. ..."
    "... The 1950's triangle of power was superseded by the oligarch's counter revolution that led to supranational trade institutions. Democracies were relegated to a secondary status and run by technocrats for the benefit of oligarchs until Donald Trump. He is a nationalist plutocrat; admittedly a lower level one, a NY casino owner who went bankrupt. Mike Bloomberg represents the other side, a globalist billionaire. Elizabeth Warren is a top level technocrat but no politician. ..."
    "... The endless wars are fought to make a profit for the plutocracy and destabilize nations to make foreign corporate exploitation possible. That was why Hunter Biden was in Ukraine. The conflicts are not meant to be won. ..."
    "... He makes stupid mistakes. Through the barrage of propaganda, reports of shell shocked troops, destroyed buildings and 11 concussion causalities from Iran's missile attack made it into the news. The military must be pissed. The aura of invincibility is gone. ..."
    "... Donald Trump should be removed by the 25th amendment before he mistakenly triggers the Apocalypse. Except the 1% politician VP, Mike Pence, believes that the End of Time is God's Will and necessary for his Ascension. ..."
    "... The power triangle theory is less in line with the facts than a simple duality: Wall Street & the MIC, you have to advance interests of both or you're out. ..."
    "... Second, the 'meeting in the Tank' sounds like complete b.s. designed to sell books ..."
    "... And the 'rules-based international order' rings very false as something that would be said with a straight face by real MIC insiders, which those generals are. ..."
    "... Not only sick of wars, his mobster approach to foreign policy and allies is an embarrassment to RINO and Independents. ..."
    "... Humanity is in a civilization war about public/private finance being fought by proxies and character actors like Trump. Maybe after this war is over, and if we survive, we can all communicate about the social contract directly instead of through proxy fronts. Do you want to live in a sharing/caring world or a selfish/competitive one?....socialism or barbarism? ..."
    Jan 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Kali , Jan 17 2020 19:26 utc | 7

    That Power Elite theory which was written in the 50s by C.W. Mills is incomplete for today because in the 60s there was a split among the power elite between the new "movement conservatives" and the old eastern bank establishment. The conservatives were more focused on the pacific region and containing China, and the liberal establishment were more focused on Europe and containing Russia.

    The "movement conservatives" leader was Barry Goldwater who Trump's dad was a big supporter of, and Trump was raised in and among AND represents that faction of elite power. In fact he is the 1st president from that faction of the elites to hold the oval office, many people thought Reagan was, but he was brought under the control of George Bush and the liberal elites after taking office after he was injured by a Bush related person. The different agendas of the the two factions are out in the open today with one being focused on anti-Russia and the other being focused on anti-China. It has been like that since the 1960s.

    The anti-China conservative faction which Trump represents (and which unleashed the VietNam War) is screwing up the "rules based order" aka "Liberal International Economic Order" aka Pax Americana which was set up after WWII at Bretton Woods and then altered in the 1970s with the creation of the petrodollar and petrodollar recycling into Treasury Bonds, by destroying the monetary scam they set up to control the world

    It needed the cooperation of the elites of Europe and elsewhere, which Trump and his faction doesn't care about -- they only care about short term profits on Wall St.

    The LIEO or Rules Based Order is based on being closely allied with European elites against Russia to contain the Middle East and Central Asia (Iran and Afghanistan) based on Zbigniew Brzezinski's Grand Chessboard theory. China trade is important for them, Russia is their main enemy. ( War of the Worlds: The New Class ). Trump and his movement conservative faction is ruining their world order for their own short term gain on Wall St.


    VietnamVet , Jan 17 2020 22:34 utc | 44
    The 1950's triangle of power was superseded by the oligarch's counter revolution that led to supranational trade institutions. Democracies were relegated to a secondary status and run by technocrats for the benefit of oligarchs until Donald Trump. He is a nationalist plutocrat; admittedly a lower level one, a NY casino owner who went bankrupt. Mike Bloomberg represents the other side, a globalist billionaire. Elizabeth Warren is a top level technocrat but no politician.

    The endless wars are fought to make a profit for the plutocracy and destabilize nations to make foreign corporate exploitation possible. That was why Hunter Biden was in Ukraine. The conflicts are not meant to be won.

    Donald Trump is way for over his head and getting old. His competent staff are in jail or fired. Apparently no one told him about the thousands of ballistic missiles that can destroy the Gulf States' oil facilities at will and make the buildup for the invasion of Iran impossible. He makes stupid mistakes. Through the barrage of propaganda, reports of shell shocked troops, destroyed buildings and 11 concussion causalities from Iran's missile attack made it into the news. The military must be pissed. The aura of invincibility is gone.

    Donald Trump should be removed by the 25th amendment before he mistakenly triggers the Apocalypse. Except the 1% politician VP, Mike Pence, believes that the End of Time is God's Will and necessary for his Ascension.

    fairleft , Jan 18 2020 1:21 utc | 81
    The power triangle theory is less in line with the facts than a simple duality: Wall Street & the MIC, you have to advance interests of both or you're out.

    Second, the 'meeting in the Tank' sounds like complete b.s. designed to sell books, with an obvious sales strategy, as b said, of pleasuring both the pro/anti Trump sides of the book-buying bourgeoisie.

    And the 'rules-based international order' rings very false as something that would be said with a straight face by real MIC insiders, which those generals are.

    Finally, whether Trump ridiculed the generals or not, that's a sideshow to entertain the rubes. Trump's always been on side with the big picture Neocon approach essential to the MIC. Their global dominance or chaos approach is essential to keeping military budgets gigantic until 'forever'. True that Trump whined about endless wars as a 2016 campaign strategy, but he was either b.s.-ing or at the time didn't get that they are part of the overall Neocon approach he backs.

    Passer by , Jan 17 2020 22:04 utc | 35

    Not a very good analysis by b because this does not explain why 90 % of US corporate media is hostile to Trump. This does not happen without significant elite support.

    That Trump is backed by the military faction is something i have been saying often. But there are forces within the government faction that dislike him, for example the CIA.

    As for the corporate faction, it is not true that free money made them supportive of Trump. Rather the faction is divided - between the globalist corporate faction, relying on globalisation, including most tech companies, and US nationalist faction, such as local US businesses, big oil, shale gas, etc.

    Another point - jews have large influence within the US, and 80 % voted against Trump regardless of his Israeli support. They again voted 80 % Dem in 2018. Having 80 % of US jews against you means encountering significant resistance.

    Demographically speaking, most women, jews, muslims, latinos, asians, afroamericans, lgbt people, young people, etc. are strongly against him so i think that he will lose. Unless for some reason they do not vote.

    Even if he somehow wins again, this will lead to civil war like situation and extreme polarisation in the US.

    A P , Jan 17 2020 19:33 utc | 9

    The US military, the various factions within the Deep State, political and corporate cabals has the attitude of a spoiled 3-year-old: If I can't have it, I'll break it so it is of little use to others.

    Unfortunately, breaking other countries is just fine for the MIC... arms sales all around and chaos to impede non-military commerce with other major power centers like Russia or China.

    Trump is the product of a dysfunctional family, a "greed is good" trust-fund social circle and a sociopathic US bully/gun culture.

    The fact "bone spurs" Trump weaseled out of the draft will also not play well with the generals, let alone the grunts who suffer most from endless POTUS idiocy (not limited to Trump, see Prince Bush/Bandar the 2nd)

    All the more proof that most Western "democracies" would be better served with a lottery to choose their Congressional and POTUS chair-warmers. Joe Sixpack could do a better job. A 200-lb sack of flour would do better than any POTUS since Kennedy.

    Walter , Jan 17 2020 23:25 utc | 56

    @ wagelaborer | Jan 17 2020 19:04 utc | 3

    your: "Trump can't start a war without ruling class backing any more than he can end the wars if the rulers veto it."

    May be, I think is, true in one sense. But Trump is far from the sole agent capable of starting a war. War, as opposed to simple murder, involve 2 or more parties. Whatever the intentions, the recent murders by drone in Baghdad hav,e it seems, brought Iran to consider war exists now...and they have a nifty MAGA policy. On Press TV today they hosted an expert who called for the execution of several exceptional American leaders...sounds like war to me.

    (Make America Go Away)

    The system is so screwy and peopled by such uneducated and delusional people that it's quite simple that they would do some stupid that that caused a war. Looks like war to me. I await the horrors.

    Decaying empires usually start wars that bring about their rapid ruin. Does it matter how they do this?

    ............

    The thesis of the triangle of elite factions is fascinating.

    Walter recalls that JFK got the reports from Vietnam that said we were winning, while at the same time Johnson got the true story. And also what happened then with the "correction" of 1963 (their words) and the immediate change of war policy. Can't help an old guy from remembering old folly. And noting that history repeats as farce.

    The Iran affair is liable to coordinate with NATO. Lavrov spoke to the NATO preparations today @ TASS...

    Some say Trumpie screwed up the schedule, which goes hot in April as a showdown with the Roooskies. I take that with a grain of salt. But I think the sources I've seen might be right. They say that if Barbarossa had not been delayed, the nazis woulda won in Russia. Screwups can be very important.

    I can't see any way the US won't use atomic bangers. But maybe...

    Likklemore , Jan 17 2020 21:50 utc | 29

    @ wagelaborer 3

    Good points. I endorse. However the USD have been weaponized, is being sidelined and will be shunned U.S. dollar: Russia, China, EU are motivated to shift from

    @ juiliana 22

    I posted an article by Shedlock essentially saying all it will take is 3 states to flip and Trump loses: Trump will be easily defeated in 2020 perhaps by a landslide.

    Not only sick of wars, his mobster approach to foreign policy and allies is an embarrassment to RINO and Independents.

    psychohistorian , Jan 17 2020 19:52 utc | 11

    I agree with wagelaborer in comment #3 and worth a repeat of most of it

    "Trump can't start a war without ruling class backing any more than he can end the wars if the rulers veto it.

    US foreign policy is not run by White House puppets.

    The US trash-talked Saddam Hussein and starved Iraqis for 14 years, but didn't actually invade until he started trading oil in Euros.

    The US trash-talked Ghaddafi for decades, and even launched missiles which killed his child in the 80s, but didn't destroy Libya until Ghaddafi decided to sell oil in dinars.

    The US has trash-talked and sanctioned Iran for decades, but it was the threat of Iran and Saudi Arabia making peace that pushed them to assassinate General Soleimani, as he arrived at the airport on that diplomatic mission.

    If Iran and Saudi Arabia make peace, and the Saudis drop the petro-dollar, the US Empire crumbles. It doesn't matter at all who is in the White House at the time, the Empire will never allow that."

    Humanity is in a civilization war about public/private finance being fought by proxies and character actors like Trump. Maybe after this war is over, and if we survive, we can all communicate about the social contract directly instead of through proxy fronts. Do you want to live in a sharing/caring world or a selfish/competitive one?....socialism or barbarism?

    [Jan 19, 2020] A new book titled 'A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America ' offers some background and perspective on trump's 3 years in the WH and some titillating quotes. An explanation for why Tillerson called him "a f**king moron" is included

    Jan 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Bubbles , Jan 17 2020 23:23 utc | 55

    A new book titled 'A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America ' offers some background and perspective on trump's 3 years in the WH and some titillating quotes. An explanation for why Tillerson called him "a f**king moron" is included.

    At one point the authors depict an angry trump lashing out at his advisors for the trillions spent in Iraq and he demands to know "where's the fu**king oil"? As in, the share of oil the US should have received for?..attacking Iraq and causing it to descend into complete chaos I suppose.

    As one leading Private Security Company Chief was quoted some years later, it's like the Wild West. And that was before the rise of ISIS.

    But he didn't stop there, no sir, he went on to rant he would never go to war with people like them. According to the book his choice of words were much more colourful. Said claim does seem a bit confusing given trump's war record as a Cadet at some school for rich kids.

    But hey, the far right Zionists seem to find him useful.


    Walter , Jan 17 2020 23:25 utc | 56

    @ wagelaborer | Jan 17 2020 19:04 utc | 3

    your: "Trump can't start a war without ruling class backing any more than he can end the wars if the rulers veto it."

    May be, I think is, true in one sense. But Trump is far from the sole agent capable of starting a war. War, as opposed to simple murder, involve 2 or more parties. Whatever the intentions, the recent murders by drone in Baghdad hav,e it seems, brought Iran to consider war exists now...and they have a nifty MAGA policy. On Press TV today they hosted an expert who called for the execution of several exceptional American leaders...sounds like war to me.

    (Make America Go Away)

    The system is so screwy and peopled by such uneducated and delusional people that it's quite simple that they would do some stupid that that caused a war. Looks like war to me. I await the horrors.

    Decaying empires usually start wars that bring about their rapid ruin. Does it matter how they do this?

    ............

    The thesis of the triangle of elite factions is fascinating.

    Walter recalls that JFK got the reports from Vietnam that said we were winning, while at the same time Johnson got the true story. And also what happened then with the "correction" of 1963 (their words) and the immediate change of war policy. Can't help an old guy from remembering old folly. And noting that history repeats as farce.

    The Iran affair is liable to coordinate with NATO..Lavrov spoke to the NATO preparations today @ TASS...

    Some say Trumpie screwed up the schedule, which goes hot in April as a showdown with the Roooskies. I take that with a grain of salt. But I think the sources I've seen might be right. They say that if Barbarossa had not been delayed, the nazis woulda won in Russia. Screwups can be very important.

    I can't see any way the US won't use atomic bangers. But maybe...

    michaelj72 , Jan 17 2020 23:27 utc | 57

    "There's an odor of mendacity throughout the Afghanistan issue . . . mendacity and hubris," John F. Sopko said in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee.


    "...What's that smell in this room? Didn't you notice it, Brick? Didn't you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room?... There ain't nothin' more powerful than the odor of mendacity... You can smell it. It smells like death...."
    - Big Daddy, in the film Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), play by Tennessee Williams

    [Jan 19, 2020] Why Neocons Hate Russia Even More Than They Hate Any Other Nation

    Jan 19, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

    Eric Zuesse July 27, 2018 © Photo: Public domain

    Neoconservatism started in 1953 with Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the Democratic Party US Senator from the state of Washington (1953-1983), who became known as a 'defense' hawk, and as "the Senator from Boeing," because Boeing practically owned him. The UK's Henry Jackson Society was founded in 2005 in order to carry forward Senator Jackson's unwavering and passionate endorsement of growing the American empire so that the US-UK alliance will control the entire world (and US weapons-makers will dominate in every market).

    Later, during the 1990s, neoconservatism became taken over by the Mossad and the lobbyists for Israel and came to be publicly identified as a 'Jewish' ideology, despite its having -- and having long had -- many champions who were 'anti-communist' or 'pro-democracy' or simply even anti-Russian, but who were neither Jewish nor even focused at all on the Middle East. Republicans Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and John McCain; and the Democrat, CIA Director James Woolsey -- the latter of whom was one of the patrons of Britain's Henry Jackson Society -- were especially prominent neoconservatives, who came to prominence even before neocons became called "neoconservatives." What all neocons have always shared in common has been a visceral hatred of Russians. That comes above anything else -- and even above NATO (the main neocon organization).

    During recent decades, neocons have been hating Iranians and more generally Shiites -- such as in Syria and in Lebanon, and now also in Yemen -- and not only hating Russians.

    When the Israel lobby during the 1990s and after, pumped massive resources into getting the US Government to invade first Iraq and then Iran, neoconservatism got its name, but the ideology itself did not change. However, there are a few neoconservatives today who are too ignorant to know, in any coherent way, what their own underlying beliefs are, or why, and so who are anti-Russians (that's basic for any neocon) who either don't know or else don't particularly care that Iran and Shia Muslims generally, are allied with Russia. Neoconservatives such as this, are simply confused neocons, people whose underlying ideology is self-contradictory, because they've not carefully thought things through.

    An example is Vox's Alex Ward, who built his career as an anti-Russia propagandist , and whose recent ten-point tirade against Russia I then exposed as being false on each one of its ten points , each of those points having been based upon mere allegations by US neocons against Russia without any solid evidence whatsoever. Indictments, and other forms of accusations, are not evidence for anything. But a stupid 'journalist' accepts them as if they were evidence, if those accusations come from 'the right side' -- but not if they come from 'the wrong side'. They don't understand even such a simple distinction as that between an indictment, and a conviction. A conviction is at least a verdict (though maybe based on false 'evidence' and thus false itself), but all that an accusation is an accusation -- and all accusations (in the American legal system) are supposed to be disbelieved, unless and until there is at least a verdict that gives the accusation legal force. (This is called "innocent unless proven guilty.")

    Earlier, Mr. Ward had headlined as if he were an anti -neocon, when he posted his "America is fueling the war in Yemen. Congress is finally pushing back." What can account for that seemingly incongruous article?

    Mr. Ward is a Democrat -- an heir to Senator Jackson's allegedly anti-communist though actually anti-Russian ideology -- but, since Ward isn't as intelligent as the ideology's founder was, Ward becomes anti -neocon when a Republican-led Administration is doing things (such as Ward there criticizes) that are even more-neocon than today's Democratic Party itself is. In other words: 'journalists' (actually, propagandists) such as he, are more partisan in favor of support of Democratic Party billionaires against Republican Party billionaires, than in support of conquering Russia as opposed to cooperating with Russia (and with all other countries). They're unaware that all American billionaires support expansion of the US empire -- including over Yemen (to bring Yemen in, too -- which invasion Ward incongruously opposes). But politicians (unlike their financial backers) need to pretend not to be so bloodthirsty or so beholden to the military-industrial complex. Thus, an American doesn't need to be intelligent in order to build his or her career in 'journalism', on the basis of having previously served as a propagandist writing for non-profits that are mere fronts for NATO and for Israel, and which are fronts actually for America's weapons-manufacturing firms, who need those wars in order to grow their profits. Such PR for front-organizations for US firms such as Lockheed Martin, is excellent preparation for a successful career in American 'journalism'. If a person is stupid, then it's still necessary to be stupid in the right way, in order to succeed; and Ward is, and does.

    This, for example, is how it makes sense that Ward had previously been employed at the War on the Rocks website that organized the Republican neoconservative campaign against Donald Trump during the 2016 Republican primaries : the mega-donors to both US Parties are united in favor of America conquering Russia. And that's why War on the Rocks had organized Republican neocons to oppose Trump: it was done in order to increase the chances for Trump's rabidly anti-Russia and pro-Israel competitors such as Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio to win that nomination instead, which would then have produced the billionaires' dream contest, between Hillary Clinton versus an equally neoconservative Republican nominee. A bipartisan neoconservatism controls both of the American political Parties. A 'journalist' who displays that sort of bipartisanship can't fail in America, no matter how incompetent at real journalism he or she might be. (However, they do have to be literate . Stupid, maybe; but literate, definitely.)

    The core of America's form of capitalism has come to be the US aristocracy's bipartisan, liberal and conservative, Democratic and Republican, form of capitalism, which isn't merely fascist (which includes privatizing everything that can be privatized) but which is also imperialist (which means favoring the country's perpetration of invasions and coups in order to expand that nation's empire). The United States is now a globe-spanning empire, controlling not merely the aristocracies in a few banana republics such as Guatemala and Honduras, but also the aristocracies in richer countries such as France, Germany and UK, so as to extract from virtually the entire world -- by means mainly of deception but also sometimes public threats and clearly coercive -- unfair advantages for corporations that are within its borders, and against corporations that are headquartered in foreign countries. America's billionaires -- both the Democratic ones and the Republican ones -- are 100% in favor of America's conquering the world: this ideology is entirely bipartisan, in the United States. Though the billionaires succeeded, during the first Cold War -- the one that was nominally against communism -- at fooling the public to think they were aiming ultimately to conquer communism, George Herbert Walker Bush made clear, on the night of 24 February 1990, privately to the leaders of the US aristocracy's foreign allies, that the actual goal was world-conquest, and so the Cold War would now secretly continue on the US side , even after ending on the USS.R. side. When GHW Bush did that, the heritage of US Senator Jackson became no longer the formerly claimed one, of 'anti-communism', but was, clearly now and henceforth, anti-Russian. And that's what it is today -- not only in the Democratic Party, and not only in the Republican Party, and not only in the United States, but throughout the entire US alliance .

    And this is what we are seeing today, in all of the US-and-allied propaganda-media. America is always 'the injured party' against 'the aggressors'; and, so, one after another, such as in Iraq, and in Libya, and in Syria, and in Iran, and in Yemen, and in China, all allies (or even merely friends) of Russia are 'the aggressors' and are 'dictatorships' and are 'threats to America', and only the US side represents 'democracy' . It's actually an aristocracy , which has deeply deceived its public, to think it's a democracy. Just as every aristocracy is based on lies and on coercion, this one is, too -- it is no exception; it's only that this particular empire is on a historically unprecedentedly large scale, dominating all continents. Support that, and you're welcomed into the major (i.e., billionaire-backed) 'news' media in America, and in its allied countries. This is America's 'democracy' . (Of course, an article such as this one is not 'journalism' in America and its allied countries; it's merely "blogging." So, it won't be found there though it's being submitted everywhere. It will be accepted and published at only the honest news-sites. A reader may Web-search the headline here in order to find out which ones those are. Not many 'news'media report the institutionalized corruptness of the 'news'media; they just criticize one-another, in the way that the politicians do, which is bipartisan -- the bipartisan dictatorship. But the rot that's actually throughout the 'news'media, is prohibited to be reported about and published, in and by any of them. It is totally suppressed reality. Only the few honest news-sites will publish this information and its documentation, the links here.)

    However, actually, the first time that the term either "neoconservatism" or "neo-conservatism" is known to have been used, was in the British magazine, The Contemporary Review , January 1883, by Henry Dunkley, in his "The Conservative Dilemma" where "neo-conservative" appeared 8 times, and was contrasted to traditional "conservatism" because, whereas the traditional type "Toryism" was pro-aristocratic, anti-democratic, and overtly elitist; the new type was pro-democratic, anti-aristocratic, and overtly populist (which no form of conservatism honestly is -- they're all elitist): "What is this new creed of yours? That there must be no class influence in politics? That any half-dozen hinds on my estate are as good as so many dukes? That the will of the people is the supreme political tribunal? That if a majority at the polls bid us abolish the Church and toss the Crown into the gutter we are forthwith to be their most obedient servants?" "No: from whatever point of view we consider the question, it is plain that the attempt to reconstruct the Tory party on a Democratic basis cannot succeed." "The Tories have always been adepts at conservation, but the things they have been most willing to conserve were not our liberties but the restrictions put upon our liberties." "The practical policy of Conservatism would not alter, and could not be altered much, but its pretensions would have to be pitched in a lower key." "Here we seem to get within the smell of soup, the bustle of evening receptions, and the smiles of dowagers. The cares which weigh upon this couple of patriot souls cannot be described as august. It is hardly among such petty anxieties that the upholders of the Empire and the pilots of the State are bred." "The solemn abjuration which is now proposed in the name of Neo-conservatism resembles a charge of dynamite." He viewed neo-conservatives as being let's-pretend populists, whose pretense at being democrats will jeopardize the Empire, not strengthen it. Empire, and its rightness, were so deeply rooted in the rulers' psyche, it went unchallenged. In fact, at that very time, in the 1880s, Sir Cecil Rhodes was busy creating the foundation for the UK-US empire that now controls most of the world .

    The modern pro-Israel neoconservatism arose in the 1960s when formerly Marxist Jewish intellectuals in New York City and Washington DC, who were even more anti-communist than anti-nazi, became impassioned with the US empire being extended to the entire world by spreading 'democracy' (and protection of Israel) as if this Israel-protecting empire were a holy crusade not only against the Soviet Union, which was demonized by them, but against Islam, which also was demonized by them (since they were ethnocentric Jews and the people whose land the 'Israelis' had stolen were overwhelmingly Muslims -- and now were very second-class citizens in their own long-ancestral and also birth-land). This was how they distinguished themselves from "paleoconservatism" which wasn't nearly so Messianic, but which was more overtly ethnocentric, though ethnic Christian, instead of ethnic Jewish. The "paleoconservatives" were isolationists, not imperialists. They originated from the opponents of America's entry into WW II against the imperialists of that time, who were the fascists. Those American "isolationists" would have given us a world controlled by Hitler and his Axis allies. All conservatism is absurd, but there are many forms of it, none of which makes intelligent sense.

    The roots of neoconservatism are 100% imperialistic, colonialist, supremacist, and blatantly evil. They hate Russia because they still crave to conquer it , and don't know how, short of nuclear annihilation, which would be extremely dangerous, even for themselves. So, they endanger everyone.

    [Jan 18, 2020] Putin plants to prohibit dual citizens to serve in government

    Highly recommended!
    Jan 18, 2020 | www.unz.com

    Peripatetic Commenter , says: Show Comment January 17, 2020 at 9:43 pm GMT

    I don't think it will be long before we see Congress in the US calling for invasion of Russia on the grounds of a lack of diversity, lack of respect for LGBTP and so forth.

    [Jan 18, 2020] In a way the brainwashed Americans and neoliberal propagandists hatred of Russia is hilarious

    Jan 18, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Wezz Gary Sellars a day ago

    "Russiagate is a hoax" Where did I hear that before?

    Oh yes, from Trump about 1000 times... strange that even though he said he was innocent he had to keep telling us every time he opened his mouth... it makes me suspicious for some reason. That and the fact that Trump has been caught lying a few times.

    Antiphon Wezz a day ago
    I usually assess the validity of such claims on something more substantial than OrangeManBad.
    Aker Wezz a day ago • edited
    Your hatred of Russia is hilarious. Doubly when Amerilards have a history of interference in other country's governments.

    America is objectively a more violent country than Russia. It isn't Russia that has ridicously high violent crime scores despite its wealth. Invaded Afghanistan, attacked Iraq, provided aid for Islamists who'd go on to build ISIS.

    I don't recall Putin's regime achieving a higher bodycount than America under Bush with Obama. Keep pretending Putin's some villain from childish stories like Harry Potter or Black Panther.

    Aker Aker 20 hours ago • edited
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

    America's homicide level is Notably higher than West Europe's and Far Eastern lands like Japan. Russia's is only somewhat higher, and is notably less wealthy.

    thelastindependentYankee Aker 6 hours ago
    The Gulags were resorts I know.
    Aker thelastindependentYankee 4 hours ago
    Tell us when you plan to shut down Guantanamo Bay and end your dysfunctional prison system. Also, Murica supported enough regimes.
    EliteCommInc. Wezz 21 hours ago
    It would be interesting if had as much veracity as a hoax ---

    but it lacks even that.

    Aker Wezz 20 hours ago
    https://www.washingtontimes...

    https://www.nytimes.com/200...

    Apologize for American interference in other countries' governments.

    John Mann Wezz 12 hours ago
    A stopped clock is right twice a day. Hey, Saddam Hussein turned out to be telling the truth about WMDs.
    Aker Gary Sellars 20 hours ago
    It's an attempt to assuage a failed presidential candidate and give a target to blame for how society is. If not Trump himself, then Russia.

    [Jan 18, 2020] I don't know if Trump is in fact overplayed by the Israelis or, worst, being deceived and goaded by them.

    Jan 18, 2020 | www.unz.com

    Swedish Family , says: Show Comment January 3, 2020 at 9:13 pm GMT

    @Interested Bystander 2020

    However, it is hard to miss Trump's style over the past three years, a consistently unconventional approach to problems that often seems illogical and rushed at the first glance, but upon a closer examination, his approaches usually have their own logic and underlying motivation that, on occasions, could be construed as the result of a broader strategic and tactical consideration.

    I once believed this, but Michael Wolff's books quickly dispelled that fantasy. Here's what strategy meant during the campaign:

    It was during Trump's early intelligence briefings, held soon after he captured the nomination, that alarm signals first went off among his new campaign staff: he seemed to lack the ability to take in third-party information. Or maybe he lacked the interest; whichever, he seemed almost phobic about having formal demands on his attention. He stonewalled every written page and balked at every explanation. "He's a guy who really hated school," said Bannon. "And he's not going to start liking it now."

    [ ]

    One of the ways to establish what Trump wanted and where he stood and what his underlying policy intentions were -- or at least the intentions that you could convince him were his -- came to involve an improbably close textual analysis of his largely off-the-cuff speeches, random remarks, and reflexive tweets during the campaign.

    Bannon doggedly went through the Trump oeuvre highlighting possible insights and policy proscriptions. Part of Bannon's authority in the new White House was as keeper of the Trump promises, meticulously logged onto the white board in his office. Some of these promises Trump enthusiastically remembered making, others he had little memory of, but was happy to accept that he had said it. Bannon acted as disciple and promoted Trump to guru -- or inscrutable God.

    Fire and Fury (Michael Wolff, 2018)

    And here's Trump readying himself for the notorious Helsinki summit with Putin back in 2018:

    On Friday, July 13, three days before the Helsinki summit, the president and his team arrived late in the day at Trump Turnberry golf resort in Scotland, after passing on their way from the airport cow pastures and cheering citizens -- but no protesters.

    Mike Pompeo and John Bolton were carrying copious briefing books. This was meant to be a weekend of preparation interspersed with golf. John Kelly, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Bill Shine, and several other aides had come along, too.

    Saturday was sunny and in the mid-seventies, with nothing on the agenda except golf. But by now a few protesters had made their way to Turnberry. "No Trump, No KKK, No Racist USA," shouted a small group of them during the president's afternoon golf game.

    Trump, energized by his NATO and UK meetings -- "we roughed them up" -- was in no mood to prepare for his Putin meeting. Even his typical, exceedingly casual level of preparation -- prep masked as gossip -- wasn't happening. Pompeo and Bolton reduced the boxed briefing binders to a one-pager. The president wouldn't focus on it.

    He was fine. And why shouldn't he be? He had walked into his meeting with Kim unable to pick out North Korea on a map, but it didn't matter. He was in charge, a strong man making peace.

    Don't box me in , he told his advisers. I need to be open , he kept repeating, as though this was a therapeutic process. Pompeo and Bolton urgently pressed him about the basic talking points for the summit, now just hours away -- but nothing doing.

    The next morning he played golf, and then it started to rain.

    Siege (Michael Wolff, 2019)

    [Jan 16, 2020] Trump is a bully and a tyrant and he embodies perfectly what America is and stands for...brute force

    Jan 16, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Circe , Jan 15 2020 5:59 utc | 130

    Trump is a bully and a tyrant and he embodies perfectly what America is and stands for...brute force. For all those who thought he was taking the Empire down; if that were the case, the EU would reply FU to Trump. Instead they're shaking in their boots.

    Trump sent over 14,000 more troops to to the ME only since last May! And is he satisfied with that? HELL NO. He wants NATO stationed there too!

    And, he has the 2nd in command of Iran murdered and brings everyone to the brink, but he has not an iota of regret and continues thumping his chest and beating the drums of war.

    That looks like a bigger footprint to me.

    [Jan 16, 2020] Escalation is the easy road to hell. De-escalation and working for peace requires skill and intellegence

    Jan 16, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    V , Jan 16 2020 4:55 utc | 208

    Piotr Berman | Jan 16 2020 4:04 utc | 206

    Indeed. Escalation is the easy road to hell. De-escalation and working for peace requires skill and intellegence.
    Very little of either seemingly emanating from the U.S...

    U.S. diplomacy (non-existent) only comes from the barrel of a gun or the drone fired missile...

    [Jan 16, 2020] Americans Beware! Russia Can Hack Your Brain, Make You Believe Joe Biden Unfit For Oval Office by Robert Bridge

    [satire]
    Jan 15, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Robert Bridge via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    ... ... ...

    Courtesy of Bloomberg :

    "U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials are assessing whether Russia is trying to undermine Joe Biden in its ongoing disinformation efforts with the former vice president still the front-runner in the race to challenge President Donald Trump, according to two officials familiar with the matter

    Part of the inquiry is to determine whether Russia is trying to weaken Biden by promoting controversy over his past involvement in U.S. policy toward Ukraine while his son worked for an energy company there."

    So how exactly does Russia, in a scene straight out of A Clockwork Orange, tap into the frontal lobe section of the U.S. electorate and cause them to lose all confidence in their political favorites?

    "A signature trait of Russian President Vladimir Putin 'is his ability to convince people of outright falsehoods,' William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, said in a statement. 'In America, [the Russians are] using social media and many other tools to inflame social divisions, promote conspiracy theories and sow distrust in our democracy and elections.'"

    Yes, somehow those dastardly Russians have outsmarted the brightest and best-paid political strategists in Washington, D.C. by brandishing what amounts to some really persuasive memes over social media, and for just rubles on the dollar. The techies at Wired went so far as to call this epic assault on the fragile American cranium, "meme warfare to divide America." By way of evidence, it cited a very creative meme that screamed, "F*CK THE ELECTIONS," which was intended, as the ironclad argument goes, to cause a number of impressionable Americans to throw up their hands in a fit of collective exasperation and say, 'Ok, that's it. I'm staying at home on Election Day.'

    Yes, it's really that easy! Imagine all the money the Russians and their radical new political technologies could have saved guys like casino tycoon, Sheldon Adelson, who showered the Trump campaign with $100 million dollars.

    Many of those divisive Russian messages wormed their way onto Facebook, purportedly, where God only knows how many voter brains' turned to maggots and mush just staring at them. Yet one individual who actually recalls seeing one or two of these dangerous memes was Rob Goldman, former Vice President for Advertising on Facebook, who revealed via Twitter, another infected social media platform, some interesting information:

    "Most of the coverage of Russian meddling involves their attempt to effect the outcome of the 2016 U.S. election. I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was *NOT* the main goal ."

    Clearly, Goldman seems to have been under the sway of some folk Russian brainwashing technique, probably passed down from the time of Rasputin. In any case, Donald Trump himself took great satisfaction from that particular revelation, retweeting it to his millions of minions.

    Most of the coverage of Russian meddling involves their attempt to effect the outcome of the 2016 US election. I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was *NOT* the main goal.

    -- Rob Goldman (@robjective) February 17, 2018

    Incidentally, it may or may not be relevant, but Goldman retired from Facebook in October 2019 after seven years with the company.

    Russia, the gift that keeps on giving

    Not only have the Democrats been able to use the Russia bogeyman as their excuse for losing the White House in 2016, they are able to summon this distant nuclear power whenever they wish to curb internet freedoms, which is pretty much every day now.

    Now, fun-loving memes are under attack and may soon go the way of the DoDo bird ("A small office of Russian trolls could derail 241 years of U.S. political history with a handful of dank memes and an advertising budget that would barely buy you a billboard in Brooklyn," screamed insanely The Guardian ). At the same time, the freedom of speech is getting destroyed by vapid accusations of 'hate speech,' which, unless used to incite violence, is a totally meaningless term used to eliminate any conversation that is undesirable to the elite.

    Meanwhile, only the mainstream media these days are permitted to dabble in 'conspiracy theories' even as their own false narratives have contributed to the pulverization of entire nations, as was the case in Iraq, for example, which sustained a full-blown U.S. military invasion in 2003 following debunked claims that Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction. That was the mother of all conspiracy theories that was pushed unchallenged by the mainstream media.

    So back to Joe Biden.

    Do intelligent Americans really need help from Russia to prove that just maybe the former Vice President is mentally and physically unfit to stand for the White House? Probably not. From whispering sweet nothings into the ears of any female within groping distance, to sucking on his wife's fingertips at a political rally, something just doesn't seem altogether right upstairs with Joe Biden. So what is the real story for dragging Russia, once again, into the internal swamp pit known as Washington, D.C.?

    The Bloomberg article provides a big hint: "This time around, the narrative about Biden and Ukraine is well-publicized and being advanced by Trump, his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and the president's Republican allies in Congress."

    And that "narrative" has everything to do with not only the Democrats' frozen impeachment proceedings against the U.S. leader, which promises to have major connections to Ukraine, Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and quite possibly dozens of other top Democrats. In other words, the Democrats understand that pushing ahead with impeachment could be their ultimate downfall.

    Although few Americans seem to remember that back in May of 2019, Trump granted U.S. Attorney General William Barr "full and complete authority" to investigate exactly how claims that Trump was 'conspiring with the Kremlin' in the 2016 presidential election had originated, the Democrats certainly have not.

    Their bogus 'Russian collusion' claim provided the rationale for a four-year-long 'witch hunt' that began when the Democrats, relying on the flimsy findings contained in the so-called 'Steele dossier, managed to get approval from the FISA court to spy on the Trump campaign. Now, some top-ranking Democrats – never imagining Hillary Clinton would actually lose in 2016 – are understandably nervous as to what Barr and his assistant, federal attorney John Durham will divulge to the public in the coming months.

    With so much riding on the line in 2020 , is anyone surprised that Bloomberg, the news affiliate owned and operated by Democratic contender Michael Bloomberg, is now reporting "U.S. officials are warning that Russia's election interference in 2020 could be more brazen than in the 2016 presidential race or the 2018 midterm election."

    In other words, the racist ploy used by Democrats to explain their monumental defeat in 2016 did not end with the Mueller Report.

    The conspiracy theory, promulgated by a media that is in effect just another branch of the Democratic National Committee, is being primed to explain not only possible criminal charges aimed at top Democrats in the coming months, but how Democrats, like Michael Bloomberg, failed once again to beat the seemingly unstoppable incumbent, Donald Trump. Tags Politics

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    [Jan 15, 2020] Impeachment motto: in our guts, we know Trump is nuts

    Jan 06, 2020 | www.unz.com

    Dumbo , says: Show Comment January 3, 2020 at 6:46 pm GMT

    Donald Trump rode to victory in 2016 on a promise to end the useless wars in the Middle East, but he has now demonstrated very clearly that he is a liar

    He also promised a wall. Maybe he meant the Israeli wall?

    [Jan 15, 2020] Trump and the Mad Negotiator Approach

    Notable quotes:
    "... Another aspect of Trump's erraticness is making sudden shifts, or what we have called gaslighting. He'll suddenly and radically change his rhetoric, even praise someone he demonized. That if nothing else again is a power play, to try to maintain his position as driving the pacing and content of the negotiations, which again is meant to position his counterparty as in a weaker position, of having to react to his moves, even if that amounts to identifying them as noise. It is a watered-down form of a cult strategy called love bombing (remember that Trump has been described as often being very charming in first meetings, only to cut down the person he met in a matter of days). ..."
    "... I would disagree with the "selecting staff" part. I can't really think of any of his appointees to any office while he is president that was a good pick. One worse than the other basically. Maybe in his private dealings he did better, but in public office it's a continuous horror show. Examples like Pence, Haley, "Mad Dog", Bolton, DeVos, his son in law, Pompeo. The list goes on. ..."
    "... For me as a foreigner who detests the forever wars and most of the US foreign policy, this is a good thing: the more heavy handed, the more brutal, the more cruel, the more stupid the US policy is, the less is the chance for our euro governments to follow the US in today's war or other policy. ..."
    "... They are not inept and incompetent at what they are trying to achieve. The GOP has long sought to privatize government to help the rich get richer and harm anyone who isn't rich by cutting services and making them harder to get. Trumps picks are carrying out that agenda very well. ..."
    "... Trump is just a huge crude extension of the usual "exceptional" leaders, much more transparent by not pretending he is any sort of representative of democratic and cooperative values claimed by his predecessors. ..."
    "... But what I think is noticeable is that his worst high profile staff picks, while horrible people, are generally those who are under his thumb and so he has control of. ..."
    "... He got elected over the dead bodies of just about everyone who counts in the Republican Party. He pretty much did a hostile takeover of the GOP. So his ability to draw on seasoned hands was nil. And on top of that, he is temperamentally not the type to seek the counsel of perceived wise men in and hanging around the party. The people he has kept around are cronies like Wilbur Ross and Steve Mnuchin. ..."
    "... The one notably competent person he has attracted and retained is Robert Lightizer, the US Trade Representative ..."
    "... oderint, dum metuant ..."
    "... Führerprinzip ..."
    "... Hitler ran the Third Reich by a system of parallel competition among bureaucratic empire builders of all stripes. Anyone who showed servile loyalty and mouthed his yahoo ideology got all the resources they liked, for any purpose they proposed. But the moment he encountered any form of independence or pushback, he changed horses at once. He left the old group in place, but gave all their resources to a burgeoning new bureaucracy that did things his way. If a State body resisted his will, he had a Party body do it instead. He was continually reaching down 2-3 levels in the org charts, to find some ambitious firecracker willing to suck up to him, and leapfrog to the top. ..."
    "... This left behind a complete chaos of rival, duplicated functions, under mainly unfit leaders. And fortunately for the world, how well any of these organizations actually did their jobs was an entirely secondary consideration. Loyalty was all. ..."
    "... Hitler sat at the center of all the resource grabbers and played referee. This made everyone dependent on his nod and ensured his continued power. The message was: there are no superiors in the Reich. There is only der Führer, and his favor trumps everything ..."
    "... The few over-confident generals he picked, except for Flynn, finally caved when they realized staying was an affront to the honor code they swore to back in OCS or their academy. ..."
    "... I don't know how they selected staff in the Reagan years, but lately the POTUS seems to appoint based on who the plutocrats want. As has been noted Bary O took his marching orders from Citigroup if I remember right. I doubt if Trump had even heard of most of the people he appointed prior to becoming president. So at least some of Trump's turnover is due to him firing recommendations from others who didn't turn out how he'd like. That's one reason I didn't get all that upset over the Bolton hiring – I didn't think he'd last a year before Trump canned him. ..."
    "... I would say that Trump, not acting in an intelligent way is doing very clever things according to his interests. My opinion is that his actions/negotiations with foreign countries are 100% directed for domestic consumptiom. He does not care at all about international relationships, just his populist "make America great again" and he almost certainly play closest attention to the impact of his actions in US opinion. ..."
    "... The maintenance of fear, chaos and blowback are exACTLY the desired result. Deliberately and on purpose. ..."
    "... It also helps him do some things quietly in the background ..."
    Jan 15, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    Trump and the Mad Negotiator Approach Posted on January 14, 2020 by Yves Smith Trump's numerous character flaws, such as his grandiosity, his lack of interest in the truth, his impulsiveness, his habitual lashing out at critics, have elicited boatloads of disapproving commentary. It's disturbing to see someone so emotional and undisciplined in charge of anything, let alone the United States.

    Rather than offer yet more armchair analysis, it might be productive to ask a different question: why hasn't Trump been an abject failure? There are plenty of rich heirs who blow their inheritance or run the family business into the ground pretty quickly and have to knuckle down to a much more modest lifestyle.

    Trump's lack of discipline has arguably cost him. The noise regularly made about his business bankruptcies is wildly exaggerated. Most of Trump's bankruptcies were of casinos , and most of those took place in the nasty 1991-1992 recession. He was one of only two major New York City developers not to have to give meaningful equity in some of their properties in that downturn. He even managed to keep Mar-a-Lago and persuaded his lenders to let him keep enough cash to preserve a pretty flashy lifestyle because he was able to persuade them that preserving his brand name was key to the performance of Trump-branded assets.

    The idea that Trump couldn't borrow after his early 1990s casino bankruptcies is also false. As Francine McKenna pointed out in 2017 in Donald Trump has had no trouble getting big loans at competitive rates:

    The MarketWatch analysis shows a variety of lenders, all big banks or listed specialized finance companies like Ladder Capital, that have provided lots of money to Trump over the years in the forms of short-, medium- and long-term loans and at competitive rates, whether fixed or variable.

    "The Treasury yield that matches the term of the loan is the closest starting benchmark for Trump-sized commercial real estate loans," said Robert Thesman, a certified public accountant in Washington state who specializes in real estate tax issues. The 10-year Treasury swap rate is also used and tracks the bonds closely, according to one expert.

    Trump's outstanding loans were granted at rates between 2 points over and under the matching Treasury-yield benchmark at inception. That's despite the well-documented record of bankruptcy filings that dot Trump's history of casino investment.

    The flip side is that it's not hard to make the case that Trump's self-indulgent style has cost him in monetary terms. His contemporary Steve Ross of The Related Companies who started out in real estate as a tax lawyer putting together Section 8 housing deals, didn't have a big stake like Trump did to start his empire. Ross did have industrialist and philanthropist Max Fisher as his uncle and role model, but there is no evidence that Fisher staked Ross beyond paying for his education . Ross has an estimated net worth of $7.6 billion versus Trump's $3.1 billion.

    Despite Trump's heat-seeking-missile affinity for the limelight, we only get snippets of how he has managed his business, like his litigiousness and breaking of labor laws. Yet he's kept his team together and is pretty underleveraged for a real estate owner.

    The area where we have a better view of how Trump operates is via his negotiating, where is astonishingly transgressive. He goes out of his way to be inconsistent, unpredictable, and will even trash prior commitments, which is usually toxic, since it telegraphs bad faith. How does this make any sense?

    One way to think of it is that Trump is effectively screening for weak negotiating counterparties. Think of his approach as analogous to the Nigerian scam letters and the many variants you get in your inbox. They are so patently fake that one wonders why the fraudsters bother sending them.

    But investigators figured that mystery out. From the Atlantic in 2012 :

    Everyone knows that Nigerian scam e-mails, with their exaggerated stories of moneys tied up in foreign accounts and collapsed national economies, sound totally absurd, but according to research from Microsoft, that's on purpose .

    As a savvy Internet user you probably think you'd never fall for the obvious trickery, but that's the point. Savvy users are not the scammers' target audience, [Cormac] Herley notes. Rather, the creators of these e-mails are targeting people who would believe the sort of tales these scams involve .:

    Our analysis suggests that is an advantage to the attacker, not a disadvantage. Since his attack has a low density of victims the Nigerian scammer has an over-riding need to reduce false positives. By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favor.

    Who would want to get in a business relationship with a guy who makes clear early on that he might pull the rug out from under you? Most people would steer clear. So Trump's style, even if he adopted it out of deep-seated emotional needs, has the effect of pre-selecting for weak, desperate counterparties. It can also pull in people who think they can out-smart Trump and shysters who identify with him, as well as those who are prepared to deal with the headaches (for instance, the the business relationship is circumscribed and a decent contract will limit the downside).

    Mind you, it is more common than you think for businesses to seek out needy business "partners". For instance, back in the day when General Electric was a significant player in venture capital, it would draw out its investment commitment process. The point was to ascertain if the entrepreneurs had any other prospects; they wouldn't tolerate GE's leisurely process if they did. By the time GE was sure it was the only game in town, it would cram down the principals on price and other terms. There are many variants of this playbook, such as how Walmart treats suppliers.

    Trump has become so habituated to this mode of operating that he often launches into negotiations determined to establish that he had the dominant position when that is far from clear, witness the ongoing China trade row. Trump did in theory hold a powerful weapon in his ability to impose tariffs on China. But they are a blunt weapon, with significant blowback to the US. Even though China had a glass jaw in terms of damage to its economy (there were signs of stress, such as companies greatly stretching out when they paid their bills), Trump could not tolerate much of a stock market downdraft, nor could he play a long-term game.

    Another aspect of Trump's erraticness is making sudden shifts, or what we have called gaslighting. He'll suddenly and radically change his rhetoric, even praise someone he demonized. That if nothing else again is a power play, to try to maintain his position as driving the pacing and content of the negotiations, which again is meant to position his counterparty as in a weaker position, of having to react to his moves, even if that amounts to identifying them as noise. It is a watered-down form of a cult strategy called love bombing (remember that Trump has been described as often being very charming in first meetings, only to cut down the person he met in a matter of days).

    Voters have seen another face of Trump's imperative to find or create weakness: that of his uncanny ability to hit opponents' weak spots in ways that get them off balance, such as the way he was able to rope a dope Warren over her Cherokee ancestry claims.

    The foregoing isn't to suggest that Trump's approach is optimal. Far from it. But it does "work" in the sense of achieving certain results that are important to Trump, of having him appear to be in charge of the action, getting his business counterparts on the back foot. That means Trump is implicitly seeing these encounters primarily in win-lose terms, rather than win-win. No wonder he has little appetite for international organizations. You have to give in order to get.


    PlutoniumKun , January 14, 2020 at 7:08 am

    I think this is pretty astute, thanks Yves. One reason I think Trump has been so successful for his limited range of skills is precisely that 'smart' people underestimate him so much. He knows one thing well – how power works. Sometimes that's enough. I've known quite a few intellectually limited people who have built very successful careers based on a very simple set of principles (e.g. 'never disagree with anyone more senior than me').

    Anecdotally, I've often had the conversation with people about 'taking Trump seriously', as in, trying to assess what he really wants and how he has been so successful. In my experience, the 'smarter' and more educated the person I'm talking to is, the less willing they are to have that conversation. The random guy in the bar will be happy to talk and have insights. The high paid professional will just mutter about stupid people and racism.

    I would also add one more reason for his success – he does appear to be quite good at selecting staff, and knowing who to delegate to.

    timotheus , January 14, 2020 at 8:30 am

    There is another figure from recent history who displayed similar astuteness about power while manifesting generally low intelligence: Chile's Pinochet. He had near failing grades in school but knew how to consolidate power, dominate the other members of the junta, and weed out the slightest hint of dissidence within the army.

    Off The Street , January 14, 2020 at 9:17 am

    To the average viewer, Trump's branding extends to the negative brands that he assigns to opponents. Witness Lyin' Ted , Pocahontas and similar sticky names that make their way into coverage. He induces free coverage from Fake News as if they can't resist gawking at a car wreck, even when one of the vehicles is their own. Manipulation has worked quite a lot on people with different world views, especially when they don't conceive of any different approaches.

    drumlin woodchuckles , January 14, 2020 at 6:52 pm

    Scott Adams touted that as one of Trump's hidden persuasionological weapons . . . that ability to craft a fine head-shot nickname for every opponent.

    If Sanders were to be nominated, I suppose Trump would keep saying Crazy Bernie. Sanders will just have to respond in his own true-to-himself way. Maybe he could risk saying something like . . .

    " so Trashy Trump is Trashy. This isn't new."

    If certain key bunches of voters still have fond memories for Crazy Eddie, perhaps Sanders could have some operatives subtly remind people of that.

    Some images of Crazy Eddie, for those who wish to stumble up Nostalgia Alley . . .

    https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A0geKYkLVB5emoUAN6RXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTEyNm03Y25mBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMyBHZ0aWQDQTA2MTVfMQRzZWMDc2M-?p=crazy+eddie&fr=sfp

    curious euro , January 14, 2020 at 9:23 am

    I would disagree with the "selecting staff" part. I can't really think of any of his appointees to any office while he is president that was a good pick. One worse than the other basically. Maybe in his private dealings he did better, but in public office it's a continuous horror show. Examples like Pence, Haley, "Mad Dog", Bolton, DeVos, his son in law, Pompeo. The list goes on.

    Another indication how bad his delegation skills are is how short his picks stay at their job before they are fired again. Is there any POTUS which had higher staff turnover?

    NotTimothyGeithner , January 14, 2020 at 9:45 am

    Its a horror show because you don't agree with their values. After the last few Presidents, too much movement to the right would catastrophic, so there isn't much to do. His farm bill is a disaster. The new NAFTA is window dressing. He slashed taxes. He's found a way to make our brutal immigration system even more nefarious. His staff seems to be working out despite it not having many members of the Bush crime family.

    Even if these people were as beloved by the press as John McCain, they would still be monsters.

    curious euro , January 14, 2020 at 10:43 am

    It's not their values that make them a horror show, it's their plain inaptitude and incompetency. E.g. someone like that Exxon CEO is at least somewhat capable, which is why I didn't mention him. Though he was quite ineffective as long as he lasted and probably quite corrupt. Pompeo in the same office on the other hand is simply a moron elevated way beyond his station. Words fail and the Peter principle cannot explain.

    The US can paper over this due to their heavy handed application of power for now, but every day he stays in office, friends are abhorred while trying not to show it, and foes rejoice at the utter stupidity of the US how it helps their schemes.

    For me as a foreigner who detests the forever wars and most of the US foreign policy, this is a good thing: the more heavy handed, the more brutal, the more cruel, the more stupid the US policy is, the less is the chance for our euro governments to follow the US in today's war or other policy. So while I am sort of happy about the outcome, I don't see the current monsters at the helm worse than the monsters 4 years ago under Obama. In fact I detested them much more since they had the power to drag my governments into their evil schemes.

    Evil and clearly despicable is always better than evil and sort of charismatic.

    tegnost , January 14, 2020 at 11:29 am

    For me as a foreigner who detests the forever wars and most of the US foreign policy, this is a good thing: the more heavy handed, the more brutal, the more cruel, the more stupid the US policy is, the less is the chance for our euro governments to follow the US in today's war or other policy.

    Indeed, if you look at the trendline from the '80's to now, trump is, in some ways, the less effective evil.

    James O'Keefe , January 14, 2020 at 1:17 pm

    They are not inept and incompetent at what they are trying to achieve. The GOP has long sought to privatize government to help the rich get richer and harm anyone who isn't rich by cutting services and making them harder to get. Trumps picks are carrying out that agenda very well.

    That he still hasn't filled 170 appointed positions is icing on the cake. See stats at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-administration-appointee-tracker/database/

    rosemerry , January 14, 2020 at 4:47 pm

    I feel exactly the same. Trump is just a huge crude extension of the usual "exceptional" leaders, much more transparent by not pretending he is any sort of representative of democratic and cooperative values claimed by his predecessors.

    PlutoniumKun , January 14, 2020 at 10:05 am

    But what I think is noticeable is that his worst high profile staff picks, while horrible people, are generally those who are under his thumb and so he has control of. But in the behind the scenes activities, they've been very effective – as an obvious example, witness how he's put so many conservative Republicans into the judiciary, in contrast with Obamas haplessness.

    curious euro , January 14, 2020 at 10:51 am

    That is not a Trump thing, getting more judges is a 100% rep party thing and only rep party thing. Sure, he is the one putting his rubber stamp on it, but the picking and everything else is a party thing. They stopped the placement for years under Obama before Trump was ever thought about, and now are filling it as fast as they can. Aren't they having complicit democrats helping them or how can they get their picks beyond congress? Or am I getting something wrong and Obama could have picked his judges but didn't?

    The people he chooses to run his administration however are all horrible. Not just horrible people but horrible picks as in incompetent buffoons without a clue. Can you show a evil, horrible or not but actually competent pick of his in his administration?

    The only one I can think of is maybe the new FAA chief Dickson. Who is a crisis manager, after the FAA is in its worst crisis ever right now. So right now someone competent must have this post. All the others seem to be chickenhawk blowhards with the IQ of a fruitfly but the bluster of a texan.

    fajensen , January 14, 2020 at 11:13 am

    Gina Haspel? She is probably equally good with a handgun, an ice pick and a pair of pliers.

    curious euro , January 14, 2020 at 11:49 am

    Is she effective? What has she done to make her a spy mastermind? She is obviously a torturer, but is that a qualification in any way useful to be a intelligence agency boss?

    I have the suspicion Haspel was elevated to their office by threatening "I know where all the bodies are buried (literally) and if you don't make me boss, I will tell". Blackmail can helping a career lots if successful.

    Thuto , January 14, 2020 at 11:18 am

    The outcomes of incompetence and malicious intent are sometimes indistinguishable from one another. With the people Trump has surrounded himself with, horrible, nasty outcomes are par for the course because these guys are both incompetent and chock full of malicious intent. Instead of draining the swamp, he's gone and filled it with psychotic sociopaths.

    drumlin woodchuckles , January 14, 2020 at 7:04 pm

    Some time ago I heard Mulvaney answer the criticism about the Trump budget of the day cutting so much money from EPA that EPA would have to fire half of its relevant scientists. He replied that " this is how we drain the swamp".

    Citing "corruption" was misdirection. Trump let his supporters believe that the corruption was The Swamp. What the Trump Group ACTually means by "The Swamp" is all the career scientists and researchers and etc. who take seriously the analyzing and restraining of Upper Class Looter misbehavior.

    Yves Smith Post author , January 14, 2020 at 12:28 pm

    I limited the post to his negotiating approach. One would think someone so erratic would have trouble attracting people. However, Wall Street and a lot of private businesses are full of high maintenance prima donnas at the top. Some of those operations live with a lot of churn in the senior ranks. For others, one way to get them to stay is what amounts to a combat pay premium, they get paid more than they would in other jobs to put up with a difficult boss. I have no idea how much turnover there is in the Trump Organization or how good his key lieutenants are so I can't opine either way on that part.

    Regarding his time as POTUS, Trump has a lot of things working against him on top of his difficult personality and his inability to pay civil servants a hardship premium:

    1. He got elected over the dead bodies of just about everyone who counts in the Republican Party. He pretty much did a hostile takeover of the GOP. So his ability to draw on seasoned hands was nil. And on top of that, he is temperamentally not the type to seek the counsel of perceived wise men in and hanging around the party. The people he has kept around are cronies like Wilbur Ross and Steve Mnuchin.

    The one notably competent person he has attracted and retained is Robert Lightizer, the US Trade Representative

    2. Another thing that undermines Trump's effectiveness in running a big bureaucracy is his hatred for its structure. He likes very lean organizations with few layers. He can't impose that on his administration. It's trying to put a round peg in a square hole.

    cocomaan , January 14, 2020 at 1:56 pm

    I have no idea how much turnover there is in the Trump Organization or how good his key lieutenants are so I can't opine either way on that part.

    Is it just me or does nobody know? Does it seem to anyone else like there has been virtually no investigation of his organization or how it was run?

    Maybe it's buried in the endless screeds against Trump, but any investigations of his organizations always seem colored by his presidency. I'd love to see one that's strictly historical.

    Yves Smith Post author , January 14, 2020 at 2:10 pm

    I am simply saying that I have not bothered investigating that issue. There was a NY Times Magazine piece on the Trump Organization before his election. That was where I recall the bit about him hating having a lot of people around him, he regards them as leeches. That piece probably had some info on how long his top people had worked for him.

    ObjectiveFunction , January 15, 2020 at 2:30 am

    Congratulations Yves, on another fine piece, one of your best. I might recommend you append this comment to it as an update, or else pen a sequel.

    While Trump has more in common stylistically with a Borgia prince out of Machiavelli, or a Roman Emperor ( oderint, dum metuant ) than with a Hitler or a Stalin, your note still puts me in mind of an insightful comment I pulled off a history board a while ago, regarding the reductionist essence of Führerprinzip , mass movement or no mass movement. It's mostly out of Shirer:

    Hitler ran the Third Reich by a system of parallel competition among bureaucratic empire builders of all stripes. Anyone who showed servile loyalty and mouthed his yahoo ideology got all the resources they liked, for any purpose they proposed. But the moment he encountered any form of independence or pushback, he changed horses at once. He left the old group in place, but gave all their resources to a burgeoning new bureaucracy that did things his way. If a State body resisted his will, he had a Party body do it instead. He was continually reaching down 2-3 levels in the org charts, to find some ambitious firecracker willing to suck up to him, and leapfrog to the top.

    This left behind a complete chaos of rival, duplicated functions, under mainly unfit leaders. And fortunately for the world, how well any of these organizations actually did their jobs was an entirely secondary consideration. Loyalty was all.

    Hitler sat at the center of all the resource grabbers and played referee. This made everyone dependent on his nod and ensured his continued power. The message was: there are no superiors in the Reich. There is only der Führer, and his favor trumps everything .

    As you note, some of these tools (fortunately) aren't available to Cheeto 45 .

    I hope this particular invocation of Godwin's avenger is trenchant, and not OT. Although Godwin himself blessed the #Trump=Hitler comparison some time ago, thereby shark-jumping his own meme.

    Tomonthebeach , January 14, 2020 at 12:53 pm

    It might be as simple as birds of a feather (blackbirds of course) flocking together. Trump seems to have radar for corrupt cronies as we have seen his swamp draining into the federal prison system. The few over-confident generals he picked, except for Flynn, finally caved when they realized staying was an affront to the honor code they swore to back in OCS or their academy.

    lyman alpha blob , January 14, 2020 at 2:16 pm

    The crooks in the Reagan administration were getting bounced seemingly every other day. Just found this from Brookings (blecchh) which if accurate says Trump has recently surpassed Reagan – https://www.brookings.edu/research/tracking-turnover-in-the-trump-administration/

    I don't know how they selected staff in the Reagan years, but lately the POTUS seems to appoint based on who the plutocrats want. As has been noted Bary O took his marching orders from Citigroup if I remember right. I doubt if Trump had even heard of most of the people he appointed prior to becoming president. So at least some of Trump's turnover is due to him firing recommendations from others who didn't turn out how he'd like. That's one reason I didn't get all that upset over the Bolton hiring – I didn't think he'd last a year before Trump canned him.

    My recollection of the Reagan years was that he had a lot of staff who left to "spend more time with their families"; in other words they got caught being crooked and we're told to go lest they besmirch the sterling reputation of St. Ronnie.

    drumlin woodchuckles , January 14, 2020 at 6:57 pm

    He early-on adopted the concept of "dismantle the Administrative State". Some of his appointees are designed to do that from within. He appoints termites to the Department of Lumber Integrity because he wants to leave the lumber all destroyed after he leaves the White House.

    His farm bill is only a disaster to those who support Good Farm Bill Governance. His mission is to destroy as much of the knowledge and programs within the USDA as possible. So his farm bill is designed to achieve the destruction he wants to achieve. If it works, it was a good farm bill from his viewpoint. For example.

    Ignacio , January 15, 2020 at 5:38 am

    I would say that Trump, not acting in an intelligent way is doing very clever things according to his interests. My opinion is that his actions/negotiations with foreign countries are 100% directed for domestic consumptiom. He does not care at all about international relationships, just his populist "make America great again" and he almost certainly play closest attention to the impact of his actions in US opinion.

    He calculates the risks and takes measures that show he is a strong man defending US interests (in a very symplistic and populist way) no matter if someone or many are offended, abused or even killed as we have recently seen. Then if it is appreciated that a limit has been reached, and the limit is not set by international reactions but perceived domestic reactions, he may do a setback showing how sensibly magnanimous can a strongman like him be. In the domestic front, IMO, he does not give a damn on centrists of all kinds. Particularly, smart centrists are strictly following Trumps playbook focusing on actions that by no means debilitate his positioning as strongman in foreign issues and divert attention from the real things that would worry Trump. The impeachment is exactly that. Trump must be 100% confident that he would win any contest with any "smart" centrist. Of course he also loves all the noises he generates with, for instance, the Soleimani killing or Huawei banning that distract from his giveaways to the oligarchs and further debilitation of remaining welfare programs and environmental programs. This measures don't pass totally unnoticed but Hate Inc . and public opinions/debates are not paying the attention his domestic measures deserve. Trump's populism feeds on oligarch support and despair and his policies are designed to keep and increase both. Polls on Democrats distract from the most important polls on public opinion about Trum "surprise" actions.

    Trump will go for a third term.

    Seamus Padraig , January 14, 2020 at 7:18 am

    Trump has the rare gift of being able to drive his enemies insane–just witness what's become of the Democrats, a once proud American political party.

    Eureka Springs , January 14, 2020 at 9:39 am

    Democrats have long been (what, 50 plus yrs. – Phil Ochs – Love Me I'm A Liberal) exuding false pride of not appearing to be or sounding insane. Their place, being the concern troll of the duopoly. All are mad. If the Obama years didn't prove it, the Dems during Bush Cheney certainly did.

    curious euro , January 14, 2020 at 10:53 am

    Yes, 50 years. Nixon played mad to get his Vietnam politics through, Reagan was certifiable
    "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever." "We begin bombing in five minutes." live on air.
    Etc.

    vlade , January 14, 2020 at 7:38 am

    I suspect only half of the post was posted? The last para seems to get cut in mid sentence.

    I'd add one more thing (which may be in the second half, assuming there's one). Trump's massively insane demands are a good anchoring strategy. Even semi-rational player will not make out-of-this-earth demands – they would be seen as either undermining their rationality, or clearly meant to only anchor so less effective (but surprisingly, even when we know it's only an anchor it apparently works, at least a bit). With irrational Trump, one just doesn't know.

    vlade , January 14, 2020 at 7:44 am

    Or maybe not (re half posted), now that I re-read it.. More likely it's just me being sleep deprived today :)

    GramSci , January 14, 2020 at 7:41 am

    Classic predatory behaviors: culling the herd and eating the weak.

    David , January 14, 2020 at 8:21 am

    I think Trump understands that one of the basic tactics of negotiation (though forgotten by the Left(tm)) is to set out a maximalist position before the negotiation starts, so that you have room to make compromises later. Sometimes this works better than others – I don't know how far you can do it with the Chinese, for example. But then Trump may have inadvertently played, in that case, into the tradition of scripted public utterances combined with behind-the-scenes real negotiation that tends to characterize bargaining in Asia. But in domestic politics, there's no doubt that publicly announcing extreme negotiating positions is a winning tactic. You force the media and other political actors to comment and make counter-proposals, thus dragging the argument more in your direction from the very start. Trump remembers something that his opponents have willfully forgotten: compromise is something you finish with not something you start from . In itself, any given compromise has no particular virtue or value.

    Michael Fiorillo , January 14, 2020 at 8:59 am

    Yes, Trump does seem to be very good at getting to people to "negotiate against themselves."

    chuck roast , January 14, 2020 at 9:52 am

    and that is why Trump will eat Biden's lunch.

    The Rev Kev , January 14, 2020 at 9:09 am

    There is actually two parts to a negotiation I should mention. There is negotiating a deal. And then there is carrying it out. Not only Trump but the US has shown itself incapable of upholding deals but they will break them when they see an advantage or an opportunity. Worse, one part of the government may be fighting another part of the government and will sabotage that deal in sometimes spectacular fashion.
    So what is the point of having all these weird and wonderful negotiating strategies if any partners that you have on the international stage have learned that Trump's word is merely a negotiating tactic? And this includes after a deal is signed when he applies some more pressure to change something in an agreement that he just signed off on? If you can't keep a deal, then ultimately negotiating a deal is useless.

    curious euro , January 14, 2020 at 9:28 am

    The incapability of the US to keep their treaties has been a founding principle of the country. Ask any Indian.

    Putin or the russian foreign ministry called the US treaty incapable a few years before Trump, and they were not wrong. Trump didn't help being erratic as he is, but he didn't cancel any treaty on his own: JCPOA, INF, etc. He had pretty broad support for all of these. Only maybe NAFTA was his own idea.

    Yves Smith Post author , January 14, 2020 at 12:31 pm

    I would put it a bit differently. Trump's erraticness is a strong signal he fits to a pattern the Russians have used to depict the US: "not agreement capable". That's what I meant by he selects for weak partners. His negotiating style signals that he is a bad faith actor. Who would put up with that unless you had to, or you could somehow build that into your price?

    barnaby33 , January 14, 2020 at 11:53 pm

    Considering I doubt the Russians have ever honored a single deal they made, that's maybe not a good example!

    Yves Smith Post author , January 15, 2020 at 12:16 am

    I have no idea who your mythical Russians are. I know two people who did business in Russia before things got stupid and they never had problems with getting paid. Did you also miss that "Russians" have bought so much real estate in London that they mainly don't live in that you could drop a neutron bomb in the better parts of Chelsea and South Kensington and not kill anyone? Pray tell, how could they acquire high end property if they are such cheats?

    Boomka , January 15, 2020 at 6:38 am

    somebody was eating too much US propaganda? how about this for starters:
    https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/26-years-on-russia-set-to-repay-all-soviet-unions-foreign-debt

    "It is politically important: Russia has paid off the USSR's debt to a country that no longer exists," said Mr Yuri Yudenkov, a professor at the Russian University of Economics and Public Administration. "This is very important in terms of reputation: the ability to repay on time, the responsibility," he told AFP.

    It would have been very easy for Russia to say it cannot be held responsible for USSR's debts, especially in this case where debt is to a non-existent entity.

    drumlin woodchuckles , January 14, 2020 at 7:09 pm

    In Syria, the Department of Defense was supporting one group of pet jihadis. The CIA was supporting a different group of pet jihadis.

    At times the two groups of pet jihadis were actively fighting eachother. I am not sure how the DoD and CIA felt about their respective pet jihadis fighting eachother. However they felt, they kept right on arming and supporting their respective groups of pet jihadis to keep fighting eachother.

    timbers , January 14, 2020 at 9:47 am

    I'm just not impressed by Trump in any way.

    He owes the fact he's President not to any skill he has, but to Democrats being so bad. Many non establishment types could have beaten Hillary.

    And Trump owes the fact that he's not DOA in 2020 re-election again because Democrats are so bad. There are a handful of extremely popular social programs Democrats could champion that would win over millions of voters and doom Trump's re-election. But instead, they double down on issues that energize Trump's base, are not off-limits to there donors while ignoring what the broad non corporate/rich majority support. For example impeaching him for being the first recent President not to start a major new war for profit and killing millions and then saying it's really because something he did in Ukraine that 95% of Americans couldn't care less about and won't even bother to understand even if they could.

    That leaves the fact he is rather rich and must have done something to become that. I don't know enough about him to evaluate that. But I would never what to know him or have a friend that acts like him. I've avoided people like that in my life.

    Yves Smith Post author , January 14, 2020 at 12:36 pm

    Did you read the post as positive? Please read again. Saying that Trump's strategy works only to the extent that he winds up selecting for weak partners is not praise. First, it is clinical, and second, it says his strategy has considerable costs.

    MyLessThanPrimeBeef , January 14, 2020 at 4:35 pm

    I agree.

    Understanding how it works is the first step in dealing with (or countering) it.

    Someone above mentions Pinochet as being similar. I can't, just now, think of anyone* from history working the way he does. Can anyone name some?

    *Except Shakespeare's Hamlet, or some Kung Fu masters, like Jackie Chan in his 1978 "Drunken Master," or earlier, the not as well-known 1966 film, Come Drink With Me, which was produced by the legendary Run Run Shaw (who lived to be 107, or maybe it was his brother), starring Cheng Pei Pei. The master becomes the master when, or only when, drunk. It reminds of the saying, 'method to the madness.'

    And often what we perceive to be chaotic – in weather, nature, space or human affairs – is only so because we don't truly comprehend it. This is not to say it can not be in fact chaotic.

    rd , January 14, 2020 at 6:54 pm

    I find it interesting that the primary foreign entity who has played Trump like a violin is Kim in North Korea. He has gotten everything he wanted,except sanctions relief over the past couple of years.

    However, Trump's style of negotiating with Iran has made it clear to Kim that North Korea would be idiots to give up their nuclear weapons and missiles. Meanwhile, Iran has watched Trump's attitude towards Kim since Kim blew up his first bomb and Trump is forcing them to develop nuclear weapons to be able to negotiate with Trump and the West.

    ObjectiveFunction , January 15, 2020 at 1:36 am

    But other than the minor matter of US 8th Army (cadre) sitting in the line of fire, the bulk of any risks posed by Li'l Kim are borne by South Korea, Japan and China. So for Trump, it's still down the list a ways, until the Norks can nuke tip a missile and hit Honolulu. So what coup has Kim achieved at Trump's expense, again?

    drumlin woodchuckles , January 14, 2020 at 7:13 pm

    Today's Democrats want to destroy those social programs you cite. They have wanted to destroy those social programs ever since President Clinton wanted to conspire with "Prime Minister" Gingrich to privatize Social Security. Luckily Monica Lewinsky saved us from that fate.

    A nominee Sanders would run on keeping Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid in existence. And he would mean it. A nominee Biden might pretend to say it. But he would conspire with the Republicans to destroy them all.

    The ClintoBama Pelosicrats have no standing on which to pretend to support some very popular social programs and hope to be believed any longer. Maybe that is why they feel there is no point in even pretending any more.

    Carolinian , January 14, 2020 at 10:08 am

    Thanks for the shrewd analysis. The problem is that Trump appears to be morphing from the mad negotiator into someone who really is mad. I think he knows he screwed up with Soleimani and there's no taking it back, only doubling down. You can't talk your way out of some mistakes. Trump is shrewd, but not very smart and like most bullies he's also weak. He gets by being such an obvious bluffer and blowhard but when you start assassinating people and expect to be praised for it it's no longer a game.

    False Solace , January 14, 2020 at 1:03 pm

    If I were Iran I'd think really hard about scheduling something embarrassing to happen just before the election. Jimmy Carter was seriously damaged by hostages, why not Trump?

    drumlin woodchuckles , January 14, 2020 at 7:14 pm

    Trump would simply bomb the hostages.

    MyLessThanPrimeBeef , January 14, 2020 at 4:52 pm

    If you note and believe he tends to start out at the furthest position, the question then becomes, is this his most forceful action.

    Is it the general plus collateral damage, and no more/no worse?

    Or maybe he doesn't always start out at the far end. Then, people need to respond differently, if the aim is to play the man in this chess game.

    Carolinian , January 14, 2020 at 4:59 pm

    I'd say the solution is to give Trump the heave ho this November and not play his game of me me me. Indeed the Iranians seem to be biding their time to see what happens.

    Trump was always only tolerable as long as he spent his time shooting off his mouth rather than playing the imperial chess master. This reality show has gone on long enough.

    MyLessThanPrimeBeef , January 14, 2020 at 5:10 pm

    And to give Trump the heave-ho, we have to know how to play the man. (Then, Iran doesn't have to.)

    But if we don't fully know – if he is unpredictable in how he starts out at the beginning – it makes the venture harder (but not impossible).

    drumlin woodchuckles , January 14, 2020 at 7:22 pm

    Bearing in mind the fact that the DemParty would prefer a Trump re-election over a Sanders election, I don't think anyone will be giving Trump any heave ho. The only potential nominee to even have a chance to defeat Trump would be Sanders. And if Sanders doesn't win on ballot number one, Sanders will not be permitted the nomination by an evil Trumpogenic DemParty elite.

    Even if Sanders wins the nomination, the evil Trumpogenic Demparty leadership and the millions of Jonestown Clintobamas in the field will conspire against Sanders every way they feel they can get away with. The Clintobamas would prefer Trump Term Two over Sanders Term One. They know it, and the rest of us need to admit it.

    If Sanders is nominated, he will begin the election campaign with a permanent deficit of 10-30 million Clintobama voters who will Never! Ever! vote for Sanders. Sanders will have to attract enough New Voters to drown out and wash away the 10-30 million Never Bernie clintobamas.

    OpenThePodBayDoorsHAL , January 14, 2020 at 7:39 pm

    Not sure he "screwed up" with Suleimani. He now has something to point to when Adelson and the Israel Firsters ring up. He has red meat for his base ("look what a tough guy I am"). He can tell the Saudis they now owe him one. He added slightly to the fund of hatred for America in the hearts of Sunnis but that fund is already pretty full. If they respond with a terror attack Trump wins because people will rally around the national leader and partisan differences will be put aside. Notice how fast de-escalation happened, certainly feels alot like pre-orchestrated kayfabe.

    Yves Smith Post author , January 14, 2020 at 6:42 pm

    Mind you, there's no reason to think that this negotiation approach wasn't an adaptation to Trump's emotional volatility, as in finding a way to make what should have been a weakness a plus. And that he's less able to make that adaptation work well as he's over his head, has less control than as a private businessman, and generally under way more pressure.

    marym , January 14, 2020 at 10:23 am

    If someone doesn't care who/what they harm or destroy; or if the harm or destruction is the actual goal, it gives them freedom and power not available to someone with even a crumb-dropping neoliberal sense (or façade) of obligation toward anyone else or to anything constructive.

    With Democrats being unwilling to scrutinize, it's not clear how much Trump and family are winning as far as personal fortune. In his public capacity he has little to show for his winnings that isn't some form of dismantling, destruction, or harm with no constructive replacement and no material benefits outside the donor class.

    xkeyscored , January 14, 2020 at 2:47 pm

    Trying to see things from Trump's perspective, while I don't know how his personal fortune is faring, his lifestyle doesn't seem to have suffered too much of a downturn. He still spends much of his time playing golf and hanging out at Mar-a-Lago. In addition, his name is known around the entire world, to a far greater extent than when he was a mere real estate crook or reality TV phenomenon. Which may be of greater importance to him than the precise extent of his wealth, let alone the fate of his country or the planet.

    Wondering , January 14, 2020 at 10:48 am

    Nice analysis, Yves. A welcome break from the typical centrist hand wringing "What norms has he broken this week?"
    Next question: Given that our system allows for bloviating bullies to succeed, is that the kind of system we want to live under?

    HH , January 14, 2020 at 11:43 am

    I recall reading that Trump's empire would have collapsed during the casino fiasco were it not for lending from his father when credit was not available elsewhere. NYT investigative reporters have turned up evidence of massive financial support from Trump father to son to the tune of hundreds of millions throughout the son's career. So much for the great businessman argument.

    carbpow , January 14, 2020 at 11:45 am

    Trump is nothing more or less than a reflection of the mind set of the US people.The left wing resorts to the same tactics that Trump uses to gain their ends. Rational thought and reasonable discussion seems to be absent. Everyone is looking for a cause for the country's failing infrastructure, declining life expectancy, and loss of opportunity for their children to have a better life than they were able to achieve They each blame the other side. But there are more than two sides to most folks experience. If ever the USA citizens abolish or just gets fed up with the two party system maybe things will change. In reality most people know there is little difference between the two parties so why even vote?

    Thuto , January 14, 2020 at 11:48 am

    While it might work in domestic politics, this mad man negotiating tactic erodes trust in international affairs and it will take decades for the US to recover from the harm done by Trump's school yard bully approach. Even the docile Europeans are beginning to tire of this and once they get their balls stitched back on after being castrated for so long, America will have its work cut out crossing the chasm from unreliable and untrustworthy partner to being seen as dependable and worthy of entering into agreements with.

    Jeremy Grimm , January 14, 2020 at 12:11 pm

    This analysis of Trump reminded me of a story I heard from the founders of a small rural radio station. Both had been in broadcasting for years at a large station in a major market, one as a program director and the other in sales. They competed for a broadcasting license that became available and they won. With the license in-hand they needed to obtain investments to get the station on-air within a year or they would lose the license. Even with their combined savings and as much money as they could obtain from other members of their families and from friends -- they were short what they needed by several hundred thousand dollars. Their collateral was tapped out and banks wouldn't loan on the broadcast license alone without further backing. They had to find private investors. They located and presented to several but their project could find no backers. In many cases prospects told them their project was too small -- needed too little money -- to be of interest. As the deadline for going on-air loomed they were put in touch with a wealthy local farmer.

    After a long evening presenting their business case to this farmer in ever greater detail, he sat back and told them he would give them the money they needed to get their station on-air -- but he wanted a larger interest in the business than what they offered him. He wanted a 51% interest -- a controlling interest -- or he would not give them the money, and they both had to agree to work for the new radio station for a year after it went on-air. The two holders of the soon to be lost broadcast license looked at each other and told the farmer he could keep his money and left. The next day the farmer called on the phone and gave them the names and contact information for a few investors, any one of whom should be able and interested in investing the amounts they needed on their terms. He also told them that had they accepted his offer he would have driven them out of the new station before the end of the year it went on-air. He said he wanted to see whether they were 'serious' before putting them in touch with serious investors.

    juliania , January 14, 2020 at 12:22 pm

    Sorry, assassination doesn't fit into this scenario. That is a bridge too far. Trump has lost his effectiveness by boasting about this. It isn't just unpredictability. It is dangerous unpredictability.

    Yves Smith Post author , January 15, 2020 at 5:52 am

    I never once said that Trump was studied in how he operates, in fact, I repeatedly pointed out that he's highly emotional and undisciplined. I'm simply describing some implications.

    meadows , January 14, 2020 at 12:28 pm

    If our corrupt Congress had not ceded their "co-equal" branch of gov't authority over the last 40 years thereby gradually creating the Imperial Presidency that we have now, we might comfortably mitigate much of the mad king antics.

    Didn't the Founding Fathers try desperately to escape the terrible wars of Europe brought on by the whims and grievances of inbred kings, generation after generation? Now on a whim w/out so much as a peep to Congress, presidential murder is committed and the CongressCritters bleat fruitlessly for crumbs of info about it.

    I see no signs of this top-heavy imperialism diminishing. Every decision will vanish into a black hole marked "classified."

    I am profoundly discouraged at 68 who at 18 years old became a conscientious objector, that the same undeclared BS wars and BS lies are used to justify continuous conflct almost nonstop these last 50 years as if engaging in such violence can ever be sucessful in achieving peaceful ends? Unless the maintenance of fear, chaos and blowback are the actual desired result.

    Trump's negotiating style is chaos-inducing deliberately, then eventually a "Big Daddy" Trump can fix the mess, spin the mess and those of us still in the thrall of big-daddyism can feel assuaged. It's the relief of the famiy abuser who after the emotional violence establishes a temporary calm and family members briefly experience respite, yet remain wary and afraid.

    drumlin woodchuckles , January 14, 2020 at 7:34 pm

    Bingo!

    The maintenance of fear, chaos and blowback are exACTLY the desired result. Deliberately and on purpose.

    Jeff Wells of Rigorous Intuition wrote a post about that years ago, in a different context. Here it is.

    https://rigint.blogspot.com/2006/07/violent-bear-it-away.html

    Edward , January 14, 2020 at 2:14 pm

    In some ways Trump has a very Japanese style; everything is about saving face even if you are saying complete nonsense. You have to divine what his actual agenda is. However his approach to negotiation actually works in the business world, it is a disaster as diplomacy.

    In trying to make sense of his foreign policy, though, there are hidden factors; some how deep state interests are able to maneuver presidents into following the same policies. What is happening behind the scenes? This manipulation may be contaminating his negotiations.

    ian , January 14, 2020 at 7:12 pm

    I saw an interview with someone (can't remember who) who had a great analogy for the relationship between Trump and the press: think of the press as a herd of puppies and Trump is the guy with the tennis ball. He tosses outrageous things out there, they all chase it. One brings it back, he tosses it again.

    Why would he do this? My own take is that he invites chaos – he has a fluid style, changing his mind often, dumping people and the like which thrives in a chaotic environment. He likes to shake things up and look for openings.

    It also helps him do some things quietly in the background, along with key allies. While everyone was foaming at the mouth over Russian collusion, he and Mitch McConnell were busy getting appellate judges confirmed.

    I think it is a mistake to underestimate him – he is an unusual person, but far from stupid.

    xkeyscored , January 15, 2020 at 5:42 am

    It also helps him do some things quietly in the background
    I think you've hit the nail on the head there.

    drumlin woodchuckles , January 14, 2020 at 7:29 pm

    There is a silver lining to that. If another term of Trump inspires the Europeans to abrogate NATO and put an end to that alliance and create their own NEATO ( North East Atlantic Treaty Organization) withOUT America and withOUT Canada and maybe withOUT some of those no-great-bargain East European countries; then NEATO Europe could reach its own Separate Peace with Russia and lower that tension point.

    And America could bring its hundred thousand hostages ( "soldiers") back home from not-NATO-anymore Europe.

    KFritz , January 14, 2020 at 10:17 pm

    Kim Jong Un uses similar tactics, strategy, perhaps even style. Clinically and intellectually, it's interesting to watch their interaction. Emotionally, given their weaponry, it's terrifying.

    Jason , January 15, 2020 at 9:15 am

    Great post! The part about selecting for desperate business partners is very insightful, it makes his cozying up to dictators and pariah states much more understandable. He probably thinks/feels that these leaders are so desperate for approval from a country like the US that, when he needs something from them, he will have more leverage and be able to impose what he wants.

    [Jan 12, 2020] The Politics Behind Banning Russia From the Olympics -- Strategic Culture

    Jan 12, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

    Michael Averko January 11, 2020 © Photo: Government.ru There've been ongoing propaganda pieces that skirt over some inconvenient realities, for those seeking to unfairly admonish Russia in the Olympic movement. One case in point is the January 2 Reuters article " Use 1992 Yugoslavia Precedent for Russians in Tokyo – Historian ". With a stated " some Russians ", that article suggestively under-represents the actual number of 2018 Russian Winter Olympians at Pyeongchang, while supporting a hypocritically flawed aspect, having to do with Yugoslavia in 1992.

    The downplaying of Russian participation at Pyeongchang, is seemingly done to spin the image of many Russian cheats being kept out. At the suggestion of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), the International Olympic Committee (IOC) closely vetted Russians for competition at the 2018 Winter Olympics. In actuality, the 2018 Russian Winter Olympic participation wasn't so off the mark, when compared to past Winter Olympiads – something which (among other things) puts a dent into the faulty notion that Russia should be especially singled out for sports doping.

    At the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, Russia had its largest ever Winter Olympic contingent of 232 , on account of the host nation being allowed a greater number of participants. The 168 Russian Winter Olympians at Pyeongchang is 9 less than the Russians who competed at the 2010 Winter Olympics. Going back further, Russian Winter Olympic participation in 2006 was at 190 , with its 2002 contingent at 151 , 1998 having 122 and 1994 (Russia's first formal Winter Olympic appearance as Russia) 113 .

    The aforementioned Reuters piece references a " historian ", Bill Mallon, who is keen on using the 1992 Summer Olympic banning of Yugoslavia (then consisting of Serbia and Montenegro) as a legitimate basis to ban Russia from the upcoming Summer Olympics. In this instance, Alan Dershowitz's periodic reference to the " if the shoe is on the other foot " test is quite applicable . Regarding Mallon, " historian " is put in quotes because his historically premised advocacy is very much incomplete and overly propagandistic.

    For consistency sake and contrary to Mallon, Yugoslavia should've formally participated at the 1992 Summer Olympics. The Olympic banning of Yugoslavia was bogus, given that the IOC and the IOC affiliated sports federations didn't ban the US and USSR for their respective role in wars, which caused a greater number of deaths than what happened in 1990s Bosnia. The Reuters article at issue references a United Nations resolution for sanctions against Yugoslavia, without any second guessing, in support of the preference (at least by some) to keep politics out of sports as much as possible.

    Mallon casually notes that Yugoslav team sports were banned from the 1992 Summer Olympics, unlike individual Yugoslav athletes, who participated as independents. At least two of the banned Yugoslav teams were predicted to be lead medal contenders.

    Croatia was allowed to compete at the 1992 Summer Olympics, despite that nation's military involvement in the Bosnian Civil War. During the 1992 Summer and Winter Olympics, the former USSR participated in individual and team sports as the Unified Team (with the exception of the three former Soviet Baltic republics, who competed under their respective nation). With all this in mind, the ban on team sports from Yugoslavia at the 1992 Summer Olympics, under a neutral name, appears to be hypocritical and ethically challenged.

    BS aside, the reality is that geopolitical clout (in the form of might making right), is what compels the banning of Yugoslavia, unlike superpowers engaged in behavior which isn't less egregious. Although a major world power, contemporary Russia lacks the overall geopolitical influence of the USSR. Historian Stephen Cohen and some others, have noted that post-Soviet Russia doesn't get the same (for lack of a better word) respect accorded to the USSR. This aspect underscores how becoming freer, less militaristic and more market oriented doesn't (by default) bring added goodwill from a good number of Western establishment politicos and the organizations which are greatly influenced by them.

    On the subject of banning Russia from the Olympics, Canadian sports legal politico Dick Pound, continues to rehash an inaccurate likening with no critical follow-up. ( An exception being yours truly .) Between 2016 and 2019 , Pound references the Olympic banning of South Africa, as a basis for excluding Russia. South Africa was banned when it had apartheid policies, which prevented that country's Black majority from competing in organized sports. Russia has a vast multiethnic participation in sports and other sectors.

    As previously noted , the factual premise to formally ban Russia from the Olympics remains suspect. The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) is set to review Russia's appeal to have the recommended WADA ban against Russia overturned, as Western mass media at large and sports politicos like Pound continue to push for a CAS decision against Russia.

    [Jan 11, 2020] New category of Russian agents: The level of fake information in coverage of neoliberal MSM of Iranian event force people to read Sputnik and Xinhua

    Notable quotes:
    "... It's as if the entire capital city of the US has become a mental asylum / Hotel California ..."
    Jan 11, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Jen , Jan 10 2020 19:30 utc | 1

    The sheer arrogance and wilful blindness expressed in the US State Department press statement and WaPo staffer Louisa Loveluck's tweets are astounding beyond belief. It's as if the entire capital city of the US has become a mental asylum / Hotel California , where one can enter but never leave spiritually and morally, though one can take many physical trips in and out of the madhouse.

    Iraq definitely does need the S-300 missile defense systems. The most pressing issue though is whether the Iraqis will suffer the delays Syria suffered in acquiring those systems even after paying for them.

    Time now is of the essence. Iraqi operators need to be trained in those systems. Syria may be able to supply some training but at the risk of letting down its guard in sending some of its operators to Baghdad and exposing them to US drone attacks.

    [Jan 10, 2020] The level of disinformation produced by fake news outliets controlled by intelligence agencies is just staggering. You cna't beleve a single work in politically changed fortin covergarate

    They really are able to turn white into black and black into white.
    Notable quotes:
    "... 1) Occurs as Iran is on brink of war with USA?; 2) Indications of USA using info war tactics; 3) airliner owner by Kolomoisky? 4) No communication with tower? 5) USA and Israel history of duplicity and narrative management (example: MH-17). ..."
    "... NATO has weaponized aircraft accident investigations. Lawfare in combination with state terrorism. ..."
    "... The Ukies know how to obliterate a debris field. MH-17 -- They used artillery for months to keep OSCE and Dutch officials away, and despite the locals working to protect the deceased and the debris, body parts have been found years later. ..."
    Jan 10, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
    Rob , Jan 10 2020 17:46 utc | 2
    There were also clear sightings of a missile to bring down TWA 800. Except it didn't. As an Navy Pilot , flight instructor and 737 captain this does not at 1st or 2nd glance appear to be a missile strike. Catastropic engine failure is my bet. They made most of the turn back to the airport before losing integrity or loss of thrust.

    Good analysis.


    vk , Jan 10 2020 17:52 utc | 3

    US Claim of Ukrainian Boeing 737 Plane Being Hit by Missile Aims to Manipulate Stock Markets
    On Wednesday, Boeing's shares plummeted by 2.3 percent ($3.4bn) after the Ukrainian Boeing 737-800 aircraft crashed in Tehran due to encountering a technical glitch.

    On Thursday, the stock rose by 3 percent after unnamed Pentagon officials claimed that the Ukrainian passenger plane was most likely brought down by anti-aircraft missiles, and US President Donald Trump implicitly supported the claim. This has been read by analysists as an attempt to manipulate the stock market; a measure that would both overshadow Trump's failure in Iraq and save Boeing from bankruptcy.

    Russia says no grounds to blame Iran for Ukrainian plane crash: TASS

    I didn't find the article on TASS. Maybe it was in its Russian version, or in its TV/Radio/Podcast version.

    I don't discard a terrorist attack from the inside, or sabotage of the plane by the Ukrainian government. What I think is missile attack can be pretty much discarded: the evidence the Iranians already have through their air control data discard any possibility, by sheer logic alone, that that was the case.

    Unless, of course, the Iranians are lying. But then there isn't any cui bono for Iran to lie about it (if it was a mistake they wanted to cover, they could blame a random independent militia so as to give plausible deniability) with the technical malfunction argument, and now Russia's foreign minister Ryabkov is on the boat with it - so I don't see the cui bono for Russia either.

    ninel , Jan 10 2020 17:58 utc | 4
    A little guide to Iran's modern history.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_executions_of_Iranian_political_prisoners
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_murders_of_Iran
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_student_protests,_July_1999
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zahra_Kazemi
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_foreign_nationals_detained_in_Iran
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Iran
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Iran

    Perseus wore a magic cap so that the monsters he hunted down might not see him. Some of you choose to draw the magic cap down over your eyes and ears so as to make-believe that there are no monsters in Iran.

    Per/Norway , Jan 10 2020 18:03 utc | 5
    Posted by: ninel | Jan 10 2020 17:58 utc | 4

    "Some of you choose to draw the magic cap down over your eyes and ears so as to make-believe that there are no monsters in Iran."

    No, it is a lot easier than that.

    Most of us dont get paid to post bs about the imperial enemies like you, and most off us still know how to use our brain.
    That is it, nothing more nothing less.

    PavewayIV , Jan 10 2020 18:10 utc | 6
    Rob@2 - What do you make of the loss of ADS-B? Could a catastrophic engine failure take out both power buses? The ADS-B transceiver? I know a the turbine blades turn into little missile blades when they decide to leave the engine, but I have no idea of the way power is transferred when either bus or the standby goes down. I assume automatic? Are the transfer switches anywhere near the engines? Does the APU automatically fire up? I assume the ADS-B box is in the electronics bay, but where is the antenna?

    karlof1 , Jan 10 2020 18:37 utc | 12
    Thanks b! As I commented towards the end of the previous thread on this topic, the mundane evidence has already been shown. IMO, if a missile or bomb was employed, the Iranians would be yelling louder than anyone and the denials would be coming from BigLie Media instead of accusations. And as I answered psychohistorian, the massive coverage by BigLie media serves as narrative distraction from what's being obfuscated--casualties taken by Outlaw US Empire troops and the BDA presented by Iranian Military.

    In that regard, The Saker's update sticks to the important facts of the now escalated ongoing war between Iran and the Evil Empire.


    Jackrabbit , Jan 10 2020 19:11 utc | 17
    Sorry, but there's good reasons to suspect foul play - as I and others have explained on the last thread.

    1) Occurs as Iran is on brink of war with USA?; 2) Indications of USA using info war tactics; 3) airliner owner by Kolomoisky? 4) No communication with tower? 5) USA and Israel history of duplicity and narrative management (example: MH-17).

    <> <> <> <>

    Also: IMO it's dangerous for Iran to invite experts from a group of Western countries. What is likely to happen is that all the Western experts will be pressure to disagree with Iran's findings. CIA knows that people will believe the "group of experts!" over Iran.

    !!

    pleasebeleafme , Jan 10 2020 19:12 utc | 18
    I don't know how anal Iran is about keeping track of ordinance but they must be pretty certain as to whether they downed the plane or not! Looks like they are being transparent and open. If they come out of this proving engine failure or something else then this could be a great pr coup.
    There would be a lot of egg on many faces trying to explain how the intelligence is wrong yet again. I look forward to watching trudeau walk that back. Hopefully!
    Gary , Jan 10 2020 19:17 utc | 19
    One explanation is the Boeing was used as a human shield, a military plane hides behind a slow moving plane when detected. The ukrainians did it with the MH17 and the israeli with the russian plane and tried it with the attack on damascus. In both cases there was a lot of dis-info and blaming right away. But the iranian would have known what the target was, and mentioned it, so very unlikely.

    Another question is the possibility a smaller missile only damaged the plane, also very unlikely.

    Head of Iran Civil Aviation Organization Ali Abedzadeh exaggerates: "From a scientific viewpoint, it is impossible that a missile hit the Ukrainian plane."

    "We can say that the airplane, considering the kind of the crash and the pilot's efforts to return it to Imam Khomeini airport, didn't explode in the air. So, the allegation that it was hit by missiles is totally ruled out," the official noted.

    Walter , Jan 10 2020 19:25 utc | 20
    Dude, when you're in Wyoming and see critter tracks down by the creek, you would assume it was Martians rather than antelope? Get real. The Ukie blew a crappy GE engine...they have this characteristic...

    Stay real, use Occam's Razor + physical evidence. Otherwise it's distraction and TBS...

    TJ , Jan 10 2020 19:26 utc | 21
    @11 Ernesto Che

    Craig Murray has been tracking a propagandist Wikipedia editor called "Philip Cross", here is the main article, but there are others on his site The Philip Cross Affair

    karlitozulu , Jan 10 2020 19:38 utc | 24
    ninel@ #4

    here is a little reminder of Murica's recent history:

    From 1945 until today - 20 to 30 million people killed by the USA

    https://www.voltairenet.org/article204021.html

    so, when you talk about monsters are you talking about yourself? ;)

    Piotr , Jan 10 2020 19:39 utc | 25
    ICAO is in contact with the States involved and will assist them if called upon. Its leadership is stressing the importance of avoiding speculation into the cause of the tragedy pending the outcomes of the investigation ...

    ICAO may be a worthy organization (some staff changes seem to be warranted), but isn't it a bit too much?! If this is a sincere wish of democratically elected heads of democratic nations that they want to form a harmonious chorus and speculate, then no mundane power can stop them. BTW, what is wrong with Zelensky that he did not join? PTSD after the brutal telephonies calls? I would add it to the list of proven damages to the security of those several states that will be debated in the Senate. [end of snark, "several states" is the entity named in the so-called Constitution of The United States of America].

    journey80 , Jan 10 2020 19:50 utc | 26
    The flight originated in Teheran, bound for Kiev, but where was it before it arrived in Iran? It could have been sabotaged anywhere; then easy, right, to set off an onboard bomb by remote control from the ground? I'm sure Iran is crawling with Mosssad/MI6/CIA spooks.
    ninel , Jan 10 2020 19:51 utc | 27
    @karlitozulu

    So you turn a blind eye to atrocities committed by other countries or peoples because the US government is responsible for the most? Did you even complete your high school education with that sort of reasoning? I never absolved the US or any other country. Simpletons like you seem to live in a black and white world in which one side must be chosen over the other. I feel unfortunate for b or anyone else who frequents this blog who does not view the world in such a profoundly problematic way.

    I am far more informed about Iranian politics, history, culture and religion than most people here. Please don't allow your hate for the USA, well justified, to cloud your judgment.

    Symen Danziger , Jan 10 2020 19:53 utc | 28
    NATO has weaponized aircraft accident investigations. Lawfare in combination with state terrorism.

    It's time for new rules and regulations. ICAO Annex 13 was drafted in different times. A rule based order is ancient history.

    People should be able to chose their destination, route and carrier based on personal preferences like price and comfort, not on factors like the latest or next conflict zone, corruption in the countries along the route, military and political adventurism, etc.

    The world has gone crazy.

    Willy2 , Jan 10 2020 20:01 utc | 33
    - As said before: I didn't believe for one second that that ukrainian plane was shot down. It would have given the US simply another stick to beat up the iranian government. I assume the iranians are smart enough to know that. They simply don't want to escalate the situation more. Although Iran has now the "moral high ground" it is still (very) vulnerable in a number of ways.

    - I think the ukrainian tourists were small traders. I.e. buy stuff e.g. clothing and other "merchandise" in Teheran, bring it into the Ukraine and then sell that "merchandise" in Ukraine with a (big) profit.

    William Gruff , Jan 10 2020 20:05 utc | 35
    We have a distinguished professor in our midst! Quite unlike the lowly regular professors or inconsequential adjunct instructors that normally grace these pages. Let me kick back and get a tan from the brilliance pouring out of this one! Us high latitude types have to get our Vitamin D wherever we can.

    As for my lack of criticism of Iran's government, that's the business of the Iranian people and none of my own. The Evil Empire attacking Iran? That, unfortunately, is everyone's business whether they want it to be or not.

    Why is it that these wise guys from the West (Americans mostly) feel it is their duty to criticize everyone else's governments and cultures when the examples they are setting themselves are so appallingly bad? Maybe these distinguished critics of other peoples' ways of life feel that it is easier to fix those other peoples' societies than it is to fix their own. After all, they apparently feel that fixing other countries just requires some number of bombs, while fixing their own country... where do they even start? How do you fix perfection?

    Jen , Jan 10 2020 20:06 utc | 36
    I'd be curious to know whether the flight crew on board Flight PS752 had had sufficient rest. Three hours of resting do not seem like sufficient time but that depends on the journey the plane made to Tehran, the duration of that journey and where it started. Was the plane also checked for signs of wear and tear during the three-hour-plus pause?

    Are UIA's owners (among them Ihor Kolomoisky) working their employees and hardware assets too hard and too cheaply as well?

    Walter , Jan 10 2020 20:33 utc | 43
    @ Rob | Jan 10 2020 17:46 utc | 2

    Yes. I think so too. Looks like the engine ran at reduced thrust as they turned, and then failed entirely at below minimum control speed, with the expected result, asymmetrical stall, yaw, roll, bang.

    There are pictures of severe erosion of what looks like compressor wheel from, presumably, ingestion of foreign material. Crap on the runway probably, and pencil-whipped maintenance, I should imagine.

    foolisholdman , Jan 10 2020 20:36 utc | 44
    bevin | Jan 10 2020 18:52 utc | 15

    Reuters was bought by Rothschild some years ago.

    PavewayIV , Jan 10 2020 21:01 utc | 49
    journey80@26 - Kiev is Ukrainian Airlines main hub. The 737 arrived from Kiev earlier that morning and was returning there.

    Jen@36 - No reason to do anything but a cursory safety check at Tehran. The airline's mechanics are in Kiev - anything beyond a normal pre-flight check involving maintenance would be done there, not Tehran. I doubt the crew was rested. That's not how UAI rolls on it's hub round-trips.

    UAI is also bleeding money like crazy. They're nearly bankrupt and stole the money they collect from passengers for the Ukraine Civil Aviation Authority fees. Tens of millions USD. The new CEO promises to fix everything somehow. I guess by overworking crews, skipping maintenance and crappy service. Those are always money-savers for cheap, poorly-run airlines (prior to bankruptcy). Too bad. Supposedly it wasn't that bad of an airline when they first added passenger service to their existing cargo ops a decade ago, but has been going downhill ever since.

    "Some real gems you got following your blog b."
    So why are you here?

    Peter AU1 , Jan 10 2020 21:39 utc | 56
    Ocams razor... bookies odds... planes fall out o the sky from time to time for all sorts of reasons not related to malicious activity. What are the odds of this occurring in Iran shortly after an Iran strike on a US base.

    The US has and does use terrorist tactics such as shooting down passenger jets. Trump threatened Iran with retribution against cultural sites and so forth (terrorist actions). Fifty two targets of fifty two ways of getting back at Iran.

    What are the odds US would down a passenger jet in Iran within hours of Iran's strike against their base.

    I have to go with US terrorist actions for that one. Similar to the protests in Iraq. The people had genuine grievances as do all good color revolutions but the were just too advantageous for the US for it not to be a made in the US color revolution style protest. We now know from the Iraq PM that is exactly what it was.

    Walter , Jan 10 2020 22:05 utc | 58
    The odds are unrelated unless there's agency. No agency has been credibly proposed. You know this is so, as the probability maths in se have been discussed previously @ MoA.

    But of course, the US does murder all over the place, so if there is agency, then I tend to agree with the idea that "they" or their cohort in zionishland may be causative. What are the "odds" that the engine shown has severe blade erosion? Again 100% . Engine swallows scrap off the tarmac...a dependent relation, drop junk in engine, blades damaged, run at 100%, 100% "chance" of engine failure.

    Repeating the essence of the matter of odds>

    "Two events are independent, statistically independent, or stochastically independent if the occurrence of one does not affect the probability of occurrence of the other (equivalently, does not affect the odds). Similarly, two random variables are independent if the realization of one does not affect the probability distribution of the other."

    ie without a dependent relationship the odds are whatever the odds are for engine failure and crash. And the other odds don't exist, because those events, the shooting, was not random or accidental. The odds of Iran firing rockets in reprisal was dependent on the US attacks, ie 100%

    But if you're building engines at GE, or obsolete defective airplanes in Seattle, then of course the odds are that you devoutly wish it was a rocket up the tailpipe... Pay-day's come Friday, and all of that...

    dave , Jan 10 2020 22:29 utc | 59
    @PavewayIV

    The APU will auto-shutdown for the following reasons:

    Fire
    Low oil pressure
    High oil temperature / Fault
    Overspeed

    http://www.b737.org.uk/apu.htm

    t , Jan 10 2020 22:38 utc | 62
    Would like to see debunk the NYT video: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/video/iran-plane-missile.html

    Have checked it myself (google earth etc) after being skeptical and the landmarks and sounds do indeed seem to match.

    Bigben , Jan 10 2020 22:51 utc | 66
    This link is worth reading. I can't play the video on my computer, but we will see if this theory gains traction during the next few days.

    https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/01/10/video-of-ukrainian-airliner-in-failed-landing-with-burning-engine-makes-trump-a-chump/

    t , Jan 10 2020 23:02 utc | 69
    @Poor,

    I know NYT is a sham, and believe me I held my intellectual nose as I went into its site. It's not somewhere I frequent at all.

    I did think about the point you made too, but there are 2 issues:

    1) In the other 2 videos we see the plane as it's already burning, we don't see it in its "before" state. For me it's reasonable to imagine the hit on the impact caused some initial burning which was extinguished due to wind, and then started back up again a few moments after the NYT video ended and before the other 2 videos began.

    2) If the NYT video is indeed doctored (and for me it would be a pretty convincing doctor), why wouldn't the creator simply keep the light going until the end of the vid?

    Likklemore , Jan 10 2020 23:39 utc | 74
    Iran to Announce Cause of Ukraine Jet Crash Tomorrow - Reports
    Iran will announce the cause of the Ukrainian Boeing 737 crash after the accident investigation commission meeting on Saturday, the Fars News agency reported on Thursday, citing a source familiar with the matter.

    "Tomorrow, after the meeting of the civil aviation accident investigation commission, the cause of the crash of the Ukrainian passenger plane will be announced", the source said.

    Domestic and foreign parties, whose citizens died in the crash, will take part in the Saturday meeting, the outlet added. They will announce the reason for the accident after reviewing the preliminary report.

    Ukraine says Iran cooperating with Boeing crash probe, calls to reduce media speculation

    [.]Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko asked that the media not spread "unconfirmed" information on Friday, pleading with reporters to "reduce the level of speculation" while the probe continues. The experts are still analyzing evidence, looking at the bodies of the victims and the wreckage in hope of gaining insight into what took down Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752, killing all 176 people on board.[,]
    A User , Jan 11 2020 1:27 utc | 78
    If no one had engaged with nine-drongos the thread would not have been disrupted and perhaps a useful dialog about the plane crash could have ensued. Those who did swallow the hook are just as guilty the original whatabouter of making this thread useless - good job. I would say exercise some discipline but that would be a waste of breath given the insecurities about their beliefs too many here apparently have. Letting some arsehole spout uninterrupted is a better indication of your point of view than anger, hysteria or ad hominem. Your stupidity has caused a thread to fail.
    Red Ryder , Jan 11 2020 1:34 utc | 82
    The Ukies know how to obliterate a debris field. MH-17 -- They used artillery for months to keep OSCE and Dutch officials away, and despite the locals working to protect the deceased and the debris, body parts have been found years later.

    Patience, folks. The truth will come out.

    Tom , Jan 11 2020 2:03 utc | 83
    #57 posted by Poor Ramin Mazaheri who works for Press TV and has had many articles published on The Saker. He would describe the Iranian economy as socialist with Iranian charters. The link to the article below is an excellent source for information on Iran's economy.

    What comes as a surprise to me is ICAO seems to have some integrity. It seems the US and friends haven't completely taken it over.

    You can judge someone by their friends. NATO and the terrorists in Idlib have backed the killing of Soleimani. Who seems to enjoy killing civilians? The US just droned killed 60 civilians in Afghanistan. Information provided by the Iraqi prime minister showed the US is willing to use snipers and paid protesters to tear Iraq apart. They utterly destroyed Mosul and Raqqa without regard for civilians. The Syrian government has tried to avoid civilian deaths, which is why those who want to cause chaos in the region always accuses them of targeting civilians. So the US would have no problem getting MEK to or some other group to shoot the plane down but I'm leaning against that scenario.

    The US has been planning to control oil for a long time. In 1975 a feasibility study was prepared for the Special Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on International Relations on "Oil fields as military objectives", better described as bringing Democracy to the Middle East. Well, they did that sorta in Iraq, and now the Iraq government has politely asked the US to leave and the Iranians have demonstrated to them why they should leave. I'm not sure if the Ukrainian plane crashing is the next move the US has made in this great game, but I would put my money on shoddy management of the Ukrainian plane. Why not, the country is barely functioning. I doubt the plane was hit with a missle. More likely the US can't pass up an opportunity for stirring trouble and the MSM has no problem memory holing another lie.

    http://thesaker.is/sanctions-on-khamenei-ending-the-myth-of-the-millionaire-mullah/

    [Jan 10, 2020] This reckless act by Trump administion was the last gasp of "Full spectrum dominance" doctime and probably means end of Pompeo career as the Secretary of state and Trump as the President

    See also With his imminent attack fake Mike Pompeo Is a Dollar Store Kissinger
    Notable quotes:
    "... This is not just about how to de-escalate – it's about recognizing that America fundamentally needs to change its disastrous course. Even if de-escalation of the acute tensions is possible, the risks will remain as long as the United States pursues a reckless policy. ..."
    Jan 10, 2020 | www.theguardian.com

    This crisis was sparked by Donald Trump. Trump withdrew from the deal that had stopped Iran's nuclear weapons program, leading Iran to restart its nuclear program. Trump ramped up economic pressure and sent more US troops to the region, and tensions grew. Then the US killed Gen Qassem Suleimani , signaling a significant escalation, to which Iran responded with an attack on Iraqi bases where US and Iraqi troops are stationed.

    ass="inline-garnett-quote inline-icon ">

    ass="inline-garnett-quote inline-icon ">

    America is far worse off today towards Iran and in the Middle East than it was when Trump took office

    It is up to Congress and the American people to force Trump to adopt a more pragmatic path. For too long Congress has ceded to the executive branch its authority to determine when America goes to war, and the current crisis with Iran is exactly the kind of moment that requires intense coordination between the legislative and executive branches. The president cannot start a war without congressional authorization, and with the erratic Trump in office, Congress must make that clear by cutting off the use of funds for war with Iran.

    This is not just about how to de-escalate – it's about recognizing that America fundamentally needs to change its disastrous course. Even if de-escalation of the acute tensions is possible, the risks will remain as long as the United States pursues a reckless policy. America is far worse off today towards Iran and in the Middle East than it was when Trump took office – even worse off than we were on 1 January 2020. Today, Iran is advancing its nuclear program, America has suspended its anti-Isis campaign, Iraq's parliament has voted to evict US troops from the country, and we are in a dangerous military standoff with Iran.

    Digging out of this hole will be difficult and this administration is not capable of it. Over the long run, future administrations will need to reorient America's goals and policies. America needs to re-enter the nuclear deal and begin negotiations to strengthen it; work with partners like Iraq – without a large US troop presence – in countering potential threats like a resurgence of Isis; and adopt a broader regional policy that focuses on protecting US interests and standing up for human rights and democracy rather than picking sides in a regional civil war between dictatorships like Iran and Saudi Arabia.

    Achieving US goals in the region will not be possible with a mere de-escalation of tensions – we need to find a new path towards Iran and the Middle East.

    [Jan 10, 2020] Pompeo evil manipulation of Trump makes Henry Kissinger look like Gandhi by Charles P. Pierce

    In short, all the "imminent threat" palaver was pure moonshine
    First-in-His-Class Mike Pompeo knows his audience. There's no question that he knows how to get what he wants from a guy who doesn't know anything
    Jan 06, 2020 | www.esquire.com
    America's top diplomat does not seem to think his job is to prevent war.

    The Washington Post dives deeply into what is laughingly called the administration*'s "process" leading up to the decision to kill Qasem Soleimani with fire last week. In short, all the "imminent threat" palaver was pure moonshine. According to the Post, this particular catastrophe was brewed up for a while amid the stalactites in the mind of Mike Pompeo, a Secretary of State who makes Henry Kissinger look like Gandhi.

    The secretary also spoke to President Trump multiple times every day last week, culminating in Trump's decision to approve the killing of Iran's top military commander, Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, at the urging of Pompeo and Vice President Pence, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
    Pompeo had lost a similar high-stakes deliberation last summer when Trump declined to retaliate militarily against Iran after it downed a U.S. surveillance drone, an outcome that left Pompeo "morose," according to one U.S. official. But recent changes to Trump's national security team and the whims of a president anxious about being viewed as hesitant in the face of Iranian aggression created an opening for Pompeo to press for the kind of action he had been advocating.

    Poor Mike was morose. So, in an effort to bring himself out of the dumps, Mike decided to keep feeding the rats in the president*'s head.

    Trump, too, sought to draw down from the Middle East as he promised from the opening days of his presidential campaign. But that mind-set shifted on Dec. 27 when 30 rockets hit a joint U.S.-Iraqi base outside Kirkuk, killing an American civilian contractor and injuring service members. On Dec. 29, Pompeo, Esper and Milley traveled to the president's private club in Florida, where the two defense officials presented possible responses to Iranian aggression, including the option of killing Soleimani, senior U.S. officials said.

    Trump's decision to target Soleimani came as a surprise and a shock to some officials briefed on his decision, given the Pentagon's long-standing concerns about escalation and the president's aversion to using military force against Iran. One significant factor was the "lockstep" coordination for the operation between Pompeo and Esper, both graduates in the same class at the U.S. Military Academy, who deliberated ahead of the briefing with Trump, senior U.S. officials said. Pence also endorsed the decision, but he did not attend the meeting in Florida.

    First-in-His-Class Mike Pompeo knows his audience. There's no question that he knows how to get what he wants from a guy who doesn't know anything about anything, and who may have gone, as George V. Higgins once put it, as soft as church music. This, I guess, is a skill. Of course, Pompeo's job is easier because the president* is still a raving maniac on the electric Twitter machine.

    Related Story Trump Dished Some Bullsh*t on Iran

    Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page here .

    Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

    [Jan 09, 2020] It looks like UK and the USA intelligences agencies run the contest to see who can come up with the most surreal anti-Russian propaganda psy-ops

    Highly recommended!
    For MI6 this level of detachment from reality is stunning
    Notable quotes:
    "... "The UK's Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, has been scrambling to prevent President Trump from publishing classified materials linked to the Russian election meddling investigation. ... much of the espionage performed on the Trump campaign was conducted on UK soil throughout 2016." ..."
    "... "Gregory R. Copley, editor and publisher of Defense & Foreign Affairs, posited that Sergei Skripal is the unnamed Russian intelligence source in the Steele dossier. ... In Skripal's pseudo-country-gentleman retirement, the ex-GRU-MI6 double agent was selling custom-made "Russian intelligence"; he had fabricated "material" that went into the Steele dossier..." ..."
    Nov 24, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com
    Likbez,

    It looks like UK and USA are engaged in the contest to see who can come up with the most surreal anti-Russian propaganda psy-ops.

    British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns

    That shed some light on the common origin of MH17, Russiagate and Scripal propaganda campaigns connecting all three with British government's psy-op operation called The ' Integrity Initiative ' which builds 'cluster' or contact groups of trusted journalists, military personal, academics and lobbyists within foreign countries. These people get alerts via social media to take action when the British center perceives a need.

    And among others participants, William Browder is listed too:

    Members of the Atlantic Council, which has a contract to censor Facebook posts , appear on several cluster lists. The UK core cluster also includes some prominent names like tax fraudster William Browder , the daft Atlantic Council shill Ben Nimmo and the neo-conservative Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum. One person of interest is Andrew Wood who handed the Steele 'dirty dossier' to Senator John McCain to smear Donald Trump over alleged relations with Russia. A separate subcluster of so-called journalists names Deborah Haynes, David Aaronovitch of the London Times, Neil Buckley from the FT and Jonathan Marcus of the BBC.
    Here is one interesting comment from MoA:

    Anya, Nov 24, 2018 11:57:00 AM

    The British government has been running a serious meddling into the US affairs:

    https://www.zerohedge.com/n...

    "The UK's Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, has been scrambling to prevent President Trump from publishing classified materials linked to the Russian election meddling investigation. ... much of the espionage performed on the Trump campaign was conducted on UK soil
    throughout 2016."
    A Steele & Skrupal's anti-Russian / anti-Trump saga: https://spectator.org/big-d...
    "Gregory R. Copley, editor and publisher of Defense & Foreign Affairs, posited that Sergei Skripal is the unnamed Russian intelligence source in the Steele dossier. ... In Skripal's pseudo-country-gentleman retirement, the ex-GRU-MI6 double agent was selling custom-made "Russian intelligence"; he had fabricated "material" that went into the Steele dossier..."
    For M16 to expose this level of stupidity is stunning.

    [Jan 09, 2020] AGAINST THE BLITZ WOLF -- RUSSIAN REINFORCEMENTS FOR IRAN'S DEFENCE

    Notable quotes:
    "... National Defence, ..."
    "... National Defence ..."
    Jun 25, 2019 | johnhelmer.net

    The Russian General Staff has reinforced the air defences for Russians at the Iranian nuclear reactor complex at Bushehr, on the Persian Gulf, according to sources in Moscow. At the same time, Iran has allowed filming of the movement of several of its mobile S-300 air-defence missile batteries to the south, covering the Iranian coastline of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. More secretly, elements of Russian military intelligence, electronic warfare, and command and control advisers for Iran's air defence systems have been mobilized to support Iran against US and allied attacks.

    The range of the new surveillance extends well beyond the S-300 strike distance of 200 kilometres, and covers US drone and aircraft bases on the Arabian peninsula, as well as US warships in (and under) the Persian Gulf and off the Gulf of Oman. Early warning of US air and naval-launched attacks has now been cut below the old 4 to 6-minute Iranian threshold. Counter-firing by the Iranian armed forces has been automated from attack warning and target location.

    This means that if the US is detected launching a swarm of missiles aimed at Iran's air-defence sites, uranium mines, reactors, and military operations bunkers, Iran will launch its own swarm of missiles at the US firing platforms, as well as at Saudi and other oil production sites, refineries, and pipelines, as well tankers in ports and under way in the Gulf.

    "The armed forces of Iran," said a Russian military source requesting anonymity, "have air defence systems capable of hitting air targets at those heights at which drones of the Global Hawk series can fly; this is about 19,000 to 20,000 metres. Iran's means of air defence are both foreign-purchased systems and systems of Iran's own design; among them, in particular, the old Soviet system S-75 and the new Russian S-300. Recently, Iran transported some S-300's to the south, but that happened after the drone was shot down [June 20]. Russian specialists are working at Bushehr now and this means that the S-300's are also for protection of Bushehr."


    Flight distance between Bushehr and Bandar Abbas is about 570 kms. From Bandar Abbas southeast to Kuhmobarak, the site of the Iranian missile firing against the US drone, is another 200 kms.

    Last Thursday, June 20, just after midnight, a US Global Hawk drone was tracked by Iran from its launch at an airbase in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), south of Dubai. The take-off and initial flight route appear to have been more than 300 kms from Iranian tracking radars. Four hours later, the aircraft was destroyed by an Iranian missile at a point at sea off Kuhmobarak. Follow the route tracking data published by the Iranian Foreign Minister, Javad Zarif here .


    KEY: blue line=drone flight path; yellow line=Iranian Flight Information Region (FIR); red line=Iranian territorial waters; green line=Iranian internal waters; yellow dots=Iran radio warnings sent; red square=point of impact. Source: Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif: https://twitter.com/ The US claims the point of impact was outside the red line.

    Additional tracking data on the US drone operation have been published in a simulation by the Iranian state news agency, Fars. The news agency claims the successful strike was by the Iran-made Khordad missile, an S-300 copy; the altitude has not been reported (design ceiling for the aircraft is 18,000 metres). The Russian military source says there is now active coordination between Russian and Iranian military staffs. "About coordination, of course there is participation of Russia in intelligence-sharing because of Bushehr and ISIS. We have a long and successful partnership with Iran, especially in terms of fighting against international terrorism." Two days after the drone incident, Russian specialist media published Iranian video footage of the movement of S-300's on trailer trucks. This report claims that although the S-300's are wheeled and motorized for rapid position changes, the use of highway transporters was intended to minimize road fatigue on the weapons.

    Iranian military sources have told western reporters they have established "a joint operations room to inform all its allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan of every step it is adopting in confronting the US in case of all-out war in the Middle East."

    Maps published to date in open Russian military sources show the four main anti-air missile defence groups (PVO) on Iranian territory, and the strike range of their missiles. The 3 rd and 4 th PVOs are now being reinforced to oppose US reinforcements at sea and on Saudi and Emirati territory.


    Key: yellow=units of the main air-defence (PVO) groups; split blue circles=military bases; blue diamond=nuclear industry sites; red rings=kill range for missiles; solid red=command-and-control operations centres. Source: Anatoly Gavrilov, "Before the storm", National Defence, April 2019

    The weaknesses and vulnerabilities of Iranian defences against US air attack are, naturally, state secrets. The open-source discussion by Russian air-defence expert Anatoly Gavrilov can be followed here . According to Gavrilov writing in March, the expected plan of US attack will be the use of precision missiles and bombs at "primary targets plants for the production and processing of nuclear fuel, uranium mines, production for its enrichment, refineries, other industrial centers. But initially [the objective] will be to suppress (completely destroy) the air defense system. The mass use of cruise missiles for various purposes and guided aircraft bombs will disable the control system of Iran's troops and suppress the system of reconnaissance and anti-aircraft missile fire. In this case, the task of the attacking side will be the destruction in the first two or three days of 70% to 80% of the radar, and after that, up to 90% manned aircraft will begin to bomb only after the complete suppression of the air defense system. The West protects its professional pilots, and it does not matter that the civilian population of Iran will also suffer."

    The main Iranian vulnerability facing American attack, reports Gavrilov, is less the range, volume and density of firepower with which the Iranians can respond than the relatively slow time they have shown to date for processing incoming attack data, fixing targets, and directing counter-fire. "In today's conditions of organization and conduct of rapid air combat, a high degree of automation of the processes of collection, processing, transmission and exchange of radar information, development of solutions for repelling strikes, and conducting anti-aircraft missile fire is extremely necessary."

    RANGE AND ALTITUDE OF MAIN IRANIAN AIR DEFENCE WEAPONS


    CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE
    Horizontal axis, range in kilometres for each identified weapon; vertical axis, altitude of interception. Source: Anatoly Gavrilov, National Defence , April 2019

    Gavrilov does not estimate how far the Iranians have been able to solve by themselves, and with Russian help, the problems of automation and coordination of fire. To offset whatever weakness may remain, he recommends specific technical contributions the Russians can make. These include the technology of electronic countermeasures (ECM) to jam or deflect US targeting signals and ordnance guidance systems.

    While Gavrilov believes the Iranian military have already achieved high enough density of fire against incoming weapons, he isn't sure the range and altitude of Iranian radars will be good enough to match the attack risks. To neutralize those, he recommends "Russian-made electronic warfare systems. The complex of EW systems is able to significantly reduce the ability of attack aircraft to search for, detect and defeat ground targets; disrupt the onboard equipment of cruise missiles in the GPS satellite navigation system; distort the readings of radio altimeters of attack aircraft, cruise missiles and UAV's [unmanned aerial vehicle, drone] "

    In briefings for sympathetic western reporters, Iranian commanders are emphasizing the Armageddon option; that is, however weak or strong their defences may prove to be under prolonged US attack, the Iranian strategy is not to wait. Their plan, they say, is to counter-attack against Arab as well as American targets as soon as a US missile attack commences; that's to say, at launch, not inflight nor at impact.


    Left: Kremlin photograph of the Security Council meeting at the Kremlin on the afternoon of June 21. Source: http://en.kremlin.ru/ Right: Major General Mohammad Baqeri, Iran's armed forces chief of staff.

    The day following the US attack and Iranian success, President Vladimir Putin chaired a meeting of his regular Security Council members in Moscow. The military were represented by the Defence Minister, Sergei Shoigu. The US attack on Iran was the main issue on the table. "The participants," reported the Kremlin communiqué, "discussed, in particular, the developments in the Persian Gulf. They expressed serious concern over the rising tension and urged the countries involved to show restraint, because unwise actions could have unpredictable consequences in terms of regional and global stability."

    Unpredictable consequences in Russian is being translated in Farsi to mean the cessation of the oil trade in the Persian Gulf. "As oil and commodities of other countries are passing through the Strait of Hormuz, ours are also moving through it," Major General Mohammad Baqeri, the Iranian chief of staff, said on April 28. "If our crude is not to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, others' [crude] will not pass either."

    [Jan 09, 2020] After killing Soleimani the first thing President Trump could come up with was bragging that it was him who gave the order to murder the popular military leader

    Jan 09, 2020 | dissidentvoice.org

    Iran vs. US: The Murder of General Qassem Suleimani

    by Peter Koenig / January 7th, 2020

    Interestingly, after the US attack on Iraqi Militia fighters on 31 December 2020, and the assassination of General Qassem Suleimani , on 2 January, the first thing President Trump could come up with was bragging that it was him who gave the order to murder the popular military leader.

    [Jan 08, 2020] Do you really want to be a one term president? Pompeo can talk big now and then go back to Kansas to run for senator. Where will you be able to take refuge?

    Highly recommended!
    Iran has incentives to increase the chance of a Democrat administration, bearing in mind the great deal they got from the last one and the lack of anything they can expect from Trump Term Two.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Reflection, self criticism or self restraint are not exactly the big strengths of Trump. He prefers solo acts (Emergency! Emergency!) and dislikes advice (especially if longer than 4 pages) and the advice of the sort " You're sure? If you do that the the shit will fly in your face in an hour, Sir ". ..."
    "... Trump can order attacks and I don't expect much protest from Mark Esper and it depends on the military (which likely will obey). ..."
    "... These so called grownups have been replaced by (then still) happy Bolton (likely, even after being fired, still war happy) and applauders like Pompeo and his buddy Esper. ..."
    "... As a thank you to Trump calling the Israel occupied Golan a part of Israel Netanyahu called an (iirc also illegal) new Golan settlement "Ramat Trump" ..."
    "... I disagree. Trump maybe the only person who could sell a war with Iran. What he has cultivated is a rabid base that consists of sycophants on one extreme end and desperate nationalists on the other. His base must stick with him...who else do they have? ..."
    "... The Left is indifferent to another war. Further depleting the quality stock of our military will aid there agenda of international integration. A weaker US military will force us to collaborate with the world community and not lead it is their thinking. ..."
    "... Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. ..."
    "... Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country. ..."
    "... We have been so thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea that Iran and Russia are intrinsically and immutable evil and hostile that the thought of actual two sided diplomacy does not occur. IMO neither of these countries are what we collectively think them. So, we could actually give it a try rather than trying to beggar them and destroy their economies. If all fails than we have to be prepared to defend our forces. DOL ..."
    Sep 18, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    Do you really want to be a one term president? Pompeo can talk big now and then go back to Kansas to run for senator. Where will you be able to take refuge? Don't let the neocons like Pompeo sell you on war.

    Make the intelligence people show you the evidence in detail. Make your own judgments. pl


    Vegetius , 17 September 2019 at 08:37 PM

    Whatever else he knows, Trump knows that he can't sell a war to the American people.
    confusedponderer -> Vegetius... , 18 September 2019 at 03:51 AM
    Vegetius,

    re " Trump knows that he can't sell a war to the American people "

    Are you sure? I am not.

    Reflection, self criticism or self restraint are not exactly the big strengths of Trump. He prefers solo acts (Emergency! Emergency!) and dislikes advice (especially if longer than 4 pages) and the advice of the sort " You're sure? If you do that the the shit will fly in your face in an hour, Sir ".

    A good number of the so called grownups who gave such advice were (gameshow style) fired, sometimes by twitter.

    Trump can order attacks and I don't expect much protest from Mark Esper and it depends on the military (which likely will obey).

    These so called grownups have been replaced by (then still) happy Bolton (likely, even after being fired, still war happy) and applauders like Pompeo and his buddy Esper.

    Israel could, if politically just a tad more insane, bomb Iran and thus invite the inevitable retaliation. When that happens they'll cry for US aid, weapons and money because they alone ~~~

    (a) cannot defeat Iran (short of going nuclear) and ...
    (b) Holocaust! We want weapons and money from Germany, too! ...
    (c) they know that ...
    (d) which does not lead in any way to Netanyahu showing signgs of self restraint or reason.

    Netanyahu just - it is (tight) election time - announced, in his sldedge hammer style subtlety, that (he) Israel will annect the palestinian west jordan territory, making the Plaestines an object in his election campaign.

    IMO that idea is simply insane and invites more "troubles". But then, I didn't hear anything like, say, Trump gvt protests against that (and why expect that from the dudes who moved the US embassy to Jerusalem).

    confusedponderer -> Vegetius... , 18 September 2019 at 07:28 AM
    Vegetius,

    as for Trump and Netanyahu ... policy debate ... I had that here in mind, which pretty speaks for itself. And I thought Trumo is just running for office in the US. Alas, it is a Netanyaho campaign poster from the current election:

    https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/a6e60efd3bde0befbcb8b0a95a42bf4c2624e017/57_296_5123_3074/master/5123.jpg?width=1920&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=1958b9e7cf24d7a3a7b024845de08f7e

    As a thank you to Trump calling the Israel occupied Golan a part of Israel Netanyahu called an (iirc also illegal) new Golan settlement "Ramat Trump"

    https://cdn.mdr.de/nachrichten/mdraktuell-golan-hoehen-trump-hights-100-resimage_v-variantSmall24x9_w-704.jpg?version=0964

    I generously assume that things like that only happen because of the hard and hard ly work of Kushner on his somewhat elusive but of course GIGANTIC and INCREDIBLE Middle East peace plan.

    Kushner is probably getting hard and hard ly supported by Ivanka who just said that she inherited her moral compass from her father. Well ... congatulations ... I assume.

    Stueeeeeeee said in reply to Vegetius... , 18 September 2019 at 08:31 AM
    I disagree. Trump maybe the only person who could sell a war with Iran. What he has cultivated is a rabid base that consists of sycophants on one extreme end and desperate nationalists on the other. His base must stick with him...who else do they have?

    The Left is indifferent to another war. Further depleting the quality stock of our military will aid there agenda of international integration. A weaker US military will force us to collaborate with the world community and not lead it is their thinking.

    The rest of the nation will follow.

    prawnik said in reply to Vegetius... , 18 September 2019 at 10:36 AM
    Need I trot out Goering's statement regarding selling a war once more?

    Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

    Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

    Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

    turcopolier , 17 September 2019 at 09:31 PM
    jonst

    We have been so thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea that Iran and Russia are intrinsically and immutable evil and hostile that the thought of actual two sided diplomacy does not occur. IMO neither of these countries are what we collectively think them. So, we could actually give it a try rather than trying to beggar them and destroy their economies. If all fails than we have to be prepared to defend our forces. DOL

    Matt said in reply to turcopolier ... , 18 September 2019 at 12:54 AM
    I agree with your reply 100%

    these phobias are so entrenched now they're a huge obstacle to overcome,

    Mark Twain: "It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled."

    William Casey: "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false"

    Christian Chuba , 18 September 2019 at 05:22 AM
    The 'ivestigations are a formality. The Saudis (with U.S. backing) are already saying that the missiles were Iranian made and according to them, this proves that Iran fired them. The Saudis are using the more judicious phrase 'behind the attack' but Pompeo is running with the fired from Iran narrative.

    How can we tell the difference between an actual Iranian manufactured missile vs one that was manufactured in Yemen based on Iranian designs? We only have a few pictures Iranian missiles unlike us, the Iranians don't toss them all over the place so we don't have any physical pieces to compare them to.

    Perhaps honest investigators could make a determination but even if they do exist they will keep quiet while the bible thumping Pompeo brays and shamelessly lies as he is prone to do.

    PRC90 said in reply to Christian Chuba... , 18 September 2019 at 10:36 AM
    These kinds of munition will leave hundreds of bits scattered all over their targets. I'm waiting for the press conference with the best bits laid out on the tables.
    I doubt that there will be any stencils saying 'Product of Iran', unless the paint smells fresh.
    Nuff Sed , 18 September 2019 at 07:22 AM
    1. I am still waiting to read some informed discussion concerning the *accuracy* of the projectiles hitting their targets with uncanny precision from hundreds of miles away. What does this say about the achievement of those pesky Eye-rainians? https://www.moonofalabama.org/images9/saudihit2.jpg

    2. "The US Navy has many ships in the Gulf and the Arabian Sea. The Iranian Navy and the IRGC Navy will attack our naval vessels until the Iranian forces are utterly destroyed.: Ahem, Which forces are utterly destroyed? With respect colonel, you are not thinking straight. An army with supersonic land to sea missiles that are highly accurate will make minced meat of any fool's ship that dare attack it. The lesson of the last few months is that Iran is deadly serious about its position that if they cannot sell their oil, no one else will be able to either. And if the likes of the relatively broadminded colonel have not yet learned that lesson, then this can only mean that the escalation ladder will continue to be climbed, rung by rung. Next rung: deep sea port of Yanbu, or, less likely, Ra's Tanura. That's when the price of oil will really go through the roof and the Chinese (and possibly one or two of the Europoodles) will start crying Uncle Scam. Nuff Sed.

    turcopolier , 18 September 2019 at 08:07 AM
    nuff Sed

    It sounds like you are getting a little "help" with this. You statement about the result of a naval confrontation in the Gulf reflects the 19th Century conception that "ships can't fight forts." that has been many times exploded. You have never seen the amount of firepower that would be unleashed on Iran from the air and sea. Would the US take casualties? Yes, but you will be destroyed.

    Nuff Sed -> turcopolier ... , 18 September 2019 at 08:18 AM
    We will have to agree to disagree. But unless I am quite mistaken, the majority view if not the consensus of informed up to date opinion holds that the surest sign that the US is getting ready to attack Iran is that it is withdrawing all of its naval power out of the Persian Gulf, where they would be sitting ducks.

    Besides, I don't think it will ever come to that. Not to repeat myself, but taking out either deep sea ports of Ra's Tanura and/ or Yanbu (on the Red Sea side) will render Saudi oil exports null and void for the next six months. The havoc that will play with the price of oil and consequently on oil futures and derivatives will be enough for any president and army to have to worry about. But if the US would still be foolhardy enough to continue to want to wage war (i.e. continue its strangulation of Iran, which it has been doing more or less for the past 40 years), then the Yemeni siege would be broken and there would be a two-pronged attack from the south and the north, whereby al-Qatif, the Shi'a region of Saudi Arabia where all the oil and gas is located, will be liberated from their barbaric treatment at the hands of the takfiri Saudi scum, which of course is completely enabled and only made possible by the War Criminal Uncle Sam.

    Go ahead, make my day: roll the dice.

    scott s. said in reply to Nuff Sed ... , 18 September 2019 at 11:32 AM
    AFAIK the only "US naval power" currently is the Abraham Lincoln CSG and I haven't seen any public info that it was in the Persian Gulf. Aside from the actual straits, I'm not sure of your "sitting ducks" assertion. First they wouldn't be sitting, and second you have the problem of a large volume of grey shipping that would complicate the targeting problem. Of course with a reduced time-of-flight, that also reduces target position uncertainty.
    CK said in reply to turcopolier ... , 18 September 2019 at 09:55 AM
    Forts are stationary.
    Nothing I have read implies that Iran has a lot of investment in stationary forts.
    Millennium Challenge 2002, only the game cannot be restarted once the enemy does not behave as one hopes. Unlike in scripted war simulations, Opfor can win.
    I remember the amount of devastation that was unleashed on another "backwards nation" Linebackers 1 - 20, battleship salvos chemical defoliants, the Phoenix program, napalm for dessert.
    And not to put to fine a point on it, but that benighted nation was oriental; Iran is a Caucasian nation full of Caucasian type peoples.
    Nothing about this situation is of any benefit to the USA.
    We do not need Saudi oil, we do not need Israel to come to the defense of the USA here in North America, we do not need to stick our dick into the hornet's nest and then wonder why they sting and it hurts. How many times does Dumb have to win?
    Nuff Sed , 18 September 2019 at 08:07 AM
    3. Also, I can't imagine this event as being a very welcome one for Israeli military observers, the significance of which is not lost on them, unlike their US counterparts. If Yemen/ Iran can put the Abqaiq processing plant out of commission for a few weeks, then obviusly Hezbollah can do the same for the giant petrochemical complex at Haifa, as well as Dimona, and the control tower at Ben Gurion Airport.
    http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/239251

    https://www.timesofisrael.com/haifa-municipal-workers-block-refinery-access-for-2nd-day/

    These are the kinds of issues which are germane: the game has changed. What are the implications?

    turcopolier , 18 September 2019 at 08:08 AM
    nuff sed

    I have said repeatedly that Hizbullah can destroy Israel. Nothing about that has changed.

    turcopolier , 18 September 2019 at 08:17 AM
    Yeah, right

    It was late at night when I wrote this. Yeah, Right. the Iranians could send their massive ground force into Syria where it would be chewed up by US and Israeli air. Alternatively they could invade Saudi arabia.

    Yeah, Right said in reply to turcopolier ... , 18 September 2019 at 08:38 AM
    Thank you for the reply but actually I was thinking that an invasion of Afghanistan would be the more sensible ploy.

    To my mind if the Iranian Army sits on its backside then the USAF and IAF will ignore it to roam the length and breadth of Iran destroying whatever ground targets are on their long-planned target-list.

    Or that Iranian Army can launch itself into Afghanistan, at which point all of the USA plans for a methodical aerial pummelling of Iran's infrastructure goes out the window as the USAF scrambles to save the American forces in Afghanistan from being overrun.

    Isn't that correct?

    So what incentive is there for that Iranian Army to sit around doing nothing?

    Iran will do what the USAF isn't expecting it to do, if for no other reason that it upsets the USA's own game-plan.

    johnf , 18 September 2019 at 08:41 AM
    There seems to be a bit of a hiatus in proceedings - not in these columns but on the ground in the ME.

    Everyone seems to be waiting for something.

    Could this "something" be the decisive word fron our commander in chief Binyamin Netanyahu?

    The thing is he has just pretty much lost an election. Likud might form part of the next government of Israel but most likely not with him at its head.

    Does anyone have any ideas on what the future policy of Israel is likely to be under Gantz or whoever? Will it be the same, worse or better?

    turcopolier , 18 September 2019 at 08:51 AM
    Yeah Right

    The correct US move would be to ignore an Iranian invasion of Afghanistan and continue leaving the place. The Iranian Shia can then fight the Sunni jihadi tribesmen.

    Yeah, Right said in reply to turcopolier ... , 18 September 2019 at 09:29 AM
    Oh, I completely agree that if the Iranians launch an invasion of Afghanistan then the only sensible strategy would be for the US troops to pack up and get out as fast as possible.

    But that is "cut and run", which many in Washington would view as a humiliation.

    Do you really see the beltway warriors agreeing to that?

    turcopolier , 18 September 2019 at 08:53 AM
    Stueee

    A flaw in your otherwise sound argument is that the US military has not been seriously engaged for several years and has been reconstituting itself with the money Trump has given them.

    turcopolier , 18 September 2019 at 08:57 AM
    Nuff Sed

    Re-positioning of forces does not indicate that a presidential decision for war has been made. The navy will not want to fight you in the narrow, shallow waters of the Gulf.

    Lars , 18 September 2019 at 09:53 AM
    I would think that Mr. Trump would have a hard time sell a war with Iran over an attack on Saudi Arabia. The good question about how would that war end will soon be raised and I doubt there are many good answers.

    The US should have gotten out of that part of the world a long time ago, just as they should have paid more attention to the warnings in President Eisenhower's farewell address.

    turcopolier , 18 September 2019 at 10:12 AM
    CK

    The point was about shore based firepower, not forts. don't be so literal.

    CK said in reply to turcopolier ... , 18 September 2019 at 10:34 AM
    The Perfumed Fops in the DOD restarted Millennium Challenge 2002,because Gen Van Riper had used 19th and early 20th century tactics and shore based firepower to sink the Blue Teams carrier forces. There was a script, Van Riper did some adlibbing. Does the US DOD think that Iran will follow the US script? In a unipolar world maybe the USA could enforce a script, that world was severely wounded in 1975, took a sucking chest wound during operation Cakewalk in 2003 and died in Syria in 2015. Too many poles too many powers not enough diplomacy. It will not end well.
    turcopolier , 18 September 2019 at 10:16 AM
    lars

    We would crush Iran at some cost to ourselves but the political cost to the anti-globalist coalition would catastrophic. BTW Trump's "base" isn't big enough to elect him so he cannot afford to alienate independents.

    prawnik , 18 September 2019 at 10:32 AM
    Even if Rouhani and the Iranian Parliament personally designed, assembled, targeted and launched the missiles (scarier sounding version of "drones"), then they should be congratulated, for the Saudi tyrant deserves every bad thing that he gets.
    turcopolier , 18 September 2019 at 10:49 AM
    prawnik (Sid) in this particular situation goering's glittering generalization does not apply. Trump needs a lot of doubting suburbanites to win and a war will not incline them to vote for him.
    Bill Wade , 18 September 2019 at 10:53 AM
    Looks like President Trump is walking it back, tweet: I have just instructed the Secretary of the Treasury to substantially increase Sanctions on the country of Iran!
    PRC90 , 18 September 2019 at 11:34 AM
    I doubt there will be armed conflict of any kind.
    Everything Trump does from now (including sacking the Bolton millstone) will be directed at winning 2020, and that will not be aided by entering into some inconclusive low intensity attrition war.
    Iran, on the other hand, will be doing everything it can to increase the chance of a Democrat administration, bearing in mind the great deal they got from the last one and the lack of anything they can expect from Trump Term Two.
    This may be a useful tool for determining their next move, but the limit of their actions would be when some Democrats begin making the electorally damaging mistake of critising Trump for not retaliating against Iranian provocations.
    Terence Gore , 18 September 2019 at 11:35 AM
    Pros and cons of many options considered against Iran

    https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/06_iran_strategy.pdf

    [Jan 08, 2020] Trump established Guinness record in US Present lawless, petty, childish, infantile, imbecile behaviour

    Jan 08, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    bjd , Jan 7 2020 1:28 utc | 153

    Zarif is blocked from addressing the UN Security Council .
    The level of lawless, petty, childish, infantile, imbecile behaviour is breathtaking.

    [Jan 08, 2020] Three major Trump accomplishments

    Jan 08, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Bubbles , Jan 8 2020 16:29 utc | 103

    arby @90

    Trump has accomplished 3 things in 3 years.

    1. Being Santa Claus to Netanyahu, the far right and the very rich (Generous donors)
    2. Doing the impossible, making Hillary look like the better of 2 terrible choices
    3. Proving 42% of the American public aren't too swift.


    [Jan 08, 2020] Donald Trump presidency Chaos and surprises emerge as twin crises - CNNPolitics

    Jan 08, 2020 | www.cnn.com

    Washington (CNN) The increasingly chaotic aftermath of the US strike against Iran has left President Donald Trump's team scrambling to keep up with his unpredictable decisions and inflammatory pronouncements, and suggests dysfunction at the heart of the nation's critical national security process.

    Top Trump aides are making frantic efforts to justify the killing of Qasem Soleimani , one of Iran's top leaders, and are bracing for a possible reprisal attack as the Islamic Republic moves around military hardware . But they are still refusing to publicly offer Americans details of the "imminent" attacks that they said the top general was planning. A farcical episode on Monday when at one point it seemed the military had announced it was pulling back troops from Iraq -- then said it made a mistake -- painted an unflattering picture of the administration's decision-making process. And t op officials have twice had to rule out Trump's warning that he could strike at "cultural" targets in Iran if it tries to avenge Soleimani's killing. Such action could amount to war crimes. The churn in Washington and growing questions over the rationale for an escalation that some fear could lead the US and Iran closer to war is complicating Trump's hopes of presenting a clean narrative that he acted decisively to eliminate a terrorist mastermind and to save the lives of hundreds of Americans.

    [Jan 08, 2020] Is Trump that stupid and malleble? Yes, he is. Now MAGA should be read "Make the USA go away"

    Notable quotes:
    "... It is clear to me after watching that extraordinary video of Trump's ignorance and stupidity that he is the idiot piper leading the West into the abyss. There could be no better epitome of the neoliberal sociopathy that drives our collapsing phase of late-capitalism. Putin's wet dream: a narcissist half-wit driving the western bus. ..."
    "... As for trying to put the blame on Pentagon staffers, even if they chose such weird options for Trump to choose, at the end of the day, it's the President himself who chose - as another one said decades ago, "the buck stops here" and the guy in the Oval Office has to bear the full responsibility. ..."
    Jan 08, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    David G , Jan 6 2020 19:57 utc | 19

    b writes:
    The New York Times reported yesterday that Trump picked the 'wrong' item from a list of possible courses of action that the military had presented him. That sounded like bullshit invented to take blame away from Trump and to put it onto the military.
    To me it looks more like the opposite: the Times's Pentagon sources pinning it on loose cannon Trump's going with the extreme option that the military hadn't intended him to. But whatever. The U.S. is facing the same harsh new reality regardless.

    Patroklos , Jan 6 2020 20:03 utc | 21

    The Times in London ran with a front page "We Will Kill UK Troops, warns Iran" ( here's the Guardian summary ). Despite initial reports that the UK and EU were distancing themselves from the assassination, the MSM have clearly been given their orders to begin banging the drum for war. The scramble for a casus belli reminds me of WMD, so I think a war of some scope is strongly desired and Boris Johnson has been brought on board. France will stay out and Germany will look first at Russia's position.

    It is clear to me after watching that extraordinary video of Trump's ignorance and stupidity that he is the idiot piper leading the West into the abyss. There could be no better epitome of the neoliberal sociopathy that drives our collapsing phase of late-capitalism. Putin's wet dream: a narcissist half-wit driving the western bus.

    lgfocus , Jan 6 2020 19:40 utc | 11

    Moqtada Al-Sadr to Trump
    "We are demanders of peace if you surrender and war if you fight. Do you threaten us? How dare you"

    read from Elijah Magnier's thread on Al-Sadr's letter.

    Zanon , Jan 6 2020 19:37 utc | 7
    Trump is probably not stupid enough to launch such a war and certainly not during an election year.

    During his campaign Trump said he wanted the U.S. military out of the Middle East. Iran and its allies will help him to keep that promise.

    Hasnt Trump proved he is stupid enough by now? How much more evidence is needed to drop him? Trump start wars to get another election win, I think that is obvious? And allies keeping him back? Which allieshave even remotely criticized his threats and murder? People need to realize that there is nothing stopping Trump, he and Israel will keep bombing and unfortunately its not much Iran could do.

    Clueless Joe , Jan 6 2020 19:37 utc | 8
    Dan: The guy fought the Talibans and ISIS, and has always been opposed to them; that's good enough for me, and that's definitely more than any of the coward and treacherous Western leaders that pussy-foot instead of calling out the US for what tantamounts to a declaration of war on both Iraq and Iran.

    As for trying to put the blame on Pentagon staffers, even if they chose such weird options for Trump to choose, at the end of the day, it's the President himself who chose - as another one said decades ago, "the buck stops here" and the guy in the Oval Office has to bear the full responsibility.

    Col. Lang is once again warning that Trump trying to keep the troops in Iraq would be a terrible mistake with bad consequences, and that it's just not realistic. He probably prefers not to say it that way when stating it's a long road from Kuwait to Baghdad, but if shit hits the fan and Iraqis decide to go after the US troops, then those who can't evacuate fast enough will end up in a position similar to that of the British in Kabul, in the very first days of 1842.

    Phryne's frock , Jan 6 2020 19:37 utc | 9
    Aghast at your words, dan. I am an aging homemaker from usa midwest and I have yet to stop weeping for Qassem Soleimani, his poor widow, and the rest of his family. I feel I owe him a personal debt for fighting zionists/terrorists/imperialists, for if they are not defeated once and for all, my captive government will continue in perpetuity to serve their horridmurderousthieving agenda, enslaving my every descendent and robbing humanity of any chance for peace on this pretty garden harbor planet. May justice be done to give peace a chance.
    Paul Bogdanich , Jan 6 2020 20:25 utc | 30
    What I wonder is who is the genius in the chain of command who brought this "opportunity" to Trump's attention and who vetted the decision? Trump made a large error when he surrounded himself with neocons (Abrahams, Bolton, Pompeo, Haspel, Esper). Anyway it's a tangle and it's pretty clear he (Trump) is in over his head. When he paniks he talks tough and he's making threats. It's also no wonder he has not received any support on his decision to murder Soleimani. From anywhere. Not even Israel is publicly supporting the decision. I think that surprised him. For 350 years there has been an unwritten rule that you don't go after generals or ambassadors or visiting politicians unless they are actively engaged in a combat zone. Remember the outrage when the barbarian Libyans killed a mere station chief? How outraged we were? Well, Trump overtly and with malice of forethought broke the rule. If I were the Iranian's and I could get to any U.S. generals or high ranking officials (working or visiting overseas) that's what I would do. Create animus within his own military and cabinet departments. Get them at the supermarket, speaking engagements, on vacation, at home, wherever. Doesn't matter. Wherever you can get them. Shitty thing to do no doubt but he started it and something the American and other populations would instinctively understand. Blood for blood retribution. No need to explain it to people.
    Alpi , Jan 6 2020 20:43 utc | 41
    ......." Trump is probably not stupid enough to launch such a war and certainly not during an election year."

    b,

    you are assuming that you are dealing with someone with a full deck of cards. If He was stupid enough to kill a sovereign nation's top general, he will be stupid enough to start a war. In fact that is his biggest wish. Elections be damned. Maybe the military would put on the breaks but not this stupid sick man.

    Robert Snefjella , Jan 6 2020 21:49 utc | 75
    Few points: (1) Thanks to Trump, Pompeo and Esper every American soldier everywhere now wears a bulls eye;
    (2) Any soldier -including Americans - might find a great deal to admire in Soliemani, a guy with a humble background who accomplished an extraordinary track record, a legendary strategist';

    (3) Has the US military's 'faith' in the sanity and competence of the civilian authority been stretched near to some breaking point?

    Lurk , Jan 6 2020 22:00 utc | 89
    Trump and Pence are dumb and dumber.

    Pence claimed on twitter that Suleimani assisted the 12 9/11 hijackers, for which he was instantly ridiculed.

    Trump wants billions payback for airbases in Iraq that were already fully transferred upon American withdrawal in december 2011.

    BTW, the trolls are obvious trolls. Could be from Tel Aviv, but perhaps from London, too (Integrity Initiative) Brits must be banging their heads against the wall over orange utan dropping a monkey wrench into the gears of the imperial machine that they too depend on. You bet that they need to spin this hard.

    Antigone , Jan 6 2020 22:02 utc | 91
    "We have a very extraordinarily expensive air base that's there. It cost billions of dollars to build. Long before my time. We're not leaving unless they pay us back for it,"
    Trump said

    Paying us back?

    Just ask the Iraqis - here is a reminder of what the bitter reality of economic violence looks like:

    The Crimes of Neoliberal Rule in Occupied Iraq

    The clearest statement of intent for the future of the Iraqi economy is contained in Order 39, which permitted full foreign ownership of Iraqi state-owned assets and decreed that over 200 state-owned enterprises, including electricity, telecommunications and the pharmaceuticals industry, could be dismantled. Order 39 also permitted 100 per cent foreign ownership of Iraqi banks, mines and factories; and allowed these firms to move their profits out of Iraq. It has been argued already in the British courts that Order 39 constitutes an act of ILLEGAL OCCUPATION under the terms of the Hague and Geneva treaties : The effect of Article 55 is to outlaw privatization of a country's assets whilst it is under occupation by a hostile military power."
    The mandate of the CPA was clear: to meet the 'humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people', to meet the costs of 'reconstruction and repair of Iraq's infrastructure', to meet the costs of disarmament and the civil administration of the country and other purposes 'benefiting the people of Iraq'. The terms of UNSCR 1483 are unequivocal in this regard. It was this resolution that established the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI)
    • DFI revenue, was available to the CPA immediately, in the form of $100,000 bundles of $100 bills, shrink-wrapped in $1.6 million 'cashpaks'. Pallets of cashpaks were flown into Baghdad direct from the US Federal Reserve Bank in New York. Some of this cash was held by the CPA in the basement of its premises in Baghdad Republican Palace. It has been reported that Paul Bremer controlled a personal slush fund of $600 million (Harriman 2005). One advantage of the use of cash payments and transfers was that the CPA transactions left no paper trail and therefore they remained relatively invisible
    • The disbursal of Iraqi oil revenue by the CPA also has had profound implications for the future structure of the Iraqi economy. ..Spending (in excess of $20 billion, partly based upon projected income) had to be underwritten by US government loans .. (which) has effectively deepened the debt that was originally accumulated during the period of UN-enforced sanctions following the 1991 Gulf War (Alexander 2005).
    • The right to self-determination and sovereign decision making over economic, social and cultural development is in international law a principle of jus cogens In this regard, the CPA clearly acted beyond its remit in terms of both the spirit and the letter of the international laws of conflict. It is the anti-democratic and pre-emptive nature of Anglo-American economic restructuring that most clearly demonstrates that the CPA regime was in violation of international law.
    • Similar violations arise from the CPA's governance of Iraqi oil wealth. Article 49 of the Hague rules notes that 'money contributions' levied in the occupied territory 'shall only be for the needs of the army or of the administration of the territory in question'.
    The political strategy was characteristically neo-liberal (evasion of 'red tape' and any obstacles that might hinder or limit the reallocation of wealth to the growing armies of private enterprises). This strategy was given momentum by the granting of formal LEGAL IMMUNITY to US personnel for activities related to the reconstruction economy. On the same day that the CPA was created by UNSCR 1483, George W. Bush signed Executive Order 13303, 2 The terms of the exemption provide immunity from prosecution for the theft or embezzlement of oil revenue, or incidentally, from any safety or environmental violations that might be committed in the course of producing Iraqi oil. Executive Order 13303 is therefore a guarantee of IMMUNITY from PROSECUTION for white-collar and corporate crimes that involve Iraqi oil. Two months later, in June 2003, Paul Bremer issued CPA Order 17. Bremer's decree guaranteed that members of the coalition military forces, the CPA, foreign missions and contractors -- and their personnel -- would remain immune from the Iraqi legal process. This carte blanche provision of immunity was extended again in June 2004.

    What we are beginning to trace out here is a US government policy of suspending the normal rule of law in the US and Iraq (so much for respecting Iraqi sovereigntx...)

    https://academic.oup.com/bjc/article/47/2/177/519163
    https://www.globalresearch.ca/neoliberalism-and-the-killing-for-profit-in-iraq/5699525

    [Jan 08, 2020] Trump as a destoryer of the US empire: Unless the USA reinvades and reoccupies Iraq, the USA military forces will be gone from Syria, probably just after the election in November so Trump can say he stood up to the Iraqis

    Jan 08, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Ghost Ship , Jan 6 2020 22:48 utc | 112

    The three most important things for doing battle are logistics, logistics and logistics, and as Pat lang explains, the US forces in Syria are essentially fucked:
    We have around 5,500 people there now spread across the country in little groups engaged in logistics, intelligence and training missions. They are extremely vulnerable. There are something like 150 marines in the embassy. There are also a small number of US combat forces in Syria east and north of the Euphrates river. These include a battalion of US Army National Guard mechanized troops "guarding" Syria's oil from Syria's own army and whatever devilment the Iranians might be able to arrange.

    4. This is an untenable logistical situation. Supply and other functions require a major airfield close to Baghdad. We have Balad airbase and helicopter supply and air support from there into Baghdad is possible from there but may become hazardous. Iraq is a big country. It is a long and lonely drive from Kuwait for re-supply from there or evacuation through there. The same thing is true of the desert route to Jordan.

    Unless it reinvades and reoccupies, the United States will be gone from Syria, probably just after the election in November so Trump can say he stood up to the Iraqis.

    [Jan 08, 2020] Trump the Intimidator Fails Again by Paul Krugman

    Jan 08, 2020 | www.nytimes.com


    Trump the Intimidator Fails Again

    Because he's just a bully with delusions of grandeur.

    International crises often lead, at least initially, to surging support for a country's leadership. And that's clearly happening now. Just weeks ago the nation's leader faced public discontent so intense that his grip on power seemed at risk. Now the assassination of Qassim Suleimani has transformed the situation, generating a wave of patriotism that has greatly bolstered the people in charge.

    Unfortunately, this patriotic rallying around the flag is happening not in America, where many are (with good reason) deeply suspicious of Donald Trump's motives, but in Iran .

    In other words, Trump's latest attempt to bully another country has backfired -- just like all his previous attempts.

    From his first days in office, Trump has acted on the apparent belief that he could easily intimidate foreign governments -- that they would quickly fold and allow themselves to be humiliated. That is, he imagined that he faced a world of Lindsey Grahams, willing to abandon all dignity at the first hint of a challenge.

    But this strategy keeps failing; the regimes he threatens are strengthened rather than weakened, and Trump is the one who ends up making humiliating concessions. Paul Krugman's Newsletter Get a better understanding of the economy -- and an even deeper look at what's on Paul's mind. Sign up here.

    Remember, for example, when Trump promised " fire and fury " unless North Korea halted its nuclear weapons program? He claimed triumph after a 2018 summit meeting with Kim Jong-un, North Korea's leader. But Kim made no real concessions, and North Korea recently announced that it might resume tests of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles.

    Or consider the trade war with China, which was supposed to bring the Chinese to their knees. A deal has supposedly been reached, although details remain scarce; what's clear is that it falls far short of U.S. aims, and that Chinese officials are jubilant about their success in facing Trump down.

    Why does Trump's international strategy, which might be described as winning through intimidation, keep failing? And why does he keep pursuing it anyway?

    One answer, I suspect, is that like all too many Americans, Trump has a hard time grasping the fact that other countries are real -- that is, that we're not the only country whose citizens would rather pay a heavy price, in money and even in blood, than make what they see as humiliating concessions.

    Ask yourself, how would Americans have reacted if a foreign power had assassinated Dick Cheney, claiming that he had the blood of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis on his hands? Don't answer that Suleimani was worse. That's beside the point. The point is that we don't accept the right of foreign governments to kill our officials. Why imagine that other countries are different?

    Of course, we have many people in the diplomatic corps with a deep knowledge of other nations and their motivations, who understand the limits of intimidation. But anyone with that kind of understanding has been excluded from Trump's inner circle.

    Now, it's true that for many years America did have a special leadership position, one that sometimes involved playing a role in reshaping other countries' political systems. But here's where Trump's second error comes in: He has never shown any sign of understanding why America used to be special.

    Part of the explanation, of course, was raw economic and military power: America used to be just much bigger than everyone else. That is, however, no longer true. For example, by some key measures China's economy is significantly bigger than that of the United States.

    Even more important, however, was the fact that America was something more than a big country throwing its weight around. We always stood for something larger.

    That doesn't mean that we were always a force for good; America did many terrible things during its reign as global hegemon. But we clearly stood for global rule of law, for a system that imposed common rules on everyone, ourselves included. The United States may have been the dominant partner in alliances like NATO and bodies like the World Trade Organization, but we always tried to behave as no more than first among equals. Editors' Picks Headless Body in Cave Is Identified as 1916 Ax Murder Suspect Adam Driver Has Put Everything He's Got Onscreen Office Treats Bring Out the Worst of Humanity Advertisement Continue reading the main story

    Oh, and because we were committed to enforcing rules, we were also relatively trustworthy; an alliance with America was meaningful, because we weren't the kind of country that would betray an ally for the sake of short-term political convenience.

    Trump, however, has turned his back on everything that used to make America great. Under his leadership, we've become nothing more than a big, self-interested bully -- a bully with delusions of grandeur, who isn't nearly as tough as he thinks. We abruptly abandon allies like the Kurds; we honor war criminals ; we slap punitive tariffs on friendly nations like Canada for no good reason. And, of course, after more than 15,000 lies , nothing our leader and his minions say can be trusted.

    Trump officials seem taken aback by the uniformly negative consequences of the Suleimani killing: The Iranian regime is empowered, Iraq has turned hostile and nobody has stepped up in our support. But that's what happens when you betray all your friends and squander all your credibility.


    Steve LHR 2h ago Times Pick

    It's finally abundantly clear that the great deal maker is nothing more than an emperor with no clothes. The real shame is the inability of a large part of America to see this for what it is: a failure of leadership from voter on up. Unfortunately, America has lost its moral ability to lead, and more's the pity as the ascendancy of others, like China, will not be as progressive as America was in the past. You'd think that the great deal maker would understand that leaders are not bullies. Sad.
    Robert AJ, AZ 2h ago Times Pick
    I have been reading a lot of commentary on very little news. One thing that is not generally mentioned is that while Iran is no match for us by itself, they are not without friends, i.e., Russia (is there a mutual defense treaty still in place?) China and North Korea. On the other hand our allies are ... well maybe Israel. We haven't always been the nice guys. Remember the novel 'The Ugly American' the 1956 novel by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer?
    Lauwenmark Belgium 5h ago Times Pick
    Excellent analysis. I note that the streets of Teheran were crowded by hundred of thousands people, because one of their leaders were killed. The US President's decision put his own country in danger of facing another costly war. Why aren't there hundreds of thousands of people crowding the streets of Washington, New-York or Los Angeles, asking for his removal from office? I keep reading that US citizens are patriots, proud of their country, their values, their constitution. Where are those proud guys? Your streets should be full of protesters, strikes to defend endangered democratic values should happen everywhere, artists should occupy the media space to denounce the abuses of a mad man. The passivity of US population shows that there are more, much more Americans supporting Trump and his ideas than votes show. And it also makes more and more probable than you'll see more Trump and Trump-like presidents in the future.
    LT Chicago 6h ago
    Did the assassination of Suleimani objectively make the United States safer and/or advance its interests now or in the future? The answer is meaningless in understanding Trump's decision because the question is meaningless to Trump. If assassinating Suleimani made Trump feel better in the moment, made him feel "strong" than that is more than reason enough. The future is not Trump's problem, if it turns out badly he'll just lie about it and blame someone else safe in the knowledge that his core supporters also prefer feeling strong in the moment than dealing with a messy reality. And his supporters of convenience? The Lindsey Graham's of the world? They are in too deep to turn back now. Like all bubbles, the belief in Trump requires a suspension of a belief in reality. Likr all bubbles it will eventually burst. And this one is going to leave a mess that will take decades to repair. If we are lucky.
    Jeff M CT 6h ago
    Suleimani worse than Cheney? Don't think so. A simple body count makes that clear. Plus, it's unclear Suleimani has ever encouraged torture. Any notion that the US was ever a force for good in the world is, well, very strange. Just work your way backwards listing things we've done, I'm not holding my breath until you get to a good one.
    Lewis Sinclair Baltimore 6h ago
    What's really frightening is this president's completely impulsive behavior. There's no plan, no endgame, just a series of inexplicable tantrums (or inactions). Right now, foreign policy has no more direction than when Gilligan and the Skipper randomly spun the ship's wheel in the opening of "Gilligan's Island."
    E Chicago, IL 6h ago
    I'd love to see a column on the financial costs of endless war to us here in the USA. We've apparently spent trillions in Afghanistan alone. How much did we spend in Iraq? How does that compare to our overall budget? What could the money have been spent on instead? How much would a war with Iran cost? I realize that all of those numbers are out there, but I haven't seen them packaged together in a way that really drives home how much money we are wasting. Paul, please write this column!
    JoeyJ Canada 5h ago
    I'll never understand why the USA thinks it has to have it's hand in every countries business (other than controlling all the world's natural resources). If the USA had stayed home and minded it's own business, they'd have excellent healthcare, affordable education and a much improved infrastructure. Apparently the military/industrial complex has no interest in that...
    William Minnesota 6h ago
    As bad as Trump's foreign affairs blunders have been, this is no time to gloss over earlier American blunders in foreign affairs. In Iran in 1953, the CIA engineered the removal of their prime minister, Mosaddegh, to be replaced by officials more amenable to British and American oil interests, marking the start of tensions between Iran and America. And then there was George W. Bush's Iraq war, an epic blunder shrouded in lies. Overthrowing governments in South America and replacing them by dictators who gave United Fruit and other corporations what they wanted belongs on this long, ignoble list.
    Socrates Downtown Verona. NJ 5h ago
    Trump's not just a weak bully pretending to be a tough guy, which is bad enough, but he's also the nation's leading Dunning–Kruger citizen, with delusions of his own superiority that comes from his inability to recognize his own lack of ability and lack of intelligence. Without any self-awareness, Dunning-Krugerites like Trump can't recognize their own incompetence or ignorance, and instead remain deluded with their 'superior' sense of themselves even though they're incompetent, unqualified and often clueless. "I'm like a smart person" said Trump to a CIA audience the day after he was inaugurated, using a phrase that no smart person would ever use. The University of Pennsylvania's student newspaper reported that Trump never made the Dean's List. Former classmates described him as a lackluster student. You don't have to get A's in school to be smart, but Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen said this about Trump to the House Oversight Committee : "I'm talking about a man who declares himself brilliant, but directed me to threaten his high school, his colleges and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT scores." "I don't think you have to put him on the couch to see that someone who has such a consistent need to build himself up and belittle everyone else must have some problems with self-esteem," said Trump biographer Gwenda Blair. "It's a lifelong theme for him." Or as Charles Darwin wrote: "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." Sad.
    Colin Somewhere 4h ago
    Whether you like it or not, Donald Trump is the (top) representative of the US. What happened is fully the doing of the USA as a country, and not that of Mr. Trump as a person. And this is the face of all Americans, including you, for the rest of the world to see. If you don't like what you see in the mirror, seeking to change it might be a better idea than refusing your part of responsibility, however small.
    Barry Henson Sydney, Australia 3h ago
    The American narrative that we support democracy, human rights, our allies, and freedom, is gone. Trump and his minions have replaced this narrative with 'America first' and accordingly we are a diminished nation with no moral compass. Values mean nothing. Shared history means nothing. Shared sacrifices mean nothing. Today everything is a transaction to win or lose, and we are losing.
    M.Downey Helena, MT 6h ago
    It seems clear that Suleimani was a "Bad Guy". What's more profoundly disturbing is that it appears that this fact was the extent of the calculation that went into the order for his demise. Perhaps the most shocking part of this story is the absence of any apparent strategy or end game in a decision that amounts to an act of war against a major power in a region of the world as deeply unsettled as the Middle East. There are lots of bad guys out there. Depending upon your point of view, many reside in this country. What happens when leaders around the world apply the "Bad Guy" litmus test as their reasoning to justify an act of war? It means that we will soon find ourselves in the midst of a world war. Since the Senate can't muster the courage necessary to perform its constitutional obligation, let's all pray we can vote the madman out of office before it is too late.
    Alan Shapiro Frankfurt 6h ago
    Excellent article by Krugman. The entire world is now suffering the cataclysmic consequences of the bizarro worldview of the 46% of American voters who electoral-colleged that world-historic con artist into power in November 2016. It is so interesting and is indeed true that the majority of the Iranian people do not like their regime and are indeed much closer to the values of the West than Saudi Arabia, etc. Iranians I know in both Europe and the US are much more enlightened and secular than people from other Mideast countries. When Trump claimed to be anti-war in October 2016, it was so interesting that he was not able to articulate even one sentence explaining WHY he was anti-war. It was a giveaway that it was fraud. He just said it to get votes. His entire personality and personal culture scream I AM A WARMONGER. No empathy, no respect for human life. It will be interesting to see what the "great" Tulsi Gabbard comes up with now.
    Charles Skeen New York, NY 6h ago
    @PATRICK . In another sphere, Democrats have been left to clean up the fiscal mess created by irresponsible Republican tax cuts (by Reagan, GW Bush, and Trump). Despite Republican claims that the "tax cuts would pay for themselves", it never happened. In the wake of the tax cuts, the debt always grew faster than the economy; GDP as a percentage of publicly held debt has grown from about 25% when Reagan got started to 78% now -- and it's headed to 95%, according to the CBO.
    Mr. Jones Raleigh, NC 4h ago
    Dr. Krugman assumes, incorrectly I think, that Trump is a rational actor with an almost unfailing tendency to misjudge the consequences of his actions. No, for Trump, worrying about consequences is for losers. He is in it for the pure chaos, the utter joy of setting a million things in motion at once with no predictable outcome, and skating clear of the vortex. This is textbook pathological narcissisism.
    Laurie Raymond Glenwood Springs CO 5h ago
    From my training and practice in mediation and conflict resolution, I know one thing for sure: without empathy, without a reasonably accurate "theory of mind," not only can you not successfully engage in negotiation, you cannot even think strategically. Trump has been called many things, though not, as I would suggest, an actual solipsist. He doesn't believe other countries are real because he doesn't believe any one but himself is real.
    JoOregon Portland, OR 6h ago
    The plot is much thicker. It became obvious when Trump withdrew from the Iran Nuclear Agreement that he was declaring economic war on Iran. He has been pushing, or has been pushed, toward conflict all along. Perhaps the Evangelicals in his administration have been behind this move, as they support every destabilizing move Trump has made in the Middle East. That he is a dupe and proxy for other people's agenda seems apparent by the child-like reasons and responses he twitters. His talking points have been fed to him. Our dear leader. Heaven help us!!
    Jerry Engelbach Mexico 6h ago
    @David, Iran is not a third-world fleabag banana republic. It's a first world nation with a strong, committed military and millions more eager to enlist. A war with Iran would cost hundreds of thousands of military lives and at least as many civilians. It's the United States that is the aggressor here, not Iran, and feeling in the US is running strongly against more war.
    David D. Boston 4h ago
    America hasn't been trustworthy in a long time. We lost all moral authority in 1953 when we installed the Shah in Iran at the behest of the same oil companies that have been destroying our planet ever since. Less than a decade after coming to the rescue of a world at war, we began shredding the goodwill we'd earned. Trump is just continuing that fine tradition -- as George W. Bush did after 9-11 with his ill-considered invasions. When will we learn?
    Jmduarte Portugal 6h ago
    Kudos to you, Mr. Krugman. One of the best, and more to the point, articles I've read about this debacle. Particularly regarding America's legitimacy through adherence to laws and respect for alies and partners. That used to be a great part of what made America a reliable superpower. Not any more. And it's sad to see Europeans and other democracies forced to make concessions to dictatorships like China, because America can't be relied upon anymore. This benefits no one, particularly democracies. However, instead of taking lessons from the universal scorn and silence this action has prompted at home and abroad, Trump will only see it as further evidence that he must keep on bullying others into submission -- with increasingly bad results. At some point, America -- even Republicans -- will have to wake up and smell the coffee of what's really at stake here.
    MG Massachusetts 6h ago
    I do not think that he really took any serious geo-political considerations into account when he ordered the attack. I believe that to him assassinating the Iran general just looked like an excellent opportunity to distract the nation from the impeachment process, which is getting more and more serious for him, and to regain the upper hand and the center stage. Besides, in an international crisis his position would be reinforced despite the impeachment, because who would undermine the government effectiveness and the authority of the commander in chief in times of national emergency, right? Well, as your column points out, this type of approach is, once again, wrong. Just another outstanding example of incompetence and another immense damage done to the country.
    Joe Scientist New York 5h ago
    Interesting that in the last paragraph Dr. Krugman states that "Trump officials seem taken aback by the uniformly negative consequences of the Suleimani killing". From what I saw on Fox news, they were portraying the Suleimani killing as the greatest US foreign policy achievement of the last decade. I fear that those who matter in the Trump administration (i.e. mostly Trump, surrounded by his base) may be unaware of negative consequences of anything he does, including this.
    stu freeman brooklyn 5h ago
    Trump's people are now telling us that the U.S. won't cooperate with the Iraqi government's demand that we pull our troops out of that country. Which makes ours an army of occupation, for the first time since Bush and Cheney sent U.S. forces into Iraq. And, by the way, Suleimani was no worse than Cheney who actually DID have the blood of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis on his hands (not to mention American servicemen and women).
    CS Midwest 3h ago
    The years 1945 to 1975 created a distorted image for most Baby Boomers. The United States appeared, and in many ways was, without any viable competitor on the world stage. This image was largely result of the fact that most of the industrialized world had been destroyed by a World War and was still recovering from it. By 1975 that dominance had largely come to an end. Japan, Germany, and other industrialized powers were outpacing the United States in both production and quality. Then OPEC entered the scene and showed how truly vulnerable the United States was. The fall of the Soviet Bloc masked what should have been a harsh realization, but that realization never sunk in. Many, and Trump is a prime example, still believe we live in a world like the 1950s, where U.S. power is undisputed. It is not, and the more we act like it is, only to have it thrown back in our face that it is not, the weaker and less capable we appear. The sooner Trump and his delusional sycophants leave DC, the sooner we can start the years, maybe even generations, that it will take rebuild respect for the United States abroad.
    Louis Denver, CO 5h ago
    The question is not one of Qassim Suleimani's character--there is no question he was responsible for a number of American casualties and civilian casualties as well--but rather one of whether taking him out was the right move. Taking out a high-level military or government official, no matter what the justification might be, is an act of war and will be regarded as such. You don't undertake an action like this unless you've really thought through the consequences and are prepared for a response. President Trump clearly did not think this through and we're all going to have to suffer the consequences as a result.
    O MD 4h ago
    @Ronald B. Duke Not everything is tactical. For the Republicans, perhaps, who have long ago shed any vestige of a moral compass and rely solely on tactics - whatever wins, whatever - but for Democrats impeachment wasn't a "gambit", it was a duty that many of them had to be dragged to the table to perform. The fact that they did despite the political risk shows that at least one party still places the welfare of our nation over their personal political fortune. We hardly need sticks to beat up Trump. He does a fine job all by himself. The problem is that he is a human wrecking ball, and he is now that he is pretty much alone in the white house, or anyway surrounded by people deeply unqualified to be there, his wrecking is just getting more dangerous. It would be one thing to "disagree" with US foreign policy - if there was in fact a foreign policy. But there is none left. Trump has wrecked that too. The only thing left for anyone is to vote this president out of office, if only to make the country and world a safer place.
    Barry Long Australia 4h ago
    The US has always used its economic and military power to get what it wants from other countries (enemies and allies alike). Trump has taken this to another level. And in doing so, he has abandoned the responsibilities that comes with that power. Trump's power has gone to his head. He is using sanctions and military might to do whatever he wants. What's to stop him from using these tools to extract assets, wealth and subservience from countries like Australia, the UK, Europe etc. While I have great fear of China's intentions, I am glad that China can serve somewhat as a counterbalance to Trump's greed and aggression. The rest of the world needs to unite and push back against Trump's overblown and growing sense of entitlement. I now regard America as being as big a threat as China to world peace and prosperity.
    friend New England 2h ago
    The first and most fundamental rule of strategy and negotiation--something I teach on the first day and most days of my game theory class-- is "Know your enemy." (Or if you prefer a less confrontational and less pithy version, "Know the person you are dealing with.") Trump fails over and over because he doesn't know, doesn't want to know, and won't be told. He has no idea what is important to them or how they view things. So he imagines them all backing down and doing as he wishes and glorifying him, which is what he wants and needs everyone to do. But most of us know that it doesn't work that way.
    henri Australia 4h ago
    Like the Roman period termed Pax Romana and the later Pax Britannica (1815–1914), Pax Americana being promoted as a time of relative peace and stability is built on too many lies to recount here. What America is doing, under Trump, is no different to the 1840's when the US seized half of Mexico. From that time many people believed that the US had a 'manifest destiny' to occupy and settle all the land bounded by Canada, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. That the US is somehow the upholder of universal moral principles is a pill too hard to swallow for anyone who has been or is still under their imperial thumb, or has been 'bombed back to the stone age'. Sometimes the insularity of thinking and learning about the rest of the world astounds me.
    Ray Haining Hot Springs, AR 5h ago
    Because of the enormous power of the United States military at Trump's disposal and because Trump is virtually a madman, this is an extremely dangerous and frightening situation. I've said it before and I'll say it again: if we stumble into World War III under Trump, it will be the world against the United States with Trump the target everyone will be focused on. And the U.S. cannot win a war against the rest of the world. So out will come the nuclear weapons. And then it will be the end of civilization as we know it. And "there ain't no Jesus gonna come from the sky" to set things right.
    cljuniper denver 6h ago
    Krugman brilliant as usual. Useful to go back to 1953 and the US-organized coup bringing down an elected Iranian prime minister in collusion with the Shah since he might be too left-wing for US tastes/preferences, and, as US Ambassador Loy Henderson described him, "so lacking in stability and clearly dominated by emotions and prejudices" (hmmm - who does that sound like?) to not be a sufficient "bulwark" against communism (see David Halberstam's book The Fifties). US involvement in regime changes, beginning with Iran, have been disasters, especially in the Middle East including Afghanistan. Yet somehow presidents who say they don't want to be doing that (e.g. W. and Trump) and want to reduce our involvement (Obama - but then supporting the Syrian rebels was a big US mistake destabilizing things) end up worsening our involvement and making a big mess of no-win situations. And as Krugman aptly points out - would we tolerate other nations doing these things to us? Isn't that the basic Christian and other religions' mantra for living a good life? As the 60s peace song goes: "When will they ever learn; when will they, ever learn?"
    Matt VT 7h ago
    "Why does Trump's international strategy, which might be described as winning through intimidation, keep failing? And why does he keep pursuing it anyway?" It's simple. Soft power strategies are much more effective in the contemporary international system than hard power strategies; hence the failure. Why does he keep pursuing it? When you lose soft power and the ability to form coalitions, the only thing left is hard power.
    RjW Chicago 6h ago
    "Trump the Intimidator Fails Again" Don't underestimate this guy. A normal person would resign. He will not. The senate refuses to save the country, our destiny must have been thus. Our time upon the stage will end. The American spirit will have expired. It's worth a fight to the bitter end so... Write, vote, advocate... do whatever you can to avert this seemingly unavoidable disaster. On Iran, we should drop the sanctions and apologize.
    Notmypresident Los Altos 6h ago
    I have always read Dr. Krugman's column with some degree of trust and respect. But this time I must take some exception to what he said. Such as "we weren't the kind of country that would betray an ally for the sake of short-term political convenience". Really? Let's not even talk about the Kurds. Ask the S Koreans after UN authorized the reunification of both N and S Korea. Ask the government of S Vietnam and that is beyond whether or not we had any business being there, not to mention the government (corrupt as it was) of Nationalist China. Also, let the people decide whether or not W's adventure into Iraq ended up being a betrayal - do we really have the right to march in the way we did and left the country in a total wreck? Then Afghanistan - aren't we preparing even as I typed this for yet another betrayal? As to Putin's Donny (certainly not we as Americans) slapping punitive tariffs on friendly nations like Canada for no good reason, maybe there is a good reason after all. Do we really know that is not what Putin wants? Reply 22 Recommend Share
    Rafael Gonzalez Sanford, Florida 6h ago
    On the surface all this criticism of the maniacal chief executive in charge of the federal government in Washington would appear to be harsh. But no, it's by far too tame. And one fact that always transcends all self-criticism seems to be the critical "but" included when comparing our criminal actions across the globe in order to advance the so-called "national interest" with other nations' doings. Never mind that from its very inception this country has always guided itself by its favorite mantra of "manifest destiny" to physically demolish others in its way toward pursuing openly imperialistic and bloody goals. Enough said already.
    Ed Marth St Charles 6h ago
    We see what Edmund Burke called unbounded power with undefined purpose. It is policy which is as feeble as it is violent. The experts who offer presidents choices in actions always list least to best, in defining potential success to match policy objectives to most strident with unknown results. Trump chose the most strident with the most unknown result as if he can bully equally strong-minded people who also talk to god as he talks to himself. Equally bad combinations on each side. If, and it is still a big IF, given Trump's long held belief that experts are not to be believed, that taking out the top commander would be a shot to cower the unhappy masses in Iran, it served instead to unify them in the time honored way of starting wars to unify at home. That might have been Trump's real objective here given all the deserved impeachment activity, but it also served to unify the people smart policy would have worked to divide. The plumb line drops straight from the decision to walk away from the nuclear treaty all be cause Obama negotiated it with international expertise and support. Now, the dogs of war are being unleashed all for pet peeves. Reply 22 Recommend Share
    Rima Regas Southern California 5h ago
    The way to look at what Trump does isn't to measure by what we would deem proper and appropriate but, rather, how it personally benefits him and is perceived by his base. Has his order to assassinate a foreign military leader increased or decreased his popularity with Republicans? Does his base even care that we have an entire intelligence apparatus that is supposed to advise a president and that a functioning NSA would have done all it could to discourage him? The same goes for his generals. They carried out his order. Has anyone quit since the order was carried out? Has James Mattis come out in public and told the public how Trump makes his decisions? No. We need to stop applying our logic and our values to score what Trump does and, instead, analyze what is behind what he does. Who is benefitting the most from Trump's foreign and military policy? Who is benefitting from frayed relations with NATO? In whose hands (seen or unseen) will Syria and Iraq be? If we do end up leaving Iraq, will we do so with matters settled and in order for us and for the people of Iraq whom we've let down? Does Trump care? Trump is repaying his debt to Putin while scoring points for more electoral help and turning our attention away from his impeachment. When's the last time he's tweeted about that. The departments of State and Defense will do as ordered. If Trump thinks there are votes in vaporizing Persepolis, the military will carry out his orders no matter what Esper says. Reply 22 Recommend Share
    Peter Vander Arend Pasadena, CA 5h ago
    In retrospect, it's truly sad a young Donald Trump didn't get the stuffing beat out of him as kid in elementary school or at the NY Military Academy. And that made me think of all those supporters who relish the behavior of narcissist megalomaniac who has demonstrated absolutely NO capacity to do the most important job in the nation, and world. The thug Donald Trump as a youngster has morphed into the adult monster who is about to create chaos on an international scale. If Republicans refuse to act because they cower from Trump's (empty) threats, it's conceivable the world will unite and act against a delusional Imperial Monarch. The American public doesn't have to wait for either option - imagine the consequences of massive peaceful protests which shutdown Washington DC and major metropolitan areas. If Americans can demonstrate their outrage and anger PLUS demand action by their elected officials in the House and Senate, all of this madness will be over shortly. Truly, "We the People" have had enough. Reply 21 Recommend Share
    asian observer Narberth, PA 5h ago
    Nothing else needed to be added: "From his first days in office, Trump has acted on the apparent belief that he could easily intimidate foreign governments -- that they would quickly fold and allow themselves to be humiliated. That is, he imagined that he faced a world of LINDSEY GRAHAMS, willing to abandon all dignity at the first hint of a challenge."...Touché
    Casual Observer Los Angeles 2h ago
    The worst may be yet to come. Countries that consider Iran a a troublemaker and even an adversary who rely upon affordable mid-East oil are unwilling to just watch the flow stop due to conflict. Remember how quiet were the Saudis when their oil processing facilities were attacked by Iranian proxies? Striking back would shut down oil exports for a long time. The big European states are not supporting what we did and are attempting to convince Iran to avoid going to war or setting loose it's proxies. The world is no longer relying upon the U.S. for peace and leadership. Rather the world is trying to find a way to achieve a safe distance from us. The U.S. is becoming the most powerful and wealthy country that nobody trusts, anymore.

    [Jan 08, 2020] Impeachment as a way out for the USa for create Trump Soliemani muder deadlock with Iran

    Jan 08, 2020 | www.nytimes.com

    Hineni47 NYC area 6h ago

    "Unlike with North Korea, it's difficult to imagine any photo op or exchange of love letters defusing the crisis the president has created. " The only thing that might defuse this crisis would be the Senate convicting Trump and removing him from office. It would be a good idea if the House passes another article of impeachment accusing the president of committing an act of war without Congressional authorization.
    Sirlar Jersey City 3h ago Times Pick
    Threatening to destroy cultural sites of a country is the sign of a deranged madman. I can't believe a US president would dare say something like that. It goes against all the principles America stands for. Nothing will motivate the people of Iran to fight the US more than the threat of destruction to their cultural sites. If we go to war with Iran, this is a Republican war. They own it. When are decent Republicans going to stand up and do the right thing? If they don't, this could be very, very, bad.
    PatMurphy77 Michigan 5h ago
    The Defense department is already walking back Trump's tweet about bombing Iran culture sites. Unfortunately, it's too late because the damage to our reputation as the "shining light on the hill" has already been destroyed. I'm afraid more than now than I have ever been in my life. Who knows when or where the revenge will occur but I'm fairly certain it will happen and we'll be more isolated than ever before. It's taken centuries to build goodwill and our reputation as a beacon of democracy for the world. We gave the keys to the kingdom to a false prophet and we'll pay for his indiscretions for the rest of my lifetime. God help us all.
    stan continople brooklyn 3h ago Times Pick
    You've sure got it right with "rapture-mad", and the most frightening thing is that the religious zealotry of Pompeo, Pence, Mulvaney and Barr, inoculates them against any criticism, because they believe they are serving a "higher"power and any criticism is a testimony to their faith. In fact, by turning themselves into martyrs, they get to advance in line for the Rapture. It seems particularly ironic that Evangelicals who support Israel do so because they see God's plan unfolding there. The Jews, just happen to be sacrificial lambs in the grand scheme. so they must must be preserved until the time is ripe for their rightful annihilation, heralding the Second Coming. So, the problem of Pompeo, et al, is not Iran destroying Israel, it's just that they've determined the timing is off.
    Eric Ashland 4h ago Times Pick
    As for the "wag the dog" theory, sure, Trump sees no difference between his personal fortunes and national interests. But worse, the impeachment rests upon evidence that points to a personal criminality on an international scale, which is the landscape where we find ourselves. The president pardons convicts like Gallagher and Arpaio because they are cruel or bloodthirsty. He admires dictators and ignores the law whenever he can, both as a private individual and a president, and has obstructed a legal investigation into his corruption. Now, on the international stage, by bypassing Congress, he is ignoring the sovereignty of the American people, while incoherently threatening war crimes. Trump is fully blossoming into a man like those he admires, an unrestrained, unprincipled, heavy hitting international tyrant. I'm so disgusted with those whose job it is to check this man, and have abdicated their responsibility, because they want to be like him. Reply 230 Recommend Share
    Aaron San Francisco 4h ago Times Pick
    I was at a friend's house on election night ready to celebrate Clinton's victory. When the networks suddenly announced that Trump had won Florida, a professor of international relations who was with us ominously predicted, "we are going to war with Iran." And here we are.
    PT Melbourne, FL 4h ago Times Pick
    America has become a living nightmare. A global power perceived mostly as benevolent by the world is now a danger to all, including itself. Already having killed the Paris Agreement, and Iran Nuclear Treaty, not to mention walking away from a nuclear arms treaty with the Russians, Trump is now ready to wreak real havoc on the world - start a war. Boy will they forget about impeachment now!
    Jonathan Baron Staunton, Virginia 5h ago
    We haven't authorized the assassination of a military leader since the daring mission to kill Japanese Admiral Yamamoto in 1943. Although he'd been the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, and we were at war with Japan, this was a departure so significant that it only proceeded after lengthy deliberation. And now, this. Your article fills in precisely how this was so very much not that. But one party is in so cult-deep into this president now that the lies won't stop. Thousands of Iranian have lost their lives in the past month trying to rid themselves of this regime. Not only were those deaths rendered in vain by the assassination of Suleimani, but the Iranian people are also even more yoked to a government they hate. And wasn't the idea of grassroots-driven change in regime a core strategy behind pulling out of the nuclear deal? And it's not okay because Suleimani is "evil." That's both subjective and never a justification for an assassination of a foreign military leader of a nation we're not at war with. As I noted, it was questionable when it was a military leader of nation we were at war with. But, most important, what did we gain from this? Following yet another disasterous military and foreign policy snap decision it only makes the importance of removing Trump from office more urgent. Come for the Constitutional crime but convict because the defendant is also manifestly unfit for the office. People are dying because of it and more will die if he stays. Reply 186 Recommend Share
    Joe Portland, ME 3h ago Times Pick
    What, then, for an effective response? Outrage is mere fuel: what is the engine? A full year seems too long. The Senate seems hopeless. What does that leave? Must we take to the streets to stop this disaster of a president? All this time spent wondering how this will end makes me feel like a victim of domestic abuse. What a waste. 1 Reply 180 Recommend Share
    AnitaSmith New Jersey 4h ago Times Pick
    The near silence of the countries frequently referred to as our allies -- before the age of Trump -- is deafening.

    [Jan 08, 2020] The Nightmare Stage of Trump's Rule Is Here by Michelle Goldberg Michelle Goldberg

    Jan 08, 2020 | www.nytimes.com

    After three harrowing years, we've reached the point many of us feared from the moment Donald Trump was elected. His decision to kill Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran's second most important official, made at Mar-a-Lago with little discernible deliberation , has brought the United States to the brink of a devastating new conflict in the Middle East.

    We don't yet know how Iran will retaliate, or whether all-out war will be averted. But already, NATO has suspended its mission training Iraqi forces to fight ISIS . Iraq's Parliament has voted to expel American troops -- a longtime Iranian objective. (On Monday, U.S. forces sent a letter saying they were withdrawing from Iraq in response, only to then claim that it was a draft released in error .) On Sunday, Iran said it will no longer be bound by the remaining restrictions on its nuclear program in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the deal that Trump abandoned in 2018. Trump has been threatening to commit war crimes by destroying Iran's cultural sites and tried to use Twitter to notify Congress of his intention to respond to any Iranian reprisals with military escalation.

    The administration has said that the killing of Suleimani was justified by an imminent threat to American lives, but there is no reason to believe this. One skeptical American official told The New York Times that the new intelligence indicated nothing but "a normal Monday in the Middle East," and Democrats briefed on it were unconvinced by the administration's case. The Washington Post reported that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo -- who last year agreed with a Christian Broadcasting Network interviewer that God might have sent Trump to save Israel from the "Iranian menace" -- has been pushing for a hit on Suleimani for months.

    Rather than self-defense, the Suleimani killing seems like the dreadful result of several intersecting dynamics. There's the influence of rapture-mad Iran hawks like Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence. Defense officials who might have stood up to Trump have all left the administration. According to Peter Bergen's book "Trump and His Generals," James Mattis, Trump's former secretary of defense, instructed his subordinates not to provide the president with options for a military showdown with Iran. But with Mattis gone, military officials, The Times reported, presented Trump with the possibility of killing Suleimani as the "most extreme" option on a menu of choices, and were "flabbergasted" when he picked it.

    Trump likely had mixed motives. He was reportedly upset over TV images of militia supporters storming the American Embassy in Iraq. According to The Post, he also was frustrated by "negative coverage" of his decision last year to order and then call off strikes on Iran.

    Beyond that, Trump, now impeached and facing trial in the Senate, has laid out his rationale over years of tweets. The president is a master of projection, and his accusations against others are a decent guide to how he himself will behave . He told us, over and over again , that he believed Barack Obama would start a war with Iran to "save face" and because his "poll numbers are in a tailspin" and he needed to "get re-elected." To Trump, a wag-the-dog war with Iran evidently seemed like a natural move for a president in trouble.

    ... ... ...

    Even if Iran were to somehow decide not to strike back at the United States, it's still ramping up its nuclear program, and Trump has obliterated the possibility of a return to negotiations. "His maximum pressure policy has failed," Nasr said of Trump. "He has only produced a more dangerous Iran."

    ... ... ... Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women's rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. @michelleinbklyn

    [Jan 08, 2020] The former reality-TV star has long been ignorant of world history and current events. During a 2015 interview, then-candidate Trump did not even know who Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani was.

    Jan 08, 2020 | www.msn.com

    ...The former reality-TV star has long been ignorant of world history and current events. During a 2015 interview , then-candidate Trump did not even know who Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani was. After prompting, Trump mistakenly identified the Iranian general as a Kurdish commander. Once Trump's ignorance was revealed, the frustrated candidate weakly attacked the interviewer for "throwing around names of people and where they live."

    The danger posed by that ignorance is matched daily by the crises created by Trump's own erraticism. His performance as commander in chief has been shaped by a collection of scattered grievances, emotional impulses and random tweets. As the Financial Times's Philip Stephens has said of Trump's foreign policy, "Looking for a framework is like searching for symmetrical patterns in a bowl of spaghetti."

    This is, after all, a president who spent last summer withholding military aid from a besieged democratic ally while pressuring its leaders to investigate a political opponent. Then, stepping in front of a bank of White House cameras , he asked the same of China. Trump also declared himself " The Chosen One " while embracing the title of "King of Israel," ordered American companies to leave China , manipulated U.S. markets by lying about phone calls with leaders of that same country and canceled bilateral meetings with a NATO leader because she refused to sell Greenland.

    Trump's increasingly erratic behavior received much attention at the time, with the Associated Press's Jonathan Lemire and Zeke Miller noting in July that the United States' foreign policy had become unmoored after Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and others were driven from the administration. Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic, followed with an article appropriately titled " He's Getting Worse ," in which he glumly noted that "there is no reason to hope that he will reform. His followers reward his radicalism and his handlers are among the most cynical figures in American political history."

    We now find ourselves living through a time when those same administration officials are providing reckless counsel to an ignorant and erratic president. Though he shares MacArthur's sense of infallibility, Trump spends most of his waking hours showing the world just how fallible he is. Critics have long warned of a time when this fatally flawed man would be forced to confront an international crisis.

    That time has arrived and it is a crisis of Trump's own making.

    Soleimani was a malevolent force on the world stage. But so, too, is Kim Jong Un. Will the North Korean dictator be next on the president's kill list? What of Syria's Bashar al-Assad? He is responsible for more deaths than any Arab leader since Saddam Hussein . And what stabilizing impact did the Iraqi tyrant's death have on the region?

    Contrary to the vows of candidate Trump, it is likely that the killing of Soleimani will now only deepen U.S. involvement in a region that has already claimed too many American lives. With Russia firmly ensconced in Syria, Iraqi discontent on the rise and Iran's nuclear program restarted, expect more Americans to die across the Middle East in the coming years. With his audacious attack, Trump has further isolated the United States from its allies, provided a lifeline to Iran's terrorist regime and broken yet another of his campaign promises.

    Inchon this is not.

    [email protected]

    Read more from Joe Scarborough's archive , follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook .

    [Jan 07, 2020] a popular figure

    Notable quotes:
    "... Naturally, we learned soon after from the Iraqi PM himself that Soleimani was in Iraq as part of a diplomatic effort to de-escalate tensions. In other words, he was apparently lured to Baghdad under false pretenses so he'd be a sitting duck for a U.S. strike. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. ..."
    "... As you'd expect, some of the most ridiculous propaganda came from Mike Pompeo, a man who genuinely loves deception and considers it his craft.. For example: ..."
    "... Moving on to the really big question: what does this assassination mean for the future role of the U.S. in the Middle East and American global hegemony generally? A few important things have already occurred. For starters, the Iraqi parliament passed a resolution calling for U.S. troops to leave. Even more important are the comments and actions of Muqtada al-Sadr. ..."
    "... Unmentioned in the above tweet, but extremely significant, is the fact al-Sadr has been a vocal critic of both the American and Iranian presence in Iraq. He doesn't want either country meddling in the affairs of Iraqis, but the Soleimani assassination clearly pushed him to focus on the U.S. presence. This is a very big deal and ensures Iraq will be far more dangerous for U.S. troops than it already was. ..."
    Jan 07, 2020 | twitter.com

    Before discussing what happens next and the big picture implications, it's worth pointing out the incredible number of blatant lies and overall clownishness that emerged from U.S. officials in the assassination's aftermath. It started with claims from Trump that Soleimani was plotting imminent attacks on Americans and was caught in the act. Mass media did its job and uncritically parroted this line, which was quickly exposed as a complete falsehood.

    CNN anchor uncritically repeating government lies.
    This is what mass media does to get wars going. https://t.co/QK1JET7TIj

    -- Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) January 6, 2020

    It's incredibly telling that CNN would swallow this fact-free claim with total credulity within weeks of discovering the extent of the lies told about Syrian chemical attacks and the Afghanistan war . Meanwhile, when a reporter asked a state department official for some clarification on what sorts of attacks were imminent, this is what transpired.

    When asked by a reporter for details about what kinds of imminent attacks Soleimani was planning, the State Dept. responds with:

    "Jesus, do we have to explain why we do these things?"

    Totally normal. pic.twitter.com/FDWtpfItEp

    -- Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) January 6, 2020

    Naturally, we learned soon after from the Iraqi PM himself that Soleimani was in Iraq as part of a diplomatic effort to de-escalate tensions. In other words, he was apparently lured to Baghdad under false pretenses so he'd be a sitting duck for a U.S. strike. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

    Iraqi Prime Minister AbdulMahdi accuses Trump of deceiving him in order to assassinate Suleimani. Trump, according to P.M. lied about wanting a diplomatic solution in order to get Suleimani on a plane to Baghdad in the open, where he was summarily executed. https://t.co/HKjyQqXNqP

    -- Joshua Landis (@joshua_landis) January 5, 2020

    As you'd expect, some of the most ridiculous propaganda came from Mike Pompeo, a man who genuinely loves deception and considers it his craft.. For example:

    Pompeo on CNN says US has "every expectation" that people "in Iran will view the American action last night as giving them freedom."

    -- Josh Lederman (@JoshNBCNews) January 3, 2020

    Then there's what actually happened.

    Absolutely massive crowds on the streets of Mashhad awaiting the arrival of Qassem Suleimani.

    "We are ready for war." pic.twitter.com/ZK4O8KQB17

    -- Sam (@sonofnariman) January 5, 2020

    Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Qassem Soleimani's daughter Zeinab were among the hundreds of thousands mourning Soleimani in Tehran today. Iranian state TV put the crowd size at 'millions,' though that number could not be verified. https://t.co/R6EbKh6Gow

    -- CBC News Alerts (@CBCAlerts) January 6, 2020

    Moving on to the really big question: what does this assassination mean for the future role of the U.S. in the Middle East and American global hegemony generally? A few important things have already occurred. For starters, the Iraqi parliament passed a resolution calling for U.S. troops to leave. Even more important are the comments and actions of Muqtada al-Sadr.

    WOW,

    Iraqi Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr orders the return of "Mahdi Army" in response the American strike that killed Suleimani.

    Mahdi Army fought against the US troops during the invasion in 2003. Sadr disbanded the group in 2008.

    -- Ragıp Soylu (@ragipsoylu) January 3, 2020

    Unmentioned in the above tweet, but extremely significant, is the fact al-Sadr has been a vocal critic of both the American and Iranian presence in Iraq. He doesn't want either country meddling in the affairs of Iraqis, but the Soleimani assassination clearly pushed him to focus on the U.S. presence. This is a very big deal and ensures Iraq will be far more dangerous for U.S. troops than it already was.

    Going forward, Iran's response will be influenced to a great degree by what's already transpired. There are three things worth noting. First, although many Trump supporters are cheering the assassination, Americans are certainly nowhere near united on this , with many including myself viewing it as a gigantic strategic blunder. Second, it ratcheted up anti-American sentiment in Iraq to a huge degree without Iran having to do anything, as highlighted above. Third, hardliners within Iran have been given an enormous gift. With one drone strike, the situation went from grumblings and protests on the ground to a scene where any sort of dissent in the air has been extinguished for the time being.

    Exactly right, which is why Iran will go more hardline if anything and more united.
    If China admitted to taking out Trump even Maddow wouldn't cheer. https://t.co/zqaEDIoWH1

    -- Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) January 6, 2020

    Iranian leadership will see these developments as important victories in their own right and will likely craft a response taking stock of this much improved position. This means a total focus on making the experience of American troops in the region untenable, which will be far easier to achieve now.

    If that's right, you can expect less shock and awe in the near-term, and more consolidation of the various parties that were on the fence but have since shifted to a more anti-American stance following Soleimani's death. Iran will start with the easy pickings, which consists of consolidating its stronger position in Iraq and making dissidents feel shameful at home. That said, Iran will have to publicly respond with some sort of a counterattack, but that event will be carefully considered with Iran's primary objective in mind -- getting U.S. troops out of the region.

    This means no attacks on U.S. or European soil, and no attacks targeting civilians either. Such a move would be as strategically counterproductive as Assad gassing Syrian cities after he was winning the war (which is why many of us doubted the narrative) since it would merely inflame American public opinion and give an excuse to attack Iran in Iran. There is no way Iranian leadership is that stupid, so any such attack must be treated with the utmost skepticism.

    [Jan 07, 2020] The neocon foreign policy brings only bankruptcy moral and financial by Ron Paul

    Jan 06, 2020 | www.unz.com

    President Trump and his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told us the US had to assassinate Maj. Gen. Qassim Soleimani last week because he was planning "Imminent attacks" on US citizens. I don't believe them.

    Why not? Because Trump and the neocons – like Pompeo – have been lying about Iran for the past three years in an effort to whip up enough support for a US attack. From the phony justification to get out of the Iran nuclear deal, to blaming Yemen on Iran, to blaming Iran for an attack on Saudi oil facilities, the US Administration has fed us a steady stream of lies for three years because they are obsessed with Iran.

    And before Trump's obsession with attacking Iran, the past four US Administrations lied ceaselessly to bring about wars on Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Serbia, Somalia, and the list goes on.

    At some point, when we've been lied to constantly and consistently for decades about a "threat" that we must "take out" with a military attack, there comes a time where we must assume they are lying until they provide rock solid, irrefutable proof. Thus far they have provided nothing. So I don't believe them.

    President Trump has warned that his administration has already targeted 52 sites important to Iran and Iranian culture and the US will attack them if Iran retaliates for the assassination of Gen. Soleimani. Because Iran has no capacity to attack the United States, Iran's retaliation if it comes will likely come against US troops or US government officials stationed or visiting the Middle East. I have a very easy solution for President Trump that will save the lives of American servicemembers and other US officials: just come home. There is absolutely no reason for US troops to be stationed throughout the Middle East to face increased risk of death for nothing.

    In our Ron Paul Liberty Report program last week we observed that the US attack on a senior Iranian military officer on Iraqi soil – over the objection of the Iraq government – would serve to finally unite the Iraqi factions against the United States. And so it has: on Sunday the Iraqi parliament voted to expel US troops from Iraqi soil. It may have been a non-binding resolution, but there is no mistaking the sentiment. US troops are not wanted and they are increasingly in danger. So why not listen to the Iraqi parliament?

    Bring our troops home, close the US Embassy in Baghdad – a symbol of our aggression – and let the people of the Middle East solve their own problems. Maintain a strong defense to protect the United States, but end this neocon pipe-dream of ruling the world from the barrel of a gun. It does not work. It makes us poorer and more vulnerable to attack. It makes the elites of Washington rich while leaving working and middle class America with the bill. It engenders hatred and a desire for revenge among those who have fallen victim to US interventionist foreign policy. And it results in millions of innocents being killed overseas.

    There is no benefit to the United States to trying to run the world. Such a foreign policy brings only bankruptcy – moral and financial. Tell Congress and the Administration that for America's sake we demand the return of US troops from the Middle East! (Republished from The Ron Paul Institute by permission of author or representative)

    [Jan 07, 2020] Impeachment as a way out for the USa for create Trump Soliemani muder deadlock with Iran

    Jan 07, 2020 | www.nytimes.com

    Hineni47 NYC area 6h ago

    "Unlike with North Korea, it's difficult to imagine any photo op or exchange of love letters defusing the crisis the president has created. " The only thing that might defuse this crisis would be the Senate convicting Trump and removing him from office. It would be a good idea if the House passes another article of impeachment accusing the president of committing an act of war without Congressional authorization.
    Sirlar Jersey City 3h ago Times Pick
    Threatening to destroy cultural sites of a country is the sign of a deranged madman. I can't believe a US president would dare say something like that. It goes against all the principles America stands for. Nothing will motivate the people of Iran to fight the US more than the threat of destruction to their cultural sites. If we go to war with Iran, this is a Republican war. They own it. When are decent Republicans going to stand up and do the right thing? If they don't, this could be very, very, bad.
    PatMurphy77 Michigan 5h ago
    The Defense department is already walking back Trump's tweet about bombing Iran culture sites. Unfortunately, it's too late because the damage to our reputation as the "shining light on the hill" has already been destroyed. I'm afraid more than now than I have ever been in my life. Who knows when or where the revenge will occur but I'm fairly certain it will happen and we'll be more isolated than ever before. It's taken centuries to build goodwill and our reputation as a beacon of democracy for the world. We gave the keys to the kingdom to a false prophet and we'll pay for his indiscretions for the rest of my lifetime. God help us all.

    [Jan 07, 2020] The Nightmare Stage of Trump's Rule Is Here by Michelle Goldberg Michelle Goldberg

    Jan 07, 2020 | www.nytimes.com

    After three harrowing years, we've reached the point many of us feared from the moment Donald Trump was elected. His decision to kill Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran's second most important official, made at Mar-a-Lago with little discernible deliberation , has brought the United States to the brink of a devastating new conflict in the Middle East.

    We don't yet know how Iran will retaliate, or whether all-out war will be averted. But already, NATO has suspended its mission training Iraqi forces to fight ISIS . Iraq's Parliament has voted to expel American troops -- a longtime Iranian objective. (On Monday, U.S. forces sent a letter saying they were withdrawing from Iraq in response, only to then claim that it was a draft released in error .) On Sunday, Iran said it will no longer be bound by the remaining restrictions on its nuclear program in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the deal that Trump abandoned in 2018. Trump has been threatening to commit war crimes by destroying Iran's cultural sites and tried to use Twitter to notify Congress of his intention to respond to any Iranian reprisals with military escalation.

    The administration has said that the killing of Suleimani was justified by an imminent threat to American lives, but there is no reason to believe this. One skeptical American official told The New York Times that the new intelligence indicated nothing but "a normal Monday in the Middle East," and Democrats briefed on it were unconvinced by the administration's case. The Washington Post reported that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo -- who last year agreed with a Christian Broadcasting Network interviewer that God might have sent Trump to save Israel from the "Iranian menace" -- has been pushing for a hit on Suleimani for months.

    [Jan 07, 2020] Trump the Intimidator Fails Again by Paul Krugman

    Jan 07, 2020 | www.nytimes.com


    Trump the Intimidator Fails Again

    Because he's just a bully with delusions of grandeur.

    International crises often lead, at least initially, to surging support for a country's leadership. And that's clearly happening now. Just weeks ago the nation's leader faced public discontent so intense that his grip on power seemed at risk. Now the assassination of Qassim Suleimani has transformed the situation, generating a wave of patriotism that has greatly bolstered the people in charge.

    Unfortunately, this patriotic rallying around the flag is happening not in America, where many are (with good reason) deeply suspicious of Donald Trump's motives, but in Iran .

    In other words, Trump's latest attempt to bully another country has backfired -- just like all his previous attempts.

    From his first days in office, Trump has acted on the apparent belief that he could easily intimidate foreign governments -- that they would quickly fold and allow themselves to be humiliated. That is, he imagined that he faced a world of Lindsey Grahams, willing to abandon all dignity at the first hint of a challenge.

    But this strategy keeps failing; the regimes he threatens are strengthened rather than weakened, and Trump is the one who ends up making humiliating concessions. Paul Krugman's Newsletter Get a better understanding of the economy -- and an even deeper look at what's on Paul's mind. Sign up here.

    Remember, for example, when Trump promised " fire and fury " unless North Korea halted its nuclear weapons program? He claimed triumph after a 2018 summit meeting with Kim Jong-un, North Korea's leader. But Kim made no real concessions, and North Korea recently announced that it might resume tests of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles.

    Or consider the trade war with China, which was supposed to bring the Chinese to their knees. A deal has supposedly been reached, although details remain scarce; what's clear is that it falls far short of U.S. aims, and that Chinese officials are jubilant about their success in facing Trump down.

    Why does Trump's international strategy, which might be described as winning through intimidation, keep failing? And why does he keep pursuing it anyway?

    One answer, I suspect, is that like all too many Americans, Trump has a hard time grasping the fact that other countries are real -- that is, that we're not the only country whose citizens would rather pay a heavy price, in money and even in blood, than make what they see as humiliating concessions.

    Ask yourself, how would Americans have reacted if a foreign power had assassinated Dick Cheney, claiming that he had the blood of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis on his hands? Don't answer that Suleimani was worse. That's beside the point. The point is that we don't accept the right of foreign governments to kill our officials. Why imagine that other countries are different?

    Of course, we have many people in the diplomatic corps with a deep knowledge of other nations and their motivations, who understand the limits of intimidation. But anyone with that kind of understanding has been excluded from Trump's inner circle.

    Now, it's true that for many years America did have a special leadership position, one that sometimes involved playing a role in reshaping other countries' political systems. But here's where Trump's second error comes in: He has never shown any sign of understanding why America used to be special.

    Part of the explanation, of course, was raw economic and military power: America used to be just much bigger than everyone else. That is, however, no longer true. For example, by some key measures China's economy is significantly bigger than that of the United States.

    Even more important, however, was the fact that America was something more than a big country throwing its weight around. We always stood for something larger.

    That doesn't mean that we were always a force for good; America did many terrible things during its reign as global hegemon. But we clearly stood for global rule of law, for a system that imposed common rules on everyone, ourselves included. The United States may have been the dominant partner in alliances like NATO and bodies like the World Trade Organization, but we always tried to behave as no more than first among equals. Editors' Picks Headless Body in Cave Is Identified as 1916 Ax Murder Suspect Adam Driver Has Put Everything He's Got Onscreen Office Treats Bring Out the Worst of Humanity Advertisement Continue reading the main story

    Oh, and because we were committed to enforcing rules, we were also relatively trustworthy; an alliance with America was meaningful, because we weren't the kind of country that would betray an ally for the sake of short-term political convenience.

    Trump, however, has turned his back on everything that used to make America great. Under his leadership, we've become nothing more than a big, self-interested bully -- a bully with delusions of grandeur, who isn't nearly as tough as he thinks. We abruptly abandon allies like the Kurds; we honor war criminals ; we slap punitive tariffs on friendly nations like Canada for no good reason. And, of course, after more than 15,000 lies , nothing our leader and his minions say can be trusted.

    Trump officials seem taken aback by the uniformly negative consequences of the Suleimani killing: The Iranian regime is empowered, Iraq has turned hostile and nobody has stepped up in our support. But that's what happens when you betray all your friends and squander all your credibility.

    [Jan 07, 2020] Trump is the kind of child leader that will throw temper tantrums in front of the world. Id impulses are running the world here and when id impulses run the world from the White House we are certain that whatever manifests will be destructive beyond imagination for most adults in the world.

    Jan 07, 2020 | off-guardian.org

    MASTER OF UNIVE American corporations will start falling into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Q1 if the USA MIC cannot find new contracts to profit from via kinetic war. The USA's last war was Iraq post-911 and the USA MIC made good money & profit from that war. Without forever wars the USA Ponzi Corporatocracy will deflate. If the USA Ponzi Corporatocracy deflates due to recession it means the end of USA Imperialism.
    If the hawks can generate forever wars the MIC suppliers may have a chance to stay in business, but if they don't get new contracts for new forever wars they all know implicitly that that is a Zero Sum game for the entire USA population.

    BIG Chief Trump little penis has only one chance to stay in power at this juncture. He has ordered troupes to Iraq and approximately 2000 marines are on the way right now. In brief, 2000 marines were not ordered to Iraq to escort the base troupes out of Iraq safely. They were sent on a mission.

    Impeachment, DOW Share Price, and no Trade Deal with China will put Trump on the defensive and he will start threatening everyone in the world if he does not get his way.

    Trump is the kind of child leader that will throw temper tantrums in front of the world. Temper tantrums worked with his parents, and the Real Estate community in New York shitty.

    Trump is a child of roughly 6 or 7 mentally & socially. Id impulses are running the world here and when id impulses run the world from the White House we are certain that whatever manifests will be destructive beyond imagination for most adults in the world.

    Children with anger management issues & rage issues will understand Trump best.

    [Jan 06, 2020] Trump as a destoryer of the US empire: Unless the USA reinvades and reoccupies Iraq, the USA military forces will be gone from Syria, probably just after the election in November so Trump can say he stood up to the Iraqis

    Jan 06, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Ghost Ship , Jan 6 2020 22:48 utc | 112

    The three most important things for doing battle are logistics, logistics and logistics, and as Pat lang explains, the US forces in Syria are essentially fucked:
    We have around 5,500 people there now spread across the country in little groups engaged in logistics, intelligence and training missions. They are extremely vulnerable. There are something like 150 marines in the embassy. There are also a small number of US combat forces in Syria east and north of the Euphrates river. These include a battalion of US Army National Guard mechanized troops "guarding" Syria's oil from Syria's own army and whatever devilment the Iranians might be able to arrange.

    4. This is an untenable logistical situation. Supply and other functions require a major airfield close to Baghdad. We have Balad airbase and helicopter supply and air support from there into Baghdad is possible from there but may become hazardous. Iraq is a big country. It is a long and lonely drive from Kuwait for re-supply from there or evacuation through there. The same thing is true of the desert route to Jordan.

    Unless it reinvades and reoccupies, the United States will be gone from Syria, probably just after the election in November so Trump can say he stood up to the Iraqis.

    [Jan 06, 2020] Is Trump that stupid and malleble?

    Jan 06, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    lgfocus , Jan 6 2020 19:40 utc | 11

    Moqtada Al-Sadr to Trump
    "We are demanders of peace if you surrender and war if you fight. Do you threaten us? How dare you"

    read from Elijah Magnier's thread on Al-Sadr's letter.


    Zanon , Jan 6 2020 19:37 utc | 7

    Trump is probably not stupid enough to launch such a war and certainly not during an election year.

    During his campaign Trump said he wanted the U.S. military out of the Middle East. Iran and its allies will help him to keep that promise.

    Hasnt Trump proved he is stupid enough by now? How much more evidence is needed to drop him? Trump start wars to get another election win, I think that is obvious? And allies keeping him back? Which allieshave even remotely criticized his threats and murder? People need to realize that there is nothing stopping Trump, he and Israel will keep bombing and unfortunately its not much Iran could do.

    Clueless Joe , Jan 6 2020 19:37 utc | 8
    Dan: The guy fought the Talibans and ISIS, and has always been opposed to them; that's good enough for me, and that's definitely more than any of the coward and treacherous Western leaders that pussy-foot instead of calling out the US for what tantamounts to a declaration of war on both Iraq and Iran.

    As for trying to put the blame on Pentagon staffers, even if they chose such weird options for Trump to choose, at the end of the day, it's the President himself who chose - as another one said decades ago, "the buck stops here" and the guy in the Oval Office has to bear the full responsibility.

    Col. Lang is once again warning that Trump trying to keep the troops in Iraq would be a terrible mistake with bad consequences, and that it's just not realistic. He probably prefers not to say it that way when stating it's a long road from Kuwait to Baghdad, but if shit hits the fan and Iraqis decide to go after the US troops, then those who can't evacuate fast enough will end up in a position similar to that of the British in Kabul, in the very first days of 1842.

    Phryne's frock , Jan 6 2020 19:37 utc | 9
    Aghast at your words, dan. I am an aging homemaker from usa midwest and I have yet to stop weeping for Qassem Soleimani, his poor widow, and the rest of his family. I feel I owe him a personal debt for fighting zionists/terrorists/imperialists, for if they are not defeated once and for all, my captive government will continue in perpetuity to serve their horridmurderousthieving agenda, enslaving my every descendent and robbing humanity of any chance for peace on this pretty garden harbor planet. May justice be done to give peace a chance.

    [Jan 06, 2020] Pompeo's Petty Decision to Bar Zarif

    Jan 06, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Pompeo's Petty Decision to Bar Zarif European External Action Service/Flickr

    January 6, 2020

    |

    8:43 pm

    Daniel Larison Colum Lynch and Robbie Gramer report on the Trump administration's decision to refuse a visa to Iran's foreign minister. Barring Zarif from the U.S. is a blatant violation of U.S. obligations as the host of U.N. headquarters:

    "Any foreign minister is entitled to address the Security Council at any time and the United States is obligated to provide access to the U.N. headquarters district," said Larry Johnson, a former U.N. assistant secretary-general. Under the terms of the U.S. agreement with the United Nations, "they are absolutely obligated to let him in."

    Johnson, who currently serves as an adjunct professor at Columbia University Law School, noted that the U.S. Congress, however, passed legislation in August 1947, the so-called Public Law 80-357, that granted the U.S. government the authority to bar foreign individuals invited by the United Nations to attend meetings at its New York City headquarters if they are deemed to pose a threat to U.S. national security. But Johnson said the U.S. law would require the individual be "expected to commit some act against the U.S. national security interest while here in the United States."

    Refusing to admit Zarif is another foolish mistake on the administration's part. Preventing him from coming to the U.N. not only breaches our government's agreement with the U.N., but it also closes off a possible channel of communication and demonstrates to the world that the U.S. has no interest in a diplomatic resolution of the current crisis. Far from conveying the "toughness" that Pompeo imagines he is showing, keeping Zarif out reeks of weakness and insecurity. Zarif is a capable diplomat, but is the Trump administration really so afraid of what he would say while he is here that they would ignore U.S. obligations to block him?

    By barring Zarif, the Trump administration has given him and his government another opportunity to score an easy propaganda win. They have squandered an opportunity to reduce tensions between the U.S. and Iran. The U.S. needs to find an off-ramp to avoid further conflict following the president's assassination order, but thanks to Pompeo's decision that off-ramp won't be found in New York.

    [Jan 04, 2020] Trump is a bully and a tool, Isreal lobby tool. He has no vision for the future other than Eretz Yisrael , the failed free market, deregulation, and small government Koch Brothers claptrap preached by the extreme right since Calvin Coolidge.

    Jan 04, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    jadan , Jan 4 2020 23:48 utc | 112

    @ Hal Duell 23
    "But can we please stop underestimating him? He has straddled the world for four years now. His only peers are Putin and Xi."

    "Straddled the world", you say? Beshitting the world with toxic narcissism is the truth. Trump is using US power to advance his own brand, his cult of personality and pursuit of emoluments. World leaders cringe when he is among them. He has intensified conflict with Iran by refusing to honor a hard won treaty that promised to stabilize relations in the region, just as he has rebuked nuclear arms agreements with Russia, and created unnecessary conflict with China. This unilateral scofflaw approach to international relations is extremely dangerous. Trump is a bully and a fool. When he claims the fat North Korean dictator "likes him", he broadcasts what a dope he really is. He has no vision for the future other than the failed free market, small government Koch Brothers claptrap preached by the extreme right since Calvin Coolidge.

    And you admire this man and think he measures up to a Xi or Putin? Trump is a coward and a bully and his supporters confuse his mindless aggression with strength as they pretend he's playing 3 or 4 dimensional chess when what he's really doing is playing them for the chumps they are. It won't be long now before you seriously regret any positive opinion to have had of this "world straddling" horse's ass.

    [Jan 03, 2020] Skripals false flag along with Douma false flag and OPCW role in it, as well as DNC hack and Gussifer 2.0 false flags might be a watershed events in terms of the ability of the neoliberal MSM to control public opinion.

    Notable quotes:
    "... That is if the MSM get their way! Maybe I am being overoptimistic, but Russia - as a permanent member of the UNSC and a member of the OPCW - will do everything in it's powers to pursue this matter, and it seems quite possible they will be able to force it onto the main agenda within 2020. If that happens it will be impossible for the MSM to push it under the rug. ..."
    "... The other aspect it is that the MSM ability to suppress this news is dependent on behaviour of the MSM community in its totality, and the relationship to reader plausibility ..."
    "... What determines whether one MSM decides to break the pack and publish news on OPCW? Well, for one thing, MoA articles can influence individual journalists and individual editors! ..."
    Jan 01, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    BM , Dec 31 2019 17:18 utc | 15

    B, under the "major stories covered" title you should include Skripal, about which you wrote many important articles; I believe ultimately - like OPCW and Russiagate - it will prove to be history-making event in terms of impact on public perceptions of media and the ability of the media to control public opinion. Probably eventually whistleblowers will come forward like the OPCW, and only thin will it have it's maximum impact.

    (Well, the original event was 2018 not 2019, but some of the reports were in 2019 anyway)

    BM , Dec 31 2019 17:36 utc | 20

    My predictions on these issue for next year are:
    ...
    Mainstream media have suppressed all news about the OPCW scandal. This will only change if major new evidence comes to light.

    That is if the MSM get their way! Maybe I am being overoptimistic, but Russia - as a permanent member of the UNSC and a member of the OPCW - will do everything in it's powers to pursue this matter, and it seems quite possible they will be able to force it onto the main agenda within 2020. If that happens it will be impossible for the MSM to push it under the rug.

    The other aspect it is that the MSM ability to suppress this news is dependent on behaviour of the MSM community in its totality, and the relationship to reader plausibility. There are a few factors that could influence this independently of major new evidence, such as the behaviour of a few outlier MSM's that decide to release information (and whether or not that information then takes off in the public consciousness); pressure that could build up in social media calling for the MSM to respond and attacking MSM credibility; or other forms of pressure from the public calling on the MSM to respond. It is therefore a dynamic that is not entirely predictable.

    Both of the above are distinct from the emergence of new major evidence, although both cases would seem likely to provoke new revelations in turn.

    What determines whether one MSM decides to break the pack and publish news on OPCW? Well, for one thing, MoA articles can influence individual journalists and individual editors!

    [Jan 01, 2020] Building a Russian Bogeyman Washington Intentionally 'Overcharged' Relations with Moscow for Strategic Advantage by Robert Bridge

    Jul 30, 2018 | www.strategic-culture.org

    Last week, we considered how the Bush and Obama administrations worked in tandem – wittingly or unwittingly, but I'm betting on the former – to move forward with the construction of a US missile defense system smack on Russia's border following the attacks of 9/11 and Bush's decision to scrap the ABM Treaty with Moscow.

    That aggressive move will go down in the (non-American) history books as the primary reason for the return of Cold War-era atmosphere between Washington and Moscow. Currently, with the mainstream news cycle top-heavy with 24/7 'Russiagate' baloney, many people have understandably forgotten that it was during the Obama administration when US-Russia relations really hit rock bottom. And it had nothing to do with Hillary Clinton's home computer getting allegedly compromised by some Russia hackers.

    The year is 2008; welcome to the international peace tour – although 'farce tour' would be much more accurate. Fatigued by 8 long years of Bush's disastrous war on terror, with over 1 million dead, maimed or on the run, the world has just let out a collective sigh of relief as Barack Obama has been elected POTUS. Due to Obama's velvety delivery, and the fact that he was not George W. Bush, he was able to provide the perfect smokescreen as far as Washington's ulterior motives with regards to Russia were concerned; the devious double game America was playing required a snake-oil salesman of immeasurable skill and finesse.

    Just months into his presidency, with 'hope and change' hanging in the air like so many helium balloons, Obama told a massive crowd in Prague that, "To reduce our warheads and stockpiles, we will negotiate a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Russians this year. President Medvedev and I began this process in London, and will seek a new agreement by the end of this year that is legally binding and sufficiently bold (Applause!)."

    It would take another 8 years for the world – or at least the awakened part – to come to grips with the fact that America's 'first Black president' was just another smooth-talking, Wall Street-bought operator in sheep clothing. In the last year of the Obama reign, it has been conservatively estimated that some 26,000 bombs of various size and power were duly dropped against enemies in various nations. In other words, nearly three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day.

    But more to the point, US-Russia relations on Obama's watch experienced their deepest deterioration since the days of the US-Soviet standoff. In fact, with the benefit of hindsight, we can say that the 44th US president picked up almost seamlessly where Bush left off, and then some. Initially, however, it looked as though relations with Russia would improve as Obama announced he would "shelve" the Bush plan for ground-based interceptors in Poland and a related radar site in the Czech Republic. Then, the very same day, he performed a perfect flip-flop into the geopolitical pool, saying he would deploy a sea-based variety – which is every bit as lethal as the land version, as then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates admitted – instead of a land-locked one.

    Following that announcement, Obama appeared intent on lulling Moscow into a false sense of security that the system was somehow less dangerous than the Bush model, or that the Americans would eventually agree and cooperate with them in the system. In March 2009, a curious thing happened at the same time relations between the two global nuclear powers were hitting the wall. A meeting – more of a photo opportunity than any significant summit – took place between then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Geneva. To the delight of the phalanx of photographers present, Clinton, in a symbolic gesture of "resetting relations" with Russia, produced a yellow box with a red button and the Russian word "peregruzka" printed on it.

    "You got it wrong," Lavrov said to general laughter. "It should be "perezagruzka" [reset]," he corrected somewhat pedantically. "This says 'peregruzka,' which means 'overcharged.'"

    Clinton gave a very interesting response, especially in light of where we are today in terms of the bilateral breakdown: "We won't let you do that to us, I promise. We mean it and we look forward to it."

    As events would prove, the US State Department's 'mistaken' use of the Russian word for 'overcharged' instead of 'reset' was far closer to the truth. After all, can anybody remember a time in recent history, aside from perhaps the Cuban Missile Crisis, when US-Russia relations were more "overcharged" than now? In hindsight, the much-hyped 'reset' was an elaborate ploy by the Obama administration to buy as much time as possible to get a strategic head start on the Russians.

    It deserves mentioning that the fate of the New START Treaty (signed into force on April 8, 2010), the nuclear missile reduction treaty signed between Obama and then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, hung in the balance on mutual cooperation between the nuclear powers. Nevertheless, it became clear the Obama sweet talk was just a lot of candy-coated nothing.

    What is truly audacious about the Obama administration's moves is that it somehow believed Moscow would radically reduce its ballistic missile launch capabilities, as prescribed in the New START treaty, at the very same time the United States was building a mighty sword along the entire length of its Western border.

    The Obama administration clearly underestimated Moscow, or overestimated Obama's charm powers.

    By the year 2011, after several years of failed negotiations to bring Russia onboard the system, Moscow's patience was clearly over. During the G-8 Summit in France, Medvedev expressed frustration with the lack of progress on the missile defense system with the US.

    "When we ask for the name of the countries that the shield is aimed at, we get silence," he said. "When we ask if the country has missiles (that could target Europe), the answer is 'no.'"

    "Now who has those types of missiles (that the missile defense system could counter)?"

    "We do," Medvedev explained. "So we can only think that this system is being aimed against us."

    In fact, judging by the tremendous strides Russia has made in the realm of military technologies over a very short period, it is apparent the Kremlin understood from the outset that the 'reset' was an elaborate fraud, designed to cover the administration's push to Russian border.

    As I wrote last week on these pages: "In March, Putin stunned the world, and certainly Washington's hawks, by announcing in the annual Address to the Federal Assembly the introduction of advanced weapons systems – including those with hypersonic capabilities – designed to overcome any missile defense system in the world.

    These major developments by Russia, which Putin emphasized was accomplished "without the benefit" of Soviet-era expertise, has fueled the narrative that "Putin's Russia" is an aggressive nation with "imperial ambitions," when in reality its goal was to form a bilateral pact with the United States and other Western states almost two decades ago post 9/11.

    As far as 'Russiagate', the endless probe into the Trump administration for its alleged collusion with Russia in the 2016 election, not a shred of incriminating evidence has ever been provided that would prove such a thing occurred. And when Putin offered to cooperate with Washington in determining exactly what happened, the offer was rebuffed.

    In light of such a scenario, it is my opinion that the Democrats, fully aware – despite what the skewed media polls erringly told them – that Hillary Clinton stood no chance of beating the Republican Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential contest, set about crafting the narrative of 'Russian collusion' in order to not only delegitimize Trump's presidency, possibly depriving him of a second term in 2010, but to begin the process of severely curtailing the work of 'alternative media,' which are in fact greatly responsible for not only Trump's victory at the polls, but for exposing the dirt on Clinton's corrupt campaign.

    These alternative media sites have been duly linked to Russia in one way or another as a means of silencing them. Thus, it is not only Russia that has been victimized by the lunacy of Russiagate; every single person who stands for the freedom of speech has suffered a major setback one way or another.

    Part I of this story is available here . The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation. Tags: Cold War George W. Bush Obama Russiagate START

    [Jan 01, 2020] 'Vladimir the Terrible' US Deep State Desperately Needs a Russian Villain to Cover Its Tracks -- Strategic Culture

    Jan 01, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

    'Vladimir the Terrible': US Deep State Desperately Needs a Russian Villain to Cover Its Tracks Robert Bridge July 26, 2018 © Photo: Public domain

    Conventional wisdom would have us believe that Russia became America's sworn enemy in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. As is often the case, however, conventional wisdom can be illusory.

    In the momentous 2016 showdown between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, a faraway dark kingdom known as Russia, the fantastic fable goes, hijacked that part of the American brain responsible for critical thinking and lever pulling with a few thousand dollars' worth of Facebook and Twitter adverts, bots and whatnot. The result of that gross intrusion into the squeaky clean machinery of the God-blessed US election system is now more or less well-documented history brought to you by the US mainstream media: Donald Trump, with some assistance from the Russians that has never been adequately explained, pulled the presidential contest out from under the wobbly feet of Hillary Clinton.

    For those who unwittingly bought that work of fiction, I can only offer my sincere condolences. In fact, Russiagate is just the latest installment of an anti-Russia story that has been ongoing since the presidency of George W. Bush.

    Act 1: Smokescreen

    Rewind to September 24 th , 2001. Having gone on record as the first global leader to telephone George W. Bush in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Putin showed his support went beyond mere words. He announced a five-point plan to support America in the 'war against terror' that included the sharing of intelligence, as well as the opening of Russian airspace for US humanitarian flights to Central Asia.

    In the words of perennial Kremlin critic, Michael McFaul, former US ambassador to Russia, Putin's "acquiescence to NATO troops in Central Asia signaled a reversal of two hundred years of Russian foreign policy. Under Yeltsin, the communists, and the tsars, Russia had always considered Central Asia as its 'sphere of influence.' Putin broke with that tradition."

    In other words, the new Russian leader was demonstrating his desire for Russia to have, as Henry Kissinger explained it some seven years later, "a reliable strategic partner, with America being the preferred choice."

    This leads us to the question for the ages: If it was obvious that Russia was now fully prepared to enter into a serious partnership with the United States in the 'war on terror,' then how do we explain George W. Bush announcing the withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty just three months later? There are some things we may take away from that move, which Putin tersely and rightly described as a "mistake."

    First, Washington must not have considered a security partnership with Moscow very important, since they certainly understood that Russia would respond negatively to the decision to scrap the 30-year-old ABM Treaty. Second, the US must not considered the 'war on terror' very serious either; otherwise it would not have risked losing Russian assistance in hunting down the baddies in Central Asia and the Middle East, geographical areas where Russia has gained valuable experience over the years. This was a remarkably odd choice considering that the US military apparatus had failed spectacularly to defend the nation against a terrorist attack, coordinated by 19 amateurs, armed with box cutters, no less. Third, as was the case with the decision to invade Iraq, a country with nodiscernible connection to the events of 9/11, as well as the imposition of the pre-drafted Patriot Act on a shell-shocked nation, the decision to break with Russia seems to have been a premeditated move on the global chessboard. Although it would be hard to prove such a claim, we can take some guidance from Rahm Emanuel, former Obama Chief of Staff, who notoriously advised, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/Pb-YuhFWCr4

    So why did Bush abrogate the ABM Treaty with Russia? The argument was that some "rogue state," rumored to be Iran, might be tempted to launch a missile attack against "US interests abroad." Yet there was absolutely no logic to the claim since Tehran was inextricably bound by the same principle of "mutually assured destruction" (MAD) as were any other states that tempted fate with a surprise attack on US-Israeli interests. Further, it made no sense to focus attention on Shia-dominant Iran when the majority of the terrorists, allegedly acolytes of Osama bin Laden, reportedly hailed from Sunni-dominant Saudi Arabia. In other words, the Bush administration happily sacrificed an invincible relationship with Russia in the war on terror in order to guard against some external threat that only nominally existed, with a missile defense system that was largely unproven in the field. Again, zero logic.

    However, when it is considered that the missile defense system was tailor-made by America specifically with Russia in mind, the whole scheme begins to make more sense, at least from a strategic perspective. Thus, the Bush administration used the attacks of 9/11 to not only dramatically curtail the civil rights of American citizens with the passage of the Patriot Act, it also took the first steps towards encircling Russia with a so-called 'defense system' that has the capacity to grow in effectiveness and range.

    For those who thought Russia would just sit back and let itself be encircled by foreign missiles, they were in for quite a surprise. In March 2018, Putin stunned the world, and certainly Washington's hawks, by announcing in the annual Address to the Federal Assembly the introduction of advanced weapons systems – including those with hypersonic capabilities – designed to overcome any missile defense system in the world.

    These major developments by Russia, which Putin emphasized was accomplished "without the benefit" of Soviet-era expertise, has fueled the narrative that "Putin's Russia" is an aggressive nation with "imperial ambitions," when in reality its goal was to form a bilateral pact with the United States and other Western states almost two decades ago post 9/11.

    Now, US officials can only wring their hands in angst while speaking about an "aggressive Russia."

    "Russia is the most significant threat just because they pose the only existential threat to the country right now. So we have to look at that from that perspective," declared Air Force Gen. John Hyten, commander of US Strategic Command, or STRATCOM.

    Putin reiterated in his Address, however, that there would have been no need for Russia to have developed such advanced weapon systems if its legitimate concerns had not been dismissed by the US.

    "Nobody wanted to talk with us on the core of the problem," he said. "Nobody listened to us. Now you listen!"

    To be continued: Part II: Reset, or 'Overcharged' The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation. Tags: Deep State Russiagate

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    [Aug 24, 2020] Announcement- Half a Pulitzer Prize to the Wall Street Journal by Ron Unz Published on Aug 24, 2020 | www.unz.com

    [Aug 23, 2020] Catapulting Russian-Meddling Propaganda by Ray McGovern Published on Aug 23, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Aug 23, 2020] Bright future lies ahead of NYT it can soon match and even exceed the caliber of jornalism of the "National Inquirer" Published on Aug 23, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Aug 17, 2020] Who's Afraid of QAnon- by Gregory Hood Published on Aug 17, 2020 | www.unz.com

    [Aug 08, 2020] Russia Hoax- Are We All Being Played- Put Up Or Shut Up! - Zero Hedge Published on Aug 08, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Aug 04, 2020] Russia never saw Trump as a potential ally or friend by The Saker Published on Aug 04, 2020 | www.unz.com

    [Aug 03, 2020] Natalie Wynn also refers to Jo Freeman's 1976 piece on "Trashing," in which she describes her experience of being ostracized by fellow feminists for alleged ideological deviation. The dynamic of cancellation predates the internet. Published on Aug 03, 2020 | crookedtimber.org

    [Aug 03, 2020] KEEPING YOUR MOUTH SHUT by James L. Gibson & Joseph L. Sutherland Published on Aug 03, 2020 | poseidon01.ssrn.com

    [Aug 02, 2020] Russiagate, Nazis, and the CIA by ROB URIE Published on Jul 31, 2020 | www.counterpunch.org

    [Jul 23, 2020] Demorats defeat amedment ot cut Defence by 10% Published on Jul 23, 2020 | news.antiwar.com

    [Jul 21, 2020] This Skripal thing smelled to high heaven from day 1. My opinion is that Sergei Skripal was involved (to what degree is open to speculation) with the Steele dossier. Published on Apr 20, 2019 | theduran.com

    [Jul 20, 2020] The Real 'Russian Playbook' Is Written in English -- Strategic Culture Published on Jul 17, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

    [Jul 19, 2020] What the MSM cliche According to former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the matter actually means Published on Jul 19, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Jul 18, 2020] Divide We Fall -- America Has Been Blacklisted and McCarthyism Refashioned for a New Age Published on Jul 18, 2020 | www.mintpressnews.com

    [Jul 07, 2020] Mutiny on the Bounties by RAY McGOVERN Published on Jul 03, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

    [Jul 06, 2020] US claim of 'Russian Bounty' plot in Afghanistan is dubious and dangerous - The Grayzone Published on Jul 06, 2020 | thegrayzone.com

    [Jul 01, 2020] Russiagate's Last Gasp by Ray McGovern Published on Jun 29, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

    [Jun 29, 2020] The bounties could be a false flag: the Taliban doesn t need a Russian bounty to kill American soldiers Published on astutenews.com

    [Jun 28, 2020] Evidence Free Press Release Claims 'Russia Did Bad, Trump Did Not Respond' - NYT, WaPo Publish It Published on Jun 28, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Jun 23, 2020] Identity politics is, first and foremost, a dirty and shrewd political strategy developed by the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party ( soft neoliberals ) to counter the defection of trade union members from the party Published on Dec 28, 2019 | crookedtimber.org

    [Jun 20, 2020] The American Press Is Destroying Itself by Matt Taibbi Published on Jun 20, 2020 | taibbi.substack.com

    [Jun 03, 2020] Dems ratpack of reparations freaks, weird sexual curiosities, and race hustlers is actually a fifth column for Trump re-election by Fred Reed Published on Jul 25, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Jun 03, 2020] Not The Onion: NY Times Urges Trump To Establish Closer Ties With Moscow Published on Jul 23, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Jun 03, 2020] Requiem to Russiagate: this was the largest and the most successful attempt to gaslight the whole US population ever attempted by CIA and Clinton wing of Dems by CJ Hopkins Published on Apr 02, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Jun 01, 2020] More Evidence of the Fraud Against General Michael Flynn by Larry C Johnson Published on Jun 01, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Jun 01, 2020] More Evidence of the Fraud Against General Michael Flynn by Larry C Johnson Published on Jun 01, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [May 20, 2020] McGovern Turn Out The Lights, Russiagate Is Over by Ray McGovern Published on May 19, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

    [May 19, 2020] America: "We demand an coronavirus origin investigation, but the investigators must agree on the outcome that we specify before they begin investigating!" Published on May 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [May 19, 2020] Russophobia in the Age of Donald Trump Published on May 19, 2020 | www.oxfordscholarship.com

    [May 16, 2020] Bought MSM experts typically are just MIC prostitutes: most are neocons and "Russiagaters" Published on May 16, 2020 | www.rt.com

    [May 11, 2020] Twin Pillars of Russiagate Crumble by Ray McGovern Published on May 11, 2020 | original.antiwar.com

    [May 10, 2020] Did the FBI target Michael Flynn to protect Obama's policies, not national security by Kevin R. Brock Published on May 10, 2020 | thehill.com

    [May 10, 2020] Does Obama now feels his potential liability for staging coup d' tat and gaslighting the whole nation? Published on May 10, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [May 08, 2020] Thiefs stole from a Russian fifth column critter: NY Times Accused Of Ripping Off Pulitzer Prize-Winning Stories From Russian Journalists For 2nd Time Published on May 08, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

    [May 07, 2020] Media Malpractice Is Criminalizing Better Relations With Russia by Stephen F. Cohen Published on Dec 13, 2017 | thenation.com

    [Apr 22, 2020] Especially as the insane neoliberal economy we live in, we are ruled by a group of kleptocrats and vicious stooges. Which make allegations against Biden deserving a closer look but that does not make them automatically credible Published on Apr 22, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    [Apr 17, 2020] The WHO provided validated working test kits on 16th of January. The USA botched the delopyment due to CDC incompetence and NIH syndrom Published on Apr 17, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Apr 17, 2020] Barr just said the Russia collusion probe was a travesty, had no basis and was intended to sabotage Trump. Published on Apr 17, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Apr 02, 2020] Bloomberg spent north of $500 millions to become president with zero results, and you want me to believe that Russians spent 1% of that and got better results Published on Apr 02, 2020 | hub.jhu.edu

    [Apr 02, 2020] We have two discredited old parties, incapable of dealing with the crises facing them, attempting to revive the only ideas that have ever galvanised the US public in their lifetimes: opposition to communism and the racism which underlay just about every US military adventure since 1945 Published on Apr 02, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Mar 28, 2020] Russians again were outsmarted by the US intelligence agencies Published on Mar 28, 2020 | www.unz.com

    [Mar 28, 2020] Why You Should Never Watch RT -- Ever! Published on Mar 26, 2020 | russia-insider.com

    [Mar 28, 2020] NYT bad habit of falling for falling for frauds and making them famous Published on Mar 26, 2020 | www.unz.com

    [Mar 24, 2020] This weaponizing of random indignation is a classic tool of the Western propaganda Published on Mar 24, 2020 | www.unz.com

    [Mar 21, 2020] When reading any article concerning current events (ie. Ukraine, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, or Coronavirus) consider how the The Seven Principles of Propaganda may apply Published on Mar 22, 2020 | https://www.moonofalabama.org

    [Mar 17, 2020] DOJ drops charges against Russian trolls after they dared demand evidence in US court -- RT USA News Published on Mar 17, 2020 | www.rt.com

    [Mar 05, 2020] Intelligence Officials Sow Discord By Stoking Fear of Russian Election Meddling by Dave DeCamp Published on Feb 24, 2020 | original.antiwar.com

    [Mar 04, 2020] Russiagate should be viewed as classic, textbook case of gaslighting and projecting election interference Published on Mar 04, 2020 | caucus99percent.com

    [Mar 03, 2020] Russia isn't backing Sanders and Trump as much as hoping for chaos Published on Mar 03, 2020 | www.usatoday.com

    [Feb 28, 2020] The impact of coronavirus on Trump reelection chances Published on Feb 28, 2020 | angrybearblog.com

    [Feb 24, 2020] Seven signs of the neoliberal apocalypse by Van Badham Published on Apr 26, 2018 | www.theguardian.com

    [Feb 21, 2020] Why Both Republicans And Democrats Want Russia To Become The Enemy Of Choice by Philip Giraldi Published on Feb 07, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Feb 19, 2020] During the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, a "neoliberal revolution from above" was staged in the USA by "managerial elite" which like Soviet nomenklatura (which also staged a neoliberal coup d' tat) changed sides and betrayed the working class Published on Feb 19, 2020 | angrybearblog.com

    [Feb 19, 2020] On Michael Lind's "The New Class War" by Gregor Baszak Published on Jan 08, 2020 | lareviewofbooks.org

    [Feb 09, 2020] Trump demand for 50% of Iraq oil revenue sound exactly like a criminal mob boss Published on Jan 21, 2020 | www.unz.com

    [Jan 31, 2020] Trump excoriates Bolton in tweets this morning Published on Jan 31, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Jan 29, 2020] For the last three years, all the "resistance oxygen" was sucked up by the warmongering against Russia Published on Jan 29, 2020 | off-guardian.org

    [Jan 27, 2020] The end of Trump? Trump betrayed all major promises of his 2016 election campaign. Trump needs to go... Published on Jan 27, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Jan 24, 2020] Peter Hitchen to Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat: You're not in the ladies' lingerie trade now, sweetie Published on Jan 24, 2020 | off-guardian.org

    [Jan 24, 2020] Crimes of the century truth, perception and punishment Published on Jan 24, 2020 | off-guardian.org

    [Jan 21, 2020] WaPo columnist endorses all twelve candidates Published on Jan 21, 2020 | caucus99percent.com

    [Jan 20, 2020] Fake Investigations... Designed To Fool by Bryce Buchanan Published on Jan 20, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Jan 18, 2020] Putin plants to prohibit dual citizens to serve in government Published on Jan 18, 2020 | www.unz.com

    [Jan 09, 2020] It looks like UK and the USA intelligences agencies run the contest to see who can come up with the most surreal anti-Russian propaganda psy-ops Published on Nov 24, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Jan 08, 2020] Do you really want to be a one term president? Pompeo can talk big now and then go back to Kansas to run for senator. Where will you be able to take refuge? Published on Sep 18, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    Oldies But Goodies

  • [Jul 17, 2017] Tucker Carlson Goes to War Against the Neocons by Curt Mills
  • [Jul 12, 2017] Stephen Cohens Remarks on Tucker Carlson Last Night Were Extraordinary
  • [Dec 10, 2016] Why the US elite loves so much to demonise Russia
  • [Dec 22, 2018] British Security Service Infiltration, the Integrity Initiative and the Institute for Statecraft by Craig Murray
  • [Dec 22, 2018] If Truth Cannot Prevail Over Material Agendas We Are Doomed by Paul Craig Roberts
  • [Dec 14, 2018] Vetting NYT materials by CIA reflects full-scale cooperation – a virtual merger – between our the government and the neoliberal MSM
  • [Dec 14, 2018] The dirty propaganda games NYT play
  • [Dec 05, 2018] Beleaguered British Prime Minister Theresa May is wailing loudly against a Trump threat to reveal classified documents relating to Russiagate by Philip Giraldi
  • [Dec 02, 2018] Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski Wins 2018 Sam Adams Award by Ray McGovern
  • [Nov 27, 2018] 'Highly likely' that Magnitsky was poisoned by toxic chemicals on Bill Browder's orders
  • [Nov 27, 2018] US Foreign Policy Has No Policy by Philip Giraldi
  • [Nov 24, 2018] MI6 Scrambling To Stop Trump From Releasing Classified Docs In Russia Probe
  • [Nov 24, 2018] Anonymous Exposes UK-Led Psyop To Battle Russian Propaganda
  • [Nov 24, 2018] British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns
  • [Nov 24, 2018] When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots psyops, you tend to come up with plots for psyops . The word entrapment comes to mind. Probably self-serving also.
  • [Nov 12, 2018] Protecting Americans from foreign influence, smells with COINTELPRO. Structural witch-hunt effect like during the McCarthy era is designed to supress decent to neoliberal oligarcy by Andre Damon and Joseph Kishore
  • [Oct 08, 2018] Hacking and Propaganda by Marcus Ranum
  • [Oct 05, 2018] Alcohol, Memory, and the Hippocampus
  • [Oct 02, 2018] Recovered memory is a Freudian voodoo. Notice how carefully manicured these charges are such that they can never be falsified? This is the actual proof she is a liar and this whole thing is staged
  • [Oct 02, 2018] The Kavanaugh hearings and the Lack of Radical Action
  • [Oct 02, 2018] Kavanaugh is the Wrong Nominee by Kevin Zeese - Margaret Flowers
  • [Oct 02, 2018] I m puzzled why CIA is so against Kavanaugh?
  • [Sep 16, 2018] Perils of Ineptitude by Andrew Levin
  • [Sep 07, 2018] New York Times Undermining Peace Efforts by Sowing Suspicion by Diana Johnstone
  • [Sep 07, 2018] Sarah Huckabee Sanders has a legitimate request to neoliberal MSM - Stop Bugging Me About The New York Times' Trump Op-Ed
  • [Aug 11, 2018] President Trump the most important achivement
  • [Aug 05, 2018] Cooper was equally as unhinged as Boot: Neoliberal MSM is a real 1984 remake.
  • [Jul 31, 2018] Is not the Awan affair a grave insult to the US "Intelligence Community?
  • [Jul 23, 2018] Chickens with Their Heads Cut Off, Coming Home to Roost. The "Treason Narrative" by Helen Buyniski
  • [Jul 22, 2018] Tucker Carlson SLAMS Intelligence Community On Russia
  • [Jul 20, 2018] What exactly is fake news caucus99percent
  • [Jul 20, 2018] Is President Trump A Traitor Because He Wants Peace With Russia by Paul Craig Roberts
  • [Jul 13, 2018] False flag operation covering DNC leaks now involves Mueller and his team
  • [Jun 09, 2018] Spooks Spooking Themselves by Daniel Lazare
  • [Jun 09, 2018] Still Waiting for Evidence of a Russian Hack by Ray McGovern
  • [May 24, 2018] Most probably Veselnitskaya was a false flag operation to entrap Trump campaign played by British intelligence
  • [May 04, 2018] Media Use Disinformation To Accuse Russia Of Spreading Such by b
  • [Apr 24, 2018] The Democratic Party has embraced the agenda of the military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political voice
  • [Apr 15, 2018] The Trump Regime Is Insane by Paul Craig Roberts
  • [Apr 01, 2018] Does the average user care if s/he is micro-targetted by political advertisements based on what they already believe?
  • [Mar 27, 2018] The Stormy Daniels scandal Political warfare in Washington hits a new low by Patrick Martin
  • [Mar 24, 2018] Did Trump cut a deal on the collusion charge by Mike Whitney
  • [Mar 12, 2018] State Department's War on Political Dissent
  • [Mar 10, 2018] Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in Obama policy and HRC campaign long before any Steele s Dossier. This was a program ofunleashing cold War II
  • [Mar 08, 2018] Mueller determines the US foreign policy toward Russia; The Intel Community Lies About Russian Meddling by Publius Tacitus
  • [Mar 06, 2018] Is MSNBC Now the Most Dangerous Warmonger Network by Norman Solomon
  • [Feb 14, 2018] The Anti-Trump Coup by Michael S. Rozeff
  • [Jan 22, 2018] The Justice Department and FBI set up the meeting at Trump Tower between Trump Jr., Manafort and Kushner with controversial Russian officials to make Trump's associates appear compromised
  • [Jan 02, 2018] Some investigators ask a sensible question: "It is likely that all the Russians involved in the attempt to influence the 2016 election were lying, scheming, Kremlin-linked, Putin-backed enemies of America except the Russians who talked to Christopher Steele?"
  • [Dec 31, 2017] What Happens When A Russiagate Skeptic Debates A Professional Russiagater
  • [Jun 23, 2020] Identity politics is, first and foremost, a dirty and shrewd political strategy developed by the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party ( soft neoliberals ) to counter the defection of trade union members from the party
  • [Dec 28, 2019] Senior OPCW Official Busted Leaked Email Exposes Orders To Delete All Traces Of Dissent On Douma
  • [Dec 20, 2019] The Tragedy of Donald Trump His Presidency Is Marred with Failure by Doug Bandow
  • [Dec 20, 2019] The purpose of manufactured hysteria in the US is to obfuscate the issues important to the Deep State like destroying the first amendment, renewing the 'Patriot' act, extremely increasing the war/hegemony budget, etc
  • [Dec 19, 2019] Historically the ability of unelected, unaccountable, secretive bureaucracies (aka the "Deep State") to exercise their own policy without regard for the public or elected officials, often in defiance of these, has always been the hallmark of the destruction of democracy and incipient tyranny.
  • [Dec 10, 2019] The level of Neo-McCarthyism and the number of lunitics this NYT forums is just astonishing: When it comes to Donald Trump and Russia, everything is connected.
  • [Dec 07, 2019] Why the foreign policy establishment consensus is neocon by default.
  • [Dec 04, 2019] Ukrainegaters claim that Trump Reduced the USA empire 'Global Commitments' was fraudulent from the very beginning. Trump is yet another imperial president who favours the "Full spectrum Dominance; The problem is that the time when the USA can have it are in the past. Europe finally recovered from WWII losses and that alone dooms the idea
  • [Nov 07, 2019] Rigged Again Dems, Russia, The Delegitimization Of America s Democratic Process by Elizabeth Vos
  • [Nov 02, 2019] WATCH Udo Ulfkotte – Bought Journalists by Terje Maloy
  • [Nov 01, 2019] Viable Opposition The Legal Connection Between Washington and Kiev
  • [Nov 01, 2019] Color revolution is a method of using a minority to render the country ungovernble, waving a simplistic banner against corruption and for (undefined) democracy, which leaves the masses unorganized and eschews even a platform, in favor of a secret coterie run by intelligence againces
  • [Oct 25, 2019] Trump-Haters, Not Trump, Are The Ones Wrecking America s Institutions, WSJ s Strassel Says
  • [Oct 19, 2019] Russian agents under every bed
  • [Sep 23, 2019] Apparently now that the notion Russia interfered in the US presidential election to tip the vote to Trump has become an article of faith that much of the world regards as established fact
  • [Sep 17, 2019] The Devolution of US-Russia Relations by Tony Kevin
  • [Sep 15, 2019] Demythologizing the Roots of the New Cold War by Ted Snider
  • [Sep 03, 2019] Russiagate as crocodile tears of western propaganda
  • [Aug 24, 2019] George Kennan on Russia Insights and Recommendations
  • [Aug 22, 2019] Trump Doesn t Know How to Negotiate by Daniel Larison
  • [Aug 21, 2019] Solomon If Trump Declassifies These 10 Documents, Democrats Are Doomed
  • [Aug 17, 2019] Debunking the Putin Panic by Stephen F. Cohen
  • [Aug 17, 2019] Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome (PTDS)
  • [Aug 16, 2019] Ministry of truth materialized in XXI century in a neoliberal way by Kit Knightly
  • [Aug 16, 2019] Lapdogs for the Government and intelligence agencies by Greg Maybury
  • [Aug 12, 2019] Russiagate is the idea around which varied interests can be organized
  • [Jul 29, 2019] The Real Reason The Propagandists Have Been Promoting Russia Hysteria by Caitlin Johnstone
  • [Jul 28, 2019] Mueller Crumbles Under Questioning by Barbara Boland
  • [Jul 28, 2019] Antisemitism prejudices projection on Russians
  • [Jul 27, 2019] Russia interfered on a massive scale ($3,684 was spends on ads on which $1932 on promoting Trump) and is doing it again as we sit here! Just how massive? They spent $100,000 on clickbait ads from a company owned by a man who was in a photo with the evil mastermind!
  • [Jul 27, 2019] Understanding the Roots of the Obama Coup Against Trump by Larry C Johnson
  • [Jul 26, 2019] Tucker What should happen to those who lied about Russian collusion
  • [Jul 26, 2019] Tucker: Democrats believed Mueller would save America. But he is A daft old man blinking in the sunlight once the curtain has been opened
  • [Jun 03, 2020] Dems ratpack of reparations freaks, weird sexual curiosities, and race hustlers is actually a fifth column for Trump re-election by Fred Reed
  • [Jun 03, 2020] Not The Onion: NY Times Urges Trump To Establish Closer Ties With Moscow
  • [Jul 13, 2019] Mueller Does Not Have Evidence That The IRA Was Part of Russian Government Meddling by Larry C Johnson
  • [Jul 06, 2019] Mueller Report Gets the Trump Tower Meeting Wrong; Promotes Browder Hoax by Lucy Komisar
  • [Jun 28, 2019] The Donald's Latest Iranian Caper Sh*t-Faced Stupidity by David Stockman
  • [Jun 26, 2019] Opinion - NY Times admits it sends stories to US government for approval before publication
  • [Jun 19, 2019] Investigation Nation Mueller, Russiagate, and Fake Politics by Jim Kavanagh
  • [Jun 14, 2019] Comments on Yasha Levin article: With Russiagate, we Soviet immigrants were finally forced to reckon with the bigotry of America's elite
  • [May 29, 2019] With Russiagate, we Soviet immigrants were finally forced to reckon with the bigotry of America's elite by Yasha Levine
  • [May 28, 2019] Any time you read an article (or a comment) on Russia, substitute the word Jew for Russian and International Jewry for Russia and re-read.
  • [May 22, 2019] NATO has pushed eastward right up to its borders and threatened to incorporate regions that have been part of Russia's sphere of influence -- and its defense perimeter -- for centuries
  • [May 20, 2019] "Us" Versus "Them"
  • [May 19, 2019] How Russiagate replaced Analysis of the 2016 Election by Rick Sterling
  • [May 19, 2019] Intel agencies of the UK and US are guilty of fabricating evidence, breaking the laws (certainly of the targeted countries, but also of the UK and US), providing fake analysis and operating as evil actors on the dark side of humanity
  • [May 16, 2019] The Disinformationists by C.J. Hopkins
  • [May 15, 2019] Russia-gate s Monstrous Offspring
  • [May 14, 2019] The Propaganda Multiplier How Global News Agencies and Western Media Report on Geopolitics
  • [May 13, 2019] US Foreign Policy as Bellicose as Ever by Serge Halimi
  • [May 12, 2019] Charting a Progressive Foreign Policy for the Trump Era and Beyond
  • [May 11, 2019] Christopher Steele, FBI s Confidential Human Source by Publius Tacitus
  • [May 07, 2019] Look! A whale!
  • [May 07, 2019] Chris Hedges: The Demonization of Russia is Driven by Defense Contractors
  • [Apr 29, 2019] The Mueller Report Indicts the Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theory by Aaron Maté
  • [Apr 28, 2019] The British Role in Russiagate Is About to Be Fully Exposed
  • [Apr 28, 2019] Breath of fresh air--real journalism again! Have so much respect for Chris Hedges and Aaron Mate, great work!
  • [Apr 28, 2019] On Contact Russiagate Mueller Report w- Aaron Mate
  • [Apr 26, 2019] Jared Kushner, Not Maria Butina, Is America's Real Foreign Agent by Philip Giraldi
  • [Apr 26, 2019] Intelligence agencies meddling in elections
  • [Apr 22, 2019] FBI top brass have been colluding with top brass of CIA and MI6 to pursue ambitious anti-Russian agenda
  • [Apr 22, 2019] Current Neo-McCarthyism hysteria as a smoke screen of the UK and the USA intent to dominate European geopolitics and weaken Russia and Germany
  • [Apr 21, 2019] John Brennan's Police State USA
  • [Apr 21, 2019] Whenever someone inconveniences the neoliberal oligarchy, the entire neoliberal MSM mafia tells us 24 x7 how evil and disgusting that person is. It's true of the leader of every nation which rejects neoliberal globalization as well as for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange
  • [Apr 20, 2019] Trump has certainly made the world safer
  • [Apr 20, 2019] Sure, blame those guys over there for Hillary fiasco and hire Mueller to get the goods . That s the ultimate the dog ate my homework excuse.
  • [Apr 17, 2019] The media's interest in the well-being of a foreign population is directly proportional to the West's interest in toppling its government, while editorial standards are inversely proportional to its enemy status
  • [Apr 13, 2019] Russophobia, A WMD (Weapon Of Mass Deception) by Jean Ranc
  • [Apr 10, 2019] Habakkuk on cockroaches and the New York Times
  • [Apr 08, 2019] Aaron Maté Was Also Right About Russiagate
  • [Apr 06, 2019] The Magnitsky Act-Behind the Scenes ASEEES
  • [Apr 02, 2019] 'Yats' Is No Longer the Guy by Robert Parry
  • [Apr 01, 2019] Amazon.com War with Russia From Putin Ukraine to Trump Russiagate (9781510745810) Stephen F. Cohen Books
  • [Mar 31, 2019] What is the purpose of Russiagate hysteria?
  • [Mar 30, 2019] The Real Costs of Russiagate
  • [Mar 30, 2019] You don't like Trump? Bolton? Clinton? All of these people who are in or have passed through leadership positions in America are entirely valid representatives of Americans in general. You may imagine they are faking cluelessness to avoid acknowledging responsibility for their crimes, but the cluelessness is quite real and extends to the entire population.
  • [Mar 24, 2019] The accountability that must follow Mueller's report
  • [Mar 24, 2019] "Russia Gate" investigation was a color revolution agaist Trump. But a strnge side effect was that Clintons have managed to raise a vicious, loud mouthed thug to the status of some kind of martyr.
  • [Mar 24, 2019] With RussiaGate Over Where's Hillary
  • [Mar 24, 2019] One thing left out is the ability of readers to call BS on a story i.e. a robust comment section for debates.
  • [Mar 23, 2019] Brennan pipe dream obliterated. The color revolution against Trump failed
  • [Mar 22, 2019] Glenn Greenwald on Twitter The Mueller investigation is complete and this is a simple fact that will never go away
  • [Feb 24, 2019] David Stockman on Peak Trump : Undrainable swamp (which is on Pentagon side of Potomac river) and fantasy of MAGA (which become MIGA -- make Israel great again)
  • [Feb 22, 2019] Neo-McCarthyism is used to defend the US imperial policies. Branding dissidents as Russian stooges is a loophole that allow to suppress dissident opinions
  • [Feb 18, 2019] Do You Believe in the Deep State Now by Robert W. Merry
  • [Feb 17, 2019] Trump is Russian asset memo is really neocon propaganda overkill
  • [Feb 16, 2019] MSM Begs For Trust After Buzzfeed Debacle by Caitlin Johnstone
  • [Feb 13, 2019] MoA - Russiagate Is Finished
  • [Feb 13, 2019] Stephen Cohen on War with Russia and Soviet-style Censorship in the US by Russell Mokhiber
  • [Jan 22, 2019] War with Russia From Putin Ukraine to Trump Russiagate
  • [Jan 21, 2019] Beyond BuzzFeed The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing US Media Failures On The Trump-Russia Story by Glenn Greenwald
  • [Jan 11, 2019] Facts does not matter in the current propoganda environment, the narrative is everything
  • [Jan 08, 2019] Shock Files- What Role Did Integrity Initiative Play in Sergei Skripal Affair- - Sputnik International
  • [Jan 08, 2019] Skripal spin doctors- Documents link UK govt-funded Integrity Initiative to anti-Russia narrative
  • [Jan 02, 2019] Russian bots - How An Anti-Russian Lobby Creates Fake News
  • [Jan 02, 2019] The Only Meddling "Russian Bots" Were Actually Democrat-Led "Experts" by Mac Slavo
  • [Jan 02, 2019] Did Mueller Patched Together Much of His Indictment from 2015 Radio Free Europe Article ?
  • [Dec 30, 2018] RussiaGate In Review with Aaron Mate - Unreasoned Fear is Neoliberalism's Response to the Credibility Gap
  • [Dec 29, 2018] -Election Meddling- Enters Bizarro World As MSM Ignores Democrat-Linked -Russian Bot- Scheme -
  • [Sep 25, 2020] US standard "negotiating" techniques
  • [Sep 23, 2020] How fake media actually works: reporter are given the narrative and they should rehash their stories to fit it
  • [Sep 23, 2020] The deviousness of Russians is completly off the charts.
  • [Sep 21, 2020] Stephen F. Cohen- The Ukrainian Crisis - It s not All Putin s Fault
  • [Sep 21, 2020] Stephen Cohen at the AJC 2017 Forum, about Russia and Terrorism
  • [Sep 20, 2020] CJ Hopkins Exposes The Final Act In 'The War On Populism'
  • [Sep 09, 2020] Proof of collusion at last! - IRRUSSIANALITY
  • [Sep 06, 2020] Polymerase test specificity and NYT articles
  • [Sep 01, 2020] How Democrats and Republicans made deals to pass Magnitsky Act by Lucy Komisar
  • [Aug 24, 2020] Announcement- Half a Pulitzer Prize to the Wall Street Journal by Ron Unz
  • [Aug 23, 2020] Catapulting Russian-Meddling Propaganda by Ray McGovern
  • [Aug 23, 2020] Bright future lies ahead of NYT it can soon match and even exceed the caliber of jornalism of the "National Inquirer"
  • [Aug 17, 2020] Who's Afraid of QAnon- by Gregory Hood
  • [Aug 08, 2020] Russia Hoax- Are We All Being Played- Put Up Or Shut Up! - Zero Hedge
  • [Aug 04, 2020] Russia never saw Trump as a potential ally or friend by The Saker
  • [Aug 03, 2020] Natalie Wynn also refers to Jo Freeman's 1976 piece on "Trashing," in which she describes her experience of being ostracized by fellow feminists for alleged ideological deviation. The dynamic of cancellation predates the internet.
  • [Aug 03, 2020] KEEPING YOUR MOUTH SHUT by James L. Gibson & Joseph L. Sutherland
  • [Aug 02, 2020] Russiagate, Nazis, and the CIA by ROB URIE
  • [Jul 23, 2020] Demorats defeat amedment ot cut Defence by 10%
  • [Jul 21, 2020] This Skripal thing smelled to high heaven from day 1. My opinion is that Sergei Skripal was involved (to what degree is open to speculation) with the Steele dossier.
  • [Jul 20, 2020] The Real 'Russian Playbook' Is Written in English -- Strategic Culture
  • [Jul 19, 2020] What the MSM cliche According to former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the matter actually means
  • [Jul 18, 2020] Divide We Fall -- America Has Been Blacklisted and McCarthyism Refashioned for a New Age
  • [Jul 07, 2020] Mutiny on the Bounties by RAY McGOVERN
  • [Jul 06, 2020] US claim of 'Russian Bounty' plot in Afghanistan is dubious and dangerous - The Grayzone
  • [Jul 01, 2020] Russiagate's Last Gasp by Ray McGovern
  • [Jun 29, 2020] The bounties could be a false flag: the Taliban doesn t need a Russian bounty to kill American soldiers
  • [Jun 28, 2020] Evidence Free Press Release Claims 'Russia Did Bad, Trump Did Not Respond' - NYT, WaPo Publish It
  • [Jun 23, 2020] Identity politics is, first and foremost, a dirty and shrewd political strategy developed by the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party ( soft neoliberals ) to counter the defection of trade union members from the party
  • [Jun 20, 2020] The American Press Is Destroying Itself by Matt Taibbi
  • [Jun 03, 2020] Dems ratpack of reparations freaks, weird sexual curiosities, and race hustlers is actually a fifth column for Trump re-election by Fred Reed
  • [Jun 03, 2020] Not The Onion: NY Times Urges Trump To Establish Closer Ties With Moscow
  • [Jun 03, 2020] Requiem to Russiagate: this was the largest and the most successful attempt to gaslight the whole US population ever attempted by CIA and Clinton wing of Dems by CJ Hopkins
  • [Jun 01, 2020] More Evidence of the Fraud Against General Michael Flynn by Larry C Johnson
  • [Jun 01, 2020] More Evidence of the Fraud Against General Michael Flynn by Larry C Johnson
  • [May 20, 2020] McGovern Turn Out The Lights, Russiagate Is Over by Ray McGovern
  • [May 19, 2020] America: "We demand an coronavirus origin investigation, but the investigators must agree on the outcome that we specify before they begin investigating!"
  • [May 19, 2020] Russophobia in the Age of Donald Trump
  • [May 16, 2020] Bought MSM experts typically are just MIC prostitutes: most are neocons and "Russiagaters"
  • [May 11, 2020] Twin Pillars of Russiagate Crumble by Ray McGovern
  • [May 10, 2020] Did the FBI target Michael Flynn to protect Obama's policies, not national security by Kevin R. Brock
  • [May 10, 2020] Does Obama now feels his potential liability for staging coup d' tat and gaslighting the whole nation?
  • [May 08, 2020] Thiefs stole from a Russian fifth column critter: NY Times Accused Of Ripping Off Pulitzer Prize-Winning Stories From Russian Journalists For 2nd Time
  • [May 07, 2020] Media Malpractice Is Criminalizing Better Relations With Russia by Stephen F. Cohen
  • [Apr 22, 2020] Especially as the insane neoliberal economy we live in, we are ruled by a group of kleptocrats and vicious stooges. Which make allegations against Biden deserving a closer look but that does not make them automatically credible
  • [Apr 17, 2020] The WHO provided validated working test kits on 16th of January. The USA botched the delopyment due to CDC incompetence and NIH syndrom
  • [Apr 17, 2020] Barr just said the Russia collusion probe was a travesty, had no basis and was intended to sabotage Trump.
  • [Apr 02, 2020] Bloomberg spent north of $500 millions to become president with zero results, and you want me to believe that Russians spent 1% of that and got better results
  • [Apr 02, 2020] We have two discredited old parties, incapable of dealing with the crises facing them, attempting to revive the only ideas that have ever galvanised the US public in their lifetimes: opposition to communism and the racism which underlay just about every US military adventure since 1945
  • [Mar 28, 2020] Russians again were outsmarted by the US intelligence agencies
  • [Mar 28, 2020] Why You Should Never Watch RT -- Ever!
  • [Mar 28, 2020] NYT bad habit of falling for falling for frauds and making them famous
  • [Mar 24, 2020] This weaponizing of random indignation is a classic tool of the Western propaganda
  • [Mar 21, 2020] When reading any article concerning current events (ie. Ukraine, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, or Coronavirus) consider how the The Seven Principles of Propaganda may apply
  • [Mar 17, 2020] DOJ drops charges against Russian trolls after they dared demand evidence in US court -- RT USA News
  • [Mar 05, 2020] Intelligence Officials Sow Discord By Stoking Fear of Russian Election Meddling by Dave DeCamp
  • [Mar 04, 2020] Russiagate should be viewed as classic, textbook case of gaslighting and projecting election interference
  • [Mar 03, 2020] Russia isn't backing Sanders and Trump as much as hoping for chaos
  • [Feb 28, 2020] The impact of coronavirus on Trump reelection chances
  • [Feb 24, 2020] Seven signs of the neoliberal apocalypse by Van Badham
  • [Feb 21, 2020] Why Both Republicans And Democrats Want Russia To Become The Enemy Of Choice by Philip Giraldi
  • [Feb 19, 2020] During the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, a "neoliberal revolution from above" was staged in the USA by "managerial elite" which like Soviet nomenklatura (which also staged a neoliberal coup d' tat) changed sides and betrayed the working class
  • [Feb 19, 2020] On Michael Lind's "The New Class War" by Gregor Baszak
  • [Feb 09, 2020] Trump demand for 50% of Iraq oil revenue sound exactly like a criminal mob boss
  • [Jan 31, 2020] Trump excoriates Bolton in tweets this morning
  • [Jan 29, 2020] For the last three years, all the "resistance oxygen" was sucked up by the warmongering against Russia
  • [Jan 27, 2020] The end of Trump? Trump betrayed all major promises of his 2016 election campaign. Trump needs to go...
  • [Jan 24, 2020] Peter Hitchen to Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat: You're not in the ladies' lingerie trade now, sweetie
  • [Jan 24, 2020] Crimes of the century truth, perception and punishment
  • [Jan 21, 2020] WaPo columnist endorses all twelve candidates
  • [Jan 20, 2020] Fake Investigations... Designed To Fool by Bryce Buchanan
  • [Jan 18, 2020] Putin plants to prohibit dual citizens to serve in government
  • [Jan 09, 2020] It looks like UK and the USA intelligences agencies run the contest to see who can come up with the most surreal anti-Russian propaganda psy-ops
  • [Jan 08, 2020] Do you really want to be a one term president? Pompeo can talk big now and then go back to Kansas to run for senator. Where will you be able to take refuge?
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